Gentlemen in the Jungle

Michael J. Harner playing a shaman's drum/Shuar woman preparing beer

My purchases this year of the LP Music of the Jívaro of Ecuador as an mp3 file and the book Visages the Bronze, and free downloads of the LP Jívaro and a pdf of The Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls all contributed to an enormous amount of recordings by the Shuar people (as the Jivaro are currently referred to) in the Top 100 but other sources were accessed as well. I've read current academic papers on Shuar culture as well as some early anthropological studies done in the 1930s. The four titles listed above are by the ethnologists Philippe Luzuy and anthropologist Michael J. Harner. I've painted Michael J. Harner here to illustrate the song Social Dance Singing (female chorus) that he recorded in 1972 together with an image of a woman preparing mash for manioc beer that Harner also took in 1972 and appears in the liner notes of Music of the Jívaro of Ecuador. [Folkways, 1973] The image of the woman photographed by Harner would also be appropriate for the song Chant de la bière de mais but for the Luzuy recording of it I used an image of the Finnish anthropologist Rafael Karsten paired with an image from a photo that he took during his frequent stays with Ecuadorian Indians in the early 1930. 

Shuar man (after a photo by Karsten)/Rafael Karsten

Karsten's book Head-hunters of the Western Amazonas was the first serious academic study of the Shuar. The Jivaro, as they were then called, had an almost mythical status in the Western imagination. So much had been fantasized and speculated since their famous shrunken heads became a fad for collectors in the late 19th century, yet none had studied their actual culture until Karsten spent time with them. Karsten's observations however, as one might expect given the early date, are far from objective.

The song Chant de la bière de mais (recorded in 1960 by Luzuy) curiously enough is identical to another social dance song from Harner's 1972 recordings on Music of the Jívaro of Ecuador. Harner's recording is not just the same song as the one Luzuy recorded twelve years earlier but it's identical note for note, as identical as a Beethoven piano sonata recorded by two different pianists at different times. Beethoven's music was written down but the Shuar songs are passed on from one singer to another. Stranger yet, even more starteling, is the fact that the singer recorded by Luzuy is a man while the singer recorded by Harner is a woman. Michael Harner, as well as others who have studied the Shuar, observed strict gender roles. (I wrote about the mysogyny of Shuar culture earlier, you can read it here.) Cultures like the Shuar may be much more flexible as anthropologists would be able to observe. (Here's the link to all my recent musings on the recordings of the Shuar.) 

Matthew W. Stirling/Shuar woman (after a photo by Stirling)

Philippe Luzuy recorded five tracks listed in this Top 100 and I still have not been able to find an image he appears on. For the fifth recording then, which is called Chant sur l'oiseau Toucan, I continued to chronicle the history of Shuar anthropology. A few years after Karsten, still in the 1930s, the American Matthew W. Stirling, produced a study of much greater integrity. Historical and Ethnographical Material on the Jivaro Indians has the flaw that Stirling relied on a certain translator who was biased, coming from a rivalling tribe. Harner, who used Stirling's book as a guidebook, tracked the informant down thirty years later and was able to set the record straight on some of Stirling's conclusions. In the painting here Stirling is seen carrying a gun (I think this may be a first for me!) in the Ecuadorian jungle. Next to him is an image of a Shuar individual he had photographed. 

Note: The photograph I used to portray Matthew Stirling, also features his wife, and long time collaborator, Marion Stirling. It felt really really weird to edit out Marion Stirling and instead, replace her by a Shuar woman, the object of their studies. In reality Stirling is much taller than the (unnamed) Shuar woman.