HOW TO SHRINK A HUMAN HEAD

Our first Christmas together, my boyfriend gave me a simulated shrunken head. It came in a plain brown cardboard box, just the size of a head, shrunk. There was no marketing, no explanatory text. I think she is female, maybe because I am female and my co-feeling for her simulated, captured, and reduced head is so strong and immediate. Or maybe just because of her long yellow-white hair, so fine it’s almost frothy. She has white, furred eyebrows arching over her eye lids, which are sewn shut with jute cords that hang from each side. Matching mouth cords stitch her dry lips closed.

When I opened the box, I stood in his kitchen and I had a feeling of vertigo. It was so easy to imagine myself captured and preserved in the place of this head, my soul stitched in tight. It was as if I had been given back myself, but frozen, less anxious, less permeable, and now suitable for display in a shadow box.

A shrunken head is “a severed and specially prepared human head that is used for trophy, ritual, or trade purposes.” Though heads have been hunted and cut off with abandon by all kinds of people all over the world, the practice of headshrinking has only been documented in the northwestern region of the Amazon rain forest, and the only tribes known to have shrunken human heads are the Jivaroan tribes of Ecuador and Peru, among whom the Shaur people are perhaps best known. The common transliteration of the Shuar word for shrunken heads is tsantsas.

I saw my first tsantsas as a teenager at the Wool-a-roc Museum & Ranch in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. There were seven heads, each mounted on an individual post in a glass case. They represented a demographic spectrum: an elder head with long curly yellowing white-gray hair; a child’s head, chin tilted up, long ropy faded black hair cascading down to the platform, a peacock-colored feathered headband resting above its tiny stitched eyes and unstitched nose, some middle-aged heads in between.

I wanted to look forever. Contemplating the fringed lashes of their unlooking eyes and their upturned noses in the glass case, every muscle in my body relaxed. It was an involuntary and very physical mechanism I can’t untangle, like the chill bumps I get on my forearms when I finally eat after getting too hungry. A sensation of completion and relief, momentarily having enough and being enough. I forgot my museum-tired feet and the historic Civil War weapons in the next case and stood suspended in time and space, there with the heads. There was nothing to do and nothing to be done.

Though the Shuar gave up making ceremonial shrunken heads years ago, it is still the attribute for which they are best known. What is less known is that the Shuar and other Jivaroan people have a long history of being exceptionally difficult to colonize. Their gold-rich territory attracted a steady stream of unwelcome conquerors, missionaries, and business interests, including two Inca emperors, Spanish explorers, and Jesuit, Franciscan, and Protestant missionaries, all of whom were resisted and mostly eventually expelled. The Jivaroan people stared back at the powers that came to tell them what and how to see. These days, it still goes on, though colonization has dropped the missionizing pretense and the Shuar find themselves in ongoing land battles with international mining and oil companies.

I understand that looking and having are acts rooted in structures of power and that my hungry gaze and fingers itchy to touch strangeness are shot through with the darkest instincts of capitalism and cruelty. When I think about shrunken heads, I tell myself that I am on their side, and yet the uneasy paradox remains that I walk around with my still-moist and full-sized head, speaking with unstitched lips, looking, wanting, touching, while the heads are a one-way transmission, giving me an image while they themselves are denied faculties of perception. Examining my obsession with shrunken heads feels risky, fraught with potential for misstep. What if my smudgy fingerprints on the glass case at the Wool-a-roc Museum make me complicit? What if Googling images of shrunken heads while I eat carrots at my desk implicates me in the murky subtexts of possessive surveillance I claim to disavow? What if my creepy pleasure in looking is inseparable from the making of shrunken heads and the exploitation of the makers?

Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the TV show, aired from 1982-1986 and was hosted by a selection of Palances (Jack, Holly), an Osmond (Marie), and most notably, Superman (actor Dean Cain). It aired on Sunday nights after Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and it contained multitudes: the Elephant Man, the Bermuda Triangle, feral children raised by wild animals, female contortionists who could wrap their legs around their heads, a man who ate an entire car bolt by bolt, and yes, shrunken heads. As a child, I was a big fan. I imagined joining the celebrities who acted as liaisons between the strangeness onscreen and the TV audience at home, or better, having some quality so shocking and special that I would be featured among the unbelievable. I didn’t know what my freakish quality or skill might be, but I was sure it was there, latent. Maybe it would emerge at puberty, like breasts and armpit hair? I wanted to take the burdensome specificity of having a body and make it something worth seeing.

