Figure 5 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
Segal's memo and receipt signed by Monge, transferring bones sent by Smithsonian to Mann, 23 September 1986. Courtesy of the City of Philadelphia Archives.
Source publication
This article examines how openly sharing data online can continue the dehumanizing work of 19th century “collectors” who stole the bodies of colonized peoples. It addresses the ongoing controversies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (“Penn Museum“), regarding the interlinked weaponization of over one thousand...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... of the City of Philadelphia Archives. 47 Ali Hameli, the leader of the independent forensics team, specifically stated that he suspected that "the noise that [Segal] them back in September 1986 ( Figure 4) -without the written aging report that Segal had asked for -he gave Katricia's and Delisha's bones to Mann ( Figure 5). His graduate student, Monge, picked them up at the Medical Examiner's Office, which was then a short walk away from the Penn Museum, and Mann kept the murdered children's remains in his office at the museum -where he held the curatorial position his advisee, Monge, would later hold -and never bothered to return them. ...
Citations
Forensic anthropology has matured into a formidable and fully fledged discipline that includes specialty graduate programs, diversified employment opportunities, an expanding scope, and improved regulation. As part of this maturity, and in step with other branches of science and the humanities, forensic anthropology has also experienced an upswing in discourse on decolonization and decoloniality. From its inception and throughout its history, anthropology has been a colonial venture that observes humans under a Western gaze. As a critique of the universality and superiority of Western systems of knowledge, the decolonial turn constitutes alternative ways of thinking and doing and provides space for these epistemes to circulate and thrive. In this synthesis, decolonization efforts within forensic anthropology are organized into five “C's” of appraisal: categories, casework, curricula, competence, and collections. Namely, these efforts feature the debates around sex, ancestry, and structural vulnerability estimation (categories); the expansion of humanitarian action and community involvement and the challenges to positivism, neutrality, and objectivity (casework); the assessment of how we educate, train, and value expertise (curricula and competence); and the interrogation of how we extract knowledge from the dead (collections). From the undercurrents of these five, a sixth C, care, is unveiled. Given the academic and practical value of forensic anthropology, especially vis‐à‐vis its consequences for colonized peoples, these discourses become imperative for the continued relevance of a colonialist field in a postcolonial world.
The Vienna Protocol on How to Deal with Holocaust Era Human Remains describes what to do when possibly Jewish human remains are found. Based on Jewish medical ethics, it responds to the 2014–2017 discoveries of human remains stemming from biomedical contexts of the Nazi period. Among the finding sites were the Dahlem campus of the Free University of Berlin, the Medical University of Strasbourg, and Max Planck Institute archives. The Vienna Protocol is unique among similar recommendations on Nazi era human remains in its representation of the voices of those who suffered violence and were targeted as victims by Nazi persecution. In addition to discussing the ethics of dealing with physical human remains, these recommendations address the use of images (i.e., visual data) from the bodies of victims of Nazi violence. This paper presents the historical background of the Vienna Protocol and its impact. It also offers a first analysis as to why, at the time of the protocol's formulation, its authors were unaware of its resonance with ethical considerations from African American bioarcheology and a new ethical culture in bioanthropology. Potential reasons for this disconnect may include the historic marginalization of the voices of black scholars in anthropology within the wider scientific community. However, more detailed studies are needed to analyze similarities and differences between the histories and continuities of antisemitism and racism in Europe and the U.S.A., and their ties with scientific theories and practices of disciplines that gain knowledge from human remains.
