Meeting them: essays and invocations about human remains in a university collection

Vanessa Hava Schulmann (Freie Universität Berlin): The stories I will tell you about happened during my work in a Berlin university collection. I was tasked of meeting the deceased whose bones and tissues were stored in those dusty wooden cupboards and figure out how to handle their presence in a dignified way.

After writing pages upon pages of scientifically concise and neutral text, the default writing style of a trained biologist, I decided that I may as well throw them away….

The author consciously invokes the personal and speculative onto the podium as a collaborative and sometimes interjecting force when discussing “scientific research” with human remains.

She invites you to dwell on key topics of human remains in collections, along with real case reports and personal anecdotes. While you will meet “them”, those whose remains I will introduce you to, you will also get to know me – whose life got intertwined with their death.

Next to scientific essays and real provenance cases, each chapter includes personal anecdotes, poems and hand-drawn illustrations to introduce key topics of provenance research.

Yes, this book is about repatriation but offers more. It is also linking up with dead bodies in current conflicts.

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