Human and proud of it!
2015; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.14318/hau5.2.031
ISSN2575-1433
Autores Tópico(s)Anthropological Studies and Insights
ResumoPrevious article FreeHuman and proud of it! A structural treatment of headhunting rites and the social definition of enemiesRobert McKinleyRobert McKinleyMichigan State University Search for more articles by this author Michigan State UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIntroductionHeadhunting is one of those customs which was almost certain to attract a great deal of attention from early western observers because it fits so well with the western world’s fantasies regarding the savagery of primitive life. One is tempted to believe that the discovery of this custom was immediately welcomed by the various Euro-American colonial powers of the last two centuries as living proof that there were indeed genuine blood thirsty savages in their tropical possessions. Any lingering doubts on this point were easily dispelled by the mere price of admission to an occasional traveling circus where a “Wild Man of Borneo” was certain to appear among the side show attractions. And if headhunters they were, then quite clearly such wayward members of the human species were in sad need of the civilizing influences of both Christianity and mercantilism.It was in this ethnocentric climate of missionizing zeal, colonial domination, and, I must add, with the decided advantage of superior fire power, that an adventurer like the first Rajah Brooke of Sarawak could be acclaimed as a champion of civilization, the perfect hero for British school boys. Ultimately, he and other administrators like him did succeed in ending headhunting raids; although there were times, no doubt, when it would have been rather difficult to distinguish between such raids themselves and some of the punitive expeditions meant to stop them. By 1930 headhunting as an active pursuit survived in only a few corners of the entire region from Northeast India to Melanesia, a region in which it is quite possible that a third or more of the tribal groups had been practicing this type of warfare at the time of European contact.Of current interest is the fact that though headhunting has been made obsolete as a mode of warfare, many groups continue to perform the rituals which were once associated with it. In many parts of Borneo head feasts are still held and the songs of ancient heroes are still sung. The only difference is that now the rites are performed over relics of the past, old skulls taken long ago rather than fresh ones from a recent raid. Some groups even use coconuts or wooden carvings as substitutes for trophy heads.The original purpose of a head feast was to install or incorporate into a village the severed heads of enemies slain on a recent war raid. This chapter seeks to determine the underlying structure and meaning of some of these rituals. What symbolic messages did they carry? Why were they so often considered essential to tribal well-being? Finally, what is so special about the head itself in its role as a ritual symbol?The following headings and comments provide a fairly close outline of the arguments contained in this chapter.1. Introduction2. Asking the right questions3. Aims and assumptionsThe central question of why enemy heads should be treated as ritual objects is raised. The answer cannot be derived until much later in the chapter, but the contention is made that such a derivation must be guided by a theory which claims that the meanings of all ritual symbols are largely social in nature.4. The native viewWhile native theories of headhunting are essential to any analysis of the custom, we find that they give no direct answer to the original question of why enemy heads should be selected as ritual objects. Instead, headhunting myths point to other matters of religious concern. Important among these is an implicit equation between war raids and cosmic journeys.5. Inferences from tribal cosmologySince head hunts are mythically equated with cosmic journeys, a summary of Southeast Asian tribal cosmology is presented.6. Implications of this cosmologyThe cosmological remoteness of enemies which is almost always indicated in the myths is shown to be consistent with the relatively great social and geographic distances between most headhunters and their enemies.7. Headhunting ideology and three contradictions in tribal life Headhunting ritual and ideology are seen as mechanisms used in maintaining the reality structures and the world views of certain tribal communities. They give the social world a greater plausibility in the face of the contradictions between (A) life and death, (B) familiar and foreign, and (C) human and non-human.8. The ritual incorporation of the enemy as friendA discussion of the reasons why headhunters are not content with only killing their enemies, but rather must bring home parts of them, is presented.9. The choice of the head: Names, faces, and the social