Old Bodies as Ourselves.
Approaches to ancient human remains in the 20th and 21st centuries .
The first seminar of the series will be:
Natives’ bodies
January 29th Tuesday, 4 pm
Monument Building, Gellner room
Central European University, Nádor u. 11.
Judith Rasson: Who Owns the Past? The Historical Context of the United States' Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)
Ildikó Sz. Kristóf: Whose is “tradition” and what does it consist of? The aims of Indigenous Studies in American Indian education.
Vivid debates were raised recently in the U.S. since Natives started claiming the ownership of ancient human bones, perceived as their ancestors. In 1990 the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was issued, allowing bones which are identified as belonging to a specific tribe to be given back to the “lineal descendants”.
Judith Rasson: is assistant professor of anthropology and director of the MA course at the Medieval studies department of CEU. She edited with G. Jaritz: The Public (in) Urban Space, Krems, 2003 and with I. Barbiera and A. Choyke: Materializing Memory. Archaeological Material Culture and the Semantics of the past, BAR, Oxford, 2009.
Ildikó Sz. Kristóf: is senior research fellow in the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. Her monograph The Social and Cultural Foundation of Witch-Hunting in the City of Debrecen and Bihar County between the 16th and the 18th Centuries, was published in 1998 (in Hungarian). Her current research interests include the history of the science of anthropology, the European reception and appropriation of non-European indigenous peoples (especially American Indians), and the history of early modern communication and witch-hunting.
