Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
Page 3
For all its unpredictability, when it is skillfully performed on a compliant victim, beheading is a quick way to go, although it is impossible to be sure how quick since no one has retained consciousness long enough to provide an answer. Some experts think consciousness is lost within two seconds due to the rapid loss of blood pressure in the brain. Others suggest that consciousness evaporates as the brain uses up all the available oxygen in the blood, which probably takes around seven seconds in humans, and seven seconds is seven seconds too long if you are a recently severed head. Decapitation may be one of the least torturous ways to die, but nonetheless it is thought to be painful. Many scientists believe that, however swiftly it is performed, decapitation must cause acute pain for a second or two.
Decapitation in one single motion draws its cultural power from its sheer velocity, and the force of the physical feat challenges that elusive moment of death, because death is presented as instantaneous even though beheadings are still largely inscrutable to science. The historian Daniel Arasse has described how the guillotine, which transformed beheading into a model of efficiency, ‘sets before our eyes the in visibility of death at the very instant of its occurrence, exact and indistinguishable’. It is surprisingly easy to forget, when contemplating the mysteries of death, that decapitation is anything but invisible. Beheading is an extremely bloody business, which is one of the reasons it is no longer used for state executions in the West, even though it is one of the most humane techniques available. Decapitation is faster and more predictable than death by hanging, lethal injection, electric shock or gassing, but the spectacle is too grim for our sensibilities.
Decapitation is a contradiction in terms because it is both brutal and effective. A beheading is a vicious and defiant act of savagery, and while there may be good biological reasons why people’s heads make an attractive prize, a beheading draws part of its power from our inability to turn away. Even in a democratic, urbanized society, there will always be people who want to watch the show. Similarly, severed heads themselves often bring people together, galvanizing them in intensely emotional situations, rather than – or as well as – repelling them. Decapitation is the ultimate tyranny; but it is also an act of creation, because, for all its cruelty, it produces an extraordinarily potent artefact that compels our attention whether we like it or not.
Even the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim can bring surprises, because there is sometimes a strange intimacy to the interaction, occasionally laced with humour, as well as sheer brutality. Each different encounter with a severed head – whether it be in the context of warfare, crime, medicine or religion – can change our understanding of the act itself. People have developed countless ways to justify the fearsome appeal of the severed head. The power that it exerts over the living may well be universal. For all their gruesome nature, severed heads are also inspirational: they move people to study, to pray, to joke, to write and to draw, to turn away or to look a little closer, and to reflect on the limits of their humanity. The irresistible nature of the severed head may be easily exploited, but it is also dangerous to ignore. This book tells a shocking story, but it is our story nonetheless.
1
Shrunken Heads
I was on my own, thinking about writing this book, when I went to see the shrunken heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum. My solitude offered me a moment of contemplation. The heads hang from cords inside their glass case: their features are set, their eyes are closed, their hair falls long and still below them. It must be quiet in there. They are withholding their secrets. Staring at them felt like a vulgar intrusion, but I stayed to stare nonetheless. I was trying to reconcile their bloody history with their inanimate presence before me.
Visitors came and went around me, and as they stood in front of the exhibition case with their families and friends, I overheard their reactions. Groups of children declared the heads ‘scary’ and ‘cool’, while numerous adults said they were ‘disgusting’ or ‘horrible’. Everyone wanted to know the same thing: were they real? How were they made? We were all trying to understand how these artefacts came to be. Objects that defy the practicalities of their own creation acquire a little magic, and it was the nature of the transformation from person to thing that enchanted us.
The shrunken heads in the Pitt Rivers Museum were made, around one hundred years ago, by the Shuar, who live in the tropical rainforest of the Andes and the Amazonian lowlands in Ecuador and Peru. The Shuar shrank heads by removing the dead man’s skull, and all the flesh and muscle from the skin, before filling it repeatedly with hot pebbles and sand until it was only a little larger than a man’s fist. To the Shuar, these practicalities served to harness the extraordinary power of their victim’s soul and were part of complex ceremonies that lasted many years, but to the visitors who confront the shrunken heads, or tsantsas, in their glass case in Oxford today, it is these practicalities that are often an end to the story in themselves.
Visitors to Oxford see the tsantsas hanging in a museum that is dedicated to the variety of objects people make and use around the world. Their environment draws attention to their materiality, but when they were made, their materiality was one of the least important things about them. Once the Shuar had successfully harnessed the power in the tsanstas for their own community, the heads themselves might be buried, thrown away, or sold to traders. Now they are in Oxford, they cannot be thrown away. In fact, quite the opposite – they have become the centre of attention.
