Kenneth M. George

Headhunting, history, and exchange in Upland Sulawesi

A few weeks after the rice harvest of 1985, drums, song, and loud cries echoed through the headwaters of the Salu Mambi, celebrating the ambush of seven victims in regions downstream. Several bands of headhunters had returned with their bloodless trophies to renew the fertility of their terraces and the prosperity of their households. If such forays appear to be troubling anachronisms in Indonesias aging New Order, they also display the surprising tenacity of those mythical realities that shape local history. What makes these annual headhunts so unusual and so instructive is the absence of real violence: no enemy actually is slain, no human head is taken. Instead, a village sends out a cohort of weaponless headhunters to get a surrogate head—;usually a coconut bought in a nearby market town. Upon the cohorts return, the community launches into a weeklong ceremony of music, feasting, and speechmaking to honor the headhunters and to glorify the village. Yet the ceremony also commemorates the past, especially with songs and liturgical chants that depict scenes from the ritual headhunts of an earlier era. In short, what takes place is not a headhunt, but something staged to look like one.

Dark Trembling: Ethnographic Notes on Secrecy and Concealment in Highland Sulawesi

The A. explores the role of secrecy and concealment in a minority religious community in highland Sulawesi (Indonesia), and their place in the construction of ethnographic discourse. Discussion shows how a « culture of concealment » has emerged as a practical and realistic response to encroaching ideologies and social formations since the pre-colonial era. The political use of secrecy takes its idioms from ritual practice, a site in which concealment may have « ontological » significance. These dimensions of secrecy shaped the ethnographic dialogue between researcher and hosts, and highlight the need for a critical and reflexive anthroplogy to ground itself in the sociohistorical concern of those whom ethnographers study.

Music-Making, Ritual, and Gender in a Southeast Asian Hill Society

The A. explores the ways in which music-making and gender differences mutually shape one another in a hill society in island Southeast Asia. The questions raised have to do with the role music-making plays in producing or subverting gender-based hierarchies of prestige and authority : Does music support or threaten predominant ideas about gender ? How does it shape the way in which women and men experience sexual hierarchy ? Can music-making itself be a form of sexual politics ?

Signature work: Bandung, 1994

Abstract Recent statements on globalization, the social life of objects, and the open‐endedness of self‐definition offer fresh angles of approach in the ethnographic apprehension of contemporary art worlds. They are brought together here in an exploration of art forgeries, connoisseurship, value, and exchange in Bandung, Indonesia. Modernist ideas about art, authenticity, and painterly subjectivity not only inform the expert systems that oversee the ‘artness of art’ but also give rise to troubling anxieties and desires associated with ‘originals’ and fakes.’ The efforts of Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous to prevent forgeries of his work from reaching the market throw special light on the difficulties experienced in containing the illusions and confusions of art value. The predicaments are both intimate and global in dimension.

Violence, solace, and ritual: A case study from Island Southeast Asia

Most headhunting traditions in island Southeast Asia link ritual violence to grief and mourning. Some of the more persuasive analyses of these practices pivot on notions of rage and catharsis, arguing that turbulent emotions motivate persons to take up cleansing acts of violence. This paper seeks a more complex understanding of how ritual may connect bereavement and violence through a look at case materials from highland Sulawesi (Indonesia). Ritual practices there suggestthat the resolution of communal mourning is more significant than personal catharsis in motivating violence; that individual affect is refigured collectively as “political affect;” and that varied discursive forms, such as vows, songs, and noise mediate the ways in which people put grief behind them and resume their lives. Indeed, such discursive forms appear to be generative sites for violence and solace.

Art and Identity Politics: Nation, Religion, Ethnicity, Elsewhere

Twenty years ago, Ulf Hannerz nudged cultural anthropologists to consider the places most in need of ethnographic work. ‘Where are the least-understood cultures now?’ he asked. ‘In Lagos or Paris, San Francisco or Bombay’, replied Hannerz, ‘[in] cities with slums and skyscrapers. … They are the cultures of cities, nations, and the world system, rather than of villages or bands.’ Work in these places, Hannerz continued, should help us see in all their haziness the views people have of other people’s views, and offer some indication of the significance of that metacultural sensibility which may build up when people are aware of cultural alternatives. [It] should offer some insight into what happens when the connection between culture and locality is attenuated, so that someone may be more linked through his ideas to an individual living thousands of miles away than he is to his neighbor next door. (Hannerz 1986, pp. 363–364)

Tools and world-making in the worship of Vishwakarma

ABSTRACT Across India, and much of the rest of South and Southeast Asia as well, tools, machines, and other instruments are periodically set down or stilled to become the focus of worship. This worship is associated often – though not always – with the Hindu deity Vishwakarma, or ‘Maker of the Universe.’ Our essay, based on preliminary ethnographic and archival research in India, gathers together myths about tools as well as anthropological accounts of tool worship to demonstrate the great diversity of rationales and occasions for such worship. We suggest that heeding mythology, the ritual care of tools, and the worship of Vishwakarma may illuminate artisanship, manufacture, and the role of materiality in religious life throughout the Indian subcontinent.