Very often the fine paid by the offender passes promptly down the throats of the jury. However, it is the only compensation for their services in keeping the peace of the pueblo, so they look upon it as their rightful share—it is the “lawyer’s share” with a vengeance.
Chapter VI
War and Head-Hunting
En-fa-lok′-nĕt is the Bontoc word for war, but the expression “na-ma′-ka”—take heads—is used interchangeably with it.
For unknown generations these people have been fierce head-hunters. Nine-tenths of the men in the pueblos of Bontoc and Samoki wear on the breast the indelible tattoo emblem which proclaims them takers of human heads. The fawi of each ato in Bontoc has its basket containing skulls of human heads taken by members of the ato.
There are several different classes of head-hunters among primitive Malayan peoples, but the continuation of the entire practice is believed to be due to the so-called “debt of life”—that is, each group of people losing a head is in duty and honor bound to cancel the score by securing a head from the offenders. In this way the score is never ended or canceled, since one or the other group is always in debt.
It seems not improbable that the heads may have been cut off first as the best way of making sure that a fallen enemy was certainly slain. The head was at all events the best proof to a man’s tribesmen of the discharge of the debt of life; it was the trophy of success in defeating the foe. Whatever the cause of taking the head may have been with the first people, it would surely spread to others of a similar culture who warred with a head-taking tribe, as they would wish to appear as cruel, fierce, and courageous as the enemy.
Henry Ling Roth[1] quotes Sir Spencer St. John as follows concerning the Seribas Dyaks of Borneo (p. 142):
A certain influential man denied that head-hunting is a religious ceremony among them. It is merely to show their bravery and manliness, that it may be said that so-and-so has obtained heads. When they quarrel it is a constant phrase, “How many heads did your father or grandfather get?” If less than his own number, “Well, then, you have no occasion to be proud!” Thus the possession of heads gives them great considerations as warriors and men of wealth, the skulls being prized as the most valuable of goods.