Journal of

MATERIAL
Preface CULTURE
Journal of Material Culture

The substance of bones: the 15(4) 371–384

© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1359183510382965
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remains

Cara Krmpotich
University of Toronto, Canada

Joost Fontein
University of Edinburgh, UK

John Harries
University of Edinburgh, UK

This special issue has its roots in a research network known colloquially as the ‘bones
collective’ that emerged in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and grew
to encompass scholars, professionals and advocates located throughout the UK and
beyond. Initiated by Jeanne Cannizzo, Joost Fontein and John Harries, this has grown
into a network of two dozen individuals. Its central, uniting problematic has been to
query what it is about human bones and bone that provokes emotional, political, visceral
and intellectual responses from those who encounter them.
The collective hosted a seminar series at the University of Edinburgh between Janu-
ary and March 2008, inviting a broad range of scholars whose work had already focused
on encounters and interactions with human bones in a wide range of different ethno-
graphic and political contexts.1 This was followed in December 2008 by ‘What lies
beneath’, a two-day workshop involving participants with backgrounds in museums,
archaeology, social anthropology, fine art and reburial advocacy.2 The aim of the work-
shop was to explore the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bone – an
approach that has proved productive as we work both deductively and inductively to
generate theoretical approaches that illuminate encounters with bones. Developing out of
the fruitful discussions of the workshop, the collective organized a session for the Asso-
ciation of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Bristol in April 2009. Although

Corresponding author:
Cara Krmpotich, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, 140 St George Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S
3G6, Canada.
Email: cara.krmpotich@utoronto.ca
372 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

the central concern of all these events has been what bones do, inevitably each event has
explored this question in differing social and material contexts. The ASA’s 2009 theme of
anthropology and archaeology encouraged the panel to situate human bones in the con-
texts of broader and more diverse encounters with material and immaterial remnants of
the past, including architecture, artefacts and ruins, memory and spirits.3
The articles in this issue draw upon the full range of the collective’s activities. Simon
Harrison presented an earlier version of his paper on the collection of bones from the
dead of the American Civil War as trophies and trinkets in the seminar series. John
Harries’ paper on the myriad identities of two Beothuk skulls and Joost Fontein’s paper
on the resurfacing bones and tortured bodies of Zimbabwe’s fraught colonial and post­
colonial legacies of violence had their first incarnations in the workshop. The forensic
and affective identification of the disappeared from the Franco years in Spain is an
expansion of Layla Renshaw’s presentation in the ASA session convened by Krmpotich
and Harries. The epilogue comes from Elizabeth Hallam whose work on the materials of
death and anatomical collections has loomed large in the background of the collective’s
critical discussions.
In all its initiatives, the collective has sought to extend its discussions to new audi-
ences and to bring in new voices. This special issue is an effort to open up the debates to
a wider, interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse academic community. The Journal of
Material Culture is an apt venue for achieving this goal as we pursue the emotive and
affective potency and efficacy of bone as material, and bones as uneasy, ambivalent
subject/objects. Heeding Ingold’s (2007) injunction to return to materials and their trans-
forming and transferring properties and affordances, we ground our investigations and
theoretical approaches both in bones as things, and bone as substance. In starting from
this approach, we are not rendering bones as other-than-human, but rather focus attention
on the very properties, processes and techniques through which bones and bone are con-
stantly constituted and negotiated as persons or things, subjects or objects, meanings or
matter. These categories, forms and states of being are neither permanent nor exclusive.
The appearance, disappearance, fragmentation, reconstruction and destruction of bones
and bone provide a means of contributing to wider theoretical debates. Inevitably, the
articles in this issue draw upon and contribute to wider, contemporary anthropological
and archaeological discourses about power, postcolonial politics and the changing rela-
tionships of ‘the body’, identity, belonging and the state. Yet they promote the theoriza-
tion of such diverse issues as repatriation, transforming personhoods, the medicalization
of body parts and bodily processes, and emergent politics of identity and belonging,
through the lens of bones as active materials encountered and viscerally engaged with
and responded to, as well as materializing evidence of human lives and relationships,
past and present. Of course, the dead body as a symbol of, or metaphor for, social rela-
tions has received ample attention (Herle et al., 2009; Hertz, 1960; Huntington and
Metcalf, 1991). The approach we advocate here is a reading of bones (and indeed bodies)
not predefined as corpse or as symbol, but as parts of other people that are sensed through
our faculties – a kind of double bodily engagement (cf. Conklin, 2001) that acknowl-
edges what Posel and Gupta (2009: 299) have coined the ‘dualistic life of the corpse’,
even as it echoes Strathern’s (2004) work on partible persons. It is difficult, if not
Krmpotich et al. 373

