Return to Venerable Forms of Leadership

According to Maybury-Lewis (1967), in the mid-twentieth century, community leaders were not formally installed and had no explicit authority. Rather, chiefly designations merely recognized where power already lay, acknowledging those especially prestigious leaders whose powers of influence derived from the ability to speak for their factions, facilitate agreement within the community, and thereby promote a sense of consensus. Becoming this kind of chief, according to Maybury-Lewis, required that one have the support of his political faction and that this faction be dominant in the community. Chiefly status endured only if one retained prestige among a dominant faction and thereby maintained one’s influence over public opinion. Although men potentially competed for chieftaincy, there could be as many chiefs as there were exceptionally prestigious men who enjoyed the support of a dominant faction.

In contrast to that historical account, in 2004, there were two formally recognized leaders with the explicit authority to conduct external relations on behalf of the community. Tsuptó was chief (dama’dö’ö’wa), and Paulo was vice-chief. Both Tsuptó and Paulo were relatively young, well educated, fluent Portuguese speakers, and had extensive familiarity with national Brazilian society, having lived and studied in large cities (see Franca 2007; Graham 1995). They represented a brand of community leader that emerged after Maybury-Lewis conducted his fieldwork because of the relatively recent importance of interfacing with external social and political spheres. According to my most recent information, the Etênhiritipá community had a chief and vice-chief, although Pimentel Barbosa was without vice-chief after a recent community fission. Yet, chiefly elders continued to exert influence much as described by Maybury-Lewis for the 1950s, except, perhaps, for his emphasis on leadership being derived from factional dominance.

Interviews with Tsuptó, Paulo, and other influential elders provided important insights into how contemporary leaders understood the historical transformations in political process that occurred between the era Maybury-Lewis referred to and the present. According to Tsuptó, oral tradition told that the A’uwẽ were a politically united people for much of history, with the influence of leadership being coordinated through the forum of the men’s council (warã). The splintering of the A’uwẽ people into geographically dispersed and politically autonomous subgroups, each with its own leaders, occurred when internal conflict turned segments of the population against one another during the occupation of the ancestral community Sõrepré, estimated to have been in the late nineteenth century (Lopes da Silva 1992; Welch, Santos, et al. 2013). Those events eventually led to overt conflict and the ultimate division of the A’uwẽ population into different subgroups and communities. Thus, although Sõrepré community was often characterized by A’uwẽ oral historians as the historical pinnacle of their society, where the population was large, reaching into the thousands, and remained united in a single location for decades, it was also the location were social strife severed the population into splinter groups that would permanently separate, initiated long-lasting feuds between kin groups, and turned A’uwẽ leadership forms toward a more authoritative model.¹ The history of conflict at the Sõrepré community was therefore also notable for contributing to a marked decline in community well-being.

In 2004, then vice-chief Paulo spoke of the important shift in leadership organization that occurred following Sõrepré, emphasizing the former plurality of leadership, whereby chieftainship was shared by respected elder males who built consensus in dialogue with the entire men’s counsel. According to Paulo, however, the internal conflict that began at Sõrepré precipitated authoritative forms of leadership, whereby single leaders manipulated the community and directed the benefits of their positions to their close relatives. According to this report, for decades thereafter, leadership became more about individual influence and much less of a cooperative process, which he considered a corruptive influence contributing to the deterioration of community wellness.

Tsuptó, Paulo, and other contemporary leaders at Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá represented themselves as engaged in the work of reversing those undesirable leadership patterns that followed the heyday at Sõrepré by promoting peaceful methods of dispute resolution and prioritizing the well-being of the whole community over personal or kin group interests. One way they did so was by deemphasizing the importance of their contemporary formal leadership positions in favor of traditionalist versions of leadership based on the idea of multiple informal leaders whose status derived from a combination of genealogy, seniority, personal capacity, and prestige. Such informal leaders were designated by the synonymous terms danhim’apito or danhim’hö’a, but also were simply recognized as mature adults (iprédu) or elders (ĩhi). There were no A’uwẽ designations that translated as “community owner” or “community master,” as has been documented in other Amazonian societies (Fausto 2008). This A’uwẽ formulation led Tsuptó and Paulo to defer to prominent elders who sat at the center of the men’s council and commanded the respect of the entire community. Thus, despite the relatively recent innovation of younger and formally recognized leaders authorized to make certain kinds of decisions on behalf of the community, real power remained with multiple elder leaders who used their influence to coordinate decision making through consensus. Advocates of this recent recuperation of more traditionalist and plural leadership styles among the elders in the men’s council, and the absence of a singular authoritative chief, viewed it as an important change since the aftermath of Sõrepré with tangible benefits for the population’s social, psychological, and physical well-being.

Both Maybury-Lewis (1967) and Graham (1995) identified leaders as those who conventionally spoke first and last in the men’s council. During my early research, those roles were nearly always filled by the late Sereburã, then one of the eldest, most respected, and charismatic men in the community—also notably Tsuptó’s father’s brother. When Sereburã stood to open council discussion, he usually introduced subjects that had already captured the attention of the community and set into motion the task of discussing solutions. In his closing remarks, he often summarized the preceding discussions, provided his opinions considering other people’s comments, and reiterated any decisions that had been reached or that he detected were evident in the discourse. Usually, decisions were not reached in a single meeting, as topics of discussion were addressed in multiple meetings over the course of days, weeks, or months. In one sense, Sereburã seemingly spoke the mind of the community. In another sense, his words transformed disparate voices into unified resolution. Sereburã’s methods illustrate Maybury-Lewis’s (1967) and Graham’s (1995) accounts of influence deriving from prestige, and prestige from the ability to facilitate collective decision making. Sereburã’s political influence in the community was at that time unchallenged, and yet his voice was not only the voice of an individual. Sereburã spoke in dialogue with the community, with other senior leaders, and with his close friends and kin. He spoke as a member of the mature adult secular age grade (iprédu), as an informal elder, and as a member of the senior ai’rere’rada age set. He also spoke as a male, a member of the poreza’õno exogamous moiety, a senior owner of several heritable prerogatives, the grandson of important historical leaders, and a real or categorical father to many younger men in the community. Sereburã’s political influence derived from that robust confluence of social factors with his magnetic personality, practiced eloquence, lifelong leadership preparation, and willingness to respect the collective will. The maintenance of his prestige according to traditionalist standards under rapidly changing historical circumstances also depended on his willingness to lead alongside young bilingual individuals in new chiefly political roles. As Sereburã once said to me, “Tsuptó is chief out there [outside the community]. Sereburã knows nothing about non-A’uwẽ. But here in the village I am leader. In the village I am chief.”

Sereburã’s example illustrates the relationship between political influence and process and provides a point of departure for discussing the mutual importance of multiple systems for reckoning age, seniority, and rank for how prestige was allocated in the political arena. Integral to that political arena was the men’s council, where Sereburã downplayed any divisive aspects of his political and social affiliations to facilitate the will of the community. The men’s council was a deliberative space where the ideals of consensus and participation usually overrode the narrowed interests of individuals, families, and factions, and therefore where the best interests of the entire community should be considered. As Graham argued, the plurality of men’s council discourse counteracted the oppositional forces of political factions (Graham 1995). During council meetings, numerous men spoke simultaneously, expressing both agreement and disagreement, thereby submerging their individuality to a cacophony of collectivity. However so, men’s council conventions simultaneously promoted influence structures that prioritized maleness, seniority, membership in the Tadpole exogamous moiety, and genealogical privilege.

Interruptions to Political Unity

Among the many divisive aspects of the political process, factionalism is the most widely recognized, having been a major theme in Maybury-Lewis’s (1967) scholarship regarding the A’uwẽ, where it was described as a ubiquitous dimension of social organization and something of an eternal competition for supremacy between kin groups. I have argued elsewhere that my more recent ethnographic data indicated that kinship-based political factionalism was not a generalized template for a pervasive division of society into political allies and adversaries (Welch 2022b).² As I argue in this book, my understanding of A’uwẽ social organization foregrounds the plurality of different configurations of equality and difference in such a manner that no single hierarchical arrangement took absolute precedence over others. A’uwẽ were no more politically factional than they were many other less divisive or conflictual things. Thus, from my point of view, it is erroneous and a disservice to the A’uwẽ to characterize their worldview as fundamentally rooted in discord between factions.

