"Human Remains" isn't specific enough

I think its disrespectful to use the phrase "human peperami"! It may be what a mummy is...but its very disrespectful.

Someone mentioned the red-haired mummy in the British Museum. I was taken to see him when I was very small, a nice museum-keeper told me all about him, and that his name was Ginger. I saw that mummy dozens of times over the years (the British Museum was my mum's default trip during school holidays). I regard him as something of a friend, really. When I first got together with Mr Pony, we had a trip to the museum, where I nostalgically pointed my mummy friend out to Mr Pony (and he didn't dump me....).

I'm an (ex)archaeologist. I'm not of the younger generation of archaeologists who are vastly more squeamish about human remains than ours was. I do sometimes wonder how excavations in the future will manage to carry out any meaningful work at all!

Archaeologists should treat human remains that they excavate, store or study with a normal level of respect - but in all honesty, I think most of us/them are pretty pragmatic. These are 'remains' after all - they aren't people, not any longer. As such, they can tell us a great deal about past cultures, living conditions, health, environment, beliefs - endless information. So I don't think they should stop being viewed as a valid area of academic study. I also don't believe that archaeologists should have a monopoly on viewing and studying archaeological material - so I think a representative sample of it should be available for the public to view, think about, talk about, in museums. (For instance, once upon a time, any material viewed as 'risque' - like rude 5th century Athenian vases, or certain Pompeiian frescoes, or naughty scenes on seal stones - were locked away and only (male!) academics allowed access to view. Because they, unlike the uneducated plebs, could be trusted not to have a fiddle while studying them. ) So I think it's valid and entirely reasonable to have this aspect of ancient Egyptian culture on display in a museum.

I think it's fair enough, and probably sensible in the current climate, to have some sort of 'trigger warning' to alert a museum visitor to human remains, but I'm getting a bit tired of people who demand to be treated like fragile bone china. OP, 'human remains' is what they were. If you're squeamish about crispy skin then perhaps consider side-stepping galleries containing ancient Egyptian remains. Oh, and don't look at the bog bodies in the British Museum, for heavens sake!

It’s “ fazed” not “ phased” OP

Typo mistakes
I ment,
to say the quite recent concerns around deacesed relics being displayed in American museums ect

@Acer

I wonder in America 🇺🇸 how much of the quite recent concern in regards of cultral deceased relics in museums being hidden away cause of sensitivities,

is to a certain extent just virtue 🤔 signaling?
especially in regards of historic connection to colonisation ect

My thinking for this is that America's track record for race relations is problematic at times,

for example similar to the Middle East making a a big show about " look we now allow our women the option of driving whithout a male charperone, usauly a member of familiy,
to keep on eye 👁 on you,
"Look how progressive we are," as a society nowadays,
"look how far we have come" in our society ect
that type of facade,

the reality as we all know, especially in certain parts of Middle East when it comes to womens human rights is very problematic ..

Many indigenous peoples don’t have such a narrow view of what constitutes descendants, though, and the human remains from First Nations, colonised peoples etc were often obtained by violent colonial ‘trading’, looting or desecration of burial sites, which turned people into exotic ‘objects’ for display in the museums of colonisers or other dominant groups. That’s not even going into the way these bodies and body parts were used to ‘prove’ forms of scientific racism, via skull measurements etc used to argue for the intellectual inferiority of ‘savage’ races.

It doesn’t even require the thefts to take place geographically distantly — look up the skulls of Inisbofin (a 19thc Cambridge anthropologist based in what is now part of Trinity College Dublin looted graves on Inisbofin in 1890 as part of a trip down the west of Ireland measuring islanders’ skulls to research their resemblance to ‘inferior races’.)

This is a good round up of current scholarship:

https://daily.jstor.org/human-remains-and-museums-a-reading-list/

This is the policy on the retention, display, deaccession etc of human remains from the National Museum of Ireland — I imagine it’s fairly standard for European museums, as it cites EU legislation, as well as UNESCO.

https://www.museum.ie/getmedia/80bd1b97-7ffb-4bac-adf9-c45f71041611/NMI-Human-Remains-Policy-2019-2023-FINAL.pdf

Not exactly to the point but someone I used to work with accidentally called our HR department Human Remains.
It stuck, of course!

YABVU. One of the silliest posts I've read on Mumsnet.

Ummm.. probably descendants

@Woodenwonder

Just wondering 🤔 if an image of the Grim Reaper like those dark comedy horror films Scream ect 😱

that kind of picture signage for the Snokeflakes generation, be better fit to prep you for anything that's out of your bubble 🫧 wrapped comfort zone,
instead of the word " human remains"..?

what do you think?

"No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away - until the clock he wound winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life…is only the core of their actual existence."

A Terry Pratchett quote that I used at my Mum's funeral.

We matter after we die, but most of us only matter to the people that cared for us. Yes, you get the occasional Isaac Newton or Robin Williams or Elvis, who will matter for some for centuries after their death. But for most of us, the ripples will vanish once our grandkids die, maybe our great grandkids.

Once that happens, we don't matter. At best, like the Mummys, we are still matter.

Plus we are all in denial about the fact that we will (eventually) be forgotten after death. Death rituals are primarily about reassuring the living that their lives matter.

For their kids, and their grandkids.

Every single post death ritual we do is for the deceased's descendants. Not for the dead, they're dead, they literally don't care.

2000 year old mummy's don't have a lot of descendants that know that's who they are. Who is it causing an issue to if they're in a museum instead of a grave?

YEP

I don’t feel it’s respectful for bodies to be displayed like this. What’s the purpose of it?

Sometimes it's good to feel uncomfortable and come face to face with things that might be unexpected and discombobulating.

It helps grow resilience.

You never know what life is going to throw at you,. We've already seen a global pandemic recently, look at how the people of Ukraine's lives have been turned upside down by war. Toughness, bravery and resilience are all deeply undervalued in the UK today.

You've seen something disturbing, but you're okay. Rather than finger point at the museum who had given fair warning, try and see the positive in the experience.

We can't always shield ourselves from the darkness.

OMG! This is a joke, isn’t it? Those mummies have been in the museum since I was a child, and we didn’t have ‘warning’ signs back then and you do know that the mummy cases and wrapped mummies often contain human remains. As a Liverpool teacher, I have taken many classes of children and not one has ever made a comment like this. The children were and are absolutely fascinated. Yes, they were people but their spirits/souls have long since gone and digging up and examining bones is what archaeologists do. Archaeologists today tend not to unwrap the mummies so as to preserve what remains. They also treat the bodies with respect unlike the Victorians who unwrapped them.

It's a museum for goodness sake! You must have led a sheltered life.

Write wnd tell the museum. Perhaps mummified human corpses would cover it better.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-for-the-care-of-human-remains-in-museums

It's guidance not legislation. Here it is.