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1 results

  • 6 - Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina

  • Edited by Craig Thompson Friend, North Carolina State University, Lorri Glover, St Louis University, Missouri
  • Book:
    Death and the American South
    Published online:
    05 November 2014
    Print publication:
    24 November 2014, pp 131-152

  • Summary

    Corpses as victims of war, enslavement, famine, and disease haunted the early South. As three peoples (red, white, and black) came together in the early South, two forms of death took a prominent place on the landscape: scalpings and beheadings. Both beheadings and scalpings targeted the head as a site of spiritual and cultural significance, and both relied on the corporeal materiality of the head for its power. Real-life dismemberment, particularly scalpings and beheadings, were also often used to symbolize political transformations. Although death concluded the victim's corporeal life, however, the corpse, in the form of a scalp with hair, retained the victim's spiritual being. To Native Americans, apparently, it was the hair and not the flesh that mattered, and this was because hair was central to the scalp's animation as a living specter. Europeans were familiar with the symbolism and practice of destroying identity through bodily mutilation.