Rest in peace

Generally, philosophical musings on the topic of dignity in death surface during debates about assisted suicide and hospice issues, but today it seems vital to me as an anthropologist and a humanist to question its place in museum ethics.\nA story broke this past weekend about an exhibit at the High Country Archaeology Museum in Argentina that is displaying the remains of a 15-year-old girl who was ritually sacrificed in the Andes more than 500 years ago. The maiden on display was discovered with two other preserved children in 1999. This ritual was performed yearly to provide children to act as mediators between the human and spirit worlds to ensure a bountiful harvest. The children who were selected were tranquilized with large amounts of grain alcohol and left to unconsciously die of exposure at exceptionally high altitudes. This archaeological find was an incredible one for science, since the bodies were so perfectly preserved as to lend themselves to unprecedented research into the culture and diet of a lost civilization. At some point during the last eight years, the researchers came to the decision to work with the Argentinean government and the museum to present the body of the oldest child to the public. According to an article on CNN.com, many hundreds of people passed through the display within the first weekend of\nits opening.\nI cannot agree with the enthusiastic curators who believe this high attendance rate is a good thing. I fear that presenting the remains of a sacrificed child to a modern public that tends to misunderstand human sacrifice in the first place is a terribly irresponsible move. How could the presence of the physical body in a gallery possibly promote understanding or add anything useful to science? It appears that the museum and the researchers are simply objectifying the girl as some cool thing they have in their possession, which is revolting. To present her in the fashion they have, sitting on her haunches in a glass box, exposed to probing, uneducated eyes and judgments, they promote exoticism and alienation. \nThe anthropology community sneers at the World’s Fairs and Buffalo Bill shows of the past that distilled living cultures into dangerous stereotypes and used cultural differences to perpetuate racism and colonial paternalism, yet here are the curators of a respected museum turning the sacred death of an individual into a for-profit freak show. In her culture, she was killed to perform a widely respected role, that of a mediator between her people and the gods. She was not meant to be found, let alone ogled and objectified, at some time in the distant future\nThe act of displaying the physical human body in any form as a cultural object is arcane, reminiscent of colonialism and armchair anthropology. By objectifying the body, curators remove the human element and create an intellectual environment of separateness from the culture doing the observing. Once a body is stripped of its humanity, its right to dignity is forgotten. These were real people – people whose remains deserve the same respect as our loved ones. Shame on the anthropologists who forget this.