West's Meditations: Austronesian Headhunting - Some Thoughts
West's Meditations: Austronesian Headhunting - Some Thoughts: Headhunting is a practice that can comfortably be ascribed to the speakers of proto-Austronesian due to its near ubiquity among their desce...
Austronesian Headhunting - Some Thoughts
Headhunting
is a practice that can comfortably be ascribed to the speakers of
proto-Austronesian due to its near ubiquity among their descendants.
Prior to European imperial domination, the idea of beheading strangers
and taking their heads home was found throughout Austronesian-speaking
island southeast Asia (the Philippines, much of Indonesia,
non-peninsular Malaysia, Brunei, and Timor Leste), island Melanesia (the
Solomon Islands and Vanuatu), parts of coastal New Guinea, and
non-Sinitic Taiwan. Emphasis on the head was considerable in Polynesia
and Micronesia, too, and heads were clearly important booty in
pre-colonial New Zealand as well. There is still a tendency to treat
headhunting as something created by colonialism instead of exacerbated
by it, but this simply is not the case; it is a tradition of prehistoric
ancestry, not European introduction.
The non-Austronesian-speaking
headhunters of New Guinea were those whose languages possess the
greatest number of Austronesian loanwords, indicating that the practice
was introduced to the island by the prehistoric migrations of
Austronesian speakers. Speaking an Austronesian language, therefore,
once correlated strongly with decapitating other human beings. And we
know that it's an Austronesian tradition, rather than one that spread in
other ways, because Austronesian-speaking headhunters were once found
in New Guinea and island Melanesia, areas cut off from later
developments in island southeast Asia and connected only through shared
origin.
Informants in different societies,
however, gave surprisingly varied answers as to why they engaged in the
practice. They did roughly the same thing, and their practices were
clearly historically related, but appeared to do it for different
reasons. Some said they did it because the ancestors told them to;
others because heads ensured a bountiful harvest; still others because
of grief caused by inter-communal violence and the rage accompanying it;
because heads are like fruit, and a rich harvest of heads indicates the
health of the community; because various supernatural entities demand
heads to fill their barns just as humans fill their barns with rice; and
so on. Some gave no explicit reason at all, and when pressed said that
it was tradition. As it happens, I believe this is the most honest
response and the closest to the truth.
Ethnographers were ready with their own
interpretations, too. Some saw heads as manifesting 'soul substance' -
something like Polynesian mana or Malay semangat - and
others espoused an origin in ecology: Andrew Vayda, for instance,
believed that Bornean headhunters took heads because this made them
frightening to enemies, which gave them an edge in competing with other
groups for fertile land. (As he didn't examine the issue in light of
Austronesian ethnology, he was unaware that other Indo-Malaysian
societies also practiced headhunting and that it had not recently
evolved on Borneo; lack of awareness of the ethnological angle is
actually quite common among investigators of headhunting.)
Rodney Needham claimed that skulls were
believed to be causal agents of fertility in themselves, even without
'soul substances' and the like, and so their acquisition wasn't based on
anything other than a belief in their intrinsic worth. This latter
view may also be fairly close to the truth. It might be better to say
that heads were valued because everyone believed that everyone else
believed that heads were valuable due to their upbringing and the
constant references to and images of skulls throughout life.
The tradition correlated strongly with
speaking an Austronesian language, and therefore seems to be an
authentically Austronesian tradition. But the headhunters themselves
all gave different generic reasons for the practice, indicating that it
was a mindless tradition instead of something done on the basis of
reasons. But how could something persist for so long without any reason
for it?
This is less of a paradox than it seems,
as long as we bear in mind that headhunting consisted of a series of
individual acts instead of a single collective action inspired by an
explicit, overarching motive. In order to explain it, we need a
self-sustaining motive, not necessarily one bolstered by explicit
religious or socio-political beliefs. We may find one in the
combination of male ambition and the life-long perception of the importance of the head in the community.
It seems clear that despite the
diversity of explicitly recognised motivations, the 'real' reason for
Austronesian speakers taking heads is that they were heirs to a
tradition of taking heads, and that taking heads was something men
simply had to do. Each generation of children would see the men of the
village receive plaudits for taking heads. They would see heads being
used in ceremonies, hanging from poles or trees, being arranged neatly
on wooden platforms, or being placed inside sacred houses. They would
perceive the community's belief in the value of the human head before
being able to articulate the reasons for it.
