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Hiwi People
The Hiwi call themselves the “people of the savannah” for the vast flatlands they inhabit between the Meta and Vichada rivers in Colombia. In Venezuela, the Hiwi live in the states of Apure, Guarico, Bolivar, and Amazonas. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians described the Hiwi as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Their long history of violent conflict, extending well into the twentieth century, has meant dramatic changes in their way of life. Today, when the Hiwi visit criollo towns, they wear European-style clothing: shirts and pants for the men, and cotton dresses for the women. In their own villages, many continue to wear traditional loincloths made of cloth or of a vegetable bark called marima. Traditional clothing also includes body ornaments. The Hiwi make necklaces of glass beads as well as shamanic amulet necklaces for ceremonial use, made with animal teeth, hooves, and beaks. Textile crafts are an important part of their material culture. Using looms, the Hiw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meta River
The Meta River is a major left tributary of the Orinoco River in eastern Colombia and southern Venezuela, South America. The Meta originates in the Eastern Ranges of the Andes and flows through the Meta Department, Colombia as the confluence of the Humea, Guatiquía and Guayuriba rivers. It flows east-northeastward across the Llanos Orientales ("Eastern Plains") of Colombia following the direction of the Meta Fault. The Meta forms the northern boundary of Vichada Department, first with Casanare Department, then with Arauca Department, and finally with Venezuela, down to Puerto Carreño where it flows into the Orinoco. The Meta River is long and its drainage basin is . The Meta divides the Colombian Llanos in two different parts: the western portion on the left bank is more humid, receives the relatively nutrient-rich sediments from the Andean mountain range and therefore soils and tributaries are also nutrient-rich, while the eastern portion, ''high plain'' or ''altillanura' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Machetes
Older machete from Latin America Gerber machete/saw combo Agustín Cruz Tinoco of San Agustín de las Juntas, Oaxaca">San_Agustín_de_las_Juntas.html" ;"title="Agustín Cruz Tinoco of San Agustín de las Juntas">Agustín Cruz Tinoco of San Agustín de las Juntas, Oaxaca uses a machete to carve wood. file:Mexican machete.JPG, Mexican machete, from Acapulco, 1970. Horn handle, hand forged blade (hammer marks visible). A machete (; ) is a broad blade used either as an agricultural implement similar to an axe, or in combat like a long-bladed knife. The blade is typically long and usually under thick. In the Spanish language, the word is possibly a diminutive form of the word ''macho'', which was used to refer to sledgehammers. Alternatively, its origin may be ''machaera'', the name given by the Romans to the falcata. It is the origin of the English language equivalent term ''matchet'', though it is less commonly used. In much of the English-speaking Caribbean, such as Jamai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hunter-gatherers Of South America
A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, honey, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game (pursuing and/or trapping and killing wild animals, including catching fish), roughly as most animal omnivores do. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct. Hunting and gathering was humanity's original and most enduring successful competitive adaptation in the natural world, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change were displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist groups ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethnic Groups In Colombia
Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuela to the east and northeast, Brazil to the southeast, Ecuador and Peru to the south and southwest, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and Panama to the northwest. Colombia is divided into 32 departments and the Capital District of Bogotá, the country's largest city. It covers an area of 1,141,748 square kilometers (440,831 sq mi), and has a population of 52 million. Colombia's cultural heritage—including language, religion, cuisine, and art—reflects its history as a Spanish colony, fusing cultural elements brought by immigration from Europe and the Middle East, with those brought by Atlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans, as well as with those of the various Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Amerindi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indigenous Peoples In Venezuela
Indigenous people in Venezuela, Amerindians or Native Venezuelans, form about 2% of the total population of Venezuela,Van Cott (2003), "Andean Indigenous Movements and Constitutional Transformation: Venezuela in Comparative Perspective", ''Latin American Perspectives'' 30(1), p52 although many Venezuelans are mixed with indigenous ancestry. Indigenous people are concentrated in the Southern Amazon rainforest state of Amazonas, where they make up nearly 50% of the population and in the Andes of the western state of Zulia. The most numerous indigenous people, at about 200,000, is the Venezuelan part of the Wayuu (or Guajiro) people who primarily live in Zulia between Lake Maracaibo and the Colombian border.Richard Gott (2005), ''Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution'', Verso. p202 Another 100,000 or so indigenous people live in the sparsely populated southeastern states of Amazonas, Bolívar and Delta Amacuro. There are at least 30 indigenous groups in Venezuela, including th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guahibo People
