Sociology
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.
This chapter takes as its starting point a 2012 cover of The Economist with the headline ‘Cry, the beloved country: South Africa’s sad decline’. This cover conjures up a powerful racialized imaginary which connects contemporary emerging markets finance to histories of colonialism and empire. Indeed, by depicting a mob of angry Black men armed with pikes, the cover suggests that the ‘sad decline’ in question (a deep socio-political and financial crisis, credit rating downgrades and large-scale financial capital flight) is due to threatening, uncontrollable and violent masses of Black people. I bring this cover into conversation with a number of quotes from interviews that I conducted with state and private actors in South Africa. I show that what those actors call ‘Afro-pessimism’ – a reference to the remarkable timorousness of international investors in South Africa – is a manifestation of the processes of ‘othering’ and racialization through which South Africa and other sub-Saharan African countries have been discursively constructed as investment destinations. I use the cover and the interview quotes to discuss how relations of race and coloniality are reproduced through the production of financial knowledges and patterns of financial capital flows, with material consequences for the people living in the spaces construed as African emerging markets.
Oil, notes David McDermott Hughes, is ‘most dangerous when it behaves ordinarily and when people treat it as ordinary … Only the abnormal event – the spill – brings a black goo into view and into contact with human flesh.’ In Part I, Tracy Lassiter and Imre Szeman take as their starting point the banality of oil infrastructure in settler-colonial landscapes. Alysse Kushinski moves to consider not the aesthetics of infrastructure’s ‘background’ presence, but the aesthetics of transparency and the ways in which oil infrastructure can be just as dangerous when its volatile, leaky nature is made transparent.
It’s an innocuous enough image: two men standing before a wooden structure with another group of (white) men in the background. The two men, Edwin Drake and Peter Wilson, actually stand before the Drake Well, the first oil well, drilled on 27 August 1859 in present-day Titusville, Pennsylvania. But in the intervening centuries, the oil industry has turned into a global economic juggernaut, causing rampant worldwide political, economic and racial exploitation. Nations fight wars over oil and, on local scales, protests and resistance movements challenge the industry’s power. It meets resistance in Nigeria, the Amazonian rainforest, Standing Rock, North Dakota and elsewhere. Leaking pipelines and toxic refineries usually are built where marginalized communities live. ‘Boom!’ would connect this historical image to the global force the oil industry has become. Where the industry ‘booms’, it generates billion-dollar profits and creates economic benefit for employees and regional governments. Yet it does so at the cost of lives, health and the environment. We can expect more frequent resistance to ‘boom’, too, as exploited peoples and concerned activities fight for our planet’s future.
‘Not everyone alive in the present is automatically included in its sense of “living” or “present’’.’ This quotation from Esther Peeren’s book The Spectral Metaphor offers a thought-provoking frame for the three chapters in Part III, in which migration into the UK and USA vividly embodies colonialism’s afterlife. Eve Dickson, Rachel Rosen and Kehinde Sorinmade contend that twenty-first-century borders have their own temporality. The temporality of borders for many racialized migrants could mean that daily life is structured by concerns about debt repayments and the need to constantly keep up with bureaucratic requirements. Kathryn Medien looks at another border erected at hospitals, clinics and sites that form Britain’s National Health Service or NHS. Medien portrays the UK border as a lethal apparatus that criminalizes movements through carceral surveillance. Christian Rossipal then examines the US immigration detention system, itself a billion-dollar industry and an extension of the prison-industrial complex.
G*** Rush coins are communicative technologies/artefacts reflective of the US nation-building project. This chapter uses an image of the 1853 and 1854 g*** dollar coins as a launching point to discuss the switch the image stamped on the coin from that of Lady Liberty wearing a coronet to that of Lady Liberty wearing an Indigenous headdress. This project is inspired by coins found in G*** Beach, Oregon during an archaeological excavation conducted collaboratively with tribes in Oregon, namely the Coquille Nation. The chapter discusses how the coins are reflective of imperialist nostalgia, and a misguided attempt to honour or eulogize the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, these g*** coins flowing from the five operating US mints in the mid-1850s sought to eradicate various Indigenous currencies in circulation (e.g. dentalium, beads, potlatch systems). G*** and other metals served as a fetish for colonizers; a means to claim and usurp land, impose power and war on tribes in order to extract the natural resource. Raw materials were then refined, processed, pressed into coins and stamped with signifiers that shed light on the financial power dynamics associated with Manifest Destiny. The scope of the chapter is then broadened to discuss more contemporary US coins with Indigenous icons and what the longevity of this trope communicates about racial/national relations with Indigenous nations.
‘Circulation’ is a popular way to describe how money works. One metaphor suggests that money irrigates economies as water irrigates land. This metaphor is so popular that someone even built a machine to illustrate the flow of money. If you ever happen to be in the city of Wellington, you can visit the MONIAC machine on display at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. In Part II, the three contributors press you to consider deeper meanings circulated by coins, banknotes and other financial assets. Catherine Cumming gets right to the heart of matters, rereading Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to unearth a paradox beneath the idea of money as circulation. Ashley Cordes engages in an equally important revisionist history project, this time highlighting the Coquille nation in Oregon, USA. Cordes traces how early coinage across settler America circulated colonial fantasies of bravery and superiority, ideas of American nationhood, myths of the American dream and economic success through enslavement. Yet the iconography on these coins masked brutal genocides, stolen lands, broken treaties and debts owed to indigenous American peoples. Syahirah Abdul Rahman dissects the colonial extraction and circulation of the mineral ore tin, a circulation of finance capital that haunts Malaysia to this today, centring her analysis on tins of Milo.