This presentation will present some of such problems inherent in the contemporary handling of skeletal remains, such as:
- the reliance on reified, essentialist and often racialised notions of ethnicity, nationality and indigeneity; an unwitting support of diverse political agendas at play;
- the risks of reductive and excluding effects of the post-/de-colonial framework in which such research and restitutions are often framed.
This critique applied to human skeletal remains can be applied to numerous other domains of contemporary society and post-/de-colonial scholarship and practice.
