In 2004, the remains of two First World War US soldiers from France were delivered to the US Government for identification and burial. One set of remains was identified and buried, and the other went into a cold-case status. In 2019, the second individual was identified using multiple lines of evidence. The possible individuals that could be associated with the remains were reduced based on material evidence recovered with the remains and the spatiotemporal historical context of the remains. The First World War personnel records then offered sufficient biometric criteria to narrow the possible individuals associated with the second recovered individual to one person, Pfc. Charles McAllister. A family reference DNA sample from a direct matrilineal descendant of the individual added statistical weight to the identification, although the mtDNA was not a decisive or necessary factor in the identification. Due to bureaucratic reasons, the legal identification of Pfc. Charles McAllister is still pending.
The extremely high death rates in northern Italy during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic called for exceptional rules and suspension of funeral practices and burial rites. Additionally, forms of collective burial, typical of a wartime scenario, and mechanical methods and timing were reintroduced into the handling of corpses. Although several academic studies have highlighted how the absence of funeral ceremonies and ‘dignified burials’ has caused prolonged and deep suffering for the mourners and for many of the caregivers and health workers, few have so far focused on funeral workers. This article focuses on the intimate, emotional and ethical experiences of a group of funeral workers in northern Italy who handled COVID corpses and had to take the place of the mourners at the time of burial. Through an anthropological analysis of their oral memories, this work attempts to analyse their expressions of discomfort, frustration, fear and suffering.
Since the sixteenth century, artistic anatomy – a branch of medical science subordinated to the Fine Arts – has understood itself as a comparative investigation halfway between forensic dissection and the analysis of classical art and live bodies. Its teaching was first instituted in Italy by the 1802 curriculum of the national Fine Arts academies, but underwent a drastic transformation at the turn of the century, as the rise of photography brought about both a new aesthetics of vision and an increase in the precision of iconographic documentation. In this article I will attempt to provide a history of the teaching of this discipline at the close of the nineteenth century within the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, with a focus on its ties to contemporary French practices. Drawing on archival materials including lesson plans, letters and notes from the classes of the three medical doctors who subsequently held the chair (Gaetano Strambio, Alessandro Lanzillotti-Buonsanti and Carlo Biaggi), I will argue that the deep connections between their teaching of the discipline and their work at the city hospital reveal a hybrid approach, with the modern drive towards live-body study unable to wholly supplant the central role still granted to corpses in the grammar of the visual arts.
Osteological collections are key sources of information in providing crucial insight into the lifestyles of past populations. In this article, we conduct an osteobiographical assessment of the human remains of fourteen Selk'nam individuals, which are now housed in the Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria. The aim is to bring these individuals closer to their communities of origin by using non-invasive methods aimed at rebuilding their biological profiles (i.e., age-at-death, biological sex and health status), adding to these with results from provenance research. This way, the human remains were assigned a new identity closer to their original one, through a process that we call ‘re-individualisation’. This is especially significant since it must be assumed that the individuals were exhumed against their cultural belief system. We conclude that building strong and long-lasting collaborations between Indigenous representatives and biological anthropologists has a pivotal role in research for reappraising Indigenous history.
Museums are places characterised by collecting objects, displaying them for public education and also subjecting their collections to research. Yet knowledge can not only be created by using the collection for research. The history of a collection can also be reconstructed, albeit mostly in a fragmentary way. This is important when there is evidence that the collection was acquired in a colonial context, when the collection contains human remains and more so if these were taken from Indigenous peoples. Reconstructing the history of a collection can assist source communities in strengthening their identities and help to regain lost knowledge about their ancestors. This study analyses the provenance of fourteen crania and calvaria of the Selk’nam people from Tierra del Fuego, stored at the Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum Vienna. Additionally, the significance of these results and their meaning for today’s Selk’nam community Covadonga Ona will be contextualised within the framework of colonial history and museum systems.
This chapter, best read in conjunction with Chapters 2 and 3, seeks to trace the now established stereotype of the puritan and the emergent one of the projector through Ben Jonson’s plays. The aim is to emphasise the role of the theatre in propagating such stereotypes, in ways which were comic, i.e. designed to entertain, and thus to make a profit; but which also had a decidedly political edge, and potential social and cultural punch to them. The chapter establishes the roots of projecting, and thus of the stereotype of the projector, in certain structural tensions and contradictions in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart states. It then uses the ambiguous feelings of Ben Jonson towards his status as a creature of the court, a popular dramatist and a poet with a serious moral purpose to illustrate wider ambiguities in how stereotypes could be used both to strengthen the status quo, by deriding and marginalising perceived threats and abuses, and (in the right, or perhaps we should say wrong, circumstances) to actively delegitimate, and thus destabilise, the status quo. The concluding section reflects on how such literary interventions shaped subsequent political and economic processes running up to the Civil Wars.
The coda looks back to the early modern case studies presented in this volume, and highlights key findings. By documenting practices of stereotyping and studying their repercussions, these case studies demonstrate both the surprising human agency over particular stereotypes, and simultaneously the disturbing resilience of stereotyping as a mode of human interaction across the early modern period. By inviting the renowned social psychologist Sandra Jovchelovitch to co-author, we explore implications of these findings for social psychology and sociology, and for civil societies in the twenty-first century.
This chapter focuses on attempts to control and dispute stereotypes in late-seventeenth-century England. It considers the conflicting uses of the ‘Catholic plotter’ stereotype by different groups of Protestants in the print culture of the succession crisis (1678–83). It argues that stereotypes were platforms on which wider political debates took place, not a crude means of simplifying complex political issues down to the lowest common denominator. Anti-Catholicism was a significant ideology in early modern culture, a commonplace means of defining the positive traits of a religious or political group through attention to its ‘popish’ inverse. ‘Popish’ stereotypes were consequently highly flexible and were applied to different groups as political contexts developed. Accusing each other of being ‘popish’ was a routine part of political conflict between Whigs and Tories, or Anglicans and dissenters, in this period. Attending to how each group applied ‘popery’ to its opponents demonstrates that stereotypes were not simply applied, they had to be controlled, sometimes even subverted, to control anti-Catholicism as an important moral language of political debate. This chapter considers how the images, rhetoric and motifs of ‘popish’ stereotypes were contested as a means of articulating broader political views and values.