Shuar
The Shuar are an indigenous people who are native to the Amazon lowlands east of the Andes in Ecuador . Shuar is the word for "people" in their language. Estimates made by Shuar associations indicate that there are 110,000 Shuar in around 668 village communities (1998). Other sources put at least 40,000 Shuar in Ecuador. The Shuar language is assigned to the Jívaro language family , among which it is the most common.
Settlement area
The areas originally inhabited by the Shuar, which are still their main settlement area, are located between the Andes Cordillera in the west and the rivers of the Río Pastaza , the Río Upano and the Río Zamora and parts of the river system of the Río Morona . This area includes parts of the Ecuadorian provinces of Morona Santiago , Zamora Chinchipe and Pastaza . Thus the Shuar live in the higher part of the Amazon lowlands in the Andean foothills at an altitude of around 500 to 1000 m. There are three major groups that Muraya Shuar ( "people of the mountains") who live in the valley of Upano that Untsuri Shuar ( "numerous people") between the Cordillera del Condor and its continuation Cordillera de Cutucú and Pankanmaya Shuar from the area beyond the Cutucú cordillera.
The Shuar's closest neighbors and linguistically closest relatives are the Achuar and Shiwiar as well as the Aguaruna . The Achuar and Shiwiar live in the wetter, deeper part of the Ecuadorian Amazon lowlands, the Aguaruna on the other side of the Ecuadorian border in Peru .
history
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origin
The exact origin of the Shuar is not known. Some authors believe that the Shuar emerged from the merging of members of Arawak-speaking inhabitants of the Amazon region with originally Puruhá- speaking groups from the Andean region . The Shuar seem to have originally belonged to the Palta , who lived in what is now the Ecuadorian province of Loja and who moved eastward before the military expansion of the Inca Empire at the end of the 15th century.
Attempts at conquest by Inca and Spaniards
This area in the east of the Andes Cordillera was not permanently ruled by either the Inca Empire or the Spanish Conquistadors . Around 1490 the Inca were repulsed and in 1549 the Shuar ensured the failure of the first Spanish advance. After the Spaniards exercised an increasingly exploitative rule for a while, the Shuar, led by Quiruba , conquered and destroyed the Spanish settlements Logroño de los Caballeros and Sevilla de Oro in 1599 and executed the Spanish governor. This meant the end of colonization efforts and led to the extensive breakdown of contacts between Shuar and Spanish rule well into the 19th century.
The Shuar were then mainly as a "barbaric" people in the history and legends one that defeated from the severed heads opponents in a ritual to an undisclosed type shrunken heads made.
Missionary work since the 19th century
"I drink from two rivers"
At the end of the 19th century took the Jesuits to re-building missions in the territory of the Shuar. In addition, increasingly poor and landless Ecuadorians from the Andean highlands came as settlers in the lower areas. The Shuar established peaceful trade relations with the settlers and gave them land in exchange for goods. They started sending their children to mission schools to learn the Spanish language . During the first presidency of José María Velasco Ibarra in 1935, the Ecuadorian government established a "reserve" ( reserva ) for the Shuar in order, among other things, to restrict the acquisition of land by new settlers, and gave the missionaries of the Catholic Order of the Salesians Don Bosco control and jurisdiction the area, excluding non-Shuar settlers and two evangelical missions. The missionary activity has been carried since the 1960s evangelicals significantly strengthened.
The missionaries were mostly successful in achieving their goals of acculturation of the Shuar. They taught them the Spanish language, (officially) converted it to Christianity and worked towards the abandonment of warfare and shrunken head making. They also brought about a change in attitudes towards puberty rituals (see below) and the increasing involvement of the Shuar in market economy contexts . They have been largely but not entirely successful in adopting monogamy in place of polygamy being practiced .
The influence of Christianity has fundamentally changed the indigenous religion of the Shuar (→ syncretism ) , but neither suppressed nor destroyed it. However, it has plunged people into an ambivalent crisis of faith. The Catholic Indigenous Church emphasizes the continuity between the indigenous religion and Christianity and adopts the ancient mythology . Representatives of this denomination integrate indigenous elements such as symbols, festivals or myths into their Christian practice. The evangelical indigenous church, however, deals with such integration differently. Instead, converting to another religion means a radical change. The evangelical Christians still see themselves as Shuar, but here Arutam - the divine power of traditional mythology - and the Christian god are different, while among the indigenous Catholics they are equated. It can be assumed that the influence of Christianity will increase from the inaccessible Amazon lowlands in the east to the west into the infrastructural Andean highlands.
