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How can we explain the cultural fault lines which currently plague a post-Brexit Britain? The Introduction makes the claim that the culprit is the peculiarity of the English imagination, whose eternal and timeless utopia is Arcadia: a perfect England which existed once and has since been lost. It is demonstrated that this vision of a perfect England is a post-war invention as Britain underwent imperial and colonial decline. We can understand Brexit as a crisis of Englishness which tries to re-imagine a vision of British society as one of pastoral harmony organised around the manor house, and imperial power channelled through networks of overseas trade. The book argues that this vision of English society can be located in the upper-class house, and through the idioms of houses we can trace notions of belonging and social unity through the upper-class personages of which these houses are associated. The book’s overarching claim is that the idiom of the house, from the country house to the public school system, monarchy to lesser gentry, has been seized upon repeatedly in a variety of social, political and cultural beliefs and practices. In so doing, the English have turned their upper class into a ‘past’, a living form of ‘tradition’ beyond the empirical here-and-now. Fall and rise traces the various ways in which a vision of national hope and loss can be traced and read in the writings and practices of the English upper-class gentleman.
Chapter 5 explores the writings of the philosopher Roger Scruton on England and Englishness found in England: An Elegy (2000). Scruton’s work is written as a ‘personal tribute to the civilisation that made me and which is now passing from the world’. But this lamentation becomes less a mournful burial and resignation to moving on, and more a way to project a lost England to the status of an absolute ideal. Instead of burying a Victorian, imperial England, an England without Empire becomes an island Englishness that is hostile to outsiders as it creates an over-determined vision of the English person: a person who is defined by the public school, the Church, the Tory party, the village, the cricket, and bridge club, and who tends to claim that a stranger is merely someone ‘like me’ but with whom ‘I am not personally acquainted’. It is a vision of racial and ethnic purity which finds its way into Scruton’s last philosophical testament: the Building Better, Building Beautiful report for the UK government’s housing initiative.
Chapter 6 consists of an ethnography of a provincial English town’s independent bookshop. Here, discussions about the role of reading, literature and the high-street reveal deep, underlying concerns on the meaning of ‘culture’ in English society and its relation to the ‘moral health’ of the nation. Awakening the debates on the meaning of ‘culture’ in the art-society tradition of the twentieth century, ranging from F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, through C. P. Snow and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, the chapter shows how the meaning of culture becomes a debate about the ethical permissibility of a traditional Englishness. We find that through interviews with the upper-class gentlemen who frequent this bookshop, and in their artistic work as writers and critics, folklorists and as readers, an aesthetic of Old Englishness emerges, an aesthetic which is used by these individuals to form a critique of the shortcomings of the present. Through constructing an aesthetic of English society in arts and letters, these individuals then pit an avaricious, and ephemeral, modernity against the certainties found in Old England.
In 2004, the remains of two First World War US soldiers from France were delivered to the US Government for identification and burial. One set of remains was identified and buried, and the other went into a cold-case status. In 2019, the second individual was identified using multiple lines of evidence. The possible individuals that could be associated with the remains were reduced based on material evidence recovered with the remains and the spatiotemporal historical context of the remains. The First World War personnel records then offered sufficient biometric criteria to narrow the possible individuals associated with the second recovered individual to one person, Pfc. Charles McAllister. A family reference DNA sample from a direct matrilineal descendant of the individual added statistical weight to the identification, although the mtDNA was not a decisive or necessary factor in the identification. Due to bureaucratic reasons, the legal identification of Pfc. Charles McAllister is still pending.
The extremely high death rates in northern Italy during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic called for exceptional rules and suspension of funeral practices and burial rites. Additionally, forms of collective burial, typical of a wartime scenario, and mechanical methods and timing were reintroduced into the handling of corpses. Although several academic studies have highlighted how the absence of funeral ceremonies and ‘dignified burials’ has caused prolonged and deep suffering for the mourners and for many of the caregivers and health workers, few have so far focused on funeral workers. This article focuses on the intimate, emotional and ethical experiences of a group of funeral workers in northern Italy who handled COVID corpses and had to take the place of the mourners at the time of burial. Through an anthropological analysis of their oral memories, this work attempts to analyse their expressions of discomfort, frustration, fear and suffering.
Since the sixteenth century, artistic anatomy – a branch of medical science subordinated to the Fine Arts – has understood itself as a comparative investigation halfway between forensic dissection and the analysis of classical art and live bodies. Its teaching was first instituted in Italy by the 1802 curriculum of the national Fine Arts academies, but underwent a drastic transformation at the turn of the century, as the rise of photography brought about both a new aesthetics of vision and an increase in the precision of iconographic documentation. In this article I will attempt to provide a history of the teaching of this discipline at the close of the nineteenth century within the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, with a focus on its ties to contemporary French practices. Drawing on archival materials including lesson plans, letters and notes from the classes of the three medical doctors who subsequently held the chair (Gaetano Strambio, Alessandro Lanzillotti-Buonsanti and Carlo Biaggi), I will argue that the deep connections between their teaching of the discipline and their work at the city hospital reveal a hybrid approach, with the modern drive towards live-body study unable to wholly supplant the central role still granted to corpses in the grammar of the visual arts.
Osteological collections are key sources of information in providing crucial insight into the lifestyles of past populations. In this article, we conduct an osteobiographical assessment of the human remains of fourteen Selk'nam individuals, which are now housed in the Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria. The aim is to bring these individuals closer to their communities of origin by using non-invasive methods aimed at rebuilding their biological profiles (i.e., age-at-death, biological sex and health status), adding to these with results from provenance research. This way, the human remains were assigned a new identity closer to their original one, through a process that we call ‘re-individualisation’. This is especially significant since it must be assumed that the individuals were exhumed against their cultural belief system. We conclude that building strong and long-lasting collaborations between Indigenous representatives and biological anthropologists has a pivotal role in research for reappraising Indigenous history.
Museums are places characterised by collecting objects, displaying them for public education and also subjecting their collections to research. Yet knowledge can not only be created by using the collection for research. The history of a collection can also be reconstructed, albeit mostly in a fragmentary way. This is important when there is evidence that the collection was acquired in a colonial context, when the collection contains human remains and more so if these were taken from Indigenous peoples. Reconstructing the history of a collection can assist source communities in strengthening their identities and help to regain lost knowledge about their ancestors. This study analyses the provenance of fourteen crania and calvaria of the Selk’nam people from Tierra del Fuego, stored at the Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum Vienna. Additionally, the significance of these results and their meaning for today’s Selk’nam community Covadonga Ona will be contextualised within the framework of colonial history and museum systems.