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During the span of their lifetimes, both men and
women can have a number of successive marriages. There
is no preferential type of marriage arrangement among
the Guajá although some anthropologists believe
that they exhibit a Dravidian type of kinship system,
where preferred partners would be cross-cousins. However,
subsequent observations reveal that this is not the actual
type of social organization among the Guajá. Perhaps
this speculation comes from the fact that some referential
kinship terms appear similar to other Tupi-Guarani groups
of the eastern Amazon region, embracing the Ka´apor,
Tembé and Guajajara (Tenetehar), all of these formerly
constituting part of a larger group along with the Guajá,
as mentioned previously. In this respect it becomes difficult
to reconstitute the Guajá's former kinship system
as many these groups disperesed and were reduced to mere
fragments of their former population.
Before permanent contact was established with
FUNAI, it is presumed that the Guajá resided
in Maranhão's pre-Amazon region in groups of
5 to 30 individuals. Some of them migrated southward
to areas very distant from their original habitat, as
was the case of two Guajá men who were found
in the states of Bahia and Minas Gerais, respectively.
One of them, Karapiru (Hawk), became a feature
story in a local TV program in Belém, Pará,
on its TV Cultura network. In 1978, Karapiru
and his family were ambushed by gunmen in a farm in
near Porto Franco, Maranhão, and as a result,
they were forced to scatter and run. He survived alone
in the forest, trekking for a period of 10 years, in
a southerly direction, and was eventually found near
a farm in Bahia in 1988.
FUNAI's attraction front brought many Guajá
groups together that were unfamiliar with one another.
Many of these people were settled together in the same
village, a situation which could have altered their
social organization. While cross-cousin marriage is
permitted among the Guajá they currently prefer
to find marriage partners among non-related people.
In this respect, perhaps it would be more appropriate
to characterize their unions as a form of "alliance"
between groups that were once hostile to one another.
In some cases, FUNAI itself has acted as a mediator
in arranging marriages between people from different
villages. Likewise, since the animosity that existed
between the Guajá and Ka'apor was appeased by
FUNAI in the 1970s, interaction between them is now
friendly, such that a Guajá man from Post Guajá
married a woman the the Ka'apor village of Urutawy,
on the Alto Turiaçu Reserve. Also under FUNAI's
influence a Guajá man was married twice to non-Indian
peasant women from hamlets nearby the Caru Reserve.
In the latter case, the person in question mentioned
that he was "ashamed" to be an Indian and
that he preferred white women to indigenous women.
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