Memento Mori: the dead among usby Paul Koudounaris In his last months, interviewers would ask Christopher Hitchens how he was. “Well, I’m dying,” the great anarch would say, and then, after a delicious pause, “… but so are you.” Even dead, Hitchens is still very much with us, but he is not with us in quite the way of a Torajan elder in Sulawesi, Indonesia, who might be exhumed and carefully re-dressed to attend a family or community celebration, or a Chinchorro ancestor in the Atacama, whose naturally air-dried body remains rela­tively incorrupt and recognisable, and who is therefore still part of community life. What precisely demarcates “living” and “dead” isn’t as clear as it might seem and is, not surprisingly, cu