Kayapo mother
  bathing her child

 Some Kayapo men
 [in modern clothes
  and overweight]

This very brief except from Werner's book provides a quick sense of significant aspects of the life of primitive people, i.e., people who live by foraging (hunting and gathering) in an environment that forces them to move their home base every two or three years because they have depleted the resources of an area.  The reference below to the son of a chief can be misleading.  Foraging groups are normally relentlessly "egalitarian" in the sense that they do not allow anyone to claim a right to be chief.  But the Brazilian government wants tribes to appoint someone to be the point of contact between them and the tribe.  So some person is temporarily assigned the name "chief."

To clear up a point of confusion in advance:  the "Mekranoti" are a 'band' of villagers, who call both themselves and their own village "Mekranoti."  This band is part of a larger local language and culture group called "Kayapo."

As you read, attend to elements of magic, shamans, spirits, life after death.  Ask yourself whether this all adds up to "religion." 

---

The calm [in the village] was interrupted one day by a loud scream from the other end of the village. Running outside, I saw some men carrying a large peccary carcass to the center of the plaza, where they began the job of butchering and distributing the meat to all of the villagers. One of the old women was wailing loudly because the men had just killed her pet. She had inherited the right to raise the animal, and had suckled it on her own breasts when it was still a piglet. It would follow her around the village, and sometimes nudge people to get petted. Peccaries have glands on their backs for leaving scents to mark their group territory, and periodically they rub each others' backs to verify this scent. The dirty, bristly hairs must have carried lice or worse, but the children and some of the adults stroked it just the same. The only problem was that like all wild animals it could never really be tamed. This one had just bitten a child so the Mekranoti decided it had to be killed.

Other pets were less bothersome. The macaws and parrots in the village had their wings clipped. They stayed out of the way most of the time, perched on shelves or crossbeams under the hut's roof. Some of the parrots learned to talk a little Kayapo. Pet birds were plucked now and then so their tail feathers could be stuck into headdresses and their body down pasted onto masks. The were a sad sight walking "nude" around the village. Another large black bird liked to follow its owner around everywhere she went. The Indians called it a myrmyr because of the cooing sound it made. Several women also had small monkeys that would cry unless they could clutch onto their mistresses' hair. When they grew up, the monkeys learned to scurry down their mistresses' backs and legs to cause mischief. Other wild animals fared less well. Hunters handed over small paca or weasels to their children to play with. But the kids almost always killed their pets with rough play. . . .

The feeling of calm was also interrupted by an incident with Kaxre. Descending on my hut with a group of other Mekranoti, the chief' son claimed that he should be paid for helping to carry me to the airstrip after I was stung by the scorpion. Gustaaf and I managed to convince him that just as we expected no payment for giving medicine to sick Indians so they should expect no recompense for helping the ill. But the real problem behind this confrontation was unsolvable: the injustice of different health standards for "whites" and for "Indians." Why should I be able to get a plane immediately when I was sick, while they had to wait for weeks? Was my life really worth more than theirs? Later in the year the Indians, who knew of a toothache I had suffered, asked if I had had the tooth extracted when I visited the city. It was difficult to explain fillings and other dental care unavailable to them. The sting of social inequality would be hard to accept after centuries of egalitarian living.

Illness was on the minds of many Indians. Several people were suffering from malaria, and several more had gonorrhea. Ultimately, the Indians feel most illness comes from the sorcery brought to the world by a treacherous pet heron back in the mythological past. Swooping down on people while they were out poisoning fish, the heron scared most people to death and caused the others to fall in the water and become sick. Perhaps the present diseases came from Indians returning from the trekking group, people speculated. Before going off by themselves, the trekkers had visited another Kayapo village to the north to get manioc flour and other garden produce to take with them. . . .

Another "health" problem had also arisen. Iredjo gave birth to twin girls. There was something animal-like about having a "litter" rather than a child. Besides, Iredjo already had three sons to take care of and, as a kupry, she could not count on the support of her husband to help her. She often brought me heavy loads of firewood or garden produce to obtain the things other women could get from their husbands--who gave me meat. Her sons lacked the attention other children in the village enjoyed. They walked around dirty and rarely got painted with genipape dye or wore elaborate ornaments. The men who had fathered Iredjo's children were still in the village, but they had their own families to support.

Iredjo was married when her first child was born. But when it died soon after birth and her next pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage, her husband left her to marry a younger woman.

Years ago Iredjo would simply have killed one, or both, of the twins as soon as they were born, but with kuben in the village this did not seem wise. Instead she waited almost two weeks. Then suddenly we were told that one of her babies had died during the night. There was none of the traditional mourning associated with death--no wailing, and Iredjo did not cut her hair. Soon afterwards the story had changed. Iredjo had given birth to only one child in the first place, people said. The kupry firmly denied any knowledge of twins.

People could ignore Iredjo's problem, but the malaria was harder to explain away. One case of the mosquito-carried illness became particularly serious. Tep'i and Kokokamrek's seven-year-old daughter was now under the care of the FUNAI clinic. Kokokamrek, Iredjo's sister, had already lost five out of the nine children she had borne. One she killed soon after birth, another drowned accidentally; and the other three succumbed to illnesses, two of them during an epidemic. The sick girl was Kokokamrek's only live daughter. I volunteered to stay up a couple of nights to take her temperature every hour and wake up Ronaldo if she appeared worse.

Ronaldo felt the girl probably had malaria combined with a bad case of anemia from the worms and amoeba most Mekranoti carry around in their intestines. After treating her for several days with chloroquine and "soro," a mixture of vitamins given intravenously, Ronaldo felt she was getting better. But then the girl's parents decided to take her back, and refused further treatment from FUNAI. One of the shamans had been pressuring the family to accept native remedies.

Almost one out of every four Mekranoti men is a shaman of some sort, and a couple of women are recognized curers as well. After learning about medicinal plants, mostly from their parents, shamans acquire extra prestige when they suffer through the illnesses they have learned to "cure." Most of them are old men by the time they gain sufficient renown to practice their craft. After mixing the leaves of different forest plants with water, shamans ask their patients to drink the concoction or they pour the mixture over their heads. Filling the area with tobacco smoke, they also chante over their patients' bodies, and sometimes suck out "evil sorcery" from the offending organs. Fortunately, only people in distant places work sorcery among the Mekranoti, so there was no problem with witchcraft accusations. Some parts of their cures were difficult to accept. I was often horrified at the sight of a shaman spitting tobacco into the boils the Mekranoti get on their buttocks or legs. The infections sometimes got so bad that Ronaldo had to lance the sores, a painful operation most people tried very hard to avoid.

Other shamanistic "cures" also seem to cause more trouble than good, but they may be beneficial at times. When suffering from a high fever, sick Mekranoti are thrown in to the river to cool off. Normally this is unhealthy, but in an emergency it may act like aspirin to bring down a dangerously high temperature. In any case, the cures, like placebos, may help even if they don't really "work." Illnesses is one of those uncontrollable and unpredictable things that call for magic to relieve anxiety.

The Mekranoti feel unsure about Western medicine. They recognize its power and use it whenever they can see it is effective. Women bring their children every day to the FUNAI clinic for minor treatment of cuts and skin infections, but in more serious cases where cures are less certain, they lose confidence. Then they can be persuaded by the shamans that the illness is not a "civilized" disease, but an "Indian" one, and therefore deserving of "Indian" cures. The shamans, for their part, would like to do as much curing as possible. It enhances their prestige, and brings in extra income as well. FUNAI dispenses medicine free of charge, but the shamans ask for expensive gifts like hammocks or shotgun shells. When their daughter was still at the FUNAI clinic, several shamans made daily visits to Tep'i and Kokokamrek, demanding that the couple bring their daughter back home to receive native treatments.

At home the fevers and chills grew worse every day. Anxious over her deteriorating condition, the child's parents eventually decided to take the girl back to FUNAI. Ronaldo was not at all pleased with the decision. Several years earlier he had gone through a similar experience. The Indians waited too long to bring him a sick child who was already beyond help. The morning after the patient died, Ronaldo was awakened from his sleep by a man at the door. "Ronaldo, come out here," the Indian said softly. "I'm going to kill you, just as you killed this girl." It took some fancy talking from Ronaldo to get himself out of that situation, and he didn't want to risk it again. Still he agreed to take back the patient.

