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In October 2011, graphic images of a blood-stained and dead Muammar Gaddafi were sent around the internet. For some time after his death, his dead body was displayed at a house in Misrat, where masses of people queued to see it. His corpse provided a focus for the Libyan people, as proof that he really was dead and could finally be dominated. When Osama bin Laden was killed by the American military in May that same year, unlike Gaddafi, the body was absent, but the absence was significant. Shortly after he was killed a decision was taken not to show pictures of the dead body and it was buried at sea. The American military appear to have been concerned it would become a physical site for his supporters to congregate, and the photographs used by different sides in a propaganda war. Both cases reflect an aim to control the dead body and associated meanings with the person; that is not unusual: after the Nuremberg trials, the Allied authorities cremated Hermann Göring—who committed suicide prior to his scheduled hanging—so that his grave would not become a place of worship for Nazi sympathizers. These examples should remind us that dead bodies have longer lives than is at first obvious. They are central to rituals of mourning, but beyond this, throughout history, they have also played a role in political battles and provided a—sometimes contested—focus for reconciliation and remembrance. They have political and social capital and are objects with symbolic potential. In The Political Lives of Dead Bodies the anthropologist Katherine Verdery explores the way the dead body has been used in this way and why it is particularly effective. Firstly, she observes, human remains are effective symbolic objects because their meaning is ambiguous; that is whilst their associated meanings are contingent on a number of factors, including the individual and the cultural context, they are not fixed and are open to interpretation and manipulation: ‘Remains are concrete, yet protean; they do not have a single meaning but are open to many different readings’ (Verdery 1999: 28).

The excavation of human remains is one of the most contentious issues facing global archaeologies today. However, while there are numerous discussions of the ethics and politics of displaying the dead in museums, and many academic studies addressing the repatriation and reburial of human remains, there has been little consideration of the practice of digging up human remains itself (but see Kirk and Start 1999; Williams and Williams 2007). This chapter will investigate the impact of digging the dead within a specific community in Oakington, Cambridgeshire, during the excavation of an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery in 2010 and 2011. The analysis of impact was enabled by applying a double-stranded methodology of collecting quantitative and qualitative social data within a public archaeology project. This aimed to explore the complexity of local people’s response to the excavation of ancient skeletal material. These results will provide a starting point to discuss the wider argument about screening excavation projects (see also Foreword this volume; Pearson and Jeffs this volume). It is argued that those barriers, rather than displaying ‘sensitivity’ to local people’s concerns, impede the educational and scientific values of excavation to local communities, and fosters alienation and misunderstandings between archaeologists and the public. The professionalization of British archaeology has taken place within Protestant modernity, and we will argue that it is this context which drives the desire to screen off human remains from within the industry, rather than the need to protect the public or the dead from one another. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, it is a condition of the Ministry of Justice licence to remove human remains that modern excavation is screened from public gaze. For many projects, particularly those carried out in an urban or public context, this condition manifests as the erection of barriers to block lines of sight. However, this has not always been standard practice. Archaeological projects have often involved a public engagement element, even before public archaeology was formally recognized. Large excavation projects, such as Whithorn, a Scottish project carried out in the late 1980s, included a viewing platform so members of the visiting public could see the excavation, including burials, from the edge of the trench (Rick Peterson, pers. comm.).

Finally, Chapter 7 traces the diminution of audiences as the medical museum ceased to be such a prestigious site for the construction and reception of pathology. In part an epilogue, it traces the largely unknown fate of anatomical pathology in the twentieth century, and the function and fate of collections from their rude health in the inter-war period to the regulatory changes of the twenty-first century, including a contrast between the use of pathological specimens in Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds and the impact of the Human Tissue Act on (more formal) pathology museums. The conclusion concludes by considering the construction of material abnormality on display and the key features of the pathological specimen.

