NARA II Screenings

Lordy…it has been a while since my last post, but in the time that’s passed, I have managed to finish off my research in the State Department records at Archives II. From everything I had been lead to believe, the State Department records are some of the worst-cataloged and difficult-to-navigate collections imaginable. The finding aides are in multiple parts, depending on the year (Prior to 1949 has one system, 1949-1963 has another, and 1963- a third,) or department.

But at least there are finding aides.

Having moved on from State, I was hoping to look at the Department of Justice and Bureau of the Budget Records. A substantial portion of the DoJ files have been declassified, but pretty much anything after WWII has to go through another round of security review before you can even see any of the files. (Why the initial security review was not sufficient, who knows? The staff certainly doesn’t!) This review can take up to six weeks to even get a case number assigned, and an indefinite amount of time for the actual review to take place. And to make matters worse, the bulk of the finding aides are classified. It is almost impossible to figure out what departments are where (i.e. how do I even request the Office of Legal Counsel files, to have them reviewed?) It seems as though these requirements are to maintain the privacy of case files, but I am only interested in administrative records, pertaining to immigration policy. I have contacted the archivist who works on the collection, but I’m not entirely optimistic that I will see any of the files anytime soon.

The Bureau of the Budget records also have no comprehensive finding aids. Instead, there is an alphabetical list of the sub-record groups (i.e. Department of State Budget Records, 1949-1952, Legislative Files, 1939-1970), that points to the Master Location Registry (MLR) for the record group (51). Aside from the fact that a number of the entries in the alphabetical list do not match up with the MLR, the only way to get to the finding aides for each sub-record group is to find the collection in the MLR, and then request box #1, which supposedly contains the finding aid.

The catch? Each box (Even the ones containing only finding aides) has to be reviewed onsite before they will give them to you (something they do not tell you in advance.) So while at least the records are reviewed as you order them (hopefully), there’s not telling how long that review can take.

All in all, if you plan a trip to Archives II, make sure to leave yourself ample time, and understand that you might not see the boxes you want on the first trip…

How Many Bodies?

The subject of my dissertation is the history of the practice of collecting, researching, and displaying human remains in the United States. For those unfamiliar with the history of anthropology, medicine, and the American West, this may seem to be somewhat of an esoteric subject. On the contrary, I argue that the practice of collecting, studying, and displaying bodies was central in the development of ideas about race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I recently strolled through the Smithsonian's new exhibit Written in Bone. I plan to write more about this exhibit either here or elsewhere, but I pinky swear that you will be the first to know. The public displays of human remains made me ponder their history; other than recent, traveling blockbuster exhibits such as Body Worlds, museums in the United States have been hesitant to display remains in their public exhibitions. While a complex history informs this hesitation, the new exhibits did cause me to think anew about the scope of human remains collections in the United States. Believe it or not, I am asked this question quite often at cocktail parties. If I had to venture a guess, I would think that when most people think of bodies in museums they first think of Egyptian mummies. Mummified bodies from Egypt, certainly, are a component of the overall number of bodies in museums in the United States. But they are vastly outnumbered by the remains of American Indians and other indigenous groups from around the world.

But just how many sets of human remains are in museums in the United States? I've struggled to find a single, clear estimate of the total number of remains in the US, but several major museums give an estimate of the number of human remains they have in their collections. This information is relatively easy to find via Google searches, but I thought it might be interested to explore nonetheless.

A 2000 report from the Hearst Museum of Anthropology lists 9,600 sets of remains (some of these catalogue numbers may reflect more than one individual).

The Smithsonian Institution’s website explains that when the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was initially passed in 1990, the museum possessed 33,000 sets of human remains. 18,000 of these remains were of Native Americans. The Smithsonian claims that since 1990, 5,400 sets of remains have been offered for return and a total of 3,652 of these have been successfully repatriated.

The American Museum of Natural History possesses a collection of nearly 12,000 individuals collected from around 50 countries.

Numerous other museums and universities possess collections that range from a handful of remains to several thousand bodies. Certainly, statistics that attempt to size up these collections fail to tell the whole story, which is exactly why I get to write a dissertation on the subject of human remains collections.