counter-productive, to separate out the agency accrued from the material properties of
human bone and that accrued from bones as parts of human beings.
Hence, our interest in the physical properties of bones is closely tied to the possibilities
that inhere in bone. The key question is not ‘what do people do with bones?’, but rather
‘what do bones do to people?’ Or more generally, what do bones enable, afford, provoke,
constrain or allow? Transcribing Gell’s (1998) possibilities for the agency of art onto
bones,4 we recognize that bones, as agents and indices, can do things through carrying or
delivering the deferred or abducted agency of human actors, whether through the dead
themselves or other living people (see also Hallam and Hockey, 2001). As Williams
(2004) has pointed out, such agency comes in different forms.5 The first is the potential
for the deceased themselves to act, through wills or legacies for example, or, as Fontein
describes, through frightening visitations by unsettled spirits. In many such cases, bones
provide a physical reminder or indicator of how well the wishes of the deceased are being
fulfilled. But bones can also be said to do things, or have ‘agency’ as materials and things;
that is as objects rather than subjects (Knappett and Malafouris, 2008). Each of the arti-
cles in this issue explores and develops the ambivalence of this agency. The crucial out-
come of considering the agency of bones as both deferred human agency and as material
objects or ‘non-human actants’ (Latour, 2005) is the destabilization of any easy boundar-
ies between persons and things, subjects and objects, actions and reactions. Furthermore,
if put alongside Ingold’s emphasis on what the properties of bone as transforming materi-
als afford and allow, such a multi-dimensional consideration of how and what human
bone does, enables or constrains, itself facilitates a profound rethinking of what ‘agency’
denotes. In the longer run, the most significant consequence of the larger debates about
materiality, object agency and the properties of materials within which our work on bones
is located, may be a re-conceptualization of what ‘doing’ actually amounts to.
Answering the question, ‘what do the dead want?’ is fraught, particularly in current
political climates where many individuals and interest groups claim to speak on behalf of
the dead. In pursuit of the dead’s agency, we have often employed scepticism towards
political statements made by particular constituencies of the living on behalf of the dead,
and instead have pursued more phenomenological approaches, with greater sensitivity to
the possibility of profound cultural and even ontological differences. In contemplating
how bones do things, we therefore privilege empirical ethnographic accounts of differing
localized sensibilities about the agency of the dead and the possible physical manifesta-
tions of such actions. Thus, whereas Williams (2004: 267) envisions decomposing bod-
ies as alienating or disgusting to the living, we make no assumptions that bones are, by
their material nature, estranging or revolting. We pursue ethnographic evidence for atti-
tudes towards bodies and bones, living and dead, in order to understand their active pos-
sibilities. The result is often a comparison between a politics of bones and the very real,
everyday ways that bones enter and engage the lives of people. Both Renshaw and Fon-
tein map the movements of bones between political, social and domestic spheres, where
state commemoration, international and national heritage processes, and family and
community mourning become entwined and fracture in complex ways. Harries further
reminds us how bones, infrequently seen, can come to bear the weight of multiple imagined
identities. Rarely encountered in their museum location, Nonosabasut and Demasduit’s
374 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

