Author: Ophelia Benson

I thought I would try to find some more articles on this Human Remains Working Group Report. I was aware of it, I remember hearing it mentioned (and even discussed briefly, in passing) on Start the Week recently, but I didn’t pay enough attention. I think I meant to, I think I made a vague mental note, but…well, we know how it is with mental notes, don’t we.

So here is a BBC article, which starts from the point of view of people who want the bones returned and then after several paragraphs mentions the objections of scientists and museum directors and pesky people like that. But here is another BBC article from last May, and this one starts from the scientific point of view.

The scientists are campaigning against the adoption of legislation already passed in Australia and the US which has seen thousands of specimens handed over to aboriginal communities. “These collections are central to what we do; if we have to hand some of this material over it will be tragic,” said Dr Robert Foley, an anthropologist from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University. “There is enormous interest in human evolution; huge interest in how modern humans came out of Africa and spread across the world. These bones help us understand that.”

It also mentions the ominous precedent of NAGPRA in the US:

In the US, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Nagpra) has seen a steady erosion of collections. Claimants decide the future of the bones, whether to rebury or destroy them, or to keep them available for study.

Claimants decide. Not, claimants and scientists both decide, but claimants decide. Not good.

And another treat, this review of a long biography of Jung. It’s full of good jokes and pertinent observations. For instance –

I picked it up with some words that Macaulay wrote in a review of a two-volume biography of Lord Burleigh echoing through my mind like the insistent snatch of a tune (I quote from memory): Compared with the labour of reading these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, the labour of children in the mines, the labour of slaves on the plantation, is but a pleasant recreation.

And then –

Jung was decidedly not born a charlatan—or at least, he was not one throughout the whole of his career. True, he grew up in a family with a more than average number of table-rappers, which no doubt inclined him later to the study of the esoteric (for it certainly never occurred to him to wonder why the esoteric was, in fact, esoteric), and was subjected in his youth to that Teutonic windiness which comes so easily, though no means inevitably, to those who think and write in the German language. There is nothing quite like esoteric windiness for creating a penumbra of profundity, to which bored society ladies are drawn like flies to dung: and this no doubt explains how he became the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy.

I particularly like that, because it’s so relevant to the Bad Writing topic we’ve been gnawing on lately. ‘There is nothing quite like esoteric windiness for creating a penumbra of profundity…’ Exactly so, and that’s why people do it. That, plus the way it makes it so much harder for critics to pin down their mistakes.

Jung was a preternaturally unclear writer and thinker: he would never say anything clearly when obfuscation would do. Whether this was from lack of talent or an unconscious appreciation that clarity led to the possibility of contradiction and even refutation…

Precisely. Dangerous stuff, clarity. It can make it clear that we’re talking nonsense.

There is an excellent article at spiked by Tiffany Jenkins, who wrote another excellent article for us last spring. An excellent article on a very depressing and irritating subject – this passion for defining all human remains, however old and however uncertain of provenance, as someone’s ‘ancestors,’ thus ensuring that they can’t be studied or preserved for future research and study.

Note that the report by the Human Remains Working Group, which was appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is called a majority report ‘because the group’s only scientist refused to accept its verdict.’ Note that and then ponder it a bit. Ponder the fact that a matter with such large implications for science is handed over to a working group with only one scientist. Which is not to say that political, ethical, moral or other non-scientific concerns should never second-guess or criticise or veto scientific ones – but it is to raise an eyebrow, at least.

But another factor is the message that this policy sends out – it effectively suggests to all and sundry that scientific research is not a priority, and that science should be put second to mystical kinds of belief. The panel of experts that will oversee the treatment of remains, for example, will explicitly not include any scientist or researcher who works on the remains – but it will include those ‘versed in belief systems’. The panel will be akin to a new high priesthood guarding the sacred relics.

And not all of this pressure to ‘return’ bones and remains is a response to demands by indigenous (or any other) groups who have had their ancestors’ remains unceremoniously carted off – a lot of it starts at the other end, among museum staff and lawyers, smitten by a bizarre mix of political zeal and spirito-mystico nonsense. It’s enough to make a cat laugh, frankly.

