Kagwahiv

ETHNONYM: Parintintin

Orientation

Identification. The Kagwahiv, known in Brazilian literature as "Parintintin," are a small, once warlike, Tupíspeaking tribe, who during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries terrorized rubber gatherers along 400 kilometers of the Rio Madeira, driven there from the Rio Tapajós in the mid-nineteenth century. The popular denomination "Parintintin" may be of Mundurucu derivation, although it does not fit Mundurucu phonological patterns (Robert Murphy, personal communication). The group's name for itself, "Kagwahiv," in its widest sense encompasses "friendly people," as opposed to the tapy'yn, "enemy."

Location. Pacified in 1923 (a classic pacification led by Curt Nimuendajú), the Kagwahiv now live in clusters of small settlements scattered along tributaries through the territory they once dominated, which borders the east bank of the Rio Madeira from the Rio Marmelos (8° S) to the mouth of the Machado. To the west, they fought with the Pirahã and Diahoi for control over the Marmelos. The hostile groups with which they were surrounded included the Brazilian rubber tappers along the Madeira, the indigenous tribes they found in the area when they arrived (of which the Mura Piraha are the chief survivors), and a number of small, culturally and linguistically affiliated tribes—the Pai'i and Kutipai'i, the Diahoi, the Jupa (Bocas Pretas), and the Apeiran'di to the south; the Juma, west of the Madeira; and the Tenharem, who share the Kagwahiv moiety system. Only the last two survive as cultural entities.

Linguistic Affiliation. The Kagwahiv speak a TupíGuaraní language of the "h" variety, one of several closely related dialects spread along the Madeira and Machado rivers, which include the Tupí-Cawahib. They are one of the group of upper Tapajós tribes denoted by Carl Friedrich von Martius "Central Tupí," which includes Kayabi and Apiaca.

History and Cultural Relations

There is scant record of the Kagwahiv prior to their pacification by an expedition led by Nimuendajú in 1923, save for numerous melodramatic accounts of their raids on rubber tappers on the Madeira. Phonological affinities with the Urubu (Ka'apor) of Maranhão suggest an ultimate coastal origin, confirmed by legendary accounts of a journey upriver to their present location from "a land without water," crossing an expanse in which the shore was out of sight for two days (the lower Amazon above Marajó). The first historical references to them, however, do not occur until the end of the eighteenth century, when, according to Nimuendajú's researches, they were located at the confluence of the Arinos and Juruena rivers on the upper Tapajós. Nimuendajú (1924) has reconstructed the history of their ancestral tribe, denoted "Cabahyba" by Martius, from the first mention of them on the Tapajós in 1797, whence they were driven by the Portuguese-armed Mundurucu in the mid-nineteenth century, scattering westward to and distributed in fragments along the Machado (where Lévi-Strauss encountered the "Tupí Cawahíb") and to the present location of the Kagwahiv on the Madeira.

Fission was a continuing process; a Pai'i chief described to one backwoodsman how the Kutipai'i split off from them over a leadership issue. In the late nineteenth century, Byahu (who met his end ambushed by a Piraha) may have been chief over all those who call themselves Kagwahiv, but after his death they divided into subregional groups, with Diai'i holding sway in the upper Maici region, where Nimuendajú established his pacification post in 1923, and Byahu's son Pyrehakatu in the Rio Ipixuna region, which he had opened up with a few of Dyahu's sons-in-law. After pacification, separate Indian Protection Service (SPI) posts were set up at Canavial on the Ipixuna (under Antonio Lobat and a series of successors) and at the mouth of the Maici Mirim near Calamas. The SPI mandate was terminated in 1942, and the Canavial post was turned over to the appointed chief Paulinho Neves (Ijet, Pyrehakatu's son-in-law), but Garcia de Freitas stayed on as patrão at the Calamas post and was succeeded by his son Benjamin.