personThe central question of why the head is the part of the enemy which, more than any other, should be selected for ritual treatment is answered. Briefly, heads contain the face, and the face signifies the social personhood of the enemy, now transformed and established as a ritual friend.10. Headhunting rites and the social definition of enemiesFriends and enemies are defined sociologically in terms of the locus of social personhood, and not solely in terms of group affiliation. The headhunting rites are able to shift the enemy’s locus of personhood from external to internal, thus making him more like a friend.11. Life and death and the internal/external oppositionAmong many Bornean groups a successful headhunt was regarded as a necessary prerequisite to the rituals which ended a period of mourning. This connection between headhunting and mourning is explained in terms of the arguments about social personhood developed in the previous section.12. ConclusionAsking the right questionsIn reflecting upon colonialism and the historical currents which eventually led to the demise of headhunting, we are reminded that for the first westerners who speculated about this custom there was no reason to see anything more in headhunting than a vivid confirmation of their own worst suspicions regarding life in tribal societies. The earliest writers looked for depraved motivations behind the treachery and violence of headhunting raids. A somewhat more sympathetic view was presented by those who had been inspired by the animistic school of primitive religion. These writers often claimed that headhunting was conceived as a way of capturing the soul force of an enemy and placing it in the service of one’s own people. For the animistic school, headhunting was at least rational, although still misguided. In a sense it was another example of the savage’s inherent propensity to place moral folly on top of erroneous thought.Perhaps the most revealing discussion showing the discrepancy between the meaning of headhunting for the western observer and its meaning to some of the people who actually practiced it was presented by William Henry Furness (1902: 59) in his account of a visit with a Kayan chief on the Baram River. The following dialogue may read contrived, but I submit it as an indicator of the picture we might get if a fuller testimony were available:“O Sabilah (Blood-brother) why is it that all you people of Kalamantan kill each other and hang up these heads? In the land I come from such a thing is never known; I fear that it would be ill-spoken of there, indeed perhaps, thought quite horrible. What does Aban Avit think of it?” He turned to me in utter, absolute surprise, at first with eyes half closed, as doubting that he heard aright, and letting the smoke curl slowly out of his mouth for a moment, he then replied, with unwonted vehemence:—“No, Tuan! No the custom is not horrible. It is an ancient custom, a good, beneficient custom, bequeathed to us by our fathers and our fathers’ fathers; it brings us blessings, plentiful harvests, and keeps off sickness, and pains. Those who were once our enemies, hereby become our guardians, our friends, our benefactors.” “But,” I interrupted, “how does Aban Avit know that these dried heads do all this? Don’t you make it an excuse just because you like to shed blood and to kill?” “Ah, Tuan, you whitemen had no great Chief, like Tokong, to show you what was right; haven’t you ever heard the story of Tokong and his people?” (Furness 1902: 59)Furness continues to tell the story of Tokong and his people. It is a story in which the hero Tokong is advised by a frog to cut off the heads of his enemies. At first Tokong finds this a very repulsive idea and does not heed the frog’s advice. As a consequence, although Tokong’s men are successful in battle, their village suffers badly from famine, disease, and infertility. Finally, he decides to obey the frog, and sure enough, the crops in the fields undergo a miraculous growth, house shingles refurbish themselves, the people themselves look younger and healthier, babies are conceived, and, most remarkable of all, canoes paddle themselves and rice pounders work under their own power. The interesting point about the story is its emphasis on the fact that killing one’s enemies is not enough. It is the acquisition of the heads and not victory alone which offers mystical benefits.While the present chapter is in no way intended as an apology for headhunting, it does insist that ritual symbols as well as native theories about them be allowed to speak for themselves in order that we might better interpret their social relevance. The conclusion to be derived below is that, in a sense, Aban Avit was right in what he said in the dialogue quoted above. He was able to tell something about headhunting which has nearly always eluded foreign observers. He saw that the ritual treatment of the heads was a community’s way of saying to itself: “Those who were once our