Historical Context

Historically, hunger, food security, food production, and economic self-sufficiency were recurrent themes in the Brazilian indigenist literature, associated with the process of “pacification,” which involved the attraction and fixation of an Indigenous group to an indigenist post or religious mission, and, subsequently, opening their original territories for developmentalist projects (Lima 1995; Ramos 1998).¹ This policy, based in now antiquated notions of assimilation, was a primary orienting principle of the Brazilian indigenist agency (SPI followed by FUNAI), which always aligned with government aspirations to develop and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the market economy (Davis 1977; Oliveira 1998; Ramos 1998, 1984). In seeking to make Indigenous people economically self-sufficient, the government intervened in Indigenous economies by means of top-down agricultural and extractive community projects. This boom-and-bust governmental approach to Indigenous people’s economies and food security prevailed throughout the twentieth century and continues in different forms in present times (Welch and Coimbra Jr. 2022).

In the 1950s, when Maybury-Lewis (1967) undertook anthropological research among the A’uwẽ who today live in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, agriculture was viewed as a secondary activity to collecting, hunting, and fishing. Between the time Maybury-Lewis conducted his research and anthropologist Flowers (1983) initiated her studies in the same population twenty years later, important economic, political, and environmental changes had occurred in Mato Grosso, with notable consequences for A’uwẽ well-being.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the governmental goal of integrating Indigenous peoples into the national economy, especially ethnic groups located in regions considered “empty” or “underdeveloped” like the cerrado, was accompanied by spending enormous sums of money to stimulate mechanized agriculture (Coimbra Jr. et al. 2002; Graham 1995; Garfield 2001; Santos et al. 1997; Welch, Santos, et al. 2013). The A’uwẽ were in the crosshairs of the government’s developmental policy, seen for their potential as rural labor to transform Indigenous lands and their residents into large commercial producers of grain and cattle.

FUNAI inaugurated its mechanized rice-producing initiative, called the Xavante Project, in A’uwẽ lands to a euphoric reception in communities. Anthropologists who conducted fieldwork among the A’uwẽ in the 1970s and 1980s commented on its “colossal” scale (Graham 1995, 44) and “extremely high investments” (Lopes da Silva 1992, 376). According to Maybury-Lewis, who visited A’uwẽ territories at the apex of the project, “The Shavante Project is undoubtedly the most ambitious development project which has been undertaken in recent years by FUNAI on behalf of any single group of Indians” (1978, 77). Despite initial enthusiasm, the Xavante Project dwindled and failed quickly, as did so many other similar development initiatives. Generous initial investments were discontinued, and agricultural machines and trucks were abandoned in the cerrado where they broke (see Graham 1995).

What remained for the A’uwẽ from this experiment was the rice, which today makes up an overwhelmingly important part of the daily diet in practically all communities. Grown in traditional swidden gardens, bought in local markets, or received through basic food baskets or other donations, rice became a convenient substitute for the many traditional varieties of wild root vegetables. From a nutritional point of view, the introduction of rice as the primary caloric staple was deleterious for the A’uwẽ because it was a main trigger of the accelerated nutritional transition underway in practically all communities and the fast-growing prevalence of obesity and diabetes mellitus type II in most communities (Coimbra Jr. et al. 2002; DalFabbro et al. 2014; Vieira-Filho 1996; Welch et al. 2009).

Markets and Foodways

Another important inheritance of the Xavante Project was the beginnings of monetarization of domestic and community economies. During this project, the first A’uwẽ began receiving governmental salaries (Graham 1995). Young A’uwẽ men were contracted by FUNAI for positions as tractor operators, truck drivers, and other jobs necessary for the functioning of the agricultural project. After the project ended, many of these employees remained in public service and continued to receive salaries and pensions until the present. At about the same time, some other young men were given temporary work for neighboring mines, ranches, and farms, especially during agricultural harvest season, when rural labor was scarce. Thus, in the 1970s, money came to circulate in A’uwẽ communities (Flowers 2014).

