[CANCELED DUE TO COVID-19]
"Billions of humans have existed on earth and are no longer alive. In death, they become a constitutive element of a global ecology. ‘Ecology’ in this sense describes relations between modes of existence: plant, animal, and inanimate (or no longer animate). From this perspective, the human-become(ing)-object as ‘remains’-- regardless if caused by a natural or unnatural death -- must be viewed as part of a process defined by the interactions of various lifeforms and material objects.1
This seminar focuses on the question of how we assess the material, institutional, ethical, social and political conundrums of human remains within ruptured ecologies. We pursue this question by foregrounding two ruptures, each formed by power imbalances and constructed subjectivities.2 Our cases3 concern communities torn by violence: genocide, mass atrocities and colonial devastations. And we query the professional and ethical practices4 that accompany efforts to create new ecologies for remains, whether contextualized by forensic5, ‘scientific’ (as the exotic or illustrative), pedagogical or memorial aims.6 Vast differences emerge between these various goals and in relation to specific cases; we argue that regardless of intention each constitutes a second ecological rupture.
We are interested in how material theorizing of post-death can help us interrogate the built environments that have been used to house and display genocidal remains. These inquiries have potential ramifications in dual registers: as policy and as critical strategies.
Of the latter, while there has been scholarship that addresses the ‘social ecology’ of the museum, we consider sites of display that are seemingly distinguished by the fact that their act of exhibiting creates necro-exceptionalism. In this context, specific remains are set apart, thereby subverting the process of their transformation into broader, less differentiated strata of materiality.
In being presented as objects of viewership, in a contained environment ‘above’ earth, human remains in the museum invoke the dual meaning of ‘conservation.’7 In curatorial terms, it applies to the labor of maintaining an object’s stability, tending to its unique material demands and helping it withstand the degradations of time, climate, and use for sustenance by other life forms.8 Conservation ecological, however, is premised on sustaining [bio]diversity and interdependence, life and renewal. We posit that exhibitions are an unstable space indexing both the a priori prerogatives of the museum, with its ontological claims to the endurance of the object, and inevitable dynamism and transformation of its materiality as a process of ecological change. By focusing on linkages between modes of existence, we are called to pay attention to alterations in the objects themselves, museum ecologies, social contexts, and even the far horizon of a material reality that the buildings will themselves will return eventually to a starkly unaestheticized earth.
Can this be considered as an environmental haunting of such repositories, recognizing that all buildings share such a long-term fate, but those that house genocidal remains present a particular opportunity to articulate this tension more directly. In sum, are there ways in which the areas of scholarship represented by our participants offer new locations of theorizing about museums and materiality that have yet to be fully examined, perhaps even articulated.
The conveners of this seminar are part of two institutions within a research university that focus on public-facing engagement and advocacy. We are interested in how theoretical approaches to various ‘ecologies’ that include human remains might impact questions that have long burdened the work of unearthing, coding and de-coding, categorizing, and displaying of such extraordinary objects. Among these questions are, who has what rights related to the no-longer-living; what guidelines govern their installation into new, built environments; how does the double rupture impose distinct demands; and so forth.
Drawing from these settings – the World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life –the seminar is designed to query the intersection of forensic, memorial and museum ethics and politics, with the goal of informing policy considerations for how museums--especially memorial museums--approach the challenges of displaying human remains.
1 Domanska, Ewa and Jacek Malczynski, eds. 2020. “Special issue on ‘The Environmental History of the Holocaust.’” Journal of Genocide Research22:2. Notably, Domanska, Ewa. 2020. “The Environmental History of Mass Graves,” Journal of Genocide Research 22:2.
2 Rasssol, Ciraj. 2014. “Re-storing the Skeletons of Empire: Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 41:3, 653 – 670; and Rassool, Ciraj. 2019. “The Politics of Non-Racialism in South Africa.” Public Culture 31:2, 343- 371.
3 Seminar participants bring case study expertise on re-patriating remains to South Africa (Ciraj Rassool); protecting and preserving Apache cultural resources (Vernelda Grant), Holocaust (Diane O’Donoghue, Zuzanna Dzuiban); genocide and mass atrocities in Peru (Isais Rojas-Perez), Ethiopia (Bridget Conley), Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia (Sara Wagner and Stephenie Young), Rwanda (Julia Viebach), the Gulag (Elisabeth Anstett).
4 For interdisciplinary work that examines the continuum between treatment of the dead and dying, and what happens after, see Elisabeth Anstett’s work, including: with Jean-Marc Dreyfus. 2017. “Why exhume? Why identify”, Human Remains and Identification: Mass Violence, genocide and the ‘forensic turn.’ Manchester: Manchester University Press.
5 Wagner, Sara. 2008. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. Berkeley: University of California Press; and Rosenblatt, Adam. 2015. Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
6 For analysis of the intersections between memorial and pedagogical concerns of memorial museums, see Naidu, Ereshnee. 2006. “Ties That Bind: Strengthening the Links Between Memorialization and Transitional Justice.” Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation Research Brief. August. Available at https://www.csvr.org.za/docs/livingmemory/tiesthatbind.pdf. Accessed on September 12, 2018. And Naidu, Ereshnee. 2014. “Memorialisation in Post-conflict Societies in Africa: Potentials and Challenges.” In Memorials in Time of Transition, edited by Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Stefanie Schafer, 29–46. Cambridge: Intersentia.
7 See the work of Ingrid Neuman on conservation, and Kristin Parker’s work on “First Aid to Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis.”
8 For discussion of how objects enter and sometimes leave museums, see Lubar, Steven. 2017. Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Part and Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press."