Do the dead have rights?

Do the dead have rights?

Ryan Schram
ANTH 6916: The social in justice
September 25, 2024

Slides available at: https://anthro.rschram.org/6916/2024/9

Before Central Station

The construction of the new Sydney Metro station at Central led to a surprising discovery.

“Search for Descendants after Family Vault Uncovered at Central.” 2021. Sydney Metro. November 11, 2021. https://www.sydneymetro.info/article/search-descendants-after-family-vault-uncovered-central.

"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us"

Not all dead people are erased, however, and the choice of whom to remember is very telling:

• National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (Punchbowl Cemetery), Honolulu, Hawaiʻi (Ferguson and Turnbull 1996)
• Memorial wall, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC (Wolfson 2017)
• Reflecting absence, National September 11 Memorial, New York City

Death choice means that some people will have bad deaths

• The Queensland Pacific Islanders’ Fund, ca. 1880s (Moore 2015)
• The morgue at Port Moresby General Hospital (Awikiak 2019)
• A funeral for an asylum-seeker in Ireland (Thomas 2019)

References

Awikiak, Glenda. 2019. “Hospital Wants People to Collect Bodies of Relatives.” The Papua New Guinea National, January 7, 2019. https://www.thenational.com.pg/hospital-wants-people-to-collect-bodies-of-relatives/.

Ferguson, Kathy E., and Phyllis Turnbull. 1996. “Narratives of History, Nature, and Death at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 16 (2/3): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/3346801.

Moore, Clive. 2015. “The Pacific Islanders’ Fund and the Misappropriation of the Wages of Deceased Pacific Islanders by the Queensland Government.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 61 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12083.

“Search for Descendants after Family Vault Uncovered at Central.” 2021. Sydney Metro. November 11, 2021. https://www.sydneymetro.info/article/search-descendants-after-family-vault-uncovered-central.

Thomas, Cónal. 2019. “Woman Who Died in Direct Provision Buried without Ceremony before Friends Were Told.” TheJournal.Ie, June 5, 2019. https://www.thejournal.ie/sylva-direct-provision-death-burial-funeral-4668250-Jun2019/.

Wolfson, Elizabeth. 2017. “The ‘Black Gash of Shame’—Revisiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Controversy.” Art21 Magazine, March 15, 2017. http://magazine.art21.org/2017/03/15/the-black-gash-of-shame-revisiting-the-vietnam-veterans-memorial-controversy/.