Corpse Traffic, Plague, and Cholera in the Late Nineteenth Century Ottoman Iraq
(Zeinab Azerbadegan)
Since the fourth International Sanitary Conference in Istanbul 1866, regulating the traffic of dead bodies to Ottoman Iraq became an international preoccupation in the emerging global public health regime. Corpse traffic was a common and long-standing Shi’i practice, where the faithful transported the bodies of their dead to be buried inside or near the shrines in Ottoman Iraq. This presentation examines the global and local attempts at regulating corpse traffic, focusing on the debates among medical experts to show how medical knowledge production was informed by Orientalist and colonial discourses at the time. Demonstrating the impact of regulating corpse traffic on state-society and inter-imperial relations in Ottoman Iraq, this presentation highlights how the dead body was ascribed different national, class, and religious identities reflecting local and global political, social, and economic concerns in the region.
Date
-