The Bororo are

indigenous people of Brazil Indigenous may refer to: *Indigenous peoples *Indigenous (ecology), presence in a region as the result of only natural processes, with no human intervention *Indigenous (band), an American blues-rock band *Indigenous (horse), a Hong Kong racehorse ...

, living in the state of

Mato Grosso Mato Grosso ( – ) is one of the states of Brazil, the List of Brazilian states by area, third largest by area, located in the Central-West Region, Brazil, Central-West region. The state has 1.66% of the Brazilian population and is responsible ...

. They also extended into

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

and the Brazilian state of

Goiás Goiás () is a Brazilian States of Brazil, state located in the Central-West Region, Brazil, Central-West region. Goiás borders the Federal District (Brazil), Federal District and the states of (from north clockwise) Tocantins, Bahia, Minas Ge ...

. The Western Bororo live around the Jauru and Cabaçal rivers. The Eastern Bororo ( Orarimogodoge) live in the region of the São Lourenço, Garças, and Vermelho Rivers. The Bororo live in eight villages. The Bororo (or even Coroados, Boe, Orarimogodo) are an ethnic group in Brazil that has an estimated population of just under two thousand. They speak the Borôro language (code ISO 639 : BOR) and are mainly of

animistic Animism (from meaning 'breath, Soul, spirit, life') is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct Spirituality, spiritual essence. Animism perceives all things—animals, plants, Rock (geology), rocks, rivers, Weather, ...

belief. They live in eight villages in the central areas of

. A famous exponent of this group is

Cândido Rondon Marshal Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (5 May 1865 – 19 January 1958) was a Brazilian military officer most famous for his telegraph commission and exploration of Mato Grosso and the western Amazon basin, as well as his lifelong support for ...

, a Brazilian army official and founder of Fundação Nacional do Índio (or FUNAI). Bororo's culture was closely studied by French anthropologist

Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair o ...

during his expedition to Amazonia and

(1935–1936), described in his famous book '' Tristes Tropiques'' (1955).

Names

The Bororo, whose name means "village court" in their language, are also known as the Araés, Araripoconé, Boe, Coroados, Coxiponé, Cuiabá, and Porrudos people.

History

The first contact with the European colonizers took place in the seventeenth century with the arrival of the

Jesuit missionaries The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rome. It was founded in 1540 ...

. In the past, most Bororo groups were continually at

war War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...

with other Bororo groups, as well as with other tribes and non-indigenous Brazilians, and their war parties undertook long-distance raids. Bororo villages formed long-term alliances for war. In the 18th century, mining sites for the extraction of gold began in

. Due to the pressure of the garimpeiros, the gold seekers, Bororo divided into two groups, those of the East (Coroados) and those of the West (Campanhas), which once separated never returned to be united. The Bororo of the West disappeared in the second half of the 20th century in Bolivia. The Eastern Bororo, however, remained isolated from the world until the middle of the nineteenth century when a road was built connecting the Mato Grosso region to São Paulo and Minas Gerais. This road passed through the São Lourenço valley, where Bororo lived. This was the reason why the most violent conflict was triggered in the history of the conquest of

. After fifty years of war, Bororo surrendered to the state and after that apparent truce came the diamond seekers who also exploited and severely damaged the territory. After these conflicts, the Bororo people saw some peace with the mission of pacifying the Salesian missionaries. Their "

Christianization Christianization (or Christianisation) is a term for the specific type of change that occurs when someone or something has been or is being converted to Christianity. Christianization has, for the most part, spread through missions by individu ...

" was, in any case, another event that contributed to almost completely extinguishing their linguistic and cultural heritage. Obviously today the situation of Bororo seems less critical than in the past.

