{"id":117402,"date":"2024-12-01T17:05:43","date_gmt":"2024-12-01T15:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=117402"},"modified":"2024-12-01T14:24:05","modified_gmt":"2024-12-01T12:24:05","slug":"01-05-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=117402","title":{"rendered":"Headhunters"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Headhunters<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Alex Joffe<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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How anthropology helps us understand the Oct. 7 massacres and the people who committed them<\/strong>.<\/span><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

Penta Springs Limited\/Alamy<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I have a theory that Neolithic farmers occasionally took part in headhunting: the ritual practice of severing and preserving human heads. At various sites in Syria and the Levant, like Jericho, archaeologists found plastered and otherwise decorated skulls. Whereas most scholars believe that the skulls belonged to venerated ancestors, I and a few other archaeologists believe that these were victims of headhunting expeditions\u2014ritualized violence. As in much later cultures, the skulls were artifacts of magic and power collected by deeply violent societies.<\/span><\/p>\n

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So here\u2019s the thing: Hamas are headhunters.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you\u2019ve never seen a person beheaded I do not recommend it. There are several aspects, the sawing motion, which takes a good deal of time and effort, is one. But mostly there is the transformation of a human being into meat. And then there is the person doing the sawing.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There are many striking things about the full video of the Oct. 7 massacres, which I recently saw for the first time, many more than I can process in a few days. The death, the blood and gore, dramatic yet not, somehow banal, only by virtue of the unstaged, uncinematic, often silent, nature of the footage. The screaming and panic, unrehearsed, the scene uncomposed. Reality is chaotic but our human minds look for structure, for flow. We know the narrative, but a 45-minute video composed of clips in which 139 Israelis are murdered cannot provide that structure.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the humans who executed the act were the most striking of all. They provide the structure. There are countless academic and literary explorations of \u201cperpetrators.\u201d These have undoubted value. But to see murderers, as we cannot see the Nazis, in full color, unrehearsed, is something nearly beyond comprehension.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Anthropological descriptions of headhunting are clinical and nonjudgmental, which is useful, at least initially, in understanding what is before us.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The image of the headhunter epitomizes the exotic, faraway native in an uncharted land, whose stories are told by adventurers, travelers, and anthropologists. But what happens when that act is recorded and celebrated by the society itself? How do the rest of us judge and what conclusions can we draw?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It is easy to fall back on terms like primitive, meaning crude or ancestral. The instinct is to separate ourselves as quickly and completely as possibly from those who undertake acts that are practically unthinkable to us. And yet here they are. Taking a man\u2019s head and then carrying it off is the most inexplicable thing I\u2019ve ever seen. The joyousness though\u2014no, the mixture of total glee and total matter of factness, that is the real crux of the matter.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One thing I haven\u2019t figured out about the Neolithic headhunters is whether the practice was the religion itself or just a part of their culture. What is the relationship between religion and culture anyway?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You could conclude from the Oct. 7 video that the slaughter was a religious act: not a form of extremism, but absolutely routine hatred that has nothing to do with land and everything to do with Jews. The cosmic affront to the attackers\u2019 orthodoxy posed by Jews with dignity, sovereignty, and power, causes them to cry out in pain and, at the moment of their triumph, in celebration, constantly, as if it were the only phrase they know: Allahu akbar\u2014the most frequently heard term throughout the video. The Jew\u2019s magical power has not only been conquered, but absorbed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Or you could conclude it\u2019s culture: habitual behavior and violence. The routineness of the exercise leads them to casually or even with annoyance, instruct each other to get on with it and shoot women hiding in a room. In the head, they repeat, in the head. Or to kill a man with a grenade and take a bottle from the refrigerator while his two sons shriek in the same room, close the refrigerator door\u2014because that is what one does with a refrigerator door\u2014and then walk out. And the radioed instructions to crucify victims in order for crowds to abuse their bodies, simply part of the job. They are playing with the head, the radio voices report. Routine.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To see it all unfold, from the initial attack to the slaughter to the taking and abuse of captives is to see an updated version of a classic\u00a0razzia<\/em>\u00a0of the seventh century and later. The tribal honor accrued is frankly reflected in the excited phone call made by one participant to his father\u2014he exclaimed that he had killed 10 Jews with his own hands. He then demanded his mother be put on the phone and repeated the claim as she wept with happiness.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is not brainwashing or extremism. It is casual orthodoxy. The end of the Jews of the Banu Qurayza beheaded in 627\u2014just the males, \u201cthose over whom the razors had passed,\u201d the women and children were sold as slaves\u2014effectively ending Judaism in northern Arabia. In southern Israel, the head of an already dead Jew is a good start.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But to see it happen, recorded by the perpetrators themselves\u2014that empty word again\u2014standing in for so much, including the most inexplicable act of violence one person can perpetrate against another, puts the events in another category. It puts the people in another category.<\/span><\/p>\n

