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Since the 1980s, the Asurini have formalized their
relations with other Indians, through marriages and the
resulting conviviality in their own village, of members
of other indigenous groups of the region such as Arara,
the Parakaña and the Kararaô (a Kayapó
subgroup). Consequently, there has been an accelerated
increase in the birth rate, with a significant increase
in the infantile population. Before, not all of the woman
could bear children. Today, all girls who have reached
puberty have children. Before, they had children after
reaching 20 years of age, after their second marriage
or when there was a possibility of a polyandric marriage,
with an older and a younger man. Today, the elder men
are fathers, without sharing paternity with the younger
men, as was the family pattern previously. Young couples
have raised offspring with three or more children (6 to
7 children), similarly we have situations of an elder
husband and a young wife with numerous offspring. The
increase in the number of children and subsequent increase
in domestic labor has not at the same time changed the
volume and rhythm of female domestic activities such as
agriculture, weaving, cooking, and ceramics.
One only notes the absence of young women in
the maraká songs and dances and one also senses
the lack of their well-made bodies decorated in geometric
designs with genipapo dye. While before, the women spent
a great deal of their time in artistic activities (decoration
of the body and making of ceramics), today the young
women are actively involved in procreation and, because
of this, they marry with non-Asurini men, who are incorporated
into the intimacy of the society and to the network
of social and economic relations. In ritual, they are
today substituted by women without children, or even
by married women with one child. These situations are
what are most adequate to the near total availability
of women in performing ritual roles, during the period
of their realization (three consecutive days). In 2001,
the rituals continued to be realized with the same vigor
and frequency.
In the last few decades, contacts between the
Asurini and the white inhabitants of the banks of the
Xingu have also become more frequent and tense, particularly
in relation to the lumbermen who constantly invade the
area. The Asurini have not retreated from these confrontations,
demanding from the regional population that they not
fish on their lands nor take out mahogany which is particularly
abundant in the region.
Since the year 2000, the Little Sisters of Jesus
have no longer worked with the Asurini. Today, besides
FUNAI, the Asurini have received assistance from the
Body Shop Foundation, through Amazoncoop, a cooperative
created in order to develop self-sustainable projects
among the indigenous peoples of the middle Xingu. Through
the presence of these agencies, the Asurini have developed
the commercialization of chestnuts and material goods,
especially ceramics. At the same time, the population
has become involved in projects of ecotourism, financed
and administered by the Amazoncoop and Funai.
A new pattern of relationships, new discourses,
a new demographic policy. The eternal maraká
continues, in the meantime, to bring them together for
the protection and guarantee of their new avá
(people), the children. We thus see a society which
is reorganizing, redistributing social roles among age
groups, redefining patterns of biological and social
reproduction. Up the present time, their lands provide
the resources that they need and this will enable them
to continue to reproduce their way of life with great
vitality.
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