headhunters, and I don't mean job recruiters

This morning, I read a very interesting post written by Kamala Thiagarajan about a very interesting-sounding book. I have to admit my first reaction to the headline ("PHOTOS: The Vanishing Body Art Of A Tribe Of Onetime Headhunters") was most intriguing for the word photos and the preview photo at first, and I almost stopped reading after the caption under that preview picture:

Chingham Chatrahpa, 75, shows off his facial and neck tattoos. A face tattoo would be etched after a man's first headhunting expedition, usually at the age of 18-to-25 years. Only a warrior who decapitated an enemy could get a neck tattoo.

My first reaction, which prompted me to consider clicking away, was "maybe that's an art that should vanish." I kept reading, though, and was rewarded for it. The book and the blog piece were not about the vanishing art of headhunting, they were really about yet another vanishing indigenous community. And despite what the British viewed as savage behavior, and we still do today, there's a lot more to their culture than hunting heads.

Last year I heard a podcast about a different community descended from headhunters and a "new" emotion that was "discovered" by a couple of anthropologists who visited that tribe in the 60s. The tribe had one word for it, liget, and the best definition these anthropologists could come up with was "it makes me want to take a head."



Here's the accompanying blog post.

The rest of this is from my recollection, as I didn't re-listen to the podcast and only skimmed through the blog, and is littered with my subjective view of society and culture.

Liget was not rage or fury, which is the way that phrase sounds to a lot of us, it was about community and protection and grief... the feeling a parent has when a child dies suddenly and unfairly. In American culture this emotion is expressed in many ways, including rage and fury, but also often with a desire to protect others, to band together as a community (support or advocacy groups, friends and relatives, parents who also lost children in the same event, other kids who survived). It strikes me now, in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and the outpouring of what I think is liget which has followed, that we could sure use a better outlet for our liget than shouting at each other from across a political divide. I'm encouraged to have had several highly productive conversations with gun enthusiasts in the past month about finding common ground in this never-ending debate and to have seen the momentum continue up to today and hopefully at least through the midterms, because at the same time I'm discouraged by Congress' continuing lack of interest in finding a compromise that seems so ready for voters to support but which remains anathema to the NRA. Perhaps we would all be better off if we acknowledged we can learn from "savage" societies. After all, it's not like Europeans were free from savagery in any way, and certainly we've seen plenty of it in modern day America.