"Made In India":
Legacy Anatomical Collections and the gap between person and object

"Made In India":
Legacy Anatomical Collections and the gap between person and object

This exhibit exposes the result of scientific racism: the collection of brown bodies to be commodified and subjugated even after death by the White Western Educational System. Item 1 describes a human male, from South Asia with the markers of two institutions that had previously purchased the skeletal remains. Known now as Person:UTSC2026-1 as the final resting place is within the Anthropology department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus (UTSC). The second item is a website where a skeleton with the same treatment as Person:UTSC2026-1 is depicted. The interview presented on the website demonstrates perfectly how little certain industries/person care about human remains. The third item in this collection is Person:UTSC2026-2, specifically the sticker found inside her skull, that says "Made in India". These items are a reminder of the reality of scientific racism and who ends up in forgotten and neglected collections, or worse, purchased to be resold to private owners.

The exhibit serves as a reminder of the work of Sabrina Agarwal (2024); where she describes that legacy anatomical collections were collected unethically and that there is work to be done to reinstate personhood and whatever fragmentary justice can be scraped together for the people represented in such collections; of which a vast majority are of South Asian ancestry. It is a reminder that reparative work through description and archival deep-dives should be conducted to fill in the significant gaps in metadata that exist in the context of these Legacy Anatomical Collections. These collections are rare, invaluable and unethically constructed and they demand our attention and care now.

2026

Gabriela San Martin Flores

English