Our changing body image

stainless-steel screws and embedded with microchips, sits immovable on its plinth. Unnervingly, its left eye looks real: lidless, it flickers in mute appeal as if someone were trapped inside. The Head of the Blue Chip II by Dianne Harris is one of several artworks commissioned by the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, UK, to complement the historical — and indeed prehistoric — artefacts that make up its current exhibition, Assembling Bodies. Harris’s head speaks of a possible future in which the mind might become as readable as your computer’s hard drive. Such a transformation would surely take place under academic scrutiny. But how can we know of the past changes in belief that have shaped our view of the human body, such as those that led our Bronze Age ancestors to cease burying dead bodies and instead cremate them? Scholars in different disciplines from the universities of Cambridge and Leicester, UK, have been funded by the Leverhulme Trust to explore these and other questions; Assembling Bodies is the publicly visible outcome. Curators Anita Herle, Mark Elliott and Rebecca Empson have brought ancient and modern cultural and scientific artefacts together with contemporary artists’ responses to perennial questions about our material being. Clustered around seven themes, the exhibits, many loaned by other institutions, range from classical sculptures to a model of DNA, and from anatomical drawings and scientific instruments to an installation of string bags from Papua New Guinea. The exhibition’s section on genealogies contains one of the 119 volumes of the printed ‘library’ of the human genome commissioned by the Wellcome Trust. We see that attempts to codify human kinship in written form are not new, with a display of John Speed’s early seventeenth-century Bible open at the genealogy he drew to link Adam to the Virgin Mary. Measurement and classification were the foundations of anthropology as a professional discipline, and the museum Our changing body image