In early October, The Swan public sale home in Tetsworth, Oxfordshire, listed a number of numerous human stays on the market, together with skulls from west Africa and shrunken heads from South America.
They have been withdrawn inside a few days after objections have been raised by representatives of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford and indigenous activists.
The Pitt Rivers Museum specialises in archaeology and anthropology and has been returning related objects from its personal assortment as a part of a wider decolonisation course of.
The stays withdrawn from the Swan public sale – largely embellished and adorned skulls – gave the impression to be from colonial-era collections, with estimated costs starting from £2,000 to £25,000. They’d beforehand been owned by collectors together with the late Playboy proprietor Hugh Hefner, and Billy Jamieson, a infamous Canadian vintage seller and self-styled “headhunter”.
The stays included examples from the Naga individuals of India, the Ekoi individuals of present-day Nigeria and Cameroon, and different teams within the Solomon Islands, Benin, Congo, Nigeria, Amazonia and Papua New Guinea.
Whereas the UK’s museums and schooling establishments more and more have skilled pointers in regards to the respectful therapy of human stays, these in personal collections do not need any safety. Though it’s tough to legislate how individuals care for personal collections, this case raises the query of whether or not human stays ought to nonetheless be allowed to be purchased and bought in any respect.
Human stays have lengthy held a fascination for the residing. Their assortment, show and use has an extended, and sometimes darkish, historical past. The Victorians had a penchant for mummies, grinding them as much as create new paint colors, tonics for numerous illnesses and extra.
There are tales from as late as 1967 of American troopers eradicating ears and fingers of these killed through the struggle in Vietnam as trophies. Throughout and after the Cambodian genocide within the Nineteen Seventies, some individuals used the stays of the useless as amulets to beat back harmful enemies, and as medicines for numerous diseases amongst different issues.
The latest public sale, nonetheless, exhibits that colonial practices of amassing, proudly owning and displaying the stays of the useless could be very a lot alive in Britain at this time.
Accumulating the useless
Only a few nations totally limit the sale of human stays, and most laws stays patchy between jurisdictions. There’s additionally usually a a scarcity of readability over whether or not guidelines about such objects would fall beneath legal guidelines involved with the therapy of our bodies or those who shield heritage.
In England, Wales and Northern Eire, the Human Tissues Act protects human stays. Rising as a response to the Alder Hey organ scandal and different related circumstances, the act goals to “guarantee human tissue is used safely and ethically, with correct consent”.
Its remit, nonetheless, is restricted to stays which might be lower than 100 years outdated. It additionally solely covers disposal, storage and public show. The sale of human tissue is barely prohibited whether it is for the needs of medical transplantation.
The vast majority of stays already in personal collections, which have been largely amassed through the colonial interval, are due to this fact not coated. There are additionally vital points with enforcement of moral requirements. A examine in 2022 confirmed that the unregulated commerce in human stays is flourishing on UK social media.
Such a commerce suggests the our bodies of some human beings are seen as artefacts or artworks. They’re handled like objects and never individuals – added to collections of “curiosities” as if they have been every other merchandise within the assortment.
This isn’t an issue of the previous or one simply related to non-public collections. Such attitudes – that others are worthy of much less respect and care than others – underpins a lot racism, imperialism and xenophobia at this time. Such views are linked to concepts of the prevalence of 1 group of individuals to a different. The sale of the useless illuminates this in vivid kind.
The Swan public sale home listed its heaps as a part of what it known as “The Curious Collector Sale” and marketed these stays alongside heaps containing film props, ethnic artwork and artefacts, collections of taxidermy and fossils, and work and posters. Though some have been recognized because the ancestors of the related ethnic group, there was nothing to tell apart them from the opposite curios and collectibles of the sale.
Neiphiu Rio, the chief minister of Nagaland in India, a few of whose ancestral stays have been amongst these being listed, is reported as writing to India’s overseas minister:
You’ll agree that the human stays of any deceased individual belongs to these individuals and their land. Furthermore, the auctioning of human stays deeply hurts the emotions of the individuals, is an act of dehumanisation and is taken into account as continued colonial violence upon our individuals.
Alamy
Promoting colonial collections, and particularly human stays, perpetuates the concepts that have been integral to British imperialism – that different individuals may be issues to be owned and traded. We’d be horrified if the stays of our personal ancestors or of individuals from our personal society have been handled on this manner. To begin coping with the underlying points associated to this, such gross sales must cease.
We approached the Swan public sale home for touch upon this story however they didn’t reply.
