 stripped of their religions, and killed in warfare, anthropologists, archaeologists, and other collectors were stealing their remains for study and exhibitions in museums across the globe.
Katie Stringer Clary, “Human Remains in Museums Today,” History News 73, no. 4 (Autumn 2018): 12–19.
As Katie Stringer Clary observes, although many museums have human remains in their collections, whether full skeletons, mummies, artifacts made from bones, or less obvious objects like Victorian memorial hair wreaths, “there are few clear legal or ethical guidelines that apply to all collections.” While NAGPRA in 1990 offered some protection to Native American graves and looted objects, “there are no similar museum guidelines for remains of people of African, European, Asian, or other ethnic descent.” This is still the case years after the publication of this article, which gives a detailed summary of human remains in American museums and museums around the world, with Clary concluding that museums must focus on “respect and consent” in addressing the ethical issues of these collections.
Uli Linke, “Touching the Corpse: The Unmaking of Memory in the Body Museum,” Anthropology Today 21, no. 5 (October 2005): 13–19
The touring Body Worlds display of dissected bodies is among the most sensational and controversial anatomical exhibitions of the twenty-first century, particularly because of its shadowy sourcing of corpses without clear donor consent. It has subsequently inspired numerous copycats. Uli Linke focuses on its presentation in Germany, “where the contact with mutilated corpses, previously evocative of war and genocide, has been rendered safe in the cocooned space of the museum.” These corpses have been preserved with a plastination process that gives them an appearance of life yet reduces their presence as individuals, which Linke sees as a contrast to earlier anatomical museum displays. “The dead, robbed of their humanity, display their seemingly un-dead bodies with a scientific objectivity that undoes and negates the museum’s task of memory production,” he writes.
Nadja Durbach, “‘Skinless Wonders’: ‘Body Worlds’ and the Victorian Freak Show,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 69, no. 1 (January 2014): 38–67.
Although Body Worlds has sparked a range of responses, from outrage to fascination, Nadja Durbach argues that it has a direct line back to nineteenth-century “freak shows” in its attempt to merge education and entertainment. “They are both examples of the dynamic relationship between the popular and professional cultures of the body that we often erroneously think of as separate and discrete,” Durbach writes. In situating the work of Gunther von Hägens, the German anatomist who organized Body Worlds, in this context, she highlights the history of anatomical display as entertainment, whether in museums, curiosity cabinets, or individuals like Joseph Merrick exhibiting himself as the “Elephant Man” in the 1880s.