Talk:Necroviolence

WP:OR

Some of the just included content belongs to page Desecration of graves, and it is already included there. Does the source say this is also a "necroviolence"? It is behind the paywall. My very best wishes (talk) 16:50, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Same question is about the next section, i.e. "Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel". My very best wishes (talk) 00:10, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

This is not an RS. And who is the author of the course/statement? My very best wishes (talk) 00:26, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I saw you edited on the Aftonbladet reference - seems to me the same thing applies - I don't think anyone in the sources referred to it as "necroviolence".

Probably much more important is that this page presents the allegation as true: "in which he exposed the decades-long Israeli practice of returning the bodies of young Palestinian men to their families with organs missing."

What the Aftonbladet article says is that Palestinians killed by the IDF are routinely autopsied, and that Palestinians allege organ-harvesting. The article at no point says that the bodies were actually returned with their organs missing. Should the allegation be included? Maybe - I can see arguments either way. Should it be included as a fact? Surely not. Samuelshraga (talk) 10:06, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

1) Desecration of, including razing of cemeteries (when done to hurt the living or disrespect the dead), IS a type of necroviolence. So far it is implicit in the sources I have read, i.e. necroviolence is actions to corpses and obviously razing cemeteries is a major example.

• The problem is probably that the Israeli mass-razing of most of the cemeteries in Gaza is likely unprecedented in history:
  • not just systematic vandalization of graves, as was likely the case during the Holocaust;
  • the Israeli actions are:
    • wider in scope (destruction of most cemeteries in an entire territory), and also
    • more intense (razing, not just vandalization), and also
    • very recent,
  • Thus not yet specifically been addressed yet in the academic media. I will try to find reliable sources that directly say what you are requesting, i.e. that razing (or at least desecration/vandalism) of cemeteries is a form of necroviolence.

2) Course: this is a course from Duke University, so I KNOW there is a reliable source here, because it is backed up by a leading university. Technically I don't have the academic paper to use as a RS. I will see what I can find. Meanwhile I would like to add the content back referring to it as a course at a leading university (and thus prominent in that way) as opposed to using the course agenda to establish "what necroviolence is".Keizers (talk) 15:14, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

No, the anonymous announcement of a course is not an RS to establish anything. Again, who are authors of that course? If you think otherwise, please post a question at WP:RSNB. And I am not talking about necessarily academic sources, just such that qualify as strong WP:RS. My very best wishes (talk) 15:40, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Also, this is new content and a new page. You need WP:CONSENSUS to include anything to this page. My very best wishes (talk) 16:34, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

P.S. The course announcement is an anonymous WP:PRIMARY; there is no way it should be used anywhere in this subject area. My very best wishes (talk) 17:00, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Post Mortem corporeal mutilation

Is mutilation of corpses “necroviolence”? Drsruli (talk) 21:19, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Good question. More generally, would everything in the List of ways people dishonor the dead qualify as necroviolence? That depends on the definition. And unfortunately, there is no any well established definition. For example, Aljazeera [1] says: Israel’s use of “necroviolence” on bodies of Palestinians has been condemned as part of its policy to exert further control over the people living in the occupied territories. Note that "necroviolence" was used in scare quotes. It does not provide any definition.

Now, consider ref #1 here De León draws on notions of structural violence to argue that there are nonhuman actors (such as the desert terrain and wildlife) involved in immigration law enforcement, and that the ways that individuals die can reflect their social position. Thus, when animals eat the bodies of would-be border crossers, he attributes this outcome to Prevention through Deterrence policies while also noting that the horrific nature of such a demise indicates the dehumanization to which migrants are subjected. ... He also develops the notions of necroviolence to refer to “violence performed through the specific treatment of corpses” in ways that are offensive (p. 69). Necroviolence, he notes, can be aimed at the living (by horrifying them) while also enabling the powerful to deny responsibility for death. Therefore, he insists, the ways that bodies decompose are political. This is an important point. Not everyone thinks about what happens to the bodies of those who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

This is a very specific situation (he is talking about the bodies of migrants who die in desert and eaten by animals), and again there is no clear definition. Hence the terminology here is not well established or clear. To avoid WP:SYN, we must only use sources that explicitly mention "necroviolence". My very best wishes (talk) 22:13, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@My very best wishes I think you're right, and I think it's kind of a mortal blow to this page actually. There are two ways I think you could make a page about an academic concept like this:

1. You talk about the concept (its definition, use, notable academics/schools that use it, its impact or importance in academic fields).

