‘Bone Rooms’: Where scientific racists stored their ‘evidence’
‘Bone Rooms’: Where scientific racists stored their ‘evidence’
By Barbara J. King April 15 at 11:18 AM
Skeletons and mummified remains of nearly 30,000 people dwell in the vaults of the Smithsonian Institution. Though their voices have long been silenced, what we say about them speaks volumes. In “Bone Rooms,” biological anthropologist Samuel J. Redman describes the cutting-edge technology brought to bear on these remains and the ethical issues Smithsonian scientists grapple with as they consult some of the descendant communities of the individuals represented in the vaults.
Redman’s primary focus is the years between the Civil War and World War II, a period when anthropologists collected these remains — and thousands of others that lined the shelves in places like Chicago’s Field Museum and Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum — with no regard for ethics. “Bone Rooms” tells the story of “the worst legacies of colonial anthropology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” The bodies of women and men who were loved by their families and might have been honored by them in death became mere objects for study. A strong motivating factor for the extensive research Redman undertook to write “Bone Rooms” was this haunting question: “Given the centrality of death and burial in the human experience, how could seemingly sacred principles be violated so directly and systematically?”
The book’s subtitle clues us in to part of the answer: scientific racism. Interest in the “exotic bodies of nonwhite races” drove research for decades. At the Army Medical Museum in the second half of the 19th century, for instance, “the number of American Indian and African American bodies that the museum acquired vastly outpaced the number of European American remains” collected. In the case of Native Americans, skeletons were simply grabbed up from battlefields such as Little Bighorn and, as the American West opened up, from archaeological sites such as the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings in Colorado. And if “indigenous bodies were considered to be commodities,” the same was true of African American bodies, Redman explains.
(‘Scientific’ racism is creeping back into our thinking. )
An effort to classify our species by race lay behind much of the earliest work in U.S. bone rooms. The notion that humans across the globe could be carved up into a discrete number of races — the tripartite scheme of white, black and yellow-brown was popular — was taken for granted. Visitors to large exhibitions, such as San Diego’s “Science of Man” in 1915, were treated to exhibits implying that some nonwhite races still maintained primitive features, and assumptions of white supremacy were veiled thinly, if at all.
In the mid-20th century, questions of human prehistory and evolution slowly began to replace those of racial classification in the museum world. A central figure in this evolving story is Ales Hrdlicka, a Czech-born anthropologist who in 1903 was named the Smithsonian’s first curator of physical anthropology. Hrdlicka’s personality was as acerbic as his ethics were rocky; he essentially encouraged looting of human remains and aligned himself with the eugenics movement.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/bone-rooms-where-scientific-racists-stored-their-evidence/2016/04/14/d6aeae46-eed7-11e5-a61f-e9c95c06edca_story.html
