Jonny Geber (Edinburgh, UK) ‘ ‘Harvested Bodies’: Biocultural Linkages of Structural Violence and Identity and the Bioarchaeology of Anatomical Collections’.

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‘Harvested Bodies’: Biocultural Linkages of Structural Violence and Identity and the Bioarchaeology of Anatomical Collections
Dr JONNY GEBER, Senior Lecturer in Human Osteoarchaeology, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh.

Social injustice and inequality have a substantial impact on human health and well-being, and the foundations that uphold these structures were firmly established in European society by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through bioarchaeological analyses of historical late modern human skeletal anatomical collections, research themes such as structural violence (factors that inhibit choices and opportunities in life), and social identity. By focusing on osteobiographies, microhistories and skeletal biology (mortality, pathological changes and anatomical variation) of individuals of known identity to gain rare insight into difficult pasts and often very tragic life histories. Throughout history (and still today), the recorded perspectives of the poor and the subaltern are rare, and they are generally described in demeaning and derogatory ways as unable, lazy, and often perceived as socially and morally inferior. A social theory-driven bioarchaeology can help to illuminate structural violence in the past from the perspective of those who experienced it; their skeletons can tell their histories.