Human Material

One of the components of my line of work that I spend the most time thinking about is ownership. The desire to own, the motivation to own, the decision to own. What gets collected, what gets hoarded, what gets used, what gets replaced. So much of the material I deal in is made to be owned and used and traded if necessary. Lamps and rugs and paintings and trinkets and dumb shit that is either of use or represents a time or place or relationship. Decorative objects that are directly made to be consumed. There is zero to be discussed here about ownership or appropriation. However so many of the most interesting things rest in the grey or jet black areas of ownership. Sometimes it's easy. I’ve had customers ask me if it's okay for them to wear native american made turquoise. What a wonderful question and the fact that it’s even being considered puts them light years above most folks. But to be frank, the vast majority of native american jewelry is made for the resale market. This was not obviously always the case, and pieces made for ceremonial use are vastly more expensive and valued, though I would argue those pieces do start to fall into the grey area of appropriateness for ownership. But I cannot exaggerate how many times I have directly said to a customer, this was made for white people, so buy it, own it, wear it, and enjoy it. This is maybe one of the more complicated but also straightforward examples of what I’m getting after. NA jewelry made ceremonial or for use within the community should absolutely be preserved for use and appreciation within the community. There is no reason for any white person to own an early squash blossom necklace that was made to be a symbol of wealth for a chieftain. But one made in the 1940s to be sold to tourists on the train lines: have at it. I am oversimplifying a very complicated topic for the sake of a different argument and I apologize for that, but this is the best correlation I can think of, and I think the comparison of agency is useful.

I could list off a thousand examples of things that are similarly a mixed bag of some versions should be left to the groups that use and cherish the things, and the bits that are made for tourists or market or whatever are fine, African Art comes to mind immediately, but there is one thing that always comes to mind first: human remains. Few things are more fraught, divisive, complicated, and worth talking about. 

Of course the first thing that ever comes up with human material is legality. How is this legal to own and trade?? For a long time that was a relatively easy question to answer, the federal government has basically no rules about human material unless it was living or indigenous, and only three states outlawed the trade. But as always, free market dynamics dictate that if it is possible to take advantage of a situation, it must be taken advantage of. 

But we should back up a little bit. The second question that comes up when a customer sees a skull or skeleton for sale is where did it come from. This is an overly simple question and when I have the energy I force the harder question: where did the current owner of this skull acquire it, or where did THIS SKULL come from, originally. This follow up generally and reasonably horrifies most folks as they are immediately forced to reckon with the fact that this is part of what was once a living human being with a name and family and friends and a life. This was life, a life. So the more likely question of how did you come to own a human skull pivots to the violent and dangerous question of why did this human’s skull get processed and preserved and is now available to be traded. This is not an easy question to answer and the most likely solution has changed over time. 19th century human material largely came from poor folks in Europe. Police officers would sell the corpses of drunks and poor folks to hospitals and universities. Wildly sketchy and problematic and a practice that continued for decades. In the 1940s a professor “found” a “source” for human material that built a business that lasted into the 1970s. This source was the Ganges RIver, where Indian poor folks could not afford to have their bodies processed in a respectful way. The bodies would get dumped, British fuck face would fish them out and process them into skulls and skeletons. In the later 20th century international human rights groups started getting into places other than whitesville and that practice stopped. However around that time China was gaining power and prominence but was still a communist system that could allow, cover, and work around just about anything. Prison labor offered an abundance of human material with a much easier to approach moral conundrum. They were prisoners so who cares. For several decades that became the main and efficient and cheap source for human material. A major international exhibit was produced that was born directly from this material: Bodies. It was everywhere, it was in a damn James Bond movie. After traveling everywhere and making a ton of money it came under scrutiny finally when someone finally asked how all these human bodies came to be available for an “art” project. Fucking the problematic part of “communism” is how. Nothing was really done until the 2008 Beijing Olympics when China had to actually address the fact that virtually the entire world disagreed with the practice of harvesting human material from dead prisoners because they weren’t really people. In 2008 as a direct result the price of human material drastically rose. A skull went from $750 to $1500 overnight. Markets shift constantly but this was very fast and very direct. Tradeable human material was now almost exclusively available on the resale market. Free market economics being what they are, people found a way to gain new product. A morgue worker stole bodies out of freezing in New England. Several states tightened up their control. Very recently a crazy person started digging up bodies out of a cemetery. More states will follow and federal mandates may come. I am in favor of these changes. I think there should be more regulation over anything that was once alive but I think antique items should have some exemption if proof of age can be made. But the important thing to examine is that people want to own human parts, humans will go to weird lengths to own human parts, and humans will take advantage of every way to work around the legality of owning and trading human parts. 