Normative language used to describe let alone make sense of these acts is completely inadequate, as it refers to an entirely different reality, and is therefore misleading. The ban on using atavistic language prevents us from plainly describing reality. But anthropologists should have no such misplaced scruples.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Primitive? We may dismiss that phrase despite the appeal. Animals? Also too easy. Subhuman? Another pejorative. All these terms remove human agency, willfulness, glee, obedience, structure, intent.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Headhunters. Anthropological descriptions of headhunting are clinical and nonjudgmental, which is useful, at least initially, in understanding what is before us.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Headhunting globally had many purposes or meanings centered around ancestors and enemies. In Borneo decapitation was the beginning of a long relationship between the perpetrator and the deceased, who became a kind of venerated guest. In Iron Age Europe there was a relationship between the taking of human heads and natural fertility, as their bones are sometimes commingled in deposits with those of animals. But this is complemented by a more base militarism connected to emerging structures of authority that encouraged dehumanization and brutality. I think this is how it worked in the Neolithic era of the Near East.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And of course it happens in war (Japanese officers loved their swords). And to prisoners (think William Wallace and Cromwell). Nineteenth-century Montenegrins going into battle would have a pact to take each other\u2019s head so as not to be buried by the enemy. And then there\u2019s anthropology and archaeology (grave-robbing for science!). There is always a system. But what drives the system?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As practiced in Gaza, headhunting as ritual violence entails enacting, preferably for the camera, multiple deaths, one of the living Jew and another of the dead Jew. Humiliating the individual and, by broadcasting those deaths at home and to others as part of continuing celebrations, targeting the Jewish collective; by holding, torturing and finally killing hostages, and hiding their bodies for the possibility of later exchange, prolonging death.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Death is a continuing, unfolding, unending process. The object of headhunting is not, as in some anthropologically attested cultures, to steal the power of the defeated enemy, or to hold the head as a trophy of a battle glorious. It is to enact and reenact deaths, to steal life from the living who learn of the acts. It is the pinnacle act of torture that underpins their own society, which also trumpets its\u00a0own<\/em>\u00a0welcoming of death, as if there is a death competition which they must win, some calculus of killing and dying\/dying and killing. In that sense headhunting is cosmological; it is punishment and sacrifice that sustains a universe. So is it religion? Then what about the ritual defacement of hostage posters, the Upper West Side\u2019s kinder, gentler form of beheading?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Stealing dead bodies which are gleefully abused by civilians\u2014a term that makes too much of a moral distinction, especially as they film themselves stomping and cursing dead bodies\u2014or hidden as currency, transports death into the heart of their society. It provides sustenance, while the quantum uncertainty of death\/not death tortures the living.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Are headhunters like us? Neolithic headhunters, were there indeed any, were people in the act of becoming fully human. Separating themselves from the animal world through self-awareness and action was accomplished by growing food, creating villages, and enacting horrific violence upon one another for no particular reason except that they could. All things that animals cannot do. Well, except hunt together. So perhaps a link to the animal world.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Certainly ethnographically attested headhunters saw this specific act of violence, as well as murder and torture generally, as natural means to maintain the sense of difference from one another. You capture others for fun and profit and to make a point, then torture, enslave and murder them. This is part, although not all, of maintaining the self. Sometimes you eat them just to make a point, or if you\u2019re hungry (see under, man corn, the\u00a0Nahuatl<\/a>\u00a0word\u00a0tlacatlaolli<\/em><\/a>). They were fully human in the sense of being bipeds with cultures, stories, looking to the skies for clues or instructions. The people they killed were too, but that commonality meant little to nothing. Like us but not like us.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How then do we categorize Hamas headhunters? Religion has been stressed, as has the absolute centrality of death. This is not a mere ideology, an argument that can be replaced by a better argument\u2014more complete, more logical, more parsimonious; it is essential, constitutive. We love death, they always say, we raise our children to be martyrs, the mothers proudly announce. Indeed they do, the flip side being the willingness to saw off people\u2019s heads and steal them. So, culture?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Violence, blood, feuds, abuse of women, children and animals, these have always been present in Palestinian society, as they are in most patriarchal, theocratic, and authoritarian societies. But something is different: the glee, not of the id temporarily unleashed (who remembers My Lai, or necklaces of ears, raise your hand), but the id triumphant, the superego gone who knows where.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s still not it. The entire superstructure services the id, looting, murder, rape, in this life and the next, those are the supreme goals.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You see a person beheaded and nothing makes much sense after that, unless it makes a certain kind of terrible sense. As a system.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Well, they\u2019re all dead. All the faces of all the Hamasniks, laughing, yelling, talking, shooting, they percolate through databases that lead only to their deaths, now or later, on the battlefield or below, from a 5.56 mm round or a munition of greater or lesser power, or merely over time, in a cell, alas. Stamping out the headhunters and their cults is how the world was won, and rightly so.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The headhunting instinct, however, is intrinsic to orthodoxy, and erupts periodically worldwide. Falling upon the neck is increasingly popular as an orthodox solution, for example in France (look up\u00a0Samuel Paty<\/a>, or just ask\u00a0Salman Rushdie<\/a>). After the video I tried to explain this to a state attorney general, that it\u2019s not \u201chate\u201d or extremism; that orthodoxy is here, in this country and his state. He said he was still educating himself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Headhunting and its discontents, something I never thought I would have to think about except as a contrarian prehistorian, from a safe remove of 10,000 years, now collapsing in on me, much less try to explain something that took place 20 miles from my sister\u2019s house. Headhunters are not like us. Scratch away the present and it looks a lot like the past, but there are different paths to us and them.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Alex Joffe<\/strong> is an archaeologist and historian. He is the Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Headhunters Alex Joffe How anthropology helps us understand the Oct. 7 massacres and the people who committed them. Penta Springs Limited\/Alamy I have a theory that Neolithic farmers occasionally took part in headhunting: the ritual practice of severing and preserving human heads. At various sites in Syria and the Levant, like Jericho, archaeologists found plastered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117402"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117402"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117417,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117402\/revisions\/117417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}