Another practice of headhunting happened in New Guinea up until the 1900s. In contrast to the Nazca trophy heads, headhunting in New Guinea still was focused around obtaining and capturing the soul but in a different way. When a child of the Asmat people came to a certain age they needed a new social identity. The Asmat men would go on headhunting raids to seek out new names for their children. The names of these people had more meaning than our use of a name because each name held a social identity and power of the victim; when the victim was beheaded the name and the social identity was transmitted to the new owner of the name being the child (Harrison 2002: 215).
The kin of the beheaded must now treat the new owner of the name as if it were their own relation. Before all of this transpired the men of the Asmat must acquire the victims name before they beheaded them. Sometimes they would use trickery to obtain the name. Each child could be presented with more then one name and inherit all the powers of the beheaded. With this new power there was some psychological factors to the new identity in that the new child began to act as the victim (Harrison 2002: 221).
Here we had a collection of many people's heads. Each head is a representation of the name that other people now posses.
Harrison, Simon
2002 The Politics of Resemblance: Ethnicity, Trademarks, Head-Hunting. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Electronic document. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3134473?seq=9, Accesed: September 12, 2010.
Browne, David M., Helaine Silverman and Rubén García
1993 A Cache of 48 Nasca Trophy Heads from Cerro Carapo, Peru. Latin American Antiquity. Electronic document. http://www.jstor.org/stable/971792, Accesed: September 12, 2010.
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