IHSS HMNS visit

We went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to view an exhibit on tribal life in the Amazon rainforest. It was definitely an interesting experience, as I knew next to nothing about it. I was extremely tired during the exhibit, so I had not retained much, but what I did remember was extremely interesting. It was mainly interesting to see an artistic style so very different from our own.
Here are some of the artifacts I saw:

 We had talked quite a bit about their diet, which consisted of mostly normal things for hunter-gatherer societies, but what I found interesting was they they were able to prepare a poisonous relative of the yucca so that it would be safe for consumption. These kinds of things always interest me because I have no idea how they managed to find out precisely what made it poisonous and devise a strategy to remove the toxin. It is similar to the awe I feel whenever edible pufferfish is mentioned because you really have to wonder how they had enough know-how to do this without an intimate knowledge of toxicology and chemistry.

Shrunken heads, while a staple in pop culture when speaking of uncontacted tribes, is actually extremely rare, only being practiced in about four to five tribes out of many hundreds. These tribes have also not practiced the collection and creation of shrunken heads for a long time, cutting back on it significantly after contact with Europe. The practice is almost entirely dead as of today. These tribes might have gotten the heads through battles or by murder. There were tales of some tribesmen a long time ago being attacked and beheaded for this practice. The process consists of removal of the skull and various organs in the head, including salivary glands and tonsils. The process continued with the removal of muscle and fat tissue and ending with a long soak in a solution. The reason they did this was because a person’s spirit and power was believed to be in his head and this power would help a warrior in battle. A warrior with two shrunken heads was considered nigh invincible.

This was a strange thing to focus on in the exhibit, but I was intrigued by the exhibit’s italicization on the tribe’s names. Mainly, I found their use of umlauts rather strange. An umlaut increases stress on a vowel and is indicated by two dots above a letter. This accent mark is common in many Germanic languages that aren't English and Uralic languages that use the Latin alphabet like Finnish or Hungarian. It is used to indicate a different, more stressed pronunciation from another vowel form. For instance, the “a” in “hat” is the same letter as the “a” in “almost” in English, but with proper use of umlauts, “hat” becomes “hät”. An umlaut is usually seen over an a, o, or u (an umlauted u in Finnish is replaced with a standard y, the sound for y in English is indicated by a j in Finnish). The exhibit had the pronunciations for the tribes’ names in standard form, with some accent marks, but their use of umlauts was strange, as when the tribes’ names were stated, there was not a need for the umlaut in the position as the vowels with umlauts were the standard forms of the vowel.