Art, Cultural Heritage and the Market by Valentina Vadi & Hildegard E. G. S. Schneider

Author:Valentina Vadi & Hildegard E. G. S. Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

7.2 The Return of Human Remains

From the 1930s onwards, indigenous people and civil rights movements in the United States, Canada and Australia have successfully struggled for internal self-determination. This struggle encompassed the return of historical and cultural treasures and of human remains. In Australia, for instance, two museums handed over Aboriginal skeletal remains to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Inc. in 1986. In the USA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted in 1990. This landmark legislation enabled native North American groups to recover human remains and funerary objects from federally funded museums, criminalised the trafficking of these remains and objects, and provided guidelines for their excavation. Around the turn of the present century, the debate on minorities and their cultural and historical heritage had become ‘truly international in character in the sense of affecting human remains in public collections worldwide, especially in Western public collections’.8

In the Netherlands, the debate about the fate of human remains only started as late as around the year 2000, and mainly related to human remains from the colonial period.9

Nowadays, collecting human remains is considered to be unethical and some institutions practice active de-accessioning. For instance, the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands has opted for ‘a responsible’ and gradual de-accessioning of human remains.10 The lesson that can be learned from the return of human remains is the primacy of the interests of the source states and communities. The possessors—ethnographic and natural history museums—have had to give up their privileged positions in favour of the people claiming the return of the remains of their ancestors. What would happen if the states and the communities that claim back colonial acquisitions are given more primacy?

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