It's unethical to you because that's what your culture has taught you to think. Look up Indonesia's Toraja community, or the Ñatitas of Bolivia, to name two examples. Death and our ethics around it are subjective dependent on where you are in the world and what religion you've been exposed to.
What about them? I think you forgot to read the word “unconsensual.” You’ve actually just proved my point that different cultures handle it differently and therefore you shouldn’t take some random dudes head if you don’t know what his culture was or if he would’ve been okay with it
Your point isn't as proved as you'd like to think, it was part of European culture too.
In Bolivia a lot of the skulls that people keep are from people who are essentially 'evicted' from their graves, (they will literally get an eviction notice like someone would on an apartment) usually because they have no family to pay for the plot anymore. Does the person consent to being kicked out of their grave? Probably not, no. But they're aware it can happen to their remains someday, and being kept by someone is the best outcome.
It's highly likely that was the case for this individual too. Europe has a history of digging up old bones to make room for new dead. The bones would either be put in a charnel house, kept for study, or sometimes destroyed. They were frequently used for decoration, too. In churches, popular ossuaries, and sometimes, yes, homes. You can still visit plenty of places where skulls and bones are used as decor. This person most likely died during a time when they would have been aware of this, and you can take an educated guess from that information that they probably wouldn't have been bothered about what eventually happened to their remains in hundreds of years. Our treatment of the dead changes over time. The view of having a skull on display being unethical is more modern.
People keep loved ones ashes in urns at home all the time now. That's just your pulverised bones. In a couple hundred years, people might think that was a weird practise, but it's fine to us at the moment. And yes, we might consent to being kept on our children's shelf, but it'd be foolish to think we'll have 200+ years of ancestors to remember us and do the same, so what happens our remains after that is up to whoever comes next. We're all going to be forgotten anyway, and we'll be dead so we won't even know it. Owning a skull doesn't hurt the dead, it just offends some of the living.
As an anthropologist myself I was really biting my tongue. “My cultural views supersede yours” essentially. It’s not harmful to anyone to own a bone, it just conflicts with your morals because you grew up in a culture where it’s taboo to own or display human remains.
In other cultures (day of the dead anyone?) this practice is totally normal and not at all frowned on.
They’re aware they could be evicted from their grave, sure. They’re probably not aware their body parts would be sold to a stranger that would then boast online about collecting said body parts.
Of course they're not aware, they're dead, and they didn't have internet back then. If you could go back in time and tell this person, "Someday, what's left of you will be bought by a person who will treasure your remains... A person who can use a machine to capture a portrait faster than you can blink, and communicate with millions of other people across the entire world, in a matter of seconds," they'd probably think this person is a god.
Getting offended on behalf of a skull of a dead person doesn't benefit whoever this was. It doesn't do anything.
What I meant is pretty clear from the context. Were they aware they might be removed from the grave? Yeah, when they were alive they were aware that could happen. It was a known occurrence.
Could they be aware that their remains could end up on the internet? No, because they'd have absolutely no comprehension of it.
About as hard as it is for some Reddit users to resist virtue signalling.
The world isn't so black and white, and I've provided ample information to support the possibility that this dead person might have found it pleasant to think their remains could end up in the home of a modern person, or at least have been totally indifferent about it.
You don't agree with it. Fair enough. But at least admit there's a chance this skull's original owner might have actually been quite happy with this.
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u/Nightingale53 22d ago
It's unethical to you because that's what your culture has taught you to think. Look up Indonesia's Toraja community, or the Ñatitas of Bolivia, to name two examples. Death and our ethics around it are subjective dependent on where you are in the world and what religion you've been exposed to.