From in among the ceremonial knives, netsuke and trephination tools, the shrunken heads exert a greater pull on the museum’s visitors than any other exhibit. While I was there a gallery attendant proudly brought over a bemused young woman, telling her, ‘This is one of the most fascinating artefacts in the museum. People come from all over the world to see the shrunken heads.’ In the press, the Pitt Rivers has been called simply the ‘Shrunken Head Museum’, and the museum’s press officer has great difficulty preventing every photographer who visits from rushing round to the shrunken heads to take an attention-grabbing photo, and stopping the constant slew of adjectives like ‘gruesome’ and ‘exotic’ and ‘weird’ that crop up in newspapers that mention the museum in ‘what to do at the weekend’ features.
Tsantsas on display in the Treatment of Dead Enemies exhibition case at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Being famous for a display of human body parts puts the museum in a difficult position, and there are ongoing debates among the staff about what should be done with the shrunken heads. Some people think that they should be taken off display, because it is disrespectful to treat the dead as curiosities to be gawped at by strangers. It does not help that visitors frequently use words like ‘bizarre’ and ‘barbaric’ to describe the shrunken heads, despite the labels that explain how and why they were created.
The shrunken heads are part of a display called ‘Treatment of Dead Enemies’ that includes decorated skulls and ceremonial dress from India and the Pacific Islands as well as South America. The text panels explain that many cultures, including our own, displayed the heads of enemies; and an engraving showing the heads of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, staked up on poles in London in 1606, underlines the point. The South American heads are presented in their cultural and historical context, and their ritual significance, as well as their popularity with European collectors, is explained.
Even so, the power of the Shuar’s technological achievement is almost unassailable. Being separated from the circumstances of their creation by an unfathomable distance in time and space makes the heads appear unreal to an outsider. Visitors looking at the heads sometimes refer to films – claiming, for example, ‘that’s the one from Harry Potter …’ (it’s not) – as though they belong in a fantasy world of our own making.
Curators at the museum are all too aware of the fact that these reactions perpetuate problematic national stereotypes. The Shuar have become known to the outside world as ‘those South American head-hunters’. If the identity of t
he Pitt Rivers Museum has merged with its collections of shrunken heads, that is nothing compared with the way in which an entire people has been typecast by museum displays like these.
Visitors say, ‘Real shrunken heads! Wow! How were they made? By slitting the skin, taking out the skull and brains and steaming them with hot sand? Gross!’ But what no one asks is: how did they get here? What are they doing hanging up in a university museum in the south of England? Once you start to answer that question, you realize that shrunken heads like these are a product as much of European curiosity, European taste and European purchasing power as they are of an archaic tribal custom. It is time to turn the spotlight round and point it back at people like you and me, and at our ancestors, who were responsible for bringing hundreds of these heads into museums and people’s homes and who delighted in them as much as – if not more than – the people who created them in the first place. After all, it is not the Shuar who are pressing their noses to the glass of an exhibition case in an Oxford University museum.
The heyday of Shuar headhunting, in the late nineteenth century, when head-taking raids were occurring roughly once a month and involved hundreds of people, was driven by a booming international trade in shrunken heads. Back in the cities of Europe and America, shrunken heads from South America, India and the Pacific Islands could be found in shops and auction houses, in museums and in people’s houses. They always sold well, and gradually supply rose to meet demand. It was simple: Europeans wanted Shuar shrunken heads and the Shuar wanted European knives and guns. The shrunken heads in our museums are not the remnants of some untouched, savage way of life as much as they are the product of the economics of colonial expansion and the power of a fantasy about ‘savage culture’. The most famous headhunting cultures, far from being ‘stuck in time’, were responding to foreign tastes.
In the 1880s, as the trade in rubber and cinchona bark, which provides the active ingredient for the anti-malarial drug quinine, spread into Ecuador, more European settler communities came to the area. The settlers exchanged cloth, machetes, steel lance heads and shotguns with the native Shuar people, in return for local pigs, deer, salt and shrunken heads. But when the settlers began to keep their own cattle, and so eat their own beef, the demand for Shuar pigs and deer declined, and eventually it was only the shrunken heads, or else the Shuar’s own labour, that settlers were interested in. The Shuar who wanted goods like cloth and machetes could trade with local missionaries who offered these things more cheaply than commercial traders, but the missionaries would never sell guns. This meant that the only way to get a gun was to sell a head, and so the ‘heads for guns’ trade became established in South America.
When visitors come to see the shrunken heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum, what they are really seeing is a story of the white man’s gun. Guns not only provided an economic incentive for the Shuar raiders, they also proved to be the best means for taking heads in the first place. Guns and steel knives were far more efficient weapons for head-taking than spears made from wood and stone, and they gave the Shuar a distinct advantage during headhunting raids. Europeans and Americans bought heads, and they supplied the equipment the Shuar needed to take heads quickly and in greater numbers. Guns were used to take heads, which were, in turn, exchanged for more guns. Well into the twentieth century it was commonly acknowledged that the price of one shrunken head was one gun. There is the story of a Shuar leader who traded some heads for guns, promptly used the guns to ambush another Shuar war party, and used those heads to trade for more guns.
It was not always so. Shuar headhunting traditions stretch back at least to the sixteenth century, but most of our knowledge of Shuar head-taking dates to the late nineteenth century, when shrunken heads were traditionally created as part of complex cultural rituals that harnessed the awesome power of a Shuar person’s soul after death. These heads were not ‘war trophies’ in the usual sense of the word, because the Shuar and Achuar people who took heads lived, for the most part, in peace with one another, and they did not value the physical head so much as the power that resided within it. Heads were not taken in warfare. Instead, tribal raids were organized specifically to take heads, or tsantsas, because tsantsas were powerful things, and a man who possessed tsantsas was a powerful man. To this extent, for the Shuar, taking heads was a socially acceptable form of violence.
After a successful raid, great feasts were held to welcome the head-takers home. These were the most important celebrations in the year, and through them the power residing in the tsantsas was transferred to the women in the family, ensuring plentiful food production for the household. Three celebratory feasts were held in total, over a period of several years, but after these celebrations the tsantsas had little public value because – unlike the traders who bought them – the Shuar were not interested in the head itself once the power of the soul had been successfully transferred to the captor’s group. Some Shuar kept their tsantsas as keepsakes, while others discarded them or sold them to travellers and settlers. In fact, it was not because they were sacred that the Shuar did not display them – just the opposite, it was because they were insignificant, like an envelope that once contained an important letter.
As trade with foreigners escalated, however, and the ‘guns for heads’ business became established, the spiritual significance of taking a person’s head – the need to secure the victim’s avenging soul and harness its power among the living – dwindled, and shrinking heads often became simply about making trade products. Shrinking heads was no longer about the circulation of power, it was about the accumulation of goods. Tsantsas lost their spiritual power and became commercial products; now some Shuar simply murdered people in order to sell their heads. In this way, Europeans and Americans helped to create the indiscriminate, bloodthirsty headhunters they expected to find. As demand grew, so the Shuar headhunters became less discriminatory. Historically, only men’s heads had been taken, because only men possessed the avenging soul that could be trapped inside the head, but now the Shuar began to take the heads of women and children for trade, even though they had no ritual significance.
So women’s heads and children’s heads, severed by European knives, ended up on the streets of South American towns and cities to be sold as souvenirs. They were little more than a kind of macabre tourist art for travellers, who no doubt thought they were buying authentic tsantsas from a land of primitive warriors rather than a shrunken head made for market. Even less authentic were the heads of settlers and South Americans who had nothing to do with headhunters, who had probably lived in cities all their lives, but who ended up under a taxidermist’s knife so that their heads could be shrunk for sale too. Taxidermists were often responsible for ‘fake’ tsantsas, and knowing that this work would make them a little extra money on the side, they made arrangements with someone at the local hospital morgue to supply their ‘raw materials’. These were the unclaimed dead, the poor and the dispossessed, who fell victim to a European and American desire for exotic curiosities.
Such was the demand for shrunken heads that when no human corpses were available, opportunists turned their hand to shrinking monkey and sloth heads which, once reduced in size and ‘remodelled’, often fooled the curio-hunters. As the American engineer and traveller Franz Up de Graff noted, ‘In Panama, where tourists have created a brisk demand for these uncouth curios, heads, either human or monkey, are made to order or sold for $25.00 each.’ Fake heads were made from goatskin, wood, resin or rubber. Even though laws were brought in forbidding the trade in tsantsas, many were still being sold surreptitiously to tourists during the mid-twentieth century.
All this means that the majority of Shuar shrunken heads in museum collections may, in fact, be fakes. Many of them are not human at all, and a number of those that are human have little to do with the Shuar, making the notion of the timeless Shuar headhunter even more of a Euro-American construction. Visitors may see these exhibits and think of them as the gruesome trophies of an untouched savage p
eople, when what they are actually seeing are the gruesome trophies of a western fascination with the idea of an untouched savage people.
Of the ten shrunken heads on display at the Pitt Rivers Museum, two are sloth heads, two are howler monkey heads and, of the six remaining human heads, three are ‘fakes’ made for sale. So, three of the human heads in the Pitt Rivers Museum – the authentic ones – tell a nuanced tale of murderous acts that were condoned by the society where they were made, that had deep spiritual significance and that played their part in the cycle of life through the generations. The other three – the fakes – tell of the nameless dead, the impoverished and outcast who, after their deaths, became the victims of an international trade in exotic collectibles that had little to do with the indigenous beliefs of the inhabitants of the Amazon jungle.