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At various times of the year, the Waimiri Atroari
interrupt their daily activities to hold their maryba,
or festivals. There is no specific calendar for putting
on maryba, although they generally occur during
slack periods when villagers are not preparing or planting
gardens or involved in other collective labor on dates
chosen by song leaders known as eremy.
The term maryba can be translated as
festival, song, or dance. It is both a ritual moment
and a gala one, when the community suspends everyday
existence and is transported to another time and space.
Maryba hold a special significance in Waimiri
Atroari life as a time when various local groups gather
together to establish and reaffirm alliances among themselves
and with other settlements.
Certain stories are sources of explanation for
how festivals arose. The best known ones are the following:
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During the era of the tahkome (ancestors),
the Kinja did not hold festivals and did not know how
to sing or dance. Xiriminja, who had granted wives to
the tahkome, taught them a maryba to sing
on occasions when he came to visit his grandson. Xiriminja
sent a message ahead asking that no one come near his
descendant, since he wanted to make sure that the child
had the distinctive features of water people, webbed fingers.
When he arrived in the village with all his followers,
including anacondas and other xiriminja people,
the Kinja were frightened. However, the villagers had
already heard the visitors' songs as they emerged from
the water, and now they could watch the visitors' dances.
Everyone began singing and dancing together.
Inside the communal house, a child who was very
curious and naughty wanted to look at Xiriminja's grandson.
When the child saw that the grandson's hands looked
like a duck's foot, he spread the fingers open and ripped
the membrane. When Xiriminja found out, he became irate
and went back home. Because of this, the Kinja's ancestors
only learned a few of the festival songs. These songs
and dances are now performed during the maryba of
male initiation. No pregnant woman is allowed to participate
in these rituals, lest Xiriminja think that she is carrying
his grandson.
In another myth, a tahkome man was hunting
and stopped to take a nap. When a drop of water fell
on his eyelashes, he woke up and saw a woman in front
of him. She was a weriri kyrwaky, the parrot's
daughter. The man aimed his bow and arrow to shoot her,
but her father intervened and promised his daughter
in marriage. The man married the parrot woman and brought
her to his village. There she taught various songs and
dances to the Waimiri Atroari. After living there a
long time, weriri kyrwaky missed her father and
began to sing in the garden to get his attention. Her
husband, suspecting a ruse, killed her rather than let
her get away. Ever since that time, the Kinja people
have sung and danced all the maryba that they
learned from their forebears.
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