Indigenous peoples in Brazil were not characterized as “poor” or victims of “hunger” for most official purposes until the implementation of large-scale public policies of social inclusion in the early 2000s (Soares 2011). These designations prompted FUNAI and other federal agencies to direct diverse social and economic programs to Indigenous populations, including the A’uwẽ. These programs sought to alleviate poverty by injecting money and resources into households and communities by means of salaries, retirement pensions, basic food baskets (cestas básicas de alimentos), school meal programs, maternity financial assistance (salário maternidade), and cash transfer programs (originally Bolsa Família, reconfigured as Auxílio Brasil in 2022).

Under current circumstances, the Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities also benefited from various salaries that became available over the last two to three decades. The primary healthcare unit offered at least two paid jobs for each community (Indigenous health agent and Indigenous sanitation agent). The educational system also contributed to community economies where elementary schools were present, such as in the Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities. Schools employed teachers and a full administrative and support staff, now exclusively Indigenous residents, providing a significant direct influx of steady income into many household budgets and indirectly into extended families and whole communities.

The Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities engaged in a “hybrid economy” (Altman 2009; Altman, Buchanan, and Biddle 2006), involving Indigenous food production, market participation, and government inputs. Residents of both communities had direct or indirect access to financial resources to purchase foods and continued to benefit from garden and cerrado food resources. Furthermore, different households had unequal direct access to garden, cerrado, and market foods associated with an emergent process of socioeconomic differentiation inside A’uwẽ communities (Coimbra Jr. et al. 2002; Welch et al. 2009). These differences predisposed some households to depend to greater or lesser degrees on Indigenous production, including gardening, collecting, fishing, and hunting. Households with greater access to monetary resources had more capacity to purchase food and therefore more options regarding their degree of investment in food self-provisioning activities. Also, some people had divergent preferences unrelated to income availability regarding whether to invest in these activities. In this kind of mixed food economy, differences between households deserve attention to avoid overgeneralization about how members of the same ethnic group or community provided food for their domestic groups.

A’uwẽ at Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá purchased market foods in three types of commercial outlets: regional market centers, roadside restaurants and stores, and traveling automobile vendors. Many people traveled to main regional market centers, including Água Boa, Canarana, and Ribeirão Cascalheira, at least once per month to withdraw their income at banks and purchase food, clothes, and other necessities. Food was usually purchased at supermarkets, often in big containers for such staples as rice and beans. Clothing and sundry items were often purchased in stores catering to the A’uwẽ and the Indigenous population from the Upper Xingu.

Hunger Mitigation

In 2019, colleagues and I undertook a study that included all households and adult residents in three A’uwẽ communities in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land (Pimentel Barbosa, Etênhiritipá, and Paraiśo), with the objective of analyzing how people used and understood public policies of social inclusion, as well as evaluating their perceptions of food security. The results of this survey helped elucidate relationships between Indigenous agency, social organization, public policies, and food security. The perception of hunger and food insecurity involved cultural, situational, and individual dimensions. I focus here on the first two, where the main cultural aspect is reciprocity and food sharing between family members and neighbors, and the situational aspect is linked to the increasing monetarization of domestic economies through government programs. In the study communities, social programs did little to mitigate mild and moderate forms of food insecurity, but the complex network of A’uwẽ food reciprocity was a fundamental element that successfully mitigated the most serious form of food insecurity—not eating.

The household food security portion of the questionnaire consisted of a series of three questions, each representing a more severe level of food insecurity than the prior question: (1) did you feel concerned that the staple/important food in your home could run out before you could get more?; (2) was there a day when you or someone else at home was hungry but ate little because there was not enough food?; and (3) did you or someone else in the household go a full day without eating because you did not have any food? The three questions were applied twice, once in reference to the prior month and once for the prior year.

