Buy One Get One: The Legal and Socio-Cultural Context of ‘Gifting’ Within the Australian Human Remains Trade

Today’s global human remains trade – how it operates on and offline, where remains come from, and how algorithmic amplification allows for complex networks to form between buyers, sellers, and middlemen – has seen an increasing amount of research and media attention. Underpinning this increasing interest is the growing realization that poorly regulated trafficking inflicts genuine psychological harm on the living (whether relatives of body donors or descendant communities), as well as accrues losses to the archaeological record or risks the jeopardization of crime scenes. Much of this work, however, has focused on the global north. Within the global south, Australia is recognized as an emerging market country for many categories of cultural heritage trafficking, including human remains. This paper reviews the function and socio-legal context of a specific seller’s tactic so far seen only among Australian human remains collectors, whereby photographs of human remains are offered for sale, with the bones themselves included as a “gift”. From a network analysis of text from a corpus of anonymized posts from Facebook, conducted using t-SNE and Voyant Tools, 11 key discourse themes are identified that point to how and why this sales tactic is used. Better understanding its function is a necessary first step to closing this loophole within Australian law, but also to identifying similar tricks at work within collector networks elsewhere.