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Nuaulu head-taking. Negotiating the twin dangers of presentist and essentialist reconstructions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2003

Roy Ellen
Roy Ellen
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Eliot College, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury CT2 7NS, UK
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Abstract

In October 1992 two transmigrants were murdered, and their heads removed, by Nuaulu from south Seram, eastern Indonesia. Until these events, head-taking had been assumed to be part of Nuaulu history. Media coverage and the court case which followed confirmed the prejudices of non-Nuaulu in the Moluccas about Nuaulu practices, and forced anthropological observers of Nuaulu life to re-assess their interpretation of the role which the idea of taking heads might play in contemporary belief. In this paper, direct knowledge of these events is used to examine the relationship between what we know about historical Nuaulu practices of head taking, current beliefs, and the circumstances of the 1992 homicides. It is suggested that analyses which see these events as a culturally eroded but otherwise unmodified version of what went before are fundamentally mistaken. It is concluded that the so-called ‘traditional’ features of contemporary homicides must be set against some ‘imagined past’ rather than what is necessarily historically authentic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Anthropology , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , October 2002 , pp. 281 - 301
Copyright
© 2002 European Association of Social Anthropologists

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Footnotes

The writing of this paper was prompted by an invitation to contribute to a seminar organised by Christian Coiffier and Antonio Guerreiro of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (CeDRASEMI) in Paris, April 1998. It is the cumulative outcome of various periods of fieldwork conducted between 1969 and 1971, in 1973, 1975, 1981, 1986, 1992 and 1996, and its completion was supported by ESRC grant R000 23 6082, and EC contract B7-5041-94.08-VIII. Administrative permissions and financial backing for fieldwork on Seram between 1970 and 1990 are fully acknowledged at Ellen 1993c: x-xi. I must thank Rosemary Bolton of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Ambon for keeping me informed on developing events from 1992 onwards, and for supplying the press cuttings, and Peter Parkes for his careful reading of the draft paper and for the pertinent modifications which have been incorporated as a result. Johan Iskandar was kind enough to assist with some matters of translation. As ever, I am grateful to Nuaulu friends and acquaintances, who in connection with the matters discussed here have been prepared to share harrowing recollections and knowledge which they often found difficult to articulate. For the Sepanese oral history of Nuaulu pacification I am indebted to the late Adam Tihurua (1981).