Settlement formation and history since the 1960s
Until the 1950s, the Shuar lost a significant part of their original territory to settlers. At that time they gave up their semi-nomadic and scattered settlement lifestyle (see below ) and began to form small settlements of five to thirty families, which are referred to with the Spanish word for “centers”, centros . These centers facilitated missionary "access" to the Shuar and at the same time formed the basis for Shuar petitions to the Ecuadorian government to obtain land rights . In return for land rights, the Shuar promised to turn the rainforest into pasture to raise cattle, which would be bought with government loans.
In the 1960s, Salesian fathers helped the Shuar to set up their own interest groups. In 1964, the Federacíon Interprovincial de Centros Shuar-Achuar (German: "Inter-provincial Federation of Shuar and Achuar Centers"; today Federacíon Interprovincial de Centros Shuar , abbreviated FICSH ). The federal government is organized democratically and hierarchically; most of its functionaries are financed by the Ecuadorian state. In 1969, the Shuar Federation signed an agreement with the Ecuadorian government, which gave it jurisdiction in the "protected area". The Shuar-Bund took over the tasks of the Salesians in the areas of school education, population registration and land rights. The further promotion of cattle breeding and other existing programs worked towards the further integration of the Shuar in market economy contexts; In addition, they caused increasing deforestation of the rainforest, which has since been recognized as a mistake. Since the agreement, the Shuar Association has differentiated itself in various ways. In the meantime the Achuar have their own league. However, the various groups still maintain good relationships with one another.
As a result of the work of the Shuar Association, the Shuar as an ethnic group have a strong sense of identity. Most Shuar also identify with the Ecuadorian state, and quite a few Shuar take an active part in political life. Many of them also serve in the Ecuadorian army , which for a time took advantage of the 19th century reputation of the Shuar as "violent savages" and formed Shuar elite units (which, however, were commanded by non-Shuar). These units stood out particularly in the Cenepa War , a border war between Ecuador and Peru in 1995 , which was largely fought in Shuar settlement areas .
Conflicts since 2000
Since the turn of the millennium, the Ecuadorian government has endeavored to promote the exploitation of the mineral resources of the Morona-Santiago province. To this end, mining concessions were awarded to Chinese companies, among other things. China has granted Ecuador billions in loans to build dams and roads and is demanding not just 80 percent of Ecuador's oil production. The Chinese company ExplorCobres has acquired 410 km² of land in the province to open a copper mine. Since half of the area is ancestral Shuar land and there was no coordination with the indigenous people, the locals are resisting the project.
In 2006, Shuar evicted the company's employees from their camps and from a hydroelectric power station that had been built to provide electricity. At the same time a network against mining was set up together with other indigenous peoples of Ecuador. The massive resistance caused the newly elected Correa government in 2007 to issue a nationwide, so-called "mining mandate", through which concessions were terminated for which neither an environmental impact assessment nor consideration of the ethnic groups had taken place and which temporarily prevented new concessions. However, the mandate was weakened and circumvented over the course of Correa's ten-year reign. According to press reports, "the government has turned into an enthusiastic advocate of mega-mining," which with new concessions granted foreign operators considerable territorial rights.
The resistance of the indigenous people was increasingly criminalized. In 2016, the Nankints municipality was forcibly evacuated and destroyed with the help of the army, to which the 200 residents responded with counter attacks. Since the prescribed coordination with the Shuar had not taken place in advance, the action was illegal. Several soldiers and police officers were wounded in the heavy clashes that followed; one policeman was killed. The government did not respond to the attempts to clarify by the indigenous umbrella organization CONFENIAE and the environmental organization Acción Ecológica . Instead, the conflict escalated: several Shuar leaders were arrested, Acción Ecológica was indicted, and the province was declared a state of emergency.
language
The Shuar language, the Shuar chicham , belongs to the Jívaro language family named by Rafael Karsten in 1935 , to which, in addition to the Shuar, the Achuar-Shiwiar, the Aguaruna (the Awajún ) and the Huambisa (Hívaro-Kawapana) languages Peru belong. Some authors form a Jívaro-Kandoshi family including the languages of Shapra and Murato, which are also native to today's Peru .
