The Shuar are Jivaroan speaking people indigenous to the Amazonas region of Ecuador.  Traditionally, Shuar were forager-horticulturalists who hunted, fished, and engaged in swidden horticulture for a livelihood. Traditionally, Shuar lived in scattered households across the Upano River Valley, between the eastern Andean foothills and the Cutucu range. Early in the twentieth century, introduction of firearms allowed them to expand eastward across the Cutucu into the territory of the neighboring Achuar, so that Shuar now live on both sides of the Cutucu (Karsten 1935; Descola 1996; Rubenstein 2001). Today many Shuar are organized under the Shuar Federation which acts in many ways as an autonomous government for the Shuar territories.

Ancestrally, the Shuar were part of the larger Jivaro people who were highly skilled warriors and headhunters. Though the practice of shrinking human heads disappeared in the early 20th century (Karsten 1935), blood revenge and intertribal feuding are still part of the Shuar culture. Even though their weapons were less sophisticated than their enemies, the Shuar famously repelled both the Incas and the Spaniards.

The Shuar field site was established by Larry Sugiyama almost ten years ago and has been opened to collaborative anthropologists at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara.

Ongoing projects include:
    1). The role of physical strength in anger among men and women.
    2). Mapping the computational design of anger-based arguments.
    3). Identifying common causes of anger: intentionality and cost/benefit ratios.
    4). A cross-cultural analysis of latent and explicit meanings of insults and their relation to cultural norms and values.

Papers that have resulted from this collaboration:

Sell, A., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J. & A. Krauss.  Anger and welfare trade-off ratios: Mapping the computational architecture of a recalibrational emotion system. In preparation.

Presentations that have resulted from this collaboration:

Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology Pre–Conference. Vegas, Nevada, Jan. 2010. "The evolutionary psychology of human anger."

Researchers

Aaron Sell Postdoctoral Researcher Center for Evolutionary Psychology University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA (email, website)
Julian Lim Graduate Student Department of Anthropology University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA (email)
Larry Sugiyama Associate Professor Department of Anthropology University of Oregon (email, website)
Ruby Fried Research Assistant Department of Anthropology University of Oregon
Melissa Liebert Graduate Student Department of Anthropology University of Oregon (email)
Felicia Madimenos Graduate Student Department of Anthropology University of Oregon (email, website)
Aaron Blackwell Graduate Student Department of Anthropology University of Oregon (email)

References
Descola P. 1996. The spears of twilight: life and death in the Amazon Jungle. New York: New Press.

Karsten R. 1935. The head-hunters of western Amazonas: the life and culture of the Jibaro Indians of eastern Ecuador and Peru. Helsingfors, Helsinki, Finland: Societas Scientiarum.

Rubenstein S. 2001. Colonialism, the Shuar Federation, and the Ecuadorian state. Environment and planning D-Society & Space 19:263–293.