According to the results of these food security questions, fewer people reported that someone in the household worried in the prior month that food would run out before they could get more (69.0 percent) than reported that someone in the household felt hungry (83.3 percent). Far fewer people reported that someone in the household spent a whole day without eating in the prior month (7.1 percent). The results of the same questions referring to the prior year show a similar pattern with somewhat more expressive values: 78.6 percent reported that someone at home worried that food would run out before they could get more, 85.7 percent reported that someone in the household felt hungry, and only 19.0 percent reported that someone in the household spent a whole day without eating. Thus, feeling hungry was more common than worrying that food would run out before more could be obtained, while it was comparatively unusual for someone to go a whole day without eating.

In our semistructured interviews, a recurrent theme was that many members of younger generations no longer appreciated or were not interested in traditional or locally produced A’uwẽ foods. Many interviewees, both young and old, highlighted the preference of younger individuals to eat food purchased in the city. Many young mothers reported exclusively purchasing food in town rather than participating in local subsistence activities to produce or collect food within the Indigenous land, despite the high prices in supermarkets. From the perspective of a young mother, “for food on a daily basis, I shop in the city, right, it’s not here in the Indigenous land, but I buy sometimes in the city.” Another young mother reinforced the pattern: “I only buy in the city. I’m the new generation, you know, I don’t produce on Indigenous land now. Now I buy food out there.” The preference for market foods was maintained despite many individuals reporting that in their opinions, purchased foods brought diseases that could be avoided with a traditional diet. One man explained, “White people’s food is good, but it brings disease, many diseases.”

Both men and women reported participating in the management of household financial resources, with a tendency for women to indicate that they had autonomy to decide how money was spent in town. According to an elderly mother, “I’m the one who decides, because only I have a retirement pension here. I do the shopping.” A younger mother emphasized the important role women played in managing household financial resources: “I decide to buy clothes for the children. Here men don’t run things; it is the woman who decides.” A younger father characterized financial management in his household as a collaboration between himself and his two wives. Yet another young father explained how he purchased the food, but the women of the household told him what to purchase: “I receive R$180 from Bolsa Família. I spend this money buying food for the family, but who decides are the women.” Similar statements were recurrent in our interviews.

These responses reflected cultural patterns involving the themes of individual and collective property, as well as the influential roles of women in making spending decisions. Traditionally, when women collected food, they did so on their own without input from their husbands. When men hunted or fished, they also did so according to their own priorities, without interference from their wives. Spending money seems to occupy an intermediate position between these two cultural models, since the decision of what to buy may be retained by women even when men earn the money or do the shopping.

Most women considered decisions to share food with other households their domain, although some men reported participating. An older woman explained that she distributed purchased and garden foods to her sons’ households as well as to houses in other communities because financial resources and garden produce were more abundant in her household. Her son provided a complementary statement, explaining that because he earned very little money, the food in his house disappeared quickly. In these moments, his mother helped, as she did for her other sons. He also mentioned that at other times, when he had the money to purchase food, it was shared with other houses in need. One young woman reported that the decision to share food was hers alone, as well as the decision to ask for food from other households when hers had run out. Her discourse was punctuated with the unhappy observation that there were many mouths to feed, such as her father-in-law, who eats at her house, leaving her unsatisfied with the quantity of food in her household.

One woman characterized the new trend of eating primarily market foods, rather than replenishable traditional foods, as connected to what she characterized as the increasing necessity of routinely asking for food from other households. Similarly, an elder man reported that in his evaluation, worrying about lack of food, or feeling lack of food, could be attributed to increased reliance on market foods: “As for the food in my house, I am satisfied. This despite being worried at the end of the month because everything starts to run out. The ‘whites’ taught us all the things that make us suffer. … Before, I didn’t miss city food. Before, we ate fish, game, didn’t worry about anything. Now, we must buy things from the market, like rice and beans, soy oil … now we buy these things, but there’s not enough money.” Satisfaction with one’s household food conditions was often attributed to the happiness of one’s children when food is plentiful. For example, one man reported. “I am satisfied when there is a lot of food at home. The children are happy with the food. They are going to celebrate, play, that’s when I am very satisfied.”

