Tourist Trinket, Religious Object, Human Remains, or Something Else: Kapalas in the Online Market

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Buddhist and Hindu Tantra practitioners have a well-known tradition of salvaging the skeletal remains of tantric monks from sky burials and converting elements for subsequent ceremonial use. These converted remains, broadly referred to as charnel ground ornaments, often include human skull calottes made into bowls (kapalas) and drums (dumaru) and certain long bones made into musical instruments (rkang gling). These items have appeared in ethnographic collections for centuries. With the advent of the online market, the sale of these items into the tourist and oddities market has exploded. Each year, hundreds of purported kapalas are listed for sale on eBay. The majority of these items are clearly real human bone. However, their provenience is dubious. It is clear that there are not enough sky burials to supply this robust trade. This presentation reviews four years' worth of eBay listings to understand the market and to contextualize them within the known religious tradition from which they purportedly derive. Combined with published accounts of active red markets in Asia, these auctions raise moral, ethical, and legal concerns. A proposed framework for management, documentation, and enforcement from an anthropological perspective is presented to continue the dialogue of protecting sacred objects.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37921.0