Returning the dead: the experience of repatriation and the heritage of racial science in Finland and Ireland

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary return and reburial of human remains in two European contexts–Inishbofin, Ireland, and Pälkäne, Finland–to analyse how communities of descent experience, articulate and mobilise claims to ancestral dead. While international debates on repatriation have largely centred on Indigenous peoples, these cases illuminate how majority or non-Indigenous European communities also engage with the legacies of racial science, colonial knowledge production and anatomical collecting. Drawing on historical sources, media reporting and community testimony, the article explores how awareness of nineteenth-century grave disturbance emerged, how heritage communities formed around the issue, and how affective languages of kinship, justice and dignity shaped engagements with museums and universities. The analysis demonstrates how repatriation rituals function as social dramas that reorder relations between past and present, science and community and institutions and citizens. By situating these cases within scholarship on the history of experience and affective heritage practices, the article argues that emotional, embodied and place-based claims constitute essential, and often decisive, components in contemporary repatriation processes.