Bones and injustices: provenance research, restitutions and identity politics

The last decade has witnessed increasing numbers of “provenance research” projects investigating the histories of human remains in academic collections and leading to their restitution. Such projects explicitly and implicitly address the historical injustices and their continuities of amassing people’s mortal remains and their subsequent use by those who have appropriated them. This article considers which historical wrongdoings provenance research and restitutions attempt to address and how effective they are in doing so. Firstly, the article points towards the relatively effective recognition of spiritual and emotional injustice. Secondly, it discusses the limited recognition of “race science’s” history and legacies and of its logic’s persistence in a social essentialism that inheres in contemporary handling of such human remains. Thirdly, it discusses how recognition of past oppression, dispossession and exploitation ties to broader political goals and attempts at redistribution.

"communities of origin". 1 Such restitution embodies a plurality of diverse spiritual and political meanings and agendas, all aimed at addressing diverse historical and contemporary injustices-a complexity which escapes singular definition or assessment. Drawing on various examples, this article asks: to what extent can provenance research and the associated restitution be seen as a form of identity politics that effectively addresses historical injustices and contributes to sustained social justice?
Many diverse but interrelated forms of injustice are embedded in the gruesome histories of human remains amassed in different academic collections. Analysing the contemporary handling of such human remains requires considering different forms of injustice separately. They include diverse wrongdoings regarding how human remains were "collected"; the disrespect and dehumanisation involved; the purposes of their "collection"; the general context of oppression and exploitation which enabled it; and the continuous legacies of all of the above.
In colonial and imperial contexts, bodies of those seen as lesser beings were systematically "collected" around the world. Poor and colonised people's graves were plundered, battlefields dug up, cadavers of victims of violence and genocide shipped, and, in some cases, individuals were murdered for their body parts. This represents a general injustice of unequal treatment of oppressed people's bodies and of the violence to which they were subjected. Even in cases where no direct physical violence took place, without the consent of the individuals or their family members permitting "collection" of their remains, such "collection" constitutes theft. Moreover, it commonly entailed disrespect for the meaning and importance of human remains and burial sites and therefore an injustice to people's beliefs, customs and emotional attachment. Disregard for the individuality and dignity of those to whom these remains belonged constituted an injustice of objectification and dehumanisation that turned them into specimens and research "material".
Such de-individualised skeletons, especially skulls, were used for scientific practices, notably for comparative anatomy and creating racial taxonomies, itself constituting an injustice of harmful erroneous science that, under the umbrella of "race science", produced and reproduced notions of essential radical differences between humans. Put differently, the context of oppression and exploitation enabled "collection" of these body parts, which enabled theories and categories that in turn often served to further justify oppression and exploitation. Such historical wrongs to different extents shape today's socio-political and economic world. These forms of injustice affected and, in myriad ways, continue to affect individuals and groups of people, constituting both historical and contemporary social injustices. How does contemporary scholarly and political handling of such human remains, through provenance research and restitutions, respond to these forms of injustice?
Aiming to address social injustices regarding human remains and to restitute them, provenance researchers first attempt to establish their original historical and geographic context. In most cases, there is limited information about particular human remains with their individual identities or ties to specific families. Instead (or in parallel, when occasional individual identities are known), restitution relies on ascribing a group identity-a contemporary ethnic or national identity. Such ascriptions are based on either historical information about regions or places of "collection", or on biological-anthropological examination and so-called "ancestry estimation" methods. Human remains are then "returned" to representatives of the ascribed identity-an act seeking to address injustices committed against members of that collective category. Such reliance on identity categories and a groupist understanding of history (an understanding in which identity groups, rather than individuals or institutions, are the main actors and inheritors of history) means restitution of human remains is effectively practising a form of identity politics. But how does such an identity-politics strategy address historical injustices and their continuities? What are its risks and shortcomings? Following Fraser (2008), I distinguish between recognition and redistribution to consider three very broadly understood forms of justice which restitutions attempt-spiritual and emotional recognition; recognition of the errors and consequences of "race science"; and recognition of historical oppression, dispossession and exploitation with relation to redistribution.

Spiritual and emotional recognition
Many official representatives of so-called "societies of origin" claim that human remains embody either ancestors or spirits that reside in bone. They thus have a metaphysical status of subjects, or spiritual entities. Consequently, many restitutions have an inherently spiritual and emotional character, and address the spiritual and emotional offence of appropriation of human remains. That historical offence is exacerbated by the contemporary harm of keeping ancestors' remains in collections, a harm that contradicts principles of respect for and honour of other people's religious or spiritual beliefs. Provenance research and restitutions attempt to address this.