Culture

While searching for missing explorer

Percy Fawcett Percy Harrison Fawcett (18 August 1867 disappeared 29 May 1925) was a British geographer, artillery officer, cartographer, archaeologist and explorer of South America. He disappeared in 1925 (along with his eldest son, Jack, and one of Ja ...

in 1930, a wayward party including

Aloha Wanderwell Aloha Wanderwell (Idris Galcia Hall née Welsh, October 13, 1906 – June 4, 1996) was a Canadian explorer, author, filmmaker, and aviator. Beginning when she was 16 years old, she became the first woman to drive around the globe, driving a For ...

filmed the daily activities of the Bororo. A 32-minute silent film from the trip survives as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Studies Film Archives and documents a ceremonial dance, a first contact scenario with Boboré villagers, and Bororo men experiencing sympathetic labor pains. Anthropologist

lived for some time among the Bororo during his first stay in Brazil (1935–1939). Their mythology features extensively in his book ''

The Raw and the Cooked ''The Raw and the Cooked'' (1964) is the first volume from ''Mythologiques'', a structural study of Amerindian mythology written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was originally published in French as '. Although the book is part ...

''. Marshal

(1865–1956), who was to become the first director of Brazil's Indians Protection Bureau (SPI/FUNAI) and creator of the Xingu National Park, was the son of a Bororo woman. His first major success after joining the Army was the installation of a

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...

line to Mato Grosso. He not only was able to pacify the Bororo, who had blocked previous attempts to set up that line, but even recruited their help to complete it. The Bororo associate body odor with a person's life force, and breath odor with the person's soul.

Language

The Bororo people speak Bororo Proper, which belongs to the Bororo language family in the Macro-Ge language family. Literacy rates are under 30%. The language is written in the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

. The Bororo people call their original language ''Boe Wadáru''. The majority of the population today speaks Portuguese and the Bororo language. This language is spoken by about a thousand individuals who constitute a small ethnic group of the Amazon named Bororo people; Its diffusion area is mainly found in the Brazilian region of

. In 1976, there was recorded a very low native number (four people) in the Bolivian district of Santa Cruz, in the province of Angel Sandoval, near the border with Brazil. However, today it is supposed that the Bororo language is extinct in Bolivia since it is thought to have been incorporated by other predominant linguistic realities. Today the Bororo language is spoken in Brazil in the state of Mato Grosso, mainly in the villages of Meruri, Sangradouro and Perigera. Even in Brazil, this language risked being extinct forever. Towards the end of the 1960s the use of the Bororo language was forbidden in the towns of Merai and Sangradouro where the Salesian mission was operating, but with the passing of time it was restored, and the bilingual education was put into practice. All this led to a moderate revitalization of the language, but since then it is still spoken by just 1024 individuals, making it a so-called "extinct language" or threatened.

Social structure

The Bororo are a small people in the

Amazon rainforest The Amazon rainforest, also called the Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin ...

living in the southwest of the Brazilian region of

. The literal translation of the word "boror" is " village courtyard". It's no coincidence that Bororo's homes are traditionally arranged in a circle that will be a kind of spatiotis or patio for them, which will act as the main space of Bororo's life. This square, if so called, is so important that it has given the same name to this group of people as it is within that typical courtyard that the Bororo people concentrate most of the social phenomena and spirit-Religious. In the complex social organization of Bororo, the classification of individuals is governed by several number of factors including

clan A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship and descent. Even if lineage details are unknown, a clan may claim descent from a founding member or apical ancestor who serves as a symbol of the clan's unity. Many societie ...

