“But who knows the fate of his bones or how many times he will be buried?” With this quote from the erudite and complex Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), the philosopher Cristóbal Marín inaugurates ‘Bones without rest’, a personal, intellectual and historical adventure documenting the transit of the remains of several natives of Tierra del Fuego. The journey of these unfortunates was extremely hard: the captain of the Beagle, FitzRoy—the one who offended God—transplanted them—the savage, him—from his land to 19th-century London. The objective, apart from the merciless evangelization, was to inoculate them with the virus of Western education and, although feral, they would then be enlightened by the wisdom of the superior people and would return to their own with the truth, armed with words, customs and decencies. new ones to convert their fellow men. Surprise: nothing as expected by these great men happened. ESSAY ‘Bones without rest’ Author Cristóbal Marín Editorial Debate Year 2024 Pages 300 Price 19.90 euros 5Marín’s obsession with knowing the whereabouts of the bones of these four Fuegians reveals the horror of his life. One died shortly after arriving amid terrible fevers, others were denigrated to the category of beasts and toured Europe in zoos, and the few who were returned to their places of origin ended up in their previous routines with the orphanhood of those who no longer knows where it comes from. A search is structured through libraries in London or Berlin, over innumerable times – it begins in the nineties of the last century and jumps centuries -, with some white lie – the author must, needs sneak into archives—and sprinkled with wonderfully improbable coincidences. But, like a good detective, Marín never stops at his first suspect: from the study of Jeremías Bentham (1748-1832), Marín takes us to the Fuegians, to Darwin, to Descartes, to the explorers of Tierra del Fuego, to the hunters. of Indians, to Freud, to the Nazis, to the chores of his own family. Rarely as a mature reader have I felt so much emotion and desire to change the page. It would be unfair to unravel the exciting rhizome of ‘Bones Without Rest’: as it forces you to unravel a new path – some written with the sloppiness typical of passion – it jumps another and others. Wittgenstein traces his spirit in the opening of the text: “Understanding, which consists of seeing connections.” Rarely as a mature reader – that is, in Asturian, “refalfiáu”, “spoiled” – have I felt so much emotion and desire to turn the page. “Forgetting is incorruptible,” Thomas Browne also wrote. Structured by a reflection on oblivion and its basic relationship with the human – no matter how much we humans want to forget it – this book works in necessary contradiction with its theme. It works as an antidote to oblivion. One of his many stories—exciting for anyone who dedicates himself to the word—is dedicated by Marín to the journey of the ‘Yamana-English Dictionary. A dictionary of a language of Tierra del Fuego’ by Thomas Bridges (1842-1899). This volume and the vicissitudes of its publication (from the first version in 1879 to its final edition in 1933) suffered all the attacks of oblivion. And he won, leaving universal evidence of a language, a speech, a people, a time, something of ours. ‘Bones Without Rest’ would deserve the same place.
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