Full Citation
Title: More Than the Sum Total of Their Parts: Restoring Identity by Recombining a Skeletal Collection with Its Texts
Citation Type: Book, Section
Publication Year: 2018
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Abstract: Biomedicine in the United States has often acted as a tool of social control, especially with respect to black and brown bodies. This control extends even into death with medical doctors and researchers controlling the disposition of bodies, literally rendering them faceless in the name of science. Definitional violence is enacted upon them, transforming them from individuals with dynamic lives to biological placeholders. This chapter attempts to reconstruct a small part of the identities of those people of color curated as a part of the George S. Huntington Anatomical Collection by combining skeletal data with archival texts and mapping data associated with the collection. This recombination of biological and historical data reveals that those individuals represent a specific spatial, temporal, and social section of New York City’s history. This chapter rejects the idea that they are representatives of New York’s “poorest of the poor.” Instead, it interprets them as a heterogeneous population that was subjected to very specific forms of cultural violence that aimed to redefine them as an aggregate group suitable for medical study. By opening up bioarchaeology to previously unused social science methodologies, we can begin to undo this process and understand how these individuals were collected in the first place.
Url: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-71114-0_4
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Authors: Zimmer, Adam, N
Editors: Stone, Pamela, K
Pages: 49-69
Volume Title: Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies
Publisher: Springer Nature
Publisher Location: Cham, Switzerland
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Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Health, Land Use/Urban Organization, Population Data Science, Race and Ethnicity
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