skulls are nevertheless laden with imagined identities, narratives and politics. Harries
undertakes an excavation of sorts to find what is at the heart of the imagined couple and
those doing the imagining. His excavation does not begin with digging down, but rather
by moving through the dissonant spaces of forested Newfoundland and industrial
Edinburgh in an attempt to understand how environment impinges on the emotive and
affective potential of bone.
During the ‘What lies beneath’ workshop, we encountered remains in close proximity
not through excavation but through the sharing of space. As death becomes increasingly
medicalized, regulated, distanced and governed (Kaufman and Morgan, 2005; Mbembe,
2003; Seymour, 1999), interactions with the dead are increasingly professionalized and
exist in the highly specialized domains of health workers, coroners, forensic scientists,
and funeral directors. For the layperson, encounters with bodies and bones often point to
the exceptional, as consequences of violence, disease and poverty, and may be demarked
by feelings of extreme unease, estrangement, or alternatively intimacy, nurturance and
responsibility.
In an attempt to overcome this distance, Joan Smith from the Edinburgh College of
Art, along with Jeanne Cannizzo, engaged us in the once common practice of anatomical
drawing and brought in two partial skeletons from the College’s collections (see Figures
1 and 2). Looking gave way to touching, and wholes gave way to segments, as charcoals
and pastels met paper. For many participants, this unfamiliar way of encountering
remains – as models intended to be translated through non-verbal, embodied representa-
tional practices of drawing lines and etching two-dimensional forms, rather than words
or theory – laid bare the propensity for competing narratives to adhere to bones. The
bones laid out on tables as still-life objects became the focus of our gaze and had diffi-
culty escaping identification as marginalized and subjugated. In a city that shares a long
and esteemed history in the study of human anatomy (Buchan, 2003; Kaufman, 2003)
with the less sanguine, but equally well known legacies of Burke and Hare’s murderous
grave robbing, it was perhaps not surprising that histories of class-based and colonially-
sanctioned grave digging and body-snatching lingered below the surface of this art les-
son. There was a desire to know whose bones these were. And more specifically, what
manner of oppression lead to their deposition in the Art College? Inevitably, participants
questioned whether it was appropriate to use human bones as a workshop activity (or as
a tool for art education). Is such an activity dehumanizing? Had we perpetuated the
anthropological gaze and created an object where there should have been a subject?
The humanness of the bones was inescapable, even if, as Hallam shows in her epi-
logue to this issue, this in part reflects the artisanship of skeletopoeia. As reconstituted
forms and arranged objects, they defied us to ignore their subjectivity. These readings
were based on participants’ imaginations of the individuals who once fleshed out and
animated these bones, imaginations that belied interests in the subaltern and subjugated.
There was a tendency to see these bones as victims, but in so doing we ran the risk of
limiting their agency. It took time for alternative readings to enter the range of possibili-
ties: that the bones belonged to patrons of the arts who bequeathed their bodies to the
school; that appreciating these bones at such a detailed level is a form of ‘respect’; and
even that bodies and bones can be rendered impotent in death – once the soul or life force
leaves a body, the material remains may be just that: material remnants.
Krmpotich et al. 375

A major task of the workshop – aided tremendously by the close examination, draw-
ing and overlaying of our sketches – was to explore bone as material; as shapes, tones
and textures. In addition to the matter comprising the bones, the apparatus used to main-
tain the forms of the skeletons – metal wires, plates and hooks – became intrinsic to the
overall form. The chemical designations of organic and inorganic were replaced by an
interdependence of form and function. The metal became a life-support at the same time
that the osteological matter became architectural. In focusing on the materiality of the
bones, our imaginations could begin again with the bones themselves, rather than a pre-
determining politics.
Each of the contributions in this issue has the potential to be framed first and foremost
through the politicized lens of colonial encounters or state violence. Yet by prioritizing
bones and bodily substances rather than the political context, each author provides a
nuanced reading of the local meanings and potentialities of human interactions with
bones. In our stance, politics do not give meaning to bones; rather it is the bones that
support or animate processes of mourning and historicization, individuation and other-
ing, marginalization and silencing, subversion and reassertion. It is bones that affirm
kinship relations and memory. The articles in this issue provide strong indications that
overtly politicized readings of bones do not tell the complete stories of bones. Bodies and
bones are, in numerous ways, central to the ongoing relationships between the living and
the dead and a focus for processes of mourning (Hallam et al., 1999; Hubert and Fforde,
2002; Thornton, 2002). Moreover, kinship grown out of biology, time and (most often)
nurturance, as well as relatedness grown out of shared landscapes (Ingold, 2000), come
to the fore as lenses through which immediate and individualized responses to bones
should be understood.
Simon Harrison’s contribution explores the social relations affirmed through bones,
and the tension between objects and subjects. The war trophies in his article are effica-
cious because as bones they are at once human and stuff – wearable, portable, mail-
able, displayable things. The bones of soldiers are reduced in size to make them
excessively portable – so portable, in fact, that they can be worn as jewellery and dis-
played as trinkets. On one level, Harrison reads these bones as symbols of a political
struggle between North and South. On another level, the collection and alterations of
these bones introduces a process of gendering: male soldiers are feminized, sent as
objects to be worn or kept by mothers, sisters and sweethearts. The gendering of the
enemy in Harrison’s account presents a unique facet to the treatment of dead enemies
which foregrounds or underlies each of the contributions in this issue. It further distin-
guishes Confederate soldiers’ bone collecting and the Army Medical Corps’ collecting
of Native American crania and skeletons from battlefields. Whereas Native American
bones became racialized others through professional practice, Northern soldiers became
racialized and gendered others through personal acts of kinship, devotion and
self-aggrandizement.
While not ignoring the political implications of interventions with human bones, we
continue to seek an understanding of what it is about bones themselves that makes them
potent political symbols. Katherine Verdery, writing about the repatriation of bodies in
post-Soviet contexts, proposes that bodies are particularly good political emblems
because
 376
Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

Figure 1.  Drawing from the ‘What lies beneath’ workshop, Edinburgh, December 2008.
Krmpotich et al. 377

Figure 2.  Drawing from the ‘What lies beneath’ workshop, Edinburgh, December 2008.

they are indisputably there, as our senses of sight, touch, and smell can confirm. As such, a
body’s materiality can be critical to its symbolic efficacy: unlike notions such as ‘patriotism’ or
‘civil society,’ for instance, a corpse can be moved around, displayed, and strategically located
in specific places. Bodies have the advantage of concreteness that nonetheless transcends time,
making past immediately present. (Verdery, 1999: 27; emphasis in the original)

This proposition requires further deconstruction to separate out bones from bodies – a
central theme in Fontein’s contribution. There are both congruities and incongruities
between bones and flesh. We continue to debate whether bones are more or less personal,
more or less human, more or less identifiable, than flesh. The former conjure adjectives
such as hard, dry, contained, stable,6 past, whereas the latter summon adjectives such as
soft, wet, pungent, leaking, recent. As Tim Ingold responded during the workshop
(Fontein and Harries, 2009: 7), bodies are not contained, and yet containment seems to
be a quality humans strive for, whether it is to keep the living body or the interred body
intact.7 Bones, though not static, hold a special place in this relationship as they convey
a sense of containment (owing largely to their enduring material properties). The per-
ceived boundedness and recognizable qualities of bones are perhaps the primary reason
that bones – even in fragments – possess the ability to stand for the whole person. This
perception is challenged by the reality described by Renshaw. She argues that, very
378 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

