File photo of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Inset, one of the museum's shrunken heads. Picture: Narayan k28/ Wikimedia Commons
AN OXFORD museum has removed a popular exhibit after 80 years.
The shrunken heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum have been removed, ahead of the museum reopening on September 22.
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Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum director, told The Art Newspaper: “Rather than enabling our visitors to reach a deeper understanding of each other’s ways of being, the displays reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the museum’s core values.”
Referred to as tsantsas, the shrunken heads were made by the Shuar and Achuar people, who live in the rainforests of Ecuador and Peru in South America.
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