Although I have been visiting museums for most of my life, it never occurred to me that the numerous sculptural heads of the Buddha on view were evidence of violence, looting, and cultural and religious desecration. It didn’t dawn on me until 2020, when I interviewed the then-director of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, Dr. Bethany Montagano, about the museum’s response to calls for racial justice and greater accountability after the murder of George Floyd. She mentioned the severed heads in the collection, and how she was initiating a digital project to research and reunite them with their bodies at sacred sites throughout Asia.

Not all museums are so concerned. I have never seen a museum caption or wall text that mentioned how a figurative religious idol was decapitated in order for a museum to acquire its head. Now that photographs of these heads are shared online, nothing in their associated metadata indicates that they once had bodies. Collecting these heads and putting them on view without acknowledging the acts of violence and violation that landed them in the museum is a further desecration and separation of powerfully sacred artifacts from their original cultural and religious context and meaning.

Heads of Buddha are Evidence of Imperialism

In her book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes how the invading and plundering forces of imperialism simultaneously separate artifacts from their people, and people from their land. The artifacts become museum objects, stripped of their original function; the people become migrants, refugees, or enslaved persons, deprived of their communities and homelands. She identifies the process by which both people and things are stripped of their connectedness:

People and artifacts have become objects of observation and study, conversion and care, charge and control by two seemingly unrelated sets of disciplines, institutions, and their scholars and experts. In truth, however, neither the movements nor their separation are unrelated. . . . They are continuously produced as disconnected, as if it were the nature of artifacts to exist outside of their communities . . . as if it were the nature of certain people to exist bereft of the worldly objects among which their inherited knowledge and rights, protective social fabric and safety, bliss and happiness, sorrow and death are inscribed.

In this way, imperial and colonial acts of separation and plundering are normalized as if things have always been this way. These are the acts and systems upon which many museums were founded and cannot help but be complicit with.

Digitization and Commodification Normalize Violence

The effects of this normalization can also be seen in our popular culture, as in this screenshot from Google Shopping:

The similarity between this screenshot and the one from the Smithsonian’s search results underscores the leveling effect of digitization. While the experience of walking into a museum is usually very different from that of walking into a store, the experience of searching for and viewing artifacts on a museum website really isn’t that distinct from the experience of online shopping. Here, the Buddha’s head is reproduced as an item of home decor, meant to signal spirituality and serenity. This recycling highlights not only the commodification of spiritual traditions but also the degree to which Western audiences have uncritically accepted the decapitation of sacred sculptures from other cultures. As detailed in this blog post from Anonymous Swiss Collector, we not only see the severing as normal, but have appropriated the heads as kitschy symbols of “pseudo spiritual artsy refinement,” when they are actually evidence of violence and desecration.

Missing Metadata Conceals Histories of Plunder

Of course, it seems obvious once you think about it: The heads were not created as stand-alone sculptures. They were once attached to bodies. In a post on Buddhistdoor Global, V. R. Sasson describes an eerie visit to the Indonesian Buddhist complex Borobudur, where several headless bodies remain, and then a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where one of the heads was on display:

The curators of the Met apparently thought nothing of it. They were proud to hang a Buddha head on a wall, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. As though there was no headless body left behind. On the description beside it, the curators explained that it was from Borobudur. They knew what they were doing, but it was just another object to them. They did not explain its provenance or anything about how the head had found its way there. They did not remark on the fact that it had once had a body to go along with it. Nor, indeed, did they seem to mind all the other Buddha heads lining the wall next to it: one Buddha head after another was proudly displayed, as though the exhibits made perfect sense.

While repatriating and reuniting these heads with their bodies is the ultimate goal, what would it look like for museums to acknowledge the violence—literal beheadings—that helped build their collections?

I found the head (above) that Sasson mentions in the post and its metadata:

As Sasson wrote, there is no mention of the head being cut from its body, or how it came to be owned by Christian Humann of New York, a French-born collector of South and Southeast Asian art active from 1960–1980. While provenance is often murky, it would not be a stretch to indicate that this head once had a body. We may not know who did the cutting and under what circumstances, or who packed and shipped or carried the head from Indonesia to New York, but the severing is as much a fact as Humann’s ownership, or the trail of exchanges that landed it in the Met.

Museums Need to Acknowledge Their Complicity in Obscuring Provenance

What would it mean for the item’s metadata and display text to reflect this provenance? Museums regularly attribute estimated dates or presumed creators to their objects, as in “circa 1890” or “likely from the school of…” Why not simply add a note that says, “likely severed from its body”? Or instead of titling the item “Head of a Buddha,” call it “Head of a Buddha (fragment),” or “Head of a Buddha (severed from its body)”?

This small change would have big implications. It would be an explicit acknowledgement of the imperialist, extractive, and culturally destructive practices that enabled many of the Met’s collections to be assembled. It would also mean being transparent with viewers, giving them a more honest account of the violence and desecration that underlie their “open access” to the world’s heritage. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but one that museums and other cultural heritage institutions must take if they are, as they say, truly working for the good of all people and not advancing the further exploitation and erasure of those they have already dispossessed.

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The Metadata Learning and Unlearning series was originally published on Medium.com and edited by Sharon Mizota, Virginia Poundstone, and Garrett Graddy-Lovelace. This series raises questions and makes proposals for what metadata can do to advance a broader dialogue about diverse worldviews within open education and openGLAM realms.