Dark Trophies—Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War

Exploring the colonial histories of Britain, France, Germany, South Africa, Australia, and the United States, Harrison (social anthropology, U. of Ulster, Northern Ireland) examines occurrences of military trophy-taking, i.e., the mutilation of dead enemies for the purpose of taking body-part trophies. He deploys forensic anthropology to investigate the material objects of military trophy-taking, including their uses long after they have been taken from enemy dead. He also considers his findings in comparison to ethnographic literature on the taking of body parts in indigenous warfare, particularly in relation to modern ideologies of race and indigenous distinctions between close and distant enemies and related colonial and indigenous metaphors of hunting and war. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Simon Harrison is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Ulster and has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the people of Avatip in Papua New Guinea. He is the author of, among other works, The Mask of War (Manchester University Press, 1993) and Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West (Berghahn Books, 2005).