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ETHICS AND THE 9/11 MUSEUM COMPLEX

A response to Colwell-Chanthaphonh The disappeared: Power over the dead in the aftermath of 9/11, AT 27(3)
In the June issue of AT, Chip ColwellChanthaponh wrote about the experiences of families of people who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, some of whom feel disturbed and angry about how the remains of their loved ones have been treated in the years since 2001. Colwell-Chanthaphonh examined the case of the remains that have yet to be identified, which are to be housed in a repository controlled by the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) within the National September 11 Memorial and Museum complex, and the controversies that surround these plans. The director of the museum, Alice M. Greenwald, replied to the article in the same issue. Editor In the summer of 2010, Alice Greenwald, director of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, convened an expert panel to examine the museums ethical stance as it approached the two-year mark until the opening of the institution. Museum staff wished to scrutinize issues of democracy, transparency and respect for human rights in the museums growing body of policy and practice. Dr Janet Marstine, founder and former director of the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University and currently lecturer at the University of Leicester, chaired the panel; she is editor of The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum (2011).1 Marstine was joined by Dr Paul H. Williams, a New York-based scholar of memorial museums, Dr Michael Pickering, Acting Assistant Director of Collections Content and Exhibitions, and former head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Program at the National Museum of Australia, and Dr Elizabeth Greenspan, a Harvard urban anthropologist who writes on the dynamic between the creation of a memorial and museum at Ground Zero and its diverse stakeholders. The panel met routinely over nine months with access to museum staff and archival materials and full knowledge of the opinions of both consenting and dissenting families that were discussed in Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonhs article, The disappeared: Power over the dead in the aftermath of 9/11, which appeared in the June issue of Anthropology Today. Upon review, the panel unanimously concluded that, despite the many complex and unique challenges the institution faces, the National September 11 Memorial Museum is exceeding best practice in museum ethics. The panel determined that the museums resolve to remain self-reflective, open and participatory is a defining aspect of the institution, and makes
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it a model of ethical museum conduct for the twenty-first century. In his article, Colwell-Chanthaphonh asserts a binary opposition between respect for those who perished and their families and museological practice. The Museums advisory ethics panel strongly rejects this assertion. As the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, whose members include representatives of museums ranging from the District Six Museum in South Africa to the Terezin Memorial in the Czech Republic, has shown, museums have the capacity both to honour victims of mass violence and to offer appropriate and substantive contemporary learning experiences in response to human-rights abuse. In fact, memorial museums are among the most appropriate and powerful public sites for diverse stakeholders to explore the difficult issues that emerge from atrocity and to inspire citizen participation in championing human rights. When it opens to the public in 2012, the National September 11 Memorial Museum will demonstrate this notion. Central to the museums understanding of its mission is that it does not intentionally collect or exhibit human remains, and that it practises due diligence in adhering to this policy. Dr Colwell-Chanthaphonh is in error when he states that human remains will be a museological feature.2 Unidentified and unclaimed human remains from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center will, as he recognizes, lie in a repository under the jurisdiction of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York (OCME). The repository, which is not visible or open to the public, is adjacent to the public spaces of the museum; a shared wall will be inscribed with a thoughtful and inspiring quote from Virgil, No day shall erase you from the memory of time. Based on our research and our experience as advisers to the museum, the ethics panel holds that the September 11 Museum has been consultative, transparent and sensitive to the needs of 9/11 families in developing its policies and practices in relation to human-remains issues. We have seen clear evidence of this consultative, transparent and sensitive process from correspondence with families, minutes of meetings with representatives of stakeholder groups, and references to relevant codes of ethics and museum policies and plans. We are convinced that the museums staff have acted in an ethically sound manner in relation to the human remains. l Janet Marstine School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester jm423@le.ac.uk Elizabeth Greenspan Harvard University elgreens@fas.harvard.edu Michael Pickering National Museum of Australia m.pickering@nma.gov.au

Paul H. Williams Ralph Appelbaum Associates paulwilliams@raany.com

1. Marstine, J. (ed.) 2011. The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum. Abingdon: Routledge. 2. Colwell-Chanthanphonh, C. 2011. The disappeared: Power over the dead in the aftermath of 9/11. Anthropology Today 27(3): 8.

