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Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Halley, and this is the morbid curiosity podcast.
My first visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford was incredibly memorable. While I marveled at all the skeletons of animals tightly packed together in the large, brightly lit atrium, I was also drawn to the cultural material in a slightly less bright and definitely more crowded second room. Somewhere in the middle of what felt like piles of curiosities was a large glass display case labeled treatment of dead enemies. Inside were several decorated skulls, as well as a few small, misshapen heads with long, glossy hair.
While I'd read about these specific cultural items, I'd never seen them up close, shrunken heads. Shrunken heads are known as Sansa by the Shuar, the indigenous people of Ecuador and Peru, who originally made them. While this practice was banned in the 1960s, trade in Sansa's continued for some time afterwards, with most of the heads ending up in museums and private collections outside of Ecuador and Peru. This is due to the intense fascination held by western settlers in Ecuador, who traded metal tools and guns for them.
Thanks to this fascination, these richly shrunken heads became a trade commodity for the Shuar. Even today, to westerners, they're still what the Shuar are most known for. We'll discuss the repercussions of Sansa's as a representation of the Shuar culture to westerners near the end of this episode. First, let's talk about the Shuar.
It should be noted that most research on Sansa's has been done by western anthropologists and explorers. Because of this, the materials I was able to find for this episode are laced with cultural bias. Cultural bias is the interpretation and judgment of another culture by standards inherent to one's own culture. Cultural bias occurs when people of one culture make assumptions about another culture's conventions, including conventions of language, notation, proof, and evidence.
These assumptions are often mistaken for the laws of logic or nature of that culture as a whole. Most of the time, this bias is unintended by the observer because one can't help but interpret new and unfamiliar things, using a lens composed of familiar things. Other times, the observer leans on the differences of the other culture in order to promote their own, such as in the case of colonizers interpreting indigenous cultures as savage or wild. Modern anthropologists have taken steps to limit cultural bias in their work, but it's close to impossible to fully understand a culture that you weren't brought up in, so keep that in mind throughout this episode.
I wanted to mention this before going into detail on the Shuar because I feel it's important to acknowledge one's own society's biases. Knowing that flaws exist is the first step in fixing them. I'm not trying to generalize. I'm presenting the most up-to-date and respectful information I've found in my research for this episode.
If you have any issues or corrections, please feel free to email me at morbidcuriositypodcast at gmail.com. The Shuar are a tribal people that have been included in a larger group of peoples that anthropologists sometimes refer to as Hivaro or Hivaroen, which all originate in an area of the Amazon rainforest near the headwaters of the Marignon River. This group includes the Shuar, the Atuar, the One Piece, or Hombisa, the Awayun, or Aguiruna, and the Candoshi Shakra. The term Hivaro was coined by Europeans around the 16th century, and later took on a negative connotation, meaning rustic or savage, so it's used less often today.
It's for this reason that I won't be using it again in this episode. The Shuar were first described in the mid-to-late 1500s by the Spanish. Today, the Shuar language is spoken by people who live in Ecuador and Peru in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains and uppermost range of the Amazon forest known as the Maraya Shuar and the wetter lowlands of the Andes known as the Atu Shuar. Many Shuar have also moved into small towns or cities or emigrated to other countries.
Before the Shuar Federation formed in 1964 to represent the Shuar in the government and in commercial manners, the Shuar were reported to be semi-nomadic, living in separate family households dispersed in the rainforest that were only loosely linked by kin relationships and local political ties. Before and perhaps during early contact with the Spanish, they may have lived in larger villages with several families living together. There was no central political leadership, and power was believed to constantly circulate. The Shuar did recognize powerful men, called or great men.
They were usually accomplished warriors who gained respect and obligations from others by protecting them and participating in warfare. They often acquired spiritual power through the collection of Arutan Wakani, which in short is warrior power or soul. More on this in a moment. Shuar daily life centred on the household, which was made up of a husband and usually two wives, their unmarried sons and daughters, and their married daughters and son-in-laws who moved into the family household once they were married.
The traditional division of labor was that men hunted and wove fabric, while women, gardened and made chicha, a beer from many which are also known as cassava. Before contact with western colonial powers, some of the Shuar came under the dominion of the Inca, a vast civilization that held power over much of the Andes of Peru from the early 13th century to about 1533. Some of the Shuar and other ethnically similar groups in the southwest were exterminated or assimilated by the Inca, but the Mariah Shuar were able to evade them. In the 16th century, the first contact with the Spanish was peaceful and centered around trade.
This changed when the Spanish tried to tax the Shuar, who violently revolted in 1599 and drove the Spanish out of the area. The Spanish tried to retaliate, but were unable to locate the Shuar due to their own unfamiliarity with the rainforest and the dispersed settlement pattern of the Shuar. After this uprising, there were attempts to settle and set up missions in the area by Jesuit priests, but these were largely unsuccessful. In the 1880s, Euro-acridorians moved down from the highlands, settling in the only remaining European colony left from the 16th century, a settlement called Makas in the Upano Valley.
Others formed new settlements. With so many new people in the area, game began to decrease, making hunting difficult for the Shuar. They soon sought new technology to aid in food production for themselves, such as guns and machetes. For these, they traded pigs and sansas to the settlers.
When the settlers began to raise cattle, they no longer required pigs, so sansas became part of the market economy for the Shuar. The usual trade was one head for one gun. This price remained consistent through the late 19th century and into the early 20th century. As guns made warfare and hunting easier, warfare increased rapidly as did sansa creation in pursuit of more guns.
The increased need for sansas changed them from a ritual item into a commercial trade item. In the late 19th century through the early 20th century, settlers and tourists to the area became fascinated with sansas. This further increased demand for sansas, which in turn drove an increase in Shuar warfare. The rise in warfare contributed to the western perception that the Shuar were violent and warlike, and also birthed the term headhunter.
This is where the misconception that sansa are war trophies arose. At their peak, Shuar raids occurred once a month, and the number of participants was somewhere in the hundreds. In 1898, a party of 500 Shuar was recorded by a or Roman Catholic missionary. The Shuar drove some of the Achuar and One Piece out of the area, and also raided other tribes to the south.
It s unknown what the extent of the raids were before this period, but this intensity could not have been sustained at this time if it had been this intense previously. During this frenzy for shrunken heads, people in Colombia and Panama, who were unconnected to the Shuar, created fake sansas from heads that were stolen from morgues, the heads of monkeys and sloths, and even from the skins of goats. It s thought that around 80% of the sansas in museums and private collections outside of Ecuador are actually counterfeit. I ll get into how to tell a real sansa from a fake after the outbreak.
Explorers in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s continued to mention the trade in heads for guns in their writings. Some explorers were more interested in the process of creating sansas, and in order to watch, they were charged the same price, one gunna to watch the creation of one sansa. The increase in warfare affected the Shuar as well as those they wore it with. There was an increase in disease due to the rise in population density and a rise in malnourishment due to subsequent lack of food resources.
The increase in disease led to more accusations of witchcraft, as it was believed that shamans were responsible for disease, and then another escalation in feuding and warfare as a response to witchcraft. Between 1881 and 1911, the population around the Gualakeza River declined by 50% because of local hostilities. At the same time the Shuar were trading sansas for guns, they were also fostering trade relationships with Catholic missionaries who discouraged the creation and trade of sansas. Around this time of decreased population, the Shuar, tired from years of warfare, were more easily convinced to send their children to live in Catholic boarding schools so that they could maintain trade with people who did not require sansas.
Their children, therefore, learned new ways to navigate the emerging economy. The spread out households of the Shuar became many small centros or centers where the Shuar lived together as a community. They also defended their territory from these locations, as well as maintained a trade with European and American settlers around them. In the 1960s, these centros created a centralized governing body, the Shuar Federation, which for a time included the Achuar, their most common victims for war and feuding in the past.
In the 1970s, the Shuar Federation severed ties with the missionaries and negotiated directly with government officials and non-Shuar settlements for their territorial rights. Today, most Shuar raise and sell cattle and lumber to pay for clothing and medical supplies. Those that can't acquire land for this purpose become wage laborers and sometimes migrate to the United States. The creation of sansas seems to have been left in the past.
While sansa were created as part of war or at least feuding, they were not considered trophies by the Shuar. A sansa is merely a vessel for a larger, more spiritual process of power transfer and soul collection. The Shuar are reported to believe in three types of spirits that humans interact with. One is the Wakani, an innate human spirit that survives after death.
Another is the Arutam, which roughly translates to vision or power and protects humans from a violent death. The last is the Muisak, a vengeful spirit which arises when a person carrying an Arutam Wakani or warrior spirit is murdered. The Muisak seeks to kill whoever killed them or harm that person's family. Shrinking the head of an enemy was thought to harness their Muisak spirit and force it to serve the one who shrank the head.
It also sealed the spirit inside the head, preventing it from avenging the death of the victim. The sansa was then used in religious ceremonies and feasts just after the victor returned home. During these ceremonies, the Muisak was used up and the sansa became inert. Shuar men believed that the Muisak they gained from shrinking ahead could enable them to empower the women of their household to cultivate more crops and make more Maniak beer.
Through their work, the women of the household provided the bulk of the sustenance in the Shuar diet, so their work was critical to life. In the past, fathers would take their young sons at around the age of eight to a nearby waterfall and have them drink Makua, a drink made from Aboria, which you might know from our Plants That Kill episode, is a hallucinogenic plant. It was thought that the visions granted by the drink could attract the soul of a deceased ancestor or warrior, an Adutam Wakani to the boy. If the Adutam Wakani did attach to the boy, he would become confident, intelligent, resist disease, slash sorcery, and physical violence.
If the boy was able to attain another Adutam Wakani before the first left him, the remaining power of the first would become permanent. Therefore, this ritual was often repeated throughout life. The more spirits they possessed, the greater their powers were thought to be. However, that power could also be lost by speaking of the visions to others, or after a few years, it might just leave of its own accord and be acquired by someone else.
The Adutam Wakani inhabited people, but it belonged to no one. It was constantly circulating. Eventually, a warrior lost all their Adutam Wakani and died. The Shuar are said to believe that a natural death doesn't exist.
Deaths due to old age or disease are thought to be due to sensek, invisible darts that cause disease and death that are sent by Uishin or shamans. At their death, the warrior's own Adutam Wakani comes into existence. Death, therefore, is a source of power that circulates from warrior to warrior, and the greatest warriors often become great men. Next, I'd like to describe the process of shrinking a human head and its traditional usage among the Shuar.
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I can't keep doing this podcast without you, so go to bit.ly slash morbidpatron.ly slash morbidpatron to choose your rewards and support the MCP. You'll have my eternal gratitude. And now back to the podcast. Before the 1950s and 60s, the ultimate sign of power for shuar men was the creation and possession of a santa made from the head of their enemy.
Creation of a santa was just a small part of the accumulation of knowledge and spiritual power, which was constantly circulating from one person to another. The shuar did not accumulate santa's. They served their purpose, and then their value was lost, which is likely why trading them to westerners wasn't an issue for the shuar. To them, they were gaining much more than they were losing by trading the heads away.
It's unknown how often santa's were made before western contact. It's possible it was quite rare until the economic demand for them prompted the creation of more. The way a traditional santa is made has been recorded by several explorers who traded metal goods and guns for the chance to see the process. Despite the ban on creating them, in 1961 Polish explorer and documentary filmmaker Enmuno Biolowski caught the only film footage of a santa being created.
The first step in the process was the murder of an enemy. Before going to attack an enemy, warriors often consulted the great men of their area to seek his guidance or approval. After trade began with westerners, great men usually based this decision on whether or not to attack on how the death would benefit their own trading position with the settlers or other shuar. Before contact, personal loyalties and connections may have had a hand in the decision.
Attacks and raids usually occurred between the shuar and achoa or other non-shuar peoples. Lesser violence known as feuding sometimes occurred between neighboring shuar households, but this did not usually result in the production of a santa. During an attack, a war party, usually led by a warrior who believed he had been wronged by those he was attacking, set fire to the roof of their house, and used lances and later muzzle-loaded shotguns to kill the male inhabitants as they fled the fire. While the heads were the primary objective, other goods, especially weapons, were also taken.
The head of the specific enemy was then severed, and an incision was made in the back of the head between the ears. The skin was then removed from the skull very carefully. Fat and muscle were scraped from the skin, and a wooden ball was placed inside the flesh to hold a round shape as the skin was shrunk. Seeds were placed in the nostrils to hold their shape and also plug them up.
The mouth was also sealed shut by placing small wooden pins through the lips. The flesh was then boiled in water, which also contained herbs, some that included tannins, which changed the color of the skin. The flesh was then dried by, I believe, filling it with hot rocks and sand. The maker would also mold the flesh in an attempt to retain the facial features.
The skin was then rubbed with balsa wood ash, which was thought to prevent the musak spirit from escaping the santa. The intense process of shrinking the head alters and forms the facial features, especially the border of the face, the cheeks, eyebrow ridges, mouth and nose. Melanin or the pigment in the skin is also depleted, changing its color. Some things are preserved however, such as hair, which seems thicker and longer as the follicles shrink closer together.
Scars, wrinkles, and earlobe shape are also usually preserved. After their success, the war party sent word ahead to an older warrior, who would then sponsor a feast that might last for two or three days. The warriors, in turn, would host one or two additional feasts up to three years after the first. These would last about five to six days and were attended by around 150 people.
There was dancing, feasting, and drinking. These feasts were not just celebrations of victory, but rituals that promoted the transference of power from the musak contained in the santa, to the women of the host's household, granting them bountiful harvests and good beer. The santa housed the immaterial power or soul, and once the rituals were over, the power circulated to the next person, leaving the santa empty. What happened to the santa after the ritual has been debated by anthropologists and ethnologists.
Some suggest that the warrior who made it kept the santa after the feast as decoration or adornment. Others believe they were just discarded or stored somewhere on ceremonies as they no longer held any value. Fake sancas, also known as commercial shrunken heads made from animal skin, have been produced by modern Ecuadorians to sell as curios in Ecuadorian tourist spots. Originally, fakes were made by people of Colombia or Panama from human heads that were stolen from morgues and graves.
