ra p h ie 3 Katharina Schramm Claims of descent Race and science in contemporary South Africa Vienna 201 4 ISSN 2311 - 231 X Department of SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

This paper is concerned with the question of how to ethnographically account for race as a complex knowledge formation and political reality. I focus on South Africa which occupies a special place in global scientific debates on race and human origins – historically as well as presently. From the early twentieth century onwards, paleoanthropology, physical anthropology and genetics were preoccupied with the study of indigenous populations in order to draw general conclusions on human evolution and biological differences (and hierarchies) between groups. These genealogies of knowledge resonate in various ways in contemporary research. At the same time, the bureaucratic and ‘culturally’ defined race classification of apartheid heavily relied on common-sense notions of race and this has contributed to their ongoing persistence. While not fully congruent with each other, these ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ classification practices are nevertheless closely intertwined. In the post-apartheid society it is therefore not enough to say that race is socially constructed or a mere biological fiction in order to subvert its ongoing political and epistemological power. I argue that we need to rather problematize race itself as a polyvalent phenomenon. In order to do so, I discuss the relationship between epistemic objects (human remains, casts and DNA), classificatory violence and the politics of memory by which different actors perform race, while articulating their claims of descent and political subjectivities in contemporary South Africa. Introduction: the many lives of ‘race’ In recent years there has been a growing debate on the apparent re-emergence of race in scientific discourse and practice. Even if contemporary race is a phenomenon that is not necessarily named (as in crude typological jargon), it nevertheless maintains an uneasy presence that cannot be solely delegated to the realm of the ‘social’ vis-à-vis the ‘biological’. This poses a number of theoretical and methodological challenges to social scientists – summarised in the question of how to account for the slippery character of race that escapes easy definition? How to analyse the coproduction of race as an epistemic object in science V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 2 and politics? Much of the recent literature on this topic has taken medical research or laboratory genetics as its starting point for the discussion of racial or racialised knowledge production (e.g. Fullwiley 2011; M’charek 2005; Montoya 2011; TallBear 2013b). In line with recent scholarship in Science and Technology Studies on epistemic cultures (cf. Jasanoff 2004; Knorr-Cetina 1999) these important studies have helped us to understand the multiple ways in which scientific knowledge about race and human biological diversity is always also ‘cultured knowledge’. Differences are not simply ‘out there’ in nature, but they are granted significance in complex biosocial configurations. However, through this specific focus on laboratory and medical practice, race has largely remained a matter of biology (or biologisation) and less attention has been paid to its other lives, i.e. in terms of memories of oppression and struggles for political recognition. In my paper, I therefore suggest an ethnographic approach which takes these dimensions into account – thereby not taking the meaning of race for granted, but problematising it at the core. Through the notion of ‘troubles of descent’1 I aim to show how race is performed and brought into being as a relational object (M’charek/Schramm/Skinner 2014; Schramm in press/b). This implies that race cannot be pinpointed as ‘residing’ in a body, DNA-marker, group classification, scientific measurement or a practice of self-identification. Rather, it constitutes a polyvalent phenomenon that is assembled from various such elements which in their combination may situationally produce racial effects (cf. M’charek 2013) that resonate with the problematic and oppressive history of the concept. The empirical base for this project comes from ten months of continuous fieldwork in South Africa, where I first started working in 2010. My main interest is in the many overlaps and historical dis/continuities between scientific and public debates on race and human origins in a post-apartheid setting.2 I focus on South Africa as a special ‘site of cognition’ (Anderson 2012; Santos, Lindee, and de Souza 2014) for two reasons. First, and in line with Anderson’s and Santos, Lindee and de Souza’s use of this term, Southern Africa was, and continues to be, a highly significant site for the study of the history of humanity as a whole through physical anthropology and human genetics of indigenous populations who were 1 I borrow the notion of trouble from Donna Haraway’s (2010) catchy phrase ‘staying with the trouble’. It helps me to address and take seriously the multidimensionality and complexity of race and descent. 