The Potter’s Field and the Thanatofield

In this work I unpack the ‘potter’s field’ –indigent cemetery, pauper’s burial ground, pit grave- as a signifier, especially as it operates in the material treatment of bodies as a mirror of life. I consider the historical evolution of this space and logic, in part, via the ways that its very specter has driven forms of sociality. From the potter’s fields of São Paulo, Brazil, I consider how these mundane mass graves are politically useful as a means to obscure important bodies alongside those who are, in an ‘age of rights’, the subjects of state terror. I then ask how the rise of the unconsecrated cemetery -the thanatofield- is inseparable from recent historical and contemporary conditions of abandonment. The thanatofield is made necessary by a politics of abandonment, becoming useful to the state as a material invocation of responsibility, interred elsewhere, while nonetheless advancing a larger logic of governance and political will in our times.