The Mystery of the Shrunken Head
By Chrissie Perella
For the past several weeks, I've been processing the extensive Hartwig
Kuhlenbeck collection. Kuhlenbeck, born in Germany in 1897, was Professor of
Anatomy and, later, Emeritus Professor at Woman's Medical College, and
served as Major of the Medical Corps of the United States Army during World
War II. He traveled all over the world, including the Alps, Alaska, the
South Pacific, India, South America, and spent several years in Japan at the
Imperial University and Keio University in Tokyo as Dozent of Anatomy and
Comparative Neurology during the 1920s. He's an interesting man with an
interesting collection. While Kuhlenbeck deserves an entire blog post to
himself, one item in his collection is just begging to be written about.
Kuhlenbeck saved various memorabilia from his travels: souvenir postcards
and stationery, maps, museum booklets, hotel receipts. Fun stuff to look
through, and much the same as we save from our vacations today.
In 1951, Kuhlenbeck spent several months in South America, lecturing (in
Spanish, of course) at the Neurological Clinic of the University of
Montevideo, Uruguay; the Hortega Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the
Universities of Santiago and Concepcion in Chile. He visited "a number of
additional Medical Schools and Scientific Institutions...[to collect] material
for comparative neurological study." He also collected a shrunken head,
allegedly from the Jivaro people.
The Jivaro are South American Indian people living in Ecuador and Peru, north
of the Mara帽贸n River in the eastern part of the Andes mountains. They are
war-like and well-known for their talent of shrinking heads to the size of
apples.1 Kuhlenbeck described the
head-shrinking process as such:
In the manufacture of the skin tsantsas, the separated head is split by a
cut from the apex across the occiput to the rear end of the neck stump and
carefully peeled away from the skull; the skinned skull is thrown away.
The skin sack is then cooked for several hours in a boiler, where water
and plant juices, known to the Indians as conducive to shrinkage, are
mixed. Then the head-hunters sew the incision to guide the peeling skin
and again achieve a further shrinkage, and at the same time shape [the
head] by placing hot stones in the neck opening of the skin sack, and roll
the stones back and forth. Furthermore, the outer side of the head is
flattened with smooth stones and modeled. Finally, hot sand is poured
through the neck opening into the interior of the hollow head; so that the
final drying and shrinkage is caused, which can be completed by a kind of
incense on the fire.
During his visit to Ecuador, Kuhlenbeck wrote in his Tagebuch