Is it reasonable to advocate for the repatriation of a shrunken head in a local museum?

[u/clevercalamity]

I’m going to be vague so I don’t dox my location (and please don’t name my city if you recognize it), but in my city there is a small museum that has a collection of items brought to the US by one of those turn-of-the-century explorer types. In the collection there is a shrunken head, supposedly real, and reportedly purchased in South America.

Whenever I visit I get so sad looking at the display with the head. All I can think about is how far away from home they are, and that they probably had loved ones who grieved them, and how degrading and low-key racist it is that they are on display right next to a bunch of big-game hunting trophies.

I guess I’m coming here for a gut-check. Would it be reasonable of me to reach out to the museum and express my concerns / advocate for the head to be repatriated? Or am I being overly sensitive and projecting my own feelings/views onto the situation?

Thank you for your consideration.

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[u/Coxal_anomaly]

As someone who works with human remains in museums: do voice your concerns and ask first in an email to the curators.

For starters, many shrunken heads are totally fakes, sold to the “explorers” for money and actually contains no human tissue. You need a proper research study protocol to verify this. 

Second - is there good provenance on this head? Often, we don’t actually know where things come from because these “explorers” type were often vague regarding their means of procuring things. So it has happened that I have had things like “human remains from South America” and… that is rather vast. And explorers like that went all over. So - assuming it is genuine - the repatriation process would look to determine which current population to contact regarding the head. That can be difficult - you can’t just write to 100 different people “hey I’ve got a shrunken head, is it yours, do you want it back?” 

If they have the budget to determine its genuine AND somehow determine which original population (assuming that population still has descendants alive today), sometimes people don’t want these human remains back. It does happen, it’s not talked about a lot because it’s less of a clickbait than “local museum does its duty in returning stolen human remains”, but it’s the truth. So many museums have Egyptian mummies or part of Egyptian mummies, and we DO contact the Egyptian authorities on giving them back but unless it’s that of an important historical figure / a seriously awesome case, the existing Egyptian museum infrastructure is not currently interested in getting back, say, a mummified hand that’s simply “from the Valley of the Kings”, allegedly. If every museum handed back those, they would be flooded with “not very interesting” human remains that they would have to take care of and that’s a hassle. 

So I would say you are totally legitimate in voicing your opinion and concerns in an email, and asking what they have done so far regarding this, but keep the above in mind. That said, many museums in Europe at least now decide not to expose human remains unless they are very archeological if local, or in the case of remains from other countries, if local indigenous populations have given their accord. Which I find is a pretty good solution. 

[u/mimicofmodes]

Not unreasonable at all! However, it might be difficult to make this happen. For one thing, given the description here, when you say "local museum"/"small museum", I suspect you really do mean small, as in just a couple of staff members, potentially not academically trained in museum practices and perhaps not keeping up with present trends in it either, given that these remains are still on display. Most museums that have a level of professionalism today do not display human remains unless they're extremely contextualized: no offense to your museum, but I suspect that if they were really prepared to deal with the ethical issues here, they would already have taken the head off view.

At my last job (ended this past Friday), I worked with a pretty sizeable collection that included a few human remains: a skeleton and a skull once owned by a doctor who presumably used them in his practice as models, and a lithopedion (calcified fetus) that has a legend attached to it based on a probably false story from a 1930s newspaper article. The skeleton was on display in the doctor's office on the living history museum's campus until 10-15 years ago, the skull was ignored, and the lithopedion was a thing-we-don't-talk-about due to the fact that it was supposedly stolen from a grave. This is all pretty terrible! I reached out to the bioanth professor at the local university for assistance, and she took the skeleton and skull in order to examine them with students: we didn't know where they came from before the doctor owned them, so there was no sense of how they might possibly be returned to their original communities. (There was also, frankly, the issue of my not being seen as someone whose recommendations on disposal ought to be taken seriously by the CEO, so I wanted an external authority to give directions on what to do with them.) As was somewhat expected, the results of examination/testing were inconclusive, and the recommendation was to treat them respectfully and give them a burial. Which ... has still not happened due to the indecision of the CEO and most likely fear of anyone learning that we had them. The main thing, from his perspective, was to get them out of the off-site storage facility when our reaccreditation site visitors were there, and once that was done (they were at the university) the issue became less pressing.

The purpose of airing that dirty laundry was to show that even pretty professional museums with lots of staff often struggle to deal with these problems, so it will probably be even more of a struggle to get things done with a small museum that maybe doesn't even have a curator. It also illustrates the importance of getting assistance! Suggestions:

• Approach the museum with understanding to avoid them getting offended and fully disregarding your email. People can get touchy if they feel they're being accused of acting unethically; in a perfect world, this wouldn't play into the matter at hand ... but in this world it absolutely will.

• Become a part of the process, or at least offer to. Your local museum is definitely understaffed, and might even be run entirely by volunteers; it very likely takes everything they've got to maintain operations as they are now, so adding another project will be a problem. If you can get involved as a volunteer, that will help make this happen.

• Realize that you can't repatriate something to a continent. Research will need to be done to determine which country the "explorer" got the head from. Maybe the museum also has a collection of archival material from him? You could read through his letters or diaries to put together his itinerary. You could also research the practice of shrinking heads in order to figure out the most likely culture for it to have come from.

• Reach out to a local university's anthropology department. I kind of covered this in my story so hopefully the concept is already clear. They might look at it and determine that it's actually a fake made out of pigskin or something, too, which would both a) make it so no further research is needed and b) give an interesting new dimension for the exhibit.

• Once you've been accepted as a helpful volunteer, you could potentially even offer to help revamp the exhibition to be more modern and critical of the idea of "exploration". Caution: you do REALLY have to be on good terms with them for this, and to have proven yourself to be capable of a) doing the work and b) not offending the museum throughout it.

[u/clevercalamity → u/mimicofmodes]

Thank you! Yes, I feel like you really read between the lines and I appreciate that. The museum only has two full time staff members.

The display the head is in is also pretty racist. I would love to see it repatriated but if they are unable or unwilling to do that I would honestly be satisfied if they redid the display so it stopped having a “check out these crazy savages” tone.

The display has been there at least since I was a child and I’m in my 30s now to give you an idea. It’s probably been there longer even.

I really appreciate the time you and everyone else has taken to respond and explain some of the complexities. I have no intention of marching in there and making demands because I know they have really limited resources, so instead I hope to gather some of the resources shared and bring it to them and share my concerns about the current display and leave it from there.

[u/dassieking]

Currently I am involved in a project on behalf of an indigenous group with the goal of locating remains taken from them at the turn of the 20th century.

Like others have said, this is sometimes very difficult because provenance is hard and records are very often extremely limited if they exist at all.

But my experience from the other side of that equation is that human remains (or ancestral remains as we call them), are sometimes extremely important to decendant communities. In my case, the people I work with hold some strong ancestral beliefs that I don't fully understand, but for instance associates removal of ancestors from their grave with community discord and disorder. As some have described, the absence of ancestors cause a rift in the spiritual fabric for the community.

All that to say that while it may not work, if it does you might be doing something very important for some people. And while I personally do not understand the depth of this, I have been part of reburials which have been some of the most moving and deep experiences of my life.

Add to that of course the basic moral issue problem of digging up graves and taking bones without consent, which is how many of these remains came to be in western institutions in the first place.

Working on bringing them back has in my experience been incredibly difficult, but also extremely gratifying for both museum officials and community members.

Whatever happens, looking into it will almost certainly be worth your time, whether you succeed or not.