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"The author describes the ikat, sungkit, pilih, and other forms of Iban weaving, the sculptures, the tattooing, metal forging, and other art of the Iban in the context of their oral sagas, stories, poetry, and love songs. He shows how art was used as a pre-literate scholastic aptitude test to ensure intelligent Iban married other intelligent Iban to increase the likelihood that their children were intelligent and were more likely to prosper. Women also chose men on the basis of their prowess at war to ensure the household, physically, was secure. That meant heads and headhunting. The book shows how weaving and headhunting came to be ritualized, the one encouraging the other, so that sexual selection was bound into the Iban's holy trinity of taking heads, growing rice, and birth or regeneration." --Publisher.
Head Hunters in the Malayan Emergency investigates the infamous political scandal sparked after horrific photographs of war crimes during the Malayan Emergency were leaked to the British press. These photographs depicted British forces and their allies in Malaya scalping corpses and posing with decapitated human heads. The subsequent scandal, involving British generals, police, trade unions, and even Winston Churchill, led to the further discoveries that British forces had deployed over 1,000 men from Bornean headhunting tribes to Malaya, were publicly displaying corpses to terrify Malaya's civilian population into submission, and that photographs of such atrocities had become popular souvenirs among British troops. Using newly uncovered photographs, eyewitness accounts, and government documents, this research is the first ever attempt by any historian to create a complete history of the British-Malayan Headhunting Scandal, its political consequences, the stories of those involved, and its attempted cover-up.
The 26 scholars contributing to this volume have helped shape the field of Indonesian studies over the last three decades. They represent a broad geographic background—Indonesia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, Canada—and have studied in a wide array of key disciplines—anthropology, history, linguistics and literature, government and politics, art history, and ethnomusicology. Together they reflect on the "arc of our field," the development of Indonesian studies over recent tumultuous decades. They consider what has been achieved and what still needs to be accomplished as they interpret the groundbreaking works of their predecessors and colleagues. Th...
Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.
Includes detailed chapters devoted to each of the five major cultural regions of the Pacific: Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and the islands of Southeast Asia.
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Provides an evocative overview of the region's ancestral arts and culture, from prehistoric times to the twenty first century. Prolifically illustrated with works of art drawn from museums around the world and the National Gallery of Australia's exceptional collection of Southeast Asian art.
This is the eighth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers in this volume examine metaphors of path and journey among specific Austronesian societies located on islands from Taiwan to Timor and from Madagascar to Micronesia. These diverse local expressions define common cultural conceptions found throughout the Austronesian-speaking world.
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