This article explores the history of the Alexander Ecker Collection and situates it within the larger trajectory of global collecting of human remains during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is then linked to the specific context of the genocide in then German South West Africa (1904–8), with the central figure of Eugen Fischer. The later trajectory of the collection leads up to the current issues of restitution. The Freiburg case is instructive since it raises issues about the possibilities and limitations of provenance research. At the same time, the actual restitution of fourteen human remains in 2014 occurred in a way that sparked serious conflict in Namibia which is still on-going four years later. In closing, exigencies as well as pressing needs in connection with the repatriation and (where possible) rehumanisation of human remains are discussed.
From 2010 to 2013 the Charité Human Remains Project researched the provenance of the remains of fifty-seven men and women from the then colony of German South West Africa. They were collected during German colonial rule, especially but not only during the colonial war 1904–8. The remains were identified in anthropological collections of academic institutions in Berlin. The article describes the history of these collections, the aims, methods and interdisciplinary format of provenance research as well as its results and finally the restitutions of the remains to Namibia in 2011 and 2014.
era of traditional, chemical photography, but it has become more difficult in the era of digital photography, in which editing and manipulation of photos is widespread, cheap and easy ( Taylor, 2000: 132 ). In fact, it is strained to breaking point now photographs are frequently disembodied from their producer and sent into the world without any detail of their provenance. Alarmingly, the technology that enables multimedia deception improves every day. Engineers and programmers have created software that can mimic voice exactly; and they are
majority of Hine’s photographs go uncredited in ARC publications. Identification and confirmation of Hine’s ARC photographs has since been determined by comparison of his stylistic characteristics, his known travel routes while in Europe, by cross reference with reproductions in at least one other contemporaneous publication in which Hine is given credit, and with the provenance provided by various archives. 6 Through archival research, I have successfully identified some 18–20 photographs of Hine’s in the ARC Magazine from 1918 to 1920 and ten to twelve additional
This epilogue turns attention to salient subjects of a modernist provenance on the Indian subcontinent. Now, in South Asia, a certain haziness regarding modernism and modernity derives not only from the manner in which they can be elided with each other, but the fact that they are both frequently filtered through the optics of modernization. At stake is the acute, albeit altering
their individuality, that is, in their empirical life, work and relationships. In defending Jewish emancipation against the restoration of the Jewish question, Marx re-affirmed the subjective right of Jews to be citizens, to be Jews, and to deal creatively, singularly, in their own way, with their Jewish origins. Real humanism is a revolt against the tyranny of provenance. The humanist Marx we are endeavouring to uncover is doubtless not the only Marx we could
same task in my hand as to his papers’.86 Some of the histories claim to rely on documentary sources no longer extant. The Matheson history written in 1838 made use of family papers of seventeenth-century provenance apparently now lost.87 Seumas Fraser had access to records, including an annalistic compilation, maintained at the Valliscaulian Priory of Beauly,88 and another chronicle, Scriptum Bunchriviae, 208 The genealogical histories of Gaelic Scotland ‘bearing the exact date of the death of all our lords and gentlemen for 200 yeares, for by tradition among us
This book explores modernity, the disciplines, and their interplay by drawing in critical considerations of time, space, and their enmeshments. Based in anthropology and history, and drawing on social-political theory (as well as other, complementary, critical perspectives), it focuses on socio-spatial/disciplinary subjects and hierarchical-coeval tousled temporalities. The spatial/temporal templates reveal how modern enticements and antinomies, far from being analytical abstractions, intimate instead ontological attributes and experiential dimensions of the worlds in which we live, and the spaces and times that we inhabit and articulate. Then, the book considers the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. At the same time, rather than approach such antinomies, enticements, and ambiguities as analytical errors or historical lacks, which await their correction or overcoming, it attempts to critically yet cautiously unfold these elements as constitutive of modern worlds. The book draws on social theory, political philosophy, and other scholarship in the critical humanities in order to make its claims concerning the mutual binds between everyday oppositions, routine enchantments, temporal ruptures, and spatial hierarchies of a modern provenance. Then, it turns to issues of identity and modernity. Finally, the book explores the terms of modernism on the Indian subcontinent.
-to-work agenda. Simon Prideaux traces the provenance of Etzioni’s 1990s communitarianism and finds that it is little different from the organisational theory which that author espoused as a functionalist sociologist in the 1960s. This, Prideaux argues, makes for a highly inappropriate basis for a Third Way supposedly of the Left. Taken together, the chapters in
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.