Lewis Cotlow: Chronicler of Head-Hunters

Lewis Cotlow's bio from the back cover of Amazon
Head-Hunters, Signet; 1954.

"Why does a man cut off another man's head, shrink it to the size of his fist, and then dance around it?" –Lewis Cotlow, from Amazon Head-Hunters, Signet Books, New York, 1954.

Sifting through artifacts of the past is a risky endeavor; if we look at history purely from an emotional point of view, we have a tendency to fail to actually learn from it, to objectively assess something, contextualize it, and sift the gold out of what can often appear to simply be buckets full of ugly detritus. If we weigh the scale too heavily on the side of reason, without putting things through a humanistic lens, we drop the ball of progress and fail to improve our understanding of the world and how we can improve our relation to it–and each other–in the current cultural context. After all, as the quote of muddied attribution seems to say: "Those who fail to the remember history are doomed to repeat it." The same goes with applying those lessons to the present.

For someone whose popular media consumption is largely a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there's a lot of dodging and pass-granting with what I read/watch/hear. Certain cultural proclivities stick out like oil spots on a white plaster wall, but that's neither here nor there. Elmer Mason Brown, H.P. Lovecraft, Donald Keyhoe, W. Somerset Maugham, Robert E. Howard,  Louis L'Amour, Edgar Wallace–the list could go on until there was no more scroll bar to the right to scroll with–all wrote great adventure tales. I certainly don't celebrate the xenophobic and misogynistic elements that pop up in their work, but that doesn't mean the stories themselves have nothing to offer. To complain about Edgar Wallace referring to a person of color as a Negro in a book from 1921 would be tantamount to complaining that Dr. Watson doesn't simply pull out a smartphone and solve crimes himself and ditch Sherlock Holmes altogether. Is it acceptable today? No. And the rational, reasonably intelligent person reading that and reacting to it would hopefully understand it without the need to demand the burning of all of Edgar Wallace's books or block a major Interstate highway in protest to point that out. 

The author's living room, adorned with a tiki from
Hawaii, a hand-carved snake from Germany, a copy
of Cotlow's Amazon Head-Hunters, and two novelty
shrunken heads.

Aside from racial and gender issues that often sully the things from this era (and while the casual window-watcher from the outside might assume that all things produced in this era contain chain-smoking white males in positions of power who consider women perfumed property and other races inferior, this is refreshingly and honestly not so, but you'd have to actually read them rather than referring to stereotypes to glean that), there's the irritating focus on affluent white males who seem to either sit around posh clubs, bragging about their latest big game kill in Africa, or spend their overabundance of inherited income and free time stomping all over some foreign culture so they can kill something from that part of the world, skin it, and bring it back to show that they've "conquered" it.

I don't agree with big game hunting. This isn't a political blog, and I don't intend to start peeling back the layers on my personal views here, but the idea of going somewhere to seek out wildlife for the sole purpose of shooting it down is abhorrent to me. Big game hunting has always been the earmark of the bored wealthy flaunting their power and stroking their egos. But, at one time, excursions by big game hunters into the unexplored regions of the world were the only insight into those strange cultures that the average "civilized" citizen had, boxed into their lives with work and home and the immediate cultural surroundings that they were familiar with, without the means to travel, save a trip to the museum or some highly fantasized piece of pulp magazine adventure.

Poster for the roadshow picture Zanzabuku (1956).

Lewis Cotlow (1898-1987) was a globe-trekker, ethnographer and cultural documentarian who could have fit into any one of the adventure tales from the early 1900s; the kind Elmer Mason Brown wrote and that eventually inspired the serials that inspired George Lucas's Indiana Jones character. He was a merchant marine who looked like actor Lex Barker, and when he wasn't working as an executive for the Massachusetts Mutual Life insurance company in New York, he traveled the world, making a name for himself making documentaries like Savage Splendor (1949), Zanzabuku (1956), Primitive Paradise (1961), Jungle Headhunters (1951, as production assistant), High Arctic (1963), and Adventures in South America (1946). These were short documentaries filmed and often put on a roadshow circuit through the United States, meaning the prints were traveled around the country, region by region, with a limited display window to entice viewers to come see this "once-in-a-lifetime" showing of a first-hand experience traveling through South America's Amazon region or through the jungles of Africa. One man's genuine cultural study is another's armchair escapism. You have to remember that this was a time without VHS or DVD technology. When you were watching a film in the theater, for all one knew, it might be the only time you'd ever have to see it.