As they grew up, they might be given an
explicit reason for taking heads, justified in terms of other practices
and beliefs with which they were familiar, but by that point belief in
the importance of taking heads may not have required much justification.
Whatever the ultimate reason for taking heads (the
reason proto-Austronesian speakers or their ancestors began taking
heads), the principal reason for men in descendant Austronesian-speaking
communities doing it was because men in Austronesian-speaking
communities had always done it.
The ethnographies of almost all
Austronesian headhunting societies from Taiwan to Timor and Sumatera to
Malaita make it clear that if a man didn't take a head, he wouldn't get
married or be tattooed. He wouldn't rise to chiefly office. He
wouldn't acquire prestige or expensive trade products. He would forever
be considered weak, shameful, and unmanly. A man had an interest in
cutting off the heads of strangers in the belief that other people would
consider him strong, manly, and worthy of marriage. Women would be
told not to marry men until they had taken a head, just as some people
in other societies would consider it unacceptable to marry before the
man has a stable job and a home to live in. The belief in the power of human heads was self-sustaining because it had an impact on male ambition.
Under such conditions, the only thing that could stop headhunting from
taking place was an explicit, enforceable ban that had even greater
consequences on ambition and success in headhunting communities.
The generic answer to why headhunting
was undertaken could easily vary - heads are like fruit, placate the
ancestors, etc. But if you ask, 'why did that man go and behead someone
in the next village?' - a more specific question - the answers make
more sense and link up more easily. Generally, they revolve around
prestige, respect, eligibility for status and marriage, and the desire
to please the community (and often the ancestors, too), combined with
the rather simple observation that elder men who had taken heads had
fancy clothes, wealth, and women. This is not a very edifying rationale
for beheading other human beings, but it really is the only solid chain
running through Austronesian headhunting. This is the main reason for
the extraordinary continuity of Austronesian headhunting.
Incidentally, headhunters really would be wealthy and taking heads really was
a good sign of the health of a village. This is because a headhunting
raid was also a time for theft and slave-raiding. Animals, grain,
slaves, and jewellery were all up for grabs, and these could be sold to
other groups or used in one's own community. A raid was a time to
enrich oneself. Headhunters would therefore be visibly wealth and worth
emulating, and their home-coming would be accompanied by a surfeit of
food for the community. In an early-twentieth century war between the
two Ngadha clans Wogo
and Wéré, for instance, the victorious Wogo clan stole twenty-three
kerbau, several chickens, pigs, and dogs, in addition to rice, millet,
and maize.
That's not the end of the story, by any
means. People do, after all, like to justify what they do according to
grander schemes. Moreover, if a tradition is followed for thousands of
years, it is likely that it is carried alongside other traditions of
similar antiquity. Language is one, but certain religious beliefs can
also be among them.
In the case of Austronesian, belief in
ancestors or ancestral spirits is common, and this influenced
headhunting in several ways. Belief in powerful supernatural ancestors
is an inherently conservative force that reinforces the idea that doing
what has always been done is good. If you believe that the ancestors
need to be placated because they can cause you to die a bad death,
and you believe as well that the ancestors demand a harvest of heads,
then that provides a pretty good reason for beheading a stranger and
taking their head home.
Religious justifications are important,
especially in determining how things actually played out in the
constellation of practices we call 'headhunting'. In Solor, for
instance, the war known as tikar bantal in Malay and ohã belone in
Lamaholot (both meaning 'mat and pillow'), fought between
representatives of two nominal alliances called Demon and Paji, was
really a series of headhunting raids intended to placate two
complementary deities (Lera Wulan and Tana Ekan) as well
as the ancestors, and was enacted whenever there was a bad harvest, an
epidemic, or something similar. This precise idea was not found
elsewhere, and may reflect local religious ideas not present elsewhere.
In a striking example from West Timor,
an Amfoan man decapitated his own wounded father during a battle in a
Dutch-sponsored war with Amanuban in 1818. The father was badly injured
in the fighting and would not have been able to return home. Were his
head to be taken by the enemy, they would acquire his smanaf (the Meto cognate of semangat) and his father would become a ghost, his smanaf
lost to his home village. This would have been so shameful and
debilitating for the village that the man beheaded his own father. This
belief not being shared elsewhere, it is difficult to imagine such an
act occurring outside of Timor. In this specific act, we cannot say
that the desire for prestige played much of a role.
Social structure also played an
important role in how headhunting worked. In many areas, it was a way
for men outside of direct succession to chiefly positions to achieve
high status, and as such it could only really occur in that way in
non-state societies, where attempts to acquire prestige through
uncontrolled or clan-based violence wouldn't threaten the functioning of
the state. The non-state nature of such societies also encouraged
tit-for-tat violence, and headhunting is a perfect way of realising
tit-for-tat violence - it even provides a convenient, durable means of
keeping score. (You might note that Renato Rosaldo's theory of grief as
causative of headhunting raids makes some sense of this, as does the
view expressed by the Dutch anthropologist J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong that headhunting was partly to do with point-scoring and establishing parity between communities.)
We should expect headhunting to be
absent from state societies, as it usually was. Headhunting was not
found in the so-called 'Indianized' states of western Indonesia, for
instance, and we can't attribute this entirely to religious change: the
Toba Batak of Sumatera, who were inveterate headhunters, had experienced
plenty of Indian religious influence but did not live in states as the
Javanese and Malays did. Moreover, other aspects of traditional
religious belief were synthesised with Indian religion, so it can't be
assumed that religion alone is behind it. States are important here.
In many areas, headhunting was used to legitimise and reinforce the
state (or aspiring state), exapting
the existing tradition for another end entirely (while still relying
chiefly on male ambition, of course). This was certainly true of
headhunting raids in late pre-colonial Timor, where warriors (meo,
meaning 'cat') underwent rituals designed to tie their success to the
ritual centre of the state, and it was true of island Melanesian
chiefdoms, as well. It is notable that Dutch, Portuguese, and British
colonial powers all used headhunters for imperial ends in their
respective territories.
I suppose motivation for headhunting
should be thought of in a similar way to motivation for crusading or .
As Peter Frankopan noted in a recent blogpost,
crusaders were motivated by the desire for prestige and wealth, by the
desire to please, by the desire for fame and all the good things. They
wanted wealth and the good life, just as headhunters did. They were
also inspired by religion: by the genuine belief that the Muslim
conquests in the Holy Land were bad and ought to be reversed, by the
conviction that the Pope was right to call men to arms, and by the
belief that going on crusade could enable them to spend less time in
Purgatory atoning for their sins. Without these religious beliefs, it
is hard to imagine crusades happening at all, but without the prospect
of winning prestige and wealth, it is hard to imagine men volunteering
to do it either. Headhunting is similar, in that the religious
justification is not usually enough, on its own, to override basic
practicality or ambition.
It should always be borne in mind that
the beliefs and desires of individual human beings, even in cases of
collective action, can be at variance to one another, and that searching
for an ultimate reason behind amorphous, prestige-winning practices
like headhunting is usually fruitless. It's not that headhunting is
mindless, irrational activity. It's just that the vague, generic
reasons mentioned by informants can sometimes be little more than
post-hoc justification for a pre-existing practice, one justified
primarily by the desire for advancement and the self-sustaining recursive set of beliefs, held by each individual in the community, that the community endorses it.
Headhunting was not exclusive to
Austronesian speakers, and it was once found almost everywhere we care
to look. Even in ancient China, we find that one of the ways of
measuring the success of military units in the state of Qin was by the
number of enemy heads it took in battle. So perhaps there is a deeper
reason for the proliferation and spread of headhunting throughout the
world based on the inherent features of the human head (for instance,
heads are individual and recognisable; decapitation is invariably fatal;
heads are portable; heads are therefore a good way to prove that you've
killed an enemy and work perfectly as props in violence-based rites of
passage; etc). You'll notice that I haven't concerned myself with the origin of headhunting, only with its transmission
as a tradition in Austronesian-speaking communities. The former
question is inherently more speculative, and I find it much less
important to resolve the ultimate origin - which must have had something
to do with conditions in Neolithic southern China - than the
distribution of headhunting in the Indo-Pacific.
Austronesian Headhunting - Some Thoughts
is a practice that can comfortably be ascribed to the speakers of
proto-Austronesian due to its near ubiquity among their descendants.
Prior to European imperial domination, the idea of beheading strangers
and taking their heads home was found throughout Austronesian-speaking
island southeast Asia (the Philippines, much of Indonesia,
non-peninsular Malaysia, Brunei, and Timor Leste), island Melanesia (the
Solomon Islands and Vanuatu), parts of coastal New Guinea, and
non-Sinitic Taiwan. Emphasis on the head was considerable in Polynesia
and Micronesia, too, and heads were clearly important booty in
pre-colonial New Zealand as well. There is still a tendency to treat
headhunting as something created by colonialism instead of exacerbated
by it, but this simply is not the case; it is a tradition of prehistoric
ancestry, not European introduction.
