Over their Dead Bodies: “Race”, “Ethnicity” and the Limits of Justice in the Contemporary Treatment of Human Remains from the Colonial Era

In his Lucian Scher­man Lecture “Over their dead bodies” on Decem­ber 5 at the Museum Fünf Konti­nente in Munich, Jonatan Kurzwelly spoke about the past and pre­sent hand­ling of hu­man remains from the colo­nial era.

In the past, human remains – especially skulls – have served to gene­rate various forms of scientific racia­lization and racism. In this way, people have been re­duced to fixed notions of iden­tity and violent systems of exploi­tation and op­pression have been legiti­mized. Universities and museums have accu­mulated thou­sands of remains from around the world, of people who have often been di­rectly or indi­rectly subjected to nu­merous forms of injus­tice in the past.

Today’s handling of these “human re­mains” aims to come to terms with and atone for the proble­matic, vio­lent past by examining certain human remains and often retur­ning them to their place of removal, as Jonatan Kurz­welly emphasizes:

Since the beginning of the exis­tence of these collec­tions, there have been repeated mis­takes by people who have deman­ded the return of such remains. [...] These returns are made with the ex­press inten­tion of correcting past in­justices.

Regard­less of the different moti­vations behind the current treat­ment of mortal remains, it often relies on essen­tialist cate­gorizations and inaccu­rate or flawed assump­tions. Jonatan Kurzwelly proble­matizes social essen­tialism as well as bio­logistic concepts of race and ethni­city with such remains and ques­tions whether and how much social justice can be achieved with current prac­tice if it is based on flawed logic:

The question is: which view do you prio­ritize if you don’t actu­ally know how people would view them­selves, how people would have spoken about them­selves?

Kurz­welly is a senior re­searcher at PRIF and head of the pro­jects “Over Their Dead Bodies: Under­lying Axioms and Contem­porary Use and Hand­ling of Human Remains from Insti­tutional Collec­tions” and ”Contra­dictions in Processes of Deradi­calization”.

The Lucian Scher­man Lecture is named after the former director of the Museum Fünf Konti­nente. Lucian Scherman was deprived of his office under National Socia­lism due to his Jewish descent. Four times a year, key topics of ethno­logy and muse­ology are dis­cussed as part of the lec­ture series.

The entire lec­ture can be watched on the You­Tube channel of the Museum Fünf Konti­nente.