This broad inquiry into the culture of the Jivaro - an extant tribe
of primitive South American Indians located in eastern Ecuador
noted for its ferocity and hyper-individualism - is primarily of
interest and value to professional ethnologists. Conceivably,
however, Harner's study could reach a somewhat extended audience
given the Jivaro's historical notoriety as headhunters. But this is
not the stuff of the late-late-too-late show. The author, a serious
anthropologist (a professor in the New School for Social Research's
graduate department), is committed to reporting "those aspects of
Jivaro culture that had changed or remained stable during this
century" - for instance, the tribe's use of hallucinogens for
religious invocation, its belligerence toward outsiders, the
socially sanctioned use of poisoning as extralegal punishment for
certain behavior. Harner's methodology includes data gathering via
extensive fieldwork (1956-57, 1964, 1969), employment of paid
informants, and a very conscientious scrutiny of the two other
major field reports (Karsten's Headhunters of Western Amazons and
Stirling's Historical and Ethnographical Material on the Jivaro
Indians - both published in the '30's and both containing many
contradictory findings). Thus, from the standpoint of the social
scientist seeking certifiable cross-cultural information on world
cultures, The Jivaro not only serves to reconcile or corroborate
(and in some instances correct) the existing data file but it
updates it and fills in the lacunae. Published in conjunction with
the American Museum of Natural History. (Kirkus Reviews)
Only one tribe of American Indians is known ever to have
successfully revolted against the empire of Spain and to have
thwarted all subsequent attempts by the Spaniards to reconquer
them: the Jivaro (hee'-va-ro), the untsuri suarii of eastern
Ecuador. From 1599 onward they remained unconquered in their forest
fastness east of the Andes, despite the fact that they were known
to occupy one of the richest placer gold deposit regions in all of
South America. Tales of their fierceness became part of the
folklore of Latin America, and their warlike reputation spread in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Jivaro
"shrunken head" trophies, tsantsa, found their way to the markets
of exotica in the Western world. As occasional travelers visited
them in the first decades of this century, the Jivaro also became
known not as just a warlike group, but as an individualistic people
intensely jealous of their freedom and unwilling to be subservient
to authority, even among themselves. It was this quality that
particularly attracted me when I went to study their way of life in
1956-57 and I was most fortunate, at that time, to find, especially
east of the Cordillera de Cutucli, a portion of the Jivaro still
unconquered and still living, with some changes, their traditional
life style. This book is about their culture.
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