In the last few years, occult head-hunters – elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times – appear to have adopted a novel and ...troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head-hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims' organs to sell them on the global market of body parts. Based on a comparison of ethnographic material from North Maluku, a province in the eastern part of Indonesia, and news reports in regional and national papers, I trace how accounts about headhunting have morphed with narratives about organ theft. I argue that this plasticity is not a merely a change in symbolic ideas of the occult that reflects changing political and economic realities. Rather, I propose that their turn to organ theft enrols headhunters in a contemporary and global 'travelling package' that includes and entangles organ trafficking practices, media accounts, political imaginaries, and social anxieties within the same field of reality and possibility, a field of verisimilitude in which fiction and fact, rumour and reality, are fundamentally blurred. The article proposes a 'more-than-representational' approach to the organstealing head-hunter that sees him not just as a representation of particular political and historical circumstances but as a co-producer of these circumstances, of particular political worlds and their attendant scales of anxiety. This approach, I argue, challenges the epistemological distinction between symbolic representation and political reality that informed (but also incommoded) the analyses of headhunting rumours in the 1980s and 1990s – and that continues to inform anthropological analyses of 'the occult' more generally.
Rumours of headhunting and kidnapping for sacrifice in modern building construction were widespread in Indonesia during the 20th century. Europeans also featured in such rumours, especially in the ...eastern Indonesian province of Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) and in the context of church construction, several decades after independence. This article discusses previous research on the construction sacrifice rumours and various construction sacrifice traditions which are viewed as local expressions of one ancient tradition. It harnesses oral history as its methodology with crucial eyewitness data from fieldwork in eastern Indonesia and recordings are available in a digital repository (Kaipuleohone). The data affirms that headhunting and kidnapping for construction sacrifice was practised on Flores during the mid to late 1900s. Strong evidence is presented of collaboration between one missionary and his local assistants, particularly a notorious witch doctor-cum-'kidnapper-headhunter'. The author concludes that the rumour is not merely folklore.
Dances with Heads Roque, Ricardo
Social analysis,
06/2018, Volume:
62, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article explores the conjunction between mimesis and parasitism as a colonial mode of relating with forms of ‘savagery’ in state administration in relation to both the colonial Self and ...indigenous Others. The article examines the participation in 1861 of Portuguese Governor Afonso de Castro in a headhunting ceremony, the ‘feast of the heads’, which was held in colonial East Timor. By following a dispute concerning the problems and merits of the governor’s compliance with this ritual, it conceptualizes the trade with savagery within colonial government praxis as a parasitic form of mimesis. In this context, the dangers of bracketing the self and surrendering to the forces of otherness allowed for headhunting ritual energies to be extracted and exploited to the colonial state’s advantage.
This article tests hypotheses about the effects of social networks on inequitable salary negotiation outcomes using a U.S. high-technology company's salary negotiation data for 1985-1995. Analyzing ...results of 3,062 actual salary negotiations, we found that members of racial minority groups negotiated significantly lower salary increases than majority members, but this effect was dramatically reduced when we controlled for social ties to the organization. Having a social tie to the organization significantly increased salary negotiation outcomes, and minorities were less likely than majority members to have such a social tie.
In common usage and in psychology sumpong is considered a deviant and irrational behavior. This article makes sense of sumpong by putting it in the historical context of animism, specifically that of ...the eighteenth-century Aeta and Ilongot of eastern Central Luzon. As a form of perception, feeling, and action, sumpong was temporally flat since past, present, and future did not succeed one another in linear fashion. Based on historical dictionaries and usage, this article explores the role of sumpong as an affective and culturally intelligible way of understanding and acting in the animist world as seen in cases of murder and religious change.
Classic recruitment for top management positions began to be replaced by head hunting, which, although requires a greater financial effort from the client, is an investment with quick payback. If at ...the beginning, this headhunting, was practiced mostly by big corporations, who knew that the company's success are the employees with valuable experience, smaller firms now seem to resort to this kind of selection of personnel. Method called "head hunting” is more than a process, is the art to highlight existing opportunities and put them in direct relationship to experience, work of some persons concerned, so they may decide in favor of changing job, in most cases to a rival company.
Memories of headhunting, and ritual re-enactments of those former violent practices, are still politically meaningful in contemporary Oceania and Southeast Asia. The case of the Sejiq of Taiwan ...illustrates how such practices were transformed and eventually terminated as a result of colonialism and the incorporation of formerly stateless peoples into new political institutions. Headhunting was once an expression of the sacred law of Gay a, as both a reinforcement of territorial boundaries and a way of settling legal disputes within communities. It expressed tensions in a 'reverse dominance hierarchy' by which some men tried to consolidate political power, but were usually deterred by a strong egalitarian ethos. During the period of Japanese administration (1895-1945), new technologies made headhunting more efficient, but it became more difficult for this formerly egalitarian people to avoid the political coercion of would-be leaders. Contradictions between headhunting as the implementation of Gaya and headhunting as a consolidation of political power -itself viewed as a violation of that Law - eventually led to the abandonment of headhunting. Local leaders found new ways to seek political power, including in the ritual re-enactment of the very same practices used by their ancestors, but continue to be resisted by ordinary people with an egalitarian ethos.
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