‘Why Can’t We See the Shrunken Head?’: Discussing the cultural ethics of displaying body remains with Nicholas Crowe and the Whitaker Museum
By Eleanor Beal
Organisers and Speakers: Nicholas Crowe (The Wellcome Trust), Gina Warburton and The Whitaker Museum, The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies
Welcome to this, our first and slightly extended blog on our collaborative event with Nicholas Crowe and the Whitaker Museum. This day gave me much to ponder on and I hope you enjoy it!
After an interesting travel experience that felt like the start of a stag or hen night – after our minibus was swapped at no extra charge for the Sheffield United football team coach – and involving TV screens, dining tables and pink strip lighting! We arrived in style (of a sort) at the Whitaker Museum with Nicholas Crowe for our event ‘Why can’t we see the Shrunken Head?’
With some time before the talk we had lunch at Whitaker’s charming café and enjoyed wandering round the exhibits. The Whitaker Museum is host to hundreds of historical objects of interest, including a recreation of a Victorian curiosity cabinet, art installations and exhibits on taxidermy.
After this, it was time for Nicholas and Gina to begin their talk about the Whitaker’s shrunken head. An artefact of human remains, that was not uncommon to see in museums and exhibits across the country. Nicholas is the Culturally Sensitive Collections Lead for the Wellcome Trust and has previously worked for the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, home to 500,000 objects, photographs, and manuscripts from all over the world and from all periods of existence. He was joined in his talk by curator, Gina Warburton, the Collections Curator at the Whitaker.
Introducing us to the broader history of the shrunken head and using their proper spiritual name of Tsantsa, Nicholas highlighted that these objects, of which there are surprisingly many, tend to form the two groups of ceremonial and commercial. The ceremonial Tsantsa, which can be traced to regions of Ecuador, formed part of a spiritual if also violent ritual in which early rival tribes would shrink the severed heads of their enemies to prevent their vengeful spirits from leaving and acting revenge. When Europeans learned about this practice in the 19th Century, they were fascinated and before long a gruesome new economy arose, comprising large scale morgue raids, grave thefts and marketplaces aimed at fulfilling the vast Victorian demand for these macabre totems. It was not uncommon during this period to find them in personal collections as well as exhibits and curiosity cabinets before being encountered, more typically, in museums throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is these commercial heads that account for the large number forming the museum market over the last 250 years, including the Tsantsa of a fourteen girl held by the Whitaker.
Part of Nicholas’s role at the Wellcome Trust, is the intricate business of repatriating human remains to their own countries. A large and complex job, he tells us, involving months sometimes years of correspondence and collaboration between governments, communities, and religious leaders. To be culturally sensitive, the collaboration depends on research and open-minded knowledge exchange about the history and spiritual meaning of these objects. The repatriation process is more than an issue of politics, finance, transport, and exchange, but involves learning and respectfully partaking in complex spiritual rituals and ceremonies nuanced by different community belief systems. Nicholas then talks us through the difficulties faced with repatriating, in particular, commercial heads, where the origins and specific culture are not known. For now, many of these bodily remains, like the one at the Whitaker, remain unclaimed and in a kind of purgatory, unable to be displayed and unable to be returned home.
Nicholas’s fascinating talk was held at the Whitaker Museum in Rawtenstall. Rawtenstall if you haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t!) is small town in the borough of Rossendale, fifteen miles north of Manchester and surrounded by the rugged beauty of the Rossendale valley. Its name signals its roots combining the Old English Ruh ‘rough’ and tun-stall ‘the site of a farm or cow pasture’. Rawtenstall is also something of an anomaly amongst small Lancashire towns being the unexpected setting for the cultural gem that is the Whitaker Museum and gallery. When considering the lamentable, but all too typical, limits on access to culture and the arts that is experienced in rural parts of the English North, the presence of the Whitaker makes Rawtenstall stand out and seem luckier than many other towns of similar size and locale.
This status is something that residents and locals are acutely aware of and keen to sustain, as the Q&A following Nicholas’s talk highlighted. One resident voiced:
“I saw it on a school trip. I brought all my children here to see it in the eighties. I saw no harm in this, and I can’t help but wonder if we are over thinking this?”.
A slight intake of breath (and the odd eye roll) followed from a few members of the audience. However, the unflappable curators, Nicholas and Gina, seemed to expect this kind of scepticism, acknowledging that these objects have honest sentimental value and cultural status for the communities to which they have been connected for generations. In fact, the provocative statement from this one resident led to further discussion amongst the audience keen to talk about their own experiences of seeing the shrunken head, fondly recounting coming to see it as children and bringing their own children. The “shrunken head”, they say, is what Rawtenstall has been “known for” and put it on the map.
This is not to say that the Tsantsa should still be on display or that endeavours to repatriate culturally sensitive objects is not the right way forward. All that spoke in fact agreed that it is time for us to reassess the relationship with exhibiting human remains. As another audience member pointed out the “shrunken head” moniker and even “Tsantsa” describes only what has happened to the body part post-mortem, not what has gone before. This kind or terminology allows us to ignore the fact that this is the severed head of a fourteen-year-old child on display for all to gawk at. We do not know how this child lived, or, indeed, died. The fact that her head may have then been stolen from its body post-mortem and sold on a Victorian marketplace to a voyeur with a morbid interest in the problematically and colonially configured “exotic” should not be forgotten or minimised.
The conversation did, nevertheless, allow us to examine one of the ‘complexities’ intimated earlier by Nicholas about sensitivities and politics of repatriation. The sense of cultural loss by residents of Rawtenstall raises an interesting conundrum about how to deal in a culturally sensitive manner with the communities that have held human remains for so long and to which their identities have become entangled, as well with the communities from which these remains come from. For small rural communities, such as Rawtenstall, this is especially poignant. However gruesome and unacceptable we may find them now, the more macabre elements of history are often “gateway” exhibits that entice people, young and old, to access other historical treasures and knowledge housed in museums. As we endeavour to become more enlightened to the horror of our past and the embroilment of historic sites and museums within colonial economies, we must ensure that the conversation is maintained as an open and meaningful one for all involved.
At the centre of all this conversation there was revealed a community less interested in seeing real-life horror or dead bodies, than one that is proud of their museum and harbouring a genuine thirst for history and eager for it not to be diminished for future generations The Whitaker Museum is extremely alert to this and to its important role in the community with an extensive and exciting programme of events aimed at introducing current and future generations to history and the arts: Homepage – The Whitaker Museum
This was also a significant part of what instigated the collaboration between Gina, Gemma, Nicholas, and The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. Our afternoon with the Whitaker, was an example of how museums, curators, academics and audiences can respond creatively and collaboratively to challenges in both community and history with events that invite discussion of our history’s dark past but also looks towards painting a brighter future for British museums and historic sites.
~ All the best, Ellie
This event forms an ongoing discussion between The Manchester Gothic Centre on ethics and death. We thank our new friends and cultural partners Nicholas Crowe and the Whitaker Museum for their time and efforts and look forward to collaborating with them again in the near future. For more events like this from the Centre, please keep an eye on our news and events pages.