enemies, hereby become our guardians, our friends, our benefactors.”The methods which I have used in supporting this conclusion may seem overly comparative for a study which purports to be a structural analysis of a single system of meanings. I have drawn upon myths and rituals from a number of separate ethnographic contexts. In defense of this method I can say two things. First, most of my examples come from Southeast Asia or Oceania, where, prior to the formation of the state on the mainland (around 200 ad) and in the Indonesian islands (around 350 ad), the custom of headhunting may have had a near continuous distribution. So within this broad region I may actually be dealing with a single tradition. Second, I think it is necessary when studying a single, though widespread ritual form, such as that of incorporating enemy heads into a community, that we pay full attention to as many variations as possible. Since all the variations are attempts to deal with the same ritual problem (in this case the problem of making the external enemy an internal friend), it takes many versions to show us the full dimensions of the problem itself. In this way I have approached headhunting ritual and myth in much the same way as Lévi-Strauss (1969) approaches mythology in general; that is, by examining many variations of a single form, and without claiming that any one version is the “true” form. Since the problems dealt with in mythology often are among the most contradictory aspects of our existence, they are not easily resolved by any single version of the myths about them, nor by a few symbolic mediations. Rather such problems seem to call for many repeated assaults of meaning. In fact such problems can never be entirely disposed of by myth. They can, however, be pushed around a bit here and there, and thus they can be placed in more convenient positions vis-à-vis the particular meaning system of any given society.Since the central problem of a myth must be worked out through variations, it is the variations which, upon analysis, can often give us the clearest picture of the structure of the myth. I would say that this is sometimes as true for ritual as it is for myth. I believe that headhunting ritual is such a case. Headhunting, as a complex of myth and ritual, seems to be much concerned with how to manage the existential limits of the social world. This concern involves symbolic modes of placing the secure inner world of community life in an acceptable relation to such unending contradictions as those between life and death, familiar and foreign, culture and nature, and friend and enemy. Naturally, no single version of the ritual complex in question has achieved a total resolution of these problems. But by examining a number of attempted solutions, I believe we are better able to discern some pattern to the problem itself.Aims and assumptionsIn her book Natural symbols, Mary Douglas states the following assumption:Symbols are the only means of communication. They are the only means of expressing value; the main instruments of thought, the only regulators of experience. For any communication to take place, the symbols must be structured. For communication about religion to take place, the structure of the symbols must be able to express something relevant to the social order. (1970: 38)This is a strong declaration of the importance of symbols in human affairs. It is an equally strong statement about the social relevance of religious symbols. It claims that religious symbols are so structured as to convey significant messages about social relations.Implicit in all this is the notion that ritual symbols are not selected in an arbitrary way, but that they are chosen for their symbolic appropriateness to the ritual contexts in which they are employed. There is some irony in this because the primary symbol which allows humans to communicate their ideas to one another is the “word” that is based on man’s unique capacity arbitrarily to bestow meaning onto clusters of sound produced by the organs of speech. So the word, which is the primary symbol, is based on a very arbitrary link between concepts and sound structures. Yet ritual symbols, which are in a sense secondary symbols, are based on direct links between concepts themselves and therefore stand in a much less arbitrary relationship to each other. Said in another way there is always more logic to metaphor than there is to nominalism. There should always be some logic to the structural links which join a number of ritual symbols into a meaningful statement about human experience with social reality. A structural analysis of ritual symbols aims at uncovering this logic and then exploring the social relevance of the statements made by a particular rite or ceremony.Ritual symbols can be expressed either verbally or non-verbally, and as actions or objects. Quite often concrete representations which we can for convenience call “ritual objects” are able to convey the ideas to be expressed by a certain rite in a far more powerful way than could words alone. There are probably many kinds of socially relevant meanings which would have no impact on people if stated in a prosaic speech, but which can have a profound effect when expressed through the metaphorical idiom of concrete ritual symbols.Because of this some serious attention must be paid to the various physical objects, whether products of nature or man-made artifacts, which are made to take on the role of ritual symbols. Since such physical objects have fixed properties and certain typical relationships with other objects and events, they quickly develop standing relationships with the everyday system of meanings and categories held by a society. Therefore all familiar physical objects are a bit like concepts themselves in that their selection as ritual symbols is not made on an arbitrary basis but in terms of the ritual or symbolic appropriateness of the meanings already assigned to or associated with them in everyday life. If these meanings are especially appropriate to the message and structure of a given ritual context then it is likely that the object will be incorporated as a ritual symbol.Thus it is that religions are always forced to borrow systematically from the mundane world of familiar objects for the symbolic hardware with which they portray the sacred. If we follow van Baal (1971: 1–8) in defining religion as a concern with “a non-empirical reality” then it is clear that religion is dependent upon the selective use of items from empirical reality now transposed as ritual objects and symbols to express its non-empirical conceptual content. Human history has seen ritual treatment accorded to a very wide and heterogeneous assortment of things, any one of which would appear fairly mundane when viewed in isolation. No extremes of iconoclasm can escape this paradox of the need for concrete ritual symbols in religions. It is essential that such symbols be borrowed from the mundane sphere, and it is by the logic of symbolic appropriateness that the selections are made.This chapter will present an analysis of the symbolic appropriateness of one such concrete symbol, namely the human head, as it occurred in certain ritual contexts which were either directly or indirectly related to headhunting warfare. It will also deal with the social relevance of the meanings conveyed by these rites. Most of all this presentation will focus on what these rites had to say about the social definition of enemies. The leading idea throughout the discussion will be that in the concrete symbol of the head a categorical enemy as a special type of social person can be ritually converted into a friend.The native viewUntil the first decades of the twentieth century many of the tribal peoples of Borneo, as well as those in other parts of Southeast Asia and Oceania, viewed the severed heads of their slain enemies as important ritual symbols. In fact a great deal of religious efficacy was attributed to these symbols. Large public feasts were held to celebrate their installation into the community, and it was believed that their presence would somehow increase fertility and generally improve the health and well-being of the group that acquired them. Of course there were a number of significant variations on this over-all theme. But the one important fact to remember about the institutional complex referred to as headhunting is that not only did groups practicing this custom feel that it was beneficial to the well-being of their communities, they believed it was essential.So we must ask, what does the head symbol mean—particularly the enemy head? Additionally, what was the underlying structure of the rituals surrounding the head? Finally, and most crucially of all; how did the head “express something relevant to the social order” of the tribal societies which practiced this custom?Knowledge of native theories regarding this custom is essential if we are to answer any of these three questions. Fortunately the literature on the many peoples who used to be active headhunters contains quite a number of native statements on the matter. More importantly, where large bodies of tribal mythology have been transcribed and translated we come across charter myths that “explain” the origin of the custom and indicate some of its benefits. In these charter myths it is typical for a spiritual being or culture hero to instruct ancestral members of the tribe in the proper and most effective ways of conducting warfare. The secret of using omens and charms may be taught, including the method of cutting off the head. Then this hero teaches them how to prepare the head and how best to conduct the elaborate ceremonies connected with its arrival in the village. Even in myths which are not explicit charters telling of the first introduction of headhunting to the tribe, there are long tales of the heroic deeds of legendary warriors who journey far and wide in taking heads and who succeed in winning secret magical powers away from the spirits and demons of many fabulous and unearthly realms. Such tales as these often outline by example the way in which the head feast should be celebrated.These myths, because of their structure and intimate relation to the tribal cosmology as a whole, must be viewed as our best source of insight into the full meaning of the custom. Usually they go much deeper and are far more revealing than the standard off-the-cuff explanations, which many informants gave to the first western observers to come on the scene. For instance they teach one that the headhunting expedition can be equated with journeys to and from other worlds—especially the sky world and the underworld, but also in a more general sense the “after world” or place of the dead.For some excellent examples of stories built on this theme consider the following: 1. The Iban story of “Klieng’s War Raid to the Sky” (Perham 1896: 311–25). In this tale the hero Klieng is able through his great courage, cunning, and magic to wage war “in the halved deep heavens.” His opponent is the cruel Tedai who has captured the parents of the beautiful Kumang, whom Klieng seeks to marry. To reach the heavens he must first go to the horizon where he receives help from the wind spirit, Hantu Ribut. Also his men use the beak of a hornbill and the wing feathers of a hawk to move up into the sky vault. Klieng succeeds in rescuing Kumang’s parents. He then returns to earth, and marries Kumang. Klieng was such a great headhunter that he boasts: “Every month I get a seed of the nibong palm [i.e., an enemy head].”2. The Iban myth of Siu (Gomes 1911: 278–300). In this tale a young hero becomes lost from his companions while hunting birds with his blow pipe. Wandering deep through the forest and then crossing some hills, he comes to the vast longhouse of the supreme sky deity, Singalang Burong. He is represented on earth as a species of kite. Siu marries the deity’s youngest daughter, and they return to earth. They have a son, Seragunting.Later, after a quarrel in which Siu commits an offense against birds, his divine wife leaves him to return to her village in the sky. Both Siu and Seragunting set out to follow her. In one version of the myth they wear feather garments to get to the heavens. During their visit to the upper-world, Singalang Burong teaches young Seragunting about warfare, bird omens, and padi planting. Seragunting gets practice by joining the bird deities in their war raids against enemies who live on the horizon (Howell 1963: 97). He then returns to earth with his newly acquired knowledge.3. The Land Dayak myth of Kichapi (Geddes 1957). As a small boy, Kichapi was already mature and skilled enough to go out hunting. However, he gets lost in the forest and is raised by a pair of giant ogres. While staying in their realm he eats only raw food. Next he is sent to a powerful female shaman of the upperworld who chops him up and cooks him. Skimming off the fat and ugly parts, she remakes him into a very handsome young man. Although he is now the perfect man, the old shaman gives him an orangutan skin to wear as a disguise in the presence of humans.The ogres then escort him to the second-year swidden fields on the outskirts of the village where Gumiloh, a wise and beautiful girl, lives. She and her village are at this time in mourning over the death of her father whose head had been taken by Minyawi, their most feared enemy. Although Kichapi is still dressed as an orangutan and has the terrifying ogres as companions, Gumiloh has the wisdom to calmly and politely invite them into the village. Kichapi now has his first cooked food after a year of wandering in the non-human realm.As a guest Kichapi participates in the daily life of Gumiloh’s village. But in addition he also makes a journey to the under-world where he makes love to the daughter of the treacherous dragon king. He gets her to help him steal secret magical charms from her father. Now he is ready to lead the war raid to avenge Gumiloh’s father. The enemy, Minyawi, so it seems, was somewhat under the protection of the under-world dragon. Of course Kichapi is successful; he recovers the father’s head, cuts off Minyawi’s, reveals his own true identity, confronts several other fearsome adversaries, and finally returns to marry Gumiloh and unite her village with his village of birth. Together they celebrate a huge head feast.4. The Baree-speaking Toradja myth of Tambuja (Downs 1955: 47–49). This hero avenges the death of his parents at the hands of a remote enemy from across the sea. In some versions this enemy is located in the upper-world or is called “The King of the Horizon.” So the Toradja headhunting hero must also journey to other worlds. He follows the rainbow to reach the sky and may then be thrown down into the underworld where he takes the heads of the enemy’s ghosts. Meanwhile the severed head itself speaks to the warrior telling him what to do with it for the head feast. A special feature of