2 I approached this complex subject through different scales (Fortun 2009) and sites. My main research took place in Cape Town, where I worked with heritage authorities, physical anthropologists, museum professionals, geneticists and members of so-called descendant communities. I also undertook a number of field trips to Johannesburg, the South African hub of population genomics, where I had the chance to get many insights into concrete laboratory practices and sampling strategies. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 3 classified as ‘Other’.3 This importance can be traced back to the early days of race science, where human remains of so-called ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots’ 4 were circulated through a global trading network that connected European and colonial scientific institutions, including the emerging South African ones. In the prevailing evolutionist logic, living and dead ‘Bushmen/Hottentots’, defined through an arbitrary mix of life-style and physical appearance, represented the earliest (read ‘least developed’) stages of humankind. After the Second World War, the race-paradigm in physical anthropology with its specific associations of hierarchical difference and morphological fixity began to give way to an interest in population diversity, adaptation and ecology in the new physical anthropology (cf. Haraway 1988) – and huntergatherer groups like the San played a major role in this shifting interest (cf. Lee 1979). Eminent South African scientists such as Philip Tobias, thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize, and Trefor Jenkins, an early pioneer of population genetics, also continued to advocate and conduct research in the Kalahari, mainly in Botswana and what was then South West Africa, today’s Namibia (cf. Tobias 1975; Jenkins et al. 1971). Under the chairmanship of the Kalahari Research Committee, 21 interdisciplinary expeditions were mounted to study Bushmen/San populations under the broad labels of human variability and genetic affinities within and between groups. And today, once again, genomic research that takes an interest in human origins and migration history focuses largely on Khoisan groups and their descendants whose mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal haplogroups appear to be closest to the root, the common ancestor of humankind (cf. Tishkoff et al. 2009, Schuster et al. 2010, Schlebusch et al. 2012). This interest is so profound that one geneticist told me ironically “there must be a shop in Smitsdrift where you can buy genetic samples!” (interview 30.05.2014). Yet there is also a second reason why South Africa can be considered as a special site of cognition for the discussion of race and the troubles of descent. This has to do with the history of South African apartheid and the ways in which it has shaped people’s common 3 Of course, South Africa is also the site of major hominid finds in paleoanthropology (‘Taung Child’; ‘Mrs Ples’; ‘Littlefoot’ and most recently ‘Austalopithecus Sediba’). Racial anthropology and the early paleoanthropology were closely related (cf. Dubow 1995). Today the disciplines of biological anthropology, paleoanthropology and molecular genetics converge in the sciences of human origins. For reasons of limited space, I mostly leave out the discussion about the ‘Cradle of Humankind’ here, even though it forms an important part of claims of descent in twenty-first century South Africa (see Bystrom 2009). 4 Nomenclature is complicated and problematic. The derogatory colonial terminology for indigenous inhabitants of the land was ‘Bushmen’ (for various groups of hunter-gatherers) and ‘Hottentots’ (for Khoekhoe pastoralists). Due to their closely entangled histories, languages etc. the joint identity label today is KhoeSan or Khoisan. San is the most common (self-)ascription for hunter-gatherer groups in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana and their descendants. However, the term ‘Bushman’ is also still widespread, especially in the discourse of so-called Khoisan revivalism. In contrast, ‘Hottentot’ or the Afrikaans equivalent ‘Hotnot’ has clearly remained an insult. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 4 understandings of race, their claims of descent and their relationship to past and present scientific practices. Many authors (e.g. Breckenridge in press; Morris 2012; Posel 2001) have argued that the racial classification of apartheid was based on a bureaucratic and cultural model and therefore disconnected from the scientific debates on race as a biological fact or fiction. While I agree to their call for historical specificity and differentiation, I argue that in order to understand the ongoing trouble with race it is important to bring these dimensions together. I will do so by looking at the difficult relationship between human remains, DNA and the contemporary self-identifications of so-called descendant communities