Bodies of the Weak: The Circulation of the Indigenous Dead in the British World, 1780-1880

Abstract

Bodies of the Weak tells the intimate history of the encounter between British collectors, indigenous bodies, and the people to whom they belonged in the British World between 1780 and 1880. It traces the movement of indigenous bodies as scientific objects across the globe. A reconstruction of their histories within the decentralized framework of their circulation, rather than the centralized framework of their accumulation in Europe’s museums, reveals that these indigenous remains embodied several worlds simultaneously. The fragmentation of these indigenous bodies, the circulation of their parts and their transformation into the raw materials of European classifications, I suggest, do not only reflect difference, but also reveal what is shared in the history of colonial entanglement. Examining accession records, letter books, museum catalogues, and travel narratives, I trace how British collecting of indigenous bodies emerges as a constitutive, though at times silenced, element in the history of British colonialism in the nineteenth century.

The extension and extent of British power depended on the ability of collectors to mobilize and reassemble the remains of the indigenous dead. Nevertheless, the acquisition and circulation of indigenous remains only rarely make it into the historiography of empire. In the nineteenth century, empirical evidence that indigenous peoples were rapidly vanishing from the face of the globe quickly became widespread and invigorated attempts to collect and record their passing. Observers soon understood that these were the bodies of the weak. The remains of the indigenous dead became “contact bodies,” objects around which collectors and indigenous men, women and children formed unsettled relationships and articulated unsettling meanings. The act of collecting was thus not only accumulative but also transgressive. Seen through the eyes of collectors of the indigenous dead and their indigenous interlocutors, the regime of classification British collectors carried with them on board Her Majesty’s men of war, survey vessels and steam ships appears not so much as a paragon of Britain’s hegemony in the world, but rather, and more importantly, as a testimony to the unsettled nature of the social categories upon which her power depended. Collectors of indigenous remains, rambling, ransacking and rummaging through human debris in search of the raw materials from which to construct elaborate natural classifications, ended up confusing the very boundaries they were trying to delineate.

In the space between British dominance and open indigenous resistance, alternative forms of power and appropriation developed. Borrowing, confiscating, purchasing, stealing, conquering, bone collectors found that easy oppositions between “colonizer” and “colonized,” “powerful” and “powerless,” could not survive in the nineteenth-century drive to acquire indigenous body parts. Indigenous men, women and children did not surrender the remains of their loved ones without a fight. Nor did they blindly collaborate with European collectors. They often withheld crucial information, showed indifference to the objects for which British collectors were risking their lives, and ridiculed these visitors and their curious obsession with the remains of the indigenous dead. The bodies of the weak presented indigenous men and women with exceptional as well as everyday opportunities to challenge the social categories they were meant to embody, to resist the extension of British power and influence, and to articulate alternative meanings of these remains.