Buy One, Get One: The Legal and Sociocultural Context of “Gifting” within the Australian Human Remains Trade

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Today’s online human remains trade—how it operates, where remains come from, and how algorithmic amplification allows for complex networks to form between buyers, sellers, and middlemen—has seen an increasing amount of research and media attention. Underpinning this interest is the growing realization that poorly regulated trafficking inflicts genuine psychological harm on the living (whether relatives of body donors or descendant communities), as well as accrues losses to the archaeological record or risks the jeopardization of crime scenes. Much of this work has focused on the Global North. Within the Global South, Australia is recognized as an emerging market country for many categories of cultural heritage, including human remains, despite relatively comprehensive legislation. This paper reviews the function and socio-legal context of a specific seller’s tactic used to bypass algorithmic detection and circumvent legislation, so far seen only among Australian human remains collectors: photographs of human remains are offered for sale and the remains themselves are included as a “gift.” Better understanding how this tactic is used and propagated through online communities is necessary to not only advocate for the closing of this loophole, but also to identify similar loopholes used by collector networks elsewhere.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38353.0