often, the hard work of forensic scientists and/or archaeologists is required to reconstitute
wholes from scattered shards, a process that precedes the reconstitution of persons from
remains (see, for example, Eppel, 2001). Whereas Verdery speaks of bodies as concrete
entities, bones are among the most concrete elements of bodies. Without the hugely inva-
sive and destructive work of embalming (Lee, 2010), bodies generally do not transcend
time as soft tissue decays and transforms in its physical state from solid to liquid. In this
transformation, soft tissue can become excessively inhuman, offending the senses and
eluding identification. Bones, on the other hand, often possess the material qualities of
which Verdery writes. Not intending to replicate the oppositions of the raw and the
cooked (Lévi-Strauss, 1969), bones can be and do things by means of their firmness,
dryness and portability. Even after death, they can often remain recognizable, especially
skulls and crania; an ironic quality given that they are almost always hidden beneath the
skin during life. Harries’ reflection on a skull guarded from view by museum walls and
policies provides a jarring example of how bones are hidden after life, although we may
more readily expect bones to evade our gaze and our touch after death by means of inter-
ment underground, in mausoleums or coffins, or more definitively through cremation
(see Prendergast et al., 2006).
Renshaw’s article draws attention to the potential of bones to retain evidence of the
normally visible, that which lies not beneath, but on the surface of the body. Harries
proposes that the ability to see the surface from underneath requires specific, profes-
sional manners of looking, such as forensic techniques of facial reconstruction. Yet the
villagers Renshaw works with develop their own techniques that appropriate a layman’s
forensics, material culture and plausible family histories to construct identities out of
anonymous bones. Whether through forensic modelling or family photographs, these
ways of looking make present that which is absent. They attach flesh, faces – even family
– to bones. The movement is not unidirectional, however, and Harries and Renshaw both
eloquently relay how the presence of bones affirms an absence of people. Fontein further
draws our attention to the ability of bones to make the past present in ways far more
salient and consequential than notions of ‘heritage’ or acts of commemoration can often
accommodate. At the outset, these findings support Verdery’s claims that bodies can
materialize immaterial concepts such as patriotism or civil society, but Fontein returns to
the ambivalence of bones as agents and actants, and proposes their subversive and con-
tradictory roles, challenging normalizing state commemoration and heritage projects.
The ability of bones to make present that which is absent increases the efficacy of
bones to be symbols. In one sense then, we agree with Verdery’s assessment of the mate-
rial qualities required for symbolic efficacy. And yet, whereas Verdery privileges the
potential for bodies to be political symbols, we continue to question whether politicized
readings of bones should dominate our knowledge of them and what they can do, enable,
animate or constrain. Does the symbolic efficacy of bones in specific political milieus
efface, deny or forget alternative experiences of interactions with bones (cf. Seremetakis,
1994)? How else are encounters with bones internalized, imagined, responded to and
vocalized?
Cases of repatriation frequently foreground discussions of bones (Hubert and Fforde,
2002; Mihesuah, 2000; Thornton, 2002), but encounters with both ancient and more
recent human bones can take on a variety of forms, from unearthing the war dead, to the
Krmpotich et al. 379

gifting and wearing of momento mori, to archaeological excavations, to morbid tourist

tours (for example, to Cambodia’s ‘killing fields’, see Stone, 2006). The breadth of pos-
sible encounters that people have with bones taunts the mind to identify universal
responses. The word ‘respect’ is often reiterated as the impetus for repatriation demands;
however, ethnographic evidence shows the concept of ‘respect for the dead’ to be perva-
sive, but by no means universal.8 Rarely is the notion of ‘respect’ as played out in inter-
national or inter-ethnic stages compounded with empirical investigations of what
‘respect’ amounts to or how it is contested in local arenas. Refusing to accept ‘respect’ as
a universal attitude (with the further quality of halting debate), the approach we advocate
presumes that notions of respect are culturally contingent, and gain traction through
(even as they actively structure) consequential engagements with bones, as readily as
they initiate such engagements.
Amidst disparate research contexts and personal experiences, unanticipated alliances
begin to emerge and suggest ways that bones affect the living. Archaeologists digging on
the Western Front, First Nations in western Canada encountering ancestral remains in
museums, diviners, war veterans and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, and artists modelling
faces from crania, for example, share a desire to find the individual ‘in’ bones. They also
share a desire to move bones from vague identities as ‘war dead’ or ‘specimens’ to named
soldiers, guerrillas, family relations, or a unique visage. With naming comes an increased
subjectivity and an increased humanness. Efforts to name bones frequently counteract
those aspects of mortuary practices that are often designed to put space between the liv-
ing and the dead, to transform the dead into another social space and set of social rela-
tions. As Fontein and Harries (2009: 8) have proposed: ‘in cases of traumatic or violent
deaths or post-deaths … humanising efforts may be a form of compensation for what
Hertz long ago identified as “bad death”.’ Thus, in Renshaw’s contribution we find post-
Franco Spaniards working with archaeologists, forensic specialists and neighbours to
resurrect and remember the names of individuals excavated from mass graves. Fontein
likewise encounters archaeologists, spirit mediums and diviners, using specialized skills
to identify and constitute not just individuals, but liberation heroes, gukurahundi victims
and family ancestors. In both settings, personal, family and community remembrances
sit in tension and entangle with often problematic state projects of commemoration.
Nonosabasut and Demasduit’s skulls are unusual among their counterparts in museum
storage rooms precisely because they bear names. This turns Harries’ approach, which in
many ways draws on, but also exceeds Kopytoff’s (1988) account of the social lives of
things, into the social lives of Nonosabasut and Demasduit. Yet when their names fade
out of focus and are replaced by different monikers such as ‘Beothuk’, ‘Red Indian’,
‘accession number NMS.Z.1827.25.1’, the story becomes less biographical, less histori-
cal, and more metaphorical and iconic. Indeed, Nonosabasut and Demasduit straddle
icon and metaphor. Their status as icons is not, however, as celebratory as Verdery’s
newly imagined national forefathers. Their osteological dismemberment and dispersal
are physical evidence of a racist past in which the sharing of territory was neither palat-
able nor generative of inter-ethnic empathy or identity building. The acts of segmenta-
tion and dispersal, rather than unification or reconstruction today discredit the pursuits
of Nonosabasut and Demasduit’s collector, however enlightened he may have been for
his time.
380 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

