Author: Hoskins, Janet ; editor:
Title: Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia
Description: Stanford [CA], Stanford University Press, 1996. orig.wrappers. 22x14cm, vi,296 pp. PAPERBACK.. Textual maps & illustrations. Minor rubbing. VG. ¶ Contents : Lyric, history, and allegory, or the end of headhunting ritual in upland Sulawesi / Kenneth M. George -- Headtaking and the consolidation of political power in the early Brunei state / Allen R. Maxwell -- Severed heads that germinate the state : history, politics, and headhunting in southwest Timor / Andrew McWilliam -- Buaya headhunting and its ritual : notes from a headhunting feast in northern Luzon / Jules De Raedt -- Telling violence in the Meratus Mountains / Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing -- The heritage of headhunting : history, ideology, and violence on Sumba, 1890-1990 / Janet Hoskins -- Images of headhunting / Peter Metcalf ["This book brings together comparative material on headhunting in a number of Southeast Asian societies, to examine the cultural contexts in which such practices occurred, and to relate them to colonial history, violence, and ritual. Over the last century, colonial conquest or "pacification" has more or less effectively stopped the practice, but its rituals continue to be performed. Ethnographers of seven regions (the Philippine highlands, Sarawak, Brunei, and South Borneo, and the Indonesian islands of Sulawesi, Sumba, and Timor) share their experiences of living with former headhunters (including an eyewitness account of a headhunting feast), attending rituals, and collecting oral histories to understand the heritage of headhunting in context. In asking what meaning taking heads has assumed in the postcolonial era, they report on contemporary people who reenact headhunts, often with effigies or surrogates for the head

Keywords: Asian Headhunting, Anthropology, Ethnology, Ethnography, Social Sociology, Headhunters, Philippines Timor, Sumatra, Southeast Asia