The body in the box: archiving the Egyptian mummy

Abstract

Linking the archive in its literal sense to the metaphorical repercussions of 'the archive' in a conceptual sense opens new lines of inquiry into the processes employed in museums to catalogue and store their objects. Archaeology-which was influential in Freud's theories of memory and Derrida's 'Freudian impression', Archive Fever-invites particular consideration in this respect, especially through the collection and interpretation of ancient Egyptian human remains. Embedded in colonial and imperial discourses of race, the Egyptian mummy confronted the West with the uncanny survival of what it had conceived as its near-double. The fates of two Egyptian bodies, a mummy dissected in the 1820s and a skeleton excavated in the 1920s, exemplify the archiving of these archaeological objects, whose multiple traces speak to what Derrida characterized as the archive's self-destructive drive, as its objects (and bodies) resist archival containment. This theoretical point encourages museums to intervene in and through their archives, for the creation of alternative histories and futures.

Excavating the Archive / Archiving the Excavation: Archival Processes and Contexts in Archaeology

“…Thinking about the archaeological and archival processes in all of the contexts outlined above can help to identify and understand some of these distortions, acknowledging the influence of multiple facets of colonialism and postcolonialism on all of the contexts explored. Moving away from traditional narratives facilitates embracing a more postcolonial approach to archival and archaeological research (Meskell 1996:4; Riggs 2016). Engaging directly with all stages of the archival processes and all of the people involved can be helpful in deconstructing and reassessing these different meanings in the archive (Ketelaar 2001, 2017).…”

“…In contrast, reading against the archival grain is a way of applying key contextual differences to the information in the archive, extracting this information and questioning it based on current knowledge and biases rather than in the construction of the archive itself (Rutherford 2009; Stoler 2002, 2009). Furthermore, understanding the intended use of archive material allows researchers to reconstruct other narratives that the material may reveal, which archaeological practice and museums have a duty to engage in (Riggs 2016).…”

LAM (Libraries, Archives, Museums) dalam preservasi pengetahuan

“…Pengetahuan dasar dan pemahaman tentang tools yang mendukung temu kembali untuk memfasilitasi akses informasi (Anyim, 2020). Dapat diperoleh pemahaman bahwa tenaga profesional yang terlibat dalam mengelola koleksi sumber informasi baik di perpustakaan, lembaga kearsipan, dan museum dituntut untuk memiliki kompetensi yang mumpuni, dengan begitu ketika dihadapkan dengan koleksi yang berbeda dan membutuhkan perlakuan khusus mereka dapat mengelola sumber informasi tersebut dengan baik (Riggs, 2017).…”

Multiple Burials in Ancient Societies: Theory and Methods from Egyptian Archaeology

“…60). The ‘uncanny’ nature of the Egyptian mummy has accentuated such a dichotomy, since the exceptional preservation of the human body, including facial features, has had the result of uprooting bodies from the archaeological context in favour of an association with ethnographic material (as demonstrated by Riggs 2016). The separation of bodies and objects is intensified by a distinction deeply ingrained into social sciences between ‘animate subjects that belong to the cultural world’ and ‘inanimate objects that are part of the material world’ (Sofaer 2006, 62), where ‘cultural’ is associated with the biological/animation and ‘material’ with lifelessness (see also Holliday 2004 and Schiffer 1987 for the distinction between cultural and non-cultural—i.e.…”