Paul Turnbull

The dead and their possessions : repatriation in principle, policy and practice

Inspired by a key session for the World Archaeological Congress in South Africa, The Dead and their Possessions is the first book to tackle the principle, policy and practice of repatriating museum artefacts, rather than cultural heritage in general. Increasingly, indigenous people world-wide are asserting their fundamental right to determine the future of the human remains of their ancestors, and are requesting their return, often for reburial, with varying degrees of success. This repatriation campaign has become hugely significant in universities and museums where human remains uncovered through archaeological excavation have been retained for the scientific study of past populations. This book will be invaluable to those involved in the collection and repatriation of remains and cultural objects to indigenous groups.

Indigenous Australian people, their defence of the dead and native title

[Extract] In July 2000, the indigenous peoples of Australia achieved significant progress in their struggle to regain ownership and determine the fate of ancestral remains preserved in western museums and medical schools.That month, a Select Committee of the British House of Commons recommended that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport initiate discussions with appropriate representatives of museums, of claimant communities and of appropriate Governments to prepare a statement of principles and accompanying guidance relating to the care and safe-keeping of human remains and to the handling of requests for return of human remains. (Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee 2000) This was less than the representatives of indigenous Australian people, who appeared before the committee, had hoped for, but they still saw this recommendation as an important step towards resolving an issue which has long caused anguish in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. In submissions and evidence before the committee, museum administrators acknowledged the distress that the continued preservation of remains caused. Regrettably, there were items in their custody that had been procured in historical circumstances which were wholly at odds with contemporary ethical standards governing the conduct of scientific research. Even so, their testimony reflected the unease within scientific communities at the prospect of returning remains and having them lost to science through reburial. For example, Neal Chalmers, representing the Natural History Museum, argued that the Museum would find it extremely difficult to agree to repatriation, believing that it had a duty to the nation to retain those objects and we have a duty to the scientific international community to use them as a very valuable scientific resource.We would find it extremely difficult to return any such objects if there was any doubt at all about their continued safety and their accessibility. (Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee 2000)

German-Australian Research on a Difficult Legacy: Colonial Collections of Indigenous Human Remains in German Museums and Collections

In recent years, curators of German ethnological and university anatomical museums have begun attempting to resolve the ethical and practical challenges arising from their possession of human remains of Indigenous peoples collected in spheres of colonial ambition during the long nineteenth century. Efforts to assess whether past injustices warrant the return of these remains to their country of origin for reburial has been prompted by Indigenous communities with ancestral ties to these relics requesting their repatriation. In the German context, the largest collections of remains are those of the Indigenous peoples of present day Namibia. However, a number of museums have also found themselves encountering repatriation requests from Indigenous Australian communities. This chapter looks at how the German museum world’s efforts to resolve this difficult legacy has led to collaboration between leading German and Australian museum personnel and scholars with expertise in the history of colonial era collecting of human remains and their repatriation. As the chapter explains, to date this collaboration has largely focused on critically assessing guidelines recommended by the Deutscher Museumsbund, or German Museums Association in late 2003 to its member institutions. Working together, German and Australian experts have drawn attention to how these guidelines—which reflect the experience of German museums dealing with human remains acquired during the Nazi era—have their strengths, but still problematically reflect Eurocentric assumptions about the nature of death, and the relations of the dead to the living.

Managing and mapping the history of collecting indigenous human remains

Abstract This article discusses the e-Scholarship Research Centre’s contribution of informatics expertise and technology to a major three-year research project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC). The project, Return, Reconcile, Renew, aimed to advance knowledge and understanding of the repatriation to Indigenous communities of ancestral human remains and related important cultural property. Project participants include three major Indigenous Australian community organisations (the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre , Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority and the Torres Strait Regional Authority, university and Indigenous community-based researchers in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Northern America, the Australian Federal Government’s Indigenous Repatriation Unit, and a number of cultural and research institutions nationally and internationally.

Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850

This book is the product of a nearly 20-year critical engagement with the written and visual records of European voyaging in Oceania. Douglas originally envisaged a study of how the agency of peoples in the Pacific and Australasia challenged 18th-century voyagers’ assumptions about them, while unsettling voyagers’ senses of self and social identity. Yet she was intrigued by the growing salience of racial thinking within European records of encounters with these peoples, and the complexities of ideas and arguments about the nature and origins of bodily and psychological difference that these encounters provoked from the early 16th century onwards.

Margins, Mainstreams and the Mission of Digital Humanities

I must confess that I am sometimes of two minds about digital humanities. The scholarly and public benefits of humanists using computational and information technologies are obvious. But so, too, is the continuing marginal status of digital work in the mainstream of humanities disciplines. In this chapter I offer some reflections on the predicament of those of us making substantial use of digital technologies in research and communicating its outcomes, in the course of which I also share some thoughts about what the future might hold.

Aphrodite's Island: the European discovery of Tahiti

There is no absolute time. Time is relative. The achievement of this work is in telling of Maohi encounters with British, French and Spanish voyagers during the first two decades of contact, alert to the immersion of Maohi within the flow of their ancestral past. It has been said of the ancient Greeks that they thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs. Whether or not this was so, Salmond convincingly shows that consciousness of the eternal presence of the past was implicit in how Maohi responded to the first Europeans they encountered. Maohi lived acutely conscious that the most mundane or intimate dimensions of their existence were subject to the abiding agency of all-powerful, capricious beings existing since the world was formed out of utter darkness. Salmond begins by tracing the unfurling of the ancestral past into the time of those whose fate it was to encounter the first European voyagers. This history is told making careful use of surviving genealogical narratives, and drawing on the justly esteemed scholarship of Douglas Oliver, Neil Gunson and, most importantly, Hank Driessen. Salmond’s remaining chapters tell of the successive interactions between Maohi and the expeditions led by Wallis, Cook, Bougainville and Boenecha, interleaved with accounts of the experiences and fates of Tupaia, Mai and other Maohi who sailed with the voyagers to Europe and Peru. Salmond is especially good at illuminating how the ancestral past licensed chiefly title-holders and priests — in direct proportion to the sacredness of their ancestral lineage — daring to use these sea-borne strangers to secure the favour of the gods and their agents in furthering their personal and dynastic ambitions. For in one critical respect at least, the indigenous polities of the Society Islands were no different from those of contemporary Europe. As Salmond shows, they had experienced religious and political upheavals as dramatic in their consequences as those shaping the three kingdoms of the British Isles from the outbreak of civil war in the 1640s until the revolution of 1688. By situating the arrival of Tahiti’s discovery within this history, Salmond enables us to see that, culturally, there was logic in much of what Cook, his contemporaries (and many historians since) found exotic or, as was often the case, confusing and unpredictably volatile, in how Maohi responded to their presence. Importantly, too, Salmond shows us that the meanings and values of this ancestral past were not immutable. They proved open to change in the play of cross-cultural interaction, and even furnished Maohi with psychic and cultural resources enabling them to accommodate and exploit Europeans who came among them until well into the missionary era. The centrality of Maohi in this book is welcome. However, as with many of the best works of revisionist scholarship, what is gained equally alerts us that there is further work to be done. Salmond’s concerted focus on recovering what Maohi made of their discovery by Europe is a major contribution to the historiography of Oceania. But it also throws into sharp perspective the need for further, more contextualised investigation of what late Enlightenment Europe made of Maohi. Salmond variously suggests that Tahiti’s European discoverers were also disposed to mythic projection of the past onto the present, seeing Maohi lifeways and culture through a haze of eroticism and enchantment with an idealised Greco-Roman world. But recent scholarship elucidating the diverse social and political uses that Greek and Roman antiquity were made to serve in 18th-century European discourses strongly suggest that there is more yet to be discovered about the ends that Arcadian allusion and the eroticisation of Tahiti were intended to serve.

Review of Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas

This book emerged out of a June 2000 conference in Vanuatu involving academic participants and others involved in restorative justice from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji. Conference proceedings do not always make balanced books, and this book is no exception. The contributions to A Kind of Mending vary from meaty excellent academic views to shorter more involved-practitioner pieces. However, the intent of the book is to provide a ‘broad church’, and all chapters are stimulating for anyone looking for both practical and academic solutions. The restorative justice technique, involving interactions between the formal justice system and informal methods of dispute resolution, is now well established in various areas of the world and certainly in the Pacific. The scene is set by Sinclair Dinnen’s 34-page introduction and John Braithwaite’s nine pages on the fundamentals of restorative justice. Clearly, there is no one technique that can be advocated; they all depend on particular circumstances. But if there is one message that comes from the book it is that the modern state is not the best institution to bring about restorative justice. As Dinnen notes, Pacific societies have long-established methods of dealing with disputes that existed before the modern state was imposed on them. Settling disputes in Pacific societies never involves ‘black and white’ facts; and the solution requires knowledge of and interpretation of kinship, status and social relations. What seems a firm agreement may have to be renegotiated when circumstances have altered. Braithwaite stresses that all main stakeholders must be included in negotiations, and that there is no one answer; each negotiation will be different and the final solution may involve both formal and informal mechanisms. The book then proceeds through a series of case studies. The first two are substantial. Michael Goddard deals with the problems of youths in Papua New Guinea urban villages, using Pari on Port Moresby’s outskirts as his study area. Alan Rumsey takes tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea Western Highlands Province as his case study, arguing that addressing underlying inequalities is necessary. He argues against Braithwaite’s assumption that community and conflict are antithetical to one another. The object, says Rumsey, is not restoration but transformation. Then follow several shorter practitioner studies: five on Vanuatu by Rita Naviti, former Police Commissioner Peter Bong and Hon. Justice Vincent Lunabek, Joemela Simeon and Paul Vuhu, two on Papua New Guinea by John Ivoro and Ruby Zarriga, and one on Fiji by Peni Moore. The preponderance of the Vanuatu studies is owing to the conference from which the book came, but all help flesh out Dinnen’s initial point that there is no one way to proceed. The next six chapters are again substantial, followed by an epilogue by Margaret Jolly. Steven Ratuva and Alumita Durutalo both discuss restorative justice between the Fijian and IndoFijian communities after the 2000 coup, Norman Arkwright deals with the corruption of the concept of traditional compensation payments in Solomon Islands. Finally Ruth Saovana-Spriggs, Pat Howley and John Tombot provide substantial pieces on Bougainville. I must admit I read A Kind of Mending at the end of writing a book on the 1998–2004 crisis years in the Solomon Islands, and was looking for clues to aid my own conclusions. It was timely and useful for me, and likewise will be used widely by historians and political scientists of the Pacific and those interested in peace and conflict resolution on a global scale. I was immediately attracted to the Arkwright chapter, which reinforced the conclusions I had already reached. In the Solomons, compensation became a new growth industry; disastrous extortion and blackmail passed off as traditional compensation payments have altered community expectations of outcomes from negotiations. Yet, it has all been done in the name of traditional justice. The Bougainville chapters are also worthy of note. If there is a sub-theme in the book, it is the role that women can have in peace-making and restorative justice, even in communities where males have appropriated most of the formal power. Jolly takes up this theme in her epilogue, and it is nicely dealt with by Saovana-Spriggs in her explanation of how Bougainville women mediated between warring groups.