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MLA Full: "What should museums do with their dead? (w/ Caitlin Doughty!)." YouTube, uploaded by thebrainscoop, 23 January 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ6mbiqBh6M.
MLA Inline: (thebrainscoop, 2020)
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=uZ6mbiqBh6M.
Many museums house significant numbers of human remains, many of which were acquired without the consent of the individual in question. So, our good friend Caitlin from Ask a Mortician stopped by the Field Museum to talk with us about it.

This is a humongous and complicated topic - we'd love to know what you think!

Caitlin's channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath
Website: http://caitlindoughty.com/
Read her books they're AWESOME: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7802044.Caitlin_Doughty

Info on NAGPRA: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nagpra/index.htm

Here's the paper from Science about the person from Spirit Cave and the genetic testing of that individual: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/eaav2621

Mummy unwrapping parties:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/victorian-party-people-unrolled-mummies-for-fun

Origins of Exhibited Cadavers Questioned:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5637687

More on Grover Krantz, Sasquatch scientist and expert on human evolution: https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/A-student-of-Sasquatch-Prof-Grover-Krantz-dies-1080702.php

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----------------------------------------­-----------------------------
Executive Producer, Creator, Host:
Emily Graslie

Producer, Director, Editor:
Sheheryar Ahsan

Production Assistant, Content Developer:
Raven Forrest

Interview with:
Caitlin Doughty

Production Support/Stuntman:
Vinícius Penteado
---------------------------------------­-----------------------------
This episode is filmed on location at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.
http://www.fieldmuseum.org

 (00:00) to (02:00)


Emily:  We have a super special guest on our program today, it's Caitlin Doughty! From "Ask A Mortician."

Caitlin: I'm so glad to finally be here at the Field Museum with the world-famous Emily Graslie.

E: I'm famous in some weird circles.

C; You're famous in my circle.

E: I- oh gosh same, I'm so excited.  I think we-

C: We're just a concentric circle that's us in the middle of it.

E: It's Caitlin and Emily and there's a lot of overlap there.  We've been talking about doing a video together for like years.

C: Years.  And we're friends off the videos, we've just never shown our friendship on the videos.

E: Yeah I mean we went to VidCon together.

C: Wild.

E: That was one of my most favorite VidCon experiences.  But I'm excited, and we're gonna have a conversation.

C: We're gonna have a sort of difficult conversation today.

E: Yes, what was really interesting about this is we put the call out to our respective audiences on the Twitterverse asking them, you know, what do they want us to talk about?   Here we are, and we have the opportunity to have a productive conversation; what was interesting was the topic that resonated the most, or seemed to resonate the most, that people were most interested in, was the conversation about human remains in museum collections.  Which is not an easy conversation to have.

C: No.  Not at all.  And historically, it's been a really hard conversation to have.  And why do you think people ask you about that so much?  I mean obviously you work at a museum, I think it's more obvious for you, right?

E: In addition to, you know, being a Youtuber who makes science videos, I am also and have been a full-time museum employee for six years at this point, so I'm privy to a lot of the nuances in the conversation about things like human remains.  Not to say that I'm at the table, I'm not, but sort of on the periphery and probably have a better understanding of some of the complications and just current considerations that are happening behind the scenes.

C: But you are also, I think, well know in your videos for openly discussing the machinations behind a museum.  Even bureaucracy or how you work with curators and how you work with administration, so when you have that sort of open dialogue with the public, they're gonna immediately go to like, "Hey here's the most transgressive, difficult issue; we need you to be open about that, too."

 (02:00) to (04:00)


E: Right.  And here's someone who historically has like, been okay with addressing some complicated issues.  But not necessarily this one.  And I think you spend more of your time talking about corpses and human remains, how do you navigate that space?

C: Well, you know, again, I'm also not someone at "the table?" Necessarily?


E: Mm-hmm.

C: You know, I can speak from an outsider's perspective, but I think that the reason that people maybe ask me so much about it is because I talk so much about consent on my channel, and specifically consent around human remains and dead bodies. And what does it mean to have the family and the individual themselves before they die have a specific vision for what happens with their dead body, and that's important either culturally or religiously, and then have that violated in some way.

And so, we talk about that all the time. We have a series called "Iconic Corpse," and most of the iconic corpses, especially the women or female-identified corpses that we have on the channel, tend to be famous because they were dragged out or exploited in some way after their death.

E: And that talking point, just the concept of consent, I think, is at the heart of why the museum collections that are in possession of human remains is so problematic, because for the most part, the human remains that end up in museum collections were not done with the consent of the individual.