through the lens of what I call classificatory violence. I am interested in the ways in which descent is performed differently in relation to the materiality of casts, bones and DNA and how disciplinary and political histories translate into one another. Contested representations of the ‘indigenous’ in South African collections: life-casts and human remains In August 2013, after almost 20 years of debate, the South African Museum (Iziko) in Cape Town decided to remove all of its so-called ‘Bushmen life-casts’ from its ethnographic showroom and put them in storage. The casts had been on display for almost 100 years.5 Together with ancient Karoo dinosaur fossils and a spectacular whale gallery they belonged to the museum’s main attractions from its inception. In a book from 1961 with the astonishing title “Bushman, Whale and Dinosaur”, the activities of James Drury, chief taxidermist at the museum and modeller of the casts, are described as follows: “Drury travelled widely to secure from living subjects the moulds for his Bushmen groups and to study the habits of these primitive people. He skinned the elephants shot by Major Pretorius and the lions and hippopotami shot by the Duke of Westminster in Rhodesia, ‘filleted’ odoriferous whales on our coasts, excavated the cave dwellings of extinct Cape Bushmen and engaged in other multifarious activities to collects specimens for the Museum” (Rose 1961: cover blurb). The author Walter Rose represents Drury as the white hero-collector who ventured far beyond the comfort zone of ordinary museum visitors so that they could eventually marvel at the wonders of the collection. Post-1994, this very agglomeration of colonial practices of hunting, collection and display came under serious criticism and the casts in particular became the 5 The majority of casts were made between 1907 and 1937. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 5 object of a heated controversy that involved various publics. As a result, the centre-piece of the display, the ‘Bushman diorama’ which showed a group of semi-naked hunter-gatherers in a nineteenth century-style camp, was closed to public view in 2001 (Davison 2001; on the history of the casts see Davison 1993). This decision was made on the grounds that the diorama symbolised the representational and genocidal violence against the indigenous people of the Cape Colony.6 Many liberal critics saw the diorama as a derogatory display of San people as a primitive Other belonging to the realm of nature and frozen in time.7 This effect, of course, was enhanced through the very form of the diorama (Haraway 1989) and its placement in a museum of natural history. However, the remaining casts, which gave an extremely lively impression as they showed people in various activities and positions (dancing, playing music, beading etc.), have recently been removed on different grounds: they are now considered as “unethically acquired...human remains” (panel description of the remodelled ethnographic display). This new categorisation of the casts has at least two components: First of all, historically, casts, photographs, voice recordings, life-measurements and the procurement and study of human remains all together formed part and parcel of racial anthropology – and so-called ‘Bushmen’ (living and dead) were favoured objects of study in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were considered to be a dying-out race, one of the ‘most primitive’ people on the hierarchical scale of human evolution. In the reasoning for removing them from public display, the casts, through their very materiality, act as intimate embodiments of the practices of scientific racism and the violence associated with them.8 Secondly, museum officials have argued that through the very act of casting, traces of bodily material (hair, cells, DNA) have 6 For some of the historical background see Adhikari (2010) and Penn (2005). It should be noted that many groups fought each other in the frontier situation, which included conflicts between hunter-gatherers and pastoralists as well as migrants from the Eastern and Northern interiors. The emphasis in the museum and in public discourse focuses on colonial forms of warfare, conquest and oppression, as analysed, for example, by Penn (1996). However, whereas Nigel Penn insists on the differentiation between Khoekhoe and San encounters with the colonial trekboer settlers in different historical periods and circumstances, these distinctions are often collapsed in contemporary non-academic debates. Likewise, the participation of Khoekhoe and other non-European troupers in the later eighteenth century commando-operations that were designed to break San resistance (Penn 1996: 86) is not prominently discussed. 