Aspectos da organização social e da cultura indígena Mundurukú: uma visão de dentro

Abstract

The interest to research aspects of the Mundurukú social organization and culture arose from reading works produced by national and foreign travelers and anthropologists about us Mundurukú. Being a member of the Mundurukú society, I lived my life until I was thirteen years old in the village. This is why I decided to do an auto-ethnography to analyze to what extent we see ourselves reflected in the vision of these scholars. For, all that has been written about us Mundurukú were studies conducted by outsiders: anthropologists, travelers and chroniclers, who wrote about us, distant in time and space. In this paper I intend to conduct a critical analysis of the literature produced by these scholars about our reality, starting from our own perception. For, the ignorance of our language, on the part of these scholars, can lead to mistaken interpretations about our social organization and our culture. The work was carried out in two stages. In the first stage a documentary and bibliographic research was carried out, in the library of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), the Federal University of Pará, the Emílio Goeldi Museum of Pará, and the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI). The second stage was the field research, during two months, carried out in the village Missão Cururu (Cururu River) and in the village Santa Cruz, (São Manoel River), in the municipality of Jacareacanga in Pará. Within the project "Aspects of Mundurukú Social Organization and Culture: An Insider's View," I delimited it by choosing a theme much emphasized in the literature about us Mundurukú: "the headhunters. For, our ancestors were distinguished by a warlike spirit and the habit of cutting off the heads of their enemies. After undergoing a process of purification, the head became an inseparable object of the bearer. These heads were attributed magical powers, that is, they brought luck in animal hunts to the bearer. These heads had powers for a limited time. And after enjoying the benefits, the heads would wander around on the ground and children would play with such objects. But upon death, upon arriving in the Mundurukú Sacred World, the spirit belonging to the head became the bearer's slave. In this world, the spirits of slain and beheaded enemies became hunters of animals for the bearers. This was the deeper reason why our ancestors cut off and mummified heads of their enemies and often of their own equals.