Maku (ethnic group)

The Maku live in northwestern Brazil and southeastern Colombia . They are hunters and gatherers . They are divided into six different groups, each with their own area and language.

Surname

There is no self-designation that is used by all macro groups. Each of the six different language groups has its own name. The name Maku is of Arawak origin and means slave or savage . It is rejected by all macro groups because of its obviously derogatory meaning, but has firmly established itself in the ethnographic literature, especially since there is no other term that encompasses the various groups.

Self-labeling	other names	Territory (Read: Between the rivers ...)
Nukak	Maku	Guaviare and Inírida , in Colombia
Bara , Kakwa	Maku, Pohsá, Boroa, Wirapoyá	Vaupés and Papuri , in Colombia
Hupda	Maku, Pohsá, Peoná, Wirapoyá	Papuri and Tiquiê , in Brazil and Colombia
Yuhupde	Maku, Pohsá, Peoná, Wirapoyá	Tiquiê and Rio Traíra , in Brazil and Colombia
Dow	Maku, Kamã	Curicuriari and Negro , in Brazil
Nadob , Kabori	Maku, Guariba Tapuya, Xiruai	Negro and Japurá , in Brazil

With the exception of the Bara , who more frequently use the term Bara instead of Kakwa ("people") as a self-designation, and the Kabori , a subgroup of the Nadub who call themselves Kabori ("children"), all other Maku use the term "people" “In their respective language as a self-designation.

The terms Boroa and Pohsá mean slaves in the Tucano languages Dahséa and Cubeo . The expression Peoná , also from the Tukano, means lords of the ways , an allusion to the fact that the Maku do not travel by canoe, like all other Indians in this area, but on foot along paths. The Desana , a subgroup of the Tukano, use the term Wirapoyá to refer to the Maku in their neighborhood. It means "corrupt Desana". The origin of the word Kamã is unknown; it also has a disparaging meaning. The name Guariba (German: howler monkey ) is used by the non-indigenous inhabitants of the Nadub area, based on the superstition that those forest inhabitants are descendants of the howler monkey. The Nheengatu word Xiruai (German: brother-in-law ) is a friendly term that the same residents use to designate the Nadub .

As a result of the influence of the regional Indian movement of the Rio Negro from the mid-1980s, the discriminatory terms (Boroa, Pohsá, Wirapoyá, Kamã, Guariba and also Maku) are increasingly uncommon - but so far no general and neutral expression has been found.

language

The six Maku languages are related to each other and together form a language family . Except for a few loanwords , these languages are completely different from the Tucano and Arawak languages .

Practically all Maku speak their own native language. The Maku in the Vaupés area (Bara, Hupda and Yuhupde) also speak Tukano languages because of their proximity to the Tukano. Since the Tukano act as intermediaries in contact with the whites, they are a kind of barrier to the cultural adaptation of the Maku, so that only about 20% of the Maku des Vaupés can speak Spanish or Portuguese. The Nukak , who were first contacted in 1988, speak little Spanish or any other foreign language. The Duw and Nadub , who had their first contact with whites as early as the 18th century and who do not have the toucano barrier in their neighborhood, can speak Portuguese and nheengatu (the lingua franca of the river inhabitants of the middle and lower Rio Negro).

To date, linguists have not gathered enough material to be able to build a bilingual education on it, which is increasingly demanded by the Maku, in a legitimate reaction to the hegemony of the Dahséa language (Tukano) in the regional schools run by the districts and led by Salesian Catholic missionaries.

habitat

The area over which their population is distributed is bounded in the northwest by the Río Guaviare (a tributary of the Orinoco ), in the north by the Rio Negro , in the south by the Rio Japurá and in the southeast by the Uneiuxi (a tributary of the Rio Negro). It covers 20 million hectares. Since this huge area consists mainly of stunted forest and scrubland with extremely poor soil, little plant diversity and few wild animals, the six language groups of the Maku are to a large extent dispersed in this wide area. They populate precisely those places where the game is more numerous and the diversity of plants is greater.

Human settlement in the area in pre-Columbian times probably took place in two stages: first, the Maku settled the mainland between the rivers; Then came the Arawak and the Tukano, who settled on the steep banks of the rivers, in the middle of the Igapó , a river bank landscape that is regularly inundated during the rainy season from April to September. The rather old contact between these peoples of different origins and different languages, each occupying a different niche in their environment, resulted in a complex system of commercial and symbolic barter.

On the Brazilian side they live in several contiguous Indian areas. The Brazilian Maku groups (Hupda, Yuhupde, Dow and Nadöb) are mostly spread across the areas between the rivers of this area.

population

Since the approximately 3000 Maku are spread over a huge, binational territory and are in the inaccessible jungle between the waterways, it is difficult to determine the total population.

