>Welcome to the Squad. I'm very interested in hearing your analysis
>of Brazilian native tribes. Please feel free to post your ideas.
First I want to apologize for any technical or spelling mistake I
might make here because I'm not anthropologist and my english is
absolutely awful.
We have about 210 indigenous tribes which represents more or less
280 thousand people, all these tribes are in different degrees of contact
with our civilization and most of them lives in preserved areas. They're
technically classified by language, first into two great different
branches (macro-ge and tupi) and then into several, almost individual
dialects. Actually there are 170 of these dialects, but it is estimated
that when our colonizators arrived there were about 1000.
The study of these dialects is as important of the study of their
mythology to analise the way they understand reality and the organization
of their culture. The cultural differences between tribes are significant
at a certain level, but an analisys of one example might be useful for
the question introduced by Bodvar.
He said that "What made such an impression on me then was how
complete their world view was: even the daily jet flights overhead was
incorporated into their mythos.". That applies to the tribe he quoted and
those of which I'll talk about as well.
This hability to quickly absorb foreign inputs into day-to-day
perception is explained by the belief that everything coexists at some
level everytime, and this is where it aproches to MOQ. The meaning of
each action, as small as it may seem, is enlargened by the perception
that it relates to something different of the action's prymary objective.
That's why, in my point of view, science and religion are not separated
in these cultures. This doesn't mean that they have more "static quality"
or a priori concepts then we do, but that their conditioned experiences
encompass more categories and are far more flexible than ours, exactly
because they are much more prepared to deal with "dinamic quality".
Canibalism is another example of non separation of subject and object,
it exists in various forms and one of the most common is a familiar one,
in which the relatives and close friends eat the dead persons's body as a
way of helping him to go where they must when they die. It is crucial to
understand that it is not a soul or a ghost that goes to that place, but
the person itself, and in many myths it returns and lives with the living
normaly.
There is a classical story in which Hans Staden tried to convince chief
Cunhambembe not to eat human meat stating that rational beings didn't do
that, the chief simply replied : " Jauara iche. I am a jaguar. It tastes
good.". If being a jaguar was a condition that made the white man
understanding eating human meat so he was a jaguar and that's it, no
complex explanation or escuses.
Another interesting example: some dialects have only some numbers, the
count goes like:1, 2, 3, 4 and "many". When something is bigger than 4 it
falls into an unpatterned category which can be 5 or 80, that is: "many"
can only be known by direct experience.
As for evil (that Bodvar also quoted in his message), there is a good
example: the "evil" spirit known as Anhanga' (ah-nhan-gah). As in some
african-brazilian religions (candomble', umbanda, macumba) it is not the
traditional western evil, but only a force uncontroled by any law. So,
the problem is not the harm it does, but the potential it has for doing
it since he can do anything he wants. This represents another cause of
caring about stuff in the long run rather than immediately, since they
take precautions and make offers in order to prevent anything from
happening.
Their behavior can't be classified as SOM oriented but there are
clearly some aspects of it in their culture, it could be interesting to
analise this more deeply and try to define how their society mechanics
work, if someone needs data to try to understand this I can post some
urls later. I'm talking with a friend of mine responsible for this area
in the University of Sao Paulo anthropology course and should have some
interesting things to say in the next few days.
[]'s
thiago
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