Head-Hunting Amenities

Collecting human heads in Brazil has its little amenities and points of courtesy, Matthew Williams Stirling, Smithsonian ethnologist, told Washington's Anthropological Society last week. He spent eight weeks with the head-hunting Jivaros, "a simple, rather kindly people," who notify their enemies of intended raids. The "victims" at once dig pitfalls and set trap guns along forest paths, post watchdogs around their tribal house, hide indoors with their women and children until the attack begins.

On a propitious night the attackers assemble all their men and boys over 7 and proceed in single file, each man stepping exactly in the footprints of the one ahead. They carefully keep to one side of the regular, now deadly trail. At dawn the marchers are ready to attack. But the watchdogs have roused the "victims" who join hands and dance to the music of a flute made from a jaguar's leg bone. The music is supposed to make them ferocious as jaguars. As they dance they sing of defiance, contempt, bravery, boasting.

The attack begins. The attackers fire a volley from behind trees, then throw away their guns and rush the defenders with lances. If the assault is successful, slaughter is indiscriminate--except for nubile girls, who are spared if they refrain from fighting.

After a raid the victors hold a ceremonial dance around the captured heads. Boys who had never before been in a fight have chicken blood smeared on their legs and feast distensively. Boys with their first heads get drunk and talk with visionary jaguars, boa constrictors, electric eels and other fierce creatures. The captured women stand and weep. Their weeping is important. If no woman was captured in the raid, the victors appoint their own women as proxies to weep for the gory heads. Each man who took a head goes on a strict diet for at least six months. He may eat no flesh of fierce animals, may never go hunting alone, must exculpate himself by sending a formal payment to the widow or a near relative of his victim. Then the head catcher may peel his trophy, artfully shrink the empty skin, display the head as proof of his prowess.

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