And that's not just looking at, you know, indigenous people from America - that's mummies, that's... the majority of human remains in collections are from marginalized groups of people from either socioeconomically, or they were prisoners, or they were patients who were mentally or physically disabled or ill - and none of these people -


 (04:00) to (06:00)


E - and none of these people consented to having their remains here, but through many different channels and many different networks over the last 200 years, they've ended up here. And so now the conversation isn't, "Uh oh, what do we do about this?" It's, "Be more proactive about taking responsibility for this fact, and doing something." Just because they're here without consent, I think it's so important to still treat them with respect that they weren't treated with initially.

C: Yeah, and I think it's important to remember that this is -, obviously, it's not a fresh conversation within museum curators -

E: Oh, no!

C: - of course. You know, it's been something that's been going on for a while now, but I think that in some ways it is a freshER conversation within the public.

E: Yeah.

C: And words like "decolonizing" museum collections are just now coming into sort of common conversation -

[chyron: "Decolonize: The undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby a nation establishes and maintains its dominance on overseas territories."

- and being able to say, "This is what we want, and this is how we want to engage it." And I think it's dangerous to just say, "Return them all."

E: Yeah.

C: "We need to return them all immediately, because they're indigenous remains." They're NOT all indigenous remains - is that correct?

E: Right.

C: It seems like incredibly diverse range in most museums of thousands or tens of thousands of sets of human remains from all cultures and all different groups and "just return them" -... Like the amount of research that goes into that process seems very intense.

E: Sometimes it's not the appropriate thing to do. So, to go back to conversations entering public dialogue, repatriation is a huge one -

[chyron: "Repatriation: The process of returning an asset, an item of symbolic value or a person to its owner or their place of origin or citizenship."]

- especially the repatriation of cultural objects from indigenous tribes and communities, and that was largely ushered in by this federal mandate, NAGPRA, -

[chyron: "NAGPRA: The Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act is a federal law enacted in 1990. The act requires federal agencies, including institutions that receive federal funding, the return Native American cultural items and human remains to affiliated tribes and descendants."]

- it's the "Native Amerian Graves Protection & Repatriation Act. And that was in the early 90s, right? That was the first time that there was this federal mandate saying that if museum collections are in possession of objects of cultural or indigenous significance, and members -

 (06:00) to (08:00)


E - and members of that culture or tribe requests for that material to be returned, then you have to pursue those avenues. 

And it's an imperfect process, obviously, but museums are moving far more toward being transparent toward this being a possibility for those communities, right? We will repatriate objects when - 

C: You have repatriation officers - 

E: Yes.

C: - at this museum, right?

E: Yes!

C: So people whose specific job it is to engage the communities and have these conversations.

E: Right. But where it gets complicated is that, you look at the fraught history of indigenous peoples in this country, and the way that they were moved off their homelands, the way that their identities were scrubbed, the way that maybe their oral histories weren't written down, and you get into some really murky waters in terms of, like, "What is the identity of the people in our collection?" That takes so much careful consideration. And it is a long process, so it's not to say that museums aren't willing to do it, it's just not as easy as looking in the phone book and calling somebody and saying, "Hey, your Grandpa's here; come pick him up."

C: Right, well if the remains are thousands of years old as well -. We did a video at the beginning of this year on the oldest sets of mummified remains in the world, and we were shocked to discover that the oldest "mummy," - they don't like to call it a mummy, but - sort of intact body that's ever been found was in Nevada -

E: Oh, really??

C: - rural Nevada. It's called the "Spirit Caveman" or the "Spirit Cave Body." And there was a whole issue with the body being taken out and the bones being taken out, when the tribe there - the Paiute-Shosone tribe - wanted the remains back, but when it was removed, they were told, "No, no; this is not your ancestor, it's a different-, you know, an older indigenous group. It's not related to you at all." And then it was finally genetically tested, a few years ago and - surprise, surprise - the remains WERE, in fact, Native American and returned to the group and reburied.

When the actual reburial took place, something that really had an impact on me is hearing that this group, the Paiute-Shoshone,

 (08:00) to (10:00)


C: - group, the Paiute-Shoshone, had the same emotional reaction to the burial - what we normally associate with grieving, visual grieving - over this body that was, I think, 11,000-, over 10,000 years old. And because of the way that they see death and they see that journey, they had the same intensity of emotional reaction.

It's not really possible to say, "Oh, this group, you know-, yeah, it's 10,000 years old; it's not really your ancestor. Who really - 

E: "Move oon."

C: Yeah, "move on." Because that's a very Western way of looking at grief or connection to the dead.