Even in cases of unaffiliated or unwanted remains, the report leans on the side of return. While there are campaign groups who have made strong and vocal demands for return, there are as many people contacted by museums who have been uninterested in receiving boxes with bones of their possible ancestors…The report seems to suggest that descendants are in denial, arguing that: ‘Museums might wish to look critically at the political, economic and other reasons for any silence or absence of protest.’

Well don’t let that stop you! If nobody wants the damn bones back, just ‘look critically’ at the reasons for that absence of protest until you manage to come up with a convincing explanation and then, wallop! drop the cartons of bones on the doorstep of some lucky descendants.

The target of this report is the researchers and scientists working on the remains. The constant message is that remains are sacred and that research must be restrained by ‘respect’. Museums’ claims to scientific or historical objectivity are implicitly criticised…What is drummed home is the idea that no bone shall be regarded in an impersonal fashion. Every molecule, hair and fingernail is seen as sacred unless proven otherwise – and even then, it is thought that the sacred significance has not yet been discovered.

The people who want the remains back have not yet been discovered, the sacred significance has not yet been discovered – so the energy that once would have gone into research on the remains themselves now goes into discovering ‘sacred significance.’ Sad, isn’t it.

A couple of miscellaneous items. A scientist goes off-topic to talk about women composers, thus revealing (and not for the first time) that scientists tend to know more about the arts than artists and humanist scholars know about science.

And then there’s a very interesting long post by John Holbo on Bad Writing. He’s just read Just Being Difficult?, the new book that re-ignited the subject of bad writing, and he has some excellent acerbic comments on it. There’s also a discussion of Holbo’s discussion at Crooked Timber. One reader there makes this classic comment:

I’ve always wanted to ask Steven Weinberg why he became a scientist. The answer would be most likely because of a certain kind of desire for a certain kind of truth. But truth is a metaphysical construct with a whole lot of poetical baggage. In court they don’t talk about ‘truth’ but about ‘facts’ which are much more mundane. No one spouts of about The Eternal Search for FACTS! do they?

Ah. Truth is a metaphysical construct with a whole lot of poetical baggage, is it. And is that all it is? Does that exhaust the subject? Does no one ever use the word ‘truth’ without attaching words like ‘eternal’ or rather ‘Eternal’ to it? Whose poetical baggage and metaphysical construction is whose, here? Interesting.

Well good, we’ve got that cleared up: all the potential Democratic presidential candidates are religious, there’s not an atheist in the bunch. That’s a relief, isn’t it? And a surprise? Atheists being so thick on the ground in US politics, especially at the national level.

The assumptions behind the news article reporting on this shocker are rather strange, however. Or at least, if not strange in the context of US politics, still, strange in other contexts one can think of. There is this remark, for instance:

Each of the Democrats vying for the right to challenge Bush next year has reaffirmed his or her faith, refusing to cede spirituality to the Republicans.

So, they refuse to cede spirituality, but they’re perfectly content to cede skepticism, secularism, atheism. Why is that? Well one obvious answer of course is that there are more religious people than non-religious ones in the US, and people seeking votes naturally want more rather than fewer. But is that all? Is there not an underlying assumption that ‘spirituality’ (whatever that is) is a good and virtuous thing and therefore must not be ‘ceded’ to the other party? Or am I imagining things.

And then of course there’s the permanent irritation of the way Democrats are always in such a sweat never to ‘cede’ anything to Republicans, and it hardly ever works the other way around. Again, why is that? Why do Dems never worry about ‘ceding’ anything to the left? Why do Republicans never worry about ‘ceding’ anything to Democrats? Why is it almost always just the Democrats who have to follow the Republicans’ lead? This is not just an artifact of the recent takeover of every conceivable political office by Republicans, either, Democrats have been doing it at least since the ’50s. Lyndon Johnson had deep misgivings about sending troops to Vietnam in the summer of 1964, for instance, but he did it anyway because otherwise Goldwater would be able to portray him as weak on the Commies. And it’s always like that. Democrats are always afraid of being seen as ‘too’ lefty, Republicans are hardly ever afraid of being seen as ‘too’ righty. I suppose that could be because Republican ideas are inherently better ideas, but, somehow, I don’t quite think so…