Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-wjfd9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T01:48:11.816Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Acts of estrangement. The post-mortem making of self and other

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2009

Zoe Crossland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The histories of post-mortem intervention in 18th- and 19th-century Britain illustrate how the relationships within which the dead were located affected their post-mortem treatment and were reproduced through it. This paper explores how traditions of marking social distinctions among the dead have been incorporated into archaeological practice, tracing some of the ways in which relationships between the dead and the living define the nature and tone of post-mortem interventions. This history suggests that the conditions within which people are produced as dead bodies through archaeological practice are at present poorly understood, and, as such, I contribute some notes towards a relational understanding of this production.

Keywords

antiquarianismautopsydissectionembodimentrepatriation

Information

Type
Notes
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , June 2009 , pp. 102 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ariès, P., 1981: The hour of our death, New York.Google Scholar
Arnold, K., 2006: Cabinets for the curious. Looking back at early English museums, Aldershot and Burlington, VT.Google Scholar
Ayloffe, J., 1775: An account of the body of King Edward the first, as it appeared on opening his tomb in the year 1774. Read at the Society of Antiquaries, 12 May 1774, London.Google Scholar
Bashford, L., and Pollard, T., 1998: ‘In the burying place’ – the excavation of a Quaker burial ground, in Cox, M. (ed.), Grave concerns. Death and burial in England 1700–1850, York, 154–66.Google Scholar
Blakely, R.L., and Harrington, J.M., 1997. Bones in the basement. Postmortem racism in nineteenth-century medical training, Washington DC.Google Scholar
Boulter, S., Robertson, D. and Start, H., 1998: The Newcastle Infirmary at the Forth, Volume 2, The osteology. People, disease and surgery, Sheffield.Google Scholar
Boyle, A., 2002: St Bartholomew's Church, Penn, Wolverhampton. Results of investigations in the churchyard, Oxford.Google Scholar
Boyle, A., Boston, C. and Witkin, A., 2005: The archaeological experience at St Luke's Church, Old Street, Islington, Oxford.Google Scholar
Boyle, A., and Keevill, G., 1998: ‘To the praise of the dead, and anatomie’. The analysis of post-medieval burials at St. Nicholas, Sevenoaks, Kent, in Cox, M. (ed.), Grave concerns. Death and burial in England 1700–1850, York, 85–95.Google Scholar
Brandes, S.H., 2003: Assuming responsibility for Ishi, in Kroeber, K. and Kroeber, C. (eds), Ishi in three centuries, Lincoln and London, 87–88.Google Scholar
Bray, T., and Killion, T., 1994: Reckoning with the dead. The Larsen Bay repatriation and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington.Google Scholar
Brickley, M., Miles, A. and Stainer, H., 1999: The Cross Bones burial ground, Redcross Way, Southwark, London, London.Google Scholar
Brown, P.R.L., 1981: The cult of the saints. Its rise and function in Latin Christianity, Chicago.Google Scholar
Buchli, V., and Lucas, G., 2001: Archaeologies of the contemporary past, London.Google Scholar
Burney, I.A., 2000: Bodies of evidence. Medicine and the politics of the English inquest, 1830–1929, Baltimore.Google Scholar
Butler, J., 1990: Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity, New York.Google Scholar
Butler, J., 1993: Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits of ‘sex’, New York.Google Scholar
Butler, J., 2004: Precarious life. The powers of mourning and violence. London and New York.Google Scholar
Bynum, C.W., 1995a: The resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, New York.Google Scholar
Bynum, C.W., 1995b: Why all the fuss about the body? A medievalist's perspective, Critical inquiry 22 (1), 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bynum, C.W. 1998: Death and resurrection in the Middle Ages. Some modern implications, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, 589–96.Google ScholarPubMed
Celoria, F., 1966: Burials and archaeology. A survey of attitudes to research, Folklore 77 (3), 161–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chamberlain, A., 1999: Teaching surgery and breaking the law, British archaeology 48, 6–7.Google Scholar
Chapman, S.J., 1997: The findings of a possible reference collection in the grounds of a Victorian general hospital, Nottinghamshire, UK, Journal of paleopathology 9 (1), 37–46.Google Scholar
Cherryson, A., Crossland, Z. and Tarlow, S., forthcoming: The archaeology of the modern body in death.Google Scholar
Cole, F.J., 1944: A history of comparative anatomy, London.Google Scholar
