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Despite the Araweté’s material austerity,
they manufacture three technically elaborate objects,
which are unique to them: the bow, the shaman’s
aray rattle and women’s clothes.
The Araweté bow is made of ipê
wood and is shorter, broader and more curved than most
Brazilian indigenous bows. Each ipê log
can yield a number of bows. The wood used to be worked
with bone and stone tools (now, with axes and machetes),
trued with a cotia tooth chisel, sanded with
a coarse leaf until completely smooth and finally carefully
warmed over the fire and bowed to shape. Babassu coconut
oil or this palm tree’s grub’s fat are used
to make the wood more pliable. The bowstring is made
from curauá, a cultivated bromeliad.
The shaman aray rattle is an inverted
cone braided with arumã strips, covered
with cotton twine until only the upper part is visible
-- the base of the cone. A cotton boll is stretched
around the base as a collar, into it four or five red
arara feathers are inserted, giving the object the seeming
of a flaming torch. Pieces of ground snail’s shell
are inserted inside the braided cone. The aray
gives forth a continuous, rasping sound; it is used
by shamans to counterpoint the Mai chants and
to perform a series of mystical and therapeutic operations:
to bring the gods and the souls of the dead back to
earth to participate in feasts; to show the way to sick
people’s lost souls and to aid in the treatment
of wounds and poisonous bites.
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During the manufacture of a bow, men are not supposed
to indulge in sexual intercourse with their wives, lest
the wood crack. The rattle, however, is braided by women,
and the cotton covering is done by men. However, once
ready, the aray cannot be used by women; a very
powerful instrument, it evokes the Mai, who can
break the neck of the woman who dared call them. In this
society, only men are shaman.
The aray is the only object made by males
which cannot be inherited by anyone; following the death
of its owner, it must be burned. Endowed with deep symbolic
values, it is a personal, non-transferable object.
This sexually branded, personal and intimate
character of the aray has its analog among female
objects: the internal waistband worn by all women after
puberty also is not inherited by anyone, contrarily
to external pieces of apparel. The traditional Araweté
comprises four pieces: the waistband, a small tube of
thick cotton canvas about 25 cm long which covers the
genitals and the upper part of the thighs, binding them
tightly and propping women into a peculiar gait; a broad
armsling to carry their children, which is also worn
even by childless young women and a headcloth, a tubular
piece as the other female clothes, with the same broad
ward and woof of skirt and armsling. Female clothing
is woven in simple looms: two babassu leaf spindles
stuck perpendicularly into the ground, and dyed with
urucum. They consume an awesome amount of cotton;
just as men spend a major part of their time manufacturing
and repairing their weapons, women dedicate many hours
of the day to the process of yarning for their clothes
and hammocks. There is always someone at the village
weaving a piece of cloth or a hammock.
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Since their tender age women wear their outer skirt;
at the age of seven, they also carry their armslings and
sometimes their headcloths. The waistband is imposed on
them from their first menses - one of its purposes is
to absorb menstrual blood - and must never be removed
in the face of men other than husband or lover, and even
so for sexual purposes only. Even among women decency
demands that a woman does not stand without the waistband:
during the women’s collective bath they usually squat
on their haunches when out of the water. Men display equal
feelings of decency when removing their foreskin strings
when in the presence of others: for the Araweté,
nudity is the absence of the female waistband or the foreskin
string. |
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