Tristram Besterman, Director of the Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, recently took part in a debate on the return of human remains held by UK museums. The debate, ‘Objects to study or ancestors to bury?’ was organised by the Institute of Ideas and took place on May 2. This was Besterman’s introductory statement.
I am, as the more observant of you may discern, a white, European male, representing a museum that collects the world: world cultures and the natural history of the world. I was educated as a scientist within the European rationalist tradition. I believe that scientific research on human remains is important. It can deepen our understanding of human origins and diversity, and ancient patterns of disease. The vast majority of human remains held in UK museums provide an uncontested, culturally isolated resource for scientific enquiry.
I shall focus, therefore, on the relatively small, but highly significant proportion of human remains in UK museums that are the subject of claims by indigenous communities.
In the five minutes that I have been given to state my position on a highly complex issue, I shall highlight three strands of the argument for the return of contested remains.
We must acknowledge:
In western science, propositions that can be tested against the available evidence to establish whether they are ‘objectively’ true or false, are deemed to be scientific. With equal sincerity, an Australian Aboriginal group argues that the social problems that beset it today are the direct result of the spirits of their ancestors needing to be released from the continuing barbaric torment inflicted on them by incarceration in the store of a museum 12,000 miles from the group’s ancestral burial grounds. This is the territory of theology, and science can no more deal with it than it can prove or disprove the existence of God. And as we all know, the inability to disprove it doesn’t mean she don’t exist!
If we wish to debate the issues solely on the grounds staked out by western rationalism, we assume the right to deny the alternative realities and belief systems of indigenous communities. I would submit that to make such an assumption is both arrogant and immoral, and the reason I would argue, is embedded in the historical context of these disputed human remains.
First, let us examine the motives for collecting human remains in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was then a pervasive impulse to classify human populations within a presumptive, racial, evolutionary taxonomy. Crania were adduced as evidence of evolutionary progress, and the crania of native African, American and Australian people were collected assiduously to support such theories, which conveniently justified colonial occupation.
If we find the motive suspect, the means employed in collecting these human remains appear utterly repugnant today. The collections in our western museums derive at their most innocent from grave robbing, and at their worst from wholesale slaughter.
So, OK, that was then, now is now: is it right to allow the clinically detached investigation by today’s scientist of such remains to be impeded by the genocidal racism that created the object of his study a hundred years ago? After all, no-one is seriously suggesting that today’s scientist is implicitly condoning past atrocities when working on contested human remains. But this is to miss the point. Good science must surely be founded upon high standards of humane, moral and ethical conduct, underpinned by the principle of informed consent. However, this is not just about the legitimacy of science, it is also about our having the generosity of spirit to recognise the moral legitimacy of the claims of indigenous people upon such human remains.
The contested human remains in western museums were collected at a time of gross inequality of power, a power that we now recognise was terribly abused at the expense of indigenous peoples. We now have the opportunity to redress that historic imbalance, acknowledging that this may entail a loss to science that will heal open wounds.
It won’t all be loss for the western museum or the anthropologist, either. At the ceremony held recently at the Royal College of Surgeons to repatriate Aboriginal human remains to Tasmania, Sir Peter Morris declared that ‘understanding different cultures is the way forward, and… I look forward to continuing dialogue on cultural issues.’ There is plenty of evidence that dialogue and transfer of authority back to where it rightfully belongs leads to a healthy relationship in which cultural exchange and understanding can flourish between the museum or the scientist and the indigenous community. That seems to me, at least, a pretty good pay-off for addressing past injustice and working with the willing consent of indigenous peoples.
CLICK HERE to read Part 1 and 2 of an Arts Hub feature on the repatriation of human remains from British Museums.
CLICK HERE to read a paper on the same issue by Tiffany Jenkins from the Institute of Ideas, the organisation which organised the May 2 debate.
