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Human skulls, dangerous wanderers
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The scientific collecting of human remains in colonial settings is sometimes understood as an activity that disrupts the indigenous cultural orders of treatment of the dead. Although this is in many instances correct, in this essay I would like to call attention to the fact that these collecting activities could as well interfere with, and potentially disrupt, European cultural traditions and norms concerning the treatment of human remains. Based on two brief case-studies, I will argue here that the collecting of human skulls within racial regimes of mobility is a potentially transgressive activity in that it paves the way to the emergence of dangerous agencies. I will point out some possible ways through which the liminal condition of skulls could liberate disruptive agencies and symbolic dangers in their travels to museums; and how these dangers could be managed by colonial collectors and scientists in practice. My case studies will concern skull collecting in New Guinea in the 1880s. These cases reveal how collectors both in the colonies and at home had to artfully confront the dangers and agency attributed – either according to the collectors’ own cultural traditions or by European or non-European people around them – to human skulls. As such, problems of anthropological skull collecting became at once ethical, moral, and symbolic problems concerning the management of dangerous connections between people and things. Displacement of human remains away from some places could bring out the disruptive agencies of human skulls. Finally, I will make brief reference to how issues concerning the agency of skulls as dangerous wanderers in the colonial past re-emerge in museums around the problems of repatriation to indigenous communities.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Human remains Museum collections Colonial collecting Symbolic danger
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Roque, R. (2016). Human skulls, dangerous wanderers [Les crânes humains, ces dangereux vagabonds]. In Lotte Arndt, Catalina Lozano, and Mathieu Abonnenc (Eds.), Crawling Doubles: Colonial Collecting and Affect / Collecte colonial et affect: rampler, dédoubler pp. 252-73. Paris: Ed. B42 [bilingual ed. Engl./Fr.]