There was a slew of "mondo" exploitation documentaries of the same nature that popped up in the 1950s and 60s, usually full of shock footage either pulled out of context or altogether staged, or with rituals often improperly credentialed as being culturally pervasive, in the vein of the repulsive Faces of Death video series that seemed to be requisite to every video store in the 1980s and 90s. These weren't Cotlow's fare. He didn't seem to be interested in shock value or misrepresentation. In fact he didn't seem to be interested in collecting ivory tusks or leopard hides, either. He does admit in his book Amazon Head-Hunters, that while traveling around to different camps, filming ritual dances and ceremonies, he'd often ask tribes to give reenactment performances if he wasn't able to capture something happening organically, so there is some artifice present but for documentation purposes, supposedly, not false customs cut from whole cloth to thrill ignorant American audiences.

Of course when seen through the lens of today, many might consider his films to be exploitative and perhaps even campy. In 2018, even the term "Savage" elicits winces. In the interest of full disclosure, I've never seen any of the films, so I'll have to reserve judgement. I've looked, and I simply can't find them to watch. But as a man granted the Explorer's Club Medal for "...extraordinary contributions directly in the field of exploration, scientific research, or to the welfare of humanity" for his decision to document the customs and cultures of tribal peoples who were likely to either vanish completely, or have their customs altered by the encroaching "enlightenment" of a shrinking globe, I find it hard to believe that Cotlow's aims were merely reputation building and personal grandeur. He was also awarded the Order of Magellan by the Circumnavigators Club in respects to "...outstanding individuals who are dedicated to advancing peace and understanding in all parts of the world."

Granted I've never met the man and I wasn't on his expeditions; and even Henry Kissinger has a string of awards and honors as long as a grocery list and seemingly oxymoronic based on his actions prior to receiving them. But one tip off to Cotlow's intentions comes in reading his book, Amazon Head-Hunters, about the Jivaro indians in Ecuador and Peru. Of course the book is covered with sensational blurbs and the title itself could come from a story found in the pages of Adam or For Men Only Magazine, but the text is refreshingly objective. Cotlow describes his trip into the South American jungles, his time spent living with the tribes in the area, and yes, it does focus on the now-taboo subject of head shrinking, but it doesn't judge or sensationalize the facts. In fact, it reads more like an archaeology text with detailed discussions between Cotlow and natives about tribal hierarchy, religious beliefs and customs and hunting strategy, than a tawdry spinner-rack paperback about lopping off heads.

Cover of paperback from author's collection.

"Nevertheless, the Jivaro is better adapted to his environment than I am, than you are. He feels more secure, despite the known and unknown dangers that surround him, than we do. He spends more hours of his life in a happy state than we do. He suffers not a whit from ulcers, cancers, diabetes, heart failure, allergies, asthma, neuroses, psychoses, inadequate housing, polluted beaches, corrupt politicians, sexual deviation, theft, murder, and war. The last two items may surprise you. But the Jivaro murders no more than our state officials murder when they execute a man for his crime." (p. 113).

Take the line about "sexual deviation" how you will. The point is Lewis Cotlow doesn't seem interested in parading these indigenous peoples as curious freaks to be gawked and snickered at by the casual civilized Caucasian; he's representing them as valid human beings with a unique culture.

Despite being largely forgotten now, Cotlow's endeavors have helped pave the way for further global cultural study. After his passing in 1987, his collection of artifacts was bequeathed to the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History (including his collection of photographs and films). To this day, a grant called The Lewis N. Cotlow Fund is available at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he briefly attended, for students doing anthropological fieldwork. A list of all of the projects that have been funded by the grant since 1991 can be seen here.