Consider the case, depicted by Fernández Mouján (2015), of Damiana, or Kryygi, an indigenous child whose remains have been restituted to a Paraguain Aché community (cf. Koel-Abt and Winkelmann 2013). In 1896, a group of settlers, responding to a horse killing, massacred several indigenous people. A 3-year-old girl survived, and the settlers took her to serve as a maid. 2 They named her Damiana, after the saint patron of the day (later, during restitution, she was renamed as Kryygi, and these names are used interchangeably). At the age of 14, after 11 years of forced servitude, she was committed to a mental institution following disapproval of her sexual relations with a boy. Shortly after she died of tuberculosis, her body was "collected" by Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (1872-1938, a German anthropologist residing in Argentina. It was taken to the Museum of La Plata in Argentina where it was stored alongside the remains of Caibú-a body "collected" from the same massacre site and is believed possibly to be that of Damiana's mother. While Damiana's postcranial skeleton remained in the museum, her head was donated to Hans Virchow , then chair of the Anthropological Society of Berlin. Thus was Kryygi objectified and turned into a specimen exemplifying the so-called primitive Guayakí Indians (as the Aché were then referred). In 2010, her postcranial skeleton was restituted from Argentina and, in 2012, her skull, hair and fragments of skin were restituted from Germany and ceremonially buried in Paraguay's National Caazapá Park. An Aché representative said, during a ceremony in Asunción: "No one will fix the pain that is in our hearts. The genocide, the killings, the dictatorship that abused our people, all of that we carry in our hearts." 3 While the pain cannot be fixed, such restitution offers spiritual and emotional recognition, a platform to express pain and trauma. The two restitutions, from Argentina and Germany, to some extent symbolically addressed the injustices committed both against the young girl who was oppressed and exploited in life and in death, and against those who share similar stories and are the heirs of continuous oppression of indigenous people in Paraguay. It also ties to recognition of more general forms of oppression and exploitation that receive some recognition during restitutions (see final section).
Spiritual and emotional claims are perhaps the most commonly and explicitly emphasised aspect of restitutions. Consider the case of one amongst the hundreds of restitutions to Hawaii over the past three decades. It involves human remains restituted in 2022 from the University of Göttingen, where I am currently employed. Hawaiian human remains are referred to as iwi kūpuna (ancestral remains), which, in spiritual terms, must return to the soil where they belong. This spiritual understanding is emphasised across the process. Thus, during the provenance research phase, we were instructed to avoid exposing the remains to natural light whilst examining what was listed as in Göttingen's collections and establishing the various boxes' contents. That was because natural light disturbs the ancestors and is offensive. During the restitution ceremony, the human remains were directly addressed as subjects, and rituals were performed to prepare the ancestors for the journey and to cleanse the ceremony attendees of negative energy. As Edward Halealoha Ayau, a member of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs' delegation, said, "every time we bring ancestors home and replant them, we restore integrity, courage and love to our families and restore our ancestral foundation" (in Hickley 2022). The Hawaiian restitutions explicitly and primarily relate to spiritual and cultural values, but they also entail political hopes and agendas (see final section).
These examples illustrate how restitutions can provide some sense of spiritual and emotional justice in the form of recognition of spiritual claims and demands, and of historical trauma, alongside the return of ancestral spirits. In that sense, restitution addresses harmed people's sense of spiritual and emotional injustice and the injustice of theft of mortal remains.
I have interviewed people involved in provenance research and restitutions, particularly scientists caring for and working with academic collections, about their thoughts and positions regarding restitutions. While the majority saw it positively, others expressed doubts that a sense of spiritual justice can legitimise restitutions. Some objected to affording priority to non-scientific beliefs over the scientific potential of such collections to produce knowledge. Others questioned the substantial amounts of funding and work it requires-it involves years, even decades, of research to investigate hundreds or thousands of human remains, needing substantial funding. 4 Some said that spending such sums solely on research and restitution ceremonies is perverse in contexts where restitutions often involve poor communities which could benefit materially from such money (see discussion below regarding the redistribution aspect of social justice). Also, a couple of interviewees suggested other less expensive ways of honouring the dead and recognising the injusticese.g. collective funerals or even mass graves.

Recognition of the errors of "race science"
Science was the main motivation for amassing large numbers of human remains from around the world. The oldest collections originate in European Enlightenment, an epoch marked by efforts to understand and systematise the world's diversity through empirical research. Comparative anatomical and anthropological taxonomies produced essentialist race categories by objectifying, de-individualising and using people's bodies. That itself constitutes an injustice. That the ideas it generated in turn legitimised discrimination, slavery and colonialism exacerbated that injustice. Does the contemporary practice of provenance research and restitutions adequately address those injustices and conceptual errors? Can it lead to sustained justice?