Calling every day for a FUNAI plane to take the girl to Belem or Altamira for treatment, Ronaldo tried for a week to keep his patient alive. But when it became obvioustheir daughter could no survive another day, her parents took her back home to die.

I was expecting the wails that night, but they were chilling just the same. When I timidly entered Tep'i's hut, it was crowded with people, most of them talking angrily about FUNAI and foreigners in general. A kerosene lamp, set in the middle of the floor, illuminated the dead girl lying on her platform bed, surrounded by people examining her body. "It's the worms that killed her," several people commented. When the body dies and oxygen is cut off, the worms crawl out through the mouth and anus to find air.

The Kayapo bury their dead in a cemetery in the weedy land surrounding the village. At night people avoid this area altogether if they can, but if they must pass through it they blow tobacco smoke to protect themselves from the spirits in the place. The norny dig the graves. The deceased's relatives or in-laws prepare the corpse, first painting it with genipap dye, and then adding other decorations used by the dead person while still alive. The body is lowered in to the grave, and placed on a mat in a sitting position with knees doubled up against the chest.

So the spirit of the deceased will not return to the village to get personal possessions, the deceased's beads, weapons, and feathers are placed nearby. At times one of the dead person's dogs is also killed and buried with its owner. There are even recorded cases in which the Kayapo have killed children to accompany adults to the grave, especially very young or crippled children who would have trouble surviving in any case. A grating of sticks covered with a mat goes over the body so that the dirt shoveled on top will not touch the corpse. People avoid stepping on the resulting mounds. It is because the moon once stomped on a grave, the Kayapo say, that humans no longer recover their bodies after they die. There is no reason to make matters worse by further violating burial grounds.

At the gravesite the mourners wail loudly. The women struggle to wrest machetes from one another's hands. To demonstrate their grief they hit themselves over their heads with the knives until the blood streams down in tiny rivulets over their faces. Fortunately, they never bring enough machetes to cause real damage before someone else grabs the knife from them.

The graveside mourning is intense but brief. The dirt is piled into a mound over the grave, and a personal possession belonging to the deceased is placed on a stick on top. The burial preparations help the dead get to their final home somewhere in the savanna regions to the east of the Mekranoti village, and discourage them from returning. Feeding on lizards and dirt, the spirits of the dead sleep in rocks and come at night to the forested areas of the Amazon, where they seek out their relatives and try to kill them. They want to bring these people with them to the village of the dead to alleviate their loneliness. Sometimes the spirits, who hide behind trees, appear as flashes of light in the dark forest and scare the living, who do not want to be killed by their dead relatives. I heard one Mekranoti say he killed a spirit when he saw it turn its head.

Mekranoti religion offers no comfort in death--no peaceful resting place, no legacy of good will for the living, no feeling of having pleased the supernatural. Their religion seems to offer little consolation for the living as well. The spirits are evil--the invisible fish that cause infections, the rocks that give people disease, and the ghosts of the dead, who try to kill their relatives. There were a few heroes in the mythological past, but they are no longer around to protect people from the malevolent spirits that still inhabit the forest and the waters. People can seek help from the shamans, but they are no longer as powerful as they once were.

The spirits mistreat good and bad people equally. But this does not mean that evil deeds go unpunished. If people misbehave they simply estrange themselves from their fellows. Bad people give everybody headaches and stomach problems, and, because they ruin their appetites and do not eat as they should, they also die young. Still, the punishment for misbehavior is entirely secular. The spirits do not get involved. It is mostly in stratified societies with courts and lawyers to judge people that the gods, like the government, take on the job of moral custodian. In simpler societies religion generally has little to do with morality.

The plane that was to take the sick girl to the hospital arrived the day after the funeral. Too late to do any good, it only added to the frustration everyone felt. Having sent the child's soul off to the spirit world, most Mekranoti were reluctant to talk about the death. It is unwise to bring up the subject and taboo to mention the dead person's name. People turn their complaints to more secular matters.

* * * *
Rollicking behind my house, one group of children forced a dog into their play. A boy hit the animal with a stick. The others joined in. A few minutes later the dog was a bloody, lifeless heap. The adults simply carried off the carcass without a word to the children, who continued their play. In the past the Kayapo sometimes gave their children dogs to kill, just to get them used to warfare. Sometimes they even gave them a sickly child to assassinate.