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| Ethnographic
records on the Arara appear for the first time in articles
by Curt Nimuendajú. Before these, only sparse historical
information appeared in the administrative reports of
the former Pará Province. Considered extinct from
the 1940s onwards, no new information on the Arara was
registered until the recent success of contact. Short
linguistic reports were initially produced, simply to
help communication, requested by FUNAI itself from missionary-linguists.
From the second half of the 1980s new studies began to
be undertaken. The Arara language was the object of both
a phonetic description in a dissertation produced at UNICAMP
by the missionary Isaac Souza, and a report deposited
at the Sector of Linguistics of the National Museum, produced
by Márnio Teixeira-Pinto on the basis of the Standard
Form for the Study of Brazilian Indigenous Languages.
The first more systematic ethnographic description, centred
on native conceptions of vital substances (ekuru) was
presented in a master's dissertation by Márnio
Teixeira-Pinto, who has also published various thematic
articles, on body painting and representations, kinship,
contact history, and recently published his doctoral thesis
as a book, which provides a more dense description of
various aspects of Arara social life related to the past
rites of enemy sacrifice, forms of hunting, production
and distribution of drinks, music performed in the rites,
etc. Jean-Pierre Estival has also produced articles on
Arara music. Recently, a commercial video on the Arara,
made between 1992 and 1994 as an independent production
by the British Equilibrium Films and Nova Films, where
Márnio Teixeira-Pinto acted as consultant, was
bought by the National Geographic Society, which is currently
preparing to launch a new version, also revised by Márnio
Teixeira-Pinto. |
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