Human remains as documents: implications for repatriation

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to investigate the documentality of human remains in museum and research collections. Second, to provide a rationale for a processual model of documentation, which can account for their repatriation and eventual burial. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine the repatriation issue. It considers an ethical argument developed to support claims for repatriation: the nominal identification of a body as a universal criterion for its burial. Based on Igor Kopytoff’s processual model of commoditisation, it looks to cultural anthropology to help explain how objects can move between a document and non-document state. Findings Human remains can be understood as examples of information-as-thing. However, while document theory can readily account for the expanding realm of documentation, it cannot adequately accommodate instances where documentality is revoked, and when something ceases to be a document. When a human biological specimen is returned, the process that made it serve as a document is effectively reversed. When remains are interred, they revert to their primary standing, as people. The process of becoming a document is therefore not unidirectional, and document status not permanent. Research limitations/implications The implications of a processual model of documentation are discussed. Such a model must be able to account for things as they move into and out of the document state, and where the characteristics of documentality change through time. Originality/value This paper explores problematic material not usually discussed in relation to document theory. The repatriation movement poses a challenge to a discourse predicated on documentation as a progressively expanding field.