7 However, there were also representatives of Khoisan groups who objected to the closure of the diorama, arguing that it served as a reminder of an ancient way of life and an ancestral connection. The whole debate about the fate of the diorama was sparked by the Miscast-exhibition, where artist-curator Pippa Skotnes had problematised the violent treatment of ‘Bushmen’ bodies in colonial hunting expeditions and scientific research (Skotnes 1996). The exhibition project caused a massive debate which focused on the problematic objectification perpetuated in the Miscast-display itself (cf. Douglas/Law 1997; Fauvelle 1999). 8 On the coercive conditions under which life-casts were often made, cf. Hoffmann (2009) and Rassool/Hayes (2002). V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 6 literally melted into the casts which therefore need to be considered as actual parts of a dead person and not mere representations. The casts are not the only objects of contention at the South African Museum – as reclassified ‘human remains’ they have joined the collection of indigenous skeletal material that became a haunting issue for the museum from the 1990s onwards. A number of South African institutions, including the University of Cape Town and the South African Museum, still hold large collections of indigenous human remains. Many of these are of archaeological origin, including a considerable number of Khoisan remains.9 These collections were started in the early twentieth century under the premise of race typology, and early procurement in particular took place in highly problematic circumstances (Legassick/Rassool 2000; Morris 1996).10 Collecting and research continued under changing conditions and with new research questions until the present (see Morris 1992). Before the end of apartheid, no provisions existed for so-called descendant communities to have a say in the future of any uncovered human remains (including graveyards). This changed with the National Heritage Resources Act of 1999 (Section 36), which explicitly states that proactive consultations should be sought with “communities and individuals who by tradition have an interest in [a] grave or burial ground”.11 But how are ‘communities’, ‘tradition’ and ‘interest’ defined here? And which timeframe is concerned? In line with a growing international debate about the treatment and possible restitution of indigenous human remains from colonial collections worldwide (Fforde 2004; Turnbull/Pickering 2010), South African activists have increasingly put forth demands for the repatriation and reburial of such remains. In its Human Remains Policy,12 the South African Museum reacted by calling upon “descendant communities, scientific communities and other concerned groups who have an interest in human remains in Iziko collections” to join forces in seeking a dialogue over the fate of the collection and to repatriate ‘unethically collected’ human remains. The book “Skeletons in the Cupboard” by Martin Legassick and Ciraj Rassool (2000) serves as an important reference point here. Through meticulous 9 See Department of Arts and Culture, Review of Heritage Legislation. Final Report 2007, p. 38. 10 The organising principles of these collections differ considerably. On the institutional development and internal differentiation of physical anthropology and comparative anatomy in South Africa see Morris (2012). 11 As stated in the National Heritage Resources Act, commissioned by the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) in 1999, p. 62. 12 Policy on the management of human remains in Iziko Collections; approved by Iziko Council, 29 September 2005; unpublished document. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 7 historical research they have documented and problematised the unscrupulous methods that were underlying the trade in human remains at the South African Museum between 1907 and 1917 – including the grave-robbing of recently deceased individuals. In its restitution policy and community outreach, the museum largely focuses on concrete cases of ‘unethically acquired’ remains identified in this and other research projects. In 2004, the Museum commissioned consultations about the restitution of such ‘unethically required’ human remains with descendant communities, mainly in the Northern part of the country. This initially concerned 15 cases, but was soon expanded to include 115 cases13 – a clear indication of the difficulty to identify ‘clean’ and unproblematic specimen in the historical collections.14 However, as I will show below, the demand for repatriation often goes beyond this narrow time span. In the above mentioned policy document descendant communities are defined as “communities that have established or recognized lines of descent” – just like the National Heritage Resources Act would have it. But this is not a clear-cut genealogy at all – especially when it concerns the notion of ‘Khoisan remains’. Even at the time when Drury made his lifecasts, many people (some of whose remains are found in collections today) had died in prisons, had been shot by farmers and hunters or had been forced to give up their lifestyle and language to become indentured labourers on white farms. Indigenous status was not recognised; by the 1920s, the South African Union, and later the apartheid-administration, considered the South African Khoekhoe and San to be on the edge of extinction. With the apartheid installation of the Population Registration Act in 1950, the ‘coloured’ category became the racial label that encompassed everyone who was not classified as ‘native’, i.e. black or white. In the post-apartheid period, however, there has been a large revival of Khoisan identities among people who had previously been classified as ‘coloured’.15 This revival is mainly concerned with the revitalisation of forms of political organisation associated with a Khoekhoe past, including the institution of chieftaincy and a hierarchical distribution of power. Nevertheless, San (as hunter-gatherers) remain an important point of 13 See Final Summary Report, Iziko Museums Consultation Process, 30 November 2004. 14 At the time of my research in 2012, none of these remains had been repatriated and I am not aware of any case of repatriation from the South African Museum collection itself. However, in 2012, Austria repatriated the human remains of Trooi and Klaas Pienaar from the collection of Rudolph Pöch in Vienna. Their case had been documented extensively by Legassick and Rassool (2000: 22-3). They received a state-burial in South Africa. 15 See Besten (2009). A number of Master-theses by South African students at various universities have also dealt with this subject, e.g. de Wet (2006) and Gabie (2014). V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 8 reference in this revivalist movement, because they represent an original and spiritual relationship to the land. It is frequently representatives of such Khoisan groups who have vehemently criticised the scientific objectification of human remains in archaeology and physical anthropology, arguing for unconditional repatriation of all human remains from international and local collections. At the same time, population genomics and genetic ancestry testing in particular are discursively embraced as a means of proving those very claims of descent, indigeneity and belonging. To understand this selective approach to disciplinary histories, scientific practices and the materiality of samples as well as the complex ways in which race is brought to the fore in these conversations, I will, in the remainder of this article, pay attention to what I call classificatory violence and its impact on the interpretation of descent and community. I will then move on to examine how the notion of descent is evoked in different ways to connect the living and the dead. Classificatory violence In my use of the notion of classificatory violence I slightly depart from Bowker and Star’s (2000) famous case-study on the meaning of racial re/classification during apartheid. In their piece, they point out the often disturbing and disastrous effects of group classifications (such as the racial regime of apartheid) on individual lives. Through the concept of “torque” they engage the process of mutual bending and twisting of biography and the process of classification itself (2000: 27). They demonstrate that the messiness of social life can hardly be tamed by a strict and exclusionary classificatory model. By speaking of classificatory violence here, I will pay less attention to the impact of classification on individual biographies but rather to the formation of collective identifications that serve as a significant reference point in contemporary debates. There are two levels which are relevant for my discussion. The first concerns the composition and historical role of the collections of human remains themselves. Classificatory violence here refers to the creation of scientific specimen from indigenous human remains in the aftermath of colonial conquest. Salvage anthropology and imperialist nostalgia worked together to create a typological archive that in today’s political debates serves to exemplify the actual violence of colonial extermination. The second level of classificatory violence is related to further processes of disjuncture and identification that are associated with apartheid classification and V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 9 the fixation of racial categories according to a hierarchical bureaucratic ordering. The political contestations around the troubles of descent in contemporary South Africa conjoin these two dimensions of memory and political subjectivity. Classificatory violence and the collections of human remains The first trajectory of classificatory violence can be said to have started with the display (alive and dead) of Sara Baartman who performed as the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’ in London and Paris where she died in 1814. Her body was scientifically examined and dissected by George Cuvier, one of the founders of modern anatomy, for whom she represented a unique racial type as ‘Boschismanne Hottentot’, sharply distinguished from other human races and closest to apes (cf. Abrahams 1997, 1998). Skeleton, body cast, and conserved brain and genitals were stored and partly exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until