Year: 2020
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: In May 2018, indigenous people from Australia, New Zealand, North America, Hawai'i and Japan gathered in Canberra to share knowledge and ideas about an issue of profound concern to all of them: the task of reclaiming and repatriating the remains of the dead, dug up by colonial scholars or trophy collectors and removed to museums and universities around the world.The European imperial knowledge system, in its nineteenth-and twentieth-century search for the raw materials to build theories of race and progress, profoundly affected not only ways of life of colonised societies, but also their ways of death.Skeleton-gathering became a scientific tool practised by scholars and trophy hunters alike in all corners of the globe, and evolved into a global network of trade in human remains.As a result, for example, the National Museum of Australia and at least one other Australian institution hold skulls of Ainu people, which appear to have been excavated in Hokkaido and traded to Australia by the Japanese anthropologist Koganei Yoshikiyo in the first half of the twentieth century, while the University of Tokyo and other Japanese institutions hold Australian Aboriginal remains that Japanese scholars received in return.The repatriation of such remains to their places of origin is now an important issue, not only for the communities 1 See Brigit Katz, 'Australia to Return Remains of Japan's Indigenous Ainu People', Smithsonian.com, 15 June 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/australia-return-remains-indigenous- japanese-group-180963697/ (accessed 3 January 2019). 2 See Tanaka Ryō, 'Hokudai "Jinkotsu Mondai" Chōsa Iinkai: "Ninkichū ni Hōkokusho o Otodoke suru" to Mochizuki Bungakubuchō', Aldo 41 (December 2009): pp.4-5. 3For further information, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, 'Performing Ethnic Harmony: The Japanese Government's Plans for a New Ainu Law', The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 16, no. 2 (1 November 2018).
Source: ANU Press eBooks
DOI: 10.22459/ofh.2020.08
Author: Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Language: English
Topic: Japanese History and Culture
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3049522950