Self-labeling	population	year	source
Nukak	378	1995	Franky et al. (1995)
Bara, Kakwa	300	1969	Silverwood-Cope (1990)
Hupda	1500	1997	Pozzobon (1997b)
Yuhupde	370	1997	Pozzobon (1997c)
Dow	78	1994	Oliveira, Meira and Pozzobon (1994)
Nadob, Kabori	≈600	1995	ISA (1996)
Total	≈3226

History of contact

The barreness of the prevailing bush landscape and the raging character of the rivers hindered the expansion of Portuguese and Spanish pioneer fronts, who fought over this region as early as the 17th century and set up military camps at some points of the Rio Negro, from where captured indigenous people downstream into the emerging urban centers ( Barcelos , Manaus and Belém ) were transported.

From the 18th century these transports increased so much that even some members of the Maku were trapped and enslaved in their hidden areas between the rivers . But analysis of colonial documents shows that among the natives of the region they were least affected by slavery and the violence that resulted from the rubber boom at the end of the next century. The rubber boom was possibly an occasion for the Maku to be active in agriculture: In order to avoid capture by rubber workers, the Tukano fled to the areas between the rivers and lived closer to the Maku for a time. From them the Maku learned the cultivation of cassava and also adopted a number of other elements of their material and spiritual culture.

In 1914, in the midst of the period of economic stagnation caused by the end of the rubber boom, missionaries from the Salesian Catholic Order began their educational activities in the area. All of the river Indians on the Brazilian side brought them in, but met with great opposition from the Maku, who refused to send their children to the boarding schools of the mission centers. In the 1970s the Salesians made a few experiments with mission villages exclusively for Maku. The gold prospecting, which spread in the region from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, until the Indian movement, with the support of the public prosecutor and the federal police, managed to throw out the intruders, had little influence on the Maku, as the gold prospectors mostly do their work in the Pursued near river banks. The only gold mine on the mainland, in the extreme south of the Indian region of Alto Rio Negro , was closed again in 1986 by the Paranapanema mining company due to insufficient productivity. With the strengthening of the Indian movement in the early 1990s, gold was only exploited by Indians.

Social organization

The traditional Maku villages had a population of 25 to 30 people - about six household communities. A Maku household consists of the husband, wife or wives, unmarried children and possibly other close relatives, widowers or unmarried adults. In general, each household has its own fireplace around which members gather to sleep and eat. The dwelling consists of wallless huts that can offer protection to between one and four closely related household groups. A village with 25 inhabitants usually has three such shelters. These are located in a clearing, a hill, near a small river or stream. The fields are located around the houses or in nearby clearings (between 5 and 60 minutes' walk). They are often laid out on former village clearings. Every household has an average of two fields of 50 × 50 meters, always in clearings for the general public.

A group of neighboring villages that are anywhere from an hour to a day's walk apart form a regional group. As a rule, each regional group speaks its own dialect of the same language. Thus, each Maku language group is divided into at least two regional dialect groups. For example, the Hupdu have three regional groups (three dialects) separated from one another by navigable watercourses whose banks are populated by river Indians . The adult members of the same regional dialect group all know each other by name and their relationships. By contrast, they have little knowledge of neighbors who speak other dialects and with whom they have no proven family ties. The regional dialect group has a strong endogamous relationship. The average number of endogamous marriages, that is, between people born in the same regional group, is 80%. The average size of a regional group in the Brazilian area of the Río Vaupés is 260 people - about ten neighboring villages.

The territory of a regional dialect group results from the various adjacent hunting territories, which are each located around a village. The men of a village of 25 to 30 people usually hunt within a seven to ten kilometer radius of the village. From the village there are a number of trails in all directions - some connect different Maku villages, others lead to river Indian villages, and still others lead to hunting camps . Each village has an average of eight hunting camps within a radius of seven to ten kilometers. When a village exceeds the limit of 30 or 40 inhabitants, it divides into two or more village communities, as the hunters in a large village are forced to move further than ten kilometers to find enough game. The excessively long existence of a village on a square (around five years) is also a motive for its relocation in order to shift the range of action of the hunters and to open up new hunting areas.

Daily life in a maku village

The women get up at the first light of day, bathe and prepare the men's breakfast, which usually takes place in the leader's house. After breakfast the men go hunting; Depending on the tracks they saw the day before, alone, in pairs or in larger groups (wild boars, for example, are good prey for joint hunting trips). After they leave, the women eat with the children and then go to the fields to harvest or replant cassava . They return around noon and prepare cassava flour, porridge and cassava cake. Around three in the afternoon the men return with their booty and hand it over to the women. Each of them cooks at their own fireplace, but the meal is eaten together in the leader's house; the men eat first, then the women and children. This is followed by three or four meals until bedtime (around 9 p.m.), which gradually have an increasingly domestic and individual character. In daily life, the men's activities have a weak rhythm, interrupted several times by long breaks in the hammocks, while the women work hard in the fields, preparing meals and collecting firewood.