membership, blood descent, and group of residence (referring to where a family lives in the village). This last detail is important because in the spatial distribution of homes each clan occupies a precise role. The aldeia (village) is divided into two exogamic half-Exerae and Tugarége-each divided into four clans, consisting of several families. A curious aspect for a people that may sometimes seem primitive is that woman has a very particular role in the concept of Bororo society, and indeed the rule of the offspring predicts that this is matriarchal, and that the infant then receives a name that Join the mother clan. The importance of these rules is also noted in marriage. After a Bororo wedding, the man will have to live in the house of his bride and will also have obligations to his family, such as fishing, hunting, working and, if necessary, making ornamental items for his bride's brother. Although it seems that man is totally devoted and devoted entirely to his wife after marriage, it is this complexity of conjugal relationships that is the cause of frequent separations, making it possible for a man to live in multiple homes throughout his life. Despite everything that has so far been explained, it may lead to thinking that the husband's obligations to his wife are at the top of the pyramid because of their importance, another truth of the Bororo culture is that a man always maintains a bond with his much more important family Of what binds her to her bride. It is true that an adult male, although married, maintains a number of obligations to the women of his family, namely his sisters. For example, it is their custom that a man is more concerned with his grandchildren, "iwagedu" in Bororo, than his own children; The only obligation of a father to his children is to banish them, a physical and non-cultural obligation. The complex organization of their lives also reflects on how one lives in the home. In fact, although two families of different nuclei (having blood ties even outside that exact space) live under the same roof, they can divide the interior spaces of the house; It is not by chance that the ends of the house are more private areas where you can put this division into practice, and the center of the house is a shared space devoted to visits, small daily rituals, and eating meals. The Bororo home is usually left with doors and windows open to allow it to be able to control what is inside (in the center), except when rituals are held inside which women cannot attend or during mourning. One last interesting thing to consider is that, in mourning, the house becomes a space between the domestic domain and the public-legal domain (as Sylvia Caiuby Novaes observes) since the end of funerals must be destroyed after it has been completely empty throughout the mourning period.

Lifestyle

Traditionally hunters and gatherers, under the influence of the missionaries and then of the Brazilian authorities more recently, were put into agriculture, which now ensures their subsistence. Men hunt and women, especially in the Rio Vermelho region, plant and harvest recently introduced cassava, maize and rice. Since agriculture is practiced only by women, they are becoming increasingly important, particularly as a result of the scarcity of game. The Bororos practice many rituals including: *

Corn Maize (; ''Zea mays''), also known as corn in North American English, is a tall stout Poaceae, grass that produces cereal grain. It was domesticated by indigenous peoples of Mexico, indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago ...

Festival, a celebration of cereal gathering, important food in Indian food; * The piercing of the ears and the lips; * The funeral ritual is a sacred celebration for all those who consider themselves Indians. The rites of passage (in which individuals pass from one social category to another) the most important are: * The naming ceremony; * The initiation; * The funerary rites, which can last up to 2 months and which have attracted the attention of ethnologists by their complexity.

Biology

The Bororo all share the same

blood type A blood type (also known as a blood group) is based on the presence and absence of antibody, antibodies and Heredity, inherited antigenic substances on the surface of red blood cells (RBCs). These antigens may be proteins, carbohydrates, glycop ...

: Type O blood, like most Native Americans.

Totemism

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (; 10 April 1857 – 13 March 1939) was a French scholar trained in philosophy who furthered anthropology with his contributions to the budding fields of sociology and ethnology. His primary field interest was ways of thinking. ...

quotes Karl von den Steinen (1894) and comments: "The Trumai (a tribe of northern Brazil) say that they are aquatic animals. The Bororo (neighboring tribe) boast of being araras red). 'This does not only mean that after their death they become araras, nor that the araras are metamorphosed Bororó, and must be treated as such. Von den Steinen, who did not want to believe it, but who had to surrender to their formal assertion, the Bororó coldly say that they are now araras, exactly as if a caterpillar said it was a butterfly. (K. von den Steinen, ''Unter den Naturvölkern Zentralbrasiliens'', p. 305-306). It is not a name they give; it is not a relationship they proclaim. What they want to convey is an essential identity ... For a mentality governed by the law of participation, there is no difficulty there. All societies of the totemic form include collective representations of the same kind, implying a similar identity between the individuals of a totemic group and their

totem A totem (from or ''doodem'') is a spirit being, sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage (anthropology), lineage, or tribe, such as in the Anishinaabe clan system. While the word ...

. "(Lucien Levy-Bruhl, ''Mental functions in lower societies'' , Paris, Alcan, 1910, Pp. 61-62.) 4 For Claude Lévi-Strauss (''Totemism today'', 1962)

Notes

External links

Society: Bororo
Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent at Canterbury

''Indian Cultures''
Brazil: Bororo World of Sound
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bororo People Ethnic groups in Brazil Ethnic groups in Bolivia Indigenous peoples in Bolivia Indigenous peoples of Eastern Brazil Indigenous peoples in Brazil