Following the ‘What lies beneath’ workshop, Fontein and Harries (2009: 7) proposed
that ‘bones do speak to us, though not eloquently enough, and their emotive and affective
force derives from the tensions between their stability and instability, their determinacy
and indeterminacy.’ Yet an anthropological interest in this ambivalence of bones, and the
relational and often politicized processes whereby bones are constituted and become, can
be made difficult in those specific ethnographic situations where vocalized expressions
towards bones are particularly acute, definite and defined; where there is or can be no
question that bones are human, or that bones can possess the agency of the deceased,
such as amongst the people of Haida Gwai (Krmpotich, 2008). There is a distinct post-
colonial context here – after centuries of bodies and bones stolen, collected, studied and
analysed, there may be little patience for academic debates about the transforming mate-
rialities and uneasy subject/objecthood of bones – and scholars must tread carefully. Yet
even such lack of patience, such acute determination for definition and firm will to sta-
bility, point exactly towards the uneasy, and not easily determined, yet hugely conse-
quential presence and constant becoming of bones.
Furthermore, what becomes apparent in the articles in this issue is that anthropolo-
gists, archaeologists, historians and curators, for all their questions about the agency and
subjectivity of bones and bodies, are not exempt from emotive and affective responses to
bones. From archaeologists encountering human remains on the Western Front
(Filippucci, forthcoming) to those excavating former refugee camps in Mozambique,
graves in post-gukurahundi Matabeleland or post-Franco Spain, we recurrently encoun-
ter descriptions of archaeology, forensics and physical anthropology – disciplines often
accused of dehumanizing praxis – as intimate, humanist, and empathic. Even the anato-
mists whom Hallam describes as being increasingly ‘educated into “dispassion” during
the 18th century’, could become deeply involved in the ‘emotional dynamics’ of their
artisanship that produced anatomical specimens. All these disciplines and professions
involve careful looking, touching and attentiveness to material properties; sensual con-
tact with human bones, which animates processes of reforming, individuating and iden-
tifying, or absenting and anonymizing human remains, and therefore can have much in
common with very different processes of memorialization, witnessing, spirit possession
and divination, through which the dead often become known and reconstituted. If bones
challenge conventional distinctions between subjects and objects, persons and things,
then perhaps they also blur often highly politicized distinctions between processes of
objectification and subjectification.
Bringing the issue to a close, in her epilogue Hallam reflects upon the themes of rela-
tional and articulated bones, both as they appear in the preceding papers, and drawing
upon her own work on anatomical practices in Britain, discussed here in a wider European
context. Her analysis of bone collections, ossuaries and the artisanship of anatomists,
illustrates how tensions of presence and absence, passion and dispassion intertwine in
complex ways with the changeable entanglements of matter and meaning, form and rep-
resentation, substance and skill, in differing encounters with bones. As with articulated
skeletons, like those we drew in December 2008 (see Figures 1 and 2), all the bones
featured in the articles presented here have been acted on: assembled, ordered, re-imagined,
re-invested, made anew and re-worked in various ways, materially and semiotically. As
Hallam states: ‘the relationality of bones … entails separations just as material
Krmpotich et al. 381

