The Papuans were headhunters, the place where they thought, the spirits lived. Possessing them made them stronger and they kept the skulls of their enemies as trophies, hanging from carved wooden hangers inside the men’s houses. Their display served both to boast of the warrior’s prowess (they had at least two names, the first name and that of the hunted person) and to appropriate the powers and ridicule the weakness of the decapitated person. Over time, those heads from New Guinea ended up in the showcases of museums around the world, which examine their conscience and wonder what to do with the human remains that populate their collections.
Three skulls from Papua New Guinea can still be seen in the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món, at its headquarters on Montcada Street in Barcelona. But it will be for a short time. Next March they will be removed from public view and placed in reserve for study and subsequent repatriation in case they are the subject of a claim by the communities of origin. “There is a context of reflection and redefinition because sensitivity has changed a lot,” says MUEC director Carles Vicente. In recent years, museums have stopped treating human remains as cultural property, collectibles, souvenirs or trophies from distant worlds, to be considered what they really are, remains of a deceased person. “And therefore they must be treated with dignity and respect,” adds Vicente, who from the museum is developing an action protocol that clearly establishes the criteria to follow, in the absence of a clear legal framework, such as the one that It exists for example in the United Kingdom.
In any case, the ethical code of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) establishes that human remains “must be presented with great tact and respecting the feelings of dignity of all peoples.” The MUEC is investigating and inventorying the human remains in its collection, whose number – likely to grow – is around thirty-five, some of them coming from the collection of the Catalan industrialist and patron Albert Folch-Rusiñol and others of excavations carried out in Catalonia that at the beginning of the 20th century ended up in the museum in a “more or less incidental” way, although, the head of collections Lluís-Josep Ramoneda clarifies, “the majority are not on display.”
Among those that can still be seen in the room dedicated to New Guinea are the three skulls, two from the island of Papua New Guinea and one from the Indonesian area, which are part of the Folch collection, the result of the adventurous expeditions led by the industrialist and his collaborator and advisor, the sculptor Eudald Serra, throughout the world. “They are the only human remains as such that we still have on display,” says the director. “Another thing are those remains (bones, teeth, hair, nails…) that were used as raw material for the manufacture of objects and that must have come either from living people who gave them voluntarily or took advantage of them, in the case of tibias.” , ribs or vertebrae of deceased people.” This is the case, for example, of two pieces from Tibet, a kangling or trumpet made with a hollowed femur and a damaru or drum made with two crushed skulls. Instruments that Tibetans used to celebrate life and invoke divine spirits to delight in their own body, as a way of surrendering their ego. These will continue to be displayed in their display case. At least for now.
The New Guinea skulls come from direct extractions in the place of origin, during a campaign carried out shortly before the independence of part of the island in 1975, and are found in a thematic area entitled Art and War. “We removed them not only because they are very sensitive pieces, but also because their presentation was very incongruous. Two of them respond to the ritual practice of cutting off heads, they are not just any skulls, they are skulls of a man whose head has been cut off, and their meaning is the mockery of the enemy to grow as a victor, however there is a third that “It is not the result of violence or conflict but corresponds to the cult of the dead, a rite of respect for the ancestors,” explains Ramoneda, for whom, in addition to this inconsistency of showing them together in a room dedicated to war, he wonders if It was pertinent to give so much prominence to the issue of severed heads to explain the culture of the Pacific island. “You show a spear with a head stuck in it and what you are doing is giving an image of the other’s savagery that seems very disrespectful to me. It is as if to show French culture we limited ourselves to exhibiting a guillotine,” she compares. for his part Vicente.
Following the protocol of other museums such as the British Museum in London or the Pitts Rivers in Oxford, once inventoried, the museum will maintain an updated list of human remains that will be publicly available for consultation through its website. “In these cases it is also essential to know the origin of the remains and how they were obtained, first of all to be able to respond with guarantees to possible restitution claims, but the authenticity of the object must also be verified in relation to the communities that have found it. manufactured because the provenance data was often changed to give them more prestige,” says Ramoneda.
And, once removed, what to do with the remains? “Obviously we are not going to throw them in the trash either,” responds the director. “Something will have to be done. Because later burials involving skulls… Of course, on the museum’s own initiative, taking it to New Guinea to be buried would be very strange. Now, it must be studied and made known and I do not rule out that a possible return would force us to do so.”
At the moment they have not received requests for return, but they have received a visit from the active Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which is interested in the pieces of the Australian aborigines in its collection, whether human remains or not, with the aim of studying them and in in case they consider requesting his repatriation for his repatriation.”
