Jonatan Kurzwelly was in Oslo with his project team for a two-week research stay from February 16 to March 1, 2025. During the research stay at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, the team focused on the philosophical and ethical dimensions of historical collecting and scientific practices around human remains.
The multidisciplinary team of the research project “Over Their Dead Bodies”, consisting of a historian, a biological anthropologist, two philosophers and a social scientist, is dedicated to the current use and handling of human remains in institutional collections. Provenance research and restitution projects are often confronted not only with scarce information, but also with a wide variety of ethical, conceptual, methodological and political problems: from the danger of falling back on ethnic-racial classifications to attributions of socio-cultural group affiliations and ethical dilemmas in questions of long-term storage. The central question is the nature of human remains and how the answer to this varies depending on the point of view between object, scientific evidence and subject, individual or even spirit.
The visit to the CAS opened up new perspectives on these tensions between cultural perspectives. The program included an exchange with representatives of Skjelettutvalget, Norway’s independent national committee for reviewing research on human remains, to learn about indigenous claims within national borders. During the visit, the team also worked on a book chapter focusing on ethical concerns in historical and contemporary collecting and scientific practices.
The research project was accepted into the Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT) program in 2024 by the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS) and will work at various institutions in the network during the three-year funding period. Following a presentation at the colloquium of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) last November and the fruitful collaboration at CAT, the research team will now next be hosted by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (WIKO).