E: Yeah. And I think it's so interesting, especially when you insert the time-element of it. It seems like time itself has a way of distancing a visitor's reaction to human remains in a collection; that creates a barrier for appreciation or respect for those remains, and I will be the first to admit that I have not always done the right thing, and it was a pretty steep learning curve.

So, a couple of years ago, I was invited to make a video about some conservation efforts that were happening on a mummified individual before they were going to go on tour and on display. And I was excited about it; you know, we don't do a lot of anthropology-focused videos on our program, so this was an opportunity where someone invited me to come in and do it.

And so, we made this video, it's called "Mummy Brains." I was invited by this conservationist, this person who was conserving these remains. There was dehydrated brain material that they found in the brain case after they had done a scan, and in the scan, they also found dermestid beetles and blowflies, which I thought was super fascinating. And I allowed my morbid curiosity to lead in front of my own humanity.

You know, you grow up in a Western country like America, and you grow up with this sensationalization of... Egypt, for instance. I mean, it's like "mummy mania" in -

 (10:00) to (12:00)


E: - in the U.K. and the United States. What do people associate with natural history museums - dinosaurs and mummies. And so, it's a huge draw for attendance and a huge point-of-interest for visitors oftentimes. And looking at these human remains or looking at this mummy or mummified remains, it's so easy to interpret it as an oddity. And when that video went out - and that was sort of the first I had this reflection of realizing my upbringing - it was taking precedence over the sensitivities needed to talk about this individual.

It was a hard learning curve, no one ever want to have something like that come back to you in such a negative way, but it was a valuable lesson, and I've thought a lot in the years since about what I should do about that video, if I should address it in a video, and I guess we finally are. Right? But that's just one example in the ways in which I've changed and grown and given an opportunity to do a video like that again, I would approach it completely differently.

C: Right, right, right. I mean, we need to remember that in the Victorian era and into the 20th century, there were "mummy unwrapping parties," -

E: Ohgod...

C: - where they would just go to Egypt, steal the mummies, bring it back, and in public - like in Piccadilly Square - they would just rip open the mummy casing and be like, "Let's see what we find inside!" for the public.

E: Ugh. It's like a morbid unboxing party.

C: It is, it's exactly that, it was exactly that - it was, like, "early-YouTube" vibes, just like, [affected voice] "What's gonna be in this secret mummy?"

What we do is sort of a new world, the idea of people people who are putting out our own self-made contents about death, about bodies - animal bodies or human bodies - and wanting to transmit our enthusiasm for them while also learning how to respect different cultures and respect historical bodies, and the idea that just because someone died in a tragic or interesting way -

 (12:00) to (14:00)


C: - interesting way - 200 years ago, 2,000 years ago - doesn't mean that it's kitsch. That doesn't mean that we can be like, "Lol. Lol, corpse." 

E: Right.

C: We still have to have that same degree of respect for the body. It's sort of without precedent, because even television shows don't have the same kind of personality that we bring to it; and I mean, like we not just like [affected voice] "the host on the National Geographic channel."

E: Right.

C: We're someone that people feel like they know.

E: Mm-hmm.

C: And so, they want us to demonstrate a very authentic curiosity. But. We also have to be aware that we are setting standards for how people engage with death, and how they talk about dead bodies, and how they talk about historical dead bodies.

E: Right.

C: And so, it's one of the most important reasons that you have to have real diverse teams working on your videos, that you have to have real understanding of the landscape, that you have to do a ton research, that you have to consider how you're going to be seen, and optics, and it's sort of exhausting, but it's also necessary.

E: It's the responsible thing to do.

C: It's the responsible thing. And what was really interesting in talking to the Paiute-Shoshone tribe for that video is learning that it wasn't that they didn't want to know anything about their ancestor, or they didn't want any testing done, or they didn't want you-, they just didn't want him not buried.

E: Right.

C: And they didn't want him away in some freezer somewhere.

E: Yeah.

C: You know, I think it's a real disservice to any marginalized group - but especially indigenous tribes - to say that they're unscientifically uninterested.

E: Mm-hmm, right.

C: You know, it seems like they just want to be a direct part of the conversation.

E: As they should be.

C: Of course.

E: I think that is the balance that is now being me or being attempted to be met in many museums. And I can say that the Field Museum recently passed an internal procedure and policy for how we deal with -

 (14:00) to (16:00)


E: - how we deal with the human remains in our own collection, and very specific and spelled-out saying that every request for visitation, every request for sampling or genetic research is almost secondary to first considering the sensitivity of the request itself, right?