Shuar call the speakers of Spanish apach and non-Shuar speakers who do not speak Spanish inkis . In Europe and its former colonies, the Shuar were long known as Jívaro or Jíbaro . This word probably comes from the Spanish spelling of the word "Shuar" from the 16th century, but has changed over time in the direction of "wild". Most Shuar take it as an insult, not as a self-designation. Nevertheless, the name Jívaro lives on in depictions influenced by older travel reports, which also emphasize the production of tzantzas (shrunken heads ), which is no longer practiced today.
Social organization and economy
From the time before their first contact with Europeans in the 16th century until the formation of the Shuar League in the 1950s and 1960s, the Shuar lived as semi- nomads in individual households that were spread across the tropical rainforest . The households were linked by loosely related family and marriage relationships, while institutionalized kin groups and political organs did not exist. The center of the Shuar's life was a largely autonomous household consisting of a man, his wives (usually two), unmarried sons and daughters. After they got married, sons usually left the paternal household while sons-in-law moved in. Men hunted and women farmed.
The Shuar economy is traditionally based on the migratory cultivation of tuber crops , supplemented by hunting, fishing and the collecting of fruits and insects. The Shuar traditionally practiced slash and burn . They grow cassava , tannia or yams , sweet potatoes , peanuts , corn , peach palms and bananas . Cultivating the plot, as well as harvesting, collecting, cooking and preparing the chicha is traditionally the task of women. The men hunt and fish. Today, hunting grounds have given way to pastureland for livestock in many areas. This is accompanied by increasing depletion of the soil and a decrease in the available land area for seminomadic forms of life. This was another reason for settling down, which was also indicated by the socio-economic framework conditions (see story ).
The Shuar settlements were traditionally widely scattered and zoned according to family affiliation. The family farms were designed for larger celebrations with relatives. The settlement of their area and missionary work in the 20th century led the Shuar to settle in small communities called centros (Spanish for "centers"). The centros originally made proselytizing easier, but they also became a means of defending the Shuar's land claims against new settlers.
The current political-administrative structure follows the system of the Shuar Federation and other organizations such as FINAE ( Federación Interprovincial de Nacionalidad Achuar del Ecuador ), OSHE ( Organización Shuar del Ecuador ), FIPSE ( Federación Independiente de Pueblo Shuar de Ecuador ) and CISAE . The base units today are the "Shuar Centers", which are grouped around a community zone that forms the central square where schools, chapels, medical posts, playgrounds and community rooms are located. The area of a Shuar center depends on the number of families organized in it and is recognized or determined by the responsible authorities.
The Shuar have their own radio stations, especially for educational work.
Traditional beliefs and culture
Mythology and religion
The traditional culture of the Shuar is shaped by the original jungle of their settlement area. Their mythology is closely related to nature and the laws of the universe and knows a wide "range" (gama) of higher beings associated with phenomena such as the creation of the world, life, death and disease. The most important of them are Etsa as the embodiment of the struggle between good and evil ( Iwia ), Shakaim as strength and skill for the work of men and Tsunki as the supreme being of the water, which brings health. Nunkui , the earth goddess , ensures the fertility of the earth ( Nunka ) and the woman. The power over plant growth in horticulture and agriculture is attributed to Nunkui , who also taught the Shuar women how to sow. Nunkui's power, however, has to be invoked through rites that call the forces of growth into the present so that the earth produces its fruits. The Shuar believe that the rainforest is filled with spirits who dwell in waterfalls and on the riverbanks.
The ripe fruit of the Chonta palm ( Bactris gasipaes ) represents the myth of Uwi . It indicates the rich season in the jungle. When the fruits mentioned are harvested, rituals are performed with requests to Uwi . The Shuar ask that he ferment the chicha , give fertility to animals and humans as well. The ceremonial celebration of these rites should lead to the fulfillment of the requests, and failure to do so will lead to lack of food and death.
The Shuar's traditional spiritual world was cyclical. They did not believe in the end of man, but in the fact that after birth and the end of a life there is no permanent state of death. The spiritual entity Arutam was received after the end of life by another, who could be his son or grandson, and with whom he spent another life cycle, which continued indefinitely. Arutam used to be the central spiritual entity for young men, as it is supposed to give them more strength and potency . The Shuar believed that whoever owns an arutam cannot die of contagious diseases. From the age of six to eight, they therefore undertook the search for Arutam in the jungle (see rituals of masculinity ) .