Dissatisfaction with one’s household’s food was also a common theme, often mixed with comments or complaints that certain relatives deplete food reserves by eating at their house. A recurrent statement was that immediately after shopping in the market, when the house was full of food, people were content with their household food situation. After relatives visited and ate their food or took food as gifts, however, the reserves became depleted, and people became dissatisfied with their household food conditions. The theme of satisfaction upon purchasing ample foods and dissatisfaction upon their depletion through sharing with relatives and neighbors was reported by multiple young women and demonstrates that reciprocity and food sharing can be accompanied by dissatisfaction. I am aware of an acute ambiguity between the importance for well-being (hunger mitigation) of asking or receiving food from others and the discontentment that resulted from exhausting food resources by sharing and attending to others’ requests.

According to some interviewees, when food ran out at home, they looked to traditional subsistence activities to meet households demands. This was a recurrent but less common response. For example, according to a young mother, “when the food runs out, I’ll go to the cerrado to get traditional food to sustain the children.” Similarly, a young man described hunting with his elders when market food ran out and sharing the resulting game meat with others. These final reports show that reciprocity was common but not the only hunger mitigation strategy for some households in the study communities.

The food security profile reported above was discouraging, with large majorities of households reporting worrying that food would run out and feeling hunger. These results showed that public policies aimed at mitigating food insecurity had little success in these A’uwẽ communities. In contrast, however, very few respondent households reported that someone in the household went without food for an entire day. Based on our qualitative interviews, we conclude that A’uwẽ strategies for mitigating hunger, especially traditional forms of food reciprocity, provided residents of most households means to obtain food before a full day passed without eating. Reciprocity was practiced with market foods in addition to traditional or garden foods. In fact, it may have been even more common to give or receive market foods because their economic prominence and perpetual scarcity was reported by interviewees to stimulate need.

Recent literature regarding Australian Aborigines has focused on demonstrating that hybrid economies are “more than merely transitional to capitalist incorporation” (Buchanan 2014, 12). Research among the A’uwẽ at the Pimentel Barbosa community is consistent with this orientation, showing that after the Xavante Project was defunded and people’s time investment in rice agriculture decreased, they reemphasized collecting, hunting, and fishing accompanied by small-scale family gardening (Coimbra Jr. et al. 2002; Santos et al. 1997). These events demonstrate A’uwẽ resilience to dramatic transformations in the availability of external government inputs. The contemporary public policies of social inclusion accessed by residents of the study communities, which included Bolsa Família, retirement pensions, school meal programs, basic food baskets, and maternity financial assistance, should be understood as products of a specific moment in the country’s political history that might not endure. With a long history of boom-and-bust economies driven by unstable government inputs, the A’uwẽ at Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá will likely experience future episodes of rebalancing of the hybrid economy, potentially in favor of subsistence food production.

Other factors may also affect the scales of the hybrid economy. For example, A’uwẽ communities and the rest of the world have recently been faced with the need to protect themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pimentel Barbosa community reacted with the innovative solution of going on trek in the cerrado to reduce their risk of exposure. A large portion of the community relocated to the Rio das Mortes, some forty kilometers distant, for about five months in 2020, where they collected, fished, and hunted for food. Although participants referred to this trip as a family trek, they remained at a single base camp rather than traveling between camp sites.

They had the benefit of on-hand transportation (truck and motorcycles) to return to the community should need arise, such as to visit the primary health-care unit. It was not an attempt at total isolation. Some people also left camp to go to town for political meetings and to conduct other kinds of business. Some salaried individuals and social benefit recipients may have gone to town to collect their money and purchase foods. I interpret this family trek as an adjustment of a traditional subsistence mode to contemporary circumstances, prompted by concern about the pandemic. It provides insight into what was currently considered a trek, with motorized vehicles and continued reliance on governmental services. It demonstrates a high potential for food sovereignty despite an apparent generational gap in traditional food knowledge transmission to some younger people. It also suggests that the transition from household food production to purchasing was not unilinear, just as the end of the rice project resulted in a return to food collecting, hunting, and fishing. This family trek was an opportunity for youths to comprehend some benefits of continuing traditional subsistence practices and learning about the landscape resources available to them despite the dominance of market foods in their contemporary food economy.