In the age of empire, colonial promoters sought to mark the very landscape of France with reminders of France’s empire: statues, war memorials, museum collections and buildings. With decolonization, and a period of ‘colonial amnesia’ that followed it, the fate of these memorial sites was brought into question, many left neglected or viewed with discomfort. In recent years, France has rediscovered its colonial past (and its legacy in contemporary issues) and ‘repurposed’ some of the old monuments, though the treatment of extant memorials and the erection of new sites suggests the ambivalence still felt about the colonial past. This essay discusses lieux de mémoire in Paris and the provinces, placing the material heritage of colonialism in the context of the colonial and post-colonial periods and France’s confrontation with the imperial record.

If you are standing on the shores of the Ottawa River looking at the Canadian Museum of History, the national library and archives and other national repositories of Aboriginal heritage, you might well despair at the comprehensive losses of curatorial expertise, programs of research, and will to work collaboratively with Aboriginal people which befell these institutions under the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Looking harder, however, neither the shifting political ideologies nor the era of financial constraint that began with the global financial crisis of 2008 seems to have thrown processes of decolonisation and pluralist representation that began to take root in Canada during the 1990s into reverse. Two exhibition projects that unfolded during that same period provide evidence of that the changes in historical consciousness of settler-indigenous relationships and the acceptance of cultural pluralism have provided a counterweight to the intentions of a right wing government to restore old historical narratives. This chapter discusses them as evidence of this deep and, seemingly, irreversible shift in Canadian public’s expectation s of museum representation. The first involves plans for the new exhibition of Canadian history being developed for the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation in 2017, specifically a fishing boat named the Nisga’a Girl which was presented by a west coast First Nation to mark the successful resolution of its land claim. The second is the Sakahan exhibition of global indigenous art shown in 2013 at the National Gallery of Canada and which marked a notable departure from its past scope. While utopia has by no means been achieved, neither, surprisingly, was dystopia realised during the years of conservative reaction.

Curation is increasingly recognised as a profession of high standing which requires extensive higher education. However, the proliferation of community engagement since the 1980s has placed new pressures and expectations on curators, thus complicating their role. This is particularly evident in the case of ethnographic curators working with indigenous communities. This chapter explores these issues by considering the ways that working with Blackfoot First Nations communities have affected the role and work of curators at three key museums, two in Canada and one in the UK. Historically museums, and de facto their curators, were often seen as an enemy by many indigenous communities as they appeared as a physical manifestation of colonialism. The historical practice of collecting sacred cultural material, and even the bones and bodies of indigenous people, have made museums synonymous with sites of death, both physical and cultural. Yet, nowadays they also present an exceptional resource and opportunity to revive and re-invigorate pre-colonial cultural knowledge and practice through their collections. Consequently, curators often find themselves in the dubious position of being both potential foe and ally. This is complicated further when curators work cross-culturally and try to embrace both indigenous and western ways of working, as this chapter explores. It has been argued that curators have moved from the position of ‘expert’ to that of ‘facilitator’ but this oversimplifies the complexities of voice, accountability and power in the representation of culture. There is a need for a more nuanced understandings of the pressures community engagement places on the role of curatorship, especially in this current time of increasing expectations on engagement and decreasing resources to support museological work.