In this section I address factional political discord not as a singularly prominent dimension of A’uwẽ social organization, but rather as an interruption to the pursuit of political unity. Episodes of conflict between clearly delineated factions were unusual and undesirable, having the potential to significantly reduce social well-being for extended periods. Factionalism has been characterized as central to politics because esteemed leaders earned their prestige through their endeavors as members of factions, retained such influence through the continued support of their factions, and all the while asserted the interests of their factions through behind-the-scenes politicking (Graham 1995; Maybury-Lewis 1967). As I came to understand it in the 2000s and 2010s, factional politics was a complex phenomenon involving transitory alliances for limited purposes, diverse formulations of genealogical relatedness, and multiple systems of social hierarchy. Not all political disagreement was aligned with factions. Rarely was a community clearly segregated into delineated factions. Many people avoided publicly choosing one faction over another until forced to do so by an imminent community division.

In the usual course of political life, political influence within a forum that privileged a morality of consensus permitted certain segments of society to enjoy ideological hegemony. Relatively few influential leaders and their patrilineal associations, bilateral kin networks, and political viewpoints became points of reference for the entire community, despite all its internal heterogeneity. This form of leadership was based in prestige and consent. It was evidence of political accord, which is considered good for the entire community.

Periodically, when political tensions reached breaking points, the unifying forces of participatory politics failed, and divisions between key actors were plainly exposed. At such moments of political breakdown, previously subordinate voices might consolidate into explicit opposition, and community leaders might seek to resolve their differences through dispute rather than consensus. This course of action set them on the path to a community division because it was hard to reverse course after political conflict had become overt. When opposing groups initially differentiated themselves as factions, their support networks might be limited to close kin and allies, while others abstained from taking sides. Community divisions might occur before or after conflict escalated to the point of generalized social polarization. When it escalated, factional leaders sought support and reinforcement from within the community and elsewhere, motivating more people to align themselves publicly. When a faction moved to another location, establishing a new community, before conflict escalated, people might decide to join them earlier or later without contributing to a climate of discord.

This fissioning process is not new. A’uwẽ oral history described a complex series of divisions and reunions since the historical occupation of the Sõrepré community. With each such division, the collective memory of political relations gained an additional layer of complexity, providing another historical motivation, genealogical argument, or ideological justification for contemporary political prerogatives or disputes. Thus, each new political crisis involved a combination of recent and historical factors with the potential to escalate the timbre of disagreement as they gained play in political discourse.

This historical and contemporary process of community division was largely responsible for the multiplication of communities within the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Whereas in the past, community divisions could result in relocation of subordinate factions to new sites at considerable distances from a mother community, recently people were constrained by the boundaries of the federally recognized land. Additionally, recently established communities had tended to be near the very small town Matinha on a federal highway (BR-158) flanking the western border of the Indigenous land. This pattern was likely due to the advantages of proximal access to the highway by motor vehicle, and thereby shorter distances to the nearest towns with banks and supermarkets. A recent concentration of communities in the portions of the land most affected by invasions by ranchers in the 1970s therefore have histories of severe deforestation. In comparison, the portions of the land least deforested by historical ranchers (near the northern and eastern borders) did not have communities in the 2000s and 2010s. This geographic distribution had potential consequences for collecting, hunting, and gardening, which might suffer in the vicinities of the new communities because of continuing impacts of past vegetation removal and cattle pastures planted with invasive grasses.

The departures of Paraíso, Santa Vitória, and Sõrepré communities from Pimentel Barbosa were largely congenial. In contrast, my impression of factional processes during the 2005–2006 division of the Pimentel Barbosa community and the 2021–2022 division of Etênhiritipá (still incomplete as of the finalization of this text) was of immense tension and insecurity among members of opposing factions. I heard allies accuse their opponents of contemporary and historical injustices. I listened to stories of siblings who stopped speaking to one another and other kin who claimed to have disowned each other. Difficult choices were made as people took sides, discontinued friendships, broke marriage promises, and moved residences. Yet, through it all, I perceived that how people negotiated those tortuous ruptures was strongly influenced by how they fit into the fabric of A’uwẽ sociality. They made those decisions individually and idiosyncratically but all the while as members of age groups, kin networks, and genders. Just as Sereburã administered political consensus as a member of various social collectivities, each member of society navigated the terrain of political crisis as a member of multiple social bodies and statuses. In the remainder of this section, I trace the interaction of such social factors in the political sphere by looking at configurations of leadership and influence as an additional age hierarchy based in seniority.

Preludes to Male Leadership

Explicit political participation was reserved for mature male adults through their inclusion in the men’s council, but the practice of leadership began much earlier for boys. As discussed in chapter 3, each secular age set was internally stratified by relative age and individualized through specific leadership positions during preinitiation. Such designations were made by parents and adult relatives according to various criteria ranging from perceptions of relative age, kinship relations, and personal characteristics such as leadership potential, including discipline, sporting competence, body size, and physical beauty. Selection as age set elders or leaders was accompanied by expectations of exemplary behavior and assumption of responsibility for one’s peers. Thus, even at early ages, the capacity for having differentiated social influence was associated with various individual and genealogical factors, the majority of which were beyond a boys’ immediate control and might contribute to exceptional prestige later in life. Furthermore, these distinctions helped to establish at an early age that social inequality was congruent with the morality of collectivity, unity, and conformity that also accompanied secular age set membership. Preinitiate differentiation prepared youths for the adult political process because it required them to adopt mature social perspectives such as deferring to those with senior rank, respecting other people’s domains of influence and authority, and subordinating individual to group agendas.

When an age set reached the novitiate adult age grade, its leadership dynamics become somewhat more structured. No longer residing in the preinitiate house, novitiate adult men held evening council meetings (warã) in the community plaza to the side of the mature adult men’s council. Observing the aesthetic of left- and right-side secular age set moiety alternation, the position of each novitiate men’s council relative to the mature adult men’s council recalled the location of its now dismantled preinitiate house: an age set whose preinitiate house was on the left side of the community held its council to the left of the adult men’s council, and vice versa (Graham 1995). During their initial years as novitiates, members of an age set had few decisions to make and therefore little to discuss in their nightly council meetings. When I was a novitiate adult, my age set peers usually spent that time in informal conversation followed by a round of singing performances. They began by singing the night’s song while standing in their council space and facing the current preinitiate house on the opposite side of the community (figure 28). They then sang around the community in front of residences while the mature adult men conducted their evening council meeting, always starting on the same side as the current preinitiate house and finishing on the side of their own preinitiate house.

Figure 28

Novitiate men (’ritei’wa) performing a song during their evening council (warã), held to one side of the centrally located mature men’s council, 2005.

After completing my initial year of fieldwork, I returned to the Pimentel Barbosa community in 2006 and was present immediately before the novitiate adults would be promoted to full mature adult status during the approximately quinquennial secular initiation rites (danhono). During that visit, I observed a striking difference in how the novitiate men went about their age set business. They seemed to take greater interest in organizing age set activities and had adopted a more formal format for nightly council meetings. They now consistently imitated the circular form and presentation style of mature adult men’s council meetings (figure 29). One by one, young men stood in front of their peers to present their reports and opinions about topics of import, while respected individuals sought through their opening and closing comments to crystallize the plurality of voices into collective decisions. Those meetings provided first opportunities for young men to practice adult political oration (Graham 1995).

Figure 29

The author participating in a circular novitiate men’s evening council (warã).

Upon reaching the mature adult secular age grade (iprédu), all males enjoyed the right to participate in the men’s council, giving the political process a presumption of collectivity. Indeed, addressing a topic in a council meeting implied that everyone had the opportunity to speak out and that any decisions reflected the will of the community. The collectivity of the council, however, was accompanied by systems of internal stratification that differentiated the allocation of influence and access to voice among its members. Four important factors that influenced disparities in the men’s council were relative age, exogamous moiety membership, heritable prerogative ownerships, and genealogical seniority. I address these factors in the remainder of this chapter.

Just as secular age set membership was a most salient means of reckoning age in daily life, so it was in the men’s council. The newest participants in the council were members of the most recent age set to have entered mature adulthood (iprédu) and served as mentors (danhohui’wa) to the preinitiates (wapté) that currently occupied the preinitiate house. By social convention, members of this youngest mature adult age set mostly limited their participation in council meetings to listening and occasionally making background comments. They positioned themselves spatially around the periphery of the council circle and rarely stood to deliver a formal address, except, for example, when reporting to their elders about their preinitiate protégés and their activities as mentors. Being a member of the youngest age set in the adult men’s council was an opportunity to observe and imitate one’s elders in preparation for future leadership. Yet, juniority in the men’s council also muted one’s voice because silence was considered the proper and respectful form of self-expression by younger mature adults. Thus, relative age tended to tilt the scales of men’s council consensus in favor of older mature adults who were not constrained by expectations that they exhibit respectful silence.

Political Influence Among Women and Men

Reaching motherhood involved establishing a sphere of female influence that began at home but gradually reached well beyond with the proliferation of her children and grandchildren. Like male influence, female influence was exercised independently from but often in dialogue with her spouse and other close opposite-gender kin. Mothers were neither victims nor objects of male prerogative, but rather active decision makers in their chosen domains who might coordinate with their husbands and other important men (see chapter 7).

