Maria Grasso: What's behind the latest bout of handwringing over the display of shrunken human heads in a museum in Oxford?
[Maria Grasso is researching a DPhil on the decline of political activism in Western Europe at Nuffield College, Oxford University.]
Recent reports suggest that some of the staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, are feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the museum’s famous ‘shrunken heads’ exhibit. They’re planning a review of the exhibit with an eye for making it more ‘respectful’, and there are even rumours of the heads being repatriated to South America. How true is this? And who do the shrunken heads really belong to? I visited the Museum to find out.
The Pitt Rivers Museum, located in the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, was founded in 1884, when General Augustus Pitt Rivers donated a collection of more than 18,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects from all around the world. The present-day collection is made up of more than half a million artefacts, including the remains of around 2,000 humans.
On the first floor, the mysterious, dimly-lit display titled ‘The Treatment of Dead Enemies’ contains the ‘shrunken heads’, or tsantsas, from the Upper Amazon region between Peru and Ecuador. It is the Museum’s most famous and popular exhibit. Traditionally, men from the Shuar, Achuar, Huambisa and Aguaruna tribes cut off their defeated enemies’ heads and shrunk them as ‘part of a ritual in which the spirit of the victim was pacified and the victim was made part of the killer’s group’ (1).
However, Dr Laura Peers, a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a member of the UK government committee that published a report for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on the handling of human remains, recently called into question the ‘ethics’ of the exhibit. She told the Oxford Times that she felt ‘uncomfortable’ with aspects of the shrunken heads display, and that she ‘personally would like to know more what the communities in Ecuador and Peru feel about it’. ‘This is an awkward area where personal views and professional training become mixed’, said Dr Peers (2). ...
The most striking thing about the recent controversy is that it emanates from within the Pitt Rivers Museum itself, rather than from any demands from overseas. It is the museum world’s own self-doubt and uncertainty about what it is right to display these days, not loud demands from tribal descendants on other continents, that gives rise to tortured debates over objects....
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Recent reports suggest that some of the staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, are feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the museum’s famous ‘shrunken heads’ exhibit. They’re planning a review of the exhibit with an eye for making it more ‘respectful’, and there are even rumours of the heads being repatriated to South America. How true is this? And who do the shrunken heads really belong to? I visited the Museum to find out.
The Pitt Rivers Museum, located in the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, was founded in 1884, when General Augustus Pitt Rivers donated a collection of more than 18,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects from all around the world. The present-day collection is made up of more than half a million artefacts, including the remains of around 2,000 humans.
On the first floor, the mysterious, dimly-lit display titled ‘The Treatment of Dead Enemies’ contains the ‘shrunken heads’, or tsantsas, from the Upper Amazon region between Peru and Ecuador. It is the Museum’s most famous and popular exhibit. Traditionally, men from the Shuar, Achuar, Huambisa and Aguaruna tribes cut off their defeated enemies’ heads and shrunk them as ‘part of a ritual in which the spirit of the victim was pacified and the victim was made part of the killer’s group’ (1).
However, Dr Laura Peers, a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a member of the UK government committee that published a report for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on the handling of human remains, recently called into question the ‘ethics’ of the exhibit. She told the Oxford Times that she felt ‘uncomfortable’ with aspects of the shrunken heads display, and that she ‘personally would like to know more what the communities in Ecuador and Peru feel about it’. ‘This is an awkward area where personal views and professional training become mixed’, said Dr Peers (2). ...
The most striking thing about the recent controversy is that it emanates from within the Pitt Rivers Museum itself, rather than from any demands from overseas. It is the museum world’s own self-doubt and uncertainty about what it is right to display these days, not loud demands from tribal descendants on other continents, that gives rise to tortured debates over objects....