The Man Who Lost His Head (2007) is a fairly painless telling of the story of how a village of Maori, who find a carving of the head of a lost leader that is still integral to their lives is now being kept in a British museum, fight to have it repatriated to them. We find the usual themes of enlightenment, romance, and that sort of thing.
But it is a useful, valuable story in that it raises important questions concerning the practices of the great museums of the world, and the objects that they hold in them. For example, on last year’s trip to Chicago’s Field Museum, we ran across a room dedicated to artifacts taken from South Pacific islands where the inhabitants are head hunters. I wonder if those villages still exist, and if these artifacts, now lost to them, are still important to their villages. This is a parallel to the Maori story of this movie, as that carving not only symbolizes that long-gone leader, but actually embodies him. His loss was a tremendous loss to the community, echoing down through the generations.
This comes down to the very different views that different societies can potentially take of their pasts and future and of the very nature of life itself. Westerners struggle between the call of ancient sects from the Judeo-Christian family, and the more objective approaches of science and even agnosticism/atheism. Some ancient artifacts are still forbidden, but others may be freely shown by museums, especially those from alien cultures.
And those alien cultures, such as the Maori, are often not finished with them. Skipping over the varied roles such artifacts, possibly imbued with some sort of agency, may play in culture, we come to a bit of cultural pollution. Much like the Elgin Marbles of Greece, taken from their origins when Greece was vulnerable, these artifacts have, in a moment of emotion I cannot even name, joined the cultural consciousness of the cultures into which they’ve been forcibly imported. Those Elgin Marbles are the iconic example of this fusion, as the British Museum continues to resist repatriation attempts, and while I’m sure their are many excuses, I suspect at the heart will be the question of what will be a British Museum minus this grand example of Greek architectural statuary?
I’ve never liked zoos. The animals, even if they have longer lifetimes than in the wild, are inmates, at best clowns to entertain the humans. I’ve always like museums, as their exhibits are almost always dead or never living, at least by Western civilization standards. But a movie like this makes me wonder if some parts of their collections may still be considered objects with agency by their home cultures, held against their will by the museums.
It makes for an odd world to think that way.