Usually, only male members of older age sets who had the benefit of years of peripheral participation in council meetings presumed to stand to advocate for a position and thereby sway the decision-making process. Thus, political influence in the men’s council came with seniority. Yet, many factors influenced who was considered senior. Seniority in terms of secular age set membership was an important factor. All other things being equal, members of older secular age sets were thought to deserve more respect, deference, and political influence than members of younger age sets. Political influence also came with personal prestige, which depended on one’s genealogy, seniority within his age set, and personal merits. Thus, it was likely that the child of a respected leader, an age set elder, or someone with a strong personality and recognized competitive skills would be more vocal and have more influence in the men’s council.

Maybury-Lewis (1967) wrote that the five eldest age sets were the most active speakers in the men’s council in 1958–1962. In 2005, members of the seven eldest age sets spoke most frequently. Nonetheless, not all members of these eldest age sets had the inclination to deliver influential speeches. One of the least vocal individuals was the late Darú, a member of the eldest age set and thus one of the two eldest males in the community. Darú was widely respected for his extensive knowledge of the past, kind nature, and exceptional skill with handicrafts. He characterized himself, however, as someone who preferred to work rather than speak and was usually silent during council meetings. In contrast, the late Barbosa, a categorical brother of the late Sereburã and among the most vocal of men’s council seniors, belonged to the fourth eldest age set and was therefore a considerably junior relative to Darú. Barbosa was an extroverted man with practiced oratory skills. He followed Sereburã as informal community leader despite his relative youth among senior mature men. When Sereburã stopped attending council meetings because of declining health in about 2011, Barbosa assumed the role of opening and closing discussion with formal speeches intended to facilitate consensus and decision making.

In 2019, most elders who formerly led the men’s councils in the Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities during my years of research were deceased, creating a leadership vacuum with the potential to disrupt consensus building and conflict resolution. Slightly younger elders were assuming leadership roles, but without the practiced expertise of such leaders as Sereburã and Barbosa. Sometimes there were long silences in the men’s council before someone would take the initiative to give an opening or closing speech. Sometimes no one did so, and the conversation proceeded informally, without the benefit of a skilled orator to facilitate consensus. I suspect this gap will be temporary, with current leaders growing into their new roles, gaining respect, and assuming responsibility for leading council meetings. Until they do so, the communities may be disadvantaged in their pursuit of sustained political unity and potentially at greater risk of political discord that negatively influences community well-being.

The morning and evening men’s councils were almost without exception male forums for discussing public affairs of interest to the whole community. During these meetings, women were often preparing meals, caring for children, or engaging in conversation with their female kin in front of their houses. In the Pimentel Barbosa community, louder men’s council discourse was potentially audible to women sitting in front of several residences situated closer than others to the center of the community plaza, or by women who happened to be crossing the plaza returning from the river or visiting other households. This meant that particularly animated speeches might be heard by women and spread by word of mouth from one household to another. When men wished to keep their discussions unheard by women, they tightened the circle of men and carefully spoke in hushed voices. Otherwise, they expected women to be informed, either directly or indirectly, of their deliberations. Upon returning to their residences, men might share with their wives and other female kin some of what was discussed to keep them informed and to hear their opinions (Graham 1995). Women discussed these matters among themselves at home and while working in gardens and in the cerrados, thereby indirectly participating in men’s council deliberations. Graham (1995) also reported two occasions in which women joined the men’s council because they were particularly interested in the topic, seating themselves behind the men after the meetings had already begun and discussing matters quietly among themselves without making formal addresses to the entire council.

Women’s discursive influence was also apparent when elder females delivered speeches in public spaces with similar practiced eloquence to elder men speaking in the men’s council. I had opportunity to observe women’s formal discourse on diverse occasions. For example, I regularly conducted group interviews about topics of interest for my research. When I did so, it was common for potential interviewees of younger ages to insist that the only legitimate interviewees were elders, who knew more and could speak more authoritatively about the given topic. Consequently, I held numerous group interviews with elders. These elders preferred to meet for interviews with only members of their gender. When I interviewed women in groups, they strictly adhered to the A’uwẽ formulation of community meetings whereby influential individuals delivered formal speeches in sequence, rather than engaging in informal back-and-forth conversation. I also observed women give formal speeches when we made video recordings of them for a land demarcation study for FUNAI and cultural documentation projects sponsored by the Museu do Índio in Rio de Janeiro, all of which were to be curated by the museum as part of its permanent digital collection. On these occasions, the importance of creating enduring audiovisual registers of their messages seemed to prompt them to deliver formal speeches (for a critique of the ideology of video technology as permanent, see Graham 2016). Thus, in my interviews, many elder women delivered eloquent speeches while standing in front of other women or in front of a video camera and onlookers. Although I am not a linguist, it appeared to me that they did so according to similar conventions as men in their council meetings (cf. Graham 1995). I therefore conclude that influential elder women, like their male counterparts, cultivated their discourse skills through observation and imitation throughout their lives despite not participating directly in men’s council meetings.

Although men’s council meetings and women’s formal discourse addressed such diverse topics as to defy generalization, it is pertinent to note that recurrent topics included access to and conservation of the local cerrado landscape. In men’s council meetings, a few of the many environmental issues discussed with regularity were preinitiate and novitiate adult excursions into the cerrado to fish and collect materials for ceremonial accoutrements with their mentors, group hunting excursions including those employing fire to flush out game, efforts to secure federal governmental support for recognition of traditional territories as Indigenous lands, planting community rice fields, men’s fishing excursions, and women’s collecting excursions. During such discussions, men frequently raised the issue of overseeing younger participants who did not yet have adequate experience in the cerrado to operate autonomously without risking their safety or environmental wellness. These two concerns appeared to be relatively new in men’s council discourse, deriving from contemporary concerns that preinitiates, novitiate adults, and even younger mature adults were not as well prepared today as they were in the past for undertaking subsistence activities in the cerrado without supervision. Furthermore, they seemed directly related to emergent perspectives among influential mature adults that some subsistence activities had the potential to ecologically overburden their now limited Indigenous lands if not carefully planned and executed in accordance with A’uwẽ traditional ecological knowledge and in ways that distribute their impacts both spatially and temporally to allow appropriate regeneration (Leeuwenberg and Robinson 2000; Welch 2014, 2015; Welch, Brondízio, et al. 2013).

Rights and Responsibilities of Exogamous Moiety Membership

I found exogamous moiety affiliation to be accompanied by a series of rights and responsibilities that directly influenced the political process. According to Paulo, then vice-chief of the Pimentel Barbosa community and a member of the Big Water moiety, “We are the servants of the Tadpole moiety. We defend them and sweep up after them.” In another context, Supreteprã Xavante (2015, 99) explained that the Big Water moiety guaranteed security in the military aspect of the community, while the Tadpole moiety administered the political aspect, with control over internal politics of the communities. In my observation, regarding community leadership, the Tadpole moiety had ultimate decision-making authority, with the right to appoint official leaders from among its ranks. Under the contemporary structure of formal chieftainship, Tadpole individuals might be chiefs and Big Water individuals vice-chiefs. In 2005, then vice-chief Paulo told me that the Tadpole moiety leadership prerogative did not preclude the possibility of Big Water moiety members being appointed as primary chiefs and Tadpole people being vice-chiefs under unusual circumstances. He explained that Tadpole elders could decide to temporarily loan that prerogative to the Big Water moiety should it be in the best interest of the community, for example, if a Big Water individual was best qualified. Interestingly, that came to pass in 2007, when the Tadpole chief of the Etênhiritipá community (recently separated from the Pimentel Barbosa community) died. At that time, the Tadpole elders at Etênhiritipá appointed Paulo, formerly vice-chief, as chief. They also appointed as his new vice-chief a younger Tadpole individual, Caimi Wai’asse. This temporary arrangement held until several years later, when a member of the Tadpole moiety assumed the position of chief and a different Big Water individual was appointed vice-chief. This differentiation of formal community leadership positions (chief and vice-chief) according to their exogamous moieties was a contemporary innovation anchored in political traditionalism, whereby existing moiety characteristics were translated and adapted to fit today’s political needs. As an instance of resilience whereby contemporary circumstances were interpreted through the lens of cultural traditionalism, it is also an example of how new forms of political organization can exemplify notions of good living.

