Anthropology is haunted
When I finished my feature about the Morton Collection in 2021, I needed a long break from writing about what I called “the ghosts in the museum”—the bones and other remains stolen from marginalized people and communities by scientists building anthropological and anatomical collections. The Morton Collection, while not unique in the gruesome history of museums, feels especially cursed, as it was explicitly designed for doing race science, which, over the next 150 years or so, slowly transformed into physical anthropology as we know it today. The Morton Collection, with its 1300 skulls largely belonging to marginalized people (and/or taken from marginalized countries), is the evidence, reminder, and embodiment of anthropology’s original sin.
So it’s no surprise that the Morton Collection continues to be highly emblematic, somehow channeling every anthropological and ethical debate of the last 200 years and magnifying their force. The latest one is exploding right now, as the University of Pennsylvania, anthropologists, and descendant communities argue about what the next step should be for the skulls of 20 Black people who died in Philadelphia and were taken for the collection by Morton and others. Penn wants to bury the skulls in a historically Black cemetery with pomp and circumstance, symbolically opening a new chapter for the collection, the museum, and anthropology itself. But critics say the university is rushing through the process and skipping over the slow but crucial archival work that might be able to identify some of the Black Philadelphians. And so I’m back to write about it:
In April 2021, following renewed attention to and criticism of the Morton and other similar collections after the racial justice protests in 2020, the Penn Museum apologized for “the unethical possession of human remains in the Morton collection” and said it would repatriate as many remains as possible to descendant communities. Anthropologists say that work should have included extensive archival research, such as examining city and county archives and death certificates and cross-referencing death dates and ages with individuals in Morton’s catalog. Such research can rediscover people’s names and families to possibly identify any living lineal descendants, as well as inform repatriation claims made by self-identified descendant communities.
The Penn Museum’s failure to search all available archives is “egregious,” says Aja Lans, a bioarchaeologist at Johns Hopkins University whose research involves identifying remains held in museum collections. The museum has an ethical obligation to “exhaust all means” of finding people’s names and families before deciding to inter them, she says. Even then, however, developing a burial plan for any still-unidentified remains “should be up to the [self-identified] descendants,” not the museum, she says.
Read the rest here, and don’t miss my 2021 feature for questions about even tougher repatriation cases—as well as an example of what an ethical future for anthropology could look like. I still tear up when I think about it. (Welela! IYKYK.)