Longing, repair and archival accountability in Edinburgh University's "Skull Room"

This paper imagines how a process of archival recovery can be animated by notions of longing. Edinburgh University’s Anatomical Museum contains the ancestral remains of over forty Inuit, Native American, and First Nations individuals stolen during the 19th and 20th centuries as part of a colonial anthropological project. Reuniting these individuals with their descendants requires extensive archival research as the provenance for these people is often fragmented, partial, or entirely missing. By ethnographically reflecting on this process of proactive provenance research, the paper examines the difficulties in constructing these biographies when working with partial, risky, and inconsistent colonial records. Longing is therefore used as a conceptual lens to think through the pull toward what is missing and the desire to repair ruptured histories, particularly when working within a risk-averse and anxious academic institution. It also critically examines notions of longing when considering the ethical risks of constructing speculative life-histories from incomplete evidence. Longing in this regard attends to the affective force of working toward futures shaped through notions of relational accountability, rather than the logics of possession. This longing is not only oriented toward the repair of past “mistakes” but also toward imagined futures that must centre notions of care and accountability within actionable political responses. The paper therefore explores how speculation, desire, and uncertainty shape reparative archival research and anti-colonial work within museums, asking researchers to examine their responsibilities, attachments, and vulnerabilities within this work.