Under the informal process of men’s council leadership coordinated by chiefly elders, Tadpole individuals were understood to have prerogatives of facilitation and diplomacy as well as the responsibility to hear and respect the opinions of Big Water individuals. Effectively, this configuration amounted to a hierarchical ranking of the two moieties, with Big Water in subordinate position to Tadpole. Moiety ranking appears to be a common feature throughout Indigenous South America (Lévi-Strauss 1944). Thus, other configurations of age hierarchy and seniority may be subverted by one’s exogamous moiety ranking, affecting how two individuals interact in formal settings, such as the men’s council, and informal settings, such as during a private conversation.

The symbolic relationship between the Tadpole and Big Water moieties may be inferred from the mythic oral history of two formal friends (da’amo) who, as preinitiates (wapté), created the world’s animals (Giaccaria and Heide 1984; Graham 1995; Sereburã et al. 1998). Formal friends (who called each other ĩ’amo) always pertained to opposite exogamous moieties in expression of an aesthetic of complementarity between the two. In this case, the Tadpole friend repeatedly asked his Big Water friend, “What shall we create now?” The Big Water friend always replied, “You choose!” The Tadpole friend would then choose an animal and, by naming it, bring it into being. In that dynamic, the power of creation resided in the pair of friends acting together but depended on the Tadpole friend acting as initiator, decider, and doer. In contrast, the Big Water friend acted as supporter, agreer, and observer.

The usual social dynamics between members of the two moieties may be described as complementary and competitive. In daily social interactions outside the men’s council, members of the two exogamous moieties enthusiastically treated each other with esteemed and pleasurable competitive jocosity. Similarly to the demeaning joking that characterized banter between members of opposite secular age set moieties, opposite exogamous moiety playful derision usually focused on the strength (siptede or danhiptede) of one’s own moiety and the weakness (sib’uware) of the other, causing them to lose friendly competitions, such as hunting fire races (see chapter 6), noni sprinting races, efforts to remain awake all night during spiritual rituals and water-splashing exercises during the initiand phase of secular age set initiation rites, and any informal situation where opposite exogamous moiety members challenged one another to playful tests of their respective fortitude. Such good-natured competition and reciprocal gibe were celebrated as healthy and inspiriting social expressions of the culturally appropriate complementary yet adversarial relations between these moieties. They reinforced the social relevance of exogamous moiety membership beyond marriage selection and contributed to cultural resilience by strengthening its salience at a historical moment of considerable sociocultural transformation.

In the context of the men’s council, the proper political role of Big Water was to listen to Tadpole proposals, voice agreement or opposition as required, and then allow the Tadpole moiety to act in its rightful role as primary decision makers. With the Tadpole moiety obliged to consider Big Water opinions, and the Big Water moiety allowed to complain and object when this did not occur, this traditionalist form of decision making approximated an A’uwẽ version of consensus and was considered socially proper and good. Big Water had ample agency and influence in this dynamic. With two council meetings per day, the Big Water moiety had abundant opportunities to present their opinions and point out when their advice should be or should have been followed.

Heritable Prerogatives and Political Influence

Heritable prerogatives were vigorously maintained and protected by their owners and widely valued as deserved individual dignities worthy of respect. According to Giaccaria and Heide (1984, 122), “All of these ‘authorities’ [ownerships] have an action that we would call particularly trusted advisors: their judgment prevails over that of men and elders of the same group, their advice is heard with respect and put into practice; if it should happen that one of these individuals has a particularly strong and numerous family, and has particularly gifted people, such as an orator, then his influence comes to be imposed over other groups within the village.” All the eldest individuals who owned a particular prerogative were considered senior. Because genealogically distant individuals could be owners of the same prerogatives, there could be multiple senior owners in a single community and many more in other communities. Despite there being multiple elder owners of each prerogative, each was an autonomous owner and ultimate authority regarding their knowledge domains within their local spheres of social influence. They freely exercised the prerogatives owned by them and their younger kin, advising their community on matters they were exceptionally qualified to speak to as senior owners. Each had the independent right and responsibility to pass such prerogative knowledge to next of kin or other designees while still alive. Prerogative ownership thereby influenced political affairs by introducing an additional dimension of age seniority within topical domains of general community interest. Although heritable prerogatives influenced political processes, they did not operate as “patrilineages” that ultimately determined dualistic consanguineal factional associations, as proposed by previous scholars (Maybury-Lewis 1967; Welch 2022b).³

Heritable prerogative ownerships were private (owned by individuals who possessed the knowledge), exclusive (protected from nonowners), and hierarchical (senior owners exercised control), but dovetailed coherently with cultural ideals of collective consensus-based community decision making. For example, the political silencing of respectful young mature adults did not diminish the perceived collectivity of decisions made in the men’s council. Similarly, heritable prerogative ownerships were understood to contribute in good ways to participatory political discourse even though they overshadowed other viewpoints. They involved a form of authority gained through deference and agreement.

Differently from other forms of political prestige, that which derived from closely guarded prerogative ownership was earned by means of less public, less visible processes. This kind of influence was derived from knowledge that was acquired and often exercised in private and was based on muted and potentially unverified reputation, with only minor dimensions being publicly known through their performance in highly visible settings. The shroud of covertness that protected many heritable prerogatives discouraged their theft by nonowners and stimulated amplification through gossip as others imagined and discussed them and their senior owners.

An example of how senior owners exercised their heritable proprietary knowledge and used it to influence the political process can be found in white-lipped peccary ownership (uhö’tede’wa). My adoptive mother’s brother Roberto Huatá Wameru Otomopá was a senior white-lipped peccary owner. As an owner of this prerogative, he explained, he located these game animals by dreaming so that he and other hunters could find them the next day. He considered himself such an avid dreamer that he frequently awoke knowing where hunters could find large white-lipped peccary bands and where smaller bands were located that should not be hunted to protect their numbers. Roberto hunted alone much of the time, but when he dreamed a large band was nearby, he informed other men at the morning men’s council, encouraging them to give pursuit. In this manner he influenced council discussion and thereby gained prestige as an opinion leader. His heritable prerogative thereby contributed to his influence in the men’s council.

Examples of heritable prerogatives that I heard about ranged from technological skills to supernatural practices. At one extreme was the art of pottery, which was a female proprietary knowledge domain that had been abruptly discontinued with the introduction of aluminum pots many decades ago. Although in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, only one owner of that knowledge remained alive in 2022, she had not yet passed it on to her daughters, granddaughters, or other appropriate recipients. I was told that when pottery making was actively practiced, pottery owners enclosed their work area with a brush barrier to ensure that nonowners could not watch. When other women desired pots, they would place orders with these women. At the other end of the spectrum was male proprietary knowledge of the proper use of certain naturally occurring sacred substances that pierced the veil separating the physical and spiritual dimensions, allowing a person to directly see the spiritual world. Although female pottery manufacture and male spiritual vision were quite divergent kinds of knowledge, the principles of their ownership and transmission were very similar. They both involved socially sanctioned secrecy, authority held by elders, and presumed parallel inheritance with the possibility of adaptation in accordance with a senior knowledge holders’ wishes (they might choose to give their prerogative to a friend in repayment for an exceptional service, loan it to a substitute in the absence of an appropriate lineal recipient, or even transmit it to an opposite-gender child).

Sorcery (abzé or simi’ö) is especially relevant to the topics of political influence and heritable prerogatives. Considering heritable prerogatives were subject to gossip because their secrets were closely guarded, sorcerous knowledge was even more so. Because there were no shaman specialists among the A’uwẽ, anyone with knowledge of curing techniques, especially elders, performed spiritual massage and prepared remedies for their extended family members. In exceptional cases, treatment of last resort for grave illness involved applying shamanistic techniques collectively during a special kind of sacred ritual (wai’a), whereby men performed sucking magic simultaneously as a group (Welch 2010). None of these men were considered shaman specialists even though they collectively acted as shamanistic healers during this single ritual. Differently than family healers and participants in male spiritual healing rituals, owners of sorcery (simi’ö’tede’wa) owned proprietary knowledge about how to poison people using secret plant substances (Welch 2022b).

A’uwẽ evaluated others’ sorcerous capabilities through supposition and insinuation because very little verifiable information was available to them. Presumed sorcerous capacities were practiced covertly, causing reputations as powerful sorcerers to be earned indirectly and the political influence they facilitated to be muted and veiled under normal circumstances. When political circumstances were amiable, and political discord was minimal, sorcerous potentialities could reinforce undertones of deference or distrust in political forums. When the political mood was tense, and people were motivated to examine a social landscape in which factional opposition was causing polarization, discussion of sorcery became magnified. Threats led to accusations, which provoked retaliations. At such times, underlying currents of distrust deriving from reputations of sorcery knowledge ownership became overt by leveraging rumors of genealogical links to ancestral sorcery knowledge owners. Through this process, previously latent political influence became actualized.

