The potter's field

Abstract

I unpack the potter's field as an everyday practice and a category, especially as it operates in the material treatment of bodies as a mirror of life. I examine this space of worthlessness as it exists in liberal capitalism. From the potter's fields of Saõ Paulo, Brazil, I consider how these are, in fact, mundane mass graves, made politically useful as a means to obscure important bodies alongside those who are, today, the subjects of terror. I then ask how the rise of the uncertified potter's field- A burial field for disposable bodies, not made legal by the state-is inseparable from recent historical and contemporary conditions of political abandonment. The uncertified field is made easy by a politics of abandonment, and becomes useful to state institutions as a material invocation of responsibility, interred elsewhere, while nonetheless advancing a larger logic of governance and political will in our times.