Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870-1930

Headhunting and Colonialism is an account of colonial violence, indigenous headhunting, and the circulation of human skulls to anthropological museums in the heyday of late European imperialism. Using the example of the Portuguese colony of East Timor, it embeds the history of a museum collection of human skulls within the large context of Portuguese imperial expansion, the emergence of scientific anthropology in Europe, Christian beliefs about the dead body, and indigenous cultures. The book examines how human skulls were critical to imperial power and indigenous communities and traces how they could be collected, exchanged, circulated, studied, and interpreted in colonial, scientific, and metropolitan contexts. By combining imperial history with historical anthropology and the history of science, it offers both a fresh reappraisal of colonial interactions as mutually parasitic, and a novel framework for understanding the social life of collections as attachments between things and histories.