Our March 2025 LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, March 26 at 5:30pm completely over Zoom. (For our next meeting in April, we plan to
meet once again in UNC’s HHIVE Lab, Greenlaw 524, with options for members to join via Zoom as well.)
For our March meeting, we discussed Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums by Samuel J. Redman (Harvard UP, 2016). Specifically, we focused on the following:
- Prologue (pp. 1-15)
- Ch. 1: “Collecting Bodies for Science” (pp. 16-68)
- Suggested optional reading: Ch. 3: “The Medical Body on Display” (pp. 126-157)
If you missed the meeting, you can still access the text on the Readings page of this site!
You can also access the recording of our meeting here.
Our next meeting, for April, will take place on at 5:30pm on Wed. April 23 in the HHIVE Lab (Greenlaw 524), with options for people to join via Zoom as well. It will be our final meeting of the semester, and we’ll be posting information about that upcoming meeting soon!
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- Also, please feel free to spread the word about LMCC to other interested graduate or professional students at UNC.
Redman, Samuel J. Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. Harvard UP, 2016. DeGruyter Academic Publishing, https://doi-org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.4159/9780674969711.
Meeting Notes:
- Contact zones across various mediums such as postal workers, newspapers, fictional accounts, notes sent with human remains (speculative or unclear provenance), fairs, retail store windows
- The mobility of these human remains
- A façade of cohesivity when the remains (and their narratives) were often patched together, treated interchangeably
- Contact zones across multiple disciplines and contexts
- Redman uses the term “scientific racism” in a very specific way, referring to the Gilded Age thru the interwar period
- Could Redman have spent a bit more time discussing the problematic natures of these remains, even in just footnotes or endnotes?
- The significance of the debate between polygenesists and monogenesists
- “Living fossils,” living people put on display at fairs; consider also removing physical material from people, such as the case of Henrietta Lacks; also reminiscent of “cabinets of curiosities”
- The transformation of a human body into pieces, specimens to study, objects to display, texts to interpret; voyeurism, the taboo, and necrotourism
- Consider the Museum of Wonder currently in Alabama or Ripley’s Believe It or Not or other similar current exhibitions; consider also current curatorial practices)
- The desire to collect as much data as possible can drive such a transformation as well, a desire to collect data to justify knowledge frameworks, frameworks that continue to have lingering influences today
- Competition between various museums and other institutions; competition between the USA and the Old World
- Professionals vs. amateurs when both are guilty of robbing graves; who is provided professional authority
- The desire to professionalize various disciplines, to justify various institutions vs. mass consumer culture (fairs, newspapers, etc.)
- Contact zones between the interpersonal, the institutional, the authoritative
A Few Key Passages:
“Starting around the time of the Civil War and stretching deep into the twentieth century, gathering human skeletal remains was a common intellectual, cultural, and social pursuit. Though not limited to professional collectors, the practice centered primarily on an important, changing, and diverse network of scholars and scientists affiliated with a number of museums in the United States” (Redman 3-4).
“The specimens, it was believed, helped illustrate the ideas considered most important to the scientists at a particular historical moment. Fueled by competing desires and ideas, several major museums grew to dominate medical and physical anthropological collections, hoarding and attempting to fully comprehend the utility of the newly acquired bones on a nearly industrial scale. The desire for scientific collections and competing ideas about race and the history of humankind fueled the growth of bone collections, which outgrew storage areas and spilled into hallways and occasionally onto gallery floors in exhibitions” (Redman 4).
“In some instances, bones were presumed to be similar enough to be simply interchangeable within racial categories; if the jaw was too broken or shattered for display, the museum could replace the broken or missing bone with another, similarly sized portion of a different Native American skeleton” (Redman 5).
“Recent historians have been harshly critical of the legacy of the amateur collectors (perhaps better described as looters) and scientists who established these collections, but few books have fully explored the interconnected nature of individual institutional histories and human remains collections as a social and cultural practice. Nor has much been written on people’s reactions to bone collections when they were placed on public exhibition” (Redman 6).
“Ideas about the human body, particularly when related to race and gender, were critical in reinforcing—and sometimes deconstructing— basic cultural conceptions regarding humanity. Classifying the races implied that race was a viable concept and an accurate reflection of humankind. A binary mode of sexual distinction— classifying bones into male or female—was taken for granted. Human remains collections shaped significant perceptions about living and seemingly vanishing races around the globe” (Redman 8).
“Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, human remains were often presented on their own, lying silently under the glass cases lining museum halls and presented to the public as representing discrete facts with little added interpretation. Bones were simply points on hierarchies, stages in evolution, or illustrations of ‘comparative anatomy’ and racial classification schemes” (Redman 8).
“This book explores how those changes—as messy as they sometimes were— shaped important and influential museum spaces as well as several major exhibits. Increasingly, an interest in human prehistory gradually displaced racial classification as the central scholarly debate consuming the obsessive drive to build bone rooms at museums of medicine, anthropology, and natural history in the United States. Despite this shift, the race question as it related to bone collections remained present, deeply rooted in their foundations” (Redman 9).
“The gradually deteriorating bones mostly languished on museum shelves, but the ideas surrounding them constantly evolved” (Redman 11).
“While these histories contribute mightily to our knowledge of the history of museum anthropology, they have largely left a documentary and interpretive gap surrounding the history of collecting, displaying, and studying the remains of human beings from around the globe. Within natural history museums, these collections were defined as belonging to physical anthropology. In more modestly sized medical museums, bones were studied for a variety of reasons; however, racial science and human history were subjects extending into medical circles as well, with collections of bones primarily understood as tools to advance the education of physicians, especially in the nineteenth century” (Redman 12).
“Human remains collected for ‘science’ were interpreted as having lost their spiritual context once taken from the cemetery, burial ground, or morgue. Once the body became an object, it became a tool in scientific study and display. This transformation led to a series of major ethical questions surrounding the treatment of human remains by museums and universities in the United States. While the connection between scientists working with museum collections of human remains has been taken for granted in most works on the subject, a history of the growth of these collections and the ideas drawn from them during what was perhaps their most active and influential period has never been written” (Redman 13).
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Note: The featured image for this post comes from Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums by Samuel J. Redman (Harvard UP, 2016), chapter 3: “The Medical Body on Display” (pp. 126-157). Between pages 137 and 138 are twenty-four unnumbered pages of photographs. The featured image for this post appears on the ninth page of photographs after page 137. It is captioned as follows:
“The Hyrtl Skull Collection at the Mütter Museum. Rarely are skull collections displayed today as they were in the nineteenth century. The Mütter Museum, however, displays its Hyrtl collection in an effort to teach not only basic human anatomy but also the history of medicine and scientific racism. Copyright © 2009 George Widman Photography, for the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.”