they were eventually repatriated to South Africa in an elaborate state ritual in 2002 (Krüger 2010). On her return, the remains were first kept at the South African Museum before being reburied in the small town of Hankey in the Eastern Cape, supposedly near her place of birth. When I visited the South African Museum in 2011, the box in which the cast had been flown in was still there. It leaned against a wall inside the storeroom where human remains were kept, obstructing easy passage. The person who led me through the storeroom indicated that nobody had dared to remove it; it sat there as an uneasy reminder of the highly political significance of the issue of human remains. The iconic case of Sara Baartman is but one out of thousands of indigenous bodies whose remains are still stored in collections worldwide. Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, a vast trade in human remains fed European and colonial scientific institutions with comparative samples of skulls, skeletons and soft tissue, mainly of indigenous people who were classified as primitive and/or different. Comparative anatomy and physical anthropology focused on the identification of pure racial types in the search for comparative samples; racial anthropologists measured skull-shape and brain-size, and identified unique features (such as the so-called ‘Bushman canine’ which is still referred to in contemporary forensic and archaeological practice; interview N.D., 24.11.2011). In South Africa, a colonial society with a distinctive scientific landscape that centred on human origins research (cf. Dubow 1995), indigenous human remains were collected with equal fervour, far into the twentieth century. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 10 In the early days, many skeletons were bestowed to the collections as donations by farmers – and while some were accidental finds, others were literally robbed from their graves. For example, several skeletons were presented to the anatomy department at the newly established University of Cape Town16 by a C.G. Coetzee in the 1920s. The catalogue entry for specimen UCT 43 reads as follows: UCT 43 Cape Inland. Known in life as Bushman. (The latter added later in pencil; copied from original entry, K.S.) Kruis River Farm, Sutherland. Skeleton of an old Bushwoman (Saartje) who had been a member of the wild Bushmen and had been caught by Mr. Coetzee’s great-grandfather. She died about 1880 and was reputed to have been 60 or 70 years old at death. She had been buried in a niche in one side of the grave at a depth of 4’ with big stones in front of her. Presented by C.G. Coetzee, 1927. Reputed to be wife of UCT 50 and mother of UCT 51. Also see UCT 52 + UCT 54. In addition, the index card informs that the skeleton, cranium and mandible are complete. It also notes that the remains have been studied as part of a PhD thesis on Holocene human evolution and “the biocultural development of the Khoisan” (Hausman 1980). A whole family joined on the shelves of an anatomy department. The narrative that the remains and the index cards tell is firstly one of objectification in life and death (cf. Roque 2011). Caught as a ‘wild bushman’, the woman was renamed “Saartje” and most likely worked for Coetzee’s great-grandfather and was later buried on the farm. As the owner of the land, Coetzee could dig up the remains (even those he had ‘buried himself’, referring to UCT 29) and present them to a scientific institution where they served as ‘type specimen’ of the ‘Bushman race’. Matthew Drennan, who started the skeletal collection at UCT, where he served as Professor of Anatomy from 1919 until 1956, extensively studied such remains, asserting that “the majority of the physical characters of the Bushman tend to lie towards the simian end of the human scale” and concluding that “the Bushman is undoubtedly a member of one of the lowest of the human races” (quot. in Dubow 1995: 47). However, this is not the only dimension here; the index card conjoins several temporalities. When the remains were accessioned, they went into the “List of Bushmen Skulls in the Department of Anatomy”. In line with the prerogatives of racial anthropology, 16 Thanks to the support of Prof. Alan Morris I had full access to the catalogues and archival material at the UCT Anatomy Department. My access to the South African Museum was much more limited – at the time of my stay, all collections were closed to external researchers. In the case of human remains, this included the registers and catalogue entries. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 11 the emphasis here was on the ‘Bushmen racial type’ and it was the skull that formed the basis for racial comparison. In the 1980s, a new Catalogue of Human Skeletal Remains/ Anthropology was put together by biological anthropologist Alan Morris, who rearranged the cards according to the specific geographic regions where the skeletons were found – if any such information was available (see Morris 1992). Thus, the new index card for UCT 43 prioritised the geographic origin of the remains. It also contained information about the completeness of the skeleton and the presence or absence of post-cranial remains. This new ordering of the catalogue was inspired by new interests and priorities in biological anthropology. Changing research questions that included human-environment interactions demanded detailed information about the landscape in which a skeleton was found; for osteopathological studies or those focusing on occupational stress, for example, the skull was far less significant than other parts of the skeleton. Clearly, this reorganisation of the collection is an indication of a paradigm shift in the discipline of biological anthropology away from racial typology, towards ‘population diversity’, ‘adaptation’, ‘ecology’ and ‘development’. This shift is largely associated with the announcement of a New Physical Anthropology in the 1950s (Washburn 1951) and concurring developments in human population genetics. Over time it definitely affected the practices of South African scientists and people working with the South African collections, if only to varying degrees. As Morris states as late as 1992 in his published “Catalogue of Holocene Remains”:17 “For too long there has been a tendency to force racial conclusions from the data either by means of typology or through the oversimplification of the biological picture into Khoisan and Negro categories only. The direction we should be taking is one that emphasizes the process of change and the dynamic nature of South African history and prehistory. For this, the data themselves must dictate the questions we can ask” (Morris 1992: 16). But, as the layered information on the index card for UCT 43 and the history of the collections suggests, this data or the meaning of the human remains does not simply reside in the skeletal material alone. Nor does the rejection of the previous ‘tendency to force racial 17 This catalogue encompasses all South African collections and presents the remains according to the geographical location (biome) in which they were found. This taxonomy does not necessarily match the organising principles of the institutional collections, some of which still follow a racial/ethnic taxonomy, as demonstrated in the Raymond Dart collection at the University of the Witwatersrand (see Dayal et al. 2009). Morris explicitly states that he excluded such remains that were solely collected for the purposes of race science or that have no additional information available. However, the catalogue includes many skeletons that were procured by scientists with a typological inclination, such as by Robert Broom or Raymond Dart. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 12 conclusions’ eliminate race itself, if we consider race and race trouble through the lens of classificatory violence and its multidimensional reverberations. Morris and his colleagues seek to generate a new understanding of human biology, prehistory and human relatedness through the study of indigenous human remains. The shared standpoint is that it is important to study the remains – if only to give ‘back’ their histories. However, as I will show below, this reasoning is not always shared by the spokespeople of political groups who claim indigenous remains (regardless of their specific way into the collections) as their ancestors. Unburied human remains have become symbolic embodiments of racial violence that is not restricted to the distant realm of scientific racism but rather connected to the more recent apartheid past and the inequalities it produced in death and life. Through the association with indigenous human remains people may articulate a new sense of indigeneity18 in the present – they become descendant communities. Apartheid categories and the rejection of the label ‘coloured’ after 1994 Therefore, the second level on which I would like to briefly discuss classificatory violence goes deeper into the historical period of apartheid where race classification and segregation were at the heart of the regime of governance. Established racial typologies persisted and were turned into administrative categories. However, in contrast to the classificatory endeavours of race science, which had largely focused on the naked body (literally naked to the bones), the apartheid classification was highly conscious of the arbitrariness of categories and brought in culture and lifestyle as explicit criteria to determine race. Thus the Population Registration Act No. 29 of 1950 states the following: “‘Coloured person’ means a person who is not a white person or a native; ... ‘native’ means a person who in fact is or is generally accepted as a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa; ... ‘white person’ means a person who in appearance obviously is, or who is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person.” ‘General acceptance’ and ‘way of life’ were equally important to ‘appearance’ – with the result of a highly flexible and thereby extremely effective system of racial classification put in