But women do not fail to complain about the laziness of men. The latter, on the other hand, sometimes fight one another and accuse one another of avarice because they do not distribute the meager prey of their daily hunt generously enough. When the situation reaches a critical point, the residential groups are distributed among different hunting camps, where they stay for between two and three days up to a month (on average, a residential group spends four months a year in a hunting camp). In the hunting camp the roles are reversed: while the men hunt nonstop for up to twelve hours a day, the women loll around in the hammock. Everyone also eats together: hunters, women and children.

Within a few days in the hunting camps, the men hunted far more game than their group can eat. As a result, they can choose to return to their village, hold a festival there, calm old quarrels or spark new ones. Or they decide to trade game with the river Indians for cassava flour, ipadu (soaked coca leaves ) or cassava cake. In this case, some residential groups may decide to spend some time (a few days up to a month) in the village on the river bank, where they work in the fields and building houses with the river Indians.

There is a very hierarchical relationship between the Maku des Vaupés and their tukano-speaking river neighbors: the former are treated like "slaves" by the latter. However, this is more of an ethnic ideology than an actual social practice. Maku are free to come and go, to enter into (or break off) relationships of "slavery" with different river villages at the same time. On the other hand, the fields of the maku, which are generally 80% less productive than the fields on the river banks and cannot cover the maku's own needs, are spared in this way. In reality, the Maku accept their status of "slave" because of the obvious advantages it gives them: they have access to the cultivated produce without the consequences of the sedentariness that would be inevitable for a production like that of the toucano to have to (the Tukano produce around 10 tons of cassava roots per year per household group - while the production of the Maku does not even reach 3 tons).

Political organization

Mobility is very important for the Maku, considering that they usually resolve their conflicts through spatial separation. There are no leaders and no tribal council to clear up common misunderstandings among residents. The leader of the village is nothing more than a host and coordinator for joint hunting trips. Generally the position is occupied by a middle-aged man, still vigorous enough to hunt and with considerable hunting experience, around whom there are five or six groups of dwelling, the heads of which are his sons or sons-in-law. He has no authority to judge who is right or wrong in an argument. A leader who would attempt such a thing is not exempt from receiving a beating during the argument or watching a significant number of his sons or sons-in-law leave him irrevocably. The temporary spatial separation is the only way to avoid the final division of the village in the event of a dispute. But depending on the severity of the conflict, a split can sometimes be inevitable, so that some household groups never return to their home village and instead settle in neighboring villages where they are closely related or start a new village.

Cousin marriage

The local groups (villages) of the Maku are composed of two sides: The leader's sons and sons-in-law both live together. The basis of male friendship is the relationship between brothers-in-law, that is, between men who swap their sisters, whereby the term “sisters” is to be understood in a broader sense. The vocabulary of family relationships is Dravidian: It is based on the division of cousins into those between whom marriage is prohibited ( parallel- related cousins: children of siblings of the same sex) and those who are preferred for marriage ( cross-related cousins: children of siblings different sex). Among the Maku, the Dravidian vocabulary is associated with a system of patrilineal exogamous clans . There is a correspondence between the vocabulary and the structure of the clans: just as the cousins are divided into "brothers" (parallel cousins) and "brothers-in-law" (crossed cousins), the clans are divided into "brother-clans" and "brother-in-law clans “So that the whole of the relatives is divided into two parts, both from the point of view of the vocabulary and from the point of view of the clan system. In this way, men who have exchanged real or classified sisters among themselves are friends (roommates, hunting companions). The most consistent local groups (villages) are those with the following composition: a group composed of brothers-in-law around a middle-aged man who is the father-in-law of one and the father of the other. This means that at least two related clans are united in the same local group.

There are no parties, corporate age groups or councils of elders among the Maku. They divide people into three main age groups (in the Hupda language ): the Dowdu (green / immature = children), the Wudndu (mature = adults) and the Wuhudndu (dry = old people). The leaders of a village are in a subclass between the Wudndu and the Wuhudndu . The leaders of a village almost always have the function of medicine man and are also the namesake. In order to give a child a name, the old man undertakes a "journey" into the world of the ancestors (using a hallucinogen from a plant of the genus Banisteriopsis ). Once there, he consults her about the child's name. Each clan has a repertoire of names, so that the proper name already gives the identity of the clan to the person and the matrimonial status (whether "brother" or "brother-in-law") in relation to the others.

