ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the reasons for, and public reactions to, the taking off display of 120 human remains in the Summer of 2020 at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. One side of “Treatment of Dead Enemies” case-displays included a supposedly “iconic” display of the Shuar shrunken heads or tsantsa, that anecdotally was the Museum's number one attraction. The removal caused both public outcry and wide-felt relief. Newly installed interpretation replaced the original case display, to allow visitors to consider the problematic past academic practices of physical anthropology, its relationship to race science and how those are linked to racist ideas about superiority and inferiority that shape our present today. The chapter discusses what tsantsa are, why they ended up in the European imagination and tries to understand some of the reactions of press and public to the changes.
