Headhunting - Asia and Oceania - Southeast Asia and Oceania

Southeast Asia and Oceania

Headhunting was practised by many Austronesian people in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Headhunting has at one time or another existed among most of the peoples of Melanesia, including New Guinea. In 1901, on Goaribari Island in the Gulf of Papua, a missionary, Harry Dauncey, found 10,000 skulls in the island’s Long Houses. In Southeast Asia, anthropological writings exist on the Murut, Ilongot, Iban, Dayak, Berawan, Wana, and Mappurondo tribes. Among these groups, headhunting was usually a ritual activity rather than an act of war or feuding and involved the taking of a single head. Headhunting acted as a catalyst for the cessation of personal and collective mourning for the community's dead. Ideas of manhood were encompassed in the practice, and the taken heads were prized.

Italian anthropologist and explorer Elio Modigliani visited the headhunting communities in South Nias (an island to the west of Sumatra) in 1886, and produced an in depth study of their society and beliefs. He found that the main purpose of headhunting was the belief that by owning another person's skull, the victim would serve as a slave of the owner for eternity in the afterlife, and thus human skulls were a valuable commodity. Sporadic headhunting continued in Nias island until very recent times, the last reported incident dating from 1998.

Headhunting was practised among Sumba people until early 20th century. It is done only in a large war parties, not in silence and secrecy like in hunting wild animals. The skulls collected were hung on the skull tree erected in the center of village. As recently as 1998, in Waikabubak, a major clash between clans resulted some people decapitated, reminiscence of the old headhunting tradition.

Kenneth George wrote about annual headhunting rituals that he observed among the Mappurondo religious minority, an upland tribe in the southwest part of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Actual heads are not taken; instead, surrogate heads are used, in the form of coconuts. The ritual, called pangngae, takes place at the conclusion of the rice-harvesting season. It functions to bring an end to communal mourning for the deceased of the past year; express intercultural tensions and polemics; allow for a display of manhood; distribute communal resources; and resist outside pressures to abandon Mappurondo ways of life.

In the past, Marind-anim in New Guinea were famed because of headhunting as well. This was rooted in their belief system and linked to the name-giving of the newborn. The skull was believed to contain a mana-like force. Headhunting was not motivated primarily by cannibalism, but the dead person's flesh was consumed.

Around the 1930s, headhunting was suppressed among the Ilongot in the Philippines by the US authorities.

The Wa tribe, whose domain straddles the Burma-China border, were once known as the Wild Wa for their "savage" behavior. The Wa were, until the 1970s, ferocious headhunters.

In Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, the colonial dynasty of James Brooke and his descendants eradicated headhunting in the hundred years before World War II. There have been serious outbreaks of inter-ethnic violence on the island of Kalimantan since 1997, involving the indigenous Dayak peoples and immigrants from the island of Madura. In 2001, in the Central Kalimantan town of Sampit, at least 500 Madurese were killed and up to 100,000 Madurese were forced to flee. Some Madurese bodies were decapitated in a ritual reminiscent of the headhunting tradition of the Dayaks of old.

The Korowai, a Papuan tribe in the southeast of Irian Jaya, live in tree houses, some nearly 40 metres high, presumably as protection against a tribe of neighbouring headhunters, the Citak. Some believe that Michael Rockefeller may have been taken by headhunters in western New Guinea as recently as 1961.

In his book PT 105, Dick Keresey writes that he was approached by Solomon Island natives in a canoe carrying heads of Japanese soldiers. He initially thought that they wanted to trade, but they continued on their way.

In the book by Jack London of his 1905 adventure in the Stark, he writes of the headhunters of Malaita attacking his ship during a stay in Langa Langa Lagoon, particularly around Laulasi Island. On one occasion, Captain Mackenzie of the blackbirding vessel Minolta was beheaded as retribution for the attack of another village during a labour "recruiting" drive. The ship apparently "owed" several more heads before the score was even.