The shrunken heads, or tsantsas, were originally made by the Shuar and Achuar people from the rainforests of Ecuador and Peru, who were once derogatively described as “headhunters”. “They were termed ‘the hairy Ainu’ to explain that they were more ‘barbaric’ or ‘savage’,” said Thompson-Odlum, who added that the documents suggested some of the museum’s samples were obtained by forcibly cutting Ainu people’s hair. Photograph: Pitt Rivers Museumįor example, archival records about 52 hair samples from the indigenous Ainu people of Japan exoticised their long hair and their beards. Other human remains including skulls, scalps, mummies and hair will also be removed. Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a research assistant at the museum who reviewed the labelling of objects, said many human remains were originally collected and exhibited by anthropologists who believed in now-debunked, racist scientific theories about the superiority of certain races. Staff at the museum are reaching out to indigenous communities around the world to see whether they think the human remains removed from display, and hundreds more in its archives, should be repatriated to their country of origin, be redisplayed in a more respectful and accurate manner, or stay in storage. Van Broekhoven said most of the human remains removed from display came from India, Tibet, Malaysia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Ecuador and the Solomon Islands. This will include commissioning contemporary artists from those countries to make work that more accurately reflects the origins of objects in the collection. The move is part of a wider project to educate visitors about the way many of the museum’s 500,000 artefacts were violently taken as a result of British imperial expansion and occupation, then presented in a way that portrayed other cultures as inferior. This will address how exhibiting human remains has “reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking” of other cultures, portraying them as “savage, primitive or gruesome”, said the museum’s director, Dr Laura Van Broekhoven. When the Pitt Rivers, one of the world’s most important ethnological museums, reopens later this month for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic, visitors will instead encounter an ethical display of its collection.
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