This study, a history of the kind of people who are supposed to have one, challenges the fashionable view that so-called primitives live in a timeless present. The conventional wisdom, that such societies are static, is shown by the author to be an artifact of anthropological method. By piecing together extended oral histories and written history records, the author found that headhunting among the Ilongots of Northern Luzon, Philippines, was not an unchanging ancient custom, but a cultural practice that has shifted dramatically over the course of the past century. Headhunting stopped, resumed, and stopped again; its victims at various periods were fellow Ilongots, Japanese soldiers, and lowland Christian Filipinos; it took place as surprise attack, planned vendetta, or distant raid against strangers. Placing headhunting in its social, cultural, and historical contexts requires a novel sense of how to use biography, recorded history, and narrative in the analysis of small-scale, non-literate local communities. This study combines historical and ethnographic method and documents the inherent orchestration of structure, events, time, and consciousness. The book is illustrated with 34 photographs.

羅納托•羅薩爾多（Renato Rosaldo），1941年生，墨西哥裔美國人，當代著名人類學傢。1971年於哈佛大學獲博士學位。現為紐約大學人類學教授、拉美研究中心主任、美國藝術與科學院院士。曾任斯坦福大學Chicano研究中心主任、人類學係主任、榮退教授，以及美國民族學會主席。著有Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis（1989），編有Creativity/Anthropology（1993）、The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader（2001）等書，並曾齣版詩集Prayer to Spider Woman（2003）。

本書是羅薩爾多的代錶作，1983年榮獲美國東南亞學會（SEAC）頒發的Harry J. Benda Prize。