Hungry Ghosts and Inalienable Remains: Performing Rights of Repatriation

Abstract

To the extent that it could be done, an animated cartography tracking the journeys of unburied biological remains of indigenous peoples from the formerly colonized world would generate global lines of movement along imperial trade, trafficking and migration routes, coalescing in scientific and cultural institutions across Europe, North and South America and Australasia. Clearly, we can say that human remains are, in a geophysical sense, separable from their communities of origin. But are they alienable? The concept of inalienability is, of course, central to human rights discourse as it was formulated during the Enlightenment and formalized in the mid-twentieth century. Inalienability is also persistently difficult to define because of the way in which it seems to announce and preclude its opposite, the condition of not having rights. The ontological and political basis of this condition is known: in his widely-cited theorization of homo sacer or bare life and the concentration camp, Giorgio Agamben offers an analytic tool by which to comprehend how the human is cleaved from its ‘inalienable’ rights, and is in such terms confined to a condition that is unspeakable, under a state of exception.¹ I invoke Agamben here because his emphasis on the biopolitics of rights seems a productive jumping-off point to conceptualize human rights as they pertain to biological remains.