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Category Archives: Advocacy and Activism

Is the TCD statement on the stolen skulls of Inishbofin a missed opportunity?

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on December 14, 2022 – 6:25 pm
Filed under Advocacy and Activism, Stolen Skulls

The statement issued by the Board of TCD in relation to Inishbofin is welcome for the fact that the Board finally considered the question of what to do with stolen human remains held by the college. However, the statement falls far short of the islanders’ petition seeking the immediate return of the remains of their ancestors and it is clear that TCD is determined to deal with this as a matter of de-accession by request rather than repatriation by right, ignoring all the evidence submitted to TCD in recent weeks by the repatriation project and its supporters.

A spokesperson for TCD has confirmed to media sources that a decision has not been made to return the skulls. TCD is busy trying to spin this as a major advance in its plan to deal with colonial legacies, but the decision merely restates the blocking strategy the School of Medicine adopted in August. All the rest is spin and the colonial legacies project looks incapable of getting its agenda adopted in the face of opposition. We will continue to press for the immediate return of the remains.

Read on:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/12/14/ireland-skulls-inishbofin-trinity-college/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/14/trinity-college-dublin-considers-returning-inishbofin-skulls

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/2022/11/19/saga-of-the-inisbofin-skulls-we-just-want-to-bury-our-dead-in-the-traditional-way/

Inishbofin Islanders demand repatriation of remains held in TCD

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on November 19, 2022 – 9:01 am
Filed under Advocacy and Activism, Public Engagement

As of Friday last (November 18, 2022) 150 members of the Inishbofin community had signed a petition demanding the repatriation of the remains of thirteen islanders stolen from the burial ground on the island in 1890 and placed in a collection of anthropological specimens in the Anatomy Museum in TCD, where they remain in their original display cases.

Marie Coyne, Director of Inishbofin Heritage launched a repatriation campaign ten years ago after reading about the theft in an exhibition of ethnographic photographs held by TCD. In 2020, Coyne co-signed a letter to Paddy Prendergast, Provost of TCD, seeking the repatriation of the remains after he announced plans to ‘decolonise’ the college campus. Prendergast agreed that the remains should be returned but the college did a U-turn after a committee tasked with the redevelopment of the Anatomy Museum objected.

Behind the scenes negotiations continued, but little progress was made and in August 2022 a spokesperson for the “Old’ Anatomy Working Group confirmed that TCD School of Medicine was is ‘not in a position to support a request for deaccession of the crania and transfer to the possession of private individuals or historical interest groups’.

Two weeks later, community representatives and repatriation campaigners attended a meeting Provost Linda Doyle organised with members of the colonial legacies team and a decision on repatriation seemed imminent. It never happened and sources in TCD confirmed that Council of the university agreed with the School of Medicine.

TCD sent a delegation to the island in November for a public meeting with the community. The delegates outlined how the college intended to process the claim as part of the Trinity Colonial Legacies project and asked for the community to engage with the process. The community responded with a unanimous show of hands demanding the repatriation of the remains held by TCD and this was repeated as an emphatic mandate when the delegation refused to engage with proposals from the floor.

26 people attended that meeting although many more islanders could not be present because of a funeral and the timing of the meeting. It was decided to confirm the show of hands with a petition of the full community and the petition will be sent to TCD early next week. In the meantime, the Trinity Colonial Legacies project is finalising a process of public consultation and evidence gathering that it hopes will persuade the Board of the college to support the repatriation process in the face of continued opposition from the School of Medicine, even though they accept that they are asking the community to jump through hoops.

circle of texture grey back ground with the words www.curator.ie embossed on it. designed by Ciarán n Walsh

I

one editor, two curators & one new history of anthropology

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on June 20, 2020 – 12:06 pm
Filed under Advocacy and Activism, Anthropology | Curatorial Projects, Journalism

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/the-victorian-curator-who-railed-against-racism-and-imperialism-39297723.html

Today, the Irish Independent publishes a segment of my research on the skull-measuring-business in Ireland in the 1890s. Commissioned by Jon Smith, Editor of the Review at the Irish Independent, this article looks back at a column that Alfred Cort Haddon wrote for the newspaper in 1893 and 1894, when it traded as The Daily Irish Independent.

Haddon worked as a curator in the Natural History Museum in Dublin and, at first glance, he seemed to be writing a general guide to the collections in the Museum for the readers of the newspaper. However, a closer reading reveals a wonderfully subversive allegory that anticipates the Black Lives Matter movement and Tribal Voice, the 2020 anti-genocide online campaign co-ordinated by Survival International.

It is fitting that the current version of The Daily Irish Independent should publish this piece and, in the process, completely subvert the history of anthropology in Ireland.

So, to participate in a small moment of history, go out and buy the Irish Independent today.

Confronting genocide: turning research into activism.

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Posted by Ciaran Walsh on January 13, 2020 – 12:29 pm
Filed under Advocacy and Activism, Comment, Conferennce

“They didn’t manage to kill us all at the time of colonization” says Celia Xakriabá “but we are living through a moment of legislated genocide.” Xakriabá is an activist who is featured in Tribal Voice, an online campaign that is organised by Survival International.

Confronting Genocide

Anthropology and Geography Conference, London June 4-7, 2020.

How do we deal with the threat of genocide in 2020?

That is a question that we will be putting to people attending the Anthropology and Geography Conference in London in June 2020.