The non-Austronesian-speaking
headhunters of New Guinea were those whose languages possess the
greatest number of Austronesian loanwords, indicating that the practice
was introduced to the island by the prehistoric migrations of
Austronesian speakers. Speaking an Austronesian language, therefore,
once correlated strongly with decapitating other human beings. And we
know that it's an Austronesian tradition, rather than one that spread in
other ways, because Austronesian-speaking headhunters were once found
in New Guinea and island Melanesia, areas cut off from later
developments in island southeast Asia and connected only through shared
origin.
 |
| A skull reliquary with shell valuables. Roviana, Solomon Islands. h/t/ Australian Museum. |
Informants in different societies,
however, gave surprisingly varied answers as to why they engaged in the
practice. They did roughly the same thing, and their practices were
clearly historically related, but appeared to do it for different
reasons. Some said they did it because the ancestors told them to;
others because heads ensured a bountiful harvest; still others because
of grief caused by inter-communal violence and the rage accompanying it;
because heads are like fruit, and a rich harvest of heads indicates the
health of the community; because various supernatural entities demand
heads to fill their barns just as humans fill their barns with rice; and
so on. Some gave no explicit reason at all, and when pressed said that
it was tradition. As it happens, I believe this is the most honest
response and the closest to the truth.
Ethnographers were ready with their own
interpretations, too. Some saw heads as manifesting 'soul substance' -
something like Polynesian mana or Malay semangat - and
others espoused an origin in ecology: Andrew Vayda, for instance,
believed that Bornean headhunters took heads because this made them
frightening to enemies, which gave them an edge in competing with other
groups for fertile land. (As he didn't examine the issue in light of
Austronesian ethnology, he was unaware that other Indo-Malaysian
societies also practiced headhunting and that it had not recently
evolved on Borneo; lack of awareness of the ethnological angle is
actually quite common among investigators of headhunting.)
Rodney Needham claimed that skulls were
believed to be causal agents of fertility in themselves, even without
'soul substances' and the like, and so their acquisition wasn't based on
anything other than a belief in their intrinsic worth. This latter
view may also be fairly close to the truth. It might be better to say
that heads were valued because everyone believed that everyone else
believed that heads were valuable due to their upbringing and the
constant references to and images of skulls throughout life.
The tradition correlated strongly with
speaking an Austronesian language, and therefore seems to be an
authentically Austronesian tradition. But the headhunters themselves
all gave different generic reasons for the practice, indicating that it
was a mindless tradition instead of something done on the basis of
reasons. But how could something persist for so long without any reason
for it?
 |
| An Atayal headhunting blade. Like many indigenous Taiwanese blades, it is single-edged and consists of a single piece of metal in a simple wooden sheath. h/t Swords and Antique Weapons. For some grisly images of Atayal headhunters and their booty, see here. |
 |
| A charming display of fake heads in the Wulai Atayal Museum in Wulai, Taipei County, Taiwan. Me, 2009. |
This is less of a paradox than it seems,
as long as we bear in mind that headhunting consisted of a series of
individual acts instead of a single collective action inspired by an
explicit, overarching motive. In order to explain it, we need a
self-sustaining motive, not necessarily one bolstered by explicit
religious or socio-political beliefs. We may find one in the
combination of male ambition and the life-long perception of the importance of the head in the community.
It seems clear that despite the
diversity of explicitly recognised motivations, the 'real' reason for
Austronesian speakers taking heads is that they were heirs to a
tradition of taking heads, and that taking heads was something men
simply had to do. Each generation of children would see the men of the
village receive plaudits for taking heads. They would see heads being
used in ceremonies, hanging from poles or trees, being arranged neatly
on wooden platforms, or being placed inside sacred houses. They would
perceive the community's belief in the value of the human head before
being able to articulate the reasons for it.
As they grew up, they might be given an
explicit reason for taking heads, justified in terms of other practices
and beliefs with which they were familiar, but by that point belief in
the importance of taking heads may not have required much justification.
Whatever the ultimate reason for taking heads (the
reason proto-Austronesian speakers or their ancestors began taking
heads), the principal reason for men in descendant Austronesian-speaking
communities doing it was because men in Austronesian-speaking
communities had always done it.
