"Unclaimed": The Making of (Un)grievable Lives in the Huntington Archive

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Huntington Anatomical Collection (1893-1921) is comprised of immigrants and U.S.-born persons who died in New York City. Like many anatomical collections, the common narrative is that decedents were dissected and curated because they lacked next-of-kin to bury them, a social impoverishment used to justify their postmortem treatment. In reality, legislation, market booms and busts, and funeral costs together worked to render these persons “unclaimed,” denying both the dead and those who mourned them a funeral and burial. Rather than a neutral descriptor, the category “unclaimed” dissolves prior histories, social relations, and identities. Yet, even as the category of “unclaimed” is destructive, the absence it indexes is generative, creating new collectivities and relations of power, ownership, and care that perpetuate the “ungrievability” of persons curated. I draw upon archive theory to explore how historical bioarchaeology can rearticulate kinship relations, recover traces of identity, and promote the “grievability” of persons collected.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow