NO FEAR OF THE EVIL EYE: PART I – ENVY AND SHRUNKEN HEADS
This is a human shrunken head. It was given to me by the man who made it, the curaka or chief of a clan of Jivaro headhunters in the Amazon. His name was Tangamashi.
The Jivaro were the first tribe I stayed with. I was 16 years old, soon to be a freshman student at UCLA as an anthropology major. There are many tribes around the world who are “headhunters” from the Amazon to Africa to New Guinea and elsewhere, but they all collect the skull of an enemy they kill. Only one tribe on earth shrinks an enemy’s head – actually the head skin – and that was the Jivaro.
They live in the Amazon jungles of southern Ecuador and northern Peru. Shrunken heads were fascinating to a 16 year-old boy, but more so to me was the Jivaro determination to be unconquered and free.
So I arrived in Jivaro territory in the summer of 1960 – a young teenager from Glendale, California who had never been anywhere in the world except once on a trip to Europe with his parents. I was by myself, and how I talked my mom and dad into letting me do this is another story. In any regard, Tangamashi and I bonded, and by the end of the summer he adopted me into his people.
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