The ethnographies of almost all
Austronesian headhunting societies from Taiwan to Timor and Sumatera to
Malaita make it clear that if a man didn't take a head, he wouldn't get
married or be tattooed. He wouldn't rise to chiefly office. He
wouldn't acquire prestige or expensive trade products. He would forever
be considered weak, shameful, and unmanly. A man had an interest in
cutting off the heads of strangers in the belief that other people would
consider him strong, manly, and worthy of marriage. Women would be
told not to marry men until they had taken a head, just as some people
in other societies would consider it unacceptable to marry before the
man has a stable job and a home to live in. The belief in the power of human heads was self-sustaining because it had an impact on male ambition.
Under such conditions, the only thing that could stop headhunting from
taking place was an explicit, enforceable ban that had even greater
consequences on ambition and success in headhunting communities.
 |
| A Paiwan house in the Taidong Cultural Park, Taiwan. The Paiwan language is the closest Formosan language to the Malayo-Polynesian languages (i.e., the Austronesian languages found off Taiwan). Paiwan people were, until relatively recently, headhunters. Me, 2009. |
was undertaken could easily vary - heads are like fruit, placate the
ancestors, etc. But if you ask, 'why did that man go and behead someone
in the next village?' - a more specific question - the answers make
more sense and link up more easily. Generally, they revolve around
prestige, respect, eligibility for status and marriage, and the desire
to please the community (and often the ancestors, too), combined with
the rather simple observation that elder men who had taken heads had
fancy clothes, wealth, and women. This is not a very edifying rationale
for beheading other human beings, but it really is the only solid chain
running through Austronesian headhunting. This is the main reason for
the extraordinary continuity of Austronesian headhunting.
Incidentally, headhunters really would be wealthy and taking heads really was
a good sign of the health of a village. This is because a headhunting
raid was also a time for theft and slave-raiding. Animals, grain,
slaves, and jewellery were all up for grabs, and these could be sold to
other groups or used in one's own community. A raid was a time to
enrich oneself. Headhunters would therefore be visibly wealth and worth
emulating, and their home-coming would be accompanied by a surfeit of
food for the community. In an early-twentieth century war between the
two Ngadha clans Wogo
and Wéré, for instance, the victorious Wogo clan stole twenty-three
kerbau, several chickens, pigs, and dogs, in addition to rice, millet,
and maize.
 |
| A rather ugly portait of a Timorese chief, 1861. He has gold and brass adornments, a cool sword, and a dashing breastplate. While clearly influenced by European fashions (see the moustache and the cross on the chain around his neck), this gives a fairly good idea of headhunter chic. The style would vary a lot between islands, but the perceived stylishness of the headhunter was a constant. Derek Freeman tells us in his book, Report on the Iban (1970), that Iban headhunters were also considered stylish and beautiful, and were buried with the best swords and coolest clothes. h/t Forensic Fashion. |
That's not the end of the story, by any
means. People do, after all, like to justify what they do according to
grander schemes. Moreover, if a tradition is followed for thousands of
years, it is likely that it is carried alongside other traditions of
similar antiquity. Language is one, but certain religious beliefs can
also be among them.
In the case of Austronesian, belief in
ancestors or ancestral spirits is common, and this influenced
headhunting in several ways. Belief in powerful supernatural ancestors
is an inherently conservative force that reinforces the idea that doing
what has always been done is good. If you believe that the ancestors
need to be placated because they can cause you to die a bad death,
and you believe as well that the ancestors demand a harvest of heads,
then that provides a pretty good reason for beheading a stranger and
taking their head home.
Religious justifications are important,
especially in determining how things actually played out in the
constellation of practices we call 'headhunting'. In Solor, for
instance, the war known as tikar bantal in Malay and ohã belone in
Lamaholot (both meaning 'mat and pillow'), fought between
representatives of two nominal alliances called Demon and Paji, was
really a series of headhunting raids intended to placate two
complementary deities (Lera Wulan and Tana Ekan) as well
as the ancestors, and was enacted whenever there was a bad harvest, an
epidemic, or something similar. This precise idea was not found
elsewhere, and may reflect local religious ideas not present elsewhere.
 |
| A map of the East Flores regency, Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia. The colourful island in the top right is Adonara, still known as 'Murder Island', as headhunting is still practiced (to some extent). It is one of the most fertile islands in the province, and therefore provides an interesting counterpoint to theories of the ecological motivation for headhunting. h/t OrangFlores. |
an Amfoan man decapitated his own wounded father during a battle in a
Dutch-sponsored war with Amanuban in 1818. The father was badly injured
in the fighting and would not have been able to return home. Were his
head to be taken by the enemy, they would acquire his smanaf (the Meto cognate of semangat) and his father would become a ghost, his smanaf
lost to his home village. This would have been so shameful and
debilitating for the village that the man beheaded his own father. This
belief not being shared elsewhere, it is difficult to imagine such an
act occurring outside of Timor. In this specific act, we cannot say
that the desire for prestige played much of a role.
Social structure also played an
important role in how headhunting worked. In many areas, it was a way
for men outside of direct succession to chiefly positions to achieve
high status, and as such it could only really occur in that way in
non-state societies, where attempts to acquire prestige through
uncontrolled or clan-based violence wouldn't threaten the functioning of
the state. The non-state nature of such societies also encouraged
tit-for-tat violence, and headhunting is a perfect way of realising
tit-for-tat violence - it even provides a convenient, durable means of
keeping score. (You might note that Renato Rosaldo's theory of grief as
causative of headhunting raids makes some sense of this, as does the
view expressed by the Dutch anthropologist J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong that headhunting was partly to do with point-scoring and establishing parity between communities.)
We should expect headhunting to be
absent from state societies, as it usually was. Headhunting was not
found in the so-called 'Indianized' states of western Indonesia, for
instance, and we can't attribute this entirely to religious change: the
Toba Batak of Sumatera, who were inveterate headhunters, had experienced
plenty of Indian religious influence but did not live in states as the
Javanese and Malays did. Moreover, other aspects of traditional
religious belief were synthesised with Indian religion, so it can't be
assumed that religion alone is behind it. States are important here.
In many areas, headhunting was used to legitimise and reinforce the
state (or aspiring state), exapting
the existing tradition for another end entirely (while still relying
chiefly on male ambition, of course). This was certainly true of
headhunting raids in late pre-colonial Timor, where warriors (meo,
meaning 'cat') underwent rituals designed to tie their success to the
ritual centre of the state, and it was true of island Melanesian
chiefdoms, as well. It is notable that Dutch, Portuguese, and British
colonial powers all used headhunters for imperial ends in their
respective territories.
 |
| Skulls on the wall of a Kayan longhouse. Borneo. h/t Tropenmuseum. |
should be thought of in a similar way to motivation for crusading or .
As Peter Frankopan noted in a recent blogpost,
crusaders were motivated by the desire for prestige and wealth, by the
desire to please, by the desire for fame and all the good things. They
wanted wealth and the good life, just as headhunters did. They were
also inspired by religion: by the genuine belief that the Muslim
conquests in the Holy Land were bad and ought to be reversed, by the
conviction that the Pope was right to call men to arms, and by the
belief that going on crusade could enable them to spend less time in
Purgatory atoning for their sins. Without these religious beliefs, it
is hard to imagine crusades happening at all, but without the prospect
of winning prestige and wealth, it is hard to imagine men volunteering
to do it either. Headhunting is similar, in that the religious
justification is not usually enough, on its own, to override basic
practicality or ambition.
It should always be borne in mind that
the beliefs and desires of individual human beings, even in cases of
collective action, can be at variance to one another, and that searching
for an ultimate reason behind amorphous, prestige-winning practices
like headhunting is usually fruitless. It's not that headhunting is
mindless, irrational activity. It's just that the vague, generic
reasons mentioned by informants can sometimes be little more than
post-hoc justification for a pre-existing practice, one justified
primarily by the desire for advancement and the self-sustaining recursive set of beliefs, held by each individual in the community, that the community endorses it.
Headhunting was not exclusive to
Austronesian speakers, and it was once found almost everywhere we care
to look. Even in ancient China, we find that one of the ways of
measuring the success of military units in the state of Qin was by the
number of enemy heads it took in battle. So perhaps there is a deeper
reason for the proliferation and spread of headhunting throughout the
world based on the inherent features of the human head (for instance,
heads are individual and recognisable; decapitation is invariably fatal;
heads are portable; heads are therefore a good way to prove that you've
killed an enemy and work perfectly as props in violence-based rites of
passage; etc). You'll notice that I haven't concerned myself with the origin of headhunting, only with its transmission
as a tradition in Austronesian-speaking communities. The former
question is inherently more speculative, and I find it much less
important to resolve the ultimate origin - which must have had something
to do with conditions in Neolithic southern China - than the
distribution of headhunting in the Indo-Pacific.
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