Michael Heppell, Iban Art, Sexual Selection and Severed Heads

Michael Heppell

Iban Art

Sexual Selection and Severed Heads

Exhibition publication, National Museum of Ethnography, Leiden 2006
With texts by Limbang anak Melaka & Enyan anak Usen
Appendix, Notes, Glossary and Bibliography
24.5 x 30.5 cm, 304 pages with numerous, mostly color illustrations
Kit Publ Amsterdam (30. Mai 2005), Hardcover, English
ISBN 978-9068325409

The author describes the ikat, sungkit, pilih and other forms of Iban weaving, the sculptures, the tattooing, metal forging and other art of the Iban in the context of their oral sagas, stories, poetry and love songs. He shows how art was used as a pre-literate scholastic aptitude test to ensure intelligent Iban married other intelligent Iban to increase the likelihood that their children were intelligent and were more likely to prosper. Women also chose men on the basis of their prowess at war to ensure the household, physically, was secure. That meant heads and headhunting.

The book shows how weaving and headhunting came to be ritualised, the one encouraging the other, so that sexual selection was bound into the Iban's holy trinity of taking heads, growing rice and birth or regeneration.

Mostly coloured illustrations document the weaving process, certain textiles and show the Iban exercising their rituals and traditions.