Art, material culture and games

Compared to the neighboring Tukano and Arawak, the Maku originally have an undeveloped material culture: canoes, ritual stools, ceramic pots, body painting and sacred flutes, among others, are all things that they copied from their neighbors. Objects originally from their own culture seem to be the “aturá” (a very robust transport basket) and the blowpipe. With the latter, popular shooting competitions are also held, especially among the Nadöb. Other popular games among the Maku are the "whistling slingshot" - made from a coconut with holes and a handle from the "Paxiúba", the hunt for pigeons with stones and a certain pleasure in cruelty to animals: a man lolls in the hammock, hits Time is dead and meanwhile gives both his tame toucan and his hunting dog a piece of flatbread each to have a great time when the toucan hits the dog with painful beak blows to drive away its rival. Children amuse themselves by tying burning sticks to the tails of stray dogs to watch them desperately flee, while everyone in the village is laughing. In addition, there is simple mockery of the others, including comparisons of the penis and vulva, with abundant derogatory expressions and mocking comments by the collective, in a high-pitched voice, about old, secret love affairs.

Cosmology and mythology

The universe of the traditional Maku religion has the shape of a standing egg with three floors or “worlds”: (1) the underground “world of shadows” from which all “monsters” come, such as scorpions, jaguars, poisonous snakes, the river Indians and the whites; (2) "our world", that is, the forest and (3) the "world of light" above the sky, where the ancestors dwelt and the creator - the son of the bone (a possible allusion to the penis, who too Called bone ). Light and shadow are the two basic substances from which all beings are composed to different degrees. Light is the source of life. Shadow is the source of death. In "our world" leaves and fruits are the beings with the highest concentration of light, while carnivores have the highest concentration of shadow. For this reason, it is better not to eat carnivores and limit your diet to herbivores. In the world of light, the deceased feed themselves with delicious fruit juices and become eternal youth.

The most important mythological cycle of the Maku tells the epic of the son of the bone - Idn Kamni in Bara , Kegn Teh in Hupda , Ku Teh in Yuhupde . The story describes the survivor of a fire that put an end to the previous creation. His attempts to recreate the world resulted in a series of gross mistakes, which is why conflict, disease and death exist. After the kidnapping of his wife by his youngest brother, the son of the bone leaves the world behind him forever to continue to live in the world of light , above the sky and the thunder he sometimes utters as an expression of his resentment. Coincidence or not, in real life brothers often quarrel over the same women, their relatives according to the clan system.

Ritual and necromancer

In addition to the already mentioned, hallucinogens of the plant genus Banisteriopsis are used in two other Maku rituals. One of them is the Jurupari ritual, which originally came from the river Indians and with which children are initiated in puberty and attain adult status. In this ritual, which consists of a theatrical representation of the arrival of an ancestral anaconda snake from the stretches of river currently being occupied by the Tukano, the men play the sacred flutes, which the women are not allowed to see. The other ritual is the dance and the song of the Kaapi wayá , also originally from the river Indians, in which the meandering passage of the anaconda is performed, but without the sacred flutes. There is also the dabocuri , which also comes from the river Indians. This is a profane, entertaining and drunken festival. Very often it ends in brawls and screams in the early morning, the consequence of which, apart from many bruises, is usually the distribution of the roommates to the various hunting camps, or even a definitive split in the village community.

Regarding the spirit world, one can generally say that all ancients are considered spiritual healers. These, however, are divided into two types: the worshipers (bididu) and the jaguar people (nyaam hupdu) . The former heal through prayer, the latter by pulling out the disease through suction. Often the same person performs both functions. In each of these cases, the healer does not instill great respect for his own kind, rather he is one of the favorite targets of ridicule. Sometimes he is also accused by others of malevolently causing diseases, which can lead to people who feel affected moving out of the village or staying in the forest until the anger is gone.

"Wild" and "tame" Maku

The Maku are called "wild" and "tame" Maku because of their different ways of life. The latter in particular are shaped by contact with the whites, while the “savages” try to avoid this.

At the beginning of the 20th century, these groups were still friendly. The patron-customer system between tame Maku ( customers ) and whites ( Patrones ) that was built up around the second half of the century , however, led to the dependence of the tame Maku and a break with the savages. Above all, rubber , skins and the like were exchanged for industrial goods (metal goods) and salt. Often times the Maku have tried to break out of this system of debt bondage . Groups that succeeded in trying to live autonomously again, joined the wild Maku, or soon fell again into the dependence of a patron.

This turmoil is evident in the worldview that has changed through contact with whites. Two cultural heroes settled after they fell out, one upstream behind a huge mountain range and the other downstream behind a wall of rain. Downriver the whites and Indian-eating monsters settle, upriver the wild Maku settle, which for their part do not let the whites into their area. The tame Maku are thus in the middle between nature (wild Maku) and culture (whites).

literature

Francois Correa: Makú . In: Introducción a la Colombia Amerindia. Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, Bogotá 1987.

Web links

Hupda. Enciclopédia dos Povos Indígenas no Brasil - Instituto Socioambiental (with bibliography)