This article looks at the diverse and rich representations of headhunting in north–east India, especially in the European translations of this tribal practice into ethnographic ‘writings’ during the late imperial age. Colonial concern and anxiety to ‘civilise’ the headhunter and ‘control’ this ‘savage’ practice in the hills is characterised by inner contradictions at every level of its articulation and operation. Headhunting is a history, a heritage, a rhetorical trope, a discursive practice, a philosophy, a returning gaze from the ‘other’, and a space for contesting masculinity. Moreover, it is a textual ‘record’ of colonial knowledge about vanishing societies for the benefit of the human sciences as well as frontier administrators in the region. But the vanishing object of salvage ethno–graphy itself appears to be a colonial construct of the anthropologising world and its legitimising representational practice. Headhunting is often neither the subject nor the object of study: it is a prolific site of discourse where the coloniser, the ethnographer, and even the local people engage in representing and translating the ‘other’ as well as them–selves, with diverse intentions.
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