If you ask an older Ilongot man of northern Luzon, Philippines, why he cuts off human heads, his answer is brief, and one on which no anthropologist can readily elaborate: He says that rage, born of grief, impels him to kill his fellow human beings. He claims that he needs a place “to carry his anger.” The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him, he says, to vent and, he hopes, throw away the anger of his bereavement. Although the anthropologist’s job is to make other cultures intelligible, more questions fail to reveal any further explanation of the man’s pithy statement. To him, grief, rage, and headhunting go together in a self-evident manner. Either you understand it or you don’t. And, in fact, for the longest time I simply did not.