| Abstract: | Beatrice Grimshaw, an Irish writer and tourist promoter, collected indigenous body parts as touristic souvenirs. Although Grimshaw bought and stole various physiological remnants, I focus on a head which she purchased on Papua's Sepik River in 1923. Grimshaw's acquisition is discussed in relation to body parts and modernist fragmentation – that sense of centripetal anarchy and discontinuity that was so prevalent during much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Buying indigenous body parts was an attempt to project not only the desire for/fear of death, but also feelings of psychical/physical disunity onto the Other. The Other as the site of brokenness, death, horizontality confirms the self as a breathing, unified, vertical whole. The head as souvenir, however, is a slippery presence. It incorporates a mobility that the white colonial tourist can never fully shackle. As is stated from the outset, the framework within which this paper has been researched and written is the current Iraq War, a situation that illustrates all too clearly the abject lack of cultural change vis-À-vis the body of the indigenous Other in extreme forms of tourism, the colonial tourism of the early 20th century and the military tourism of the 21st. |