I heard many sorcery accusations and threats during my fieldwork. In some cases, accusations followed circumstantial evidence, such as physical proximity between an adversarial adult and one’s child followed by the death of the child. In other cases, accusations were based mainly on patrilineal associations with reputations of heritable prerogatives. For example, one man accused another of supernatural maleficence because his deceased father was suspected of having killed an entire community with sorcery. In another example, a man expressed fear for his life because he suspected retaliation after being accused of murder by a family known to have powerful knowledge ownerships. In these and other cases, suspicions of sorcery knowledge ownership were transformed into verbal action as people sought to discredit opponents, incite fear, and justify aggression within contexts of factional conflict involving imminent or recent community divisions. Accordingly, sorcery discourse leveraged the ambiguity of heritable prerogative prestige as a strategy in political conflict, thereby transforming previously silent political powers into real forms of influence. These sorcery accusations amplified the already acrimonious relations between factions, thereby contributing to the social unwellness of a community embroiled in unnerving conflict.

Over the years, relations substantially calmed after the Etênhiritipá community divided from the Pimentel Barbosa community in 2006. Nevertheless, accusations of sorcery between them persisted. For example, in about 2016 the water tank at Etênhiritipá stopped pumping and was not fixed by public health services for over a year. During this time, women from Etênhiritipá collected water from the tank at Pimentel Barbosa. Some women from Etênhiritipá, however, told me they disliked this arrangement because they feared people from Pimentel Barbosa would take advantage of the opportunity to poison the water with sorcerous substances.

Political prestige and influence, whether derived from practiced leadership skills, exogamous moiety membership, or heritable prerogative ownerships were inseparable from relative age and seniority. Based on these examples, it is tempting to characterize A’uwẽ communities as gerontocracies, where elders exerted considerable political influence. Yet, I believe doing so would exaggerate the mechanisms of silencing younger adults and would devalue the importance of newer forms of political leadership that often placed younger men with intercultural experience in formal positions of chieftaincy or vice-chieftaincy to complement traditionalist formulations of plural elder leaders who exerted influence according to cultural concepts of consensus. These contemporary forms of leadership exhibited social wellness and resilience by promoting the persistence of traditionalist formulations of influence involving seniority and structured consensus through the incorporation of innovative forms of leadership that drew on A’uwẽ social models to attend to contemporary demands for younger political leaders.

Real and Categorical Parents

To orient oneself within the A’uwẽ kinship terminology, it is first important to understand some basic marriage principles that found clear expression in the first ascending generation. The A’uwẽ kinship terminology had abundant examples of consanguineal-affinal equations (terms that apply to both consanguineal kin and in-laws) and a corresponding logic of sibling exchange (marriage arrangements whereby two or more sets of siblings marry one another) in certain generations (figures 30 and 31). For example, in the first ascending generation of the vocative terminology, ĩtebe was used for father’s sister and mother’s brother’s wife; ĩmama was used for father, father’s brother, and mother’s sister’s husband; dati’ö was used for mother, mother’s sister, and father’s brother’s wife; and ĩmawapté was used for mother’s brother and father’s sister’s husband. Thus, as was the case in many actual marriages I documented, the terminology suggests paternal uncle married maternal aunt, and paternal aunt married maternal uncle. Although these terminological consanguineal-affinal equations were maintained even in the absence of actual sibling exchanges, it was very common for father’s brother to marry mother’s sister and for mother’s brother to marry father’s sister. These types of marriage arrangements based on the principle of sibling exchange were often negotiated after a first marriage was successful and the son-in-law became well integrated into his parents-in-law’s household. In many such cases, the parents-in-law wished to offer a second child for marriage to a sibling of the first son-in-law because they were already known by the parents-in-law to be a good fit.

Figure 30

A’uwẽ referential kinship terminology.

Figure 31

A’uwẽ adult vocative kinship terminology.

Many men had especially intimate paternal relationships with their sisters’ children. As Maybury-Lewis observed, a mother’s brother and his sister’s children often called one another friends, gave each other choice foods during distributions, and entered name bestowal relationships (Maybury-Lewis 1967). Such men treated their sister’s children with similar indulgence to fathers. As discussed in detail by Lopes da Silva (1986), a special social bond was established between a woman’s children and one of her brothers (real or classificatory) when, during their childhood, he painted them, adorned them with cotton necklaces, and sent them to their parents’ house carrying large maize loaves (figure 32). This ritual was performed by just one of her brothers for each child, often the same brother for all her children. Through that ritual, the mother’s brother became their ceremonial father (danhorebzu’wa), and they became his ceremonial children (ta’rebzu). The social dynamic between ceremonial parents and their ceremonial children was especially intimate, an example of a joking relationship (Lopes da Silva 1986), reflecting the same paternalism characteristic of other real and classificatory parents and their children. He continued to play a very important role in their lives, including bestowing names on his ceremonial sons and sponsoring marriages (dabasa) for his ceremonial daughters.

Figure 32

Children (ta’rebzu) carrying ceremonial maize loaves across the community plaza after being ritually painted by their ceremonial father (danhorebzu’wa), 2005.

Ceremonial fatherhood (danhorebzu’wa) and childhood were accompanied by a host of changes to the kinship terms they used for one another. Using the referential terminology as an example, after childhood, ceremonial children stopped calling their ceremonial parents by the terms for mother’s brother (ĩmamawapté) and father’s sister (ĩtebe). Ceremonial sons began referring to them as ceremonial parent (aimana), while ceremonial daughters called him father (ĩmama) and her mother (ĩna). At the same time, he ceased to call them by the term for preadult ceremonial children (ta’rebzu) in favor of the term for adult ceremonial children (simana). These terminological shifts provoked corresponding changes in how other close kin referred to one another. For example, spouses of ceremonial children might call the ceremonial parents by the term for parent-in-law (ĩmaprewa), and fathers might call their children’s ceremonial parents by the special term sorebzu’wa rather than brother-in-law terms.

Lopes da Silva (1986), characterized ceremonial parenthood as the consanguinization of categorical affines, such that individuals in the opposite exogamous moiety came to consider one another same-moiety members. Although I would argue that they were already considered consanguines according to a bilateral dimension of A’uwẽ notions of relatedness, her insight highlights that mothers’ brothers and fathers’ sisters could play intimate parental roles. Children therefore might grow up with a great deal of social access to and familiarity with the homes of their paternal aunts and maternal uncles, and therefore also their cross-cousins.

Real and Categorical Siblings

The preference for marriage exchanges evident in the first ascending generation did not extend to the ego’s generation. In fact, according to many of my consultants, marriage was proscribed between both cross-cousins and parallel cousins (cross-cousins are linked by parents of different genders, while parallel cousins are linked by parents of the same gender). Nonetheless, one mature man with considerable insight into the kinship system explained that marriage between first-degree cross-cousins was not proscribed because they belong to opposite exogamous moieties. According to him, such marriages were very infrequent but might be arranged if parents believed it to be in the best interest of the individuals and families involved. For example, siblings might wish for their children to marry to strengthen their blood or because political relations with other families were less favorable. Nevertheless, in practice such first cousin unions were rare. I found only one example of first-degree cross-cousin marriage in a sample of 253 marriages (0.4 percent) in the mid-2000s, while Maybury-Lewis (1967) found no examples in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, the logic of marriage between groups of siblings in the first ascending generation did not result in a pattern of first-degree cross-cousin marriage in the ego’s generation.

Another explanation I heard for not marrying first-degree cousins was that one could not marry anyone they called a sibling or considered close bilateral kin (wasi’höiba), which included one’s close same-moiety kin and one’s first-degree cross-cousins. In contrast to the first ascending generation, in which uncles and aunts were distinguished terminologically by crossness, same-generation cousins were not similarly distinguished. Rather, they all received the same terms used for real siblings (which were inflected for the gender of the speaker and the relative age of the sibling).

Thus, in the ego’s generation, the A’uwẽ terminology was generational, which means all real siblings and first-degree cousins were represented by the same kinship terms and were therefore understood to be real and categorical siblings. The generational aspect in the ego’s generation was consistent with the tendency to avoid marriage with any of one’s parallel and cross-cousins and derived logically from the A’uwẽ formulation of consanguinity. As discussed in chapter 2, a child received its substance, or blood (dawapru), equally from both parents, although male blood was believed to be stronger. That formulation lent consanguinity two aspects, one patrilineal and one bilateral. The patrilineal aspect was manifested most overtly in the two exogamous moieties, Tadpole (poreza’õno) and Big Water (öwawe). Although one received substance equally from father and mother, because father’s blood was stronger, one always inherited their father’s and not their mother’s moiety affiliation. Marriage between members of the same moiety was considered inappropriate. The bilateral aspect was most explicit in the generational aspect of the ego in the kinship terminology, whereby all one’s parallel and cross-cousins were considered categorical siblings. Cross-cousins were siblings insofar as they share mother’s blood, but they were not siblings to the extent they did not share father’s dominant blood. When the two notions of consanguinity are considered together, A’uwẽ marriage “rules” seem to be nearly complex or semicomplex (Lévi-Strauss 1965, 1969) or “non-prescriptive” (Viveiros de Castro 1995), whereby spouses ideally should not be members of one’s patrilineal exogamous moiety or one’s first-degree cross-cousins. The coexistence of binary and cognatic aspects in Gê kinship terminologies was anticipated by Gordon (1996) based on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (1993) analysis of Dravidian systems in Amazonia.