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh replies

When I sent the above letter to the 9/11 family-advocacy groups I work with, they were surprised to learn that such an expert panel existed. They had never heard of these professionals, never been invited to speak with them, and never been told about the panels conclusions. We now discover that the panel convened at the apex of the victims families dispute with the 9/11 Museum in 2010, and yet it did not reach out to these family groups. Apparently, the panel satisfactorily gained full knowledge of the victims families by questioning museum administrators and studying archival material. The panels letter belies the simple facts. Why, if the 9/11 Museum is a model of openness and transparency, are museum administrators willing to share documents about the human-remains issue with a handful of academics but not with the victims families? The 9/11 Museum refused, without giving reasons, to disclose any such documents to the family groups despite repeated requests throughout the first six months of 2010. The letter also belies reality. Museum administrators and their advocates verge on doublespeak when they persist in their suggestion that the human remains do not constitute a feature of the 9/11 Museum complex and experience. The 9/11 Museum has elected to use a Virgil quotation explicitly to call the attention of paying guests to the human-remains repository (which one of the museums few public documents referred to as a programmatic element (World Trade Center Memorial Foundation 2006: 4)). To imply that this quotation is unrelated to the repository is like claiming that an epitaph has no relation to a tomb. And while museum administrators will not control the human-remains repository itself, they will entirely control family visits to it. Finally, if the 9/11 Museum chooses to exhibit the composites (the crushed floors of the World Trade Center), then it is likely that curators will be exhibiting objects containing human remains, against their own putative policy. Any visitor to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial or the Oklahoma City National Memorial knows the potential power of the memorial museum. As I have written elsewhere, the memorial museum can be an institution of great solace and healing (ColwellChanthaphonh 2010); I argue for no clear-cut binary, as the panels letter asserts. But we must recognize that negative heritage can also
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be a source of profound ambivalence, even terror (Meskell 2002). One only has to read the anthropological literature about wedding parties at Pol Pots grave or the crosses erected at Auschwitz to grasp how memorial museums are not easy solutions to the horrors of history (Logan & Reeves 2009). Even now, with the public airing of the human-remains controversy, neither the 9/11 Museum nor its panel has tried to consult with the families who disagree with their decisions. The 9/11 Museum and its advisors would do well to enter into direct consultation with WTC

Families for Proper Burial (Diane and Kurt Horning, founders); 9/11 Parents and Families of Firefighters and WTC Victims (Fire Chief Jim Riches, chair); Advocates for a 9/11 Fallen Heroes Memorial (Lt Jim McCaffrey and Dr Rosaleen Tallon-DaRos, representatives); the Skyscraper Safety Campaign (Sally Regenhard and Monica Gabrielle, chairs); and any other of the victims families who wish to be involved. To enter into such a dialogue would allow the 9/11 Museum to speak with the most important stakeholders: the people whose loved ones will soon be a part of the 9/11 Museum complex. l

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh Denver Museum of Nature and Science chip.c-c@dmns.org

Colwell-Chanthaphonh, C. 2010. Fascination and terror. Current Anthropology 51(3): 445-446. Greenwald, A.M. 2011. Alice M. Greenwald replies. Anthropology Today 27(3): 11. Logan, W. & K. Reeves (eds) 2009. Places of pain and shame: Dealing with difficult heritage. London: Routledge. Meskell, L. 2002. Negative heritage and past mastering in archaeology. Anthropological Quarterly 75(3): 557-574. World Trade Center Memorial Foundation 2006. Request for qualifications: Exhibition design services. 3 October.

calendar
We try to avoid errors, but please check dates before making a special journey. Entries are best submitted with a current web address to which readers can refer for further details. AnthCal is online at www.therai.org.uk/at/anthcal/. Made for trade (to 27.01.2013); People apart: Cape Town survey 1952 (to 08.01.2012); The last Samurai (to 11.09.11); Ghost forest (to 31.07.2012). Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PP; tel. +44 (0)1865 270927; www.prm.ox.ac.uk. Exhibitions focusing on Australia (04.11 to 10.11); Treasures of heaven: Saints, relics and devotion in medieval Europe (to 09.10.11); Baskets and belonging: Indigenous Australian histories (to 11.09.11); Living and dying (permanent); Africa Gallery (permanent); Images and sacred texts. British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG; tel. +44 (0)20 7323 8299 (information desk); www. thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/whatson/ exhibitions/index.html. Bali: Dancing for the gods (to 08.01.12); African worlds (permanent); Centenary Gallery: 100 years of collecting (permanent); Taslim Martin: Blue earth 1807-2007 (permanent). Horniman Museum, 100 London Road, Forest Hill, London SE23 3PQ; tel. +44 (0)20 8699 1872; www.horniman.ac.uk. Museum closed until early 2012. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ; tel. +44 (0)1223 333516; maa.cam.ac.uk.

