Dienstag, 14. März 2023, 15:00 - 19:00

Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, Research Lounge 1010 Vienna, Rabensteig 3, 3rd Floor

In the summer of 2022, the transcontinental travel of a single tooth made the headlines worldwide. The tooth belonged to Patrice Lumumba – the first prime minister of the post-independence Republic of Congo, brutally murdered in 1961. Lumumba’s body was violently dismembered and dissolved. Only the tooth survived the destruction and, as a contentious trophy, travelled to Belgium with a Belgian policeman responsible for the disposal of the body. In 2020, after it became publicly known that the tooth of the leader of the struggle for Congolese independence was in the possession of this individual for over six decades, a Belgian court ruled that it must be returned to Lumumba’s family. This finally happened in 2022: the tooth was publicly displayed in Belgium and then transferred to Kinshasa, where it was ceremonially buried. It is virtually impossible to know if other complete or fragmentary human remains still reside in private archives of (descendants of) perpetrators of colonial and racialised violence, and - unlike those in public collections – will never be recovered and repatriated. And yet the travel of a single tooth from Congo to Belgium and back made manifest the deep entanglement of human remains in the past and ongoing legacies of violence but also their power to (re)instantiate debates about the ownership, dignity, and the subjecthood of dead bodies - in various culturally and geographically disparate contexts.

The journey made by Lumumba’s tooth should be seen in the context of the long history of circulation of human remains, also beyond the private realm, across many ‘scientific’ and heritage settings. Our conference takes a look at several of these cases in which human remains were put on the move. We look at their historical and contemporary travels to – and from – research institutions, collections and museums. The objective is to interrogate the politics behind these travels and their implications for thinking about the complex ontology of human remains, and about the modalities of violence to which they are posthumously subjected. Taking as a vantage point postcolonial and decolonial debates around repatriation of human remains still deposited in various public archives, museums and research institutions in the Northern Hemisphere, we trace the routes through which dead bodies travelled to those institutions – and the contexts of their deaccession. At the same time, we attend to the very material, political and affective presence of the human remains on the move between private and public bodies, between the formerly colonised to the colonisers (and back), and between global museums devoted to political violence in contexts other than colonial, including the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Japan.

Programme:

15:00-16:15 Session I

Éva Kovács (VWI)

Opening words

Zuzanna Dziuban(Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Introductory remarks

Sophie Schasiepen (University of the Western Cape)

People Made into Objects: Academic Collections of Human Remains and the Production of Capital

Christopher Heaney (Penn State)

Andean Ancestors and the Global History of Human Remains

Kelly Hyberger (Filson Historical Society)

Reckoning and Repatriation: Indigenous Remains in US Museums

Chair: Ran Zwigenberg (Penn State)

16:15-16:30 Coffee break

16:30-17:30 Session II

Gudrun Rath (University of Art and Design Linz)

The Return of Ataï: ‘Science’, Skulls, Ongoing Struggles

Zuzanna Dziuban (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Ran Zwigenberg (Penn State)

Holocaust Ashes on the Move: Incinerated Human Remains in Global Memorial Museums

Éva Kovács and Kinga Frojimovics (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies)

Online exhibition ‘Wiesenthal in Linz’

Chair: Ljiljana Radonić (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

17:30-17:45 Coffee break

17:45-19:00 Panel Discussion (with all presenters)

Moderator: Zuzanna Dziuban

Please click here to open the folder with further information.

Organised by:

Institute of Culture Studies and Theater History, Austrian Academy of Sciences, ERC project Globalised Memory Museums, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) and Penn State University

Concept: Zuzanna Dziuban (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Ran Zwigenberg (Penn State)

Image: WIlh. Greve [Lithographer], “The Bay and Necropolis of Ancón,” from Wilhelm Reiss and Alphons Stübel, The Necropolis of Ancon in Peru: A Contribution to Our Knowledge of the Culture and Industries of the Empire of the Incas. trans. Augustus Henry Keane, Vol. 1 (Berlin: A. Asher, 1880-1887). Collection Development Department. Widener Library. HCL, Harvard University

By participating, you consent to the publication of photos, video and audio recordings that are made during the event.

Due to limited number of participants in person and online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2853121653

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