By Lorraine Murphy
Back in 2010, Damien Huffer, then a PhD student at the Australian National University, was contacted to assist in a court case about possibly smuggled items intended to be sold through a bourgeoning illicit market. The items in question were human remains. Shortly thereafter, Huffer discovered another disturbing truth: the trade of these deceased bodies was flourishing over prominent online social media platforms.
The trade in human skeletal remains is but one part of the digital marketplace referred to as the Red Market, an industry constructed of bad actors with nefarious intentions; individuals who knowingly transform what is left of a life into a sought-after commodity to be sold online.
These were people, once. Now, disarticulated, robbed from their resting place, the remains were relegated to anonymous things, fragments, stripped of their humanity.Huffer and Graham, These Were People Once
These were people, once. Now, disarticulated, robbed from their resting place, the remains were relegated to anonymous things, fragments, stripped of their humanity.
In his study of the Red Market, Huffer joined forces with Carleton University’s Shawn Graham, Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of History. Together they have been focusing on the constantly evolving industry for over a decade.
Now an accomplished osteoarchaeologist and interdisciplinary illicit trafficking researcher, Huffer focuses primarily on ancient or historic-period human remains to understand how lives were lived in the past. Most recently, he was a Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland, Australia.
Correspondingly, Graham’s extensive and innovative research uses digital technologies to ask new questions of the past and interrogates how archaeological methods shed light on our digitally mediated present.
With these similar but distinctive perspectives and skillsets, the duo has made it their business to research, track and report on the exploitative Red Market.
"For the last several years, we have been trying to understand why people do this, where and from whom the remains come or belong, and how extensive this trade is,” says Graham.
The results of their research are detailed in a new book titled, These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains, and Why It Matters (available now from Berghahn Books).
“People involved in the trade will often claim that it is entirely legal to buy and sell human remains. The truth is more complex – a variety of laws address buying and selling human remains, but often with very particular caveats. Other times, some laws might apply but have never been tested in court. While bone traders say the trade is legal, it’s more true to say that there are enormous loopholes that let the trade flourish” says Graham.
Consequently, many sellers have become quite resourceful in finding methods to move their products. As demonstrated in the research, hiding-in-plain-sight seems to be one of their preferred avenues, and so this ‘bone trade’ occurs over social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and the like.
There are more Ikea cabinets filled with the dead than you’d imagine.Huffer and Graham, These Were People Once.
There are more Ikea cabinets filled with the dead than you’d imagine.
The first online trade in human remains known to researchers took place on eBay, around 2002-2003, and eBay eventually banned the practice. On Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta), there is no discernible effective enforcement method. In fact, Graham and Huffer recently reported a skull seller to Facebook and were notified it's not in violation of the Terms of Service.
And while the researching pair have delved deeply into the day-to-day trade within the marketplace, keeping their eyes out for specific items or trends, their core objective is loftier – they intend to unpack the very complex meaning of the industry itself.
To understand this, they analyzed vast amounts of internet data to determine what the trade in the deceased can tell us about the living who participate and the societies, including ours, which tolerate it. Graham explains that platforms like Facebook and Instagram, designed to connect people with similar interests, effectively serve as dealers through their algorithms.
In These Were People Once, the authors employ various digital humanities methods to seek answers on the online bone trade. From simple hashtag searches on social media sites to analyzing hundreds of thousands of data points across platforms, tracking conversations, mapping connections, and tracing influence, they were able to make sense of, and provide a grid to the Red Market.
But perhaps even more significant, their findings dissect the cynical and complicit nature of our culture's relentless pursuit of innovation and growth. This prompts crucial discussions about the profound impacts of neoliberalism in the digital age on our identities, communities, and our understanding of ourselves and others.
In essence, the mistreatment of our dead symbolizes the world we’ve created and its disregard for the living as well as the wishes and customs of descendants and civilizations.
Huffer and Graham explain that groups who are marginalized in life are equally marginalized in death, as they make up a disproportionate number of the remains traded online. They make it clear, that in so many ways, the traumatic consequences of the Red Market further aggravate the deep and festering wounds of colonialism.
"The human remains trade—the trading in human materials stripped of their humanity—is like buying and selling the evidence from the broader crimes of structural racism," they write.
Colonialism involves the act of "othering." During the Victorian era, explorers often acquired skeletons from foreign lands, perpetuating the notion of adventure and dominance. Displaying human remains from abroad during this time signified one's bravery and control over violence. This historical trend persists today, with the desire to exhibit heroic masculinity driving the trade in human remains.
“It's the story that sells the skeleton,” says Huffer.
“When a body goes on the market, all the context, all the markers that might signal to what group or community that person belonged, are largely lost. A person is transformed into a thing, and dehumanized again,” Graham explains.
“For many groups, these are not objects, these are ancestors, and they have power in this world, and they are active agents in this world, but because they're in the trade they suffer another round of dehumanization. There is real harm that this trade causes.”
As readers of These Were People Once confront the unsettling reality of the Red Market and its ties to colonial legacies, they are challenged to give intense consideration to the moral justifiability of the online and offline systems of control that shape day-to-day life, and perhaps the afterlife. It is this compelling appeal from Huffer and Graham that renders the book so dreadfully poignant.