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ANSTETT Elisabeth

IdHAL
elisabeth-anstett
ORCID
0000-0002-1548-4146
WoS
FXI-4529-2022
Short status
Ch-EC
Status
CNRS Research Director
HDR
Yes
Employer
CNRS
Activités

Elisabeth Anstett est anthropologue sociale, directrice de recherche au CNRS. Ses travaux portent sur le traitement social et culturel du cadavre, et plus particulièrement sur les pratiques funéraires et les processus de patrimonialisation des restes humains dans les contextes contemporains marqués par la violence extrême ou l'expérience de la mort de masse.

Elisabeth Anstett is a social anthropologist and director of research at the CNRS. Her work focuses on the social and cultural treatment of the corpse, and more particularly on funerary practices and the processes of patrimonialization of human remains in contemporary contexts marked by extreme violence or the experience of mass death.

Research themes

Elisabeth Anstett's research is based on ethnographic surveys carried out in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and questions several distinct moments of the fate of the dead body in situations of mortality crises, that of the production of the corpse, which makes it possible to address, in contexts of extreme violence, the stakes of the killing and post-mortem treatment of corpses, notably within genocidal or criminal practices, the search for and identification of remains, which allows us to reflect on the absence of the dead, the deprivation of funerals and the resilience of societies, and finally the return and circulation of bodies, which allows us to go beyond the sole question of the commemoration of the experience of collective death and its patrimonialization, and to address all the practices that aim to inscribe human remains in society.
Research programs

Winner of an ANR grant (2020-2023) for the research program TRANSFUNERAIRE: Comparative approach to collective reburial rituals in Europe and Latin America XXth-XXIst centuries (see research notebook), Elisabeth Anstett is also laureate with Prof. José Lopez-Mazz (University of the Republic) of an ECOS Uruguay fellowship (2018-2021) for the research program ARCHEOFOR - Care of contemporary human remains: new issues and new challenges for archaeology (see research notebook).

Elisabeth Anstett was awarded an ERC - Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for the program Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide (2012-2016, budget 1,2 M€, see the research notebook), laureate in 2016 of the S2C3 2016 call (Social and Cognitive Sciences of Collective Behavior) of the CNRS, and recipient in 2011 of a fellowship from Yale University, awarded for a research residency by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition.

A member of the Death in Time of Crisis research group, she is also associated with the work of the War Losses research group.

 

Author's publications