The Shuar did not believe in natural death prior to Christianization , although they recognize that certain contagious diseases such as measles and scarlet fever , which were transmitted through contact with Europeans, are deadly. The Shuar fought mainly with spears and blowguns , but believed, like many peoples in the Amazon region, that they could also be killed by invisible arrows - tsentsak . Inexplicable deaths were therefore attributed to a tsentsak . Tsentsak are considered to be alive, but not acting independently. Especially the medicine men called Uwishin should possess and control Tsentsak . Tsentsak had to be purchased from other medicine men. To control a tsentsak , a Uwishin must take natem (from the liana species Banisteriopsis caapi ; see also Ayahuasca ). It serves as a trance agent to travel to the world of spirits. Many Shuar still believe that disease is caused when someone hires a Uwishin to shoot a tsentsak into the body of an enemy. Such actions are done in secret, and medicine men are unlikely to admit they did them. When one becomes sick, they can turn to an Uwishin for diagnosis and healing.
Medicine men traditionally worked with the Shuar not only as mediators to the supernatural world, but also as leaders, because they held a high position in its hierarchy. They had guardian spirits in animal form. There were “good” and “bad” medicine men. Similarly, a Uwishin can send out his servants to bewitch someone, but also to heal them. In addition to ayahuasca, they also use concentrated tobacco juice as a stimulant ( nicotine in a highly concentrated form as a psychotropic , very fast-acting substance).
Although the earlier beliefs have been strongly influenced by Christianity today (see: #Missioning since the 19th century ) , the old myths still have an important meaning in the life of the Shuar.
Customs
Shrunken Heads ( Tsantsas )
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In the 19th century especially were Muraya Shuar from the Upano Valley in Europe and North America for their sophisticated practice, from the heads of enemies killed in battle (usually Achuar ) shrunken heads , tsantsas to make known. The shrunken heads of the Shuar were by outsiders as head-hunters - Trophies regarded as the Shuar insist that the heads themselves mean little to them, and no trophies were. They attached importance to the “soul”, Muisak , of the fighter, preserved in and through the shrunken heads . Shuar men believed that controlling the Muisak would enable them to control the work of their own daughters and wives. Since the women grew cassava roots and made chicha from them , which together made up the bulk of the nutritional energy in the Shuar's diet, the work of the women was extremely important for the Shuar's biological survival and social life. At the end of the 19th century, traders of European descent began trading with the Shuar , exchanging goods, including firearms , for shrunken heads. As a result, on the one hand, the image of the Shuar emerged as headhunters in Europe and North America; On the other hand, the Shuar's war activities took on intensified traits through the use of weapons and the stereotype of the "violent Shuar" received additional nourishment. Tsantsas made today are not made from human heads, but rather from sloth heads.
Rituals of masculinity
The Shuar culture was originally the culture of a warrior society. The core element was / is the initiation of the young warriors through the supervised hallucination at a consecrated waterfall. Boys between the ages of about six and eight were taken by their father or uncle on a three to five day trip to a nearby waterfall , during which they drank only tobacco water . At a certain point in time, the child was given the intoxicant of the tree angel trumpet ( Brugmansia arborea ), maikua , to evoke brief visions that embodied an arutam . The origin of these visions was believed to be a wakaní , the spirit of an ancestor. If the boy was brave enough, he could touch the arutam and take in an arútam wakaní . That would make the boy very strong, the inclusion of several Arútam wakaní even invincible. However, the Shuar believed that they could easily lose an Arútam wakaní and therefore repeated the ritual several times. A Shuar fighter who had killed many opponents in his life was given the name Kakaram . The Shuar believed that if a Shuar in possession of an Arútam wakaní died peacefully, he would release a new wakaní ; if, on the other hand, he was killed in battle, a new Muisak was created .
Other mind-altering drugs such as Ayahuasca are also used in varying degrees of strength for initiation.
Blood revenge, feuds, and polygamy were common in Shuar culture.
literature
- Maurizio Gnerre: Sources of Spanish Jívaro. In: Romance Philology , Volume 27, Issue 2, 1973, 203-204.
- Michael J. Harner: Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984, ISBN 0-520-05065-7 (Spanish translation as Shuar, pueblo de las cascadas sagradas. Ed. Abya Yala . Quito 1994, 3rd edition).
