The Shuar Tribe

The Shuar is a tribe in Peru. This tribe is very interesting because of all of their traditions. The main one I will be talking about is the shrunken heads and why they did this. The heads were from fallen warriors of the other tribes they fought in battle. They did not use these heads to count how many people they have killed like scalping, in fact they were only allowed to have two. The reason they were only allowed two heads was because they believed if you had two or more heads their powers would not work. The Shuar believe that after you kill a warrior the spirit is still inside the body mainly the head. They stitch the mouth and eyes closed so the spirit doesn’t escape from the head. The process of making the the heads is very spiritual and bloody. They wait for the battle to be over then they start. They make a cut around your neck then one from your top of your skull to the back of your neck, then they strip the skin from the skull. Then they will start shrinking the skin. They put the skin in a pot of boiling water and take it out to let it cool and then they put it back in the hot water and repeat the process till it's the size they need it to be. After it's the right size they sew up all the openings except for the neck. They use that hole to put rocks, mud, and sand to give it a shape of a skull. What the Shuar do with the skull of the fallen warrior is they throw it into the river for the water god. The finished produce of shrunken head is a head that looks like it has been shrunk but with really long hair because in this process of shrinking the skin the hair stays the same and eyes, mouth, and neck are sealed to not let the spirit get out. This tradition has ended because the tribes have become less of a savage society. Now there are lots of tourist that go thru the area and of course these tourist what some shrunken heads. What the Shuar do is they go and get monkeys and do the same process to then and they call it a human head to sell it to the public. They still practice all of the original traditions anywhere from religion to language and of course dress and dance, but the Shuar don’t have a written language. We don’t know most of their past. There are about 45,000 Shuar in our world today. They might be small in numbers but in these numbers they are strong in their culture.