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Please see the statement below, outlining the interests and proposed  
research activities
of a new research group in Social Anthropology at the University of  
Edinburgh, focusing
on the affective presence and emotive materiality of human bones.

for further information please contact Dr Joost Fontein -  
[log in to unmask]

?Bones Collective? Research Group
Social Anthropology, SSPS, University of Edinburgh

What Lies Beneath:
Exploring the affective presence  & emotive materiality of human bones

Background

What Lies Beneath is the title that an emerging research group (?the  
Bones Collective?)
at the University of Edinburgh has given to a project we are  
developing that is based on
our shared interest in the significance of human bones. While the  
longer term aim of the
project is to develop a large interdisciplinary research programme,  
at an intermediate
stage we will be organising a seminar series (between January & March  
2008), a workshop
(November/December 2008), and possibly an exhibition, through which  
we will seek to
explore and develop the themes that we have identified as of  
particular interest in
relation to the social and cultural significance of bones (as set out  
below). We are keen
to forge creative and constructive links with academics in other  
institutions who share
our interests and who are working on related themes, and anticipate  
that these events in
2008 will provoke considerable academic interest, leading in turn to  
a substantial and
original publication.

Statement of Interests
Human bones matter to people. Not all bones, to all people, all the  
time, but
cross-culturally, bones, as the hardest and most lasting remnants of  
the body, do matter.
How they matter varies widely. For many, they matter as part of the  
people they once
were, or indeed may still be. So it is that bones are often central  
to rituals of
mourning and remembrance, for in handling bones and situating them  
purposefully in the
landscape, the living relate with the dead who can achieve a quality  
of enduring
presence, in the very materiality of their remains and their  
communion with the land,
that transcends the work of time (cf. Bloch 1988). For others, bones  
matter as trophies
or curiosities, objects whose handling and display is less about  
relating to the dead and
more about affirming the identity of the owner or collector (cf.  
Harrison 2006). For yet
others bones (it does not really matter whose bones) held in baskets  
and scattered on the
ground, are a way of divining the future. Whatever the case, bones  
matter. They do stuff,
make things happens, change things, enable us to remember the past  
and reveal the future,
and so we care and feel about bones.
Social scientists have long taken an interest in human bones. They  
have done so in a
variety of ways. Archaeologists and forensic/physical anthropologists  
have been
interested in the form and materiality of bones: their composition,  
the marks upon them
and their emplacement in the earth. Past lives somehow dwell in the  
substance of these
bones and, if they are properly studied, these past lives may become  
known, right down to
the details how people looked, what they ate, what diseases they  
suffered and injuries
they sustained, and even how they, themselves, related to their dead.  
Social and cultural
anthropologists, in contrast, have been more interested the  
significance that different
peoples give to bones and how the significance of the dead relates to  
the meaningful
existence of the living. In this case, the substance of the bones,  
beyond the mere fact
of their material presence (and perhaps not even that), is less  
important. What is
important is how we, the living, interact with, and so give meaning  
to, the remains of
the dead.
In developing our shared research agenda under the name ?What Lies  
Beneath?, we are
interested in the meaning of bones and how this meaning varies cross- 
culturally and
through time. Yet in saying this, we also acknowledge that human  
bones are, indeed,
things-in-themselves, and any study of the social and cultural  
significance of bones must
encompass their physical being, their affective quality of presence  
and their emotive
materiality. In other words, if the bones of the dead are ?richly  
filled with meaning?
(Weingrod 1995: 12), this meaning is not simply bestowed upon them,  
but also relates
intricately to something that inheres in them, and exists, therefore,  
in the relationship
between bones and those who handle, talk or write about them. In  
recognising bones, and
the significance of the materiality of bones, we highlight that they  
possess a curious
quality of presence, for they are, as Howard Williams argues, ? 
intrinsically situated as
being both ?person? and ?object?? (2004: 264). So, even as we  
consider bones as things
that have meaning only as they are caught up in human transactions  
and endeavours, this
consideration is haunted by the animate personhood, which is imminent  
within the thing,
held in its very form and substance.
In recommending this approach, we are arguing for a study of, with a  
nod to Igor Kopytoff
(1986), ?the cultural biography of bones?. This study would follow  
the movement of the
bones themselves through space and time, and map the unfolding  
networks of relationships
of which bones are a part. Such a study rests on the recognition of  
the ?agency? of
bones; an agency which, as Roger Sansi-Roca develops from the work of  
Alfred Gell, ?does
not derive from the ?abduction? of the mind, the attribution of  
thought, but comes from
the evidence of their physical presence and [their] dialectical  
relationship to the human
body? (2005: 150). In the case of bones this relationship is  
peculiar, in as much as they
are, at once, both of the body, bearing the traces of their embodied  
being, and yet also
objects external to and abstracted from it.

Seminar Series ? January ? March 2008
Between January and March 2008 (semester two) we will be inviting  
social scientists whose
work we have identified as being particularly relevant to the  
interests of the research
group, to deliver papers at the weekly social anthropology seminars,  
which are held on
Friday afternoons during term time. Although there will necessarily  
be a congruence of
shared themes around issues of materiality, the agency of objects and  
human remains, we
envisage that the papers in the seminar series will engage with the  
broader theoretical
and ethnographic field within which our project is situated.

Workshop - November/December 2008
The two-day workshop will provide a forum for an interdisciplinary  
conversation
concerning the affective presence and emotive materiality of human  
bones. Such a workshop
would be, in part, an opportunity for invited researchers to present  
and discuss their
own research material in relation to each others work, but also be  
specifically targeted
at the emerging and developing interests of the research group.  
Importantly, by enabling
this conversation, we hope to begin the process of mapping a common  
theoretical and
methodological ground from which a substantial program of cooperative  
research concerning
the social and cultural significance of bones would emerge. A  
discussion of this program
of research, as well as innovative strategies for the dissemination  
of its results,
including but by no means limited to, a substantial publication, but  
also an exhibition,
would be central to the agenda for the workshop.

June 2007

Dr Jeanne Cannizzo
Dr John Harries
Dr Joost Fontein

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