It's finding that balance between recognizing that human-remains collections collections are a wealth of information for genetic scientists, for bioanthropologists, but that can't come at the expense of recognizing and acknowledging that each of these sets of human remains are from an individual.

But I think having that conversation in museums is something that didn't happen 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.

C: Well, that's a question I had for you, because I talked about the mummy-unwrapping parties, and we know that museum collections and how human remains were handled were just, like, (?~14:49) Granjeño horror.

E: Yes.

C: You know, like, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, there was no thought or respect to this at all - I mean, especially in Western museums - it just wasn't part of the conversation. And when did that change, and where are we right now in that journey, do you think?

E: I will say that in my time working here at the museum, which has been six years at this point, you and I deciding to have this conversation, and me bringing up this possibility to some of our anthropologists, there was an acknowledgement that it is time that we acknowledge that we have these remains and that people are aware of the complications and the nuances in managing and caring for them and making them available to research, and it's a conversation that needs to be out in the public, it can't just be something that we're talking about internally

C: Well, something else that we have to reckon with is the idea that the public really does want to see this stuff.

E: Yes.

C: If you think about something like "Body Worlds," -

E: Yes!

C: - where a lot of the original bodies used for the "Body Worlds" exhibition were Chinese political prisoners.

E: Oh, not good.

C: You know, I'm like, "Why does this guy playing beach volleyball have a -

 (16:00) to (18:00)


C: - beach volleyball have a bullet hole in is head? Oh! Because he was shot in a Chinese political prison."

E: Oh no.

C: It's complicated, and they're now, you know, I guess to their credit, they are much at the new bodies that are coming in are from people who have donated their bodies explicitly for this purpose. And that's sort of fascinating when you think about - "Okay, this person wanted very much for their body-," like this fun German person was like, [accent] "I want playing golf, and my skin in flayed, and -" 

E: Yeah, forever!

C: I don't know, that's my German impression, it's bad. But. The Chinese political prisoner, probably not so much.

E: It goes back to that concept of consent.

C: It's completely about consent. And so, even when you talk about the different groups that may have ancestors or relatives in a human-remains collection, what is their opinion on display that gives a lot of context, and that is very respectful, and that is educational, and that talks about their current situation - the current group - versus complete repatriation, versus "this is exploitative; we hate this, get it out," versus "we don't care at all," you know.

And you can't assume that that's a blanket opinion...

E: Right.

C: - that all of these groups have. There's an incredible diversity of human remains, an incredible diversity of ancestors, an incredible diversity of opinions on this.

E: Yes.

C: And so, just saying that we need to make one move with a human-remains collection doesn't even seem to begin to scratch the surface of what's necessary.

E: It's not practical, it's not feasible, and it's not the right thing to do, right? Doing the right thing means dealing with each of these requests-, inquiries on a case-by-case basis, and that's all you can do.

C: Even those of us who are hyper-aware of issues of repatriation and why it's so crucial to give those people a voice - I'm gonna be honest with you - I still wanna see 'em.

E: Yeah.

C: I still want to go into the -

 (18:00) to (20:00)


C: - wanna go into the human-remains collection, I want to see it in a museum, I want to see it in medical museums, I maybe even want to see it in some place like Body Worlds.

E: Yeah.

C: I am fascinated by this; as a human, the idea of ancient humans and people who came before me still fascinates me.

E: Yeah.

C: Do I want to do that at the expense of other people's feelings? No.

E: Mm-hmm.

C: But. That's when I put my hands in curator's and put my hands into the anthropologist's. So, in a way, the public is looking to museums to be the ethical line.

E: Yeah.

C: You know, we are looking to the experts around these human remains to say, "Okay, this is a human remains. In this situation, this is this okay to engage with and be curious about and even enjoy. And if the public feels like that trust is violated in some way because it's actually NOT okay or there's a group that's incredibly angry that this is being displayed, that takes a very natural curiosity and almost makes it uncomfortable or wrong.

E: Yeah. And it's about holding those people in those positions of power accountable, right?

C: Mm-hmm.

E: And I think that's why it's important that within our own policy about the exhibition or research of human remains is that it's very explicit in there that says human remains are not for entertainment purposes. Like, the entertainment value of something, I mean, it shouldn't even factor into the equation.

C: Well, I think that we, in general, get kind of confused between entertainment and curiosity?

E: Yeah.

C: That's everywhere in a museum, right? Is what is entertainment, because curiosity is entertaining.

E: Sure.

