John Harries

The substance of bones: the emotive materiality and affective presence of human remains

This special issue has its roots in a research network known colloquially as the ‘bones collective’ that emerged in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and grew to encompass scholars, professionals and advocates located throughout the UK and beyond. Initiated by Jeanne Cannizzo, Joost Fontein and John Harries, this has grown into a network of two dozen individuals. Its central, uniting problematic has been to query what it is about human bones and bone that provokes emotional, political, visceral and intellectual responses from those who encounter them. The collective hosted a seminar series at the University of Edinburgh between January and March 2008, inviting a broad range of scholars whose work had already focused on encounters and interactions with human bones in a wide range of different ethnographic and political contexts. This was followed in December 2008 by ‘What lies beneath’, a two-day workshop involving participants with backgrounds in museums, archaeology, social anthropology, fine art and reburial advocacy. The aim of the workshop was to explore the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bone – an approach that has proved productive as we work both deductively and inductively to generate theoretical approaches that illuminate encounters with bones. Developing out of the fruitful discussions of the workshop, the collective organized a session for the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Bristol in April 2009. Although

Contributions Of Ethnography To The Study Of Public Services Management

Abstract Ethnography in the study of public service organizations is gaining acceptance, but the practice of ethnography is changing in line with epistemological concerns and new organizational realities. We outline a move away from ethnography as participant observation of micro process in spatially bounded settings. Work in contemporary organizations is embedded in relationships that cross boundaries, and relationships are not just between people, but also between people and human artefacts such as IT systems. ‘Multi-sited’ ethnography is an approach to understand and manage ‘the organization’ as connections, disruptions and fluid boundaries. Implications for ethnographys contributions to multi-disciplinary organizational research are suggested.

The vitality and efficacy of human substances

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly work devoted to the ‘materialities of death’ in Africa and beyond. Aligned with a burst of activity exploring the changing nature of death (Lee and Vaughan 2008; Jindra and Noret 2011), ‘necro-politics’ (Mbembe 2003) and the ‘governance of the dead’ (Stepputat Forthcoming), much of this work has focused on the material dimensions of the politics of memory, commemoration and what Verdery (1999) calls the ‘political lives of dead bodies’ (cf. Posel and Gupta 2009). In part, this proliferation reflects an increasing recognition of the changing salience of human corporeality across a wide diversity of African contexts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These include movements for the repatriation of indigenous human remains from museums in the ‘north’ – such as Sara Baartman (Crais and Scully 2009) and Hintsa’s skull in South Africa (Mkhize 2009), victims of Germany’s Namibian genocide (Dobler 2012), ‘El negro’ in Botswana (Parsons and Segobye 2002) and the bones of Savorgnan de Brazza in Congo-Brazzaville (Bernault 2010) – but they also relate to growing concerns about illicit trades in body parts, ‘trophies’, organs and human tissues (Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 2002; Jenkins 2010; Harrison 2012). Although sharing a focus on human remains and the political afterlife of the dead, the ethnographic scope of these studies is vast, stretching from the changing significance of funerals, graves and reburials in the politics of land, migration and belonging in South Africa, Kenya, Cameroon, Zimbabwe and elsewhere (Cohen and Odhiambo 1992; Geschiere 2005; James 2007; Fontein 2011), to the propagation of state-led and vernacular exhumations in post-conflict contexts as varied as Rwanda, Kenya (Branch 2010) and Zimbabwe (Fontein 2009, 2010, Forthcoming). In charting the changing meaning of death across the region and beyond, this expanding scholarship has also reflected upon new funerary practices, which have in some contexts created new forms of ritual expertise and, in South Africa in particular, a growing popularity of new embalming practices by ‘funerary entrepreneurs’, exploiting changing popular demands and expectations for the handling, return and burial of the dead (Jindra and Noret 2011; Lamont 2011; Lee 2011). Yet, although it is hard to deny that there have been profound changes to material practices, rituals and meanings associated with death across the region, it is also important to recognize that the salience of human corporealities has a much deeper historical purchase. For example, the presence (and sometimes disquieting absence) of bodies in the ground is central to forging links between claims to ‘autochthony’, entitlement to land, and burial in the soil, as well as in the significance of

Of bleeding skulls and the postcolonial uncanny: bones and the presence of Nonosabasut and Demasduit:

Based on three years of fieldwork in Newfoundland and the UK, this article considers the various materializations of a Beothuk man and woman, all of which have, at their heart, the skull as an ambivalent thing, at once a trace of their presence and a confirmation of their absence. These various processes of materialization, the author argues, are attempts to arrest the ambivalent movement between presence and absence, yet are themselves haunted by the thing itself, which is both insufficient to, yet in excess of, these materializations. In so doing, it engages with broader questions of the nature of the affective presence of human remains, particularly in the context of the postcolonial politic of belonging in settler societies.

A stone that feels right in the hand: Tactile memory, the abduction of agency and presence of the past:

This article is a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the possibility of ‘touching the past’. Drawing on fieldwork from Newfoundland, Canada, and in conversation with Gell’s Art and Agency (1998), it focuses on the process of abduction whereby, in their discovery and handling, pieces of stone become artefacts that index the presence of an absent other. It is argued that through this tactile process of becoming an artefactual index, the distinction between past and present is momentarily dissolved, enfolded into the fit between stone and hand, giving rise to the possibility of historical sensation and the feeling of pastness.

Education for integration: four pedagogical principles

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider how postgraduate education can contribute to the effective integration of health and social care through supporting public service managers to develop the skills required for collaborative working. Design/methodology/approach – Review of documentation from ten years of delivery of a part-time postgraduate programme for health and social care managers, critical reflection on the findings in light of relevant literature. Findings – The health and social care managers participating in this postgraduate programme report working across complex, shifting and hidden boundaries. Effective education for integration should: ground learning in experience; develop a shared language; be inter-professional and co-produced; and support skill development. Originality/value – This paper addresses a gap in the literature relating to the educational and development needs of health and social care managers leading collaborative working.