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.
