Culturally Sensitive Materials: the study and the exhibition of human remains

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Our regular readers know already how much wide and diversified the diagnostic science applied to the Cultural Heritage’s world is. The same are also aware that every cultural object is unique and un-reproducible, so that every scientist dealing with it must consider these characteristics, in order to provide the preservation of the object’s matter and of its artistic and/or historical message. 

Here we present a group of cultural goods confined to a separate category due to their additional special needs. These pertain to the ethic sphere, thus the category is named “Culturally Sensitive Material” and ruled by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Human remains belong to this category. As you are probably wondering… Why? 

Can human remains be regarded as cultural goods? Yes, they can, but not all of them. Human remains studied by and exposed in museums are part of the Cultural Heritage, as they come from archaeological excavations or have been used as scientific resources by previous scholars (e.g., physical anthropologists’ collections and anatomical specimens). It is not easy to deal with human remains housed in museums; in the ICOM’s Code of Ethics we can read: “Collections of human remains […] should be acquired only if they can be housed securely and cared for respectfully. This must be accomplished in a manner consistent with professional standards and the interests and beliefs of members of the community, ethnic or religious groups from which the objects originated, where these are known.”. These attentions arise from the shared awareness of handling, more than an archaeological discovery or a scientific tool, a human being that once eat, spoke, thought, lived.

How can visitors embrace the study and the musealisation of human remains? First, let’s take a look into the reaction of a random individual: its personal growth story may lead the individual to wonder and react looking at a musealised remain, indisputably linked to the sphere of death, with angst, peeve, repulsion or with curiosity and attraction for the access into a dimension that, for several reasons, remains barely understandable; now, we could consider instead the reaction modalities of a group of individuals, sharing the same religious believes, or, more generally, belonging to the same cultural group, and this again may drive them to forward requests that are certainly licit but often in contrast with study and museology needs. Both the reaction dynamics must be considered when studying and exposing human remains. This is a very recent consciousness which is still evolving. A new sensitivity in the approach seemed to be necessary after those tenacious requests of repatriation demanded by indigenous populations from United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand that laid claim to their cultural identities, during the last decades in the last century. Nowadays, these requests are extended also to historical and scientific collection belonging to occidental museums, including the Italian ones. The only efficient response to these issues seems to be a “collaborative museology” between scientific experts and representatives of communities. Human remains are an invaluable source of information about lifeways (i.e., diet, health, economy, migration routes) of past human societies. If human remains are not thoughtfully handled and the request made by the small communities to which the cultural good belong are avoided, the result would be that of a catastrophic depletion of precious museums’ collections. The human remains’ study, conservation and expositions must be carried out with additional precautions respecting the visitor as an individual, the ethnic and religious communities involved, and, of course, the human remain itself. 

With this post, I hope to have sparked your interest on a unusual category of Cultural Heritage which is very important for understanding our history as human beings. 

See you soon, with insights into new analyses and approaches to the study of human remains! 

Silvia

Bibliography

Giacobini G., 2011 - Una minaccia per le collezioni di antropologia biologica (e non solo). Museologia Scientifica, 5 (1-2): 8-10.

ICOM, 2009. Code of Ethics for Museums. http://www.icomitalia.org/images/documenti/codiceeticoicom.pdf

Joint Committee ANMS/AAI (Associazione Nazionale Musei Scientifici and Associazione Antropologica Italiana), 2011 - Documento sulla questione della richiesta, presentata dal Governo Australiano, di restituzione di resti scheletrici umani provenienti dal territorio Australiano conservati presso la Sezione di Antropologia ed Etnologia del Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Università di Firenze. Museologia Scientifica, 5(1-2): 11-21.

Monza F., 2014 - Esporre i resti umani: un problema tra ricerca, etica e comunicazione. Il caso britannico. Museologia Scientifica Memorie, N. 11: 241-244.

Turner T.R. (ed.), 2005 - Biological anthropology and ethics: From repatriation to genetic identity. SUNY Press.