HEADHUNTING

'Headhunting' is the practice of taking a person's head after killing him or her. Headhunting was practiced during the pre-colonial era in parts of China, India, Punjab, Nigeria, Nurestan, Assam, Nagaland, Myanmar, Borneo, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, Micronesia, Melanesia, New Zealand, and the Amazon Basin, as well as among certain tribes of the Celts and Scythians of ancient Europe and in the Pacific theater of World War II. Today it is a universally prohibited practice and appears to have died out.
As a practice, headhunting has been the subject of intense discussion within the anthropological community as to its possible social roles, functions, and motivations. Contemporary scholars generally agree that its primary function was ceremonial, and that it was part of the process of structuring, reinforcing, and defending hierarchical relationships between communities and individuals. Some experts theorize that the practice stemmed from the belief that the head contained "soul matter" or life force, which could be harnessed through its capture. Themes that arise in anthropological writings about headhunting include mortification of the rival, ritual violence, cosmological balance, the display of manhood, cannibalism, and prestige.

Contents

Southeast Asia and Melanesia

Amazon

New Zealand

China

Taiwan

England

Celts

World War II

Popular culture

References

See also

External links

Southeast Asia and Melanesia

Headhunting was practiced in many parts of Austronesian southeast Asia and Melanesia. Anthropological writings exist on the Ilongot, Iban, Dayak, Berawan, Wana, and Mappurondo tribes. Among these groups, headhunting was usually a ritual activity rather than an act of war or feuding and involved the taking of a single head. Headhunting acted as a catalyst for the cessation of personal and collective mourning for the community's dead. Ideas of manhood were encompassed in the practice, and the taken heads were prized.
Kenneth George wrote about annual headhunting rituals that he observed among the Mappurondo religious minority, an upland tribe in the south-west part of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Actual heads are not taken; instead, surrogate heads are used, in the form of coconuts. The ritual, called ''pangngae'', takes place at the conclusion of the rice harvesting season. It functions to bring an end to communal mourning for the deceased of the past year; express intercultural tensions and polemics; allow for a display of manhood; distribute communal resources; and resist outside pressures to abandon Mappurondo ways of life.
Around the 1930s, headhunting was suppressed among the Ilongot in the Philippines by the US authorities. In Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, the colonial dynasty of James Brooke and his descendants eradicated headhunting in the hundred years before World War II.
Some believe that Michael Rockefeller may have been taken by headhunters in western New Guinea as recently as 1961.
In his book ''PT 105'', Dick Keresey writes that he was approached by Solomon Island natives in a canoe carrying heads of Japanese soldiers. He initially thought that they wanted to trade, but they continued on their way.

Amazon

The Shuar in Ecuador and Peru, along the Amazon River, practiced headhunting in order to make shrunken heads for ritual use. The Shuar still produce replica heads which they sell to tourists, and there are still some splinter Shuar tribes that continue to practice headhunting.

New Zealand

In what is now known as New Zealand, the Māori preserved the heads of enemies, removing the skull and smoking the head. Māori are currently attempting to reclaim the heads of their ancestors held in museums outside New Zealand.

China

During the Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States Period, Qin soldiers were prone to collect their enemies' heads. Since most of the soldiers were slaves, they and their families could be freed from slavery and even secure promotions in the army by returning victorious with heads. The act of Qin soldiers carrying heads in battles usually terrified their foes; as such, headhunting is attributed as being one of the factors in the Qin dynasty defeating six other nations and unifying China. After the Qin dynasty, headhunting ceased to be practiced amongst Chinese people.

Taiwan

Headhunting was a common practice among the Taiwanese aborigines. Almost every tribe except the Yami (Tao) practiced headhunting. Han Chinese settlers were often the victims of headhunting raids as they were considered by the Aborigines to be liars and enemies. A headhunting raid would often strike at workers in the fields, or employ the ruse of setting a dwelling alight and then decapitating the inhabitants as they fled the burning structure. The practice ended around the 1930s during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan.

England

When Charles II reclaimed the crown for his family, he exhumed the body of Oliver Cromwell, who had had his father, Charles I, beheaded, and had Cromwell's head removed from the body and placed atop the Tower of London. After Henry VIII had Sir Thomas More executed, he ordered his head placed atop the Tower of London for a month, until More's daughter Margaret Roper rescued it.

Celts

The Celts of Europe practiced headhunting for an indeterminate religious reason. Ancient Romans and Greeks recorded the Celts habits of nailing heads of personal enemies to walls or dangling them from the necks of horses.^[1] Headhunting was still practiced for a great deal longer by the Celtic Gaels — in the Ulster Cycle, Cúchulainn beheads the three sons of Nechtan and mounts their heads on his chariot — though this was probably as a traditional, rather than religious, practice. The religious reasons for collecting heads was likely lost after the Celts' conversion to Christianity. Heads were also taken among the Germanic tribes and Iberians, but the purpose is unknown.

World War II

During World War II, Allied (particularly American) troops regularly collected the skulls of dead Japanese as personal trophies, as souvenirs for friends and family at home, and for sale to others. (The practice was unique to the Pacific theater; German and Italian skulls were not taken.) The Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, in September of 1942, mandated strong disciplinary action for any soldier who took enemy body parts as souvenirs. Nevertheless, trophy-hunting persisted: ''Life'', in its issue of 22 May 1944, published a photograph of a young woman posing with the autographed skull sent to her by her Navy boyfriend, causing significant public outcry. ^[2]
[3]

Popular culture

Headhunters have featured in:

★ Many episodes of ''Gilligan's Island'' have characters who are headhunters.

★ Disneyland's Jungle Cruise attraction in the Adventureland section of the park introduces a character named "Trader Sam" holding a head as "our head salesman". They say he will "....trade two heads for one of yours."

★ Predator aliens from the movie ''Predator'' practice head-hunting, or more specifically skull collecting.

★ The episode "Into the Jungle" from Anthony Bourdain's ''No Reservations'' includes the appearance of Itam, a former Sarawak Ranger and one of the Iban people's last members with the ''Entegulun'' (hand tattoos) signifying his taking of an enemy's head.

★ In a short arc of InuYasha, Naraku's detachment Hakudoshi was headhunting demons for a while until the location of the last Shikon jewel shard was revealed.

★ The psychobilly band Los Gatos Locos have a song named "Headhunter".

References

1. see e.g. Diodorus Siculus, 5.2
2. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, , Paul, Fussell, Oxford University Press, 1990,
3. Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of remembrance./Les Trophees De la Guerre Du Pacifique Des Cranes Comme Souvenirs Transgressifs, , Simon, Harrison, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2006


★ Kenneth George (1996). ''Showing signs of violence: The cultural politics of a twentieth-century headhunting ritual''. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20041-1

See also

★ Shrunken head

★ Decapitation

★ Tribal warfare

External links

★ Encyclopedia Britannica entry 1996

★ Headhunting and headshrinking among the Shuar