Important differences between those two aspects of consanguinity are their relative strength and temporal aspect. Because male blood was dominant, patrilineal consanguinity was more substantial than matrilineal consanguinity. That distinction helps explain the noted ambiguity regarding the acceptability of cross-cousin marriage, whereby some but not all individuals considered it acceptable even though it was rare. Important in this context are comments by many individuals that parallel cousins were “real” (uptabi) siblings, but cross-cousins were not, even though they were called by the same terms in the kinship terminology. Interviews revealed that cross-cousins were considered kin, and marriage to them was often thought to be inappropriate, but they were not considered kin of the same close order as parallel cousins. Such assessments follow from similar comments that father’s brother and mother’s sister were “real” parents, while mother’s brother and father’s sister were not, distinctions that were well reflected in the referential kinship terminology.

Another consequence of the dominance of male blood is that consanguinity was understood to be bilateral for several generations, but decreasingly so. The distinction in the ego’s generation between parallel cousins as “real” siblings and cross-cousins as something else indicates that consanguinity, while bilateral in the ego’s generation, was more patrilineal than matrilineal. Similarly, the matrilineal aspect nearly vanished in the first descending generation. According to all my interlocutors, any opposite-moiety children of cross-cousins might marry because their blood is sufficiently differentiated. Interestingly, there is also evidence that bilateral consanguinity was recognized at that level even though marriage was allowed. Although some individuals identified such marriages as neither better nor worse than other marriages, others identified them as preferable for the sake of avoiding political conflict because all parties to the marriage were related. The ubiquitousness of consanguinity was also expressed by one older adult male, who told me that irrespective of moiety affiliation or genealogical distance, “we are all related; everyone one might marry is some kind of kin.”

Although marriage between cross-cousins was not attested as a preference terminologically or in practice, single-generation sibling exchange was again suggested in the ego’s generation. For example, brother terms (for example, ĩdub’rada and ĩno for older and younger brothers of a male ego, respectively, in the vocative terminology) also applied to wife’s sister’s husband. Sister terms (for example, ĩhídiba for sisters of a male ego in the vocative terminology) also applied to wife’s brother’s wife. Also, brother’s wife was the same term as wife’s sister (for example, ĩsidána in the vocative terminology for a male ego). These equations were consistent with A’uwẽ practices of multiple marriages between sets of siblings in a single generation. In other words, a brother and a sister married a brother and a sister, or two brothers married two sisters, but rarely did any of their children marry one another.

Bifurcate Generational System

Given the characteristics described above, I classify the A’uwẽ vocative terminological configuration as bifurcate generational (Dole 1969) or the Mackenzie Basin type (Spier 1925). Due to the generational feature, this contemporary terminology cannot be classified as Iroquois (or Dakota) as proposed by Maybury-Lewis (1967). The defining features of bifurcate generational systems are the extension of parent terms to one’s parents’ same-gender siblings, separate terms for one’s mother’s brother and father’s sister, and one set of sibling terms for all one’s bilateral cousins (mother’s brother’s child, mother’s sister’s child, father’s brother’s child, and father’s sister’s child). In the A’uwẽ case, this classification reflected important features of how people construed relatedness. It was not a two-section system because consanguinity was extended bilaterally in the ego’s generation. Thus, marriage exchanges were not repeated in subsequent generations. Also, consanguinity had an egocentric (cognatic) aspect, and patrilineality was not reflected terminologically in all generations. One’s same-generation categorical siblings were, in this sense, a kindred, being shared only by one’s actual siblings (mother’s child or father’s child).

It is important to note that the generational logic continued into the first descending generation. Using the vocative terminology for a female or male speaker as an example, all children of real and categorical brothers were called by a single set of terms, mentioned in chapter 2, that changed in accordance with their life cycle stage (daughters: otí [girl], zarudu [female adolescent], soimbá [childless wife], and pi’õ [wife with child]; sons: bödi [boy], ’repudu [male adolescent], hö’wa [preinitiate], and aibö [adult man]). All children of real and categorical sisters were called ĩrapté. Accentuating the generational logic in this first descending generation, all spouses in the first descending generation, regardless of the gender of the sibling connecting them to the ego, were called either saihí for wives or ĩza’amo for husbands (interestingly, ĩza’amo was also used for husbands of real and categorical sisters in the ego’s generation). Thus, the crossness apparent in the first ascending generation was not continued in either the ego’s generation or the first descending generation. For this reason, the A’uwẽ kinship terminology cannot be considered Dravidian, which requires, among other factors, a terminological logic of cross-cousin marriage (Trautmann 1981).

Relative Age

An essential aspect of the kinship terminology was the pervasive and conditional role of relative age, which corresponded with very real contrasts in how people related to one another according to their respective age identities. The generational aspect described above is one example. Also, separate terms were used for older and younger same-gender siblings (ĩdub’rada and ĩno, respectively). Additionally, as discussed below, one’s mother’s brother and one’s father’s sister might perform ceremonial roles that caused extensive terminological changes after childhood. Other examples are to be found in the substitution of age group terms for kinship terms during certain phases of life. For example, same-gender siblings in adjacent age sets tended to not call each other by sibling terms during their youth. Rather, before an age set attained mature adulthood, its members called all members of the next oldest age set, including siblings, ĩhi’wa and might be called by them sinhõ’ra until achieving novitiate adulthood. Similarly, the term sinhõ’ra was used for same-gender siblings in the next youngest age set (opposite age set moiety) while they were adolescents (ai’repudu) or preinitiates (wapté). Subsequently, these individuals often resumed use of sibling terms ĩdub’rada or ĩno. These examples illustrate the contingent nature of the kinship terminology, whereby the designations used for other people shifted through life as their multiple relationships to one another underwent transformations. As one man explained, “These things always change. You never know what’s coming and all the terms can change” when, for example, people join adjacent age sets. The importance of age is also apparent in several age-specific terms that implicated simultaneously age, kinship, and friendship. For example, the term wasirewarõ might be used for members of the ego’s secular age set who were in the ego’s exogamous moiety or whom the ego considered particularly intimate friends. That term said as much about age set intimacy as about patrilineal relatedness. Similarly, wasirewãhõno might be used for members of the ego’s secular age set who were also in the ego’s exogamous moiety, socially very close to the ego, or first-degree cousins to the ego. That term also spoke to age set intimacy and close kinship, but construed relatedness bilaterally.

This brief account of the A’uwẽ kinship system touches on just a few notions of relatedness that were particularly salient for how people referred to one another respectfully and engaged in proper social dynamics that contributed to healthy relationships with others. Some of these principles were related to marriage possibilities and proscriptions, usually within the context of who were considered consanguineal kin. Formulations of consanguineal kinship, especially as it relates to fathers, real and categorical siblings, and real or categorical children, are important for understanding how people made decisions, often under challenging circumstances, in the political arena. When political strife was acute, people often could not make decisions about whom to support or how to treat one another based on the criterion of what would promote community wellness. Rather, they were limited to choosing courses of action that were perceived to advance more restricted interests. Nevertheless, they did so according to other sets of values that include multiple configurations of social relations considered to exemplify good living. Among these were the age relations considered to be beautiful.

Community Divided

In mid-2005, I began perceiving particularly strong undercurrents of political tension at the Pimentel Barbosa community, with at least four distinct topics of disagreement. The first three were resource sharing, leadership, and economic development. Meanwhile, although I was not aware of it at the time, a fourth debate emerged regarding who would be the ceremonial ear piercer (daporezapu’u’wa) for the group of preinitiates to be initiated into novitiate adulthood in late 2006 (the tirowa age set). Established custom called for a single piercer to be chosen from among the children of owners of the heritable prerogative master of ear piercers (daporezapu’u’wa’tede’wa). The decision for someone to be piercer was made by the elder heritable prerogative holder(s). Two individuals were being promoted as candidates for the job by their respective fathers and supporters, each claiming the right based on ancestral precedent.

Ignorant of that debate and after months of prodding by my A’uwẽ friends and adoptive family members, I decided in July 2005 to have my ears pierced. I was a male member of the novitiate adult age grade (dahí’wa or ’ritei’wa), a status that was inscribed on the body in a most essential manner through the piercing of one’s ears (figures 33 and 34). Pierced ears, and the practice of wearing special wood plugs in them, signaled that one had been initiated into adulthood and was equipped to dream songs by communicating with the ancestors (Graham 1995). Lacking pierced ears, I was a novitiate adult in name only, a status that was occasionally ridiculed or questioned by my age set moiety rivals. The decision to have my ears pierced involved a desire on my part to respect the wishes of my A’uwẽ hosts and to assume more completely my status as novitiate adult. The piercing process was simple. One Friday morning in July during the early morning men’s council, I expressed my interest to be pierced. The men responded with a loud clamor of support punctuated by laughter, a brief discussion, and the departure of several messengers to fetch sleeping men and request the retrieval of piercing equipment.

Figure 33

Boy having his ears pierced in anticipation of his passage to novitiate adulthood (’ritei’wa), 2011.

Figure 34

The late elder Hipru Xavante wearing traditional A’uwẽ ear plugs, 2005.

My impression was of broad support for the idea in a public forum. I did not perceive any disagreement as to how my piercing would be executed. I was later told that the preference was that I be pierced by the ceremonial piercer from the previous age set initiation rites, when my age set (êtẽpa) had been pierced and initiated into adulthood. Unfortunately, that individual was traveling and therefore unavailable. It was decided that I would be pierced by one of the two contenders for the position of ceremonial ear piercer in the upcoming age set initiation rites. This young man had never pierced before, so an elder man who had been piercer many years before gave him careful instructions and oversaw the process. Sereburã stood at my back with his hands on my shoulders and cried a mourning song (dawawa) (see Graham 1995) while the young piercer moistened the puma (Puma concolor; asada in A’uwẽ) leg bone awl with saliva and then, for each side in turn, aligned it against my cheekbone and thrust it through my ear lobe. Temporary reed ear plugs covered in urucum (Bixa orellana) salve were inserted in my freshly pierced ears. With that, the event was finished, and people gradually left to go about their business for the day.

Not until January 2006, when I returned after a short absence, did I hear that the events of that morning had precipitated a grave dispute that was polarizing the community. Close kin and supporters of the candidate for the position of ear piercer who did not pierce my ears accused their opponents of subversively stealing the ceremonial ear-piercing role by having their candidate pierce my ears without consulting them. Furthermore, they accused members of the Tad-pole exogamous moiety of meddling in the business of the Big Water moiety and, more specifically, of the owners of the ear-piercer heritable prerogative, by facilitating that decision and participating in the piercing event that morning in July. I was very surprised by these accusations because it seemed improbable that none of the men who supported their ear-piercing candidate was present in the morning men’s council the day my ears were pierced.

Some people attributed the political tension to these events, characterizing it as originating inside the Big Water moiety, being essentially a longstanding multigenerational dispute between two families that came to a head over the issue of who from among their ranks would be ceremonial piercer. Other people characterized it as a disagreement derived from the other three sources of tension mentioned at the beginning of this section.

Between January and July of the same year, tensions escalated to the point that an effective community split took place. Initially, the decision was made to employ two ear piercers, one for each of the two interested Big Water kin groups and their allies. That decision motivated the two groups to hold separate age set initiation rites, each with its own piercer and its own contingent of ceremonial positions. Other community functions split, and the discord developed into a full factional dispute. For example, two men’s council meetings were held each morning and evening, the two Indigenous health agents attended only members of their own factions in the primary healthcare unit, and members of rival factions refused to sit in automobiles together. In July, I encountered several people from the faction that would relocate in the local FUNAI office to inform the local agent that they were declaring themselves independent from the Pimentel Barbosa community, would henceforth be known as the Etênhiritipá community, and would be led by Chief Samuel Sahutuwẽ and Vice-Chief Paulo Supreteprã. That stage of the separation was, perhaps, the most intense, with rampant incidents of physical altercations between members of opposing factions, accusations of politically motivated murder and sorcery, and death threats. There was no longer social space for people to remain neutral, so household members, spouses, close kin, and intimate friends went through the painful process of deciding in which community and in what household they would reside. In late 2006, Chief Samuel’s new community physically moved, relocating about a half kilometer away, where it could access shared resources, such as the community primary healthcare unit. As I write this book, many years later, circumstances have improved considerably. As recently as 2022 I learned of visits and open communication between men of the two communities and observed women visiting kin in the other community. Yet, each community goes about its business autonomously and pursues its own strategy of economic development. The households and kin groups that were ruptured by the separation have reconstituted themselves within their new social environments.

I feel a great deal of ambivalence about my role in the dispute that contributed to the community separation. I regret that the circumstances of my ear piercing provided reason for the long-held antagonisms between rival kin groups within the Big Water moiety to transform into open opposition and for the previously simmering debate about economic development to coalesce into a fully fledged community division. Even more, I lament that the ensuing events required previously united households, extended families, and age set peers to break from one another. I know I could not have anticipated these events and believe that had the choice of my ear piercer not helped precipitate the conflict, some other event or events would have done so soon thereafter. That view is maintained by all my A’uwẽ contacts on both sides of the division, who express that I was an unsuspecting pawn in political affairs beyond my control.

Patrifilial Loyalty and Sibling Solidarity

The events described above involved a totality of social phenomena. Through the experiences, opinions, decisions, and actions of the people involved, they engaged the full gamut of sociocultural beliefs and practices, with all their internal variability. Furthermore, the experience of those events was deeply individualized for those involved. Consequently, attempting to reduce them to a social model of factionalism would oversimplify the whole affair and diverge substantially from how A’uwẽ view the process. My objective in this section is not to distill from those political events a limited set of predictive or explanatory factors. Rather, in keeping with the objectives of this book, I seek to explore how age organizations contributed to social well-being. I highlight a pair of social relationships, patrifilial loyalty between fathers and children and sibling solidarity that bound patrilateral and bilateral kin of the same generation. Those two axes of fidelity promoted a highly dynamic field of social relations involving notions of genealogical seniority and unity in addition to the diverse and irreducible multitude of sociocultural factors that contributed to the social experience. I argue that those two axes were salient aspects of A’uwẽ sociality—among many others—that fundamentally bore on the political enterprise (in its best and worst moments).

In January 2006, when I first became aware of major escalation of political tensions at the Pimentel Barbosa community, the factional division that threatened to divide the community was still largely in flux. Although key proponents on each side had vocally and unambiguously established their alignments, most mature adult men reserved judgment, at least publicly. Many younger individuals avoided taking sides in deference to their parents, who had not yet aligned themselves. According to many elder individuals at that time, their eventual affiliations would be based on the issues they perceived were involved, which centered on the four sources of tension mentioned above.

By January 2006, I knew of twelve men who had openly voiced their support of one side or the other. Among those early deciders, 75 percent were members of the Big Water moiety, suggesting the dispute was at that time more divisive within than between exogamous moieties. Furthermore, 67 percent of Big Water moiety early deciders supported the faction led by a Tadpole moiety leader rather than the faction led by a member of their own moiety, indicating that there was not a tendency for people to support the community leader pertaining to their exogamous moieties. By June 2006, all but one head of household had publicly affiliated themselves with one of the two factions, although I found there to be a great deal of uncertainty remaining among younger individuals who were not heads of households. Moiety affiliation did not significantly influence political alliance, with equal proportions of members of both exogamous moieties supporting the two factions. These observations, which show that moiety distribution was balanced between and within political factions, run contrary to Maybury-Lewis’s (1967) thesis that patrilineal exogamous moiety membership and factional affiliation were ideologically analogous (Welch 2022b).

By this time, I observed people were less interested in discussing the four substantive issues that had previously been important in their evaluations of the conflict. Instead, I found kin relations had become important factors in how people negotiated the political landscape and ultimately aligned themselves as the community divided.

Among the most frequently invoked theories of political solidarity that were expressed to me beginning in June 2006 was “family,” construed in those contexts as close same-moiety siblings including one’s real siblings and first-degree parallel cousins (wasisinawa) or close bilateral kin including one’s close same-moiety kin and one’s first-degree cross-cousins (wasi’höiba). For example, formal and informal leaders on both sides of the dispute frequently threatened that they had numerically and tactically strong kin in other A’uwẽ communities who were keeping close tabs on the political situation at the Pimentel Barbosa community and would, if necessary, come to their aid to provide reinforcement. Such references to close kin in other communities were especially evident immediately after the physical separation of the two communities, when concern was focused on administrative control of shared resources, such as the primary healthcare unit. Both sides operated under the assumption that the larger of the two communities would gain the bureaucratic upper hand in managing those facilities. By March 2007, after the physical relocation was complete, several households of close kin of factional leaders had already relocated from neighboring communities to Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá. I also heard abundant discussion of others who were on call to do the same should it be necessary to tip the population balance between them. Notions of solidarity between close same-moiety siblings (wasisinawa) and close bilateral kin (wasi’höiba) were central to how individuals, married couples, and extended family households aligned themselves politically and, ultimately, decided where to reside after the community separation.

