Abstract:
The destruction of Sufi heritage in Timbuktu used and abused heritage to assert sovereignty, terrorize the living, and repudiate materiality. Archeologists have not analyzed how necropolitics relates to the desecration of the dead and the torture of the living in Mali, where bodies are becoming prime stages for radical performances of sovereignty, ideology, and materiality. To understand how Sufi shrines are becoming prime ideological battlegrounds, we must consider the affective presence and emotive materiality of the dead bodies and spirits of the saints being slayed, and acknowledge the relationship between the disturbance of the dead and postcolonial violence on the living. © 2013 World Archaeological Congress.