Among Savages attempts to deconstruct the Western gaze on «the savage» and its consequences. Alternating, overlapping archival footage and self-produced imagery filmed in the slide archive of the University of Hamburg‘s Department of Art History, as well as postcards from the period, are accompanied by a narrative about an American named Carlos Poppe who produced shrunken heads for profit.

The appropriation and commercialisation of the ritual practice to the point of deliberate killing, the literal hunting of heads to satisfy the increased economic demand for heads by tourists and collectors, raises the question of who is actually the savage. At the same time, the viewer is cynically confronted with documentary and written narratives from the 1940s that present and emphasise the superiority of the work of white male ethnographers. The work opens up a space for complex contexts and connections between narratives of the Other and the categorisation of the Other as savage, uncivilised or exotic, the latter of which remains a popular category in institutional and museum archives to this day.