Human Remains In Museums

It strikes me that the age of the human remains and how much they resemble an actual living person are factors here. We might not object to a skeleton but we might object to a person stuffed and mounted (arf!) by a taxidermist.

Jeremy Bentham was stuffed, I believe. (with straw, I think)

But if we are going to return them somehow, how far should we go with that? Christian burials would seem out for pre-Christian remains. But I'll be damned if I'm helping to build a pyramid.

I tend to think that the body is an object, so if it was me in a museum I wouldn't mind. (it's fun to think of someone practicing ventriloquism to frighten kids, with their hand inside your head). But as most of my ancestors and most of my fellow 'alive-types' don't share that belief I tend to think their wishes should be respected, especially as some of them would have pretty strong views on bodily resurection (maybe they even killed people because they didn't think they would literally be taken into heaven at rapture).

I incline to the same view of bodies as (fascinating, wacky) objects (that contained life but now are just flesh & bone), but that's probably because of a long period of objectification through life drawing and anatomy studies.

The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons is amazing from this point of view: they have a hanged felon's flayed skin, the Irish Giant's skeleton alongside a dwarf lady from the same period's, dolphin spleens, syphilitic skulls, elephant cocks, pickled conjoined twin foetuses in jars, resin-filled horse lungs, the arterial vessels from a body stretched out and pinned on a great big board...one of those crazy Victorian places and not very acceptable to the average passerby.

(More on this later, but it's hella busy at work today.)

Bentham wanted to be preserved, Truganini was never asked.

Bentham belong to the society which was the oppressor, Truganini was of the oppressed.

Bentham's society is thriving to this day, Truganini's (the Tasmanians) are now extinct. Truganini is widely believed to be the last Tasmanian - this isn't in fact the case, although she was one of the last.

When we start using ancient bones in museums, we have no idea of what that person's wishes may have been, but I think we can respect the dignity and life that the body represents. We can guess that the body we are seeing was once loved by someone, replenished with food and water, protected by a parent etc. and I think that it is entirely natural of a human being to treat a body with respect. Canibalism is not just taboo for health grounds, the same with necrophelia. If the allied troops arriving at Auschwitz had played football with a skull from one of the piles I think most people would rightly be horrified.

So, I guess I just think that a human being, whilst not being represented by her remains, is somehow represented by it - after all we know most people's bodies more than we can know their souls. The human-ness for them dies at the moment of death, but for the rest of us the human-ness has it's residues for a long time. And speciest or not, that body is imbued with meaning for us in a way that an animal body is not. I think we owe a human, even if we have never met them, more than to be used as an educational tool.

If property is theft, then owning a body...

"Fuck Off! We're the Judaean People's Front!"

(That said, I think Bog Man is one of the best bits of the BM. Not so sure about the mummies, though. I have heard two stories about mummies - one is that the desecration of the mummie rips the poor Egyptian out of the afterlife... and the other story is that the adulation and fame actually helps various Pharoahs and folks in the afterlife. So take yer pick.)

The temptation to play hangman with him must be too great for bored museum curators.

"Right, take the skellington apart, it's your go!"

The possibly most-sacriligeous part was: after his death, his skeleton had been used as a teaching aid in the local hospital. When it was no longer needed for that, it was set up in the foyer connected to a mechanism which, when someone walked past, extended his arm to point to a donation box.

Somewhere, I've got a human fingerbone. I picked it out of a grave which was being washed away by the sea, on an unhabited island in western Scotland. I've sometimes thought as to whether I should keep it, and what I should do with it if I dispose of it.

(although I did once take it to my local pub, to go "Look! I can be goth, too! I keep human bones around the place!")

Pitt Rivers. I've never been there tho.

the fact that he'd been given a name

not only that but he'd been given a *cat's* name! Why couldn't they've called him something that was actually Egyptian sounding, like Rameses or something!

I heart the Hunterian Museum! He was the model for Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, you know!

The possibly most-sacriligeous part was: after his death, his skeleton had been used as a teaching aid in the local hospital. When it was no longer needed for that, it was set up in the foyer connected to a mechanism which, when someone walked past, extended his arm to point to a donation box

not only that, but the local museum has his scalp, which has been tanned and the proceedings of the trial in a book bound in his skin.

The scale of this is pretty stunning:

https://www.propublica.org/article/repatriation-nagpra-museums-human-remains

"The remains of more than 110,000 Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Natives’ ancestors are still held by museums, universities and federal agencies."