Forschung
Swiss National Science Foundation Project: History Within: The Phylogenetic Memory of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules (Project Leader Marianne Sommer)
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History Within: The Phylogenetic Memory of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules engages the cultural history of the historical life sciences. History Within analyzes the contributions that sciences such as evolutionary biology, (paleo)anthropology, primatology, and human genetics have made to cultures of remembrance since the turn of the 20th century. How do these sciences provide orientation, meaning, and identity through the popularization and commercialization of origin narratives and historical images?
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Swiss National Science Foundation Project: Collecting Humanity: How Human Remains Are Made into Museum Objects (Project Leader Marianne Sommer)
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In the nineteenth century, anthropologists studied the many aspects of human diversity. While cultural anthropologists amassed huge collections of artefacts from various peoples to study cultural diversity, biological anthropologists investigated biological diversity mainly by measuring and studying collections of human bodily remains. To this purpose, human bodies, skulls, and bones were shipped from all over the world to scientific institutions in Europe. In the process of reshaping national and local identities, (groups in) former colonies have demanded that human remains from such collections be returned to their place of origin, an iconic case being South Africa’s demand to repatriate Sarah Baartman’s remains from France. Such claims have raised many questions for curators, for example how their duty to conserve artefacts and to preserve collections can be balanced against the claimants’ demands.
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