Head Hunters

In 1898 Alfred Cort Haddon led an expedition to the islands of the Torres Strait where he made the very first ethnographic films. Haddon took the fledgling ‘Cinderella Science’ of Anthropology away from the speculative theories of Victorian scholars into the real world of native peoples whose lives had been transformed by global mercantilism and Christian evangelisation. Michael Eaton’s play centres upon Haddon’s relationship with James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough and armchair anthropologist par excellence, and on the time he spent as a volunteer in the YMCA Huts on the Western Front, where Charles Myers, one of the original members of the team, pioneered the psychological treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. Head Hunters is richly illustrated with an Introduction which pays tribute to Haddon’s unjustly neglected work and its recent unforeseen political consequences.

Michael Eaton is a dramatist whose film The Masks Of Mer documents the making of Haddon’s ground-breaking cinematographs. His previous publication for Shoestring Press was a translation of Ernest Renan’s drama, The Priest of Nemi.

“With an informative introduction The Priest of Nemi is an elegant translation of a fascinating play.” – Francesca Wade, Times Literary Supplement