Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia

ISBN-13: 9780804725743 / Angielski / Twarda / 1996 / 308 str.

Janet Hoskins

Opis

This book brings together comparative material on headhunting in a number of Southeast Asian societies, to examine the cultural contexts in which such practices occurred, and to relate them to colonial history, violence, and ritual. Over the last century, colonial conquest or 'pacification' has more or less effectively stopped the practice, but its rituals continue to be performed. Ethnographers of seven regions (the Philippine highlands, Sarawak, Brunei, and South Borneo, and the Indonesian islands of Sulawesi, Sumba, and Timor) share their experiences of living with former headhunters (including an eyewitness account of a headhunting feast), attending rituals, and collecting oral histories to understand the heritage of headhunting in context. In asking what meaning taking heads has assumed in the postcolonial era, they report on contemporary people who reenact headhunts, often with effigies or surrogates for the head itself.