2. You talk about what the concept refers to.

I think that if we have a page on necroviolence, it should follow the first path. It's not such a common term that we can just assume that people know what necroviolence is, and how it's used, and can just describe instances of it (even if we take out WP:Original Arguments that certain historical events and allegations fall into the category. To be honest, and without assuming bad faith, the page as it stood yesterday read like it was written as a way of writing a whole lot of allegations against Israel in mainspace without drawing attention to the fact. So with a view of facilitating that, I don't think there's anything wrong with a new entry: "Israeli mistreatment of Palestinian corpses". After all, we have a page American mutilation of Japanese war dead. That page could have a subsection "Necroviolence" I suppose. Then the people who like to edit in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict space could hash out some wording for that page, make sure everything is NPOV, Verifiable, based on Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Not sure I see the value in this page. Samuelshraga (talk) 12:15, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree. As framed by the cited source, this is very strange. Yes, one can blame the US government of the migrant's deaths, although even that is debatable. But blaming the government of the violence with regard to the dead bodies, while it simply does nothing? That sounds very much WP:FRINGE. My very best wishes (talk) 17:33, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

@Keizers, feel free to input. Would you consider merging this page with your other new page Israeli razing of cemeteries in the Gaza Strip? And maybe getting some editors with varying opinions to weigh in? I am a bit concerned that this page made an unsourced allegation that people stole organs yesterday, and think that some viewpoint diversity would help. Samuelshraga (talk) 14:50, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Suggest that needs to be considered that if the term is still undefined, and if the definitions are covered by topics of other pages, then it isn’t ready for its own page and should be merged or redirected to the the other page. Drsruli (talk) 19:02, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Interesting and educational discussion. FWIW, why did I create the article? I have been seeing the term a lot in news (and raw videos) from Gaza of the razing of cemeteries but also the digging up, "playing around with", intermingling and scattering of corpses. In reading about the larger conflict, I saw the term used to cover atrocities allegedly taking place in the West Bank (holding back the corpses of prisoners who die from their families until the corpses "finish their sentences", organ removal, graves with numbers only, etc.) For that reason thought that it was a general concept in wider use covering violence to corpses, that simply didn't have a page yet.

Chat GPT when I asked " what is necroviolence" gives an answer that kind of confirmed my assumption i.e.

"Necroviolence" typically refers to acts of violence or mistreatment directed towards the dead, corpses, or burial sites. It can manifest in various forms, such as desecration of graves, mutilation of corpses, or other disrespectful actions towards the deceased. The term is often used to describe extreme cases where individuals or groups engage in violent acts against the dead, which may have cultural, religious, or criminal motivations. It is important to note that necroviolence is generally considered morally and legally reprehensible in many societies.

So I proceeded to make the article and brought in other uses that I could find, which was chiefly the book and the Mexico–US border. Since then I found out the term was invented by Duke professor Achille Mbembe

Now I understand that necroviolence is not (yet at least) a common category under which we can place all examples of abuse of corpses. So I think for the academic use we can put the content under Necropolitics, from which the term necroviolence is derived. The various types of alleged atrocities against Palestinian corpses, may deserve a short paragraph there, if only as its use is gaining traction in the press.

For the alleged Israeli abuse and weaponization of corpses I can add that to the Israeli razing of cemeteries in the Gaza Strip and perhaps rename that article, expanding the scope to all atrocities related to corpses. I'll try to use the right verbs to indicate that these are allegations, neutral POV etc. Thank you all for those suggestions.Keizers (talk) 03:33, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Moving topic

I'll go ahead and move the content and set the article to redirect to Necropolitics#Necroviolence, as I suggested above. Let me know if anyone has concerns about that. Keizers (talk) 16:31, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Keizers. Perhaps I've misunderstood the concepts here, but it doesn't look like Necroviolence is a particular sub-type of Necropolitics. From reading the wiki there, it looks like it says that Necropolitics specifically concerns people who are alive - "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead." Necroviolence exclusively concerns the treatment of the dead. De Leon invokes Necropolitics to describe how immigrants to the United States are treated, and from there develops his term Necroviolence to describe what happens to their corpses (including, as @My very best wishes points out, by the natural environment), but that doesn't mean the two are so closely related that they should sit on each other's pages.

I think the second part of your suggestion - adding the particular specific examples to the page that deals with the relevant phenomenon - makes more sense. Inasmuch as the term necroviolence should be used, I would say an attributed and quoted format makes the most sense, e.g. According to Al-Jazeera, "actions X and Y were a form of necroviolence practiced ..." Samuelshraga (talk) 08:44, 21 January 2024 (UTC)