These were quickly replaced with shrunken heads made from monkeys, sloths, and sometimes the skin of goats. As I mentioned before, the process of shrinking the head alters the facial features quite drastically, but for fakes, this is less often the case. Those selling fakes want the buyer to believe the head is human, so more features are purposefully preserved or molded to resemble a human face. As females and children weren't considered to possess any Arutan wakani, there was no benefit in creating sancas from their heads.
So any shrunken heads that appear female or childlike are likely fakes. Also, those that include a torso or parts of a torso are probably fake, as nothing more than the head was traditionally shrunk by the shuar. The addition of a torso is likely another ploy to sell a fake shrunken head by making it appear more human. Real traditional sancas include sealed eyelids, lips, sewn shut with strings, shiny skin, a large incision that sewn shut near the back of the head, and compression of the head on both sides.
Most fakes do not have these features, again due to the makers creating them to look more human. As I said, replica sancas are still sold as curios in many parts of Ecuador, as this is what many tourists still seek out today. In fact, in many travel writings about Ecuador, the shuar and their sancas are still mentioned, which drives the current trade in these commercial replicas. There's been some recent research in how to properly identify a traditional sanca from a fake using forensic techniques such as CT scans, microscopic hair analysis, quantitative morphometrics, and DNA testing.
Facial reconstruction has also been attempted after experimentation using pig heads to see exactly how facial features shrink so that a human face might be extrapolated from a sanca. These investigations have come about with the modern movement toward repatriation of cultural items from museums to the countries the items were originally taken from. As the shuar traded away all their sancas, their meaning began to change. To westerners, they became a representation of shuar culture, but also of savagery in general.
These morbid curiosities were accumulated in private collections which put a stop to their original purpose of circulating power. This accumulation also created an absence of sancas in shuar society. The practice of creating sancas ended with the colonization of the area and the incorporation of the shuar into the state in the mid to late 20th century. The practice was banned, but it's not known for sure at least by western researchers if the shuar really stopped making sancas altogether.
Rumors often circulate during times of strife that sancas are still being made. Leaders of the shuar federation state that they are not, but the members are reported to say that if they had the opportunity, they might make more. As I said, sancas that have been acquired by western collectors often end up in museums. Newer museum displays often display sancas as a way to remind viewers of modern societies relationship to violence and attempt to maintain the history of the sanca without presenting the shuar as savage.
Sancas are presented as a reminder of how museums have often been founded on a violent trade in indigenous culture. In the past however, this was not the case. In the past, many museums portrayed the sancas as a representation of the savagery of the shuar, of how uncivilized they were. They stated that sancas were artifacts of shuar culture and didn't mention that most were created as commodities to be traded to fascinated Europeans and Americans.
They were presented as war trophies when really they were products of colonial expansionism. Sancas became the sole representative of the shuar to most westerners, which brought on the stereotype that they were violent, primitive and uncivilized. The shrunken head itself became such a symbol of savagery that when it was discovered during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 that a shrunken head had been made from a prisoner at Buchenwald, a Nazi death camp near Vimer, Germany, the image of the head was used to denounce the Nazis even further, though their atrocities stretched far beyond the creation of shrunken heads. Because of its already prominent association with what were termed primitive people, it was used as the ultimate symbol of the barbarism and baseness of the Nazi party.
This then reflected back on the shuar, giving them an even more violent reputation. Thankfully, throughout the late 20th century, scholars as well as the general public have grown more sensitive to the history of indigenous peoples instead of focusing on colonial powers and their expansion. In 1990, the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was passed. This act requires federal agencies and institutions in the United States that receive federal funding to return Native American cultural items to the descendants and culturally affiliated tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.
Cultural items include human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. While Sansa were legally traded and mostly outside the United States, many museums have chosen to repatriate their collections of Sansa's back to the shuar federation. The Pitt Rivers Museum, too, has been reconsidering its display of Sansa's and how better to present them or if they should be repatriated. The feelings of the shuar about Sansa's varies.
Many are not ashamed that such things were made or traded. Others take pride in that history and like the idea of Europeans and Americans looking at Sansa's. Still others could care less as the items were rendered meaningless after the initial rituals were completed. Leaders of the shuar federation see a new kind of power in the Sansa, a connection with the past.
While the meaning of Sansa's has changed, they continue to be important to the leaders and members of the shuar federation, albeit for different reasons. They have changed from ritual objects to trade goods to museum oddities and are now culturally significant links to the shuar past. Still, being that they are made from the heads of one's living humans, for many people, they still bring out the morbid curiosity in us. The Morbid Curiosity Podcast was produced by H.
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