Collins, H.M., 1994: Dissecting surgery. Forms of life depersonalised, Social studies of science 24 (2), 311–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crossland, Z., 2009: Of clues and signs. The dead body and its evidential traces, American anthropologist 111 (1), 69–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, J., 1793: Nenia Britannica. Or, a sepulchral history of Great Britain; from the earliest period to its general conversion to Christianity, London.Google Scholar
Dumont, C.W. Jr., 2003: The politics of scientific objections to repatriation, Wicazo sa review 18 (1), 109–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, D.T., 1999: The former female prison. ‘Skeletons in the cupboard’, Archaeology in York, interim 23 (1), 17–22.Google Scholar
Fforde, C., Hubert, J. and Turnbull, P., 2002: The dead and their possessions. Repatriation in principle, policy, and practice, London and New York.Google Scholar
Forbes, T.R., 1985: Surgeons at the Bailey. English forensic medicine to 1878, New Haven.Google Scholar
Freeman, R., 1985: Post-medieval burials near Dartmouth Castle, Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Society 43, 131–34.Google Scholar
Geary, P.J., 1978: Furta sacra. Thefts of relics in the Central Middle Ages, Princeton, New Jersey.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geary, P.J., 1986: Sacred commodities. The circulation of medieval relics, in Appadurai, A. (ed.), The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge, 169–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gittings, C., 1984: Death, burial and the individual in early modern England, London and Sydney.Google Scholar
Groves, C., and Boswijk, G., 1998: Tree-ring analysis of coffinboards from the former burial ground of the Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, English Heritage ancient monuments laboratory report 15.Google Scholar
Hamilakis, Y., 2007: The nation and its ruins. Antiquity, archaeology and national imagination in Greece, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harding, V., 1992: Burial choice and burial location in medieval London, in Bassett, S.R. (ed.), Death in towns. Urban responses to the dying and the dead, 100–1600, Leicester.Google Scholar
Harding, V., 1998: Burial on the margin. Distance and discrimination in early modern London, in Cox, M. (ed.), Grave concerns. Death and burial in England 1700–1850, York, 54–64.Google Scholar
Harley, D., 1994: Political post-mortems and morbid anatomy in seventeenth- century England, Social history of medicine 7 (1), 1–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heizer, R.F., and Kroeber, T. (eds) 1979: Ishi, the last Yahi. A documentary history, Berkeley, CA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henderson, D., Collard, M. and Johnstone, D.A., 1996: Archaeological evidence for eighteenth-century medical practice in the Old Town of Edinburgh. Excavations at 13, Infirmary Street and Surgeons’ Square, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 126 (2), 929–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hertz, R., 1960: Death and the right hand, Glencoe, IL.Google Scholar
Highet, M., 2005: Body snatching and grave robbing. Bodies for science, History and anthropology 16 (4), 415–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschauer, S., 1991: The manufacture of bodies in surgery, Social studies of science 21 (2), 279–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschauer, S., 1994: Towards a methodology of investigations into the strangeness of one's own culture. A response to Collins, Social studies of science 24 (2), 335–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hubert, J., 1989: A proper place for the dead. A critical review of the reburial issue, in Layton, R. (ed.), Conflict in the archaeology of living traditions, London, 131–66.Google Scholar
Hubert, J., 1992: Dry bones or living ancestors? Conflicting perceptions of life, death and the universe, International journal of cultural property 1, 105–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hubert, J., and Fforde, C., 2002: Introduction. The reburial issue in the twenty-first century, in Fforde, C., Hubert, J. and Turnbull, P. (eds), The dead and their possessions. Repatriation in principle, policy, and practice, London and New York, 1–16.Google Scholar
Hull, G., 2003: The excavation and analysis of an 18th-century deposit of anatomical remains and chemical apparatus from the rear of the first Ashmolean Museum (now the Museum of the History of Science), Broad Street, Oxford, Post-medieval archaeology 37 (1), 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humphrey, D.C., 1973: Dissection and discrimination. The social origins of cadavers in America, 1760–1915, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 49 (9), 819–27.Google ScholarPubMed
Hunnisett, R.F., 1961: The medieval coroner, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Jones, D.G., 1994: Use of bequeathed and unclaimed bodies in the dissecting room, Clinical anatomy 7 (2), 102–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, D.G., 1998: Anatomy and ethics. An exploration of some ethical dimensions of contemporary anatomy, Clinical anatomy 11, 100–5.3.0.CO;2-Y>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, D.G., and Harris, R.J., 1998: Archaeology and human remains. Scientific, cultural and ethical considerations, Current anthropology 39 (2), 253–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordanova, L., 1989: Sexual visions. Images of gender in science and medicine between the 18th and 20th centuries, Madison, WI.Google Scholar
Kaufman, S.R., and Morgan, L.M.. 2005: The anthropology of the beginnings and ends of life, Annual review of anthropology 34, 317–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, L.S., and Meehan, M.C., 1973: A history of the autopsy. A review, American journal of pathology 73, 514–45.Google ScholarPubMed
Kristeva, J., 1982: Powers of horror. An essay on abjection, New York.Google Scholar
Kroeber, T., 1961: Ishi in two worlds, Berkeley, CA.Google Scholar
Laderman, G., 1996: The sacred remains. American attitudes toward death, 1799–1883, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Laqueur, T.W., 1983: Bodies, death and pauper funerals, Representations 1, 109–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Laqueur, T.W., 1989: Bodies, details and the humanitarian narrative, in Hunt, L. (ed.), The new cultural history, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 176–204.Google Scholar
Laqueur, T.W., 1993: Cemeteries, religion, and the culture of capitalism, in Garnett, J. and Matthew, H.C.G. (eds), Revival and religion since 1700. Essays for John Walsh, London and Rio Grande, OH, 183–200.Google Scholar
Laqueur, T.W., 2002: The dead body and human rights, in Sweeney, S.T. and Hodder, I. (eds), The body, Cambridge, 75–93.Google Scholar
Lawrence, S.C. 1996: Charitable knowledge. Hospital pupils and practitioners in eighteenth-century London, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawrence, S.C. 1998 Beyond the grave – the use and meaning of human body parts. A historical introduction, in Weir, R. (ed.), Stored tissue samples. Ethical, legal, and public policy implications, Iowa City, 111–142.Google Scholar
Linebaugh, P., 1977: The Tyburn riot against the surgeons, in Hay, D., Linebaugh, P., Rule, J.G., Thompson, E.P. and Winslow, C. (eds), Albion's fatal tree. Crime and society in eighteenth-century England, London.Google Scholar
Litten, J.W.S., 1991: The English way of death. The common funeral since 1450, London.Google Scholar
Lucas, G., 2004: Modern disturbances. On the ambiguities of archaeology, Modernism/modernity 11 (1), 109–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCullagh, R., and McCormick, F., 1991: The excavation of post-medieval burials from Braigh, Aignish, Lewis, 1989, Post-medieval archaeology 25, 73–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, H., 2005: Human remains. Dissection and its histories, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
MacDonald, H., 2007: A scandalous act. Regulating anatomy in a British settler colony, Tasmania 1869, Social history of medicine 20 (1), 39–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, M., and Murphy, T.R., 1990: Sleepless souls. Suicide in early modern England, Oxford and New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGuire, R.H., 1989. The sanctity of the grave. White concepts and American Indian burials, in Layton, R. (ed.), Conflict in the archaeology of living traditions, London, 167–84.Google Scholar
McMahon, V., 2006: Reading the body. Dissection and the ‘murder’ of Sarah Stout, Hertfordshire, 1699, Social history of medicine 19 (1), 19–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMains, H.F., 1999: The death of Oliver Cromwell, Lexington.Google Scholar
Markus, A., 1990: Governing savages, Sydney.Google Scholar
Matthews, P., 1983: Whose body? People as property, Current legal problems 36, 193–239.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miles, S.H., 1991: The anatomy lesson, Clinical anatomy 4 (6), 456–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moshenka, G., 2006: The archaeological uncanny, Public archaeology 5 (2), 91–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mølleson, T., and Cox, M., 1993: The Spitalfields project. The middling sort, Volume 2, London (CBA Research Reports 86).Google Scholar
Morrison, R.S., 1971: Death. Process or event? Science 173(3998), 694–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nilsson Stutz, L., 2007: Archaeology, identity and the right to culture, Current Swedish archaeology 15, 1–16.Google Scholar
O'Sullivan, J., 2001: Ethics and the archaeology of human remains, Journal of Irish archaeology 10, 121–51.Google Scholar
