What Lies Beneath:
Exploring the
Affective Presence
&
Emotive Materiality
of Human Bones
Research Workshop
4-5 December 2008
University of Edinburgh
Convenors:
Joost Fontein
John Harries
Jeanne Cannizzo
(j.fontein@ed.ac.uk)
(j.harries@ed.ac.uk)
(j.cannizzo@ed.ac.uk)
Conference Assistants:
Yi-Fang Chen
(s0454196@sms.ed.ac.uk)
Monica Yarham
(m.c.yarham@sms.ed.ac.uk)
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 19141918
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 at Ploegsteert and at Fromelles, where a mass grave has
become hotly contested ground.
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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 relegitimise 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.
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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.
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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.
But if Zimbabwe’s postcolonial milieu is haunted by resurfacing bones and troubling,
unsettled spirits, then recent political violence indicates that it is not only dry bones but also
the fleshy materiality of tortured bodies (still living and recently dead) that are entangled in
the troubled recent politics of this postcolony. Pictures, widely circulated by human rights
organisations, of the maimed and tortured bodies of recent victims of ZANU PF violence,
seem to illustrate the force of Mbembe’s notion of ‘necropolitics’ - that death or killing is the
ultimate expression of sovereignty. Zimbabwe’s tortured bodies do seem to be inscribed
with, and demonstrative of, this kind of sovereignty, yet the wide circulation of these images
by human rights groups also illustrates how the emotive materiality of broken bodies can be
easily manipulated for ulterior motives.
Therefore in this paper I consider not only what bones do, but also what bodies do. I seek to
explore and contrast the complexity of agencies entangled in the affective presence and
emotive materiality of both bones and bodies in Zimbabwe. If bodies inscribed with torturous
performances of sovereignty do have substantial, if duplicitous, political affects, then how
does this contrast with the unsettling presence of resurfacing bones of the longer dead?
What, in other words, does the passage of time - both the material decomposition of flesh,
but equally the cultural and transformative processes of burial - do to the affective presence
and emotive materiality of the dead? How does the emotive materiality of broken bodies give
way to the affective presence of bones? How then, in short, do bodies and bones differ?
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