Workshop Abstracts

Jeanne Cannizzo & Joan Smith

Feeling our way forward

This will be an experiential introduction to the workshop. All presenters will gather around a table and be faced with an object to be explored through our senses, while voicing the sensations and emotions we are experiencing (a sound recording and/or visual record may be made).

Paola Filippucci

Mute witnesses: words, things and the dead on the western front

My contribution focuses on attempts to make the dead ‘speak’, or to ‘speak for’ the dead in the case of soldiers fallen in the Great War. It compares such attempts at the time of the war and in the immediate aftermath with aspects of today’s engagement with the war dead in the areas of the former Western Front. In particular the paper highlights the ‘mute’ quality of objects, and the role of this in triggering imagination and emotion about the war dead. Through this example is used to explore the potential of material things in linking the living with the dead, and the relationship between material objects and the remains of the dead in the case of the dead in war.

Christel Mattheeuws

Do crisps flavoured with chicken tikka have something in common with Central-East Malagasy ancestral bodies?

Central-East Malagasy individual ancestral bodies in the family tombs are shaped by the bones of the deceased carefully wrapped into shrouds that have caught the spirits of the dead persons during the famadihana rituals. In case of lost bodies, the bones are replaced by a small stone erected outside the tomb. Bones that have been mixed up are covered with only one shroud, depersonalising the dead without necessarily extinguishing their forces. With the question, do have crisps flavoured with chicken tikka something in common with Central-East Malagasy ancestral bodies, I explore the relation between materiality, personhood, imagination and bodies. I am in particular concerned with the life of concepts and their embodiments that shape our present society and comparing them with the process of becoming ancestor in Madagascar.

Cara Krmpotich

Ancestral bones: creating proximity and familiarity, erasing distance and anonymity

Focusing on the affective presence of bones as well as the humanness of bones, I explore how encounters between ancestral remains and the Haida—living on the Northwest Coast of Canada—bring to light ideas about time, kinship, personhood and Haida ontology. These encounters challenge the notion of “ancestors” as an anonymous collective, and refute the use of time to diminish belonging and create distance. Instead, drawing upon their knowledge of reincarnation, their sense of identity and historical continuity, Haidas use these encounters to reinforce the proximity of themselves with their ancestors, and the continued integration of their ancestors within social and familial relationships. Using ethnographic examples from my own fieldwork with the Haida as a starting point, my desire is to stimulate a conversation that considers how peoples’ differing senses of self and personhood contribute to the affective presence and/or emotive materiality of skeletal remains.

Martin Brown

All quiet on the western front? Excavating human remains from the Great War 1914-1918

In the years following the First World War the Missing became a community within the fatalities of war. Exploded by shells or sunk in the mud of the Western Front thousands were lost. While some were recovered from the battlefields and buried in the cemeteries across the former Front many more still lie in the Flanders' Fields. Since 1918 bodies have periodically been discovered and recovered by farmers or during building works but in recent years archaeologists have begun to study the conflict and explore its physical remains. Inevitably excavations on the battlefields have encountered the remains of the Fallen. However, while excavation processes for these people may be similar to those for human remains of other periods, the background against which they are excavated is very different because here one is excavating the Missing. They are described above as a community and they are still regarded as such by Great War interest groups, all of whom have agenda and opinions on the exhumation of the dead.

The archaeological investigation of the Fallen of the Great War has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years, partly because major development projects have unearthed bodies but also because of the development of archaeological research in the period coinciding with renewed interest in the history of the conflict. This archaeological work has been the focus of television programmes (Finding the Fallen and Trench Detectives), it has been hotly disputed in government, it has been the focus of regimental pride, caused the pouring of vitriol on archaeologists, and has reunited families. Politics, emotion and national pride converge and sometimes collide and it is against this background - and aware of it - that the archaeologist tries to work rationally, ethically and professionally. This paper will explore issues surrounding the discovery and recovery of human remains from the war in archaeological contexts, including atPloegsteert and atFromelles, where a mass grave has become hotly contested ground.

Jocelyn Parot

Excavating and remembering those slain in the Finnish-Russian war

Based on a case study and extensive data collected through ethnomethodology, this paper scrutinizes the commemorative practices performed by a Finnish collective in North-Western Russia during the post-Soviet period. It will consist of some actor-provided descriptions that give a detailed insight of a new type of commemoration that emerged in the Finnish-Russian border context. The digging out and the recollection of the fallen soldiers are constitutive phases of a repatriation process that began no more than 50 years after the conflict itself. At first glance, the bone collectors are playing to a patriotic script: they are crossing the border, heading to the former battlefields, bringing the war heroes back home. While gathering the bones and re-burying them side by side with their comrades in the heroes’ graveyards, they are arguably enacting an imagined community. However, this nationalism–centred explanation falls short to explain the novelty that characterizes the actions at stake in the Finnish context. This paper tries to go beyond a microstudy of national identity. Through a detailed analysis of how the actions are carried out, it strives to analyze these practices not merely as practical nationalism, but also as meaningful symbols of a new commemorative culture.

Tiffany Jenkins

Constructing the contemporary controversies over human remains in museum collections in Britain: a case study of Pagan and professional claims

Human remains in British museum collections have become subject to a variety of claims in the last decade. Originating in concerns about the remains of overseas community groups who suffered from British colonisation, concerns about the holding of human remains in museum collections have extended to human remains from people of the British Isles and unclaimed human remains such as those of the Egyptians.

