Jivaro: Head-Hunters of the Amazon

The Jivaro Indians of the Peru-Ecuador interior have long been renowned for their ferocity and cruelty in warfare; they are also shamanistic, communing with ancient spectres through the ingestion of poisonous hallucinogens. But above all, the Jivaro are known for their unique and macabre brand of death magic – the severing and shrinking of human heads.

JIVARO is the true account of an expedition into the Amazon rain forest to locate and study the Jivaro Indians; their dialects, social structures, methods of survival, and – above all – the orgiastic witchcraft rites which culminate in the slaughter, decapitation and spell-binding of their enemies, whose souls are forever imprisoned and silenced by the ritual reduction of their heads.

• Illustrated throughout
  
• with a new Introduction
  
• two anthropological Forewords on the Jivaro and the history of human trophy-taking

JIVARO is one of the true classics of populist ethnography, a vivid record of a vanishing way of life which retains its power to grip, and sometimes shock, the reader.