Alfred Cort Haddon did not actually kill anyone for his collection of skulls, but he was an experienced collector of human heads, and his activities raised no condemnation from the academic community or the press because they were far from unusual: most anthropologists had a few stories about their ‘headhunting’ exploits abroad. Haddon is remembered as one of the founding fathers of British anthropology because he organized the first professional anthropological field trip of its kind, to the Torres Strait and Borneo, in 1898. On this expedition, Haddon was so ‘very anxious to obtain some human skulls for the collection at Cambridge’ that he asked for them wherever he went. On the island of Mer, in the Torres Strait, where people were reluctant to comply with Haddon’s requests, he would ‘constantly’ say to the people he met, in pidgin English:
Me fellow friend belong you fellow. ’Spose you get me head belong dead man, I no speak. ’Spose you get him, I no savvy what name you catch him, that business belong you fellow. What for I get you fellow trouble?
Haddon offered sixpence for each head belong dead man and eventually met with some success. On one occasion, to his amusement, a woman who overheard one of these transactions ‘looked rather queer’ when she heard the name of the dead man in question, and Haddon later learned that this particular skull ‘belonged to the girl’s uncle!’ This was how the white man hunted for heads.
Haddon did not just buy heads on his travels through the Torres Strait and Borneo, he bought all the paraphernalia of headhunting too: he bought the knives that people used to cut heads off, the cords they used to hang them from, and the slings they used to carry them home. He frequently asked questions about headhunting – why did people do it? When did they last do it? How did they do it? – as did the colonial officials who were intent on monitoring the practice. And he spent a lot of time lining people up and measuring their heads – recording the size of people’s heads was a particular scientific obsession at the time – which must have been a rather nerve-racking experience under the circumstances.
When Haddon visited Borneo, the rajahs and their government had been caught up in local headhunting raids for decades, and on many occasions the government had condoned the taking of heads in return for political and military support. Those tribes that associated with the Rajah were given opportunities to take heads. When, for example, the Bornean Iban people had helped the Rajah suppress a Chinese rebellion in Kuching in 1857, they set about drying the heads of the rebels in the town’s bazaar. ‘This head cooking was the most disgusting part of the whole affair,’ wrote one European observer, ‘and made us feel very strongly that it was only one set of savages who had been called in to punish another.’ And that might have described colonial rule for the rest of the nineteenth century: headhunting was forbidden, and severely punished, except when it was not. In 1894, an agreement was reached between the indigenous groups and the colonial government to outlaw headhunting, but intermittent raids and inter-tribal warfare continued until 1924, when a second peacemaking ceremony was held in Sarawak.
Before this, government officials had found it impossible to eradicate headhunting, and often became drawn into the politics of inter-group conflicts. Charles Hose, a colonial officer and Haddon’s host while he was in Borneo, remembered a ‘typical’ example of his efforts to maintain law and order among the headhunters in the 1880s and ’90s. When an innocent Chinese merchant was murdered for his head, in an unprovoked attack, Hose felt he had to take action. The accused, a man named Tingi, failed to answer a summons, so Hose asked a neighbouring tribe to seek him and his accomplices out and bring them back alive, or, ‘if this could not be done, to execute them and bring their heads’.
It is unclear whether Hose wanted Tingi’s head for his own reasons, as proof that justice had been done, or whether he was acknowledging local conventions, turning a blind eye, or offering some kind of reward by allowing his accomplices to take the heads in question. Whatever the reason, it is clear that government officials instigated or excused headhunting expeditions when it suited them. The problem, as Hose later put it, was ‘how to combine judicious repression with a liberal development of the territory’. There were practical limits to the colonial officer’s powers, and he found himself playing local politics as best he could. Before long, Tingi was found and shot (with a gun provided by Hose) and his head was cut off – ‘Snick! Snick!’
Tingi’s death almost triggered all-out war between the different Iban groups, and soon afterwards Hose found himself joining a war party, 500 men strong, intent on taking heads. On this occasion, he was able to avert bloodshed when the enemy appeared to have fled into the jungle, but he was constantly having to achieve his own objectives of establishing the rule of law and reducing headhunting raids from within a culture where headhunting was part of the dynamics of inter-group relationships. Ironically, his efforts to punish those who took heads could easily lead to an escalation of violence.
Hose also accumulated a sizeable private collection of crania from Bornean headhunting raids, 112 of which are kept in the Duckworth Collection at the University of Cambridge. Men (and occasionally women) like Hose and Haddon collected heads in the name of rational knowledge. They set about documenting, measuring and comparing heads, activities which were all considered eminently sensible as they were essential first steps towards understanding indigenous people in a way in which they could not understand themselves. Many early anthropologists were medical men who were used to handling dead bodies and treating them as scientific specimens to be compared. Haddon and Hose were both trained as zoologists, and their cultural research was an extension of their interest in natural history. They were contributing to a ‘science of man’, and had developed a professional detachment to their subject matter.