The scientific racism underlying such collections' histories is sometimes mentioned during restitution ceremonies. For example, Professor Metin Tolan, the University of Göttingen president, said in his speech at the hand-over ceremony of human remains to Hawaii: As we all know, knowledge undergoes change. Today we seek to shed light on the past, and to understand, and set right, what was done to your ancestors in removing them from their graves. We apologise to your ancestors for the fact that our ancestors have made them involuntary participants in research carried out under paradigms that we today no longer share. From today's scientific perspective the human rights violations committed to bring human remains to Europe and elsewhere are cause for retrospective grief.
[…] We seek healing together with you, and [with] other societies of origin, seeking to reclaim their ancestors. Let me then again thank you for undertaking this journey and for moving our university forward in removing the troubling remnants of colonialism in collections. 5 So-called "race science" (Rassenkunde) here receives only implicit mention, as a paradigm subsequently overcome. There is neither examination of that paradigm's precise scientific errors nor of its socio-political consequences. The human-remains collections are merely "troubling remnants of colonialism" the consequences of which can be "set … right" by returning some mortal remains. This example is hardly exceptional. I know of no restitutions that have included a detailed exposé of "race science's" exact errors and the injustices it entailed. Publicly recognising "race science's" underlying erroneous logic would force involved actors to acknowledge that the reifying essentialist and identitarian element of that logic persists in restitutions themselves. It would complicate restitutions further by raising doubts about whom to address, especially if the goal is to deliver sustained justice.
"Race science" commonly evokes images of racist, deprecatory motivations. From that perspective, embracing contemporary humanist motivations and symbolically distancing one from "race science" may seem sufficient to address "race science's" injustice. It was, however, "race science's" logic and consequences, not its motivations, that effected harm. This is particularly relevant in the University of Göttingen context, where Johan Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), a founding father of physical anthropology, amassed one of the first collections of human remains, and is still seen as an important figure in the university's history. Explicitly motivated by abolitionist and anti-racist convictions, Blumenbach's theories and research (see Wilckens 2022) addressed debate then over whether different groups of people have different origins (polygenesis), and thus effectively constitute different species, or whether humans have a single origin (monogenesis) and human diversity is that of types within a single species. Using skulls to prove his theory empirically, he argued that humankind is one species with a single origin, rather than different species that could be treated discriminatingly. Moreover, he saw no biological basis for assumptions about racial hierarchies and thus no validity in using a logic of relative superiority and inferiority to legitimise maltreatment of others. Yet, despite his anti-racist motivations, 6 his racial taxonomy-a development of Linnaeus's-conflated biological and social categories and, in so doing, helped perpetuate social essentialism and enabled others to solidify the idea of biological "races" amongst humans.
Blumenbach and other "race scientists" used a limited number of arbitrary characteristics to create racial classifications. Falling into a confirmation bias, those corresponded with their preconceived notions about human diversity. They made a classificatory error by assuming diversity of skull shapes or colour of skin rather than other characteristics necessarily represents wider racial categories. Since at least the 1960s, numerous scholars have argued that a division of humans into biological "races" misrepresents the diversity of our species. 7 "Race scientists" erred further by conflating biological diversity with sociocultural differences. Blumenbach's naming types as "Caucasian", "Ethiopian" or "Mongolian", rather than using terms without socio-political meaning, inevitably linked biological difference to geographical categories and/or social identities. This constitutes an error of social essentialism. 8 Blumenbach's categories enabled interpretations relating certain phenotypes necessarily with specific social groups or geographic locations: Assuming a phenotype to be "Ethiopian" forecloses its being "German". Identities are not necessarily related to a person's phenotype, place of dwelling, cultural practice or place of death. An assumption that it does is essentialist. Such essentialist assumptions persist in the contemporary handling of human remains, including in restitutions.
In today's context, demands for restitution overlay a sense of national guilt. Contemporary provenance researchers and restitution personnel then face the problem of identifying the origin of specific human remains in collections. 9 This results in restitutions occurring through ascription of ethnic or national identities since in most cases details about each individual set of remains are unknown and irrecoverable (the example of Damiana/Kryygi is exceptional). Different resources are used for such ascriptions: historical records of where given human remains were "collected"; the "collector's" own categorisation of the remains; and/or contemporary bio-anthropological "ancestry estimation" (skull measurements or DNA samples compared against a database to correlate biological characteristics with geography and social identities). In other words, in most restitution cases, human remains have social identities ascribed to them using criteria such as phenotype, genotype, place of dwelling or place of death, with no knowledge of the identities which the living person actually identified with. 10 Consequently, provenance research and restitution practices treat ethnicity or nationality as tangible historically or biologically characterised-almost as if it has been calcified within the matter of the bone itself (see Kurzwelly 2023, forthcoming). This is contrary to contemporary socio-scientific understanding of identities as social constructs, which are constantly changing, and which are relevant contextually rather than ubiquitously. Professor Tolan's framing of the restitution as repairing the wrong which "our ancestors" (i.e. Germans) committed towards the ancestors of contemporary "Hawaiians" (who are said to be the "society of origin" of these human remains) is an example of such essentialist logic which ascribes social identities on the basis of arbitrary characteristics, and which interprets history and historical responsibility through a lens of group identities. 11 This logic inherent in his words is, in turn, facilitated by provenance research having established that the human remains were "collected" in the islands currently called Hawaii, and therefore categorisable as Hawaiian.
Provenance research and restitutions not only fail to adequately address the details of the injustice and errors of "race science". They also perpetuate and legitimise social essentialism by ascribing reified identity categories onto deceased people and handing their remains to representatives of those categories. Provenance research and restitutions can only therefore lead to limited recognition of the injustice of "race science" since they also reproduce and legitimise its underlying erroneous logic. Addressing other historical injustices, such as spiritual injustices, through restitutions usually also relies on such identity ascriptions. 12 How to assess this practice in social justice terms?
Provenance research and restitutions are no exception in a contemporary world where much socio-political organisation relies on essentialist and reified notions of groups and identities. This could be an argument for identity politics and strategic essentialism. For example, claims that because racism is real, and that people keep perceiving social race as real (despite scientific rejection of biological races), may justify using racial and other racialising categories to correct social injustices based upon them. Yet, there are several arguments against such a stance: (1) Social essentialism is inherently erroneous so seeking to address social injustices using essentialist thinking perpetuates that error and risks unforeseen consequences (even if motivated by good intentions, as contemporary activists do, and as Blumenbach did).
(2) Addressing injustices through using essentialist identity categories assumes that people are necessarily underprivileged primarily because of their identity. Even if, in specific contexts, experiences of oppression and exploitation statistically correlate with identity, using identity categories is an imprecise and indirect strategy for addressing their exploitation and oppression. Rather than using fixed identity categories as variables for social justice, one could take account of contextual relative positionality, or use processual variables, both of which would be more precise in assessing relative privilege and capability to seek justice and access rights. 13 (3) Seeking to address injustices on the basis of identities sometimes forces people to adopt and perform an unwanted identity, and to comply with normative expectations 11 His speech responded to the political demands and the ritual character of the restitution ceremony, adopting what seemed as preferred vocabulary of the Hawaiian delegation. 12 Spiritual restitution ceremonies often rest on the assumption that a given person belonged to a given ethno-cultural group, and by extension shared the group's spiritual or religious convictions. 13 One example of an alternative could be to use the "heft of citizenship", which Macklin (2007) proposed as an analytical measure to estimate a person's access to citizen's rights, which could account for changes in time, context and exposure to specific injustices. about its contents. 14 For example, as Pérez and Radi (2020) show, gender-specific legislation in Argentina forced gender-non-conforming persons to choose between seeking justice and expressing their identity. Similarly, a shift from justice based on fixed categories to justice based on processes might offer a solution. (4) Overall, using essentialist identities in struggles for justice and political change-the strategy of identity politics-stands in an uneasy tension with a politics that prioritises redistribution of means of production and seeks sustained change in economic relations (see Fraser 2008;Reed 2018;Das 2020). I expand on this point below.

Recognition of historical oppression and exploitation, and the issue of redistribution
The act of "collecting" human remains was facilitated by colonial-imperial structures of oppression, dispossession and exploitation. Theories produced through "race science's" analyses of these remains further legitimised such structures and political agendas. Beyond a recognition of spiritual injustice, and the recognition of the injustice of "race science", do restitutions of human remains address the injustices of such oppression and exploitation which marked both the cause and the outcome of such "collecting" practices? Provenance research and restitutions provide some limited recognition of such injustice. Sometimes restitutions relate to broader agendas of political change and, on occasion, to some form of redistribution.
In many restitutions, recognition of past violence is tied to specific political issues and agendas. Damiana/Kryygi's restitution to Paraguay included public mention and recognition of Aché people's experiences of violence, killings and land dispossession and of the persistent oppression and exploitation they still face. It also implicitly related attempts to improve their situation, including so far unsuccessful attempts to claim their property rights over the National Caazapá Park. While this restitution attracted media attention, it led to no concrete redistribution-although some might argue that the attention provided some symbolic weight for future redistribution claims. Hawaiian restitution ceremonies, such as the one mentioned above, were used by Halealoha Ayayu to express hopes for Hawaii's sovereignty and restoration of its monarchy (in: Hafstein and Skrydstrup 2020, 39). Restitutions contribute thus to a general indigenous Hawaiian "cultural renaissance" tied to hopes and struggles for greater sovereignty and even independence from the USA. The role of restitutions in such political agendas is, however, difficult to assess in social justice terms. On one hand, the unequal and unjust status quo is recognised; on the other, their association with demands for an alternative political order in a monarchic state raises questions about their potential to lead to a more just society.
Restitutions from Germany to Namibia in 2011and 2018(see Förster 2020) illustrate a degree of both recognition and redistribution being achieved. This was done arguably through political and media-driven impetus that drew attention to the brutality and injustices of the German Colonial Empire  and, in particular, the Herero and Nama genocide (1904)(1905)(1906)(1907)(1908) in then German South West Africa. Contemporary Germany's prevailing critical historical gaze on the horrors of National Socialism also gave important visibility to earlier historical injustices and pressured politicians to act. In Namibia, too, the restitutions marked an important recognition of past violence-of murder, genocide and land dispossession-but then became entangled in conflicting claims. Herero and Nama non-governmental organisations identified the human remains to be their ethnic ancestors, while national government representatives identified them as Namibian national heroes. The situation was exacerbated by its relation to a long struggle over economic reparations for the genocide, and to whom such reparations should go-the ethnic organisations or individuals, or the government. Under pressure, German authorities have recently acknowledged and apologised for the genocide and, after long and controversial negotiations, have agreed to a 1.1 billion Euro additional aid package, over 30 years, to the Namibian government. Almost half of the amount is earmarked for land reform which is locally contentious as it might be used to provide land to families other than those whose ancestors were subjected to the genocide ( van Wyk 2021). A further portion of the amount is to be used to improve rural roads, water, sanitation and (renewable) energy infrastructure, and education and vocational training.
Here, one sees restitution of human remains being tied both to broader issues of recognition of colonial oppression and exploitation and to concerns for redistribution. Evaluating the extent to which social justice is achieved through such redistribution depends on one's political convictions. On one hand, it can be seen as a limited but successful redistribution that addresses historical wrongs and their contemporary consequences. Some families will receive land, productive capital with potential to improve their economic standing. Similarly, infrastructure and expansion of educational programme could lead to significant improvements in some people's living conditions. On the other hand, a more critical Marxian perspective (such as that of Das 2020 or Das 2022/23 in this special issue) would portray such developmental aid as surface redistribution that does not address the primary injustice of exploitation caused by capitalist relations of production (relations which in many of the places involved in restitutions were imposed through colonial rule). From such a political stance, redistribution, which leads to sustained justice and precludes continuous exploitation of the oppressed and the poor, requires a change in relations of production and popular democratic control over the means of production. It is hard to imagine restitutions of human remains contributing to such an overall goal.
The above examples all reveal the entanglement of restitutions of human remains in diverse socio-political issues, which are often complex and in myriad ways attempt to achieve social justice through both recognition and redistribution. As with all political processes, evaluation of such practices depends on one's political convictions. From a position that accepts the status quo or attempts only subtle reforms and shifts, one sees restitutions as having potential for addressing injustices and bringing improvements. From a position which sees the main injustice of our world in the undemocratic control of means of production, one evaluates restitutions unfavourably-as either having little to no potential to overcome this primary injustice, or even as being counter-productive and reinforcing identitarian divisions instead of class-based unity.

Conclusions
Collections of human remains in academic institutions are tied to diverse historical and contemporary injustices, which provenance research and restitutions attempt to address. This contemporary practice most explicitly focuses on spiritual and emotional harm, which is recognised in acts of returning mortal remains to the places from which they were taken, and to representatives of so-called "societies of origin". However, restitutions address the injustice of "race science", for which the remains were used, less effectively. Not only is "race science's" main essentialist error not recognised, but the contemporary practice relies on and reproduces its fallacious logic through ascribing contemporary ethnic or national identities onto deceased people, and doing that by taking arbitrary characteristics as identity markers. Identitarian interpretations of who deceased people are, along with groupist-identitarian understandings of history, render restitutions themselves a form of identity politics. However, identity politics focuses on issues of recognition of historical and continuous forms of oppression, dispossession and exploitation while offering limited opportunity for surface redistribution and little hope for political-economic change.