This paper will locate the agents who seek to question, move and remove the human remains in collections to explain the rise of these concerns. Through a case of Pagan claims on human remains in collections, through the formation of ‘Honouring the Ancient Dead’, a Pagan group formed in 2004, and the reaction of the profession to these claims, this paper will argue that a central influence on the construction of the contestations over human remains in collections is a shifting conception about the purpose of the museum institution, which means the context in which this material is housed is no longer legitimate. It will argue that the central agents involved in these controversies are the profession who use the problem of human remains for their own interests to add weight to their attempts to re-legitimise the museum institution.

Howard Williams

Bones and the early archaeologists

This paper will explore engagements between early diggers and human remains. As a case study, the paper will focus on the explorations of a series of archaeologists and antiquaries into early medieval burial sites during the mid-nineteenth century (roughly 1840 to 1870).

Within these reports and the popular literature they generated, we find instances of a variety of engagements with the bodies and bones of the dead. To date, the only discussions of this material have focused upon the extraction of bones for scientific study and the experiments in ‘craniology’ the bones facilitated linked to early Victorian ideas of race. This practice can itself be reconsidered – the evidence shows a variety of motivations, engagements and interpretations derived from the form, arrangement and context of the bones uncovered. The reports show how the early archaeologists incorporated specific interpretations about the dead based on the relationships between bones and artefacts and between different bodies and their position and treatment. Further still, the reports show attitudes and engagements with bones and bodies in three other ways: the perceived ‘animation’ of dead bodies into ‘history’, working-class bodies as agents of recovery and destruction, and the actions and mortality of the archaeologist’s body.

This topic aims to have relevance to (a) the history and theory of mortuary archaeology including the interpretation and display of human remains, (b) anthropological debates concerning emotive and mnemonic practices of engagement with human bones and (c) interdisciplinary debates over death, mortality and the body in Victorian society. For each, the source material provides the basis for a broader questioning of the motives and context of early archaeology in the British Isles.

John Harries

Flesh, clay, rock, bone and a million tiny points of colour: the many faces of Nonosabasut

There is a story that was written a few years ago by an American author now living in Newfoundland. The story relates how a Scottish merchant and adventurer found his way to Red Indian Lake, deep within the interior of the island of Newfoundland, in 1823. There he came across a hut may of wood, bark and moss. In that hut he found two skeletons. He knew these to be the skeletons of two Beothuk: one of these, the larger, was that of a man named Nonosabasut. The adventurer took the skulls from the two skeletons and made away with them. That night he dreamt of an ancient presence, material yet immaterial, and of blood, red and living, pouring from sockets of dry bone. Yet still he made away with skulls and sent them on to a museum in his native Scotland and so the story ends.

All of the story is true – the trip to Red Indian Lake, the hut, the skulls, the museum – all except the dream. That is a fiction. It is, however, a fiction that speaks to the anxiety that surrounds these skulls, that overlies them as a face, a face of rock, of clay, of flesh, a face realised in film and computer imaging as a million tiny points of colour. To varying degrees all these faces claim to be like the living man, to be imbued with his spirit, to somehow make him present even as he is long dead. The skull lies hidden beneath these claims (for even as various faces circulate in the public domain the skull is rarely seen, not being on public display) giving them substance: for it is of him, somehow holding his form, his nature, the truth of him. Like the fictional adventurer, the skull haunts the waking dreams of postcolonial Newfoundland. These may be dreams of the guilty (of blood pouring from bone) or reveries of some kind of reconciliation by which a violent past is peacefully enfolded into the landscape of the present. But they are dreams nonetheless, lying at threshold of past and present, absence and presence, immateriality and materiality, flesh and bone.

Maja Petrovic-Steger

Emotive materialities and emotionalised anthropology?

Anthropological analyses of situations of death, dying and sundered bodies, tend to attract a certain emotional charge, too often focused on the visual languages of memorialisation, fraught with human remains or the relics of charred cities and massacred landscapes. It does not help in conveying any alternative sense of death or dead bodies that readers, along with anthropological informants, typically expect stories of loss to be intoned gravely, reconciliatory, or slightly overlaid with sensationalism.

Building on three case studies, the workshop presentation will reflect upon some contemporary representational, compositional and re-piecing practices dealing with dead bodies. I shall discuss a range of material practices and rhetorical strategies constructed around the dead body in post-conflict situations in Serbia and Aboriginal Tasmania. The analysis will be complemented by an ethnographic consideration of the Swiss art group etoy and their artefact Mission Eternity Project’s Sarcophagus, a mobile sepulchre displaying composite portraits of those who consented to have their ‘informational remnants’ cross over into a digital afterlife.

By enquiring into the technological aspects of the practices dealing with human remains in these three ethnographic contexts - where the “emotive materiality” of the remnants is routinely managed through re-association, classification and identification technologies - the presentation hopes to illuminate some contemporary artistic, scientific and political conceptualisations of dead bodies.

Joost Fontein

Between tortured bodies and resurfacing bones: the politics of the dead in Zimbabwe

Bones occupy a complex place in Zimbabwe’s postcolonial milieu. From Ambuya Nehanda’s legendary 1896 promise that ‘My bones will rise again’ (made as she was hanged by Rhodesian colonialists) to freedom fighters and war veterans inspired by these ancestral bones to join the struggle for independence and later for land; and from the resurfacing bones of the unsettled war dead of Zimbabwe’s second chimurenga to the even more troubling remains of gukurahundi victims massacred in the postcolonial violence of the 1980s, it is clear that bones, and the unsettled spirits of the dead they once were, are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. With ambivalent agency as both extensions of the dead (that is spirit ‘subjects’ that make demands on the living), and as unconscious ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (that retort to and provoke responses from the living), bones in Zimbabwe not only challenge normalising processes of state commemoration and heritage, but also animate a myriad of personal, kin, clan, class and political loyalties and struggles.