Paper short abstract:

In 1890, 13 skulls were brazenly stolen during the colonial era from the Irish island of Inishbofin by famed British ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon. The crania remain at Trinity College Dublin. Cultural anthropologist Pegi Vail, a descendent of Inishbofin, explores the quest for their return.

Paper long abstract:

In the early 1890s, a photograph was taken of cultural anthropologist Pegi Vail’s ancestor Myles Joyce having his head measured on the remote Irish island of Inishbofin by medical doctor Charles Browne as a crowd of villagers looked on. In this era when anthropometry and phrenology were employed to assign racial classifications during colonisation, a study was published incorporating photos of some of the islanders, documenting their measurements in detail and theorizing what these measurements might indicate, including Vail’s great-great grandfather James Joyce. Around the same time, influential British ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon, with whom Browne had worked to set up the Anthropometry Laboratory at Trinity College Dublin in 1891 with a grant from the Royal Irish Academy admitted in his journal that he stole 13 skulls from the island’s cemetery at the St. Colmen’s Monastery ruins, with the help of Andrew Francis Dixon, a student at Trinity. To this day, the crania remain at Trinity College Dublin. Vail follows their hopeful repatriation to the island after having joined the campaign for their return with Irish anthropologist Ciarán Walsh, whose scholarly and curatorial work on Haddon and Browne brought this material into the public sphere. Will Trinity College finally let them go home after over a century and a quarter in their possession? If so, what can this act tell us about contemporary Irish and British collaborations at decolonizing universities and museums? This talk will explore the role of this fraught history of anthropology from a personal and professional perspective.