Current ontological critiques point to how discourses of diversity like multiculturalism help domesticate difference by making it fit into pre-determined categories, such as those we are accustomed to thinking of as cultures. These ways of conceiving relations within and between groups of people—common to anthropology and museums, as well as to liberal democratic regimes of governance—assert that differences between peoples are relatively superficial in that our cultures overlay a fundamental and universal sameness. Museums showcasing cultural artefacts have thus helped domesticate difference by promoting world-making visions of (natural) unity in (cultural) diversity. Yet some artefacts exceed the categories designed to contain them; they oblige thought and handling beyond the usual requirements of curatorial practice. This chapter considers the challenges of ‘curating the uncommons’ in relation to work carried out by and with the Māori tribal arts management group Toi Hauiti and their ancestor figure, Paikea, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Australia’s first Migration Museum in Adelaide recognised from its inception in 1986, that representing migration history could not be done without acknowledging its intimate association with colonisation and the dispossession of indigenous people. Their first move therefore, was to create a distinction between all migrants, a category that included British ‘settlers’, and Indigenous Australians. This was significant not only because it implicated colonisation within migration history but because it made all non-Indigenous Australians migrants. The move though, was not easy to establish, largely because, in the public imagination, migrants were the other to mainstream or ‘British Australia’. In the mid-1990s, however, it seemed to work as Australia was indeed seen as a country that was relatively successful in integrating various waves of migration into its historical narratives while valuing cultural diversity and recognising the prior occupation of the land by Aboriginal people. The ‘War on terror’, the arrival of asylum seekers and the threat of internal terrorist attacks, along with changes in immigration policy and a general climate of fear has changed that, and migration museums are now working to combat a new wave of racism. To do so, I argue, they have developed a new set of curatorial strategies that aim to facilitate an exploration of the complexity of contemporary forms of identity. This chapter provides a history of the development of curatorial strategies that have helped to change the ways in which relations between ‘us and them’ have changed over the years in response to changes in the wider public discourse. My focus will be on both collecting and display practices, from changes to what is collected and how it is displayed, to the changing role of personal stories, the relationship between curators and the communities they work with, and the role of exhibition design in structuring the visitor experience.

Although I am a strong advocate for access to collections in museums and although I see new technologies as a necessary part of this goal, I do not think that technology and its associated impacts and benefits should be the end goal. Rather, they should exist collaboratively with physical museums that mirror the robust developments in digital technology. The physical museum needs to be transformed so that their material collections can stimulate cultural production by living artists and cultural practitioners. This juxtaposition of the past and the present, the dead and the living, ensures that museums remain vibrant and vital spaces for the multicultural communities around them.

Jorge Duany examines the shifting cultural ties between Cuba and the United States since 1959, and how they have reframed relations between Cubans on and off the island. Duany argues that the cultural politics of Miami’s Cuban community have changed substantially because of demographic and generational transitions over the last three decades. Until the 1980s, Cuban artists and other intellectuals in the United States had limited contact with their island counterparts. However, it is now customary for U.S. museums and galleries to collect and exhibit artworks produced in post-1959 Cuba without much protest or opposition from Cuban Americans. Although some exile artists and critics still believe that U.S. cultural institutions should not display such artworks, the fault lines between Cubans residing on the island and abroad seem more porous than in the past. The author concludes that the visual arts may serve as cultural bridges across the Florida Straits.

Most historians of the Civil War era have neglected material culture studies, but the field has a great deal to offer to scholars. Numerous relics survive from the time period, and they can be found in museums, historical societies, and state archives; they are also mentioned frequently in the manuscripts. People who lived through the war used objects to convey a host of powerful cultural messages about their experiences.

The prologue reflects on the relationship of conventional museum curatorial practice to Smithsonian Folklife Festival curatorial practices. In particular, it examines the multiple mediations in which Festival curators are involved and the process of “presenting” artists and participants to the public. It raises questions about the perils of objectification of artists within these “living exhibitions” and argues for dialogic approaches to developing Festival programs that incorporate participatory or community curation.

This chapter uses the 2008 Bhutan program to examine visitor experience and the role of curators in crafting these experiences. Using the suggestive possibilities of a portable Buddhist shrine featured in the program and basing the analysis on 20 years of experience working with the Festival and its evaluation, the author lays out a framework for analyzing four levels of Festival visitor engagement: Level 1—Sensory Cultural Enlightenment/Being Present; Level 2—Choosing a Route/Moving Through; Level 3—Viewing and Taking part in the Live Performance/Active Experiencing; and Level 4—Revealing the Deeper Layers/Discovering More. The chapter concludes with observations about visitor studies relevant to museums as well as festivals.