the Toradja myth seems to be that in certain tales the daughter of the enemy is given the power to become small and conceal herself in a flute carried along with the head. From here she gives betel nut to the father. Then her presence is revealed to the warrior, and, after the head feast is properly celebrated, they marry.5. The two Ifugao myths: “Virgin Birth” and “Self-Beheaded” (Barton 1955: 46–96). Both these myths are about the headhunting hero, Balitok, who encounters and gains control over the under-world ghoul “Self-Beheaded.” In the “Virgin Birth” story Balitok is conceived when a male sky deity named Mayingat descends through the upstream region to the central region of earth. He impregnates Balitok’s mother by giving her some betel to chew. At that time Balitok’s mother is an unmarried young woman who has a reputation for being choosy for she refuses all suitors and lovers. Her pregnancy raises a lot of talk about how she must prefer men of distant regions, enemies no doubt. After Balitok is born, he is raised by his maternal grandfather. They have no other kin, so young Balitok takes a great deal of ridicule from other boys who like to compete with him. One day in anger he kills one of these rivals. The kin of the dead boy want revenge, and Balitok and his grandfather are quite vulnerable alone. At this point Balitok’s divine father steps in to rescue him by teaching him how to use magic prior to warfare. In particular he learns the dances and types of omen-taking which must be done prior to a headhunt. With this help Balitok prevails.In the myth of the Self-Beheaded, Balitok realizes that his enemies in another village are preparing to make war on him. So he journeys to the bottom of the lake of the downstream region seeking some strong sorcery to aim at these enemies. In the under-world he meets the stump-necked ghoul, Self-Beheaded. As long as Balitok will give raw food to Self-Beheaded this unpleasant creature will work for him against his enemies. A key fact to relate to this myth is that the Ifugao held special rites over the beheaded corpses of their own villagers fallen in ambush. Their spirits are implored to seek revenge against the outsiders who brought about their untimely deaths. Meanwhile, the victors would try to counteract this rite by imploring the heads, themselves, to turn their anger against their own former kin. Thus, Balitok’s rapport with Self-Beheaded seems to represent a general ability to subvert the war magic of his enemies. In another Balitok myth, Wigan, the major sky deity and the patron of headhunters, teaches Balitok to hold preparatory headhunting rites to ensure the ability to overcome the loss of a dead relative through a successful revenge attack (Barton 1955: 207–09).6. The Marind-anim pig totem myths (van Baal 1966: 211–12; 395–405). Nazr is the central figure in one of the Marind myths of the origin of headhunting. He was a totem (dema) of the pig clan and could exist as either a wild boar or a man. (The wild pig, by the way, is viewed by these people as strong and courageous.) During the day he appeared to his covillagers as a man. But at night he would go into their sago groves as a pig and devour their food. One night his pig-self was trapped and later eaten in a big feast. Nazr himself, though, continued on to become a great wanderer confronting various demons.Unlike the previous Indonesian headhunting heroes, he did not go to the upper-world or under-world during the mythic era. Instead a powerful female spirit named Sobra came down to him from the upper-world to be his wife. She also taught him to hunt heads. He would build large war canoes to carry him on journeys for this purpose. His travels took him to all the most distant geographic areas known to the Marind. These areas were inhabited by people regarded as semi-human and who were therefore also regarded as fair game for headhunting.In some of the mythic journeys of the Marind totemic figures we find that events occur which are thought to be responsible for present geographic features. For example, one island off the New Guinea coast is thought to be the severed head of a mythical being. Allegedly it was this violent act which cut the island off from the mainland. Its original place was along the eastern limits of the Marind warring zone. From there it drifted west, following the course of the sun. The totem beings, themselves, now live in the under-world. At night they follow the course of the “night-time sun” moving from the west to east.The sun apparently is associated with the head as a symbol. The acquisition of heads from the extreme east and west regions is viewed as a way of reestablishing, on a cosmic level, the living community’s sacred ties with these original beings. Thus a headhunt is a suitable corollary to the large initiation and renewal ceremonies held in the village. At these ceremonies the totemic beings reappear as masked dancers to reena
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