Some were sold to travellers, and demand for them grew in Europe and America. Prince Harry is having a bruising time in the High Court They were made about a century ago by the Shuar tribe of Peru and Ecuador, by removing the skull, flesh and muscle, then repeatedly filling the skin with hot sand and pebbles the idea was to harness the power of the soul, and once that had been achieved, in ceremonies that lasted years, the heads were disposable. She begins her story at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (of which she has co-written a history), where shrunken heads - tsantsas - are displayed in the ‘treatment of dead enemies’ section. ‘Could decapitation,’ asks Larson, ‘be just another stage in a person’s life?’ And Americans pay $50,000 to have their own heads cut off - cryonicists prefer the term ‘cephalic isolation’ - and preserved in thermos flasks of liquid nitrogen. Medical students dissect them, thereby acquiring the ‘necessary inhumanity’ of their profession. Artists are inspired by them, especially the erotically charged ones in the stories of Salome and Judith. Pilgrims visit them: the heads of St Peter and St Paul, for example, are thought to be in the high altar of the Basilica of St John Lateran. A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently impossible duality… an intense incongruity’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |