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Traditionally, an intercommunal network
of multiple exchanges established the relations between
the various subgroups and defined the basic principles
of social life: political autonomy and economic independence
were conjoined with collaboration for the ritual cycles;
matrimonial alliances, on the other hand, given the residential
principle followed by the Arara, scattered men and their
ties throughout various of the subgroups belonging to
the intercommunal network. The possibility for these traditional
patterns of Arara social life (dispersion and independence,
conjoining and alliance) to become effective in practice
obviously depended on each subgroup's capacity to form
relations with the others. Their recent history, marked
by forced relocations and the search for new sites for
villages and economic exploration, safe from the exogenic
penetrations into their territory, modified the selection
criteria for each local group's settlements - no longer
the search for autonomy and independence as a condition
for ritual collaboration and the matrimonial alliances:
the simple possibility of physical survival became foremost.
The choice of new settlements no longer obeyed the double
condition of maintaining autonomy and independence and
at the same time allowing the periodic conjoining with
the other local groups. Against the traditional form of
spatial dispersion, political autonomy and economic independence
added to ritual collaboration and matrimonial alliances,
recent Arara history has imposed limits on the possibility
of actualizing the way in which the network of intercommunity
exchanges formerly operated.
The post-contact situation
brought with it a reality of spatial reduction, with
the consequent loss of the possibility of territorial
exploration in the traditional way, and the demographic
clustering and concentration of numerous of the former
subgroups.
There are two areas legally defined
for the Arara, with different juridical and geographical
situations: the Arara Indigenous Territory and the Cachoeira
Seca do Iriri Indigenous Territory. The first is associated
with the subgroups contacted between 1981 and 1983,
while the second to the subgroup finally contacted in
1987. The area to the north of the Transamazonian highway
was completely abandoned by the Indians, both as a settlement
area and as a territory for economic exploration.
All the Indians contacted between
1981 and 1983 ended up being settled in villages to
the south of the highway, initially in two different
villages and later in a single village. Nowadays, the
majority of the Arara live in a village built by FUNAI
after contact, within the Arara IT, located close to
the Laranjal creek, whose population amounts to a little
more than 100 individuals. A small portion of the population,
about two dozen people who previously also lived in
the Laranjal village, was relocated to a FUNAI surveillance
post constructed next to the Transamazonian highway,
thereby forming the nucleus of another 'residential
group.' The Arara IT has a total of 139 indigenous inhabitants.
The most distant subgroup - still
relatively isolated from the rest - is the one contacted
in 1987, living in a village near to the Cachoeira Seca
creek, on the upper Iriri river, in the Cachoeira Seca
IT. This group comprises 56 individuals, all descendants
of a single woman (who was still alive in 1994).
The total Arara population in 1998
was 195 individuals.
Before contact, the local groups were
integrated in a large network of multiple exchanges
(economic, ceremonial, matrimonial, etc.). The large
reunions taking place during the dry season also served
the purpose of reuniting these various spatially dispersed
groups. Today, despite the reduction of various local
groups to a single village, effectively transformed
into residential groups, they still basically function
as if they were in the traditional situation, with a
large degree of independence and autonomy. The impact
of contact was mainly felt in terms of residential patterns:
the death of some older leaders and fathers-in-law during
and soon after the attraction process broke bonds between
people who reorganized their relations in other residential
groups. Though the probable effects of the long process
of attraction cannot be underestimated, since the end
of attraction the Arara population has experienced a
fairly impressive demographic growth. Somewhere around
30% of the population was born after the onset of permanent
contact with Brazilian national society. Clearly such
changes have brought some consequences, but they do
not yet appear to have altered the principal traces
of Arara social life, nor the fundamental status of
the subgroups.
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In the Laranjal village, every one of
the former local groups ended up grouping together, in
general, in the same residential group, as an expression
of their collective nature. Such residential units are
typically large collective houses, centred around the
figure of an elder man, father to most of the women and
father-in-law to the adult men living there. Despite being
named only by the name of their old leader and lacking
any particularly clear juridical status, the social character
of these residential groups is evidently publicly recognized:
every individual is said and taken to belong to a specific
residential group, and the collective houses in fact function
as independent social units, operating in various aspects
of social life as a kind of collective subject.
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In contrast to the Laranjal village,
the village built by the Indians next to the FUNAI Post
on the Cachoeira Seca creek simply appears as a small
disordered agglomeration of houses occupied by different
conjugal units. This is doubtless due to the fact that
as a single local group whose isolation from the others
is a product of its peculiar history, the residential
configuration there became more indeterminable.
The residential groups
are formed by a set of distinct logical criteria. Marriages
are defined on the minimum basis of birth group exogamy.
Uxorilocal residence, almost compulsory for a man's
first marriage (the Arara are generally polygynous)
is an important principle of recruitment, but one which
competes with individual options for choosing which
are always subject to variations (prestige and personal
affinities, pacts of solidarity and cooperation between
people, etc). While affinal relations form an important
element in the composition of residential groups, another
condition is the necessity for the residential groups
to behave as efficient units of co-operation: a reasonable
number of adult men, working together in the collective
tasks that the groups aim to fulfil (hunting during
the dry season, the clearing of a collective swidden,
etc.). Affinity and the necessity for co-operation are
principles organizing the residential groups: affinity
implies a form of compulsory co-operation (a concrete
mode of bride-service to be rendered to in-laws), which
the Arara try to avoid, while the relations of consanguinity
and 'formal friendship' which the Arara recognize (hunt
partnerships and war partnerships) imply another form
of co-operation, less tense and more amicable (but which,
virtually speaking, are just as compulsory as the former).
There is a large margin of imponderability
in the reasons which determine the personal choices
that influence the mode of distribution of the population
between the various houses. In the Laranjal village,
for example, there are three recognized residential
groups, but five different houses: two of these are
inhabited by conjugal units who, for particular reasons,
have autonomous dwellings but are socially integrated
into wider residential groups.
The Arara have no specific term for
'village,' the assembly of houses within a common space.
The lack of distinction between house and village also
highlights the fact that, as in the fairly recent past,
a single house may comprise the entire settlement of
a local group; without the recognition of a 'village'
properly speaking, a space where different dwellings
are conjoined, the Arara see house and village as co-extensive.
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