I didn’t see Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, in which a Bearded Lady and Human Skeleton and Stork Woman and Human Torso honor the eventually-duplicitous full-sized trapeze artist Cleopatra with the chant: “We accept her, we accept her! One of us! One of us!” until much later, but when I watched Ripley’s Believe it or not! I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to take the embarrassing state of corporeality and make it glamorous; I felt stuck here, in the position of being a human, right alongside the car eaters and contortionists, the boneless and obscure. Oddity seemed like an answer. I was mesmerized by the clean lines of transactionality that just relaxing into being an actual exhibit, an exhibit of strangeness, seemed to offer. You wouldn’t have to try, you could just be if it was your very unacceptability that gave you value. Who wouldn’t want to get paid for the strangeness they were already sure made them unbearable? What I didn’t consider then was that the symmetrical and famous hosts were the only ones on the show who could really count on getting paid. Maybe, like in the movie, the freaks always end up betrayed. Or maybe the line between the looker and looked-at isn’t so distinct.

My father was, among other things, a hypochondriac, a compulsive shopper, and a fan of pornography. A collector and a looker-at of bodies par-excellence, which meant I had an almost overwhelming cache of ambient bodies-as-text at home. In my memory, he always wore rectangular horn-rimmed glasses and brown slacks and pale blue short-sleeved dress shirts, even on the weekends. He kept a beige pen with blue ink in his shirt pocket and a little spiral bound notebook for writing down his thoughts. He was a social scientist, not a real scientist, but he loved collecting data, rounding up the physical world into measurable categories. He spoke to me often about the importance of developing a critical eye. His critical eye was everywhere in my childhood and maybe inside of me still. He turned it on himself and on the bodies, the clothes, and the manicures of the women he encountered, in his department and at the mall and on TV.

I imagined him plotting ladies on axes that divided graphs into quadrants of basic attractiveness, intelligence, femininity, and some ineffable sense of presentation, something like the word “poised,” which he offered me as a form of praise. I imagined he had a scoring system, like the Miss America pageants on TV that he never missed. When I went with him to his office at the University, together we looked at his secretary. We noticed her red nails and long clumpy black eyelashes and sour-sweet lily perfume and the Oreos in her desk drawer. But we also noticed she was not a professor and that her orange pumps were misshapen around a bunion on her foot and she quietly listened to the country music radio station all day at her desk. It was a sexual look, this critical eye, but it was also plainly regulatory and it applied to everything. My father watched his own body too, applying different standards, plotting himself on lines of professional success, health, disease, and the having-of desirable things and people. He watched me too and, because of my half-way status, him but not him, I had a place on both charts.

He supported his looking with documentation and source material was all over the house. While my family watched nature specials on PBS, I memorized the soft-focus underwear ads in the Sears catalog and scrutinized advertisements for jock straps and catheters, examining the contours and bulges of the sexless but very sexy mannequins. The real visual bounty of bodies, however, was found in my father’s office, where he wrote books and graded papers surrounded by exotic but mundane artifacts like Iranian teapots, cloisonné ring boxes, and African statues carved out of dark wood. In the evenings, while he was in the living room watching The Love Boat and The Benny Hill Show on the couch, I lolled on the goldenrod shag carpeting to study the stack of Playboy magazines he kept in a steamer-trunk coffee table and pore over his brand new hard-cover first edition of the American Medical Association Family Medical Guide (1982), which I loved above all else. My favorite parts were…all of it…the sections on gestation, cancer, human sexual development and particularly dysfunction, disorders of the digestive system, and the color plates in the center, showcasing real people’s real skin rashes and tumors and undescended testicles and swollen limbs.

I studied the pictures of rosacea and psoriasis and skin cancer and hiked up my baby-blue Garfield nightgown to draw ball-point pen picture-frame squares around the moles on my thigh so they would look like the pictures in the pages of the book, considered, labeled, and diagnosed by professionals and regarded with horror and compassion by other people, people like me. “Severe Advanced Mole,” I would caption the frames.

After first considering repurposing a Plexiglas baseball display cube, I decided to keep the Christmas tsantsa in a glass bell jar with a natural cork base I found on sale at a craft supply store. Right now, it sits on the long low vintage wooden coffee table shaped like a surfboard in my living room, between the candles and magazines, though I shift it often to make room for eating or working. She’s awkward to move in the bell jar: slick glass, no handles. Her hair and cords are really too long to rest comfortably without a platform and they kind of pool around her, crowding her but also providing a pillow.