Park, K., 1994: The criminal and the saintly body. Autopsy and dissection in Renaissance Italy, Renaissance quarterly 47 (1), 1–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Park, K., 2006: Secrets of women. Gender, generation, and the origins of human dissection, New York.Google Scholar
Philp, B., 1995: Storm over excavations in Sevenoaks church, Kent archaeological review 120, 247–48.Google Scholar
Ponsford, M.,(ed.) 2002: Post-medieval Britain and Ireland in 2001, Post-medieval archaeology 36, 173–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Powers, N., and Walker, D., 2005: MoLAS annual review 2005. Human osteology at St Marylebone, Westminster, London (MBH04).Google Scholar
Richardson, R., 1987: Death, dissection and the destitute, London.Google Scholar
Richardson, R., 2000: A necessary inhumanity?, Medical humanities 26 (2), 104–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rodwell, W.J., and Rodwell, K.A., 1982: St Peter's Church, Barton-upon-Humber. Excavation and structural study 1978–81, Antiquarian journal 62 (2), 283–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sappol, M., 2002: A traffic of dead bodies. Anatomy and embodied social identity in nineteenth-century America, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Sawday, J., 1995: The body emblazoned. Dissection and the human body in Renaissance culture, London.Google Scholar
Siraisi, N.G., 2007: History, medicine, and the traditions of Renaissance learning, Ann Arbor, MI.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, A.C., and Kleinman, S., 1989: Managing emotions in medical school. Students’ contacts with the living and the dead, Social psychology quarterly 52 (1), 56–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speaker, S., 2003: Repatriating the remains of Ishi. Smithsonian Institution report and recommendation, in Kroeber, K. and Kroeber, C. (eds), Ishi in three centuries, Lincoln and London, 73–86.Google Scholar
Starn, O., 2004. Ishi's brain. In search of America's last ‘wild’ Indian, New York.Google Scholar
Stock, G., 1998: Quaker burial. Doctrine and practice, in Cox, M. (ed.), Grave concerns. Death and burial in England 1700–1850, York, 129–43.Google Scholar
Tarlow, S., 2002: The aesthetic corpse in nineteenth-century Britain, in Hamilakis, Y., Pluciennik, M. and Tarlow, S. (eds), Thinking through the body. Archaeologies of corporeality, New York, 85–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarlow, S., 2006: Archaeological ethics and the people of the past, in Scarre, C. and Scarre, G. (eds), The ethics of archaeology. Philosophical perspectives on archaeological practice, Cambridge, 199–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarlow, S., 2008: The extraordinary history of Oliver Cromwell's head, in Robb, J. and Boric, D. (eds), Past bodies, New York, 69–78.Google Scholar
Tarlow, S.C., 2000: Landscapes of memory. The nineteenth-century garden cemetery, European journal of archaeology 3 (2), 217–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, D. H., 2000: Skull wars. Kennewick Man, archaeology, and the battle for Native American identity, New York.Google Scholar
Thomas, J., 2004: Archaeology and modernity, London and New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turnbull, P., 1991: ‘Ramsay's regime’. The Australian Museum and the procurement of aboriginal bodies, c. 1874–1900, Aboriginal history 15, 108–21.Google Scholar
Urry, J., 1989. Head hunters and body snatchers, Anthropology today 5 (5), 11–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Gennep, A. 1960: The rites of passage, Chicago.Google Scholar
Vizenor, G., 2003: Mister Ishi. Analogies of exile, deliverance, and liberty, in Kroeber, K. and Kroeber, C. (eds), Ishi in three centuries, Lincoln and London, 363–72.Google Scholar
Watkins, J., 2001: Yours, mine or ours? Conflicts between archaeologists and ethnic groups, in Bray, T. (ed.), The future of the past. Archaeologists, Native Americans and repatriation, New York, 57–68.Google Scholar
Watkins, J., 2004: Becoming American or becoming Indian? Journal of social archaeology 4 (1), 60–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weaver, J., 2003: When the demons come. (Retro)spectacle among the savages, in Kroeber, K. and Kroeber, C. (eds), Ishi in three centuries, Lincoln and London, 35–47.Google Scholar
Weiss-Krejci, E., 2005: Excarnation, evisceration and exhumation in medieval and post-medieval Europe, in Rakitra, G.F.M., Buikstra, J.E., Beck, L.A. and Williams, S.R. (eds), Interacting with the dead. Perspectives on mortuary archaeology for the new millennium, Gainesville, FL, 155–72.Google Scholar
YAT, 1998: Former female prison, Castle Yard, York. Report of an archaeological evaluation, York (York Archaeological Trust Field Report 26).Google Scholar
Zimmerman, L.J., and Clinton, R.N., 1999: Case note. Kennewick man and native American graves protection and repatriation act woes, International journal of cultural property 8 (1), 212–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar