History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia Comparative and longitudinal views
Barbara Watson Andaya
Abstract: In what must be regarded as a preliminary foray into the subject, this paper considers the topic of ‘headhunting’ in South East Asia in relation to three separate but interconnected historiographical questions. First, to what extent is it possible to make comparative generalizations across regions separated by the academic creation of area studies? Second, what methods are avail- able for reconstructing the past of poorly documented and remote communities? Third, how would the picture of ‘traditional’ war- fare shift if historians were to consider the implications of conflict from a gendered perspective? In response to this final question, the paper argues that while headhunting was clearly important to men, who acquired great status in their own eyes and in the eyes of other men, women also saw those who participated as more virile and thus highly desirable as lovers, husbands and potential fathers. Moreover, women played a significant part in the rituals that accom- panied headhunting, while the sexuality implicit in headhunting guaranteed their fertility, the fertility of their crops and the health of their children and kinsfolk.
Keywords: women; headhunting; gender; warfare; fertility; South East Asia
In 1848 the Journal of the Indian Archipelago published a paper by James Logan in which he identified several cultural features shared by the ‘hill tribes bordering on Assam’ and those found in the Malay– Indonesian archipelago. In particular, Logan commented on the similarities between the Borneo ‘Dyaks’ and Naga groups found in the mountainous areas of contemporary north-east India, most notable among which was headhunting.1 Although other observers endorsed Logan’s
1 Logan, J. R. (1848), ‘Customs common to the hill tribes bordering on Assam and those of the Indian archipelago’, Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, Vol 2, pp 229–236.
South East Asia Research, 12, 1, pp. 13–52 14 South East Asia Research views, J.H. Hutton, Deputy Commissioner in the Naga Hills and later a reputed anthropologist, put the case particularly strongly in a 1928 article, suggesting that the headhunting of Assam was ‘intimately connected with similar cults in south-eastern Asia and Indonesia’.2 Over the past 50 years, the uneasy academic boundary laid down between ‘South’, ‘East’ and ‘South East’ Asia has militated against the comparative in- stincts of early ethnographers, but recently a renewed interest in ‘crossing borders’ has encouraged efforts to think outside the intellectual boxes that area studies have created.3 In the words of two authorities on Bor- neo,
From the upland regions of Taiwan, as far west as Assam, and extending south- wards to Sulawesi and the outer islands of the Indonesian archipelago, the purposeful taking of heads was a dominant feature.4 Exponents of the wider view would be the first to warn against overly confident generalizations, since heads were taken for numerous and often overlapping reasons: to enhance community status, to end a period of mourning, to vitalize a new longhouse, to initiate manhood, to assert territorial claims, to affirm a chief’s prestige, to challenge rival tribes, to ensure the fertility of crops, or to gain revenge.5 All contemporary commentators are agreed, nonetheless, that the internecine raiding associ- ated with headhunting was once of enormous cultural importance, and in many places still today informs communal memory. Yet this conclu- sion does not fit easily into discussions of conflict found in standard texts on pre-modern Asia. With their concentration on ‘great states’, such histories have accorded little attention to small tribal groups, and
2 Elwin, V. (1969), The Nagas in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, London, p 107; Hutton, J. H. (1928), ‘The significance of headhunting in Assam’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol 58, July–December, pp 406–407. 3 See, for example, Jacobs, J. (1990), The Nagas: Society, Culture and the Colonial Encounter, Thames and Hudson, London, pp 11–12; Stirn, A., and van Ham, P. (2000), The Seven Sisters of India: Tribal Worlds Between Tibet and Burma, Prestel, Mu- nich; Fiskesjö, N. M. G. (2000), ‘The fate of sacrifice and the making of Wa history’, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, IL. 4 Davison, J., and Sutlive, V. H. Jr (1991), ‘The children of Nising: images of headhunting and male sexuality in Iban ritual and oral literature’, in Sutlive, V. H. Jr, ed, Female and Male in Borneo: Contributions and Challenges to Gender Studies, Williamsburg, VA, and Borneo Research Council, p 153. 5 Goslings, J. F. W. L. (1933), ‘De Toradjas van Galoempang’, Koloniaal Tijdschrift, Vol 22, p 59 provides an early overview; see also Rousseau, J. (1990), Central Bor- neo: Ethnic Identity and Social Life in a Stratified Society, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp 275–279. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 15 have tended to interpret warfare in terms of acquisition of territory and people rather than as a dynamic element in a community’s social and political culture.6 In what must be regarded as a preliminary foray, this essay considers the topic of ‘headhunting’ in South East Asia in relation to three sepa- rate but interconnected historiographical questions. First, to what extent is it possible to make comparative generalizations across regions sepa- rated by the academic creation of area studies? Second, what methods are available for reconstructing the past of poorly documented and re- mote communities? Third, how would the picture of ‘traditional’ warfare shift if historians were to consider the implications of conflict from a gendered perspective?
Methodological considerations Despite the fascination headhunting has long held for Western observ- ers, a comparative view across South East Asia was only attempted a few years ago, under the editorship of the anthropologist Janet Hoskins.7 In addition to its scholarly content, the book also provided a useful working definition, characterizing headhunting as ‘an organized, co- herent form of violence in which the severed head is given a specific ritual meaning and the act of headtaking is consecrated and commemo- rated’.8 Despite the collection’s comparative lens, however, it contained no reference to the tribal areas of India and eastern Myanmar that at- tracted the attention of Logan so many years ago. Nor did it incorporate any discussion of groups closer to hand, such as the headhunting soci- eties of coastal New Guinea, or those once found in Taiw an. Certainly, scholars are justified in pointing to the dangers of undue simplification that can result from employing a wider canvas. The Naga, for example, speak around 30 languages belonging to the Tibeto–Burman family, and the headhunting practices they follow are by no means similar.9 In
6 Junker, L. L. (1999), Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, p 336. 7 Hoskins, J., ed (1996), Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia, Stanford University Press, Stanford. A predecessor was the article by Richard Downs, published 30 years earlier (1955), ‘Head-hunting in Indonesia’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde (hence BKI), Vol 111, pp 40–70. Less cited is another comparative article, Patuleia, M. J. C. S. (1992), ‘Heads for force: on the headhunting complex in Southeast Asia and Melanesia’, Anais Universitàrios, Vol 3, October, pp 113–130, which touches on several points developed in this paper. 8 Hoskins, supra note 7, ‘Introduction’, at p 2. 9 See, for instance, Elwin, supra note 2, at pp 538–580. 16 South East Asia Research linguistic terms they are also quite separate from the Wa, another erst- while headhunting people who straddle the modern China–Burma border and speak an Austro–Asiatic language related to Mon-Khmer.10 For a historian the problem is compounded by ill-balanced sources, since there are only scattered references to headhunting in South East Asia in early times. Although once more common than standard histories suggest, the practice was regarded askance by the world religions that supported South East Asia’s most powerful kingdoms, and references in officially sponsored material are thus rare. Whereas a relief from Angkor’s Bayon temple shows two warriors presenting heads to the king,11 the Ayutthaya chronicles attribute the taking of heads in the great battles of the sixteenth century to their allegedly less cultured enemies, the Burmese.12 South East Asian rulers applied the same hier- archy as imperial authorities in China, who deemed Wa groups that offered slain animals to the spirits to be ‘more civilized’ than those that continued to buy or actively hunt human heads.13 An episode in a Bru- nei epic telling of a legendary leader’s rejection of heads taken by his followers has thus been interpreted as symbolically differentiating between the evolving Muslim state and its animist subjects.14 Although documentation relating to the highlands of western Burma and the north-eastern areas of contemporary India before the nineteenth century is almost nonexistent, the material did expand as European control began to spread into isolated areas where headhunting was still part of a cultural complex. The invention of the camera also supplies another resource, and an early photograph from Sarawak portrays Iban women dancing with the skulls their forebears have taken.15 But the historical window shuts quickly, for a primary aim of colonial regimes
10 Fiskesjö, M. (2002), ‘The barbarian borderland and the Chinese imagination: travel- lers in Wa country’, Inner Asia, Vol 4, No 1, p 81. 11 Quaritch Wales, H. G. (1952), Ancient South-East Asian Warfare, Bernard Quaritch, London, pp 22, 104; Chandler, D. P. (1974), ‘Royally sponsored human sacrifices in nineteenth-century Cambodia: the cult of Me Sa (Uma Mahisasuramardini) at Ba Phnom’, Journal of the Siam Society, Vol 62, No 2, pp 207–221. 12 Cushman, R. D., trans, and Wyatt, D. K., ed (2000), The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya, The Siam Society, Bangkok, p 34. 13 Sao Saimong Mangrai (1965), The Shan States and the British Annexation, Data Paper 57, Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, Ithaca, New York, p 271. 14 Day, T. (2002), Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, p 254; Maxwell, A. R. ‘Headtaking and the consolidation of politi- cal power in the early Brunei state’, in Hoskins, supra note 7, at p 115. 15 Hose, C., and McDougall, W. (1993 – reprint of 1912 edition), The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, 2 vols, Oxford University Press, London. See Vol 2, plates 102 and 105. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 17 was to end the periodic raiding they saw as alien to the civilization and economy they sought to promote. In Minahasa (northern Sulawesi), officials of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had negotiated several contracts with local leaders that ineffectually pro- scribed the taking of heads,16 but as elsewhere, the expansion of colonial authority essentially eliminated traditional-style raiding.17 In more remote areas, such as south-west New Guinea, the process was slower and headhunting remained part of communal life into modern times. As one priest who lived with the Asmat in the early 1950s remarked, ‘I had ample opportunity to study their headhunting prac- tices on hundreds of occasions’.18 Yet, by the end of the twentieth century, Christian missions and government interdictions had largely ended Asmat headhunting, despite its symbolic preservations on shields, masks and war trophies. Because the prohibition of headhunting entailed a radical reshaping of socio-religious practices, reconstructions of earlier attitudes and customs in such communities are typically established retrospectively, and interpretations offered by contemporary anthropologists therefore rest on a shallow historical base.19 While modern research carried out among societies where headhunting remains a core cultural trope has been remarkably insightful, the ‘ethnographic present’, however skil- fully reconstructed, is still distanced from the reality of the headhunting experience.20 This point is worth emphasizing, for despite Adriani and Kruyt’s magisterial work on the Toraja, 21 the contemporary literature
