The contradiction was that in real travel and journeys, 'other' villages were populated by creatures that looked human and seemed to be thriving or living just like one's own 'people', but by cosmological definition could not be. Hence, perhaps they were perceived as 'semi-human'. The rituals of headhunting and the focus on taking the head of someone from another village, according to structural analysis, helped resolve the contradiction in the following way. By taking the head rather than some other part of the body back to one's own village, warriors could incorporate the 'enemy' or 'semi-human' spirit into their own community of 'humans'. Often, they gave the head a new name and treated it in ways that were friendly so as to persuade the spirit to join their community.
Faces are overt symbols of the individual as a social person.
Furthermore, as noted in the rituals and myths of Southeast Asian tribal peoples who practiced headhunting until early in this century, the gods instructed them to take heads as a beneficent virtue that would enable them to increase the fertility of crops, humans, and to acquire other blessings from the ancestral and other sacred beings of the skyworld. In 1968, Michelle Rosaldo began fieldwork among the Ilongot peoples of the northern Philippines . Nine months into their fieldwork they realized that 65 of 70 adult men over the age of 20 years had taken at least one head. Surprised that headhunting was still of recent vintage, Michelle Rosaldo set out to find how such an otherwise 'peaceful' and friendly group of people could have engaged in such violent acts and how they explained it. In her conversations with Ilongot, she found no support for the explanations above.