Workshop 1: Restitution and the Anatomical Museum

Description

Goals of the workshop

1. To provide information about the history of the ‘collection’, including:

· Ensuring that our understanding of the human skulls goes beyond the supposed medical reasons for their collection and engaging with the fact that medicine, although often depicted as benign, has been implicated in the development of racial sciences, which is not something that is often acknowledged by medics and/or scientists.

· Understanding how the skulls came to be there in the first place and where we're at in terms of investigating their provenance.

· Understanding how the skulls were used historically, for example, in teaching.

2. To find out about processes of repatriation, including:

· Understanding how restitution and repatriation works by looking at examples in other institutions.

· Listening to the experiences of people who have done provenance work in the archives and have been involved in repatriation processes, including historians/archivists AND people from heritage communities.

· Recognizing the complexities involved at a policy level, state level and cultural level, e.g. different cultures and groups have very different approaches to their ancestors and ancestral remains.

3. To ascertain people’s responses to the existence of this ‘collection’ and the so-called ‘Skull Room’ as part of the review, which means creating a structure in which we do the following:

· Ascertain what people know already.

· Explore people’s reaction to it.

· Identify what we would they like to see happening to it.

· Identify strategies to take this forward.

· Invite follow-up by being part of the focus group.

Period	31 Oct 2023
Event type	Workshop
Location	Edinburgh, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	Local