422 Part V: Southeast Asia
Head-Hunting in the Philippines
Head-hunting was once widespread in Southeast Asia. A great deal of evi-
dence focuses on Borneo, but important anthropological studies come as well
from the Philippines, where “Spanish sources leave little doubt that in the Phil-
ippines the taking of heads and body parts in warfare, together with human
sacrifice, feasting and mortuary ritual, was intrinsic to the display of male sta-
tus” (Andaya 2004:21). As previously pointed out, there is no single meaning
to the practice; each local culture incorporates its own cultural meaning sys-
tem, yet there were frequent associations with death rites, with masculinity,
with initiation of warriors, and with life and vitality.
Many theorists have tried to explain the logic of head-hunting. In 1974
anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, working in an Ilongot community of upland
cultivators 90 miles north of Manila, tried out one of these theories on an older
Ilongot man. Rosaldo writes:
What did he think, I asked, of the idea that head-hunting resulted from the
way that one death (the beheaded victim’s) canceled another (the next of
kin). He looked puzzled, so I went on to say that the victim of a beheading
was exchanged for the death of one’s own kin, thereby balancing the books,
so to speak. Insan reflected a moment and replied that he imagined some-
body could think such a thing (a safe bet, since I just had), but that he and
other Ilongots did not think any such thing. (Rosaldo 1984:167)
Rather, “rage, born of grief, impels him to kill.... He needs a place ‘to
carry his anger.’... The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head
enables him, he says, to vent and, he hopes, throw away the anger of his
bereavement” (p. 167). Rosaldo describes visiting a father whose six-month-old
baby had just died of pneumonia. “He was sobbing and staring through glazed
and bloodshot eyes at the cotton blanket covering his baby” (p. 169). This was
the seventh child he had lost. His pain was too great to bear. In the old days he
could have dealt with this pain through a head-hunting raid, when he could
have found a victim by the side of a path, violently cut off his head and then
just as violently have tossed it away. That would have brought relief. But now
martial law prevented him dealing with his grief in that way. Instead, to
Rosaldo’s surprise, the father converted to Evangelical Christianity. The expla-
nation given by Ilongot for this conversion was that Christianity provided an
alternative way to deal with such terrible grief. Clearly, this motivation for
head-hunting is unlike what we’ve seen for the Berawan.
Rosaldo’s initial study of Ilongot head-hunting focused on Ilongot history and
head-hunting as remembered through narratives of the past (1980), a kind of his-
torical reconstruction but lacking in emotional empathy. Later, in 1984, he pub-
lished a searing account of how he finally came to comprehend the headhunter’s
rage. He and his wife, fellow anthropologist Michele Zimbelman Rosaldo,
returned to the Philippines in 1981. One day while she was walking along a cliff
with two companions she lost her footing and fell to her death into a swollen river