16 Schouten, M. J. C. (1998), Leadership and Social Mobility in a Southeast Asian Society: Minahasa 1677–1983, KITLV Press, Leiden, pp 42, 51. 17 Rousseau, J. (1998), Kayan Religion: Ritual Life and Religious Reform in Central Borneo, KITLV Press, Leiden, p 19. 18 Zegwaard, G. A. (1959), ‘Headhunting practices of the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea’, American Anthropologist, Vol 61, No 6, p 1020; Boelaars, J. H. M. C. (1981), Head-Hunters About Themselves: An Ethnographic Report from Irian Jaya, Indone- sia, VKI 92. Nijhoff, The Hague. 19 George, K. M. (1996), ‘Lyric history and allegory, or the end of headhunting ritual in upland Sulawesi’, in Hoskins, supra note 7, at p 59. 20 See the reconstruction in Rosaldo, R. (1980), Ilongot Headhunting 1883–1974. A Study in Society and History, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p 140; Dozier, E. P. (1966), Mountain Arbiters: The Changing Life of a Philippine Hill People, Uni- versity of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, p 198. 21 See the section on warfare in Adriani, N., and Kruyt, Alb. C. (1950–1951), De Bare’e Sprekende Toradjas van Midden Celebes (De Oost-Toradjas), 2 ed, Noord-Hollandsche Publishers, Amsterdam, pp 236–269. This is a revised edition of the work first pub- lished in 1911–12. See also Kruyt, A. C. (1899), ‘Het koppensnellen der Toradja’s van Midden-Celebes, en zijne beteekenis’, Veslagen en mededeelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Vol 3, pp 147–229. 18 South East Asia Research on headhunting in South East Asia is dominated by studies of the Iban, the people termed ‘Sea Dayaks’ by nineteenth-century Englishmen. Here researchers have been fortunate in the depth of historical material in English generated by the ‘White Rajah’ regime, and the energy of modern scholars, Iban as well as non-Iban, who have recorded so many oral traditions. Nevertheless, the very richness of these sources means we must be wary that the Iban experience does not speak for the re- gion. Historians would also do well to remember Spenser St. John’s salutary reminder in 1863, ‘In writing about [Dayak] headhunting, I frequently employ the past tense, as all such portions of those tribes, as have been brought under English influence are rapidly losing these customs’.22 Warfare in South East Asia is usually presented primarily, if not solely, in terms of men’s experiences, and even male researchers sympathetic to the female viewpoint may encounter a gendered barrier. As a mis- sionary remarked of the Jaqaj in south-western New Guinea: ‘It was impossible to elicit any stories [of headhunting] from the women. They certainly knew the stories because they were told in their presence. They simply did not wish to tell me.’23 Nonetheless, the topic of headhunting is potentially amenable to a ‘female-friendly’ approach because the relationship between the taking of heads and ideas of hu- man and plant fertility infuse the literature. The celebratory maro dance performed by headhunters and unmarried women in Western Seram, enacting a myth in which plants grew from the corpse of a young girl,24 is simply one example of a theme that resonates well beyond the bor- ders of ‘South East Asia’. Along New Guinea’s Fly River, the dancing of Kiwai men after a successful headhunting raid mimicked a warrior shooting at some imaginary foe, while the women ‘dug’ with pieces of wood normally used as garden spades.25 These references themselves reveal my fairly broad-brushed treat- ment of this essay, for which I make no apologies. I take heart from a comment by Janet Hoskins, in which she expresses regret that argu- ments over headhunting specifics have discouraged the exploration of
22 St. John, S. (1863), Life in the Forests of the Far East: Or Travels in North Borneo, Smith, Elder and Co, London, pp 7, 73–74, 83. 23 Boelaars, supra note 18, at p 197; George, K. (1996), Showing Signs of Violence, The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, p 134. 24 Downs, supra note 7, at p 55. 25 Riley, E. B. (1925), Among Papuan Headhunters, Seeley, Service and Co, London, p 267. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 19 the connections between fertility and violence ‘so evident in the ethno- graphic literature’.26 From this departure point, I would like to advance two generalizations that would seem to hold up across Monsoon Asia in early modern times. First, in headhunting communities the partici- pation in raids was an essential component of masculinity that was linked to initiation into manhood and readiness for marriage. Second, women played important roles in the ceremonies for receiving heads, or in post-headhunting feasts, and the rites as a whole celebrated, as Hoskins has put it, a ‘more generalized concept of fertility’, rather than a mere glorification of male triumphs.27 In tracking the historical particularities of these two generalizations, I have ranged over periods and places while making judicious use of the sources available to me. Contemporary material from the pre-nineteenth century may not be extensive, but in many cases passing comments can be explicated more fully when linked to descriptions or analyses dating from later times. A Ming text, for example, merely remarks that traders between Yunnan and upper Burma must pass through the area of the Kawa (Wa) ‘who hunt people for sacrifice’. The cultural significance of these killings and the fertility aspect of Wa headhunting becomes much clearer when Chinese sources are coupled with British accounts from the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries.28 I am aware, of course, that the ploy of invoking ‘tradition’ to vault over centuries and thus tie the past to more recent experiences can be a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, prudent use of this methodology can provide an ethnographic depth that would other- wise be unavailable, and it is in this spirit that the present essay is offered.
Taking heads, becoming a man
Early accounts In an important study of early South East Asia, Charles Higham has argued forcefully that comparisons of prehistoric societies from Yunnan to the Red River valley, and possible connections to Austro–Asiatic groups in eastern India, have for years been impeded by the ‘intrusion’ of China’s southern boundary into archaeological studies. In search of a ‘headhunting’ past, we should therefore give due attention to Chinese
26 Hoskins, supra note 7, ‘Introduction’, at p 9. 27 Hoskins, supra note 7, ‘Introduction’, at p 18. 28 Fiskesjö, M. (1999), ‘On the “raw” and the “cooked” barbarians of imperial China’, Inner Asia, Vol 1, No 2, pp 139–168; Fiskesjö, supra note 3, at pp 20–22. 20 South East Asia Research comments on the frequency of armed conflict among ‘southern barbar- ians’ and to the carvings on bronze containers found in Yunnan, which depict warriors with severed human heads.29 Later material is less re- vealing, although Magnus Fiskesjö has suggested that the absence of references to Wa headhunting in Chinese sources indicates that the taking of heads was not considered peculiar to this ethnic grouping. Other Mon-Khmer peoples, such as the Palaung on the Burmese–China border, and the Khamu on the Lao side, are also reputed (by their neighbours at least) to have a headhunting past.30 Although it is possible that headhunting was once found all across the highland areas of southern China and mainland South East Asia, the paucity of evidence in these areas means that historical comparisons must largely concentrate on the island world. Even there we are not provided with eyewitness accounts until the Spanish arrival in the Philippines in the sixteenth century. The vocabulary lists drawn up by the early missionaries demonstrate that headhunting was an established custom among lowland societies, although this was soon to disappear with the adoption of Chris- tianity. The 1630 Tagalog vocabulary compiled by Father Miguel Ruiz, for example, translated the verb mangayao as ‘to go and cut heads’. Other dictionaries record words such as sumbali, which refers to cutting the head without totally severing it from the body (cortar el garguero o tragadero solamente, ‘to cut only the windpipe or the throat’, and degollamiento por delante, sin quitar la cabeza, ‘to cut the throat from the front, without severing the head’). If we accept, as one anthropologist reminds us, that decapitation was a male skill only slowly acquired and which boys per- fected through practice on small animals and birds,31 we can detect some difference between ‘pogot’, which Ruiz defines as ‘to cut heads’ and tong- ol, which indicates that a person has been decapitated in one stroke.32
29 Higham, C. (1996), The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 1, 134, 139, 147, 157. 30 Fiskesjö, supra note 3, at pp 3–4; von Geseu, L. A. (1991), ‘Akha internal history: marginalization and the ethnic alliance system’, in Chitakasem, M., and Turton, A., eds (1991), Thai Constructions of Knowledge, School of Oriental and African Stud- ies, University of London, London, p 138; Scott, J. G. (1921), Burma: A Handbook of Practical Information, 3 ed, De La More Press, London, p 407. 31 van der Kroef, J. (1952), ‘Some headhunting traditions of southern New Guinea’, American Anthropologist, Vol 2, No 1, April–June, p 229; Vertenten, P. (1923), ‘Het koppensnellen in Nederlandsch Zuid Nieuw-Guinea’, BKI, Vol 79, p 71; Boelaars, supra note 18, at pp 145–146. 32 See Rodriguez, F. N. (2003), ‘Juan de Salcedo joins the native form of warfare’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO), Vol 46, No 2, pp 143–164; Mintz, M. (1996), ‘Prehispanic terms for war and conflict’, Pilipinas: A Journal of Philippine Studies, Vol 26, spring, pp 165–193. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 21
The Spanish arrived in the Philippines at a significant historical moment, when the emergence of larger-scale chiefdoms had apparently led to a greater incidence of competitive raiding. This would have been of consider- able significance in an environment where William Scott believes some kind of head cult was in operation; one finds, for example, skeletons buried with two skulls, special ‘skull boxes’, and in one case a skull resting in a celadon bowl.33 Despite Scott’s doubts, these may well represent headhunting trophies, since it is evident that a skilled warrior could indeed separate a head from the body with ‘surgical precision’. More importantly though, mortuary sites dating from before the fourteenth century have yielded few signs of violent death; ‘a significant number’ of skeletal remains from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show evidence of decapi- tation and death from wounds. In 1995 excavations at one site in southern Luzon indicated that approximately 25% of those buried had died as a result of violence. Specifically, however, those who killed successfully appear to have enjoyed considerable status. Laura Lee Junker mentions, for example, the grave of a Visayan warrior buried with valuable por- celain, pig’s tusks and two detached heads.34 Against this background the comments of de Morga in 1609 assume a greater significance: [The Filipinos] are so skilled that when they go in pursuit of an enemy they clutch his hair with one hand, while with the other, in a single blow of the bararao (a bladed weapon) they strike off his head and carry it away with them. After- wards they keep such heads up in their houses on show and great display is made of them, so that their possessors may appear as brave men who have wreaked vengeance upon their foes for wrongs done them.35 Spanish sources leave little doubt that in the Philippines the taking of heads and body parts in warfare, together with human sacrifice, feast- ing and mortuary ritual, was intrinsic to the display of male status.36 Similar conclusions can be inferred from other observers, notably em- ployees of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). In 1621, for instance, Artus Gijsels, head of the VOC post in Ambon, remarked that a headhunting raid was often initiated by the death of a great chief.37 His
33 Scott, W. H. (1984), Prehispanic Source Material for the Study of Philippine History, revised ed, New Day Publishers, Quezon City, p 27. 34 Junker, supra note 6, at pp 363–365. 35 de Morga, A. (1609), in Cummins, J. S., ed and trans (1971), Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, Cambridge University Press/Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, p 252. 36 Junker, supra note 6, at pp 345–346. 37 Knaap, G. J. (1987), Kruidnagelen en Christenen: De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie en de Bevolking van Ambon 1656–1696, Foris Publications, Dordrecht/ Providence, p 73. 22 South East Asia Research contemporary, the pioneer Dutch missionary George Candidus, com- mented that: in their wars [Formosan aboriginals] have no captains or chiefs, but any one who has got possession of many heads, or who is considered to have cut off a head. . . . When they succeed in cutting off an enemy’s head . . . they take the head and carry it about the village – a great triumph for the man who has taken the head. . . . [who] is much honoured and respected.38 A hundred years later similar remarks were made by a Chinese gover- nor in Taiwan: ‘When they kill a man, they take his head, show it off, and claim to be heroes.’39 These observations mesh readily with oral material collected in more recent times. Although many of the great epics of headhunting societies have been lost, the examples that have been recorded or transcribed almost invariably focus around the ex- ploits of some ancestral hero, who is by definition a renowned headhunter. In a guritan or epic poem recorded in Besemah (South Sumatra) about 30 years ago, one section thus speaks of the war chief Amburan Caye who ‘killed forty warriors,/twenty-five [heads or body parts] were hung up as trophies’.40 Drawing on historical documents, their own observations and the pool of indigenous knowledge made available to them, a number of later commentators have stressed the importance of headhunting in the creation of masculinity. The intimate details of war ritual recorded by a missionary in Timor in 1846, for example, can be combined with refer- ences from the 1780s and oral traditions related by Timorese headhunters in the 1930s to reconstruct the ceremonies that elevated the meo (a man who has taken a head) into an invulnerable atoni au-besi ma nakfatu (literally, a man with a body of iron and a head of stone).41 Among the Asmat titles such as nao pimir pitsj, ‘man of frequent killing’ and kus fe juro iptisj, ‘man with many skulls’ were bestowed on great warriors, who were also entitled to wear a dagger of cassowary bone.42 Perhaps
38 Campbell, W. (1967), Formosa Under the Dutch, Described from Contemporary Records, Cheng-wen Publishing Company, Taipei, pp 13, 14–15. 39 Shepherd, J. R. (1993), Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier 1600–1800, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p 262. 40 Collins, W. A. (1998), The Guritan of Radin Suane: A Study of the Besemah Oral Epic from South Sumatra, KITLV Press, Leiden, pp 67, 318 n 42. 41 Schulte Nordholt, H. G. (1971), The Political System of the Atoni of Timor, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut 60, Nijhoff, The Hague, pp 327, 340. 42 Men who had not killed were given names such as ‘man that did not venture far from home’ and ‘man that stayed home from fear’. Zegwaard, supra note 18, at pp 1036, 1040; Vertenten, supra note 31, at pp 46–48; Valeri, V. (1990), ‘Both nature and History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 23 the link between maleness, courage and the taking of heads has been most forcibly expressed in the seminal writings of Derek Freeman, who began his field research in Sarawak in 1949 when headhunting was still a matter of ‘passionate concern’ despite a century of English control. ‘Among the Iban’, he wrote, ‘ . . . the head of an enemy was . . . the most highly valued of trophies, being regarded as a ‘tanda berani’, a sign of fighting prowess’. In the Iban view, sapa enda’ berani, enda’ bulih antu paala’, enda’ berita, ‘those who are not daring, who do not take heads, lack renown’.43
Arousing fear To a considerable extent male status reflected the fear headhunting raids aroused, and occasionally the horror of intended victims comes through even in official reports. Seventeenth-century Spaniards spoke with trepi- dation of highland Igorots ‘foaming at the mouth’ as they attacked, for they were said to kill any Christian they caught, including Europeans; not only heads were taken, but fingers or ears or other parts of the body would also be cut off.44 The sight of these mutilated bodies aroused justifiable terror. In 1602 the English merchant Edmund Scot described how boatloads of Lampung raiders terrorized Banten (west Java) for a month. ‘These men . . . would boldly come into the Towne, and not only in the evenings and nights come into houses, and cut off the peo- ple’s heads, but at noondayes.’ Indeed, they were sufficiently confident to abduct a woman from a house immediately adjoining that of the English merchants, and to ‘cut her throate’ in their yard.45 The deliberate choice of a female as a victim (regarded as ‘cow- ardly’ by most Europeans) was not accidental. Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the VOC minister François Valentijn noted that the young men who made up headhunting parties among interior
culture: reflections on menstrual and parturitional taboos in Huaulu (Seram)’, in Atkinson, J. M., and Errington, S. (1990), Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp 247, 260. 43 Freeman, D. (1979), ‘Severed heads that germinate’, in Hook, R. H., ed, Fantasy and Symbol, Academic Press, London, p 238; Masing, J. J. (1997), The Coming of the Gods. An Iban Invocatory Chant (Timang Gawai Amat) of the Baleh River Re- gion, Sarawak, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Vol I, p 173. 44 Fr Antolín, F. (1988), Notices of the Pagan Igorots in the Interior of the Island of Manila, William Henry Scott, trans, Corporación de PP Dominicos de Filipinas Inc, Manila, p 111; Scott, The Discovery of the Igorots, p 86. 45 Purchas, S., ed (1905), Purchas His Pilgrimes, Glasgow University Press, Glasgow, Vol 2, p 453. 24 South East Asia Research
‘Alifuru’ (from a north Halamahera word, halifuru, meaning ‘wildness’) groups were as ready to kill women as men, young as well as old.46 Furthermore, as the VOC Governor of Ternate commented in 1673, women and children were the easiest prey.47 Numerous other sources make the point that the head of a woman, older person or a child was considered a particular prize, since it demonstrated that the warrior had penetrated into the heart of enemy territory and captured those very individuals whom men should protect. In Taiwan, said Candidus, the hunters, stealthily creep into the fields . . . anyone they find, young or old, man or woman, they instantly kill, and cut off their heads, hands and feet . . . Should they find no one in the fields – as sometimes happens – they enter the village. Waiting for a favour- able opportunity, they surprise one of the houses, kill every one they find within, and hastily cutting off the heads, arms and feet, retreat with all possible speed.48 Chinese records from Taiwan are more phlegmatic, but given the fear of sudden ambush and value placed on any head, whatever age or sex, much can be read into the comment that eighteenth-century Chinese settlers were ‘constantly being killed by the barbarians . . . and their heads taken’.49 The survival of orally transmitted material into modern times in- fuses a more enhanced sense of ‘the extraordinary kind of terror’ that the mere mention of headhunters aroused among those who imagined themselves as potential prey. Chants collected in the uplands of Sulawesi in the 1980s speak of ‘those who shake in panic, hear the yells of the warriors’, so that even the lowland Bugis say, ‘They [ie the Toraja] come again to empty homes/to make orphans of the children’.50 Some- thing of this impending horror is captured in the ritual chants that extolled the slashing blades cutting through the victim’s neck, ‘debata (spirits) taking the head, debata taking the eyes, debata taking the brain, debata taking the ears, debata taking the tongue’.51 The threatening note was sounded equally strongly by Iban lemambang (mastersingers) as they recited the fate awaiting their enemies: 46 Moore, C. (2003), New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu; Valentijn, F. (1724), Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën, Vol 2, ‘Beschrijvinge van Amboina’, Van Braam/Onder de Linden, Dordrecht/Amsterdam, pp 72–74, 81–82; Knaap, G. (2003), ‘Headhunting, carnage and armed peace in Amboina, 1500–1700’, JESHO, Vol 46, No 2, pp 171–172. 47 Padt-Brugge, R. (1866), ‘Bescrijving der zeden en gewoonten van de bewoners der Minahassa . . . 1679’, BKI, Vol 13, pp 1–2, 319. 48 Campbell, supra note 38, at pp 12–13. 49 Shepherd, supra note 39, at p 187. 50 George, supra note 23, at p 117. 51 George, supra note 23, at pp 65, 92, 94. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 25
What shall we use for the smith’s bellow? Let us kill those In the upper Kayan River. What shall we use for the pipe that blows the fire? Let us use the neckbone of the Kejaman people! What shall we use for the trough? Let us use the belly of an ancient corpse What shall we use for water? Let us pour out the blood of a Punan child.52 A description by Charles Brooke, Sarawak’s ‘white rajah’, in 1859 conveys an impression of the frenetic atmosphere that surrounded these raids, describing a campaign when Dayaks ‘mad with excitement’ were ‘flying about with heads. . . . One lad came rushing and yelling past the stockade, with a head in one hand and holding one side of his own face on with the other. He had had it cut clean open, and laid bare to the cheek-bone, yet he was insensible to pain for the time . . .’53 Celebrating masculinity The battle feats of these warriors were celebrated in the epics sung during post-raid celebrations, but a man’s achievements could also be read from his own body, via the ornaments and tattoos to which he was now entitled. Writing of the Visayas in the mid-seventeenth century, the historian Francisco Colín noted that ‘in olden times no tattooing was begun until some brave deed had been performed, and after that, for each one of the parts of the body which was tattooed, some new deed had to be performed’.54 Colín himself did not appreciate the sig- nificance of the fact that some Visayan men ‘tattooed even their chins and about their eyes’ to create a mask-like appearance, but later evi- dence indicates that in several societies the extent of tattooing was a sign of the successful headhunter, for whom special designs were reserved. Among the Naga of Assam, wrote a British military officer in 1847, these designs consisted of 10 or 12 rings or circles interspersed with dots around the calves of the legs, the thighs, the breast and other parts of the body, providing a visual record of a man’s triumphs. Certain marks on one arm showed that [the headhunter] had killed once; ‘when
52 Sandin, B. (1977), Gawai Burong: The Chants and Celebrations of the Iban Bird Festival, University Sains Malaysia, Pulau Pinang, p 9. 53 Brooke, C. (1990, reprint of 1866 ed), Ten Years in Sarawak, Oxford University Press, Singapore, p 353. 54 Translated in Blair, E., and Robertson, J. A. (1903–9), The Philippine Islands 1493– 1898, Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland, pp 40, 64; Jacobs, supra note 3, at p 14. 26 South East Asia Research both arms and body are scarred he is know to have murdered two indi- viduals; and when the face and eye-sockets are indelibly impressed with the tattoo, he stands proclaimed as the assassin of three of his fellow-creatures, and is henceforth esteemed a valiant warrior’.55 Free- man, who himself witnessed the spectacular Iban ceremonies held to celebrate headhunting, emphasized that only after an Iban male had taken a head was he entitled to have his hands tattooed.56 Numerous other items of dress and ornamentation also proclaimed a warrior’s prowess. Headdresses decked with feathers, cloaks made of skins of animals, shields and spears decorated with demonic images or decorated with tufts of human hair were all intended to assert status and strike fear into potential opponents. The ‘black and naked’ men from coastal New Guinea mentioned in a Dutch report of 1606 who wore ‘zeehoorntien’ (kotika) or penis-shields, necklaces of wild boar teeth and the bones of sword fish through their noses were simply affirming their sexual virility, their physical strength and their prow- ess in war.57 Portuguese accounts of the island of Seram (eastern Indonesia) refer to warriors dancing the wardance, the cakalele, the handles of their parang decorated with human hair, and the symbols on their shields each representing a captured head.58 Although rela- tively few early authors regard textile designs as a signifier of masculinity, Colín’s 1663 account commented that only those who had killed were allowed to wear the red potong, or head cloth. This would, of course, have been woven by women, who would also have embroi- dered the borders of the cloths that showed a man had killed seven or more individuals.59 Another description from south-east Borneo in the early eighteenth century mentions Dayak groups who came down to the coast wearing ‘rows of tygers teeth strung and hung round their
55 Elwin, supra note 2, at p 542. 56 Freeman, supra note 43, at p 238. Even in Borneo, however, there are exceptions: Rousseau, supra note 17, at p 17 notes that Kayan men have been tattooing less frequently than women in recent years, although St. John (supra note 22, Vol I, at p 55) specifically mentioned tattooing among male Kayan. 57 Haga, A. (1884), Nederlandsch Nieuw Guinea en de Papoesche Eilanden. Historisch Bijdrage. I, 1500–1883, Bruining, Batavia/Nijhoff, The Hague, pp 38, 57. 58 Georg Schurhammer, S. J., Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times. Vol 3. Indonesia and India, pp 154–1549, trans Costelloe, M. J. (1980), The Jesuit Historical Institute, Rome, p 103; de Sá, A. B., ed (1955), Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, Vol 3, Agência Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, p 395; see also van Hogendorp (1780), ‘Vervolg van beschrijving van het eiland Timor’, Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap, Vol 2, p 71. 59 Landa Jocano, F., ed (1975), The Philippines at the Spanish Contact, MCS Enter- prises Inc, Manila, p 161; Blair and Robertson, supra note 54, at pp 40, 61. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 27 necks and bodies’.60 While such adornments served as a telling reminder of male mastery over powerful and threatening forces, the probable significance of ‘tygers teeth’ is made clearer by Hans Schärer, a mis- sionary who worked among the Ngaju Dayaks of southern Borneo in the 1930s. He explains that pieces of stone or wood thought to contain supernatural ancestral powers were inserted into hollow tiger teeth, which were then sealed with resin. A rich and renowned headhunter was expected to display a string of tiger-teeth (penyang taring haramaung) around his loins, acquired from animals that he himself had killed, or from other hunters. These would not only guarantee him a tiger’s strength, but also ensure that he had the protection of the an- cestors.61 In an extension of the same theme, a missionary in Assam reported in 1844 that some Nagas wore necklaces of real teeth taken from the heads of their enemies.62 In moving toward maturity, young men in headhunting societies were surrounded by tangible reminders of the masculinity of their fathers and grandfathers. In some parts of Borneo young men slept on the verandas of longhouses rather than in a separate building, but in many other headhunting communities the focus of maleness was the men’s house, such as those noted in Taiwan in the early seven- teenth century and among the Igorot in 1755.63 While a number of writers on South East Asia have emphasized the ‘female’ aspects of domestic dwellings, among the Asmat the roof beams and walls of the bachelors’ houses were named after the male relatives of the