Groups also live near Tres Casas, on the seringal owned by the progressive descendants of the enlightened landowner Manuel Lobo (who instigated the pacification to end the state of war between the Kagwahiv and the rubber tappers) and near Nimuendajú's pacification outpost just east of Humaita. The Kagwahiv were nominally converted by Salesians and have abandoned traditional ritual but maintain their beliefs, social patterns, and food avoidances. A team of Summer Institute of Linguistics (a Protestant organization) missionary-linguists, Helen Pease and LaVera Betts, were at Canavial from after 1960 to 1976 doing linguistic research and rendering medical treatment, but they made no converts. Economically dependent on the gathering of sorva latex, a jungle product used in natural plastics, the Kagwahiv are hard-pressed economically and are diminishing in numbers. It is difficult for young people to find appropriate spouses of the opposite moiety, and the outlook for preservation of their social system is not bright. Many Kagwahiv retain a strong pride in their history and values, however, and despite the universal contempt for índios in Amazonas, the Kagwahiv retain a certain local respect for their past valor and continuing determination.

Settlements

The small settlements now average three nuclear families, or sixteen people; the largest prepacification settlements of Pyrehakatu numbered little more than two or three times that size. Settlements are always located on igarapes (waterways) for access to canoe transportation and resources.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The Kagwahiv economy is based on hunting, fishing, and shifting cultivation, principally of maize, manioc, and several varieties of potatoes. Fishing is done with bow and arrow from canoes during the dry season, from platforms during the rainy season, or by poisoning pools with timbó. Hunting, now done with shotguns, was done with feathered arrows of bamboo with notched hardwood tips inserted for small game or a corner-notched bamboo point attached to a hardwood tip for large game and warfare. Shifting fields are cleared annually for gardening in jungle areas assigned by the headman. An individual might call a collective work party to help, feasting them in return. Women plant and harvest, although this is increasingly done in family groups. Fruit and potatoes are also planted at the edge of the settlements. Fruit, honey, and turtles and their eggs are gathered, mostly by women and children.

Industrial Arts. The main transportation is by canoe; they were once made of bark, but today wooden canoes are purchased from Brazilians. Pottery has not been made in the memory of living informants. Hammocks are woven from cotton planted in the settlements.

Kinship and Sociopolitical Organization

Kin Groups and Descent. Nonlocalized exogamous patrimoieties are named after birds, the kwandú (harpie eagle) and mytum (curassow). The Kwandú moiety was also associated with the macaw, taravé, the name of the corresponding Tenharem moiety. The system is complicated by a Kwandú subgroup, the Gwyrai'gwara (associated with the japú bird), who intermarry with other Kwandú as well as with the Mytum, constituting a third de facto patrisib.

Kinship Terminology. The kin terminology is a two-line system appropriate to moieties, with sibling terms extended to same-generation members of one's own moiety, all cross cousins of the opposite moiety designated amotehe (a term for "lover" in other Tupí languages), and so on. Married amotehe observe a formal avoidance of one another.

Marriage. Marriage was determined by a series of arrangements beginning at birth. An infant was named by a selected mother's brother (tuty ), establishing a betrothal with the latter's infant of the opposite sex. When of age, the betrothed pair were married, the bride given away by two real or classificatory brothers who thus gained the right to name one of her children and claim that child in betrothal to one of their own children.

Marriage was effected by a period of bride-service to the father-in-law (tuty)—5 years for the first wife and less for later marriages—after which the son-in-law was theoretically free to leave, but usually remained in uxorilocal residence.

Polygyny was practiced, preferably sororal, but was never widely popular because of the complexity of familial relations involved: a man with five wives was scoffed at as imprudent. When a man took a second wife, his first might leave him if she so desired.

