Throughout their history in America, museums, including those of art, have adapted according to their environment. One result of this adaptability is that objects in art museum collections are not as permanent as those outside the museum field tend to believe. As scholarship, funding, and audiences change, objects which at one time were considered pertinent to a museum collection may be deaccessioned, the term used for when a museum removes an accessioned object from its permanent collection. Yet deaccessioning in America tended to remain the exception, rather than the rule, until the last three decades of the twentieth century. How deaccessioning became a normal element of collections management in the late twentieth century can be understood as a consequence of a number of factors, including a change in the institutional and economic climate in which art museums operated. Examining some of the factors leading to the normalization of deaccessioning, at least for those in the museum community, can help us better understand the implications of such a shift.

In 2019 media articles about clearance of human remains at a museum in Gothenburg caught my attention. The remains would either be destroyed, reburied or repatriated. The politically driven management, Västarvet, had made a decision on clearance of human remains at two museums in Gothenburg, which created reactions both in the research world and in the media. That´s why I chose to study deaccession of human remains in museums.  The purpose of this master's thesis is to study how the principles for human remains, and attitudes towards deaccession of human remains have changed since the 19th century, and why? This is studied through a power and ethical perspective. The thesis research question is, what are the attitudes to clearance of human remains and how have the principles changed? This question is broken down into three smaller questions, which are; What function have human remains had and what function do they have today? How has the view of human remains changed since the 19th century? What are the alternatives for clearance of human remains? The method in this thesis is mail interview and literature study. The theoretical standpoints in this thesis are power and ethic, where power is based upon Michel Foucault’s approach to power and subject. I have also included two cases of deaccession, one is Västarvet and the other one is a case of repatriation from the British Museum. Some of the results are that the function human remains have had, has partly changed over the past 200 years. Early on, human remains became study objects, which has continued into our time. But today the focus is mainly on research that is more or less ethically justifiable. Attitudes toward clearance of human remains in museums are generally something that comes with objections, specially from media. From museum professionals clearance is not something that they are opposed to, but at the same time it is a process that few in the industry use. This is a two years master´s thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies.