The Shuar Religion

          The Shuar are a community of people of  who believe in mysticism and have deep rooted spiritual beliefs. Mysticism is a heavily based spiritual belief. The Shuar believe any nature or real world occurrence is a direct result from the spiritual world they believe in. Their religion is polytheistic meaning they believe that there are many gods that control the earth as oppose to one. Some people might confuse their practice of  Mysticism for Animism. Although their are strong similarities between the two religions there is a big difference that defines what The Shuar practices as Mysticism. Animism believes that everything has a spirit living or nonliving and every spirit has the same value. Mysticism does not equal out all of the spirits encompassing the world. The Shuars belief in the spirit world controling the earth makes them also believe that the spirit world is much
greater than themselves.

          Humbling themselves down to a lower level is seen in a lot of different ways they live. Daily living choices revolve around pleasing the spiritual world for some type of reward and avoiding certain decisions if it invites evil spirits into their lives. Positive "good" spirits may reward the people with fertile land for healthy crops to grow. It may involve certain weather components such as a lot of     rain. Their geography has a lot to do with the reinforcement of their beliefs in spirits during earlier periods. Their rainforest environment provides a lot of  humidity and rain. So when they would pray to their spirits for rain they were most likely going to get it because it rains in the rain forest concreting their faith in their spirits. This was the good side to their spirits but The Shuar did not shy away from believing in the bad spirits allowing both sides to essentially grow their culture around.

          The Humidity in the rain forest makes it an ideal spot for many diseases. Exposing themselves to these diseases that could end their lives so easily allows them to believe that the bad spirits were responsible for it. If someone came down with a sickness it was just assumed the sickness came from bad spirits like witches or someone put a curse on them. More specifically they believed in something called a tsentsak which is an invisible dart that people could buy and hire a shaman to shoot their enemies with it to make them sick. This exchange was always done in secret so the person who bought the tsentsak and the shaman who shot it was always very hard to figure out.  The Shuars had a lot of  practices that were not in secret though. The believed the earth God/Sprit would come out from the middle of   the earth, where she lived, and would dance among the gardens to make plants grow. The women would weed the garden and sing to her about processing their land and providing good crops to appease the Earth Mother.
       
          Recently due to the growing exposure and combining of  the modern world and their world Christianity has been growing among the community. The larger Shuar community still hold to their mystic beliefs. Among the community about ten percent of  the population are christian. Communities located northern have been exposed more than then ten years to a large number of    baptist missionaries. The Baptist community is not reaching the southern communities. This statistic does not include the members of    the community who have combined their religion and Christianity.  It is not extremely common though and rejected a lot because the religions are so different. Also because of the growing exposure to the world the indigenous groups have been relying more on organizing a body to communicate with government for problems they are having. For example Ecuador passed a Water Act that grants mining companies free range of  access of water supplies. Many indigenous groups, and non-idigenous groups have gathered to protest this act because of     health, farming, and other concerns. This shows a shift in reliance on their Gods who control the earth to peaceful protest which is something a part of  the world. 

New World Encyclopedia 
2008 Shuar. Electronic Document 
<http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Shuar>. accessed June 

Joshua Project 

Countries and Their Cultures." Shuar, Jivaro in Equador 
<http://www.everyculture.com/wc/Costa-Rica-to-Georgia/Jivaro.html>. accessed June 3

John Ahni Schertow   
2009 Equators Indigenous Movement Mobilized For Water. Electronic Document
https://intercontinentalcry.org/ecuador-indigenous-movement-mobilizes-for-water/. accessed June 3

Head Shrinking (Tsantsa)

The Shuar have achieved their notoriety through their customary practice of head-shrinking. This practice occurred in the Northwestern region of the Amazon rain forest, and the only tribes known to have shrunken human heads are of the Jivaroan tribes; such as: the Shuar, Achuar, Huambisa and Aguaruna tribes, localized in Ecuador and Peru. The Shuar call a shrunken head a tsantsa or tzantza. (1)

     The practice of making shrunken heads originally had religious significance; shrinking the head of an enemy was believed to control the spirit of that enemy and force him to serve the shrinker. (1) It was said that shrinking the enemies' head eliminate the craving for revenge from the deceased warrior’s soul, the Shuar decapitated the victim and set about reducing the size of his head.(2)