Socialization. An infant is given a "first name" or "play name" (mbotagwahav ) by a mother's brother and, in later childhood, a moiety-associated name by a father's brother (ruvy ). Thereafter, new names (selected from moiety sets of age- and sex-appropriate names) were assumed on entering new stages of life, on major changes of status, or at certain special events. Boys received their first ka'a, penis sheath, from a father's brother. A woman, on her first menarche, was isolated for ten days in a hammock behind a partition, observing strict taboos, at the end of which she was carried to the river by her father and ritually bathed. Her first wedding followed the ceremony.

Conflict and Social Control. Raids were organized by any warrior moved to call one and led by two nhimboypara'ga, "raid callers," whose position lasted only for the duration of the expedition. A principal objective was to take an enemy head, which would be exhibited at an akagwera toryva ("head-trophy feast"), a lavish ceremonial display celebrating the exploit, cosponsored by the head taker (who thus achieved the honored status of okokwahav ) and another prominent warrior. There is some evidence for ritual consumption of parts of the slain enemy. The killer was obliged to undergo a period of ritual seclusion (like a woman's menarche seclusion), and he assumed a new name.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs and Practices. The cosmological frame is laid out in the myth of Pindova'umi'ga, the powerful ancient chief who, annoyed by quarreling among children, lifted his house and the best natural resources to the sky. He is to be distinguished from the trickster/culture hero Mbahira (Mair of other Tupí mythologies), who originated many important cultural items and processes but has little to do in the current world. A third ancestor, the "Old Woman" (Gwaivi), was cremated by her sons and transformed into Kagwahiv crops. These myths and a few others form the core of Kagwahiv mythology. Food taboos are an enduring and central part of ritual life. One set applies to all parents, from the birth of their first child until old age. Others obtain during pregnancy and the months following birth; still others apply to sick individuals and their primary relatives. Agouti, which makes one lazy, is prohibited for young warriors. Handling manioc in any form is dangerous to a sick person. Sexual activity is also prohibited under certain circumstances; during a fish poisoning by timbó it will interfere with the action of the poison, and between parallel cousins it will cause the death of parents and/or children of the offenders. Certain acts will make a hunter panem, unable to kill a particular species or any species with a particular weapon.

Religious Practitioners. Curing, beyond the herbal level, was done by a shaman (ipaji ) in a ceremony called tokaia. The ipaji went into trance (without drugs) behind a small screen or shelter (tokaia) set up in the plaza and made a spiritual journey through the various levels of the cosmos, concluding with an encounter with Pindova'umi'ga, chief of the Sky People. The ipaji (or a helping ipaji outside the tokaia) greeted each spirit encountered on the journey and asked for its help; the spirit replied in a characteristic song through the voice of the ipaji in trance. Dreaming is associated with shamanism. An ipaji or a layman may encounter spirits in dreams or predict (and, for a shaman, alter) the future through them. Dream predictions are mostly of success in hunting or of illness and death. Ipaji were born via dreams; a shaman would dream of a particular spirit of Sky Person, who announced that he would be born to a particular woman as a future ipaji. Her next-born son would then be marked for apprenticeship to the dreaming shaman, and the spirit reborn in him would be his rupigwara, the spirit agent of his power. The chain has been broken by the death of the last Kagwahiv ipaji before he could pass on his knowledge to his "dreamed one.

Bibliography

Kracke, Waud (1978). Force and Persuasion: Leadership in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kracke, Waud (1979). "Dreaming in Kagwahiv." Psychoanalytic Study of Society 8:119-171.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1948). "The Tupí Cawahíb." In Handbook of South American Indians, edited by Julian Steward. Vol. 3, The Tropical Forest Tribes, 299-305. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1955). Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon.

Nimuendajú, Curt (1924). "Os índios parintintins do Rio Madeira." Journal de la Société des Américanistes 15:201-278.

Nimuendajú, Curt (1948). "The Cawahib, Parintintin, and their Neighbors." In Handbook of South American Indians, edited by Julian Steward, Vol. 3, The Tropical Forest Tribes, 387-397. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

WAUD KRACKE