The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
On the trail of the Iveragh skulls and the head-hunters who disturbed their rest
KERRY ANTHROPOLOGIST CIARÁN WALSH HAS REVIVED INTEREST IN THE FIGURE OF A VICTORIAN ACADEMIC WHO EMBODIED A STRANGE CONTRADICTION –ADVOCATING FOR THE COLONISED IRISH WHILE AT THE SAME TIME ROBBING THEIR MOST PRECIOUS POSSESSIONS FOR ‘SCIENCE’
IF you thought head-hunting the sole preserve of the tribal warriors of Borneo and New Guinea of old you might be taken aback by some of the practices of anthropologists of the Victorian era on their travels in the west of Ireland.
Former Siamsa Tíre Visual Arts Director Ciarán Walsh was certainly astonished to behold the trove of human material contained within the vaults of Trinity College Dublin in his research over the last decade towards the PhD in Anthropology he was recently awarded from NUI, Maynooth.
Ranging from sources in the west of Ireland to the Tropics, these skulls and human bones were the fruit of the ‘head-hunting’ academics of the Victorian era – not least Cambridge’s Alfred Cort Haddon.
Their practice of collecting differed significantly from that of the tribal traditions once observed on Borneo, of course, in so far as they didn’t kill their subjects prior to bagging the skulls and bones. Rather, they pilfered them from graveyards from Inishbofin right down to St Finian’s Bay in the Kingdom.
“They learned nothing from the skulls they were so keen to measure and study of course,” Ciarán told The Kerryman.
And in the case of Alfred Cort Haddon, they ring an enigmatic alarm bell in a career otherwise defined by a remarkably modern and progressive approach towards the evils of colonialism.
Ciarán’s dissertation on Haddon and the phenomenon of the academic head-hunting of the era has reignited interest in the life of the Cambridge scholar; a man who railed against the worst excesses of colonialism so far as to describe the holocaust of the native Tasmanians in the early 1800s under the auspices of his own countrymen as ‘legalised murder’.
At a time when most honorable sons of Empire were happy to engage unquestioningly in the systematic destruction of native cultures across the globe Haddon and like-minded fellows would have seemed major party-poopers.
But as the response to a recent overview of his career Ciarán wrote in the Irish Independent suggests, his record resonates deeply in the Black Lives Matter era.
“The material Haddon wrote is not what you would call highly regarded, but he really brought a brilliant eye to the work of zoology and anthropology using the latest in filming techniques of the time. In fact he was the first to film the traditional dances of the Torres Strait Islanders between Australia and New Guinea, whom he studied at length before his studies took him to the Aran Islands,” Ciarán explained.
Haddon eschewed to a degree an individualistic interpretation of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’; becoming increasingly of the view that co-operation between humans played as much of a role in the evolution of the species as brute force; that the tight-knit nature of early communities was the primary key to the survival of the gene-pool. He witnessed it first hand in the native communities of the Torres Straits to the Aran Islands, Ciarán explained.
The proto-socialist saw Aran society as a form of what he termed ‘natural communism’.
“He was totally taken by the culture and the people of the Aran Islanders. He thought it the most remarkable place he had ever been and the people there equally so. The big difference with Haddon and other academics of the time is that he took a camera with him, one that was portable and quick and he spent weeks taking photographs of seemingly everything that moved on the island.”
Which brings us to another part of the treasure trove unearthed by Ciarán in a dusty space under the old anatomy theatre in Trinity, accessed as an associate on his study in Maynooth. Portraits of islanders and west of Ireland people abounded in a collection of photographs, taken by Haddon and others in the period, that Ciarán uncovered. Among the collection, incidentally, was a never-before-seen photo of the Blasket’s most famous son, An tOileánach author Tomás Ó Criomthain.
Although fascinated with the ways of the western peoples, Haddon was just as taken with their physical dimensions striving to measure skulls alive and dead in his travels.
“My dissertation was focused on the practice of head-hunting and skull measuring as well as on the figure of Haddon. What was such a radical doing measuring skulls in the Aran Islands, and even stealing them? The two aspects seemed to be contradictory.”
“The museum is still there in Trinity, choc-a-bloc with human remains. While a lot of them were from donors, some were from an expedition Haddon was on in 1890 with a young medical student. They stole 13 skulls from a graveyard in Inisbofin on that occasion. Less well known is the fact that he stole another cache of skulls from St Finian’s Church in Ballinskelligs. They are stored to this day on a shelf underneath the Inishbofin skulls.”
Along with Inishbofin genealogist Marie Coyne, Ciarán is now arguing for the skulls to be returned to their rightful resting places to honour the dignity in life of the dead.
“Ethically, these skulls, along with those from Inishbofin should be returned to their original graves.
“That’s something we are keen to see happening. There’s a big controversy in anthropology at the moment after the American Journal of Anthropology had to remove a cover photo they used of an image of shrunken skulls over an outcry from the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Many of the skulls in the collection were bought directly from headhunters or received from donors posthumously. “The Inishbofin skulls are different. They were stolen from a graveyard. Haddon describes going ashore and hiding behind a ditch evading a group of locals before stealing the 13 skulls from the graveyard. An attempt was made again three years later but the locals were alert to it and prevented it from happening which means the original incident upset them a great deal.”
The reaction to Ciarán’s recent article in the Independent showed the Ballyheigue resident the degree to which the figure of Haddon resonates in the Black Lives Matter era; as people quicken the dismantling of the colonial legacy of the US and Britain – toppling statues and questioning certain myths that might have survived the best efforts of post colonial revisionism.
Not even the semi-religious figure of US founding father George Washington has escaped as statues to the man get daubed in red paint to remind all of his slave-owning past; juxtaposed with the contradictory fact of his emancipation of his slaves against the prevailing mores of the time.
As with Washington, we might do well to unpack Haddon’s past similarly today, Ciarán believes. Credit his advcocay and progressiveness and right his wrong-doing by bringing the the skulls home to the west.
It was all part of Victorian science’s attempt to write the history of humankind, Ciarán explained. “They learned nothing of use from measuring the skulls, but they regarded them as like the genetic markers we have today as they sought to trace the evolution and spread of mankind across the globe.”
Despite his penchant for a theft of the kind utterly in keeping with British-style colonialism, Haddon was, in fact, a champion of the colonised - even drawing the ire of the British authorities in campaigning for the welfare of the Aran Islanders at a time when they faced recurring famine.
“The greatest lesson from his example is the absolute moral obligation to stand with the victims of genocide, land-grabs and colonialism.
“He had this horror of what white people did in the colonies and it is amazing that Célia Xakriabá has called out President Jair Bolsonaro’s treatment of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon in Brazil using almost the exact same phrase as Haddon used to describe the horror in Tasmania.
“‘We are living in a moment of legislated genocide,’ Xakriabá said of what’s going on there at the moment.”