Dead bodies: The changing treatment of human remains in British museum collections and the challenge to the traditional model of the museum
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The contestation over human remains in museum collections among indigenous groups, archaeologists, and museums that took place in the USA, Australasia, and Canada in the late 1980s developed more slowly in the UK. Law and codes of practise have now been passed to ensure the repatriation of human remains; the transfer to culturally affiliated groups is possible and accepted by the profession. This paper explores the influences on the construction of the contestation, to explain this development. Drawing on research for an ongoing study, this paper will first outline the influence of reparations thinking and a therapeutic ethos present in ideas in the politics of recognition. It is argued that the idea of human remains as a scientific resource holds less authority than the recognition of emotional claims for human remains from once colonized or disenfranchised communities. It is suggested that the museum profession has been receptive to claims for repatriation as a response to a crisis of legitimacy. Repatriation of human remains is part of a broader renegotiation of the basis of their authority. It is concluded that the traditional remit of the museum is questioned by these developments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it