60 Beeckman, D. (1973 reprint of 1718 ed), A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo, Dawsons, London, pp 43–44; King, V. T. (1993), The Peoples of Borneo, Blackwell, Oxford, p 239; see also Hoskins, ‘The heritage of headhunting: history, ideology and violence on Sumba, 1880–1990’, in Hoskins, supra note 7, at p 226, fn 1. 61 Schärer, H. Ngaju Religion: The Conception of God Among a South Borneo People, trans Rodney Needham (1963), Nijhoff, The Hague, p 125; King, supra note 60, at p 239; Schouten, supra note 16, at p 27; Elwin, supra note 2, at p 540. The Timorese compared teeth with a penis. Middelkoop, P. (1963), Head Hunting in Timor and its Historical Implications. Timorese Texts with Translations, Oceania Linguistic Mono- graphs, No 8, University of Sydney, Sydney, p 45. 62 Owen (1844), Naga Tribes in Communication with Assam, cited in Hutton, supra note 2, at p 405. For a description of the Naga textile collection at Oxford University, see Ruth Barnes (1992), ‘Women as headhunters: the making and meaning of textiles in a Southeast Asian context’, in Barnes, R., and Eicher, J. B., eds, Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, Berg, Providence/Oxford, pp 33–37. 63 Campbell, supra note 38, at p 19; Antolín, supra note 44, at p 61; Jenks, A. E. (1905), The Bontoc Igorot, Bureau of Public Printing, Manila, p 52; Geddes, W. R. (1957), Nine Dayak Nights, Oxford University Press, London, p 47; but compare this with St. John (supra note 22, Vol I, at pp 167, 177) who mentions bachelors’ houses in south-west Sarawak in 1863. 28 South East Asia Research occupants.64 It was also here that the trophies taken in the hunt were displayed, visible reminders of the daring that was an essential com- ponent of being a man. Early Portuguese reports from the island of Nusa Laut in Amboina noted with appalled fascination how enemy skulls decorated the community houses of the interior peoples, the Alifuru,65 and similar responses can be tracked through the historical sources. In 1679 the governor of Ternate, Robert Padt-brugge, described the skulls and other human parts he saw suspended from veranda posts in Minahasa, together with the pots in which the heads had been cooked.66 A European observer in Timor around 1770 simi- larly remarked on the heads of slain enemies that decorated village sacred houses (rumah pamali).67 Later material indicates that these community collections could be substantial. It was not unusual to find collections of between 100 and 150 skulls in Iban longhouses, and a visitor to a Naga morung (men’s house) in 1842 said he had counted around 130.68 In 1890 a Chinese traveller in the remote south-west commented on the ‘skull avenues’ (a British term) that lined the ap- proaches to Wa villages.69 Like their European counterparts, Chinese authorities realized that the loss of these trophies was a direct blow to male prestige. Following a successful campaign in Taiwan in 1724, ‘countless skulls’ were recovered from rebellious tribes, and nearly three centuries later in north-west India the British were similarly in- clined to assert their authority over Naga settlements by destroying the preserved heads.70 In sum then, the connection between success in war and masculine prestige fostered an implicit and accepted male hierarchy, with claims to leadership being authored and legitimized by the numbers of heads taken. In 1687 the 60-year-old Raja of one island that had allegedly been Christian since 1574 boasted to the Dutch minister François
64 Waterson, R. (1990), The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South- East Asia, Oxford University Press, Singapore, pp 62–64, 168–197; Zegwaard, supra note 18, at p 1029. 65 Schurhammer, supra note 58, at p 102; de Sá, supra note 58, at p 395. 66 Padt-Brugge, supra note 47, at p 324. 67 Lombard-Jourdan, A., and Salmon, C. (1998), ‘Les Chinois de Kupang (Timor) aux alentours de 1800’, Archipel, Vol 56, No 1, p 401. 68 Anonymous (1838), ‘Iets over de Dajakkers, Tijdschrift voor Neêrlands-Indië, Vol 1, p 43; Elwin, supra note 2, at p 94. 69 Fiskesjö, supra note 10, at p 84; Fiskesjö, supra note 3, Vol 2, at p 298, fn 8. 70 Shepherd, supra note 39, at p 501, n 64; Barua, S. N. (1991), Tribes of the Indo– Burma Border: A Socio-Cultural History of the Inhabitants of the Patkai Range, Mittal Publications, New Delhi, p 257. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 29
Valentijn that in his youth he had slain numerous enemies, and had roasted the heads of many over coals.71 The historical sources repeat- edly point to the direct correlation between chieftainship and bloodletting. Among the Igorot of Cagayan, said early Spanish com- mentators, ‘they have a cruel and barbarous custom which they call “the cutting off of heads”. . . . The richest and chiefest among them is he who has more heads hanging in his house than the others . . . ’ Chiefs, the most eminent head-takers, commonly drank their wine from the skulls of captives, in the process increasing their spiritual strength even further.72 A modern ethnographer who worked among the Buaya of Kalinga (northern Luzon) puts the case simply: ‘the greatest leader in traditional Buaya society was a headhunter, who was also a wealthy man and a legal expert’.73 This standing was probably the greater because, as Ida Pfeiffer, the intrepid ‘lady traveller’, commented in 1852, popu- lations would have been decimated if a skull had actually been taken for every touted ritual need.74 In many cases a man acquired status simply by participating in a successful raid, with the prestige gained by killing even a few victims accruing to all those involved. In seven- teenth-century Taiwan, for example, it was enough to take some of the hair from a captured head or merely seize a spear; sometimes the body of a victim could be cut into pieces, which were then distributed.75 Through this inclusion (which could also be accompanied by other ini- tiation rites) a young man’s masculinity was confirmed, the bonds with other males were strengthened and the community acknowledged that he had moved into the domain of adulthood.76
71 Valentijn, supra note 46, at p 84. 72 Felix Keesing (1962), The Ethnography of Northern Luzon, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p 62; Antolín, supra note 44, at p 111; Scott, W. H. (1974), The Discovery of the Igorots: Spanish Contacts with the Pagans of Northern Luzon, New Day Pub- lishers, Quezon City, p 43. 73 De Raedt, J. (1996), ‘Buaya headhunting and its ritual: notes from a headhunting feast in northern Luzon’, in Hoskins, J., ed, Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p 168. 74 Pfeiffer, I. (1857), Mon Second Voyage autour du Monde, L. Hachette, Paris, p 63. It is impossible to establish precise numbers of victims of headhunting raids, but Rousseau attempts some assessment in central Borneo. In a population of about 10,000 people in the Baram River area, 136 people were reported killed by headhunters between 1876 and 1912. In the Baluy River district, with a population of around 6,000, 328 people were killed by headhunters between 1871 and 1910. Rousseau, supra note 5, at p 274, n 3. 75 Boelaars, supra note 18, at p 135; Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980), Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p 56; Campbell, supra note 38, at pp 13, 14. 76 Jacobs, supra note 3, at p 57. 30 South East Asia Research
Women and the hunters of heads
Debating women and headhunting Although the importance of headhunting to men has been treated as a given, it was also of immense concern to women, the community’s mothers and future mothers. A glance through the literature should draw attention to the recurring cultural conviction that the spilling of blood was necessary in order to promote life. In 1863, for example, Spenser St. John remarked that among the Bidayuh (‘Land Dayak’) of Sarawak the most beneficial ceremony was the ‘head feast’ which followed a raid, since its celebration would ensure that rice would grow, the forest abound with game, the rivers swarm with fish, that women would be fertile and bear healthy children.77 To a lesser or greater extent the same theme emerges even when scholars identify other motives for headhunting. Thus, although Justus van der Kroef argued that in south- ern New Guinea victims were killed so that their names could be arrogated for ritual purposes, he also noted the belief that children con- ceived during the headhunting feast would be strong and healthy.78 A ritually prepared skull rested between the thighs of a young Asmat man during his initiation, almost touching his genitals, for he was now on the way to becoming not only a husband but a father.79 In what is almost a mirror image of this process, the Rungus Dusun of Sabah placed a skull between the thighs of a barren woman in order to assist in conception.80 Indeed, when Rodney Needham questioned his Kenyah informants about the reasons for headhunting, they told him simply that the taking of heads ‘gives children’.81 Despite the generally acknowledged link between headhunting and procreation, interest in the place of women in these societies has only recently become evident. In his synthesis of research on the Naga of north-east India, Julian Jacobs has addressed this issue directly, argu- ing that here head-taking was essentially a male cult that could theoretically continue without much female involvement. Although women did play some role in the head-receiving rituals, a headhunter
77 St. John, supra note 22, Vol I, at p 204. 78 van der Kroef, supra note 31, at p 234. 79 Zegwaard, supra note 18, at p 1027. 80 Freeman, supra note 43, at p 237; the Kalinga similarly believed that the taking of an enemy life would enable a barren woman to bear a child. Dozier, supra note 20, at p 201. 81 Needham, R. (1976), ‘Skulls and causality’, Man, Vol 11, p 79. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 31 did not have to be married and his wife did not automatically share the higher status he enjoyed.82 Specialists on the Iban likewise acknow- ledge that although women could play an important ritual role in receiving the newly taken heads into the longhouse, they were ‘automatically disqualified’ from participating in the status acquisition associated with headhunting because they were non-combatants.83 Whatever their accom- plishments in other areas, it is generally accepted that women never enjoyed the same kind of prestige that accrued to men from the taking of heads.84 Indeed, in some societies this confirmation of male superi- ority could be disadvantageous to women. ‘Once you have come back from a headhunting raid’, said the Jaqaj of south-west New Guinea, ‘you may raise a stick against your wife’.85 In recent years several scholars of South East Asia (where male– female complementarity is often considered a hallmark of gender relations) have reconsidered the gender inequality that headhunting seems to project. For example, although Kenneth George also sees women excluded from Toraja headhunting ‘of all kinds’, he reminds us that they once had their own secret rituals.86 This latter point has re- ceived particular attention in revisionist views of Iban society, which contend that female skills such as weaving and dyeing – the ‘woman’s warpath’ – complemented male accomplishments in war. The highest honour was paid to those women who had mastered the designs used in the huge ceremonial cloths that received severed heads, with the hands of a great weaver tattooed as a public statement of her achievements.87 Less researched, but even more important in asserting a woman’s place in the community, was her courage in facing the life-threatening proc- ess of giving birth. In this context the symbolic capital attached to headhunting and notions of courage carried specific resonances. In Timor, a young mother wore the headdress and neck pendants of a successful
82 Jacobs, supra note 3, at p 131. 83 Davison and Sutlive, supra note 4, at p 163; Sather, C. (1978), ‘The malevolent koklir: Iban concepts of sexual peril and the dangers of childbirth’, BKI, Vol 134, No 2/3, p 343. 84 Wadley, R. L. (1998), ‘Rape in a ‘rape-free’ society: evaluating the Rungus case’, Sarawak Museum Journal, Vol 53, p 74 (New Series, p 10); Rosaldo, supra note 75, at p 27. 85 Boelaars, supra note 18, at p 148. 86 George, supra note 23, at p 150. 87 Gavin, T. (1991), ‘Kayau Indu, the warpath of women: a Ngar ritual at Entawau, Baleh in October 1988’, Sarawak Museum Journal, Vol 17, pp 1–41; Valerie Mashman, ‘Warriors and weavers: a study of gender relations among the Iban of Sarawak’, in Sutlive, supra note 4, at pp 231–263; Barnes, supra note 62, at pp 29–43. 32 South East Asia Research headhunter at the end of her seclusion after childbirth;88 a Jaqaj woman whose children had died repeatedly would perform a ritual dance in the manner of a headhunting warrior to strengthen her child-bearing capac- ity.89 Headhunting and marriage Women had a direct interest in the headhunting raid because it marked a young man’s entry into manhood and thus denoted his readiness for marriage, which was in turn essential in attaining adulthood. Despite his characterization of headhunting as a purely male cult, Jacobs ad- mits that for the Naga ‘marriage is vital for the social advancement of the individual male, for most of the ceremonial [post-headhunting] feasts that confer status depend on a man having a wife’.90 For young men in Timor, says Schulte Nordholt, ‘the headhunting raid and marriage, death and life, are inseparably linked together. War and death are a condition for life and marriage’.91 As an Iban chant indicates, a man’s perform- ance during the headhunt was a primary influence in a young woman’s assessment of a potential sexual partner, and a warrior needed to make sure his courage was appreciated:
See, madam, the scar of a spear on my shoulder Like the roots of a broken tree trunk See the scar of the berayang spear on my back Like the ends of unburnt trees which are gathered for reburning in the farm.92 While one could cite numerous supporting examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century material, hints of the same ideas also emerge in earlier sources. The bold expeditions into Banten by men from Lampung (south Sumatra) were undoubtedly fraught with danger, but the prize was great, since ‘their king gives them a woman for every stranger’s head they bring him’.93 A historian of gender, however, would prob- ably wish to tweak such references so that they suggest the viewpoint of a marriageable female; only a husband who had demonstrated his courage and physical prowess by participating in a headhunting raid
88 Barnes, supra note 42, at p 41. 89 Boelaars, supra note 18, at p 66. 90 Jacobs, supra note 3, at p 61. 91 Schulte Nordholt, supra note 41, at p 356. 92 Sandin, supra note 52, at p 66; see Elwin, supra note 2, at p 541 for an 1847 para- phrase of a Naga warrior’s chant. 93 Purchas, S., ed (1905), Purchas His Pilgrimes, Glasgow University Press, Glasgow, Vol 2, p 454. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 33 would guarantee her strong and healthy children, and ensure that she did not herself die in childbirth. Indeed, an eighteenth-century Malay manuscript specifically attributes the raiding of Abung groups in Lampung to the need to take heads prior to marriage, and notes the involvement of young women who met the returning raiders with joy. During the actual wedding ceremony, those present drank wine that was imbued with protective qualities because it was contained in skulls.94 The interconnection between headhunting and sexual intercourse recurs in other indigenous representations of male–female relationships that assume particular significance in non-literate societies. The door- ways of Naga morung, for example, depicted a warrior in full dress surrounded by stylized heads and female breasts, and copulating cou- ples were carved on the timberwork.95 Still today Ilongot men may carve headhunting knives (iteng) and maiden’s breasts (rinapa) on the roofbeams of their houses.96 Asmat myths relate how the young initiate finally gives the ritually prepared skull to his betrothed bride,97 while the Syair Awang Simawn, an epic poem from Brunei, sees the taking of heads as an important item of bride wealth, necessary if a man is to marry. Simawn’s people, are oh so fierce Tens of thousands make head-baskets (garanjang) All the Murut, whoever is unmarried Take heads, to bring betrothal gifts (mambari tunang).98 The idea that a young man should present his bride with a head is found repeatedly in the literature, and is sometimes borne out by eyewitnesses. Community recognition of a marriage in south-west New Guinea was predicated on the husband’s participation in a successful raid, and a Jaqaj man was supposed to hang a head on the arm of his bride at the wedding feast. She would then dance with the skull until she was exhausted, when her mother would assume her place.99 Even when the historical evidence for the head-as-gift is absent, the connection between headhunting and marriage remains. William Jones, an American anthro-
94 Drewes, G. W. J. (1961), ‘De biografie van een Minangkabausen Peperhandelaar in de Lampongs’, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Institut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol 36, p 110. 95 Jacobs, supra note 3, at p 99; Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1969), The Konyak Nagas: An Indian Frontier Tribe, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, p 14. 96 M. Rosaldo, supra note 75, at p 165. 97 Zegwaard, supra note 18, at p 1022. 98 Maxwell, supra note 14, at pp 92, 101. 99 Boelaars, supra note 18, at pp 135, 148, 142. 34 South East Asia Research pologist who collected material on the Ilongot in the early 1900s, made no mention of the common lowland belief that the father of an Ilongot bride expected a head from his future son-in-law. Seventy years later, however, Ilongot men still yearned to kill before they wed, and saw the right to wear the headhunter’s hornbill earrings as the mark of man- hood.100 As Michelle Rosaldo points out, the aspiring headhunters of Ilongot myth and legend are almost always depicted as bachelors, who become distinguished as proud killers and potent lovers.101 The com- mon belief that animist groups in Seram took heads before marriage may not be invariably correct, for a raid could also be occasioned by the death of a great man, or the erection of a new meeting house that required a human sacrifice. Nonetheless, as a Dutch commissioner re- marked in 1684, ‘there are still a few men [in Ambon] whose women and children are not permitted to wear a waistband because their father has not brought in a head’.102 For older women, especially those of high status, the headhunt could also serve an important purpose in the rituals accompanying a hus- band’s funeral. Speaking of the Philippines in 1589, a Spanish priest commented, ‘when some chief dies, to avenge his death they had to cut off many heads, with which they would make many feasts and dances’. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources describing the Apayao of north-western Cagayan indicate that the taking of heads and the burial of skulls was essential to end the prescribed period of mourning.103 A similar pattern was noted in nineteenth-century Minahasa (northern Sulawesi), where only a headhunting expedition could end a widow’s mourning, making possible a new cycle of sexual union and procrea- tion. Understandably, raids were often undertaken at the urging of a woman who wished to remarry.104 For those whose husbands had them- selves become victims, the capture of an enemy head could represent a public statement of retaliation. The Kayan of Central Borneo even speak of the women’s dance performed during the kayo, the post-headhunting
100 The Great Hornbill, dichoceros bicornis, appears as symbol of the headhunter through- out much of Monsoon Asia. M. Rosaldo, supra note 75, at pp 19, 56; Nid Anima (1985), The Headhunting Tribes of the Philippines, Cultural Foundation for Asia, Quezon City, p 19. Similarly, among the Toraja white beaded bracelets were a public statement that a young man had been drawn into the privileged world of the head- hunter; George, supra note 23, at p 145. 101 Rosaldo, supra note 75, at p 149. 102 Knaap, supra note 37, at p 73. 103 Junker, supra note 6, at p 346. 104 Schouten, supra note 16, at p 33; see also Boelaars, supra note 18, at p 171. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 35 rituals, as ngajen hule, literally, the dance of revenge.105 Some Naga villages performed a special rite when a head was taken to avenge the death of one of their warriors. The widow went out to meet the suc- cessful headhunters outside the village, where she thrust a spear into the eyes of the captured head (which could easily be that of an old woman or a child rather than a man), taunting it by recalling how in life ‘he’ had danced in triumph when her husband had been killed. She also provided a pig for sacrifice in honour of the man who had wounded or killed on her behalf. If the village had lost several heads, all the wid- ows of those killed speared the captured head and gave pigs for sacrifice.106 Encouraging headhunters Despite the comments by Jacobs, it does seem that among the Naga, as in other societies, the prestige of headhunters could also pass to their lovers, mothers, daughters, sisters or wives. This status was often af- firmed in dress or body decoration, like the cowries that women sewed on to skirts and aprons, or wore as necklaces to demonstrate their rela- tionship to a great warrior. 107 In Minahasa, said Padt-Brugge, a headhunter’s wife was also tattooed, although this could only occur if her husband’s body was already completely covered.108 Other societies may have been more relaxed. A modern commentator notes that Kalinga women whose male relatives had been tattooed were entitled to the same honour – a privilege easy to claim, since a relationship with a successful headhunter was usually easily established.109 A photograph taken in 1952 shows one Asmat woman, the wife of a great headhunter, wearing the bamboo breastplate associated with warriors as a symbol that heads had been taken for her.110 There could also be more practical benefits, for Toraja women who had presented their men with some personal item as a protection against harm could even expect to receive a share of captured booty when the warriors returned home.111 Women therefore had a vested interest in encouraging headhunting, since the fortunes of their men directly affected their own future and
105 Rousseau, supra note 17, at p 89. 106 von Fürer-Haimendorf, supra note 95, at p 98. 107 Jacobs, supra note 3, at p 110. 108 Padt-Brugge, supra note 47, at p 318. 109 Dozier, supra note 20, at p 201. 110 Zegwaard, G. A. (1996), ‘Missionarissen en menseneters’, Spiegel Historiael, Vol 31, No 7–8, p 288. 111 Adriani and Kruyt, supra note 21, Vol I, at p 283. 36 South East Asia Research their own community status. This female engagement is graphically depicted in an Ifugao hudhud (epic) celebrating the exploits of a head- hunter: The women onlookers watched Pumbakhayon, and beautiful they were They cheered him, shouting together ‘Fight, fight, Pumbakhayon Kill Aliguyon, bring his head to us.’112 Similar ideas can be found in the oral epics sung by the Iban, when the great ancestors participate in a war party because one of their women insists on a gift to take to a festival. ‘I do not want to bring the ancient skull’, she says, ‘I must bring a new one which is still dripping with blood.’113 In the ethnographic literature, this female incitement of headhunting is a recurrent theme. In his comments on Assam in 1891, for instance, one English official remarked that the desire for heads was ‘still very strong’ among Naga and Kuki youths. That this should be so is more the fault of the women than of any one else; these are given to laugh at the young bucks at the village festivals when they turn out without such decorations as match the successful warrior.114 While similar comments occur in other contexts, the Iban material is the most vehement in asserting that headhunting was motivated prima- rily by the demands of wives and lovers. An early account from 1838 states categorically that ‘as long as a man has not taken a head, he has no status and a woman will not marry him’.115 The same claims were repeated by numerous authorities on Borneo, with the most extreme example occurring in a 1909 contribution to the Sarawak Gazette:
The women, in their cruelty and bloodthirstiness are the cause of this headhunting. At every festival the old skulls are taken from the fire place, where they are
112 Jovita Ventura Castro et al (1983), Anthology of ASEAN Literatures: Epics of the Philippines, ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, Quezon City, pp 28– 29. 113 Sandin, supra note 52, at p 71. 114 Elwin, supra note 2, at pp 546–547; Sardeshpande, S. C. (1987), The Patkoi Nagas, Daya, Delhi, p 50. 115 Anonymous (1853), supra note 68, at p 44; Brooke, J., cited in Keppel, H., A Visit to the Indian Archipelago in H.M. Ship Maeander with Portions of the Private Journal of Sir James Brooke, Richard Bentley, London, Vol I, p 129; for a similar comment, see Perham, J. (1878), ‘Mengap, the song of the Dyak head feast’, JSBRAS, Vol 2, December, p 132; Hose and McDougal, supra note 15, Vol 1, pp 186–187; see also Rousseau, supra note 5, at p 276. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 37 preserved and smoked from generation to generation, and carried through the house by some women, A monotonous song is sung by the women in honour of the hero who cut off the head, and in derision of the poor victims whose skulls are carried around; and again and again the infernal chorus is heard, ‘agi ngambi, agi ngambi (bring us more of them)’.116
Tapping supernatural powers The successful raid was not dependent merely on brave warriors and sharpened weapons, but required the support of supernatural forces, since any accident could be attributed to the anger of powerful spirits. In this context the female contribution could be critical. Naga men who had killed were entitled to decorate their shields with locks of their sisters’ hair, thought to impart invulnerability,117 while Toraja girls re- putedly mixed such hair with their own menstrual blood as a talisman against danger.118 In Sumba, the model ‘trees’ laden with the skulls of victims (known as andung), which women wove into fabric designs, projected their own menacing potential. As one old man explained to a contemporary researcher, ‘people were afraid to approach us in the past, when we wore the andung motifs . . . They were reminded of our fierceness.’119 The Iban believed that some designs even had the power to incite (merangsang) men to go on the warpath. ‘The pattern of the iron hook is crying, weeping and softly pleading, proudly demanding the ribs and both flank for bait.’120 It is not surprising to see the status accorded to women skilled in producing textiles that made the wearer invulnerable or imbued him with courage.121 Women were also prominent in the ritual performances prior to the departure of the headhunters. Special war dances that could involve
116 Anonymous; reprinted in Richards, A. J. N. (1963), The Sea Dyaks and Other Races of Sarawak, Borneo Literature Bureau, Kucing, pp 91–92, which continues, ‘[The] women take possession of the fresh head and start at once their horrible dance with it. I have seen them myself with the heads, dripping with blood and exhaling an awful stench; with devilish joy they were taken by the dancing women, who in their rage – for they get enraged over it – bit the head and licked it whilst they were dancing through the house like mad women.’ 117 Elwin, supra note 2, at p 219; von Fürer-Haimendorf, supra note 95, at p 57. 118 Adriani and Kruyt, supra note 21, at p 283. 119 Forshee, J. (2001), Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives and Travels from Sumba, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, p 34. 120 Personal communication from Traude Gavin, cited in Davison and Sutlive, supra note 4, at p 210. The significance of the ‘iron hook’ motif is not explained here, but in Timor the kait, or hooked implement was a harvesting tool, but was also hitched into the skull for hanging. Schulte Nordholt, supra note 41, at p 352. 121 Masing, supra note 43, Vol 2, p 403. 38 South East Asia Research both sexes were intended to galvanize male energy and recruit the sup- port of powerful spirits, as evident in an 1841 account of the Nagas, which described how women formed an inner circle surrounded by men leaping and brandishing their weapons.122 The Spanish friar Fran- cisco Alcina commented that in the Philippines certain epics were chanted or sung before raiding expeditions to inflame the passions of the warri- ors and inspire them to fight valiantly.123 Dayak villages maintained a few female singers whose chants and beating of gongs were essential in rousing their men to combat. In the mid-nineteenth century Dutch officials recruiting support against rebellious settlements even found it useful to slip these women ‘a few guilders’ to ensure that the warriors were suitably motivated.124 Headhunters, mothers and shamans Despite the emphasis on headhunters as lovers, they are also sons, and deference to the wisdom of mothers and senior women is a common trope in indigenous sources. In one chant, for instance, a young woman is told: You cannot receive [the head trophy], dear daughter Since you have yet to make a pattern in the woven blanket You still ask my advice On making a pattern in the form of the jaw of the adulterous crocodile.125 As teachers, nurturers and purveyors of cultural values during the critical childhood years, mothers were as important as the men’s house in socializing boys and youths so that they would be made eager to join older men on the warpath. The lullabies sung by Iban mothers to their sons, like those on the Indonesian islands of Sumba and Timor, are infused with images of battle, and the relationship between mothers and their warrior sons can be tracked as a cross-cultural theme.126 A myth collected in southern Borneo in 1847 in fact attributes the intro-
122 From Robinson, W. (1841), Descriptive Account of Assam, to which is added a Short Account of Neighbouring Tribes, London, cited in Verrier Elwin (1959), India’s North- east Frontier in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, London, p 30. 123 Junker, supra note 6, at p 347, citing the Muñoz text of Alzina’s (1668) History of the Bisayan Islands, Part 1, Book[s] 1–[4]. Transliteration from a microfilm of the Spanish text in the Biblioteca de Palacio, Madrid, by Victor Baltazar [196–?], Phil- ippine Studies Program, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, pp 177–179. 124 Anonymous, supra note 68, at p 45. 125 Sandin, supra note 52, at p 114. 126 Janet Hoskins, supra note 7, ‘Introduction’, p 23. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 39 duction of headhunting to a hero whose widowed mother wanted venge- ance following the death of her husband, and would not be content until she had a human head.127 The Marind-anim of south-west New Guinea similarly trace headhunting to the instigations of Sobra, an old woman whose name is repeatedly invoked in the ayasé, the song that accompanies the dancing on the eve of a headhunt.128 In central Bor- neo, where Jérôme Rousseau worked in the 1970s, mothers often carried out demanding food taboos on behalf of their adolescent sons during the post-headhunting rituals.129 Stories recorded among the Jaqaj a hun- dred years later still describe mothers appealing to the older men to watch over their sons, and depict village women dancing and crying out ‘your mother, your mother’ to remind the departing headhunters that they should not disappoint their mothers.130 When the men returned, wives and sisters gave the spears that had been used to kill to the moth- ers of the killers, or to their own mothers, in recognition of their contribution to the raid’s success.131 Senior women had particular responsibilities in many headhunting communities because they had passed the dangerous zone of fertility, and their ability to hold a head or deal with its powers was considered greater than that of a younger female. Having attained this ‘male-like’ status, they might even be entitled to take on some roles normally re- served for men, as among the Kalinga, where old women joined old men in reciting the kalommatik, the chant performed after a successful headhunting foray.132 More specifically, however, older women were important because the prime source of supernatural support came through the expertise of those skilled as spirit mediums. Although males and females could both serve as shamans, a number of historical sources indicate that older women were thought to have a particular ability to bridge the gap between the world of humans and that of spirits.133 The audacious manner in which an ‘Indian anitero (spirit medium)’ from Cagayan (northern Luzon) confronted Spanish priests in 1595 is
127 Schärer, supra note 61, at p 145. 128 van Baal, J. (1984), ‘The dialectics of sex in Marind-amin culture’, in Herdt, G. H., ed, Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, p 156. 129 Rousseau, supra note 17, at p 211. 130 Boelaars, supra note 18, at pp 141, 147. 131 Boelaars, supra note 18, at p 166. 132 Dozier, supra note 20, at pp 167, 267. 133 Infante, T. R. (1975), The Woman in Early Philippines and Among the Cultural Minorities, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, pp 167–194. 40 South East Asia Research particularly striking. ‘This is a province’, the Spanish reported, ‘where the people have wars. . . and where they do not take anybody alive, women and children, but cut off their heads’.134 Similar individuals were highly effec- tive in rallying peasants in anti-Spanish uprisings.135 Significantly, the Spanish also noted that the only women who could perform ritual blood- letting were these ‘male-like’ spirit mediums, who in certain ceremonies actually or symbolically killed the animal (or human?) to be sacrificed.136 The Dutch in Taiwan were similarly struck by the role of women shamans among the headhunting groups they encountered in Taiwan. In the words of Candidus, ‘All the other nations that I have ever known have male priests, popes or teachers who instruct the people . . .; but this nation has only priestesses, whom they call Inibs. They prophesy good or evil, whether it will rain or whether fine and beautiful weather may be expected’.137 In central Sulawesi, where the majority of shamans were female, the missionary Nicolaus Adriani in 1917 directly linked the expe- ditions by headhunters with the travels of the priestess to the Upper and Lower world; both were intended to protect the community from danger. Like a headhunter, a shaman also performed dangerous work, and she needed to be as strong as he if she was to interact with the various deities and spirits. Tangible evidence of this connection is apparent in the special poncho-like coverings and headdresses made of bark-cloth worn by the shamans, for these resembled the clothing of warriors at a headhunting feast. In other words, the kind of relationship with headhunters attained by accomplished Iban weavers was matched in central Sulawesi by women who became competent shamans.138 It was the priestess who could nullify the effects of a headhunter’s ill-omened dreams; it was the priestess who had mastered the special language and rituals necessary to ensure the
134 Jocano, supra note 59, at p 189, ‘Description of the land of the Province of Cagayan and the manner of dress of the natives and their customs and its rivers and creeks is as follows’; Blair and Robertson, supra note 54, Vol 30, pp 306–307. 135 Anderson, E. (1977), ‘Traditions in conflict. Filipino responses to Spanish colonial- ism, 1565–1665’, PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, pp 69, 100, 218; Brewer, C. (2001), Holy Confrontation: Religion, Gender and Sexuality in the Philippines, 1521–1685, Institute of Women’s Studies, St. Scholastica’s College, Manila, pp 167– 168. 136 See, for example, Blair and Robertson, supra note 54, Vol 5, p 13, in which the priestess during her trance ‘pierces the heart of the hog’. 137 Campbell, supra note 38, at pp 24–25. 138 Adriani, N. (1932), ‘De Toradjasche vrouw als priesteres’, Verzamelde Geschriften, Vol 2, Erven F. Bohn, Harlem, p 190; Eija-Maija Kotilainen (1992), ‘When the Bones are Left’: A Study of the Material Culture of Central Sulawesi, The Finnish Anthro- pological Society, Helsinki, pp 13, 131–154, especially p 150. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 41 warriors’ safe return; in her capacity as midwife she might even be able to supply that most powerful of amulets, the finger of a stillborn child.139 Obviously we cannot generalize from these cases and assume that female spirit mediums elsewhere were equally prominent. For example, in a recent study of a former headhunting society, Fiskesjö states explicitly that among the Wa the ba pi (‘the one who chants the ritual headhunting prayers’) were always men, and the preference for male seers can be found in numerous other societies.140 A recent study of a Kayan subgroup like- wise places the responsibility for overseeing the rites connected with headhunting firmly in the domain of the male ritual chief, the eda lekaè.141 Nonetheless, the role of such women in the Philippines, Taiwan and central Sulawesi seems very similar to more recent descriptions of the Buaya, one of the Kalinga groups in the northern Luzon highlands. De Raedt, who attended an allegedly ‘traditional’ headhunting feast (sagang) in the 1960s, accepted that much had changed, but he still believed that it displayed many subtle understandings about supernatural powers, which still operate today.142 The aggressive male spirits who could cause ill- nesses and other catastrophes demanded the offering of heads and could only be reached through a female spirit medium, a mangalisig. Accord- ingly, most headhunts were undertaken on the advice of a mangalisig who could call for a headhunt because of illness, declining fortunes or the need for revenge. She would become possessed by spirits who would guide the headhunters, and would produce talismans and protective amulets to protect them from attack. Like her counterparts described in seventeenth- century Spanish sources, a Buaya ‘priestess’ was actually involved in the fighting, accompanying the warriors and even initiating the battle with a high-pitched yell, throwing her sacred spear towards the enemy. At the conclusion of the raid, it was she who called on the soul of the victim to follow the body part that was carried off.143
139 Adriani and Kruyt, supra note 21, Ch 6. 140 Fiskesjö, supra note 3, Vol 2, p 296; see further Vertenten, P. (1935), Vijftien Jaar bij de Koppensnellers van Nederlandsch Zuid-Nieuw-Guinea, Davisfonds, Leuven, p 50. 141 Guerreiro, A. (1992), ‘Intégration au rituel des groupements modang weheà (Kalimantan Est-Indonésie)’, Bulletin de l’École d’Extrême Orient, Vol 79, No 2, pp 35–38. 142 De Raedt, J. (1996), ‘Buaya headhunting and its ritual: notes from a headhunting feast in northern Luzon’, in Hoskins, supra note 7, at p 167. 143 De Raedt, in Hoskins, supra note 7, at pp 166–181; on the role of the medium in another Kalinga area, and the performance of the sagang ceremony to bestow long life on the village, see Dozier, supra note 20, at p 200. Spenser St. John commented, however, on the relatively low profile of priestesses during a Dayak head-feast, al- though when he wrote there had not been a head-feast for many years. St. John, supra note 22, Vol I, pp 196–197. 42 South East Asia Research
Staying at home Women did not normally accompany a headhunting raid, although in south-western New Guinea they could be included as porters and take care of captured children. In special cases young women of reputed stamina could even participate in the actual fighting, although they had to undergo a period of discipline and training, and acquisition of the skills involved in handling a sok, or headhunter’s bamboo knife. On occasion female relatives of headhunters could be especially selected as ‘nowan’, the individuals who actually decapitated prisoners.144 How- ever, although women usually remained at home, they were still spiritually engaged in the conflict, and in his observations on the Manila region, the Spanish chronicler Miguel de Loarca noted that women refrained from work while their men were at war.145 Later sources show that women were also required to observe numerous taboos when their male kin were out raiding.146 A Sumbanese woman, for instance, was required to stay inside her house while her husband was absent, keep- ing her hair tied and refraining from performing any women’s work, like sewing or weaving. She was also expected to follow other ritual obligations, such as tending to the tree on which the skulls were hung, in order to ensure her husband’s safe return.147 The wife of an English missionary remarked that Dayak women were punctilious in observing a multitude of restrictions, but in some places the need for greater spir- itual concentration (or perhaps the dictates of pragmatism) led to the selection of one emblematic female to observe the taboos on behalf of all women whose husbands were absent.148 The missionary Petrus Drabbe, who spent nearly 20 years of his life on the island of Tanimbar (eastern Indonesia) noted that a female, either an older woman or a very young girl, was accorded a special ritual role while the headhunt- ers were away. She had to remain enclosed in a place sacred to the spirit, maintaining constant contact with the spirits and ensuring that the fire did not go out, since this would signal the death of the warriors.
144 Van der Kroef, supra note 31, at pp 221–235; Vertenten, supra note 31, at p 57; Zegwaard, supra note 110, at pp 289–290. 145 In Blair and Robertson, supra note 54, Vol 5, p 163. 146 George, supra note 23, at pp 114–117. 147 Hewitt, F. E. (1963), ‘Dyak “pemali” (restrictions)’, in Richards, supra note 116, at pp 45–48; George, supra note 23, at p 115; Rousseau, supra note 17, at p 86; Adriani and Kruyt, supra note 21, at pp 302–306; Evans, I. H. N. (1990, reprint of 1922 ed), Among Primitive Peoples in Borneo, Oxford University Press, Singapore/New York, p 163; Kruyt, A. C. (1922), ‘De Soembaneezen’, BKI, Vol 78, p 560. 148 Rousseau, supra note 17, at pp 86, 211–212, fn 55. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 43
She could not speak to people outside, and could not engage in sexual intercourse or any other activity such as weaving that would threaten the headhunters’ security.149 The headhunters’ return Every headhunter was stalked by the spectre of death, and a women’s plaint collected among the Toraja of upland Sulawesi expresses the anxiety once experienced when headhunters were slow to return. ‘The day when they left is long past’, the chorus intones, envisaging the likelihood that their village could be ‘the place of widows/one hamlet the place of orphans/one mountain the place of the graves’. Because of the relief that must have followed a successful raid, female jubilance reached its height in the post-headhunting celebrations, which aroused comment from many early commentators. In Taiwan, Candidus reported, the head was displayed in a parade, after which it proceeded to the ‘idol house’ where it was boiled until all the flesh fell off. It was then put in the sun to dry, to be followed by further festivities, which could last for as long as a fortnight.150 Accounts from the Philippines provide similar evidence. In Cagayan (north-west Luzon), a sixteenth-century commentator said:
If they win and bring back some prize or heads of their enemies, they celebrate it also by drinking, ringing some bells which they possess, some dancing, others drinking – including women – and everybody celebrates the feasts of victory they have won, placing on the wreaths many pendant feathers of gold, and these the brave Indians put on, those who have cut off heads. And they celebrate these dances and drinking two, three or more times.151 The Spanish reference to female participation in these feasts provides a linkage to later documentation, for virtually all writers are agreed that women played a prominent part in the rituals and triumphant danc- ing when communities celebrated the successful raid. According to Edward Dozier, the special cry of Kalinga women, the ayaya (an eerie staccato sound made by moving the tongue quickly against the upper teeth) was used specifically to announce that victorious headhunters
149 Drabbe, P. (1940), Het Leven van den Tanémbarees; Ethnografische Studie over het Tanémbareesche Volk, Brill, Leiden, p 230; McKinnon, S. (1991), From a Shattered Sun: Gender and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands Hierarchy, University of Wiscon- sin Press, Madison, p 80. 150 Campbell, supra note 38, at pp 15, 322. 151 ‘Description of the land of the Province of Cagayan’, in Landa Jocano, supra note 134, at p 190. 44 South East Asia Research were returning and to alert nearby villages.152 In his 1780 description of Borneo (‘as far as is now known’), Radermacher wrote of commu- nity celebrations that welcomed the warriors, with Dayak women dancing to the beat of gongs and accepting the heads from their men- folk.153 Twenty years later Bengal’s chief engineer, James Rennell, described how Kuki women wearing their headdresses of red and black threads, embroidered with beads, went to meet the conquerors. ‘When a married man brings his wife a head, they pledge one another alter- nately in horns of liquor, and she even washes his bloody hands in the liquor that they drink.’154 In the early twentieth century another writer still spoke of the ‘beautiful plaits of red and black cotton’, which young Kuki women tied around the hairknots of the successful headhunters, and of the headdresses (chawndal) the men were now entitled to wear.155 A closer examination of this material indicates that the most promi- nent among the welcoming women was often the female shaman. In Timor, said Geerlof Heijmering in 1846, an old woman received the head following the hunt, combing its hair, and feeding it with rice and pork. Timorese oral traditions collected nearly a century later recalled the prominence of a young woman, herself dressed as a meo or head- hunter, who led the male initiates into the shrine area where the head would be displayed.156 A parallel role was played by the Buaya mangalisig, and in the feasts that honoured the returning headhunters, she and other female mediums danced before the basket of heads, becoming possessed by spirits as they did so. In this state, the head could be tossed back and forth and, says de Raedt, ‘people told me of other more spectacular things that could happen. . . ’ In some cases the prophetess might dance with the head on her head, then suck its blood.157 Yet conversely, participating women could also appreciate
152 Dozier, supra note 20, at p 200. 153 Radermacher, J. C. M. (1780), ‘Beschrjving van het Eiland Borneo voor zo verre hetzelve, tot nu toe, bekend is’, VBG, Vol 2, p 10. See also Padt-Brugge, supra note 47, at p 318. On the role of women in greeting the headhunters, see, for example, Fiskesjö, supra note 3, Vol 2, pp 301–302. 154 Cited in Lewin, T. H. (1870), Wild Races of South-Eastern India, W.H. Allen, Lon- don, p 273. 155 Shakespear, J. (1912), The Lushai Kuki Clans, Macmillan, London, p 58; for the women’s role in greeting Wa headhunters, see Fiskesjö, supra note 3, Vol 2, p 301. 156 Heijmering, G. H. (1846), ‘Een inlandsch oorlog op her eiland Timor’, Tijdschrift voor Neêrlands-Indië, Vol 8, No 3, p 220; Middelkoop, supra note 61, at p 139; Schulte Nordholt, supra note 41, at p 351; for old women among the Ibans, see Masing, supra note 43, Vol I, p 67. 157 De Raedt, supra note 143, at pp 166–181. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 45 that somewhere some other mother or wife was grieving for the loss of a son, a husband, a lover, and it was often their duty to placate the skull’s angry spirit. An account of eighteenth-century Timor referred to the ‘lamenting’ that accompanied the celebratory dances around the newly severed heads, and during the great Iban feasts the wife of the sponsor often acted as the head’s ‘mother’, caressing and feeding it so that its spirit would be appeased.158 The Chinese ethnologist Ling Chunsheng, who visited the Wa country in the 1930s and 40s, describes the procession that brought the head back to the village. The women walked behind the men, wailing loudly, crying as follows, ‘Everyone knows not to walk, [yet] why did you [owner of] this head, have to take the wrong way and lose your life? Your father and mother raised you, how would they know today is the date of your death?159
Feasting and sexuality Obviously a historian can only speculate about the significance of many of these actions, for memories can fade remarkably quickly. When Schulte Nordholt carried out his research in Timor in the late 1940s, his Atoni informants were unable to explain the full meaning of the headhunting rituals that Pieter Middelkoop had recorded only 20 years earlier. 160 Yet whether we are talking about north-eastern India or southern New Guinea, it is clear that the post-raid celebrations were important and prolonged, and that they marked significant peaks in the sexual relationships of husbands and wives as well as young men and women. This heightened sexuality must have been at least in part due to the fact that intercourse was normally proscribed prior to a raid. Husbands and wives often remained apart, and men frequently prepared themselves for combat by eating special foods, which wives and mothers could be forbidden to prepare.161 The potentially emasculating powers of female sexuality are suggested in customs from Seram, where a Huaulu man
158 See also van Hogendorp, supra note 58, Vol 2, p 71; Masing, supra note 43, Vol 2, p 227. 159 Cited in Fiskesjö, supra note 3, at pp 34, 302. 160 Schulte Nordholt, supra note 41, at p 352. 161 Boelaars, supra note 18, at pp 155–156; Elwin, supra note 2, at p 287; Schulte Nordholt, supra note 41, at p 350; Williams, F. E. (1969 reprint of 1936 ed), Papuans of the Trans-Fly, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p 269. 46 South East Asia Research would be excluded from a headhunt if his wife was menstruating or giving birth.162 Perhaps the most extreme example of the headhunting– sexuality apposition comes from seventeenth-century Taiwan, where Candidus, who spent 16 months in an aboriginal village, reported that the wives of headhunters regularly aborted their pregnancies. In other words, men were not able to live with their wives and become fathers in the true sense until their period of service as warriors was complete. ‘As long as the men go to war and generate children with their wives, they kill these children up to the time that they do not go to war any more.’ One woman told him that she had undergone 17 abortions!163 Observance of sexual taboos prior to the raid must have been rigidly enforced by self-censorship, for transgressions would have meant that the men would certainly be killed, and the women themselves left vul- nerable to attack. Women also knew they could become sick or ill if they ignored the prohibitions associated with headhunting preparations or witnessed activities that were supposed to remain male secrets.164 In essence, then, return of the victorious headhunters marked a restora- tion of normal patterns of intercourse, as well as opening the door for new relationships between men of heightened potency and willing young women. It is thus understandable that even in modern times the Syair Awang Simawn, a paean to headhunting prowess, was often recited during Brunei wedding rituals.165 Indeed, the headhunt itself could be regarded as a prelude to a time of enhanced sexuality. The Keraki, a group in the Trans-Fly region of southern Papua release their weapons against their opponents with the cry ‘Tokujenji (the mythical bullroarer, a phallic symbol) is copulating with you!’166 Everywhere, it seems, the dancing that accompanied the celebrations was overtly sexual, with both men and women emboldened by alcohol, and the atmosphere redolent with physical desire and the frenzy with which the heads (or the idea of heads) was received. As Ling Chunsheng remarked, ‘After the sacri- fices are over, men and women mingle and shout with loud voices, playing flutes and beating drums, dancing madly in joy, drinking wine
162 Valeri, supra note 42, at pp 247, 260; Rousseau, supra note 17, at p 273. 163 Campbell, supra note 38, at pp 19–20, 95; Blussé, L., and Roessingh, M. P. H. (1984), ‘A visit to the past: Soulang, a Formosan village anno 1623’, Archipel, Vol 27, p 70; Shepherd, J. R. (1995), Marriage and Mandatory Abortion Among the 17th-century Siraya, Monograph 6, American Ethnological Society, Arlington, VA, p 3. 164 George, supra note 23, at p 139. 165 Brown, D. (1988), Hierarchy, History and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Human Consciousness, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, p 78. 166 Williams, supra note 161, at p 183; see further van Baal, supra note 128, at p 154. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 47 and making merry’. Around the same period a Frenchman, one of the few non-Wa to attend a headhunting celebration, graphically describes how the joy intensified during the evening, turning into ‘a madness that hurled couples into the jungle and brought them back again’.167 Iban epics transcribed by Benedict Sandin and James Masing provide a remarkable sense of the longhouse mood on such occasions. The atmosphere could be such that even a great ancestor might not recog- nize which women are unmarried and which are wives. He touches them on their breasts, He pushes down on the buns of their hair.168 Stories collected from Jaqaj respondents in New Guinea project a similar environment. When the men arrived home, they said, the kud (the rat- tan basket containing the head) was passed from woman to woman, each of whom danced with the head hanging from her apron.169 The erotic interplay of headhunter-husband and wife-lover is likewise con- veyed in praise-recitations in upland Sulawesi collected in the 1980s.170 As the Ilongot chant collected by Michelle Rosaldo has it: Here, here they are, these men who have taken heads Wearing earrings, they have taken heads, Here, here they are, all lined up, the girls, Wearing new blouses, all the girls Ah, like a twisting vine, the thighs of killers and the girls.171 But while the entire community may have been caught up in these cel- ebrations, it was the headhunter, said the Buaya, who enjoyed the greatest sexual pleasure.172 Unmentioned, but implicit, is the pleasure of his partner as well.