- Aij Juank: Pueblo de fuertes: rasgos de historia shuar. Ed. Abya Yala, Quito 1984.
- Rafael Karsten : The head-hunters of Western Amazonas: The life and culture of the Jibaro Indians of eastern Ecuador and Peru [Finska vetenskaps-societeten, Helsingfors] Commentationes humanarum litterarum. VII. 1. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletins, Washington, DC, 1935.
- Elke Mader: Metamorfosis del poder: Persona, mito y visión en la sociedad Shuar y Achuar. Ed. Abya-Yala, Quito 1999, ISBN 9978-04-477-9 .
- Mark Munzel: El pueblo shuar, de la leyenda al drama. Ed. Abya Yala, Quito 1981.
- Carmen Ochoa, Luz María Sierra: Una comunidad shuar en proceso de cambio. Ed. Abya-Yala, Quito 1976.
- John Perkins and Shakaim Mariano Shakai Ijisam Chumpi: The Spirit of the Shuar. Wisdom of the last unconquered people. Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 2001, ISBN 978-0-89281-865-5 .
- Steve Rubenstein: La conversión de los Shuar (PDF; 323 kB). In: Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales. 9th vol., No. 22, 2005, pp. 27-48 (published by FLACSCO , Quito).
- Steven Rubenstein: Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2002, ISBN 0-8032-8988-X .
- Mark Münzel (text and planning): Shrunken head maker? Jíbaro Indians in South America. Museum für Völkerkunde :, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, (Red thread to the exhibition, 4)
- Anna Meiser: “Jesus Is the Same Arutam” Logics of Appropriation among Missionized Indians and Indigenized Missionaries . In: Anthropos , Vol. 106, No. 2 (2011), pp. 493-510.
Web links
- Virtual exhibition of the ethnographic seminar in Marburg
- Information about the Shuar on the homepage of the State Council of Indigenous Nations and Peoples of Ecuador (CODENPE) (Spanish)
- Literature about the Shuar in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin
- Project to support the Shuar - a project initiated by the Shuar with German support. In addition, a large part of the CODENPE information has been translated into German and English and updated with current developments.
- Elke Mader, Myths in Latin America. Ethnological myth research , In: Latin America Studies online , 2005 (based on a lecture script, often refers to the Shuar).
- William Jamieson, Head Hunting: The History of the Shuar , website about the Shuar and Tsantsas (English)
- La Nacionalidad Shuar , article about the Shuar at edufuturo.com , the education portal of the prefecture of the Ecuadorian province of Pichincha (Spanish)
- Entry at Ethnologue about the Shuar language (English)
- Photos of the Shuar from the Adventure Museum (Saarbrücken) at DigiCult Saarland
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas: Shuar: Población y Organización Social. In: Website of the State Council of Indigenous Nations and Peoples of Ecuador (Codenpe). 2002, archived from the original on March 7, 2009 ; Retrieved January 20, 2019 (Spanish).
- ↑ a b c Anna Meiser: "I drink from two rivers". On the logic of transcultural processes among Christian Achuar and Shuar in the upper Amazon. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2012. ISBN 978-3-17-022381-3 .
- ↑ a b Jan Christoph Wiechmann: Poison arrows against a great power - an indigenous people in South America takes on China , Stern from January 10, 2019, online version , queried on April 1, 2019.
- ↑ a b Silvia Ribeiro: Ecuador's government against indigenous people and environmentalists , La Jornada / poonal, Mexico City, January 7, 2017, in [amnesty-ecuador.de/Assets/Docs/Artikelsammlung2010-2016.pdf Amnesty Ecuador, Artikelammlung2010 -2016], pp. 1-3.
- ↑ Karsten (1935)
- ↑ See Alain Fabre: Candoshi. In: Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos. Edición Electrónica. 2005, archived from the original on June 1, 2013 ; Retrieved January 20, 2019 (Spanish).
- ↑ Gnerre (1973)
- ↑ Åke Hultkrantz , Michael Rípinsky-Naxon, Christer Lindberg: The book of the shamans. North and South America . Munich 2002, ISBN 3-550-07558-8 . P. 118.
- ↑ Elke Mader: Ethnological myth research. Theoretical perspectives and examples from Latin America. (pdf, 1.5 MB) In: latein America-studien.at. March 16, 2005, p. 18 , archived from the original on May 18, 2015 ; accessed on January 20, 2019 .