Paper short abstract:

From the case of the de-museification of certain human remains kept in French and South African museums and their transformation into buried and memorialized ancestors, I propose to analyze the vocabularies, taxonomies, and techniques of knowledge production in physical anthropology collections.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1990s, museum and university collections of human remains have been the focus of a series of international requests for restitution, made by representatives of the South African state to French and Austrian museums (the cases of the human remains of Sarah Baartman or Klaas and Trooi Pienaar) or national ones, formulated by representatives of indigenous populations towards the South African laboratories of paleoanthropology and anatomy (the case of the remains of Cornelis Kok II). These demands for restitution also provoke tensions between different indigenous political movements, as demonstrated by the recent process of "reburial" of human remains from Kruisrivier, Sutherland and "discovered" in 2017 in the collections of the University of Cape Town.

It is often the experts in human genetics who are called upon to find an answer to seemingly intractable questions that are becoming increasingly politicized. For example, which indigenous groups might be considered "descendant communities" and therefore have the right to claim the return of human remains and decide on the future of the remains?

From the case of the de-museification of certain human remains kept in French and South African museums and their transformation into buried and memorialized ancestors, I propose to analyze the vocabularies, taxonomies and techniques of knowledge production on physical anthropology collections. What research using paleoanthropological specimens is accepted by museum ethics committees or, on the contrary, refused? What is considered "bad" or "good science"? How are old technical and conceptual tools perpetuated in projects that declaratively propose to "decolonize knowledge"?