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Presently, there are ten Palikur villages on the
banks of the Urukauá, but the number of villages
is always fluctuating, because the decision to leave a
village and create a new one is established by the chief
of a domestic group which is composed of an elderly couple,
with their single sons and daughters, their married children,
sons-in-law and grandchildren. Of all the villages, Kumenê
is the most populous, with 511 inhabitants. The others
vary between a minimum of 10 (in general comprised by
a single domestic group) and a maximum of 80 inhabitants.
Before contact with the evangelical religion,
the Palikur were distributed in small villages which
were distant from each other. The population growth
of the village of Kumenê began in the mid-1960s
with the process of evangelization and later with the
building of an Assembly of God church. Nevetheless,
for nearly twenty years, several families have gone
back to living spread out, alledging the need for distribution
in land occupation for the protection of the territory.
At the end of 1998, the first village was founded on
the side of highway BR-156, on kilometer 80, near the
headwaters of the Urukauá river and quite isolated
from the population nuclei that inhabit the banks of
this river.
Traditionally, the villages are built facing
the river. The morphology of the villages is varied.
In the smaller ones, the reference point is the house
of the founding member of the village, with the other
houses arranged around it. Several middle-sized villages,
with around eight houses, are built around a soccer
field, or are organized into streets. The largest village,
Kumenê, is long, with its houses ligned up in
two parallel streets and occupies the whole extent of
the island. The public buildings, like the school, health
post and FUNAI post, are located on the most isolated
point of the village.
Kumenê brings together various domestic
groups that, in the “more traditional”, spatially
fragmented, pattern, would be more separated in different
territories. Nevertheless, the spatial distribution
of this village follows the traditional model, which
displays a division marked by the rule of uxorilocal
residence, in which the newly-weds go to live together
with the wife’s family, and the influence of the
subgroup of the men who are able to bring together more
sons-in-law around them.
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