     The procedure of shrinking a head may take up to six days and outcomes in the size of a man’s fist. This is an excerpt from M. Harners book “People of the Sacred Waterfalls” that explains the process; “The process of preparing a tsantsa[shrunken head] has a number of steps. With the aid of a machete or a steel knife, the victim’s skin is peeled back from the uppermost part of his chest, shoulders and back, and the head and neck are cut off as close as possible to the collarbone… here he makes a slit up the rear of the head and carefully cuts the skin from the skull and throws the latter into the river as a gift to the anaconda. The skin is boiled for half and hour. It is then dried. Then the skin is again scraped… the slit in the rear is sewn… Heated stones or sand then is rolled around in the head… Three pins are put through the lips and lashed with string. The skin is rubbed daily with charcoal so it will become blackened…” (4)

     After gaining enemies heads the Shuar have different feasts or tributes unfolded in three stages, each lasting several days, but the last one separated by a year.(3) This occurs to allow the re-harvesting of crops for the subsequent celebration. The reasons behind the ceremonies that took part with the tsantsa are for the benefit of defunct relatives in order to show that the Jivaros are fulfilling their obligations of blood vengeance as well as to increase their own prestige. The possession of the trophy enabled the warrior to be singled out in admiration amongst his peers.(3)

     It is frequently misunderstood that tsantsa were trophies of combat. It was not until the 19th century and early 20th that the Shuar started keeping the shrunken heads. They kept them in order to commerce with Europeans and Euro-Americans for manufactured goods such as guns. This need lead to an increase in tribal wars, which amounted to head hunting and added, gave the Shuar a bloody reputation.(3)

References

1) Indian Cultures by Hands Around the World

2014 Shuar Indians Electronic document.

http://www.indian-cultures.com/cultures/shuar-indians/ June 2nd, 2015

2)Memim encyclopedia

2015, Shuar people, Electric document.

http://memim.com/shuar-people.html June 2nd, 2015

3) History and Process of head- shrinking

2013 Shuar indigenous people, Electronic document.

http://www.stormfrontfilms.com/shrunken_heads.htm    June 2nd,2015

4) Steven, Rubenstein

2006 Circulation, Accumulation, and the Power of Shuar Shrunken Heads.

Cultural Anthropology vol 22 issue 3 pp. 357-399

Family and Gender Roles

     Shuar families are known to be large. According to health surveys, the fertility rate is about eight children per woman. (1) Women are having between six to ten children at an early age, and approximately fifty percent of the Shuar population is under the age of 15. (1) Families are settled in single households around an open grass field. Most of these households practice monogamy, rather than polygamy. (1) Families are related and connected through kinship, social, economic, and emotional ties. These ties connect families together that are living in different centros, because the centros are not close units. (1)

There is a strict gender division amongst Shuar individuals. Men tend to meet their wives at an early age, marry her, and then they both have their first child right away. (1) Women’s task include gardening, cooking, caring for children and domestic animals, creating pottery, as well as the preparation of chicha, a signature Shuar drink. (3) On the other hand, men’s jobs include participating in community politics, house and canoe building, cattle breeding, hunting, and fishing. (3) Men sometimes even leave their homes, to do work outside the centro, and bring in cash. (3)  Shuar families and communities greatly value peace and harmony within relationships. (1) Quoted directly from Petersson, Charlotte “The aim of the good life is to restore tranquillity or status quo rather than to achieve change, development or progress, which are embedded in the Western notion of well-being”. (1)

While the men and women complete their daily tasks, the children attend school. A member of the community interprets lessons of teachers from a small portable radio, for about six hours. (2) The member writes the lessons on the board and helps the students. The radio school teaches students both primary and secondary elements of reading, math, writing, and history. (2) They are also taught about traditional music and folktales, mainly in the Shuar language. (2) The school day ends around 1 pm, leaving time for children to help their parents with their daily tasks, and learn the skills they will need for the future, such as agricultural skills. (2) Before radio schools were developed more than sixty percent of Shuar children did not attend school, now however, about eighty percent of children graduate primary school.(2)  Illiteracy has decreased about ten percent since radio courses have developed.(2) For the indigenous group, education is now an element of great pride which is also represented by the radio school. (2)

Although families are more likely to participate in monogamy, Shuar people do accept polygamy as well. (1) The male is the head of the family, and "chief", and can have up to three to five wives. There have been situations where men are able to "reserve" a child from a pregnant woman for him, as she gets older. (3) Traditionally, cross-cousin marriages were practiced, simply meaning a woman were to marry one of her cousins. That practice still happens but is also becoming less common.(3) The "in-law" relationships are very important. For instance, brothers and brothers-in-law tend to work and hunt together. (3)

Resources

1.) Petersson, Charlotte
2012 Negotiating Reproduction: Family Size and Fertility Regulation among Shuar People of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Sweden: University of Gothenburg
http://hdl.handle.net.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/2077/31456. June 3, 2015

2.) Theodore, Macdonald

Shuar Children: Bilingual-Bicultural Education. Cultural Survival. 10.4 (Winter 1986) Children: The Battleground of Change
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/shuar-children-bilingual-bicultural-education. June 3, 2015.

3.) Barret, Clark

Culture and the Mind: Shuar Fieldsite in Amazonian Ecuador 

http://www.philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/culture&mind/people/barrettc, June 3 2015.

Political History and Development.

The beginning. The Shuar are a group of indigenous people of Ecuador and Peru and up in till the 16^th century maintained their way of life with the same culture isolation as the rest of South America. The Shuar had a fierce reputation before meeting with the Spaniards. During the time when the Inca Empire ruled, the Shuar were one of the very few tribal groups to have resisted them. To put into numbers, the Inca had a population of 12 million during this time period () while the Shuar now have a population of 110,000 in 1998 (3). Even with today’s population, the Shuar compared to the ancient Inca would have been outnumbered by 109 to 1.

First contact. After the meeting of the Spaniards and the converting by the priests in the 16^th century, the Shuar recognized the change of the status quo the foreigners brought with them and began to uses the teachings of the Europeans to protect their land. By converting religions, the Shuar were able to successful negotiate with the Europeans and hold onto their land with some Spanish oversight. While the Shuar did hold onto their land, they had to give mineral rights to the right gold deposits to the Spaniards which were of course mined by the Shuar (2). At one point the Spaniards went too far in taxing the Shuar and had a violent altercation because of it which ceased communication between them up in till the 19^th century (3). 

Globalization. In 1964 after about a 100 years of minor communication with missionaries, the Shuar people took a huge step to modernizing their society by reaching out towards the Ecuadorian and global community. They “formed a political Federation to represent their interest to the state, non-governmental organizations, and transnational corporations” also known as Centros (1), this move allowed for the Shuar a voice in their government. Further in 1969, the Shuar, through their Federation, convinced the Ecuadorian government to give them jurisdiction over their land. This means that they would be in charge of duties such as education, civil administration, land-tenure and cattle-production. This authority over there lively hoods would allow for the Shuar people and their culture to survive in an ever changing world.

Post globalization. Despite the Shuar people fighting to maintain their culture heritage, some members of the current generation also feel pride and worth in their Ecuadorian lineage. This resulted in some of the latest generation of the Shuar to have gone on to serve in a governmental captaincy. A new trouble has also arisen that could threaten their land and identity Large pockets of oil have been discovered in their lands. This is a problem since having valuable natural resources has been shown in the past as being the first step to having one’s cultural destroyed due to the greed of outsiders. Now the Shuar along with other native tribes are defending their land from devastation to their ancestral homes the oil companies would cause deforestation and government migration.

Sources

Petersen, Rachael

2012 Indigenous Peoples of the World: The Shuar. Electronic document

https://intercontinentalcry.org/indigenous-peoples/shuar/  June 1st

Indian Cultures by Hands Around the World

2014 Shuar Indians Electronic document.

http://www.indian-cultures.com/cultures/shuar-indians/ June 1st

Memim encyclopedia

            2015, Shuar people, Electric document

http://memim.com/shuar-people.html  June 1st