Jivaroan peoples

Jivaroan peoples refers to groups of indigenous peoples in the headwaters of the Marañon River and its tributaries, in northern Peru and eastern Ecuador. These groups identify speakers of distinct languages of the language family of the same name.

The Jivaro people are famous for their head-hunting raids and shrinking the heads from these raids. These head-hunting raids usually occur once a year in one particular Jivaro neighborhood. These raiding parties usually only attack one homestead per raid, killing the men, spearing the older women to death, and taking younger women as their brides. Once the heads have been collected they are shrunk by cutting the skull vertically and removing the skull and jaw bone. Then, the head is boiled and later mixed with hot gravel and sand, shrinking the head to the size of a large orange. The head is sewn along the lips, which are blackened with charcoal.

Jivaro also engage in hunting activities. These activities usually involve both a man and his wife hunting with a blow gun and poisoned dart, dabbed with the poisonous plant curare, which stops the heart beat of the animal. Jivaro usually hunt for monkeys and birds, but they do not rely on hunting as their primary food source.

The principal groups are:

Some have also named the following:

Moreover, the Shiwiar are a group of Achuar speakers living along the Corrientes River, next to Quechua speakers; many Shiwiar also speak this other, unrelated, language.

The Jivaroan worldview is built upon the idea that both animate and inanimate objects hold souls that cannot be seen by our common eyes. These souls contain power, or karáram, that the Jivaroan people believe can be contained and harnessed within one’s self. Harner talks about these souls, called arutam:

“A person is not born with an arutam soul. Such a soul must be acquired, and in certain traditional ways. The acquisition of this type of soul is considered to be so important to an adult male’s survival that a boy’s parents do not expect him to live past puberty without one. By repeatedly killing, one can continually accumulate power through the replacement of old arutam souls with new ones. This “trade-in” mechanism is an important feature because, when a person has had the same arutam soul for four or five years, it tends to leave its sleeping possessor to wander nightly through the forest. Sooner or later, while it is thus drifting through the trees, another Jivaro will “steal” it. Accordingly, it is highly desirable to obtain a new soul before the old one begins nocturnal wanderings. This felt need encourages the individual to participate in a killing expedition every few years.”

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Wikipedia