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Exhuming the Dead and Talking to the Living: The 1914 Fire at the Florida Industrial School for Boys—Invoking the Uncanny as a Site of Analysis
Author(s) -
Jackson Antoinette T.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1111/anhu.12141
Subject(s) - uncanny , archaeology , excavation , history , documentation , event (particle physics) , sociology , psychology , psychoanalysis , physics , quantum mechanics , computer science , programming language
SUMMARY This article revisits the 1914 fire at the Florida Industrial School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It resulted in the deaths of ten people and led to increased levels of public focus on the school's mission, purpose, and its day‐to‐day operational practices. Those who burned in the fire were buried on campus in the area known as “Boot Hill Cemetery.” Very little documentation about the history of the cemetery, or who is buried there, exists; and the exact locations of individual burials were never documented. In 2013, a University of South Florida (USF) research team began excavation of the burials located in the area of Boot Hill. Their efforts have been justified by requests from family members to learn about missing loved ones. Exhuming bodies of those who perished in the fire, as well as those who died at other times, demands that we think critically about what is recovered, what is invoked, and what is next and for whom. I introduce Freud's concept of “the uncanny” as a frame of reference for talking about things that surface when one recovers human remains or in some way revisits the site of a past, perhaps long‐hidden, traumatic event.