Bridging Generational Gaps

The current situation at the Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities involved a pervasive generational bifurcation. Many elders valued traditional foods and wished their younger relatives would come to appreciate them and learn how to procure them. Many youths and young adults had little interest in them and preferred to rely on market foods. Yet, neither elders nor younger people consumed traditional foods with notable frequency. In these communities, there had not yet occurred a generalized resurgence in interest in traditional foods or amplified discourse about food sovereignty motivated by health concerns or interest in preserving cultural food heritage. Nevertheless, some younger people showed great interest in collecting or hunting, having the potential to bridge the generational gap by retaining traditional ecological knowledge without interruption.

Participation by A’uwẽ of the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land in Brazilian national society brought enormous transformations over the seventy-five years since stable contact was established with the SPI. However impactful these changes may have been on foodways, they were mediated by A’uwẽ cultural resilience, strongly informed by highly salient traditionalist social constructions of reciprocity understood to promote community well-being. A’uwẽ foods were not only about nutrition, but also involved strong identity markers that were lavishly displayed during community distributions of game meat during wedding and initiation rites, as well as gifts of maize loaves and roasted wild root vegetables during spiritual rituals and other ceremonial occasions. These ceremonies and their significance for social relations, ethnic identity, and well-being invigorated community interest in traditional foodways independently of the abundant economic changes currently underway. Thus, regardless of the future direction of the country’s public policies that bear on diets and food economies, there is a good chance A’uwẽ society will be sufficiently flexible within its nonstatic hybrid economy to maintain culturally relevant traditional ecological knowledge of cerrado foods and thereby exhibit greater resilience in the face of changing circumstances of monetarization and food security.

Primary Healthcare Units

Contrary to the large SPI operation at São Domingos, the modest FUNAI post at Pimentel Barbosa in the 1970s and 1980s was typical of the era, with several buildings constructed to house a small staff and a school. The miniscule primary healthcare unit operated out of a door behind the schoolhouse, was intermittently staffed by a nursing assistant (secondary education preparation), and contained insufficient supplies of basic medicines, such as aspirin, antibiotics, and antimalarials, as well as oversupplies of medicines of no use for the A’uwẽ, such as those to treat high blood pressure, with which the A’uwẽ were not yet afflicted in the 1970s (Flowers 1983).

Over the years, however, the Indigenous primary healthcare unit developed and became more important in the lives of people residing in the Pimentel Barbosa community and, after its foundation in 2006, the Etênhiritipá community. The healthcare unit’s benefits, such as significantly reducing child mortality, expressively affected A’uwẽ notions of how to properly care for children to improve their bodily wellness. It also illustrates how the healthcare unit’s intercultural dynamic contributed to the emergence of new notions of appropriate therapeutic itineraries, which now included reliance on traditional A’uwẽ ethnobiological and spiritual medical practices in combination with biomedicine accessed through governmental health services (medical pluralism).

Although not all communities had their own primary healthcare units, the Pimentel Barbosa community had had one since soon after FUNAI became responsible for Indigenous people’s primary healthcare in 1967. In 1999, following creation of the Unified Health System (Sistema Unico de Saude), the Indigenous Healthcare Subsystem (Subsistema de Atenção à Saúde Indígena, or SASI) was established to provide differentiated healthcare, which was conceived as primary healthcare that functions in consonance with Indigenous communities, thereby ensuring that Indigenous knowledge and practices were respected, and culturally appropriate care was provided. Responsibility for executing the Indigenous Healthcare Subsystem changed hands twice since the Pimentel Barbosa community was established (for a review of the history of public health policy for Indigenous peoples in Brazil, see Cardoso et al. 2013).

