Terror, Laughter, and the Grotesque

Myriad themes and issues come together in pangngae: grief and mourning, envy, eroticism, fertility, and ideas about masculinity, for example, routinely surface and intermingle in the discourse of the ritual head-hunt. And they do so in complex ways. In the tangle of ritual discourse, the existential and sociohistorical problem of "making an other"—one of the principal and formative strains in pangngae—links with these other themes by way of the imagery of the severed head. For this to happen, the head must possess the character (and do the work) of the grotesque.^[23] Lake other kinds of grotesque images, the severed head can wed awe, terror, and violence to a ludic fascination with bodies, fertility, and ways of transcending death.^[24]

First, the making of the other. Treating the problem of the other as a structural and existential feature of social life, McKinley (1976) argues that the trophy head is the most apt symbol for ceremonies like pangngae because it contains the rice, the most concrete image of social personhood. The ritual incorporates the face of the stranger into the headhunters' community, and thus "restores the stranger's misplaced humanity" (McKinley 1976:124). I would add that such a "rice-to-rice" encounter restores the

possibility of speaking to others, thus acknowledging "strangers" and making them accessible within the social give-and-take of dialogue (cf. Gusdorf 1965; Natanson 1970:34-36). At the same time, bringing this alien other within the headhunters' community becomes evidence for the stability and rightness of local power and tradition.

As helpful as these arguments may be, they gloss over or ignore the terrifying violence of the headhunter. Not only does the headhunter kill, but he dismembers. The headhunter's violence, in an important sense, ends in the objectification of "the other." But that violence also involves the mortification and debasement of the fallen. The ritualized project of violence that requires the taking of a life and a head is thus one that produces a demonized and degraded other. Further, it surrounds the degradation of the fallen in an atmosphere of festivity and laughter.

Here is where a discussion of the grotesque may shed light on headhunting ritual. By "the grotesque" I mean kinds of imagery and discourse that foreground the monstrous, the fantastic and bizarre, the exaggerated, the incongruous, and the terrifying or awe-provoking. The aesthetic and political aspects of the grotesque are by no means stable and uniform, but appear as particularized cultural and historical modes of discourse (cf. Bakhtin 1984, Stallybrass and White 1986). Nonetheless, the interplay of terror and laughter seems central to any notion of the grotesque, no matter whether it is an alien or comic world that is imagined. And to twist and disfigure a statement by Flannery O'Connor, it is in the language and imagery of grotesque that "man is forced to meet the extremes of his own nature."^[25]

Taking a head in ambush is a marked, rather than unmarked, form of violence.^[26] In the Salu Mambi region, it is recalled not as a feature of warfare and feud, but as a ritual act only. The ritual of pangngae serves, then, to mark the taking of the head as an extraordinary kind of terror, constrained with respect to time, place, purpose, and person. Already marked in this way, the violence takes a grotesque turn with the dismemberment and deformation of the victim. As such, the violence of pangngae is marked not only by its ritual dimensions but also by an anatomizing fascination with the body.

How grotesque violence figured into the ritual discourse of the past is uncertain. The contemporary language of pangngae, however, shows a recurrent interest in the grotesque and lurid. For example, the theme of dismemberment figures importantly in the ma'paisun discussed earlier in this chapter. The babalako chants out the protocol of mutilation—slashing the neck, taking the head, removing the eyes, removing the brain, removing the ears, and (in a 1985 recitation) removing the tongue. The dismembering

and debasing of the victim's body also appear in the sumengo, but often are euphemized as the felling of a tree. In contrast to the precise mutilations enunciated in the ma'paisun, sumengo lyrics are more likely to deflect the imagination toward the "scene" of dismemberment. For instance,

Both songs make a topographic move, placing the scene of dismemberment along a river. The lyrics in the first counterpose place and action through the image of branching. The confluence of two rivers, or, rather, where a river branches into two lesser ones, serves as the spot for dismembering and beheading a victim. The verb baratoi means to cut off limbs, ribs, or branches, things that protrude in number from a vertical "spine." Thus, the spot where the river branches ironically serves as the place for the "de-branching" of the victim. As for the lyrics that follow in the next song, the trampled ferns connote the excited rush to deliver the first slash. The lyrics direct the gaze of the listeners' imagination first to the ground, then upward to the wounded neck, held aloft as a gesture of exuberant dominance.

