"‘Face-to-face’ is the most prevalent metaphor in the literature on bog bodies. Lévinas’s notion of the face, the ethical demands that others make on us, is about responsibility. It is, he argues, 'definitely not a plastic form like a portrait.' Nevertheless, he does point out that a visual representation of a face can become the place, to use Judith Butler’s formulation, 'where humanization and dehumanization occur ceaselessly,' so that the face in representation essentially becomes a paradox. The paradox is that the human face, when captured in a plastic form (such as a face reconstruction) can lose the very humanness it proposes to show. I used Levinas’ concept and Butler’s culling of his concepts to investigate how face reconstructions of bog people fit into this paradox.''

Recommended by Karin Sanders, Professor of Scandinavian and author of Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination.