Can we talk about shrunken heads, please?

The bizarre Gold Coast attraction which needs more scrutiny.

A short while ago, the pointy heads at the University of Sydney were having a tricky ethical debate; is it actually okay to display bits of dead humans in museums? 

Several items in their Chau Chak Wing museum were of concern, including a partially wrapped mummified head, along with the shins and feet of a child. 

What a sign of the times, eh? 

Once we wouldn’t have thought twice about displaying dismembered body parts for people to gawk at. As a child, I recall thinking these were the only things that made museums interesting. Ancient tablets and decorative pottery were the medicine you took in order to get the special treat of seeing a real human corpse.

But these days we care about things like ‘cultural sensitivity’ and ‘respecting the dead.’ So after a lot of consultation, Sydney University made the decision to remove the body fragments from display. These artefacts were put in storage just last week. So if you want to see embalmed baby legs or human heads, you’ll have to seek them elsewhere I’m afraid. 

But don’t worry - you won’t have to go too far! There is still a place that is untouched by boring stuff like good taste and ethics. 

Of course, I’m talking about Surfers Paradise. 

If you have an itch that only tastelessly displayed human remains can scratch, just look for the enormous fibreglass blue-ringed octopus in the centre of town, adorning the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not shopfront. 

There are all manner of bizarre things here: a replica of The Last Supper, comprised of 280 pieces of toast; five dead crickets painted to look like Michael Jackson; a taxidermied fox dressed as Marie Antionette, for some reason. But unquestionably, the jewel in this establishment’s crown (calling it a museum seems a stretch) lies in its grisly collection of shrunken heads. These have featured prominently in the attraction’s advertising for the last several decades, and are claimed to be genuine artefacts recovered from the Jivaroan peoples, a collection of South American tribes famously associated with the practice of head shrinking. 

There are three heads, each a little smaller than a fist. They sit on sticks in individual perspex cases, forming a circle around a life-sized model of a Jivaroan warrior. Perhaps this replica would cut an intimidating figure, were he not slowly rotating in place like a microwave meal. 

There isn’t a whole lot of information on the heads, who they belonged to, or how they came to rest in such unbecoming circumstances. Each is just given basic classification with a small laminated plaque. There is a ‘caucasian shrunken head,’ a ‘rare one of a kind negroid shrunken head’ (the fact anthropologists no longer use this obsolete and offensive classification has yet to reach the Ripley’s curators); and a ‘tribal shrunken head of a 5 year old child’.

To think. All the hand wringing at Sydney University over their tasteful Egypt displays. Meanwhile, Ripley’s has a whole damn baby’s head on a stick and no one raises an eyebrow. There isn’t even a complaint about the fact they’ve put the grisly exhibit next to a vending machine dispensing scorpion lollipops for $7. 

Seeing this, your likely first question is - are the heads even real?

The short answer: kind of.

Let me explain. 

There are some Jivaroan tribes (Shuar and Achuar) in Northern Peru and eastern Ecuador who had a cultural practice of shrinking heads. Because you might be reading this over breakfast, I won’t go into too much detail about the process, but it involves removing the skin from the skull, boiling it, heating it with hot stones, and then reforming the shrunken remains into a head-shape. There’s some academic discussion over where the heads (or tsantsas as they’re technically called) came from, but it’s largely agreed that the custom was ritualistic and used the bodies of enemy warriors killed in battle. 

This happened in relative obscurity until around the 1850s when European settlers and Christian missionaries entered the area and started trading with these tribes. Unsurprisingly, all the shrunken head stuff did not go unnoticed. Not long afterwards, scientific communities began publishing articles about tsantsas and the world became fascinated by the practice. 

If there was something Victorian-era people fucking loved, it was the macabre. And what’s more creepy, morbid, and bizarre than a shrunken human head? No curios cupboard would be complete without one. While the Shaur and Achuar people were more than willing to part with the occasional ceremonial head for trade purposes, there were only so many a couple of small tribes could provide. 

When there is demand, there are entrepreneurs willing to meet it with supply. In this case, the plucky entrepreneurs were mostly doctors and morticians working in hospitals and morgues in poor parts of middle and south America. 

Which brings me back to the three heads in Ripley’s. 

Having read a…  probably unhealthy… amount of academic literature about shrunken heads over the last few days, I can say with certainty that they are not ceremonial heads created by any Jivaroan tribes. There is a lot of visual evidence which I could go through which helped me reach this conclusion, but I don’t have to do that. Ripley’s makes the admission in the plaques. 

Jivaroan tribes made shrunken heads out of warriors from neighbouring South American tribes. Not 5-year-old children or foreigners. No, these are just regular old heads from people who (probably) died of natural causes and just ended up in the wrong morgue.

I’m not sure whether or not this is disappointing - do some mutilated corpses have more intrinsic value than others? Most reputable museums believe so. ‘Commercially’ created heads, as they’re called, are stored but not displayed. 

These are not the questions Ripley’s is asking of itself or its audience. Well, they’re not really asking anything of the audience, to be fair. If you’re shocked and slightly entertained for five minutes, that’s probably enough. If you buy a scorpion pop or a shrunken head mug from the souvenir store, even better. 

The irony, of course, is that Ripley’s is implicitly pushing a portrayal of South American tribes as savages, because of their treatment of human remains. But it wasn’t the Shuar and Achuar people who made shrunken heads a thriving industry right into the mid 20th Century. That’s the proud history of the west, my friend. 

I think we can all agree that when a person says they want to see a dead body, that’s weird. But if that dead body happens to be in a museum, for some reason it becomes totally fine. It allows people to hide their ghoulish and morbid curiosity behind a veneer of intellectualism. But Ripley’s takes a different approach. They say: ‘Hey! Come look at this dead guy!’. Yet somehow, in the age of community consultations and focus groups, they’ve managed to avoid all scrutiny. 

The most probable reason, I suppose, is that the kinds of people who are worried about ethics in the display of human remains in museums are not spending $30 to walk around hokey Gold Coast tourist traps.

Perhaps it’s time they did.