I took a picture of her in the bell jar, positioned on a woven placemat under a lamp, and posted it on Facebook. It’s not a very good picture because you can see the crumbs on my table and the lamplight glares off the glass. There is an off-center reflection of the lightbulb sharing the visual field co-equally with the head. I caption the photo: “Shrunken head simulation in a bell jar: too awesome for a decorative accent, or just awesome enough? I am, um, asking for a friend.” I’m nervous about posting it to the critical eye of my Facebook audience, but my desire to expose my fascination and myself outweighs my fear that they’ll think I’m weird or bestial or racist. And maybe I also want to share the responsibility, to not be the only one to look and approve of this more-than-an-object that I’m going to keep in my living room.

The reaction is small and mixed. There were enthusiastically supportive comments from the murky mostly-silent corners of my friend list: a woman I studied for comps with who now lives in England said it would be “Perfect for the office,” the ex-best friend of a college boyfriend who is a bouncer and paramedic in Portland weighed in, “Keeper.”  A retired librarian, who was the first to comment, mused: “Can’t help but wondering what the head’s original owner would’ve thought.” I told her I suspected the head’s original owner was a Naugahyde factory and she chirped back: “Whew! Well, enjoy!” The consensus seemed to be that keeping a fake shrunken head in a bell jar in your living room is okay, or maybe interesting, but just barely.

The meanings tsantsas held for the Shaur people of Ecuador are dynamic and have been multiply revised by anthropologists pushing the pieces of what they observed on their expeditions into existing ontologies; it may be there is no translation for the in-context cocktail of power and divinity and respect and violence these objects carried, and more generally, there may be no way for ethnography, or any of the sciences-of-looking-to-know, to be about anything besides the fear, language, and desire of the lookers.

It is not particularly groundbreaking for a woman to muse about the power politics of exhibition, ownership, and the gaze, and of course I read my fascination with shrunken heads through this lens, but included in the layers of wondering, and perhaps just as pressingly, I am curious if I might also be longing for a way of collapsing the space between looking and being looked at, containing the danger that flows both directions. I want to look back at the mystery of the head, the self, the other, the distances and edges, to trap it and cut it to down to size, making humanness bite-sized and somehow manageable.

My father was always showing me things I couldn’t see, like how to use perspective in drawings, the arc of the handle of the Big Dipper, a scissor-tailed flycatcher in a tree, a deer at the salt-lick in my grandparents’ backyard, math. When I had chicken pox he pointed at his forehead, telling me not to scratch because I’d end up with a scar like him. I looked and looked, searching his forehead for a warning, but I just saw his face. So I scratched and picked my own scar, near the corner of my left eye. More than thirty years later, it’s mapped through with lines that make it hard to identify, but I know it’s there.

Orion’s belt was the one constellation my father finally taught me to identify. He told me that Orion is important because it is far enough away from Earth that it will still be recognizable after the stars that make up the closer constellations spread into obscurity. Eventually there will be nothing left, he said, of what we can now see. I remember lying next to him as the three bright stars, Zeta, Epsilon, and Delta, came into a pattern, the chaos of the stars shaping up, following his direction.

Looking is learned, but it’s an infinite skill, imperceptibly and always changing the world we see. My vision shifts, advancing and retreating. Anything can make everything look different, but the contours of my looking are especially apt to arrange themselves to accommodate being looked at. When people ask what superpower I wish I had, I tell them it’s close to invisibility, but different. I don’t just wish that I could decide not to be seen, I wish I that everyone else, just for a few minutes, couldn’t see or move or speak or think. I want some power that would let me freeze the world, to make everyone else stop and give me a chance to just look, without their looking-back eyes. When I was a teenager I dreamed of freezing parties so I could walk between people, touching the fabric of their skirts and checking the labels of their jackets, touching their cheeks and smelling their faces to see whether they used Coty loose powder or Cover Girl liquid foundation, getting close enough to notice the texture of the skin on the raw necks of boys. A world that keeps moving can never, finally, be seen.

In the months I’ve had the tsantsa in my living room, I’ve become so habituated to her shape and her silence that most of the time I no longer see her there among the Jesus candles and old issues of The Atlantic. Even the cat slinks around her, unbothered. But sometimes she comes into my focus, again, as she is now under a glass dome that accumulates smudges and dust. I see her there in a way that is more like feeling her, like feeling her look back and see me.

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Sarah VanGundy is a writer, editor, and librarian originally from Norman, Oklahoma. She currently works as a librarian at the University of Idaho, where she is also an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction. Sarah is the English language editor of Panorama of the Americas and Images, Etc. editor of FUGUE.