What Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers does do is highlight the western obsession with death and body parts. It's Gibbon who inserts the tension into this video, Gibbon who asks the nosy questions ("How did that make you feel?" he asks one harassed widow), Gibbon who reveals the Bielawski video to the Shuar without telling them that head-shrinking takes place in it. Hmm. they're not surprised. Gibbon has a real obsession with shrunken heads, and he expects that obsession to be shared by the Shuar: but it isn't. The Shuar are okay with their past. And that, oddly enough, makes for an interesting video. Just probably not what the National Geographic had in mind.
Sources and Further Information
- National Geographic Expedition Week 2009
- Piers Gibbon, official website
- Brief bio Steven Rubenstein (anthropologist studying the Shuar, who had nothing to do with NatGeo's coverage)
- Janet Wall Hendricks' book, To Drink of Death: The Narrative of a Shuar Warrior, also nothing to do with this film
I'm not an anthropologist by trade (although by association, of course), so I had to do a bit of digging into what scholars have said about the Shuar, to set this story in context. This is a short list of recent work by the main scholars researching the Shuar that I had a chance to read in advance of this review.
Harner, Michael 1984 Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hendricks, Janet W. 1988 Power and knowledge: discourse and ideological transformation among the Shuar. American Ethnologist 15(2):216–238.
Price, Michael E. 2006 Monitoring, reputation, and ‘greenbeard’ reciprocity in a Shuar work team. Journal of Organizational Behavior 27:201–219.
Rubenstein, Steven L. 2007 Circulation, accumulation, and the power of Shuar shrunken heads. Cultural Anthropology 22(3):357–399.
