#shuar

Creation 14: The Primordial Feuds

The heyday of Shuar headhunting, in the late 19th century, when head-taking raids were occurring roughly once a month and involved hundreds of people, was driven by a booming international trade in shrunken heads.  Back in the cities of Europe and America, shrunken heads from South America, India and the Pacific Islands could be found in shops and auction houses, in museums and in people's houses.  They always sold well, and gradually supply rose to meet demand.  It was simple: Europeans wanted Shuar shrunken heads and the Shuar wanted European knives and guns.  The shrunken heads in our museums are not the remnants of some untouched, savage way of life as much as they are the product of the economics of colonial expansion and the power of a fantasy about 'savage culture'.  The most famous headhunting cultures, far from being 'stuck in time', were responding to foreign tastes. In the 1880's, as the trade in rubber and cinchona bark, which provides the active ingredient for the anti-malarial drug quinine, spread into Ecuador, more European settler communities came to the area.  The settlers exchanged cloth, machetes, steel lance heads and shotguns with the native Shuar people, in return for local pigs, deer, salt and shrunken heads.  But when the settlers began to keep their own cattle, and so eat their own beef, the demand for Shuar pigs and deer declined, and eventually it was only the shrunken heads, or else the Shuar's own labour, that settlers were interested in.  The Shuar who wanted goods like cloth and machetes could trade with local missionaries who offered these things more cheaply than commercial traders, but the missionaries would never sell guns.  This meant that the only way to get a gun was to sell a head, and so the 'heads for guns' trade became established in South America. When visitors come to see the shrunken heads at the Pitt River Museum, what they are really seeing is a story of the white man's gun.  Guns not only provided an economic incentive for the Shuar raiders, they also proved to be the best means for taking heads in the first place.  Guns and steel knives were far more efficient weapons for head-taking than spears made from wood and stone, and they gave the Shuar a distinct advantage during headhunting raids.  Europeans and Americans bought heads, and they supplied the equipment the Shuar needed to take heads quickly and in greater numbers.  Guns were used to take heads, which were, in turn, exchanged for more guns.  Well into the 20th century it was commonly acknowledged that the price of one shrunken head was one gun.