Ancestors: Critical Reflections on Rehumanization and Care at Manchester Museum

This paper draws on my empirical engagement with Ancestral remains in the care of Manchester Museum to examine rehumanization as a decolonial methodology that challenges not only colonial collecting practices, but also the inherited language through which museums continue to describe and relate to the dead. Terms such as "human remains," "collections," and "objects" have long been embedded within museum practice, yet they are products of colonial knowledge systems that transformed once-living people into scientific specimens, museum property, and subjects of racial classification. Rather than treating this vocabulary as neutral, I argue that it reflects and perpetuates forms of dehumanization that continue to shape museum practice. Rehumanization begins by acknowledging the colonial violence through which ancestral remains were appropriated, looted, exhumed, and collected through salvage anthropology, grave robbing, and other extractive practices before being incorporated into museum collections. Against this backdrop, I ask: "what does it mean to become human again within museum practice?" I argue that, in a decolonial moment, there are no "human remains" in museums in the conventional museological sense. Rather, these are Ancestors who remain connected to living descendant communities through enduring cultural, spiritual, and kinship relationships. Recognizing them as Ancestors requires museums to move beyond inherited object-centred and possessive vocabularies towards relational and ethical frameworks grounded in dignity, care, accountability, and respect. By tracing how museum practices historically stripped Ancestors of their humanity through measurement, categorization, racial profiling, and scientific objectification, this paper demonstrates how rehumanization offers both a practical and conceptual pathway for transforming museum practice and confronting the enduring colonial legacies embedded in museum collections and language.