Going Wilde in “Old” Anatomy. William Wilde’s collection of skulls goes on display in TCD as a backdrop for the filming of “Growing, Up Live”
The skulls have been taken out of storage and put on display as the “Old” Anatomy Museum in TCD goes “live” for three nights during Science Week 2018. The Museum has been transformed into a studio for Growing Up, Live. It is being filmed in front of a live studio audience and the programme makers will “be treating the audience to live science experiments every night” which, RTE promises, “will unlock our understanding of a human lifetime.’
The Anatomy Museum is a really interesting setting for a show like this. Historically, dissections were done in front of a live audience. That won’t happen in “Growing Up, Live” but the audience will be surrounded by the results of 300 years of anatomical research. The Museum is home to a collection of anatomical and medical specimens that was built up over 300 years of medical education in Trinity College, University of Dublin, much of which was “re-discovered” when “Old” Anatomy Dept was decommissioned in 2014 and the School of Medicine move to the TBSI building on Pearse St.
Angela Scanlon adopts the traditional pose of the Anatomist – skull in hand – in “Old” Anatomy in preparation for the filming of “Growing Up, Live.”
The live broadcast marks a turning point in the process of opening the least known and most interesting museum in Dublin to the public. In March 2017, Joe Duffy created some controversy when he called for the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath, the Irish Giant, to be removed from display in the mistaken belief the Magrath’s body had been robbed, dissected in secret, and his skeleton put on display in 1760. I was working on the collection at the time and found evidence that Magrath had in fact been in the care of Trinity School of Medicine when he died.
The controversy died but there was a some nervousness about opening the collections to the public as a result. Brendan Holland, another Irish Giant, came to the rescue. He filmed part of the documentary “The Giant Gene” in the Anatomy Museum and went public on the most difficult question of all: as a giant, how would he feel it his skeleton was put on display? Brendan didn’t have a problem with that, given the contribution that historic specimens like Magrath continue to make to medical research into conditions like gigantism.
2018. Public engagement at work: BBC Northern Ireland recording an interview between Brendan Holland and Martina Hennessy (School of Medicine TCD) for the a documentary entitled “The Giant Gene.” It was produced by Chris Nikkel and broadcast in June 2018.
2016. The Anatomy Museum operating as a mixture of conservation workshop and anthropological “field.” This is some of the material that was discovered in 2014 and needed to be sorted, catalogued, and stored in preparation for conservation and display. The anthropological material is visible in the foreground.
The use of the space as a studio marks another turning point. An enormous amount of material was discovered in the process of decommissioning the “Old” Anatomy Dept in 2014. Much of this was in tea-chests and crates but there was a lot of material stored under the old theatre and in every nook and cranny of the building. This included a really important collection of photographs taken in the Aran Islands in 1890, shortly before the Anatomy Dept established a small Anthropology Dept and opened an anthropometric (the measurement of humans) laboratory.
A photograph taken by Andrew F. Dixon and Alfred Cort Haddon in Dún Chonnchubhair, Inis Meáin, in 1890. The negative on the left still has the masking that was used to create the effect of a clear sky. The image on the right is an inverted scan of the original, which is called a positive.
That is where curator.ie got involved. I received funding from the Irish Research Council (research.ie) to work on collections associated with the Anthropometric Laboratory and its programme of ethnographic surveys in the west of Ireland. The project was a joint venture of Maynooth University, TCD School of Medicine, and Kimmage Development Studies Centre, now Shanahan Research Centre.
As a curator and a student of anthropology, I did my fieldwork in “Old” Anatomy. Most of the material discovered in 2014 was stored in the Anatomy Museum and it took the best part of two years to go through it and organise suitable storage in the nooks and crannies from whence it came. The plan, all along, was to restore the museum as a public space.
The filming of “The Giant Gene” was a key part of a strategy to make the collection visible and to engage the public in a conversation about the contemporary significance of “Old” Anatomy, whether that is the Skeleton of Magrath, the huge range of medical education material, or the ethnographic material associated with the Anthropological Dept.
The filming of “Growing Up, Live” is on a different scale altogether, given the reach of Science Week and the presence in the museum of a studio audience. RTE publicists have described the “studio” as an amazing Anatomy Museum” and it will be very interesting to see how the audience engages with the various collections.
This is the space to watch during Science Week.
The history of the British Isles as represented in skulls. Ethnologists in the mid-nineteenth century believed that they could find traces of the various invasions of Ireland by comparing the shape of ancient skulls.
To Follow: The Skull Measuring Business: the work of the Dublin Anthropometric Anthropometric Laboratory (1891-1903).
Confronting genocide: turning research into activism.
“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.
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.
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.
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).
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.