The Headhunters of Borneo: Enjoying a Bedtime Tale by Carl Bock

Enjoying a bedtime tale by Carl Bock.

By Jelayan Kaki Kuta

As a bedtime tale, The Headhunters of Borneo may serve its purpose. As a scholarly work, however, it rests on fragile ground. 

The intellectual foundation of this book is not grounded in rigorous ethnography; it is built instead on the author’s imagination, filtered through a Western gaze that frames the Dayak not as historical subjects, but as exotic objects.

For more than a century, The Headhunters of Borneo has functioned as an early and influential source shaping global perceptions of the Dayak people. 

Unfortunately, it has also played a decisive role in constructing and perpetuating a distorted stereotype, namely the Dayak as a society defined primarily by headhunting.

Colonial Gaze and the Making of a Distorted Dayak Image

While the book contains fragments of factual observation, these are overwhelmed by errors, exaggerations, and sweeping simplifications. Its disproportionate emphasis on headhunting practices has significantly contributed to a misleading and reductionist image of the Dayak among outsiders. Such an image fails to reflect the cultural depth, moral systems, and social complexity that characterize Dayak societies across Borneo.

With the advancement of ethnographic research and a more nuanced understanding of the peoples of Borneo, including the Dayak, we are now able to move beyond colonial stereotypes. 

Contemporary scholarship allows us to see Dayak life not as spectacle, but as lived reality shaped by history, ecology, ethics, and adaptation.

Headhunting, Sensationalism, and the Loss of Cultural Context

The book’s detailed depictions of indigenous artifacts, traditional dwellings, and attire, especially when paired with its visual plates, have likely reinforced a popular colonial fantasy of Borneo as a land of savage headhunters and bare-breasted women. These images, while visually striking, function less as documentation and more as confirmation of European expectations of the primitive.

To be fair, this work remains historically valuable as one of the earliest written records about Borneo, and its relevance persists more than a century after its publication. It offers insight not so much into Dayak society, but into how Europeans of the late nineteenth century imagined and exoticized the non-European world. The text reveals more about European anxieties, curiosities, and fantasies than about the people it claims to describe.

The book is further supplemented by thirty colored plates that provide a visual guide to local life, clothing, housing, and everyday practices. These illustrations are undeniably valuable as historical visuals. Yet they must be read critically, as they too are framed by the same exoticizing lens that governs the text.

Visual Representation and the Politics of Exotic Fantasy

In 1879, the explorer Carl Bock, commissioned by His Excellency Van Lansberge, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, embarked on an expedition into the interior of southeastern Borneo. By 1881, his sensationalized account of a journey spanning more than 700 miles, from Tangaroeng to Bandjermasin, was published. This account included claims of cannibalism among the Dayak and even his prolonged search for a mythical tailed tribe, a story he admitted was based on hearsay.

Carl Alfred Bock, born in Denmark to Norwegian parents in 1849, left for London at the age of nineteen to pursue a career in natural history. In early August 1878, during his first specimen-collecting expedition for the Zoological Society of London, he found himself aboard a Dutch steamship traveling from Batavia to Padang. Shortly thereafter, he was assigned to explore the interior of southeastern Borneo. The observations he gathered during this journey were later published in English under the title The Headhunters of Borneo.

Due to the limited literacy and lack of indigenous written sources available at the time, Bock’s work became one of the primary references on the peoples of Borneo, especially the Dayak. Its influence was therefore cumulative and profound. In his narrative, headhunting emerged as the defining cultural marker of Dayak identity.

Yet this is precisely where the problem lies. The book constructs a deeply unbalanced image of the Dayak. While some aspects of Bock’s descriptions are accurate, many are fundamentally flawed. He possessed only a partial and superficial understanding of headhunting, grasping merely one strand of what later scholars identified as five distinct mytho-ritual frameworks surrounding the practice, as documented by Lontaan (1975) and Masri (2010). Stripped of context, cosmology, and ethical structure, headhunting becomes mere barbarism in his telling.

From Colonial Narrative to Indigenous Authority in Writing Dayak History

This limitation is not incidental; it is structural. The lack of cultural fluency, combined with colonial assumptions of the era, resulted in an interpretation that is more misleading than enlightening.

Thus, while The Headhunters of Borneo holds undeniable historical and documentary value, it cannot be regarded as an authoritative or accurate representation of Dayak life and culture. As scholarship evolves and indigenous voices reclaim narrative authority, the interpretations offered by this book must be rigorously re-examined.

A Colonial Lullaby

In this sense, The Headhunters of Borneo functions best as a kind of colonial lullaby, entertaining, evocative, and soothing to Western imaginations, rather than as a serious academic study. As a scientific work, it suffers from profound weaknesses in method, perspective, and depth.

The book reflects the worldview of a Western observer attempting to articulate unfamiliar realities through an alien cultural framework. Limited data, constrained perception, and the intellectual habits of the nineteenth century result in a portrayal of the Dayak that is simplified, distorted, and often inaccurate.

Works like this must always be approached with critical distance. They tell us less about the societies they describe and more about how Europe once viewed the non-European world. To understand the Dayak with integrity, accuracy, and respect, we must turn to contemporary ethnography and, above all, to writings produced from within Dayak society itself.

This is why one conclusion becomes unavoidable.

The Dayak must write from within.

Only then can the Dayak reclaim their history, restore cultural balance, and dismantle narratives imposed from the outside.