persistence is bound up with transience.’ What we challenge here is the notion that the
articulated skeleton is necessarily more eloquent. Like the disseminated, partial bones
from which they are constituted, their identities and meanings are inevitably both bound
and enabled by, and yet in excess of their material forms, qualities and presence. Bones
evade being wholly known through anatomical language, artful drawing or forensic
examination. However articulated or disarticulated, persistent or transient, enduring or
ephemeral their forms, substances and meanings are, it is through their thingness, their
substantial being that their emotive materialities and affective presences engage those
they encounter.

Notes
1. Hosted by Social Anthropology at Edinburgh, this seminar series featured the following
speakers and papers between January and March 2008: Simon Harrison, ‘Collection and use
of human trophy skulls by twentieth-century military personnel’; John Harries, ‘Skull stories
from Newfoundland: memory, materiality and the face of Nonosabasut’; Tiffany Jenkins,
‘How museum professionals relate to human remains’; Howard Williams, ‘The agency of
bones in early medieval Britain’; Neil Curtis, ‘Human bones in museums: respect, research
and revelation’; Maja Petrovic-Steger, ‘Human remains and informational economies’; Paola
Filippucci, ‘Embodying the dead: war remembrance, reenactment and landscape on the West-
ern Front today’; Joshua Bell, ‘“Tossed hither and thither and possibly used as tools”: colonial
anxieties and the transforming materiality of bones and the person in the Papuan Gulf’; Piotr
Bienkowski, ‘Authority and decision making over human remains: genealogy, relationship and
working with communities’.
2. This workshop was supported by a British Academy research grant, for which we are very
grateful. The papers presented were by Paola Filippucci, ‘Mute witnesses: words, things and
the dead on the Western Front’; Christel Mattheeuws, ‘Do crisps flavoured with chicken tikka
have something in common with central-East Malagasy ancestral bodies?’; Cara Krmpotich,
‘Ancestral bones: creating proximity and familiarity, erasing distance and anonymity’; Martin
Brown, ‘All quiet on the Western Front? Excavating human remains from the Great War 1914–
1918’; Tiffany Jenkins, ‘Constructing the contemporary controversies over human remains in
museum collections in Britain: a case study of Pagan and professional claims’; Howard
Williams, ‘Bones and the early archaeologists’; John Harries, ‘Flesh, clay, rock, bone and mil-
lions of tiny points of colour: the many faces of Nonosabasut’; Maja Petrovic-Steger, ‘Emotive
materialities and emotionalised anthropology?’; and Joost Fontein, ‘Between tortured bodies
and resurfacing bones: the politics of the dead in Zimbabwe’. An introductory session, titled
‘Feeling our way forward’, was led by Jeanne Cannizzo and Joan Smith. Tim Ingold and Mag-
nus Course provided a summary and points for discussion at the conclusion of the workshop.
A full report of the workshop (Fontein and Harries, 2009) is available at http://www.san.ed.ac.
uk/research/bones_collective
3. This panel at the ASA 2009 was entitled ‘Encounters with the past: the emotive materiality
and affective presence of human remains’, and the following papers were presented: Layla
Renshaw, ‘The role of human remains, portrait photographs and possessions of the dead in the
scientific and “affective identification” of Republican civilian victims from the Spanish Civil
War’; Paola Filippucci, ‘“Mute witnesses”: the ruins of the battlefield and the reality of war
on the former Western Front’; Cara Krmpotich, ‘The continued presence of ancestors: the affec-
tive presence of ancestral remains’; Mark Lamont, ‘The social afterlife of Swahili tombs on the
Mrima coast, Tanzania’; Flávia Pires, ‘When the dead have fun: haunting in the Brazilian Northeast
semi-arid Region’; Emma Restall Orr, ‘Dead persons: British animism and the experience of
382 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