With the creation of the subsystem, Indigenous health services were transferred from FUNAI to the National Health Foundation (Fundação Nacional de Saúde—FUNASA), Ministry of Health. As a result, a new primary healthcare unit was established in a small building constructed by a European nongovernmental association near the old Pimentel Barbosa community schoolhouse, and FUNASA staffed it with a full-time nurse technician and two salaried Indigenous health agents, supported by a nurse who traveled between communities. This was the first time the Pimentel Barbosa population had access to reliable, if still deficient, health services. Primary care nurses played a strategic role in the routine functioning of the primary healthcare unit, being responsible for maintaining updated vaccination schedules, conducting prenatal consultations, dispensing prescribed medications, monitoring chronic diseases (e.g., diabetes, hypertension), among many other important tasks. Very often, the nurse was the only health professional with higher education at the primary healthcare unit, usually assisted by at least one bilingual Indigenous health agent, who was essential to the workflow because many members of the community did not speak Portuguese and had culturally distinct understandings of health and illness processes.

Following implementation of the SASI, which remained in effect through the present, several major healthcare improvements occurred that directly affected well-being among resident A’uwẽ. One was the beginning of scheduled childhood vaccinations for measles and polio, which had been major causes of death and illness among the A’uwẽ in previous decades. Another example was the furnishing of supervised tuberculosis chemotherapy, which practically eliminated this disease from the population. Also, regular prenatal consultations, which did not exist beforehand, became available to all expectant mothers. These interventions alone were responsible for drastically improving the survival of A’uwẽ children. Many parents and grandparents I spoke with were enormously pleased with the large sizes of their families, which they indicated was not possible in earlier decades because of higher child mortality and greater interbirth spacing. Finally, another benefit of the Indigenous Healthcare Subsystem was access by referral to secondary and tertiary services such as cataract, orthopedic, and congenital heart defect surgeries. These newly available services dramatically improved A’uwẽ physical wellness even though the Indigenous Healthcare Subsystem was justifiably criticized for diverse ongoing deficiencies, including mismanagement of financial resources, unavailability of needed medications and supplies, lack of qualified health professionals, and deficient intercultural sensitivity and accommodations, among others.

By 2004, when I first visited, standing in the morning line at the FUNASA primary healthcare unit was a regular, even daily, habit for many mothers with children and people taking overseen medications. As more people came to suffer from chronic noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, and others contracted infectious diseases requiring antibiotics, visits to the healthcare unit came to be a regular occurrence for many people. Besides dispensing medications, the healthcare unit served as a front-line resource for children and adults with illnesses or injuries. If the health technician judged a case to require additional professional attention, transportation was arranged to take patients to the nearest public hospital of reference, about a hundred kilometers distant. Additionally, the health services were responsible for maintaining water wells and tanks with treated potable water for every community, although it can take many years for these to be constructed in newly established communities, thus seriously compromising health, especially of young children vulnerable to diarrhea and collateral effects.

The presence of a (relatively) well-functioning healthcare unit came to motivate people to remain in their community or to live close by to easily access its services daily. It also caused many individuals to avoid leaving the community temporarily to go on trek, as was common in the past, for fear of being isolated from valued health services in the event of unexpected injury or illness. This remained especially true for parents of young children, who often expressed to me their desire to stay close to the healthcare unit in case their children needed its services. My A’uwẽ interlocutors told me and demonstrated by their actions that the healthcare unit was a key resource, and they valued its proximity to such a degree that they opted to modify their residential and subsistence activities. When Etênhiritipá separated from Pimentel Barbosa, it relocated such a short distance away in part to benefit from the local presence of the primary healthcare unit. The benefits of having a healthcare unit in proximity to one’s community were significant and included improved access to emergency care, transport to hospitals, facility in obtaining routine consultations, and local administration of controlled and maintenance medications. Smaller and newer communities tended not to receive healthcare units of their own, being serviced by those located in larger nearby communities, with obvious disadvantages. Larger and older communities with local healthcare units, such as Etênhiritipá and Pimentel Barbosa, had considerable motivation to remain in their existing locations. Thus, community healthcare units served as a first major pillar of contemporary sedentarization.

