Headhunting
Among these spectacles, I was arrested by the ghastly appearance of a once human head. In mere derision it had been boiled, stripped of the skin and hair, and put on a post with a raw kumara [sweet potato] placed in the mouth. (John Alexander, nineteenth century New Zealand missionary, cited in Vayda, 1960:95)
Headhunting, along with other practices, described (as above) by colonial writers, such as cannibalism and human sacrifice, has been ignored by serious anthropological attention. Most of the earliest first-hand accounts, like that from which the preceding quotation, is taken, were written by Christian missionaries, administrators, soldiers or adventurers, quick to emphasise the brutality of headhunting and their own disgust at the practice. Implicit here is the perception that headhunting was no more than a primitive and murderous sport.
The paucity of modern scholarly attention has partly also been the result of the early suppression of headhunting practices by colonial administrations. In most of the regions where it was formerly practised, this prohibition occurred before the establishment of anthropology as a mature discipline.
Given this lack of high-quality field data, there have been correspondingly few attempts to theorise or even define headhunting as a social practice. The motivation for these ritualised behaviours may be religious.
If we do not get a head every year, the crops will be bad, the pigs and cattle will not increase, our children will get ill… We cannot say why this should be. It has always been like that. (attributed to Konyak Naga informant, from private notes of W. G. Archer, 1940s, cited by Jacobs, 1990:120)
For the Konyak Nagas (a tribe in northeast India state of Nagaland) headhunting was not a formalised religious practice, but rather a set of heavily ritualised actions bound by tradition and understanding of the world.
More importantly, it demonstrates how the extreme violence perpetrated on outsiders was core to the Nagas’ understanding of the principles governing their own survival and security. By way of illustration, headhunting for the Konyak Nagas was related to fertility, understood here in its broadest sense in terms of the health and reproduction of the community.
In relation to headhunting, we find very few accounts of deposition in the ethnographic literature. Instead, we have often meticulously detailed descriptions of the ritualised activities that accompanied headhunting raids, the reception of the heads and successful headhunters by their community, and the post-mortem treatment and curation (rather than disposal) of trophy heads themselves.
Given that most headhunting activity in the remote past will likely have left virtually no direct archaeological trace, we do find in archaeological deposits in so many diverse geographical and chronological contexts, many with overt signs of violence, strongly suggests that headhunting was practised just as commonly in prehistory as it was around the fringes of the colonial world in the last few centuries.
The frequent association between heads and fertility is perhaps the most dominant theme among headhunting communities globally. This should be no surprise when dealing with societies operating within subsistence farming regimes, where resources could be fragile and insecure. Yet, the concept of fertility here is broad, perhaps better expressed in terms of success or bounty, affecting every element of the well-being of the community, as the following quotation illustrates:
If no heads are brought in, there will be much illness, poor harvest, little fruit, fish will not come up the river as far as our kampong [village], and the dogs will not care to pursue pigs. (Lumholtz, 1920:155) when we took heads all the time, there was no illness.
This association between headhunting and the perceived well-being of the community was recognised by writers from at least the end of the nineteenth century. Rather than simply the product of barbarous trophy-taking, it began to be understood that the taking of enemy heads was somehow seen as conferring spiritual benefits on the community.
Early ethnographers, notably the Dutch Calvinist missionary Albert Kruyt, active in Indonesia during the 1890s, initially conceptualised this as occurring through the transfer of some form of ‘life-fluid’, or ‘soul-substance’. This idea formed the basis for much writing about headhunting during the early 20th century and is expressed, for example, in John Henry Hutton’s work on the Nagas, where he understood this ‘soul-substance’ as:
A supply of life-fertilizer which exudes into the sacred stones of [the Naga headhunter’s] village, to pass into the cycle of life of its crops, its livestock, and its human population.
Severed heads themselves simply mediated between the two realms, whose boundaries were fluid and permeable. Thus, in Sumba, scalps were hung alongside ears of corn to ensure a good harvest, while in Borneo, severed trophy heads were placed between the thighs of infertile women to promote conception (Freeman, 1979:237). The accumulation, appropriate treatment, and display of heads could thus enable spiritual interventions to the benefit of the community.
Trophy heads are well-suited to this “in between” role. When preserved with the flesh intact, the head signifies the suspension of an individual in a state between life and death; physically dead but prevented from undergoing the funerary rites.
They are evidence of souls in suspension; neither alive nor fully dead, neither person nor object. Their embodiment of ambiguity and transition makes them peculiarly appropriate as mediators with the otherworld.
Cross-culturally, the taking of a head has been associated with rites of passage, such as the assumption of adult male status. Trophy heads have also been employed in the other in between contexts, such as the foundation for war canoes, log gongs and house-poles.
Studies of both recent and ancient societies have demonstrated how the role of headhunting changed with the increasing separation of society. In Indonesia, for example, Janet Hoskins (1996c) has examined the different historical trajectories of the east and west parts of the island of Sumba during the nineteenth and early 20th century.
In West Sumba, relatively egalitarian societies practised headhunting as part of an ongoing cycle of reciprocal revenge killings between small-scale communities. In neighbouring East Sumba, however, where contact with Dutch trading partners had led to the establishment of an increasingly powerful noble class, headhunting became much more targeted at political display and an ‘ideology of encompassing’ of smaller neighbours, promoted by expansionist elites.
This brief consideration of headhunting in both the remote and the recent past illustrates something of the wider relationship between violence and society. Debates around this subject in archaeology have frequently coalesced around two issues, such as whether objects, like elaborately decorated weapons, should be viewed as functional or symbolic. They are, of course, usually both; violence is frequently highly ritualised, and ritual (as the headhunting literature clearly demonstrates) can often be very bloody.
With headhunting, we see violence used strategically to reinforce the solidarity and identity of the” in-group” while also dehumanising the” out group”, turning the latter into a resource to be used for the spiritual benefit of the community.
From:
Armit, Ian Headhunting as Ritualised Violence in Prehistory and the Recent Past in Warming, Rolf, ed. Violence and Warfare in Social Context: Sodertorn hogsakola (Sodertorn University) 2025
Tom McLaughlin for BorneoHistory.net