The discourse of the headhunt reveals, too, fascination or disgust with rot and decay. One song, for example, depicts the body of the victim as a fallen palm left to be consumed by a swarm of maggots and grubs:

Slain and abandoned to rot in a makeshift grave, the headhunter's adversary lies abused and debased. The most explicit gesture of revulsion often occurs, however, when the trophy head first is brought into the village. As the prize is raised up for all to see, the crowd of villagers turn their heads and shout Bossi'! Bossi '! "It stinks! It stinks!"

The grotesque imagery of dismemberment and rot renders the humiliation of the fallen in ways that stir curiosity, awe, and revulsion. The violent deformation of the victim's body also should be read as the disintegration and debasement of an oppositional or adversarial community. The blows delivered to the body of the fallen are blows to the Mandar community. Themes

of noise and panic only underscore the disintegration of the rivermouth communities. Recall the opening lines of the ma'denna :

mountains banter, talk back and forth
peaks taunt, lash out at each other
cockerels frighten the hamlets
whom do they throw into a panic
it's the head that they throw into a panic

Terror and anguish over the destruction of home and settlement echo in the lyrics of many sumengo, too. For example,

Finally, the highland throngs who sing of this terror abuse their fallen adversaries with laughter. Umpaningoi ulunna , "playing with the head," is the penultimate ceremony of pangngae, staged the night before the feast of the cohort and the presentation of the head to the debata. During this ceremony, the community has the chance to heap honor and humiliating abuse on the enemy head. As is typical of headhunting rituals elsewhere in island Southeast Asia, the head sits as an honored guest in the home of the tomatuatonda' (the village head), or in the home of the cohort leader, and is presented with gifts of tobacco and betel quid. The babalako or topuppu will chant soothingly to the head, mixing pity and hospitality (see Figure 4):

For you this grandchild of Daeng Maressa
the one who is seated below at the rivermouth
. . . don't be red of face
. . . don't ooze blood from your throat . . .
savor your betel with a relaxed look
smoke your tobacco with contented breath
soon you will arrive there at your place of gold

Fig. 4.
Ambe Sope, the topuppu (the one who presides at ritual festivities) in one of the
mappurondo communities, offers areca, betel, lime, and tobacco to the surrogate head,
here perched on a makeshift centerpost and swathed in a headcloth. After honoring
their victim as a guest, villagers will taunt the head with song. Ambe Sope's face is
caked with rice paste, intended to lighten and refine his complexion for the final cere-
monies of pangngae. 1984.

But as the evening wears on, the crowd will taunt the head with the caustic verses of the ma'denna. And from time to time someone will still shout out Bossi! Bossi'! and thereby provoke laughter from the gathering. Some ToSalu remarked to me that in the past, village women would occasionally dance in bawdy fashion with the head.^[27] Things are tamer now, and the laughter of pangngae appears to have lost some of the derisiveness it may have had in the past. Yet laughter endures as a mark of survivorhood, power, and the capacity to surmount and control terror.^[28]

As in medieval carnival (Bakhtin 1984) or the feasts of Saturnalia (Nagy 1990), the grotesque imagery of pangngae serves a discourse of regeneration and fertility. The dismemberment and rot of the headhunter's other becomes the source of renewal and rejuvenation for the upland communities. Put somewhat differently, grotesque imagery renders the political reversal of a dominant adversarial community as the earth from which the upland villages prosper. At the same time, the exaggerated and anatomizing violence of the headhunt evokes astonishment and awe among the uplanders. Taking a head is an extreme and marked act of terror, intended not only to frighten and humiliate an adversarial community, but also to stir dread and awe among those in the hills, and thereby allow them troubled recognition of their own violence. In the theater of pangngae, it is not enough to show stolen cloth and weapons as a sign of domination over the coast. It takes a disfigured head. For in gazing at the head, the uplander does face the extremes of his own nature: that alien other downstream and his own terrifying violence.