C: But curiosity is also valid. But where does the line - and this is completely a cultural line that changes all the time - as to when something becomes (?~19:44) prurient in some way and, like, tiptoes over the line to no longer being an appropriate display of something.

E: Right. And it might also, again, not to go back to consent again, but the entertainment -

C: No, yeah, I'm always -

E: - the entertainment of an exhibition like Body Worlds-, it's easier to digest if you know that those individuals  -

 (20:00) to (22:00)


E: - those individuals being displayed gave their consent to do so.

C: Oh, completely. Because then you feel like you're all on the same page of-, the conversation then is, "The human body is fascinating!" 

E: Yeah.

C: Not, "We took these people without their consent and flayed them and put them in acetone until they're now preserved having sex."

E: And the year is 2019 and I paid $28 to go see this.

C: Oh, it's more than that, I think it's - 

E: Yeah, nobody feels good about that situation.

C: No. No. Any display of human remains you want both the ancestors of the people that it came from, and the public engaging with it, and the museum that it came from to all be somewhat in the same place -

E: Yeah.

C: - with why this is happening and what we're learning from it.

E: I also look at-, you know, there are instances where people have, again, donated their bodies with consent, and it's ended up being a delightful interaction, right? I think about Grover Krantz; this guy was an anthropologist and was one of the first legitimate Sasquatch academics? Published academic papers on Bigfoot? He knew an anthropologist -

C: What is a "legit Sasquatch academic" mean? [E laughs] Hold on...

E: I wanna say he published papers, I don't know if they were peer-reviewed, and when he passed away, he had made a request to the Curator of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum that he wanted his body put in to the museum, and the curator agreed. And this wasn't long ago, this was like, 2002.

And so, they sent Grover Krantz's body and the body of one of his favorite Irish wolfhounds to a body farm in Tennessee, and now it's still on display there.

C: Yeah.

E: And that is a situation when one can feel good about this.

C: Absolutely!

E: Knowing that Grover was like, "I want to use my body to educate people! And I want to be with my dog forever!"

C: A lot of people DO want that. Scientific donation is a very valid, and frankly, less expensive thing that you can do with your body.

E: Yeah.

C: Whether it's going to a medical school or a private donation company - although, if you're thinking about -


 (22:00) to (24:00)


C: - although, if you're thinking about a private donation company, make sure that they share your values and you have some sense of what's going to happen to your body, because it may be used to test things for the military-industrial complex, for example?

E: Oh, awkward.

C: But it can make funeral costs much lower, and if you were someone who was very interested in science or doesn't have a really intense relationship with your body, or if the idea of burial or creation or traditional "honoring" or memorialization of your body, then by all means, give it to science and let it be useful.

E: I asked one of our anthropologists if someone wanted to donate their body to the Field Museum would we take it, and he was like, "Yeah, we'd consider it.

C: Amazing!

E: Depends on what collection they want to go to. I mean, you could be like, "I want to donate my body to the zoology collection, and then you can put me with the primate exhibit.

C: Are we not primates.

E: [overlap] I mean, are we not primates. Ancient remains. But, [chuckles], but I think that's interesting, too.

The overall message of this is just, again, realizing that the way that things were done for a hundred-, 150 years in museums is ont the way that things are done today.

C: No.

E: But reversing or acknowledging a lot of those ills is just something that's going to take time.

C: I think that we're both very invested in continuing this conversation, and we're both very interested in what you have to say as well. So, this is kind of a long-winded, like, "Tell us in the comments -" [chuckles]

E: Yeah!

C: "- what you think about this." And how you're engaging with this. and how you - , honestly, how you think about how we discussed it.

E: Yeah.

C: And how we presented it. Because we're learning as advocates how to -

Both: - talk about it.

E: And, who knows the reaction to it, but we wouldn't be having it recorded and putting it on the internet if we didn't want other people to be thinking about these things as well.

C: Oh, completely. Yeah.

E: If you want to solve a giant problem, you need a lot of input.

C: Yeah, and I think that we're also - even us as advocates -

 (24:00) to (24:52)


C: - as advocates in talking about it - we're also, I believe, deeply interested in what you think about this.

E: Yes! Thank you! Thanks for your comments.

C: Yeah, this was so nice to finally be here. I feel like we should've done a slightly more fun video, - 

E: There' still time!

C: -  but you know, they're not always wacky.

E: Yeah. And it's matching the conversation-, match in tone. 

C: Oh yeah, I don't mean that we should've talked in a wackier tone of voice [E laughs] about human-remains repatriation. I mean that we should've answered questions about beetles or something.

E: There's still time!

C: Yeah.

[outro, music ends]

E: It still has brains on it.