SEMINAR: Gathering the National Body: Indigenous Human Remains and Reputational Justice

This paper focuses on the conceptualisation of the repatriation of Indigenous human remains, museum and national government repatriation policies. It is prompted by a request made of the British Museum, in 2011, by Torres Strait Islanders for the return of two skulls of Torres Strait origin that were deposited in the Museum in the latter part of the 19th century. The processes of request facilitated separate regional and national mobilisations of legitimacy that, in turn, gave the skulls particular mediatory qualities. These mediatory qualities are not easily synthesized in a way that allows for a singular argument about their value, meaning, or ownership to emerge. In this sense, the Torres Strait Islander experience repeats what other indigenous peoples and scholars have found when confronting repatriation. While acknowledging the very real importance of negotiating issues of ownership, theft, and return I wish to take the discussion in three different directions. Firstly, I question the processes of return of human remains to Indigenous peoples and suggest an alternative language to expatriation and repatriation that derives from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. This, I argue, has the potential to address some of the concerns Martin Skrydstrup raises when repatriation is understood through the broad prism of the social life of material culture. Secondly, I ask what is gained by treating request, negotiation and return as a matter that occurs between nations for the purpose of constituting the importance of singular nations. Following this, and thirdly, I suggest the idea of reputational justice, a notion that extends ideas about international branding and trade first elaborated by the economist Simon Anholt (2007).