Erratum to: Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia

Turnbull, Paul

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_14

Cited by 3 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…On the one hand was the fixation of Cuvier on the physiognomic and anatomical study of ‘race’, and on the other, de Gérando’s emphasis on the observation of ‘savagery’. In the very early years of the 19th century, however, the historical demarcation of savagery was gradually being overwritten by the physical delineation of race, which placed a premium on collecting – of both skulls and languages (Turnbull, 2017: 72–6). Both could be decoded and traced through their nearest resemblances to reconstruct the pathway a people had taken through history, from their distant origins to their present state, thus supposedly explaining racial and national variety.…”

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Knowing savagery: Australia and the anatomy of race

Buchan

Burnett

2019

History of the Human Sciences

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When Australia was circumnavigated by Europeans in 1801-02, French and British natural historians were unsure how to describe the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land they charted and catalogued. Ideas of race and of savagery were freely deployed by both British and French, but a discursive shift was underway. While the concept of savagery had long been understood to apply to categories of human populations deemed to be in want of more historically advanced 'civilisation', the application of this term in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was increasingly being correlated with the emerging terminology of racial characteristics. The terminology of race was still remarkably fluid, and did not always imply fixed physical or mental endowments or racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, by means of this concept, natural historians began to conceptualise humanity as subject not only to historical gradations, but also to the environmental and climatic variations thought to determine race. This in turn meant that the degree of savagery or civilisation of different peoples could be understood through new criteria that enabled physical classification, in particular by reference to skin colour, hair, facial characteristics, skull morphology, or physical stature: the archetypal criteria of race. While race did not replace the language of savagery, in the early years of the 19th century savagery was re-inscribed by race.

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“… 10. It is not clear where the Blue Mud Bay warrior’s remains ultimately ended up, though Turnbull (2017: 68) speculates that it is possible they may have been given to Joseph Banks. Many of the human remains collected through Banks’ networks were placed in the Hunterian Museum in London (Gascoigne, 2003: 154; Miller, 1996: 32).…”

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Knowing savagery: Australia and the anatomy of race

Buchan

Burnett

2019

History of the Human Sciences

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“…The objectives of such historical collection varied, but included, for example, posthumous retribution for the purported wrongs of a person or group; 4 as souvenir or curio; 5 for display; commercial trade; anatomical, anthropological and phrenological research; 6 and as trophies. 7 Worldwide examples range from the collection of tattooed heads of Maori, 8 to skeletal remains (especially crania) of First Peoples of Australia, 9 Native Americans 10 and the Saami of northern Norway. 11 From the early decades of the 20th century, in Australia and elsewhere, formal anthropological research activities included the collection of hair, blood, bone, and other bodily materials from humans.…”

Section: Collections Of Bodily Materials In Australia — Historical Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections of Genetic Heritage: The Legal, Ethical and Practical Considerations of a Dynamic Consent Approach to Decision Making

Prictor¹,

Huebner²,

Teare³

et al. 2020

J. Law. Med. Ethics

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Dynamic Consent (DC) is both a model and a specific web-based tool that enables clear, granular communication and recording of participant consent choices over time. The DC model enables individuals to know and to decide how personal research information is being used and provides a way in which to exercise legal rights provided in privacy and data protection law. The DC tool is flexible and responsive, enabling legal and ethical requirements in research data sharing to be met and for online health information to be maintained. DC has been used in rare diseases and genomics, to enable people to control and express their preferences regarding their own data. However, DC has never been explored in relationship to historical collections of bioscientific and genetic heritage or to contexts involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (First Peoples of Australia). In response to the growing interest by First Peoples throughout Australia in genetic and genomic research, and the increasing number of invitations from researchers to participate in community health and wellbeing projects, this article examines the legal and ethical attributes and challenges of DC in these contexts. It also explores opportunities for including First Peoples' cultural perspectives, governance, and leadership as a method for defining (or redefining) DC on cultural terms that engage best practice research and data analysis as well as respect for meaningful and longitudinal individual and family participation.

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“…Of the anatomical specimens collected by British and European collectors, the most prized samples came from the so-called primitive races. The construal of Indigenous Australians, especially Tasmanians, as “living fossils” made these remains particularly attractive to science (Turnbull, 2017, p. 26). Today, it is tempting to dismiss obsolete theories of racial science as pseudoscientific folly.…”

Section: Human Remains As Documents: the Legacy Of Racial Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Osteological material, especially skulls, was thought to provide direct evidence about humankind’s evolutionary genealogy. However, as Paul Turnbull as shown, many older specimens “were acquired in the pursuit of other, earlier avenues of scientific curiosity” (Turnbull, 2017, p. 3). These remains were collected to support now outmoded theories of racial science, in which human crania was used to validate notions of racial diversity and hierarchy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human remains as documents: implications for repatriation

Berryman

2019

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to investigate the documentality of human remains in museum and research collections. Second, to provide a rationale for a processual model of documentation, which can account for their repatriation and eventual burial. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine the repatriation issue. It considers an ethical argument developed to support claims for repatriation: the nominal identification of a body as a universal criterion for its burial. Based on Igor Kopytoff’s processual model of commoditisation, it looks to cultural anthropology to help explain how objects can move between a document and non-document state. Findings Human remains can be understood as examples of information-as-thing. However, while document theory can readily account for the expanding realm of documentation, it cannot adequately accommodate instances where documentality is revoked, and when something ceases to be a document. When a human biological specimen is returned, the process that made it serve as a document is effectively reversed. When remains are interred, they revert to their primary standing, as people. The process of becoming a document is therefore not unidirectional, and document status not permanent. Research limitations/implications The implications of a processual model of documentation are discussed. Such a model must be able to account for things as they move into and out of the document state, and where the characteristics of documentality change through time. Originality/value This paper explores problematic material not usually discussed in relation to document theory. The repatriation movement poses a challenge to a discourse predicated on documentation as a progressively expanding field.

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Erratum to: Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Knowing savagery: Australia and the anatomy of race

Knowing savagery: Australia and the anatomy of race

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections of Genetic Heritage: The Legal, Ethical and Practical Considerations of a Dynamic Consent Approach to Decision Making

Human remains as documents: implications for repatriation

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