While headhunting defined ‘primitive’ man’s base condition, collecting other people’s heads bolstered ‘civilized’ man’s cultural ascendancy. In some ways, primitive and civilized people occupied different worlds even when they lived side by side. Back at home, colonial residents had to translate their experiences into stories that their countrymen could understand. Even reputable men like Haddon and Hose could not resist presenting their lives abroad as though they were scenes in a Boys’ Own adventure story every now and then: off came Tingi’s head, ‘Snick! Snick!’
There is, of course, a great difference between collecting head-hunting trophies and creating them. None of these British scientists, not even Jameson, had wielded the blade himself. The sheer brutality of the act of decapitation set apart ‘them’ from ‘us’, and it proved to be an irresistible symbol of cultural difference. Headhunting epitomized the moral limitations of ‘savage society’. Headhunters were characterized in the press as emotional people who were unable or unwilling to recognize the ethical implications of their actions. These tribes were driven by base and belligerent instincts so compelling that they appeared to be in danger of eradicating themselves – soon-to-be victims of their own natural impulses. Unlike James Jameson, they did not know what was good for them.
The vision of headhunting informed a much deeper dichotomy that flourished in the late nineteenth century, between ‘wild’ people and the more ‘refined’ viewing public who gazed upon them. A profound and derogatory prejudice has shaped the display of foreign cultures in Europe and America for centuries, and it allowed those who visited fairs and museums to define themselves in opposition to those people they came to see. Set on display at a reassuring distance – on a stage, in the pages of a book or magazine, in a glass case or encircled by a protective rope barrier – the fantastical ‘primitive savage’ embodied everything that middle-class society was not. But before we comfort ourselves that we have come a long way since then, maybe we should return briefly to the shrunken heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum. There are more than a few echoes of this all-too-easy opposition at work when we encounter tsantsas in museums today.
In 2007 it was erroneously reported in the news that staff at the Pitt Rivers were considering taking t
he shrunken heads off display, and people were quick to voice their disapproval. A spokeswoman for the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum said that they were the ‘number one exhibit’ and loved by children, who would miss them if they were taken away. Philip Pullman, the author who drew inspiration from the Pitt Rivers for his children’s book The Subtle Knife, also wanted the heads to stay. Interestingly, he acknowledged that exhibiting human heads might be thought ‘brutal’, but at the same time believed that their value lay in the very fact that they were real and not plastic replicas. A few months later, as I described in the introduction, the artist Ted Dewan offered his own head for shrinking and hoped it would make a ‘family friendly’ exhibit. ‘The Pitt Rivers Museum is a wonderfully inspiring and Holy place for me,’ Dewan wrote. ‘Being an ethically sensitive institution that honours the belief systems of indigenous peoples, no matter how obscure, I’m sure the Museum would not discriminate against my belief system.’
Dewan’s offer was politely refused, but how would we feel if Dewan’s head was shrunken, according to his own wishes, and put on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum? Would the families who come to Oxford to see the shrunken heads react in the same way if they were confronted by a glass case filled with European heads that were less than a hundred years old? And, if not – if a case of European people’s heads seems outrageous – what does that say about the ethics of putting South American people’s heads on display? The museum is, after all, meant to be a civilized and civilizing institution. It has a duty to the people it represents, to the people it looks after, to create respectful and educational displays.
On the other hand, it is too easy to say that if displaying shrunken heads is not civilized, it must be barbaric, and there are good reasons for the Pitt Rivers Museum to keep its collection of heads firmly inside their glass case. There are no requests from the Shuar or Achuar people to have the heads taken off display or returned to South America. In fact, Shuar visitors to other museums, notably the American Museum of Natural History in New York, have shown no interest in asking for tsantsas back. Instead, they – at least these particular Shuar visitors – felt that the tsantsas in the American Museum of Natural History created an important connection between their people and the people of New York City. If the Shuar do not mind seeing these shrunken heads in a museum display, then maybe we should not mind either; it is not so much the fact that tsantsas are on display that is problematic, it is the kinds of messages they are sending out to people who come and see them.
Of course, the Shuar do not see themselves as primitive savages, and they never have, because that is a foreign label and a foreign construct. In a way, it has nothing to do with the Shuar and everything to do with us, how we see them and how we see ourselves in relation to them. Today, many Shuar are cattle farmers; in the past, Shuar men hunted and women cultivated food in their gardens. The Shuar visitors to the American Museum of Natural History in 2003 were migrants who lived and worked in New York City. When they saw the display of tsantsas in the museum, they thought of them not as part of who they are, but as part of who they are not, because, of course, it is not these New Yorkers who are headhunters, but their distant ancestors. Shuar headhunting raids were completely suppressed during the 1960s and 1970s. To us, the shrunken heads represent the Shuar, but to the Shuar they represent one small part of their people’s history.
