Approaching the Ethics of Human Remains from a Medical History perspective. Report from the AAHM meetings.
May 11-14, I attended the annual meeting for the American Association for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I chaired a roundtable entitled “Historical Medical Collections, Human Biomaterials and Remains” which explored the multiple ethical challenges surrounding historical medical collections, a category that is problematized also in Ethical Entanglements.…
Report from “Encountering Human Remains: Heritage Issues and Ethical Considerations” in Cambridge
On May 11 and 12, 2023, the 23rd Cambridge Heritage Symposium took place at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. The topic of these two-days symposium was “Encountering Human Remains: Heritage Issues and Ethical Considerations”. Despite what one may think looking at the hosting place, archaeology was not the only point of view in discussing the…
Reading Alexandra Ion: on ruins, nostalgia, and lonely specimens
Last week the project invited Alexandra Ion, formerly at the Institut de Antropologie Francisc I. Rainer, Academia Romana in Bucharest, to discuss her article “Anatomy Collections as “modern ruins”: The nostalgia of lonely specimens, published in 2021 in Science in Context. This beautifully written paper explores a range of entangled issues relating to the collection…
aDNA Research and Research Integrity. Some thoughts from a webinar.
On November 17, 2022, Norway’s National Committee for Research Ethics on Human Remains hosted a webinar about ethical challenges in ancient DNA (aDNA) research of archaeological human remains. Museum collections and data management were the main themes, but other hot topics emerged, such as long-standing communication problems between geneticists, archaeologists, and museum curators, and the…
Addressing dark heritage in exhibitions. The University Museum in Groningen.
After our visit in Amsterdam I continued to Groningen which aslo has an anatomical collection on display in its University Museum. Here, the anatomical collection is part of the exhibition on the history of the university and its scholars, and it is thus clearly inscribed in the broader history of research and scholarship. A separate…
Museum Vrolik and Body Worlds Amsterdam: reflecting on two exhibitions of human remains
In early November, we (Sarah Tarlow and Liv Nilsson Stutz) visited the Netherlands with the objective of viewing two different exhibitions of human remains: Museum Vrolik and Body Worlds, The Happiness Project, Amsterdam. While we realised it would be two distinct experiences, we were not quite prepared for just how radically different these two exhibitions…
The Anatomical Collection at Karolinska. Report from a seminar.
On March 29, 2022, Karolinska institutet organised a seminar on their anatomical collection. The purpose of the seminar was to present the history of the collection, and to discuss possible ways forward as the institution grapples with a problematic history. This work is part of a broader engagement on behalf of Karolinska with regards to…
Some thoughts about the connections between Ethics and Theory. Review of Geller’s Theorizing Bioarchaeology.
I recently published a book review of Pamela L. Geller’s noteworthy book Theorizing Bioarchaeology for the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. The book takes a broad approach to how social and critical theory can inform and improve our study of human remains. The book outlines how a bio-cultural perspective on humanity informed by considerations of…
Exploring Sustainable Collection Practices. Report from a workshop.
On May 2-4, 2022, I participated in a workshop “Museums, sustainability, collections” at the Africa Museum / the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. The workshop was organised within the European cooperation project “TAKING CARE – Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care” and included curators, conservators and other museum professionals…
Human Remains in Contract Archaeology – report from a workshop
The Ethical Entanglements project mainly focuses on collections of human remains in museums, but a significant process by which they get there today is contract archaeology. In contrast to the scientific practices that resulted in many of the older collections in museums, including ethnographic, anatomical and archaeological collections, these new additions to archaeological collections are…
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