In Chapter 1 we began to explore how bones occupy a complex place in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. As both extensions of the dead (spirit ‘subjects’ making demands on the living) and as unconscious ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (provoking responses from the living), bones in Zimbabwe not only challenge state commemoration and heritage but also animate a myriad of personal, kin, clan, class and political loyalties and struggles. Political violence since 2000 – especially the troubled elections of 2008 – indicates, however, that it is not only dry bones but also the fleshy materiality of tortured bodies that are entangled in Zimbabwe's troubled postcolonial milieu. This chapter explores the complexity of agencies entangled in the affective presence and emotive materialities of both dry bones and leaky, fleshy bodies in Zimbabwe, in order to understand how the corporeal dimensions of violence and of post-violence are intertwined. If bodies inscribed with torturous performances of sovereignty do have significant, if duplicitous, political affects, how does this contrast with the unsettling presence of the longer dead? What does the passage of time – both the material and leaky decomposition of flesh, but equally the transformative processes of burial – do to the affective presence and emotive materiality of the dead? And how does the corporeality of physical violence – inter-rupting the bodily boundaries and processes of containment through which persons are normally constituted – relate to post-violence efforts to remake and safely settle the dead and resolve troubling pasts. How, in short, do broken bodies become bones?

To address these concerns, I consider how anthropology's turn towards questions of materiality, the properties of materials and the ‘agency’ of objects over the last two decades, can be usefully deployed to consider how both bones and bodies do things in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. Developing the discussion initiated in the previous chapter, here I explore how the different theoretical perspectives offered by Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour about ‘object agency’ are complemented by the work of Tim Ingold; and how all three can be usefully engaged to examine the affective presence and emotive materialities of bones and bodies.