The Guahibo (also called Guajibo, or Sikuani, though the latter is regarded as derogatory) people are an indigenous people native to the Llanos or savanna plains in eastern Colombia (Arauca, Meta, Guainia, and Vichada departments) and in southern Venezuela near the Colombian border. Their population was estimated at 23,772 people in 1998. A related group, sometimes considered a sub-tribe of the Guahibo, are the Playero, whose population, estimated in the early 1980s at 200 people, live along the Arauca River. Municipalities belonging to Guahibo territory The Guahibo inhabited the Llanos of Arauca. History An 1856 watercolor by Manuel María Paz is an early depiction of the Guahibo people in Casanare Province. From the late 1700s until at least 1970s, Guahibos and the related Cuiva people suffered severe, if sporadic, violence at the hand of Colombian and Venezuelan colonists. Episodes of violence included an 1870 massacre of over two hundred Guahibos organized by Venezue ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Curassow
Curassows are one of the three major groups of cracid birds. They comprise the largest-bodied species of the cracid family. Three of the four genera are restricted to tropical South America; a single species of ''Crax'' ranges north to Mexico. They form a distinct clade which is usually classified as the subfamily Cracinae. Evolution In line with the other 3 main lineages of cracids (chachalacas, true guans, and the horned guan), mt and nDNA sequence data indicates that the curassows diverged from their closest living relatives (probably the guans) at some time during the Oligocene, or c.35–20 mya (Pereira ''et al.'' 2002). This data must be considered preliminary until corroborated by material (e.g. fossil) evidence however. What appears certain from analysis of the molecular data, calibrated against geological events that would have induced speciation is that there are 2 major lineages of curassows: one containing only ''Crax'', and another made up of ''Mitu'' and ''Paux ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shaman
Shamanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner (shaman) interacting with what they believe to be a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spiritual energies into the physical world for the purpose of healing, divination, or to aid human beings in some other way. Beliefs and practices categorized as "shamanic" have attracted the interest of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including anthropologists, archeologists, historians, religious studies scholars, philosophers and psychologists. Hundreds of books and academic papers on the subject have been produced, with a peer-reviewed academic journal being devoted to the study of shamanism. In the 20th century, non-Indigenous Westerners involved in countercultural movements, such as hippies and the New Age created modern magicoreligious practices influenced by their ideas of various Indigenous religions, creating what has been ter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maraca
A maraca (), sometimes called shaker or chac-chac, is a rattle which appears in many genres of Caribbean and Latin music. It is shaken by a handle and usually played as part of a pair. Maracas (from Guaraní ), also known as tamaracas, were rattles of divination, an oracle of the Brazilian Tupinamba people, found also with other Indigenous ethnic groups, such as the Guarani, Orinoco and in Florida. Rattles made from ''Lagenaria'' gourds are being shaken by the natural grip, while the round ''Crescentia'' calabash fruits are fitted to a handle. Human hair is sometimes fastened on the top, and a slit is cut in it to represent a mouth, through which their shamans (''payes'') made it utter its responses. A few pebbles are inserted to make it rattle and it is crowned with the red feathers of the (scarlet ibis). Every man had his maraca. It was used at their dances and to heal the sick. Andean curandero A ''curandero'' (, healer; f. , also spelled , , f. ) is a traditional ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hammocks
A hammock (from Spanish , borrowed from Taíno and Arawak ) is a sling made of fabric, rope, or netting, suspended between two or more points, used for swinging, sleeping, or resting. It normally consists of one or more cloth panels, or a woven network of twine or thin rope stretched with ropes between two firm anchor points such as trees or posts. Hammocks were developed by native inhabitants of the Americas for sleeping, as well as the English. Later, they were used aboard ships by sailors to enable comfort and maximize available space, by explorers or soldiers travelling in wooded regions and eventually by parents in the early 1920s for containing babies just learning to crawl. Today they are popular around the world for relaxation; they are also used as a lightweight bed on camping trips. The hammock is often seen as a symbol of summer, leisure, relaxation and simple, easy living. Etymology The word ''hammock'' comes, via Spanish, from a Taíno culture Arawakan word ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
