Cultural History In Focus | “If You Can Keep Your Head: An Analysis of Torajan Headhunting” by Mark Hobart
If You Can Keep Your Head
An Analysis of Torajan Headhunting
by Mark Hobart
Prefatory Remarks
Although my social anthropological research was to be on Bali, I felt I needed to familiarize myself with the Dutch scholarly literature on Indonesia, not least their eclectic version of structuralism. One of the most complete, if ponderous, corpuses was on the Toraja of Central Sulawesi. That proved no stroll in the woods until themes emerged that the authors seemed not to have appreciated. Like most academic disciplines, Anthropology tends to vogues that their protagonists ferociously disclaim. Then current was Lévi-Straussian structuralism. The charm of uncritical rationalism is that it exposes wonderful structures behind will-o’-the-wisps. It was not hard to extract ‘the deep structure’ underlying Torajan head-hunting—and there are many published analyses based on far flimsier evidence. Academic logic conveniently stops when scholars have reached their intended conclusion which they have mostly decided upon before they begin. However, what happens if you carry on following the logic? Not only do the wheels come off the argument, but you end up with surreal possibilities. In this case it includes vaginas being symbolic ashtrays. If you are intrigued, I hope that you might enjoy If you can keep your head.
— Mark Hobart
This article was generously provided by Mark Hobart.
Mark Hobart
Before the Media & Film Programme became a separate entity, I was involved in developing contemporary human science theory courses in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology over some twenty years, as well as rethinking regional ethnography courses through an analysis of the hegemonic texts that defined regions, cultures and important issues. I have devised courses on semiotics and ethnographic film. Currently I teach approaches to television and audiences, popular film in maritime South East Asia and Theoretical Issues in Media and Cultural Studies, the core course of the new MA in Critical Media and Cultural Studies, and organize the MPhil Research Training Programme.
Since 1990 I have been engaged in building up archives of Indonesian television materials for educational use. This project now has an archive of some 2,000 hours of recordings of cultural broadcasts on Indonesian television, which comprises part of the Balinese and Javanese Research Archive (BAJRA), of which I am director. We are currently working with the leading centres of performing arts in Indonesia to produce a series of audio CDs and DVDs of important performances of music and dance; and also on an archival project to record the works of young choreographers and composers.
Having spent some eight years in Indonesia, mostly in Bali, perhaps unsurprisingly I have a strong interest in performing arts and their mass mediation. With the Balinese singer-dancer, Ni Madé Pujawati, I have developed a series of lecture-performances on aspects of Balinese dance and opera. We are also working on the translation and analysis of a performance of Arja, Balinese dance-opera, in multimedia format.
Research
I have worked on Balinese culture and indigenous philosophy, and Indonesian discourses of development, from 1970 until it became difficult to ignore the social consequences of television. The mass media raised ethnographic and theoretical challenges about how to analyze and understand what was happening, which led me to research theatre, television, and audiences from the late 1980s. My current research is on public life as performance as the mass media increasingly permeate Indonesian society.
My recent research has been into changes in contemporary mass media in Indonesia. In particular, I have been interested in the role of television, radio, print, and the Internet in framing public discourse – how Indonesians imagine themselves and others in different media. This is part of a longer-term project on how maritime Southeast Asians are represented in Euro-American media as against how South East Asians understand themselves and the rest of the world in their media. I am trying to address the problems of over-interpretation of media ‘content’ by looking at intermedia commentary and, through ethnography, at production practices in television stations and newspapers in Central Java and Bali to understand how Indonesians engage with the media in their professional and personal lives.
The current theoretical confusion in media and cultural studies has attracted my long-standing interest in the philosophical problems in the human sciences. For disciplines that began in theoretical critique, media and cultural studies are now remarkably under-theorized and critiques from post-structuralism and elsewhere largely ignored. So I have written about the presuppositions behind ideas of articulation and representation, culture, media, and ideas about the human subject.
Another research interest is performance, media, and audiences. Since 1988 I have been working on theatre in Bali as the means by which Balinese argued over who they were and their place in the world. Central issues were how audiences understood what was going on and what happened when culture became increasingly mediated by television. This led to a study on regional television and the articulation of ideas of culture in Indonesia. The research raises questions of performativity and practice. It is instructive to consider public life itself as performative and to contrast Euro-American ideas about the function of theatre and performance with Indonesian understandings. There is also a stark contrast between intellectual accounts or reviews of theatre performances and television programmes and the practices and understandings of producers, actors, and audiences.
Colophon
Author | © Mark Hobart 1969 [revised 1989]