The end of headhunting: sources, comparison and gender In both Taiwan and the Philippines pre-nineteenth century sources have allowed historians to track the processes by which headhunting and its associated cultural practices were effectively eradicated in lowland areas.
167 Fiskesjö, supra note 3, at pp 302, 306. 168 Sandin, supra note 52, at p 37. 169 Boelaars, supra note 18, at p 167; Zegwaard, supra note 110, at p 291. 170 George, supra note 19, at pp 75, 79. 171 M. Rosaldo, supra note 75, at p 149. 172 De Raedt, supra note 143, at pp 166–181. 48 South East Asia Research
In Taiwan, immigration from China and the imposition of Chinese con- trol, like the assertion of Spanish authority and Christian conversion in the Philippines, meant that by the beginning of the eighteenth century the taking of heads was associated with ‘primitive’, uncivilized or unconverted peoples in the mountain areas. In other areas of colonized Asia such as Borneo, eastern Indonesia and in north-east India change came more slowly, and as late as 1885 headhunting was still ‘in full swing’ among the Naga groups east of the Doyang River.173 By the 1920s, however, the assertion of central authority and spread of missionary influence made headhunting incidents a rare occurrence except in more remote areas such as New Guinea, where it was a reality as late as the 1950s. In closing, I would like to return to the three questions that helped frame this paper. Methodologically, I have adopted an approach that some might be inclined to discount as ahistorical, since I have tried to address the problem of documentation by linking pre-nineteenth cen- tury sources with the richer material from later years. Obviously this approach can still gather up only a tiny portion of a practice that was once so significant, since many of the changes that occurred over this 400-year period are lost to the historical record. In one provocative statement in 1926, for instance, Charles Hose, a man with many years’ experience in Borneo, speculated that the Iban might have begun to headhunt ‘only a few generations ago’ in imitation of the Kayan and other tribes. In 1888 it was also claimed that several groups in northern Luzon were beginning to adopt the practice from the Apayao, said to be ‘passionate headhunters’.174 Nonetheless, when used with caution I believe that the effort to establish linkages between early and later material is defensible and that headhunting deserves some discussion in any history of the region, if only to demonstrate how long-estab- lished customs can be overwhelmed or redirected. A second question revolves around the contentious issue of regional comparison. Historians have been at the forefront of the academic ef- fort to define South East Asia as a coherent region, and one of the most thoughtful scholars in the field has gone on record as saying that com- parative studies stand as ‘the ultimate justification for regional studies’.175
173 Elwin, supra note 2, at p 347. 174 Hose, C. (1926), Natural Man: A Record from Borneo, Macmillan, London, p 145; Keesing, supra note 72, at p 164. 175 King, V. T. (2001), ‘Southeast Asia: an anthropological field of study?’ Moussons, Vol 3, p 16: Wolters, O. W. (1999), History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, revised ed, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, p 235. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 49
By contrast, anthropologists have generally been reluctant to general- ize on the basis of ill-defined units of comparison, and have been impatient with the ‘woefully simplistic’ juxtaposition that arises when inadequate attention is given to specific contexts.176 Yet it is equally possible that some aspects of human experience are sufficiently simi- lar to warrant comparison, and that the process can pose new questions and open up new lines of inquiry. The ‘coherent violence’ that imbues the taking of a human head with ‘specific ritual meaning’ is one such experience. Reaching across the South East Asian region and even bey- ond, comparisons can throw up some intriguing parallels. Among the Naga, for instance, heads are hung on the Ficus and the Euphorbia (a cactus-like tree), both of which exude a white sap like breast milk – a pointed comment on the connection between headhunting and fertility. It is highly likely that the same associations also held in Sumba, where Hoskins notes that the ‘cactus-like’ katoda or ‘skull tree’ was also used to display the ‘fruit’ of the skulls taken in combat.177 Finally, I have asked whether it is possible to generalize across ‘Monsoon Asia’ in terms of what headhunting meant in the constructions of gender. Clearly it was important to men, who acquired great status in their own eyes, and in the eyes of other men, but women also saw those who participated as more ‘manly’ and more virile, and thus highly desir- able as lovers, husbands and potential fathers. Moreover, while women could never attain the kind of status that a man did through participation in a raid, they still played a significant part in the accompanying rituals. Furthermore, the sexuality implicit in the headhunting concept guaranteed their own fertility, the fertility of their crops, and the health of their children and kinsfolk. These generalizations are obviously subject to local contextualizations. The role of the female priestess seems especially prominent in what might be seen as the core headhunting band, stretch- ing from Taiw an through the Philippines and Borneo to Sulawesi. Even though available records largely reflect the perceptions of men, women seem ritually less evident in what could be conceptualized as the ‘headhunting outliers’, Sumatra, New Guinea, north-east India and south- west China. While Iban chants regularly mention female ancestors and
176 Gregor, T. A., and Tuzin, D., eds (2001), Gender In Amazonia and Melanesia, Uni- versity of California Press, Berkeley, CA, p 4. 177 Hoskins, ‘The heritage of headhunting: history, ideology and violence on Sumba, 1890–1990’, in Hoskins, supra note 7, at p 217–218; Hutton, supra note 2, at p 404. There are also reports of ‘head-trees’ in south-west New Guinea. Boelaars, supra note 18, at p 169. 50 South East Asia Research spirits as well as the wives of headhunters who are being fêted, women play almost no part in the head-myths of the New Guinea Jaqaj, and receive few references in accounts of Naga raiding.178 At the beginning of the twenty-first century headhunting clearly be- longs to the past. Although modern informants are generally pleased that the old days of headhunting are no more, several anthropologists have also detected a sense of nostalgia for times long past, especially among men.179 The belief that communal well-being declined when men no longer headhunted, and that male virility was somehow diminished commonly surfaces in the anthropological literature. 180 Societies that see a direct relationship between human fertility and headhunting are not necessarily consoled by WHO statistics, which demonstrate the improved rates of infant mortality and maternal health in even remote tribal areas. In the 1940s Naga groups were generally agreed that when men were headhunt- ers the people were healthier, children did not fall ill and crops and animals flourished.181 A decade or so later a famous Kenyah chief told Rodney Needham that ‘when we took heads we had many children’, and several other old men asserted that the population had declined since headhunting was outlawed.182 Against this backdrop, the survival of some headhunting rituals, albeit in a much altered form, has raised scholarly questions about the extent to which communities have been able to fill the vacuum created by the forced abandonment of an old tradition. 183 While one must be impressed with the cultural dexterity that allowed ceremonies to con- tinue, it is also evident that many men have successfully negotiated other paths towards status. It has been suggested, for instance, that Kalinga men, for whom headhunting status was one of the few paths to power and influence, have now found alternative avenues through political action and involvement in organization.184
178 For example, Sandin, supra note 52, at pp 22, 55, 98; Zegwaard, supra note 18, at pp 1021–1028; Elwin, supra note 2, at pp 538–580. 179 Fiskesjö, supra note 3, at p 290; Elwin, supra note 2, at p 547. 180 Elwin, supra note 2, at p 286; Jacobs, supra note 3, at pp 57, 110; Schärer, supra note 61, at p 125; von Fürer-Haimendorf, supra note 95, at p 98; Valeri, supra note 42, at p 259; Rosaldo, supra note 75, at pp 35, 150; George, supra note 23, at pp 551, 264; Tsing, A. L. (1993), In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, pp 85–87, 90–91; Hoskins, supra note 7, ‘Introduction’, pp 31–33. 181 Jacobs, supra note 3, at p 121. 182 Needham, supra note 81, at p 78; Rousseau, supra note 17, at p 32; De Raedt, supra note 143, at p 171. 183 For example, M. Rosaldo, supra note 75; R. Rosaldo, supra note 20; George, supra note 23; Rousseau, supra note 17; Hoskins, supra note 177. 184 Dozier, supra note 20, at pp 125, 205. History, headhunting and gender in Monsoon Asia 51
Always overshadowed in the headhunting literature, the situation of women in the post-colonial environment has been of rather less con- cern. Certainly in 1872 Edward Dalton noted that marriage was only allowed to those who had tattooed themselves, which was itself dependent on taking a head. How, he wonders, did women’s expecta- tions of bridal gifts change when headhunting was proscribed?185 It is not possible to propose any generalizations across ‘Monsoon Asia’ from the information currently available. In upland Sulawesi, the ex- pensive and lengthy post-headhunting ceremonies conducted by women, intended to bring prosperity and health to the family, have been largely abandoned as more Toraja have become Christian. As a result, George believes, the place of women in ritual life has been reduced;186 and while it is possible that the end of Naga headhunting may have seen a rise in the importance of feasts of merit, for which a woman’s contribution is absolutely vital, the sexual licence of such occasions is also disappearing under the influence of Christianity.187 Commercialization and modernity are similarly affecting the role of women in former headhunting cultures, although comparative details are unclear. Iban women could once gain status from their knowledge of weaving and dyeing, especially of the great blankets used to receive heads. We know little, however, of the ways in which the prestige of weavers (increasingly older and declining in numbers) has been affected by the availability of synthetic dyes and commercial thread.188 My closing point would thus be that as far as women are concerned, we still await a larger pool of case studies that will facilitate cross- cultural comparisons of the final chapters in the headhunting saga. I would also like to stress that a greater focus on women is not merely of boutique interest, especially in South East Asian studies in which relative gender equity has long been claimed as a regional character- istic. A gender-oriented study has the capacity, as the late O.W. Wolters suggested, to accomplish more than simply putting women into history. It can also ‘throw light on the history – male as well as female – into which women are put’.189 If this kind of approach helps
185 Elwin, supra note 2, at p 401. 186 George, supra note 23, at pp 55–57, 115 187 Jacobs, supra note 3, at p 131; Diran, R. K. (1999), The Vanishing Tribes of Burma, Seven Dials, London, p 180. 188 Mashman, supra note 87, at p 263. 189 Wolters, supra note 175, at p 229. 52 South East Asia Research to ‘transcend political boundaries’ and aid in the re-exploration of border- lands and ‘margins’, historians, like their anthropological colleagues, can only benefit.190
190 King, supra note 175, at p 25.