“We” are a group of researchers, academics, and environmental activists who are responding to the humanitarian consequences of unprecedented and accelerated deforestation in the Amazon, which raises the issue of genocide in Brazil and other countries across the globe.

The burning of the Amazon rainforest in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. Photo: Mayke Toscano/AFP/Getty Images & The Guardian

In keeping with the conference theme of “dialogues past, present and future,” we are asking if we have learned anything from over 150 years of genocide and humanitarian activism in response to it. For instance, in the 1890s, a small group of anthropologists and geographers went against the colonial mainstream and demanded a radical political response from the scientific community and the public to the threat of genocide created by habitat destruction by colonists.

It sounds very historical, but Celia Xakriabá (see above ) makes it clear that the threat of genocide is very real, very current and the call to action is even more urgent today given the situation that is developing in the Amazon under Bolsonaro, whose policies have been described as “legislated genocide.”

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are not the only populations under threat and Brazil is not the only place where a combination of globalisation and habitat destruction is leading to “legislated genocide”-–the deliberate destruction of livelihoods and the legalised murder of indigenous peoples. Genocide is happening now in Turkey, the Kalahari, the Congo Basin, the jungles of India, the Andaman Islands, Australasia.

Mohammad Salas, a 51-year-old man from Iran’s largest Sufi order, the Gonabadi Dervish religious minority. Salas was executed by the Iranian authorities after a trial that was widely condemned as a miscarriage of justice. Amnesty International.

Much of this genocide has remained hidden and we hope that our research and activism will start a debate about “legislated genocide,” a combination of advocacy and activism that will encourage further action in solidarity with the victims of habitat destruction, forced migration, and genocide, whether the causes are cultural, political, economic, or environmental.

The Contributors

The debate will be chaired by Dr Eve Bratman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. She will give a paper on “The Lives and Landscapes of Sustainable Development in the Xingu River Basin of the Brazilian Amazon.” She asks how the discourse of sustainable development legitimates and privileges certain interests, and how it comes to be manifested – and resisted. She will present as a case study the geographic and social terrain of the Xingu river basin in the state of Pará. Oxford University Press has just published her book Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Brazilian Amazon.

Representatives of the local indigenous communities and environmental activists demonstrate in Sao Paulo against the construction of Belo Monte dam at Xingu river in the Brazilian state of Para. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images (The Guardian).

Fiona Watson, Advocacy and Research Director with Survival international, will present Tribal Voice, a series of hard-hitting videos that provide an online platform for tribal peoples living in an age of legislated genocide. These videos expose hidden genocides and support tribal peoples in their fight against genocide. Tribal Voice represents a significant development in the nature and direction of humanitarian activism and has profound implications for the idea of engaged practices in a multi-agency fight against legislated genocide in 2020 and beyond. Watson is a regular contributor to The Guardian.

Dr Raúl Acosta-Garcia, Institut für Ethnologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, will deal with advocacy networks that have sought to protect the Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants, creating associations that have become laboratories for political experimentation. His analysis builds on arguments presented in his new book Civil becomings: performative politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean, the first monograph of the series NGOgraphies (University of Alabama Press).

Top: An aerial view of the road BR-319 highway near city of Humaita, Amazonas state, Brazil (Irish Examiner). Bottom: A paved section of the BR-163 highway in Brazil. (Photo by Jeso Carneiro/Flickr / Eve Bratman & NACLA)

Dr Federico Ferretti, Associate Professor, University College Dublin, School of Geography, will present a paper on “Savage anarchy’ between geography and anthropology”, which deals with early forms of collaboration that occurred between geographical and anthropological (or ethnographical) knowledge around the circuits of anarchist geographers between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Ferretti is the invited author for the Progress in Human Geography report series on ‘History and Philosophy of Geography‘ from 2020 to 2022 (3 papers).

A detail of a photograph taken by Alfred Cort Haddon in the Torres Strait in 1888 and a detail from a Tribal Voice video released by Survival International in 2019

Ciarán Walsh, freelance curator, will deal with the emergence of social anthropology from radical geography in Ireland in the 1890s, using the photo-ethnographic practice of Alfred Cort Haddon as a novel vantage point from which to see how anthropology is positioned to deal with climate change, the destruction of habitats, and hostile borders in the present and assess the future relevance of the discipline in this context. His essay on “Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement” is about to go to press (Routledge).

The discussant is Dr Matthew Cheeseman, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, College of Arts, Humanities and Education, University of Derby, who is working with Carina Hart of the University of Nottingham on a collection of essays (Routledge) dealing with the relationship between nationality, identity, and folklore movements in the context of Brexit and the rise of the alt right in Europe.


The Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future conference is jointly organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Royal Geographical Society, the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS (The School of Oriental & African Studies), and the British Museum’s Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The conference will be held in SOAS, Senate House, and the Clore Centre of the British Museum.

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    • An Island Funeral, Inishbofin, 16 July 2023.
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    • Blogging resumes on Ballymaclinton: An Irish giant, 24 stolen skulls, one colonial legacies project and a slave owner named Berkeley.
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Latest News



An Island Funeral, Inishbofin, 16 July 2023.



TCD to announce return of ancestral remains to Inishbofin



Blogging resumes on Ballymaclinton: An Irish giant, 24 stolen skulls, one colonial legacies project and a slave owner named Berkeley.



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