Issues on human remains

In the mid-1980s, one of many Kabayan mummies in the bodega of the National Museum was displayed to the public in a glass case. I brought my students there, pointing out the tattoos clearly visible on the smoked skin of this anonymous woman’s arms and back. History and anthropology are allied disciplines that reconstruct life from traces, and in this case, human remains. Back in the classroom, we discussed other considerations. Wasn’t the mummy someone’s great-great-grandmother? What would a descendant say about the display of human remains in a museum? Where and how do we draw the line that separates legitimate research, teaching, and learning from morbid curiosity?

The University of Michigan ReCollect/ReConnect Initiative recently hosted a study group from the Cordilleras headed by Dr. Analyn Salvador-Amores that went over artifacts in the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology and photographs in the Bentley Historical Library. They held a ritual at the door of the museum bodega to honor the traces of their ancestors’ clothes, weapons, everyday objects, and perhaps even human remains if they have a long handle made from a human jaw. The archival photographs were a revelation as people connected the 21st-century visitors with the people and lifeways of as late as the 19th and early 20th centuries.

There is brewing debate on such collections abroad often fueled by feelings of oppression and victimization during our colonial past. This requires reevaluation based on facts from primary source documentation, not emotion. The Michigan artifacts were collected by scholars that wanted to understand the subject peoples and cultures. Their collecting methods and aims are way different from those of the 21st century. Most, if not all, of these artifacts are not spoils of war like the Balangiga Bells that were returned after a sustained repatriation campaign. In the age of digitization, there is no need for physical repatriation. If these objects were in the National Museum, all would probably have been lost during the 1945 Battle for Manila. If things were left in situ, they would have been acquired in the 1960s and 1970s by the antiquities trade and exported to private collections abroad where they will not be accessible for research or enjoyment by the public. The Michigan Collection is a time capsule for Philippine history.

While historians work primarily with manuscripts and books, I sometimes come across human remains. The earliest one I encountered was Emilio Aguinaldo’s pickled appendix. One had to ask the curators at Aguinaldo’s home in Kawit to open the medicine cabinet where it was stored in a small bottle together with bottles of eye drops that Aguinaldo used in his old age. The appendix used to be preserved in alcohol that had dried up so it is not in a good state of preservation. Another bottle contains cloth that was taken out after Aguinaldo’s appendectomy. The surgeon forgot a towel inside when he sewed Aguinaldo up! Then there was a lock of Apolinario Mabini’s hair in the bodega of the National Historical Commission, collected when the corpse was exhumed in 1980, to determine the cause of his paralysis. It was polio, not syphilis.

Most of Jose Rizal’s mortal remains lie in a box under the monument in Luneta, but a small piece of his vertebra is displayed in a reliquary in Fort Santiago. According to family lore, the backbone is chipped where the bullet hit him. In 2003, I disapproved a request from doctors who wanted to exhume Rizal’s skull. They explained that they wanted to bore a hole in the top of the skull to fill it with mongo seeds. This would determine the size of his cranial vault. I was a hindrance to research by declaring: “I won’t allow you to pour mongo seeds into the National Hero’s skull.” The heirs of Saturnina Rizal donated many items to the Ateneo de Manila University Archives, including a bottle that allegedly contains fragments of Rizal’s brain. I was shown this by Archives director Dr. Francis Navarro recently and I presume it was once preserved in alcohol that dried up. They look more like cranium fragments than brain matter. I leave further comments to scientists. But, do we subject these to DNA testing, or do we respect Rizal and leave his pieces in peace?

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