Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual

Abstract

This book has to do with the language and cultural politics of ritual violence in a minority religious community in highland Sulawesi, Indonesia. More particularly, it is about headhunting ceremonies and their stubborn presence in the contemporary social life of a marginal, upland enclave, an enclave that has suffered the wounds of social and cultural dislocation just by staying in place. No longer so remotely situated from the centers of state and post-colonial order, this minority community has had to look for social terrain in which its legitimacy and autonomy can be asserted. In their search, they use what is at hand as well as that which has been brought from over the horizon. The discourse and violence of headhunting ritual have been tangled up in the social life and struggles of this enclave for a long time. Becoming familiar with the discursive construction of violence in the theater of head-hunting ritual is, for me, a way to acknowledge and make plain what this community has at stake as it tries to shape its history and its fate.