So why is this never the first question. Why do we beat around the bush so much in this one area? The question of can I do this immediately pops up, but the question of should I do this is so much harder and weirder and more complicated. 

I rarely consider legality in buying an item besides the ability to resell. If it's beautiful and special there is a market and I can maybe find it. But I buy to resell. And I have to be okay with profiting off that item. Hence I don’t buy nazi shit or kkk shit or blackface shit etc. I can’t sit with making money off of that. Human material becomes so complicated in this way. To me the main question is agency. In the way that NA jewelry that was made for culture import does not have the agency to stay within the community because it is an object, when a human dies and their skull is all that physically remains, it no longer has the agency to determine what is done with it. But it was and is a human and so this agency is paramount to me. There is almost no world in which we can know the agency of this PERSON. If a necklace was made to be a signifier of wealth and unity between two groups it should remain as that. If that type became a desirable object to the point of being made for trade outside the cultural group in which it had existential value, so be it, that is up to that group. But to actively take something from a human without their agency or consent is absolutely violent. And participating in that market directly participates in that violence.
So back to human material. We know that virtually all available human material that has been used in medical preparations was taken from the Ganges River or was Chinese prison labor, neither party has any agency in the future use of their bodies. Ancient examples have similar complications. Even if the person agreed to the preservation of their body, either by ritual mummification or any number of other means, the purpose was to stay in that state of preservation, either as ritual or for some spiritual reason. Taking that material disturbs that service and thus removal also removes the agency of that individual. Also it's just gross and mean. The closest I have been able to come to a piece of human that is meaningfully preserved and could potentially be traded with agency and consent of that person is buddhist monk bones. On some occasions monks would allow their skeletons to be carved into prayer beads and ritualistic vessels, but theoretically by use by future monks. I have not directly discussed this practice with any monks but I would like to, to better understand their use of these items and their thoughts on the trade of them. I do currently own one that I bought mislabeled as a folk art skull carving. I have held on to it partly to keep it out of the hands of anyone who doesn’t know or appreciate what it is, but also in the traditional memento mori sense, but in this case extending to the trade of such items. I want to have to think about what this means and what everything I buy and sell means for all parties involved. 

So when customers ask where a skull comes from I tend to give them the full answer when I have the time. I want them to understand when they buy human material that they are signing up for owning a piece of a human without that person's consent or agency. I do not judge them but they should know that and be able to sit well with it. Is whatever you’re getting from owning this worth that knowledge? Can you accept that this person's skull lives with you now and they do not know that and almost certainly did not want that to be the case? Many folks who are wanting to own these sorts of things will quickly say that they would be happy for their body to be preserved and appreciated after they’re dead and that is fine, but it is impossible to know that about the dead. They can no longer speak for themselves, and based on the source for the vast majority of human material it is wildly unlikely that they would sign off on this. We cannot know, but this lack of a solid footing should be a non starter for most, and at absolute minimum the most important consideration in the choice to own human material.

This is a topic I am and will always be interested in a thinking about. I have by no means reached any sort of conclusion, but I think it is essential to think this way about materials that have a deeper layer of meaning and history and importance. If you ever meet me in the real world I would be happy to talk about this at length, just buy me a beer first. Like a human.