ancestral remains’; Robert Wallis and Jenny Blain, ‘From respect to reburial: examining con-
temporary pagan interest in prehistoric human remains in Britain’; Kenneth Lymer, ‘The ice
maiden: appropriation and contestation of an ancient mummy found in the mountains of the
Altai, southern Siberia’.
4. Bones can of course be fine or decorative art objects. See, for example, the popular Sedlec
Ossuary (2009: http://www.sedlecossuary.com) in the Czech Republic – an extreme example
of the lengthy history of displaying finely decorated reliquaries.
5. Williams applies these forms of agency to corpses, not bones in particular.
6. Participants in the December workshop agreed that the slower rate of decay of bones under most
circumstances gives them an appearance of stability and firmness. In his concluding comments
to the workshop, Ingold suggested that perhaps bones’ enduring quality affords the construction
of long ancestral genealogies (Fontein and Harries, 2009), although this is also environment-
dependent. In Newfoundland, the acidity of the soil means very few Beothuk bones remain, a
material dimension that clearly animates the continuing but unclear significance of the skulls
that Harries discusses.
7. A good example is provided by Lee (2010) in her discussion of increasingly popular, but hugely
invasive, new embalming practices of ‘funeral entrepreneurs’ in South Africa, which enable
corpses to remain visibly intact for long journeys back to rural homes. These practices are kept
partially hidden from relatives and mourners who judge the success of mortuary officials on
their ability to make corpses appear neither too alive nor too dead, but rather asleep.
8. During the ‘What lies beneath’ workshop (Fontein and Harries, 2009), Magnus Course pro-
vided us with a cautionary example of the Wari of southern Amazonia (Vilaça, 2005) where
there is no expectation that the dead require ‘respect’ or further attentions from the living.

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384 Journal of Material Culture 15(4)

Biographical notes

Cara Krmpotich is Assistant Professor in the Museum Studies programme at the University of
Toronto. Her research interests include contemporary meanings of historic collections, memory
and material culture, and museum and source community relations. She has worked with the
Haida Repatriation Committee for the last six years, conducting ethnographic research on the
intersections of kinship, memory and materiality expressed during the process of repatriation.
‘Remembering and Repatriation: The Production of Kinship, Memory and Respect’ was published
in 2010 in the Journal of Material Culture. As a member of the International Research Network,
‘Haida Material Culture in UK Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge’, she facilitated a
research visit for 20 Haidas to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and British Museum.

Joost Fontein holds a Lectureship in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is

also an editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies and a new online journal called Critical
African Studies, and a co-founder of the Bones Collective research group at Edinburgh University.
He has carried out several periods of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in southern Zimbabwe and,
apart from his current interests in materialities of death, has worked on the politics of heritage,
landscape, memory and the past, and more recently on water and land reform. His first monograph,
The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage, was published
by UCL Press in 2006. He is currently working on a new monograph provisionally titled Graves
& Water: The Political Materiality of Landscape around Lake Mutirikwi, Southern Zimbabwe.
Address: School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 5.25 Chrystal Macmillan
Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK. [email: J.Fontein@ed.ac.uk]

John Harries is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the
University of Edinburgh and an Honorary Research Fellow associated with the Department
of Social Anthropology, also at the University of Edinburgh. He has carried out ethnographic
fieldwork in Newfoundland, Canada, most recently focusing on the ways in which the people
of Newfoundland remember the Beothuk. He is presently preparing a monograph based upon
this fieldwork entitled Beothuk Ghosts: Memory, Materiality and Poetics of Postcolonial Guilt in
Newfoundland. Address: School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal
Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, UK. [email: j.harries@ed.ac.uk]