Head trophy

Capturing heads was seen as a socially necessary form of violence with profound religious and cultural significance. The fight was not about the appropriation of material things but about the highest good - life. Headhunting was embedded in a system of rites and taboos that created an idealised space that placed headhunting outside of everyday life.The motivation for headhunting was manifold. The early ethnographers usually claimed somewhat vaguely that there was a connection between a "soul substance" that was located in the head and that after death was returned to the cycle of fertility of women and fields. A captured head from another village therefore meant additional fertility for one's own. This may not be entirely wrong; an old Rengma-Naga told us a few years ago that the captured heads were kept in their rice granaries.A much more common Naga explanation is that a successful headhunt entitled one to wear certain jewellery, hats or cloth, and that no girl would look at a young man unless he had taken part in a raid or headhunting ceremony. The death of one brought prestige and social status to the other, and with it the right to beauty - beauty in the form of fancifully decorated objects that only a successful headhunter was allowed to wear. Although the motifs of headhunting dominated the material culture of the Naga, in practice it rarely took place, for example when a community house was built or in the case of events that threatened the well-being of the village community.
When the British banned headhunting in the late 19th century, a common objection from the Naga was that their jewellery culture would die out as a result.

From the book "The Naked Naga":

"I will never forget the moment when we suddenly found ourselves in Yimpang facing a tree from which hung numerous heads of the victims of this and other acts of war. They were not actually hanging from the tree itself, but from long bamboo poles leaning against the tree. My desire to have these heads for a museum coincided with Mills' intention to punish the Yimpang men for the extermination of Saochu. He therefore declared the Saochu heads confiscated without further ado and had them taken down from the poles by Chingmei men in our company" (Christoph Fürer-Haimendorf).