Why did they take him away? Following Aboriginal remains using modes of existence

• In Event: Unsettling STS 2

Abstract

In 1891 the Peabody Museum at Harvard University took Neddy Larkin, an Aboriginal man, into their skeleton collection. He was returned in 2012 to his original place of burial at North Lismore, NSW. Amongst the many questions his present-day community ask are: How does that happen, that a man would be stolen from his grave and bought by a museum on the other side of the world? And how does it happen that over a century later that same museum decided to send Neddy home without asking for their money back? This paper outlines an approach to answering the first of these questions using the method Bruno Latour sets out in An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence. By placing Neddy Larkin at the centre of the action rather than emphasising the agency of the non-Aboriginal actors, this approach enabled a diplomatic engagement between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers who undertook this project. Neddy’s spiritual importance as ancestor and kin could be maintained, while the plural ontology of Latour’s modes of existence sensitised the analysis to the many transformations between modes Neddy underwent during his very Western journey. Finally, the focus of modes of existence on the value that gives potential for action, enables an understanding of “why they took him away” that is fine-grained and avoids generalisations that jump immediately to colonialism and power, important as they are. Rather, by following Neddy Larkin closely we see in his progress colonialism and power under construction in concrete and locally meaningful ways

Author

• Rob Garbutt, Southern Cross University