Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
By Frances Larson
Granta, 336 pages, $30
Reviewed by Mike Stimpson
With Islamic State's decapitation of hostages making headlines and leading newscasts the world over, the subject of British anthropologist Frances Larson's new work of popular history is timely.
Larson, an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford, has written a smart and engaging history of how Western society's fascination with human heads has extended to collecting and displaying them.
Severed is written for a general audience, though some prospective readers may cringe at its subject matter. Those who get past their discomfort are in for a treat.
The brutal execution videos from Syria have understandably repulsed and horrified people here. Yet it wasn't so long ago that Europeans crowded town squares to watch heads get lopped off, and centuries-old heads are on display in churches and museums.
Saint Oliver Plunkett's more-than-300-year-old head, with some hair still clinging to its slowly decaying flesh, is in a glass case at a church in Ireland, just as Saint Catherine of Siena's is kept as a divine relic in Italy.
Perhaps the most famous and talked-about part of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum is its collection of shrunken heads from South America.
The place decapitation still holds in popular culture is reflected by enduring figures of speech such as "head on a platter" (a reference to John the Baptist's execution) and "don't lose your head."
Fascination with heads and their separation from bodies is hardly surprising, Larson notes, when you consider that our faces express our personalities and our heads host four of the five senses.
Chopping a head off, then, is a powerful denunciation of what a person has done, and keeping a head on display at a place of worship is an expression of profound reverence.
Sometimes keeping a head or skull can be an expression of deep respect or admiration, such as when a church sexton in Vienna swiped composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's skull.
Other times it has nothing to do with respect and admiration. Larson writes that the shrunken heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum are remnants of "an international trade in exotic collectibles" in the 19th century, when European colonials offered cash and goods for human heads.
In the 20th century, some American soldiers in Vietnam and the Second World War's Pacific theatre kept skulls as trophies. Life magazine sparked outrage in 1944 by publishing a photo of a pretty Arizona woman with a gift her navy boyfriend had sent her: a Japanese soldier's skull.
Indeed, Larson remarks, "The physical detachment of a person's head is often preceded by an assumed social detachment that separates the perpetrator from his victim. This social detachment has often taken the form of racism."
Perceptive and well-written, Severed is a great read even if its subject seems at odds with the holiday season.
It's also, as one might expect of an academic's work, thoroughly researched. The bibliography runs to nearly 30 pages, and Larson promises "detailed notes" at her website.
Larson has a good head. This book is evidence of that.
