Defining Respect
Whether we are speaking with archaeologists, osteologists, anthropologists, museum curators, Pagans, one word arises which all assert : respect. Each one of us declares that we have a clear and undeniable respect for human remains. A shared intensity of interest, a deep sense of there being a duty of care, inspires us to get involved in the treatment of human remains, and each of us does so in ways that accord with our own understanding of respect. Yet our definitions of respect can be quite radically different.
It is not my intention here to claim that HAD has an understanding of respect that overrides all others. Here, therefore, are differing definitions. It should be noted that the presence of someone's contribution here does not imply that they are in agreement with HAD's remit nor the content of HAD's website.
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A human being is not an isolated entity, but instead a creature wholly and inherently integrated within its social and ecological context. This is not simply a Pagan religious or spiritual view; it has been an accepted perspective within philosophical thinking since the preSocratics, and no doubt before. To isolate anything is to deny it its meaning, identity and value: to negate or annihilate it. The notion of respect in any forum, therefore, must be based upon an understanding of the relevant contextual web, and the ways in which each and any individual is relationally connected, to whom or what.
As an animist, I do not consider the dead to be absent. They remain dynamically present within many if not all their previous relationships - albeit in a transformed state - including the landscape with which they were connected and its community. Their memories are not thoughts that linger in some separate substance that is mind; they are an ongoing part of the living ever-changing vibrancy and presence of ensouled nature. They remain not just in the stories told and retold, but in the breath we breathe, the land we walk, the waters we drink.
Where physical remains are found, it is not enough to store or handle them carefully in order simply to analyze them and present possibilities or traces of those individuals’ stories. There can be no respect if that ancestor has been isolated in every way but the conceptual, his or her bones treated as inanimate objects to be studied.
If respect for human remains is to be valid, it has to be contained within (a) the understanding of that ancestor as a person within their own ongoing web of connectedness and (b) an acceptance that the ancestor him/herself is not absent. A mechanistic materialist mindset might draw a blank at this notion, but to the animist it is common sense. Every decision that is made about human remains must consider the fabric of that person’s ongoing relationships, accepting the principal importance of landscape and tribe or community. As we cannot know what an ancestor would have wanted, if our assumptions are to be respectful they must be based upon the tenet of least unnecessary harm; in the case of human remains, harm involves isolation from those primary relationships.
Emma Restall Orr
Founder, Honouring the Ancient Dead
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When applied to human remains, respect means treating the dead as persons, caring for them as persons.
That means applying Kant’s categorical imperative to include the dead: to treat the dead as ends in themselves and not as means to our own ends. In that sense, respect means acknowledging that the function of the dead is not solely to serve the needs of the living. The dead have wishes, interests and needs – often archaeological and historical evidence makes it quite clear what at least some of those are – and respect means recognising and acknowledging that we have a responsibility to take those into account. It means ensuring that our activities do not privilege the living at the expense of the dead, acknowledging that we have as much responsibility to the dead as to the living – maybe more, since the dead rely on us to care for them.
In many ways the dead can and do serve the living, but respect means acknowledging that the living should also serve the dead. It is a reciprocal relationship, in which we, the living, must always remember to ask: what can we do for you, the dead, who have given us everything we now have and made us who we are?
In terms of practical respect for human remains, applying these values means recognising that excavation, retention, analysis and display of human remains should be options only when there are very clearly articulated, essential things that those human remains can teach us that we cannot otherwise learn. Otherwise, the default position should be to allow the ancient dead the freedom to change through the natural process of decay by leaving ancient graves undisturbed, or reburying excavated remains as soon as possible. The acid test for practical respect is: could we face the ancient dead and say honestly that we have done the honourable thing for them?
Piotr Bienkowski
University of Manchester
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To hold in esteem; to value. Actions flowing from this are culturally and historically informed, and might include: to listen and accept another person's perspective; to study, and therefore learn more about the object of respect (or from him or her); or to leave the object of respect (or the person whom one respects) alone, out of respect.
Laura Peers
University of Oxford
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Respect is about the way remains are handled; it's about treating them as what they are - the remains of former persons. It's about remembering that they were people, with stories, and thoughts and feelings. People who wanted to be remembered; whose surviving relatives created memorials for them. Sometimes those memorials have been lost, and all that remains is the stories inscribed in the bones themselves, that can only be recovered by osteoarchaeology - where the person lived, what they ate, where they travelled, how they lived and worked. As osteoarchaeological techniques improve, more and more of the stories of people's lives can be recovered and celebrated. Two of the main things about being human are that we love and tell stories. These are people who lived and loved and told stories; their stories deserve to be told once more.
Yvonne Aburrow
Pagans for Archaeology
http://archaeopagans.blogspot.com
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Respect can be a very nebulous concept. We all know what it is but putting it into words is quite another matter. As an animist respect is at the core of my understanding of the world. In respecting the world I try to work with it and not exploit it. For to me everything contains a life force, a spirit. So even the bones of the long dead have life and, being human, their life force is akin to our own and deserves the same respect I would give to a living human. How to define respect? Working with and not exploiting is true here too. Treating the bones with care and a certain reverence for the ancestral beings, whether my own or others, that they come from. Protecting them and only displaying them when there is a real purpose in doing so, testing them to get the data from them, yes, but not then storing them away indefinitely when the likelihood of them being required again is very low, but returning them, if not whence they came, for that is not always possible or desirable, but at least to a similar site within a reasonably close distance, and burying them with care and honour and security but without imposing on them rites they would neither recognize nor desire. Respect I find works both ways, if I respect the world and all that is in it, then the world, in turn, has respect for me and I can feel that respect as a tangible entity in itself. If I respect the ancestors and all that they have left us, their bones, their artifacts, the structures we can see around us then I will feel their respect for me.
Angela Grant (kestrel)