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 takes as its starting point a 2012 cover of The Economist with the headline ‘Cry, the beloved country: South Africa’s sad decline’. This cover conjures up a powerful racialized imaginary which connects contemporary emerging markets finance to histories of colonialism and empire. Indeed, by depicting a mob of angry Black men armed with pikes, the cover suggests that the ‘sad decline’ in question (a deep socio-political and financial crisis, credit rating downgrades and large-scale financial capital flight) is due to threatening, uncontrollable and violent masses of Black people. I bring this cover into conversation with a number of quotes from interviews that I conducted with state and private actors in South Africa. I show that what those actors call ‘Afro-pessimism’ – a reference to the remarkable timorousness of international investors in South Africa – is a manifestation of the processes of ‘othering’ and racialization through which South Africa and other sub-Saharan African countries have been discursively constructed as investment destinations. I use the cover and the interview quotes to discuss how relations of race and coloniality are reproduced through the production of financial knowledges and patterns of financial capital flows, with material consequences for the people living in the spaces construed as African emerging markets.
Oil, notes David McDermott Hughes, is ‘most dangerous when it behaves ordinarily and when people treat it as ordinary … Only the abnormal event – the spill – brings a black goo into view and into contact with human flesh.’ In Part I, Tracy Lassiter and Imre Szeman take as their starting point the banality of oil infrastructure in settler-colonial landscapes. Alysse Kushinski moves to consider not the aesthetics of infrastructure’s ‘background’ presence, but the aesthetics of transparency and the ways in which oil infrastructure can be just as dangerous when its volatile, leaky nature is made transparent.
It’s an innocuous enough image: two men standing before a wooden structure with another group of (white) men in the background. The two men, Edwin Drake and Peter Wilson, actually stand before the Drake Well, the first oil well, drilled on 27 August 1859 in present-day Titusville, Pennsylvania. But in the intervening centuries, the oil industry has turned into a global economic juggernaut, causing rampant worldwide political, economic and racial exploitation. Nations fight wars over oil and, on local scales, protests and resistance movements challenge the industry’s power. It meets resistance in Nigeria, the Amazonian rainforest, Standing Rock, North Dakota and elsewhere. Leaking pipelines and toxic refineries usually are built where marginalized communities live. ‘Boom!’ would connect this historical image to the global force the oil industry has become. Where the industry ‘booms’, it generates billion-dollar profits and creates economic benefit for employees and regional governments. Yet it does so at the cost of lives, health and the environment. We can expect more frequent resistance to ‘boom’, too, as exploited peoples and concerned activities fight for our planet’s future.