Perhaps an even more important factor was what I call patrifilial loyalty. This term is not to be confused with Meyer Fortes’s “filial piety,” which implied a sentiment with reverential overtones that tended to be extended to ancestors (Fortes 1959, 18; 1961, 174). Patrifilial loyalty was the commitment of a child, usually a son, to support his father socially and politically and reside in his community, where this support was most beneficial. Patrifilial loyalty might also extend to one’s categorical fathers (father’s brothers) and potentially even one’s mother’s brother who served as ceremonial father, but under the pressures of divisive factional politics, loyalty to one’s real father appeared to be paramount. In March 2007, after the two communities split, 98 percent of married males with living real fathers lived with them in the same community. In other words, virtually all sons remained politically and residentially unified with their real fathers. This statistic suggests that virtually all married females whose parents and parents-in-law chose to live in different communities opted to live with their husbands in their fathers-in-law’s communities. Thus, nearly all women faced with this decision chose to live apart from their parents rather than separate from their husbands, who remained with their real fathers (or mothers chose to live apart from their daughters). Nonetheless, some young unpregnant and childless married women did exercise their prerogative to live with their parents and end their marriages with husbands who decided to live in the other community.

Another relationship that was important for how people sided in the community division was sibling solidarity. Independently from their respective loyalties to their fathers, real and categorical siblings shared close social bonds. Although sibling solidarity might be extended to all bilateral categorical siblings through the principles of bilateral consanguinity and close bilateral kinship (wasi’höiba), it was especially salient among close same-moiety real and classificatory siblings (wasisinawa). I am reminded of a conversation with my adoptive brother Denoque and our father, Valdo, in which Denoque called me his “brother” in Portuguese and Valdo corrected him, saying he should call me by the Portuguese word for “friend.” Denoque objected, arguing that I was his adopted brother, not just a friend. Valdo insisted that the A’uwẽ word for brother would be correct, but the closest translation in Portuguese was friend, because A’uwẽ brothers are all close friends. Groups of real and same-moiety categorical brothers were extremely close in the usual routine of life and during the factional dispute.

During the community separation, however, sibling solidarity was strongest when there were living real or categorical fathers to bind them. Some close same-moiety siblings whose fathers were deceased aligned themselves with opposite factions in the separation. In some cases, even the most intimate of real brothers moved apart from one another and some stopped speaking to each other for several years. In these cases, the brothers aligned themselves with other close same-moiety siblings (wasisinawa), close bilateral kin (wasi’höiba), or with their spouses’ allies according to their own priorities. For example, a married couple once disagreed about whether to move to another community after it separated from Pimentel Barbosa. The wife wished to move to be with her brother in the other community, while the husband wanted to remain in Pimentel Barbosa, where he had categorical brothers. Unable to agree, she moved to her brother’s community on her own, and her husband remained behind for about three weeks before deciding to acquiesce to be with his wife. Subsequently, all their real children moved to the new community to be with their parents and their mother’s brother. Thus, sibling solidarity was a strong social bond but might not be sufficient to withstand competing forces in factional separations unless combined with patrifilial loyalty.

According to oral histories, sets of influential brothers with no living fathers have opposed one another in past political disagreements, implicating their descendants in disunity for generations to come. An important example of such an oral history begins with Apöwẽ, a renowned leader of the population I studied from before the SPI contact era (1940s) until the 1970s. Most written accounts of Apöwẽ cast him as a strong leader who, despite having achieved power by killing his political opponents, was widely respected by his people (Flowers 1983; Graham 1995; Maybury-Lewis 1967). That view was maintained by many of his actual grandchildren and their political supporters, including the leadership of other communities, which previously split from the Pimentel Barbosa community and remained estranged. In contrast, according to influential individuals at the Pimentel Barbosa community, Apöwẽ was a despotic leader who defied the morality of collective decision making in the men’s council by using authoritarian and coercive strategies, often murder, to force people to comply with his political program (cf. Dent 2020). These oral historians recalled that contrasting viewpoints were present during Apöwẽ’s life, when their own ancestors, who were close same-moiety categorical siblings to Apöwẽ, disagreed with his ruthless strategies and advocated for cooperative leadership and peaceful methods of conflict resolution. These contrasting versions of the oral history suggest that a disagreement between close categorical brothers in the absence of patrifilial loyalty to a living father may sustain estrangement between their patrilineal descendants for generations.

Affinal Obeisance

Whereas patrilineal relatedness seems especially important for the A’uwẽ formulation of genealogical hierarchy (seniority) that I call patrifilial loyalty, kinship-based intergenerational ranking was also evident between parents-in-law (damaprewa) and their children-in-law (female: dazani’wa; male: daza’õmo). Whereas the bond of patrifilial loyalty was one of intimate solidarity, the bond that united intergenerational in-laws was characterized by distant respect (danhisé). Many A’uwẽ, especially elders, believed reserved deference between sons-in-law and parents-in-law an important expression of traditionalist notions of good living. According to Graham, young sons-in-law and their parents-in-law showed their mutual respect through avoidance behavior, including absolute absence of direct speech (Graham 1995).⁴ She characterized it as a “muting” of the son-in-law and accounted for it as a means of minimizing the potential for conflict between an established residential family and a new coresident husband, who might have different political alliances. This traditionalist formulation of shame, respect, and separation as a beautiful form of social interaction between in-laws was similar to that described for the Xikrin subgroup of the Mebêngôkre (Gordon 2016). Although such relationships were overtly formal and distant, they also had the potential to mature into strong sociopolitical alliances.

According to my data, in addition to reciprocal avoidance behavior, this relationship manifested in a perception by both parties that the son-in-law should contribute to the sustenance of his parents-in-law (laboring in their garden, contributing game meat and fish, and purchasing food) without expectation of return. This obligation preceded marriage and continued throughout life, whether or not the son-in-law resided in the parents-in-law’s house according to the pattern of uxorilocal residence. It contrasted with the typical relationship between a young man and his own parents, which entailed the liberty to consume their food without reciprocating with contributions of food, work, or money. I characterize the traditionalist social orientation of sons-in-law relative to parents-in-law as affinal obeisance to distinguish it from the more intimate and entitled character of patrifilial loyalty. Affinal obeisance afforded parents-in-law considerable influence over sons-in-law and figured importantly into many young married men’s social realities.

After some years, once a new A’uwẽ couple had developed an intimate spousal relationship and given birth to several of their own children, relations between parents-in-law and sons-in-law often remained respectfully formal but more relaxed. Among contemporary A’uwẽ, many younger parents-in-law were dropping their expectations of this form of respect relationship, opting instead to engage with their sons-in-law more casually from the beginning, without avoidance behavior. They considered these forms of respectful constraints on the relationship between parents-in-law and son-in-law to be overly burdensome and unproductive. Thus, notions of what comprised a healthy affinal social relationship were undergoing substantial changes in recent years. Such changes should not be understood as loss of culture because these same individuals were strong advocates of maintaining traditional A’uwẽ social relations in other forms and contexts. Social and cultural resilience involves making innumerous choices about adjusting some viewpoints and practices to permit the conservation of others under contemporary circumstances. These decisions affect social relations, economic conditions, foodways, spiritual practices, pastimes, health, and many other dimensions of daily life that bear on well-being. The choice by some parents-in-law to relax some of the behavioral and social constrictions traditionally placed on sons-in-law was a reinterpretation of what constituted good and proper social relations, but not an indication that these sons-in-law now disrespected their parents-in-law or no longer behaved or identified as A’uwẽ.

The genealogical configurations of patrifilial loyalty and affinal obeisance, along with leadership seniority and heritable prerogative seniority, did not influence political process in a strict manner. Rather, they were a few among many age-related ideological factors that influenced how people went about the business of social interaction. Some others included the age systems discussed in this book, which together made up an intricately complex landscape of seniority and juniority, rivalry and alliance, that people engaged in personally and in contextually appropriate ways as they navigated political life. These configurations were considered traditional, and most of them enjoyed widespread popular support as essential factors in the persistence of social well-being in communities and the maintenance of A’uwẽ identity in the present era of radical sociocultural change. These divergent principles created a “particular structural positioning of differential elements” (Gordon 2016, 214) that enabled people to navigate community harmony and discord in creative ways by engaging with multiple social frameworks considered beautiful and proper.