we accept calendar items for AnthCal online - see www.therai.org.uk/at/debate/ celticstudiescongress.org/ 2-5 Aug 2011 III International Conference on Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latin American Studies (ICALLAS). Accra, Ghana. personal.tcu.edu/ kaggor/ConferenceMain.htm 5-7 Oct 2011 4th International Finnish Anthropology Conference: Dynamic anthropology. http:// www.antropologinenseura.fi/en/ events/annual-conference-2011/ 6-7 Oct 2011 Transnational religion, missionization and refugee migrants in comparative perspective. International Workshop/Book Project, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gttingen, Germany. Contact: MisRef@mmg.mpg.de 20-22 Oct 2011 Aghamtaong Kaagapay: 33rd Annual Conference of the Ugnayang Pang-Aghamtao (UGAT) Anthropological Association of the Philippines, Central Mindanao University, Musuan, Bukidnon, Philippines. http://www.ugat.org.ph/event.html 27 Oct 2011 The award ceremony of the 2011 A Film for Peace festival. Stevenson Theatre, British Museum, London. www. unfilmperlapace.it Studies. University of Dhaka and Bangla Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh. www.banglabidya.org/ cfp/cfp.html

MARCH 2012
9-18 Mar 2012 6th International Folk Festival. Kathmandu, Nepal. folkfestivals.org.np

EXHIBITIONS

SEPTEMBER 2011
3-6 Sep 2011 IUAES Annual Conference: The futures of culture. Stellenbosch University, South Africa. www.iuaes.org 6-9 Sep 2011 12th Conference of the Asociacin de Antropologa de Castilla y Len (FAAEE). Theme: Places, times, memories: Iberian anthropology in the 21st Century. University of Len, Spain. www.antropologiacastillayleon.org/ congreso/index.htm 13-16 Sep 2011 ASA 2011. Theme: Vital powers and politics: Human interactions with living things. University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter campus. www. theasa.org/conferences/ 19-24 Sep 2011 Stars and stones: Voyages in archaeoastronomy and cultural astronomy a meeting of different worlds. vora, Portugal. www.ciuhct.com/ seac2011/index.htm 22 Sep 2011 Learning unlearning: Critical dialogues between anthropology and education. One-day conference in conjunction with the journal Teaching Anthropology. Department of Education, University of Oxford. www.teachinganthropology.org

APRIL 2012
3-6 Apr 2012 ASA Annual Conference: Arts and aesthetics in a globalizing world. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

JUNE 2012
8-11 Jun 2012 (provisional dates) Anthropology in the world. RAI conference. Clore Centre, British Museum. Contact:.rai_event_ admin@nomadit.co.uk.

NOVEMBER 2012
14-18 Nov 2012 AAA 111th Annual Meeting: San Francisco Hilton and Towers, San Francisco, California. www.aaanet.org/meetings/ 26-30 Nov 2012 IUAES Inter Congress: Children and youth in a changing world. KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. www.iuaes.org

NOVEMBER 2011
2-4 Nov 2011 Vampires: Myths of the past and the future. Interdisciplinary conference, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. igrs. sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=496 14 Nov 2011 French Anthropology Day. Clore Education Centre, British Museum, 10:30 a.m. (provisional time). www.therai. org.uk. 16-20 Nov 2011 AAA 110th Annual Meeting: Traces, tidemarks and legacies. Montral Convention Center, Montral, QC, Canada. www.aaanet.org/meetings

AUGUST 2013
5-10 Aug 2013 17th IUAES World Congress: Evolving humanity, emerging worlds. University of Manchester. www.iuaes.org

OCTOBER 2011
3 Oct 2011 RAI AGM, followed by the Curl Lecture by Dr Graeme Were. On the materials of mats: Thinking through design in a Pacific society. Clore Education Centre, British Museum, 4pm. 3-4 Oct 2011 Beyond the buzzword: Problematising drugs. Monash University Prato Centre, Italy. Contact: CDP@curtin.edu.au. www.ita.monash.edu/.

NOVEMBER 2013
20-24 Nov 2013 AAA 112th Annual Meeting. Chicago Hilton, Chicago, IL.

DECEMBER 2011
16 Dec 2011 RAI Huxley Lecture by Professor Bruce Kapferer. Clore Education Centre, British Museum, 5.30pm. 17-19 December 2011 2nd International Congress of Bengal

AUGUST 2011
1-5 Aug 2011 14th International Congress of Celtic Studies. NUI, Maynooth, Ireland. www.

DECEMBER 2014
3-7 Dec 2014 AAA 113th Annual Meeting. Marriott Wardman Park and Omni Shoreham, Washington, DC.
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ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 4, AUGUST 2011