Museums have a duty to tell the stories of the dead, and to show other cultures as rational, meaningful and part of the same modern, global community. The archaeologist Melanie Giles has written of the sense of advocacy she feels in her work with Iron Age ‘bog bodies’, some of whom were decapitated. She writes that ‘it is by conjuring the historical and environmental context of these violent events that we begin to understand them not as alien or barbaric acts, but as meaningful – if brutal – strategies, adopted by people in times of social crisis’. Rather than positioning ourselves behind the rope barriers and maintaining those old colonial boundaries, we can explore the spaces that the tsantsas open up.
The Shuar heads, and other human heads in museums, still exert their power over the living, they still draw the crowds, and because of that they can make people stop and think again. These shrunken heads can help to break down stereotypes and challenge people’s assumptions about supposedly primitive customs. The tsantsas are not what they seem. They are the product of a relationship between Euro-Americans and South Americans, and they have as much to do with ‘our’ history as with Shuar and Achuar history. If the tsantsas are to remain on display in Oxford, then this is where their power should lie. They can help us to confront the complexities of foreign engagement with South American culture over the centuries and flout not only the popular impression that artefacts like these are trophies of war – since tsantsas are not war trophies – but also the notion that when we stare through the glass case at shrunken heads in a British museum, they are somehow nothing to do with us.
As a postscript to this, it is sobering to discover some of the popular stereotypes of foreigners in Island Southeast Asia. What do ‘they’ think of ‘us’? They think of us as headhunters, of course. Given that European and American collectors spent a considerable amount of time asking for people’s heads on their travels, and many took the trouble to open up graves and rob people of their skulls, it is hardly surprising that ‘the white man’ has made a reputation for himself in some places.
Today, foreigners are associated with danger and evil forces in parts of Indonesia. For more than a century, rumours have spread through the villages of Borneo, Java and Sulawesi of men who prowl at night in search of heads, or strangers sent by the government to kidnap children so that their heads can be buried under new roads and bridges to strengthen them. When an oil company, drilling for natural gas in East Java, caused a huge mud volcano in May 2006, rumours started to spread that the government was looking for children’s heads to drop into the crater to stem the tide of mud. People said they needed thousands of heads. There were stories of headless bodies lying in the fields and in hospitals, and of children being kidnapped and taken away on motorbikes. Some people kept their children away from school or decided to accompany them home rather than let them walk on their own.
Rumours like these are not new. In the 1890s stories spread around Sarawak in Malaysia of government agents sent to take heads to bury in the foundations of a new reservoir, and a number of supposed head-hunters were murdered by frightened villagers. Similar ‘scares’ were common in the twentieth century, as the government set about building new roads and bridges. People on the island of Flores remember running into their houses as children, in the 1950s, at the sound of a car, because their parents had told them that cars, which were rare at the time, carried headhunters searching for children to decapitate.
More often than not, Europeans were implicated in these stories. Missionaries often found themselves at the centre of headhunting panics. There was talk of priests who gave out medicines that made people die and then dug up their fresh graves so that they could decapitate the bodies. One priest working in Flores in the 1960s used to sit in his church late at night in prayer, but the locals thought he was waiting for victims. They refused to go to church, and rumours began to circulate that he had been seen walking through villages at night with children’s heads. Eventually the priest was moved to another parish, and his successor was advised to be less pious. Later priests were told not to walk alone at night, or if they had to, to carry a lantern and sing loudly so that they could not be mistaken for evil spirits.
Today, there are stories on Sumba, an island in eastern Indonesia, of foreigners who carry metal boxes and drive white trucks filled with babies’ blood, fat, heads and body parts, which they use to convert into electricity. These intruders are especially feared in the months of July and August, which happen to be both the peak tourist season and the traditional time of year for headhunting raids, and they have become more common in the last two decades as ‘adventure’ backpacker holidays have g
rown more popular and electricity has become more widespread. It is ironic that holidaymakers come to Sumba to experience a supposedly wild, remote and potentially dangerous tribal culture, and all the while, the Sumbanese think that their foreign visitors look like ferocious beasts, that their hair has a distinctive and unpleasant smell, and that they use their ubiquitous ‘metal boxes’ (cameras) to take away their children’s blood.
Headhunting is still, as it has always been, one of the ways in which people in Indonesia make sense of outsiders, and particularly those outsiders who are associated with technologies like cars, cameras and electricity, roads and bridges and medicines. These foreigners are wealthy, and sometimes they perform ‘miracles’, but this means that they are also potentially dangerous. Anthropologists have theorised that the idea of a foreign headhunter is a reaction to the intrusion of state power and the loss of political autonomy. Settlers took control over traditional headhunting in colonial times and assumed its practices for themselves. Now they, the settlers, are the headhunters. They have the right to use force, to punish and rule, and to take heads if they so wish. And so headhunting has become a symbol of foreign domination over indigenous culture, one of the ways in which the strength of the village has been appropriated to fortify the state.
Generations of anthropologists and government officials have tried to convince their indigenous subjects that their stories are unfounded. But it is hard to extinguish such pervasive rumours – rumours that crop up year after year – particularly when the evidence of history is against you. Headhunting, in all its forms, has shaped the history of the colonizer as well as the history of his colonial subjects.
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Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 5
