Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

Overview

A “wide-ranging and thoughtful” (Wall Street Journal) exploration of the varied obsessions that the “civilized West” has had with decapitated heads and skulls.

The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain, and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and connects our inner selves to the outer world. Yet there is a dark side to the head’s preeminence, one that has, in the course of human history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. So explains anthropologist Frances Larson in this fascinating history of decapitated human heads. From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues, from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores our macabre fixation with severed heads.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631490996
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/02/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	409,191
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Frances Larson is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Durham and the author of An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World and Severed. She lives in Durham.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Prologue: Oliver Cromwell's Head xiii

Introduction: Irresistible Heads 1

1 Shrunken Heads 17

2 Trophy Heads 47

3 Deposed Heads 77

4 Framed Heads 109

5 Potent Heads 137

6 Bone Heads 165

7 Dissected Heads 209

8 Living Heads 239

Conclusion: Other People's Heads 269

Sources 277

Acknowledgements 308

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

"A brilliantly original exploration of what it is to be human. . . . Her fluently sinuous prose is by turns meditative and disquieting—and always utterly compelling."

Helen Castor

Despite the ghoulish subject, this is a closely researched, indeed, scholarly study of the bizarre customs of hunting, collecting, trading, displaying and otherwise bonding with other people's heads. Larson states her theme—"severed heads are everywhere"—in a surprisingly pleasant narrative voice…

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

09/01/2014
Larson (An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World) delves into the grotesque yet wildly fascinating topic of decapitation. She begins her story by offering an explanation as to why disembodied heads have maintained such novelty over time: it’s because a severed head is “simultaneously a person and a thing.” Beheadings have always captivated, as can been seen from the popularity of historical tales, such as the exhumation and decapitation of Oliver Cromwell (his head then circulated a series of private collectors and was finally buried—the exact resting place a secret), and the frequency of contemporary internet searches for the decapitation of prisoners by terrorists. Larson mentions three contexts in which heads, sans body, have been prominent: in soldiers’ homes as war trophies, in the market that was created to sell shrunken heads to European travelers, and in science labs that conduct research on heads. Perhaps more relevantly for most readers, severed heads have been a noteworthy feature of many museums and religious iconography. Larson’s lively, conversational tone turns these morbid objects into something more meaningful than a mere expression of the macabre. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"[W]ide-ranging and thoughtful… In an age where so many taboos are fading, the severed head retains its dreadful and sacred power."

Wall Street Journal - Mike Jay

"This idiosyncratic history of decapitation… jumps between historical and recent examples, from the invention of the guillotine in the French Revolution to Damien Hirst’s self-portrait in a morgue… This morbid obsession, [Larson] argues, is common to all cultures—a realization that dawned on her when she worked at a museum that exhibited shrunken heads. Her book shares in this fascination—‘dangerous but irresistible’—and makes some distinctions between the forms it takes."

New Yorker

2014-09-21
Larson (Honorary Research Fellow/Univ. of Durham; An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World, 2009) explores our morbid preoccupation with the grotesque, as typified by the value we place on severed heads. Not only do severed heads appear in museums and similar collections, but "[v]ideos of beheadings have been uploaded online by terrorists and murderers in recent years and downloaded by millions of Europeans and Americans to watch in their own homes." The author explains that this book was an offshoot of her interest in how museum collections are curated, but she was soon drawn to a different reality. A skull, she writes, is the tidied-up end product of "the act of decapitation…the brutality that is required to behead a person, and the varied conditions under which that brutality is unleashed." She finds evidence that the practice of tribal headhunting was more a business transaction with representatives of collectors than a pagan religious rite; in the late 19th century, there was "a booming international trade in shrunken heads." Shakespeare expresses the symbolic power of a severed head—now an object but once the seat of our personhood—when Hamlet contemplates the soul of Yorick. Larson examines beyond the horrific instances of terrorist beheadings of hostages, and she delves into the degraded treatment of dead Japanese soldiers by American GIs who desecrated their remains. "All the World War II trophy skulls so far recorded by forensic scientists in America are Japanese," writes Larson, "and there are no records of trophy heads taken in the European theater." In the author's opinion, the savagery expressed by these cases was not only occasioned by the brutality of battle conditions, but also by "the intense racial prejudices that informed these conflicts." In fact, "soldiers often equated their job to hunting animals in the jungle." Along with the history, the author supplies complementary photographs and illustrations. An alternately intriguing and disturbing sidelight on our cultural values that is not for the squeamish.

Kirkus Reviews