Headhunting and the social imagination in Southeast Asia1996
by Jules de Raedt
This is the first book to bring together comparative material on headhunting in a number of Southeast Asian societies, to examine the cultural contexts in which such practices occurred, and to relate them to colonial history, violence, and ritual.
This volume documents and analyzes headhunting practices and shows the persistence of headhunting as a symbol or trope. Ethnographers of seven regions (the Philippine highlands, Sarawak, Brunei, and South Borneo, and the Indonesian islands of Sulkawesi, Sumba, and Timor) share their experiences of living with former headhunters (including an eyewitness account of a headhunting feast), attending rituals, and collecting oral histories to understand the heritage of headhunting in context.
In asking what meaning taking heads has assumed in the...