Benito Mussolini died in shame, his battered corpse hung upside down dangling beside his lover in a public square. Josef Stalin was treated to a massive ceremonial funeral attended by thousands of mourners. Societies under totalitarian regimes, like children in families, experience the death of powerful patriarchal figures in different ways. How such leaders die and even the very nature of their deaths are significant. But traditional studies of political regimes often terminate with the demise of the men who "fathered" them and rarely explore how societies seek posthumous closure.

Now a new Cornell University web site will allow faculty, students and researchers from around the world to explore the socio-political fallout that followed the death of six 20th-century patriarchs, including Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin, Ceausescu, Mussolini and Tito.

John Borneman, associate professor of anthropology at Cornell, and Linda Fisher, media artist and web designer on staff at Cornell, have announced the publication of the web site titled Death of the Father: An Anthropology of Closure in Political Authority. The site is a special project of its host, the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, overseen by H. Thomas Hickerson, the institute's director. Partial support for the project has been provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rose Goldsen Images in Society Fund.

The web site includes six regime changes that represent the end of four state political forms: Fascist Italy (1943), Nazi Germany (1945), imperial Japan (1945) and the state socialist regimes of East Germany (1989), Romania (1989), the Soviet Union (1991) and Yugoslavia (1991). Those ends are considered in light of the deaths of the leaders: Benito Mussolini (1945), Adolf Hitler (1945), Emperor Hirohito (1989), Nicolae Ceausescu (1989), Josef Stalin (1953) and Josip Broz Tito (1980).

"Most people who lived under these regimes really thought of these leaders as 'fathers,'" said Fisher. "One could draw a compelling parallel to parent-child relationships. People loved

these leaders, depended on them and were in denial about their true natures and in most cases genuinely grieved for them when they died. (But) in the cases of Mussolini and Ceausescu, we see once-beloved fathers viciously executed for their betrayals."

Death of the Father is the culmination of an international dialogue between six anthropologists: Tone Bringa, University of Bergen, Norway; Maria Pia Di Bella, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Paris; John Borneman, Cornell; Kyung-Koo Han, Kangwon National University, South Korea; John Schoeberlein, Harvard University; and David Kideckel, Central Connecticut State University. Also involved are historian Baber Johansen, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and two members with combined experience in music composition, film, photography, digital imaging and web design: Linda Fisher and Noni Korf Vidal, curator of visual and electronic collections at Cornell.

Through use of archival images, music, news reports and sound effects, visitors to the web site may listen and view more closely the affective force of authority and its symbolic forms. In addition to the main gallery pages, the site provides chronologies and maps for the "fathers" and regimes as well as a glossary of terms. A book of essays and a video, serving as complements to the web site, are currently in production by Borneman, Fisher and project team members.

The web site can viewed at http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/DOF. Public inquiries concerning the project may be directed to dofweb@cornell.edu.

For media information only, contact Linda Fisher at (607) 255-7375, e-mail LF16@cornell.edu, or John Borneman, (510) 644-2047, e-mail borneman@qal.berkeley.edu.