In 2010, amid accusations that FUNASA mismanaged resources and was plagued by corruption, the Indigenous Healthcare Subsystem was transferred to the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health (Secretaria Especial de Saúde Indígena—SESAI), which implemented a higher standard of health services than had previously existed. Several years after SESAI assumed responsibility for healthcare at the Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá communities, a new primary healthcare unit was constructed that conformed to upgraded national standards, with a reception desk; nursing, medical, and dentistry consultation rooms; and adequate staff housing in a separate building to the back. The entire primary healthcare unit was surrounded by a wall with barbed wire, with room for two SESAI vehicles within the gate. Although SESAI was rightfully criticized by A’uwẽ health service users as understaffed, underfunded, and lacking in basic supplies, the current service standard was higher than it had been under FUNASA. In the first place, there were now full-time nurses on staff at the healthcare unit, not just nurse assistants or technicians, who continued to be assisted by Indigenous health agents. Additionally, health professionals including doctors and dentists now frequented the healthcare unit to offer additional services without requiring that A’uwẽ patients travel to the nearest hospital in town. Access to doctors was greatly improved beginning in 2013 by the More Doctors (Mais Médicos) program that initially contracted Cuban doctors under a bilateral agreement to improve access to doctors nationally, and subsequently employed Brazilian doctors to work in underserved communities, including Indigenous lands. Dentists, who rotated through multiple A’uwẽ healthcare units, maintained regular calendars to attend to the oral health needs of the population. Before SESAI, no oral health services were offered to the A’uwẽ residing in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Improved infrastructure, more professional staff, and more comfortable clinical spaces continued to reinforce the importance of the primary healthcare unit in the lives of Pimentel and Etênhiritipá community residents.

Most illnesses currently treated at the healthcare unit were not present before the A’uwẽ interacted directly or indirectly with people of European descent. Although such diseases as some chronic viral infections (e.g., hepatitis B and herpes), intestinal parasites, gastroenteritis, cutaneous leishmaniosis, and routine injuries are known to have been present in precolonial times (Coimbra Jr. and Santos 2004; Merbs 1992; Salzano and Callegari-Jacques 1988), many of the other reasons people sought medical attention in recent years are historically derived from the colonial experience. For example, A’uwẽ continued to suffer from tuberculosis (in greatly reduced numbers), influenza, and pneumonia (malaria was eradicated from the region that includes the A’uwẽ territories between the late 1970s and the early 1990s). Additionally, they increasingly suffered from chronic noncommunicable diseases, such as cancer, and those associated with transformations in the dietary economy and physical inactivity, such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. With the introduction and widespread acquisition of motorized vehicles, there was now an unprecedentedly high frequency of vehicular accidents besides increased physical inactivity resulting from reduced walking. Here we see the rub of the primary healthcare unit’s contribution to A’uwẽ sedentism—in anchoring people to a fixed community and thereby reducing physical activity, limiting access to arable land for agriculture, and reducing access to local wild food resources, it contributed to some of the very illnesses it sought to address. This apparent irony was complex and not reducible to the sole role of primary healthcare. There are multiple reasons the A’uwẽ are now more sedentary than they were in the past, and the ramifications of this transformation are not simple.

Schoolhouses

A second pillar of the transformation to sedentarism since the 1990s was local community primary education schools. The first such school was opened by FUNAI after it relocated to the Pimentel Barbosa community in 1973 and was abandoned for a time in 1976 as a result of disinterest by the A’uwẽ. It operated intermittently through the 1980s when teachers were available (Laura R. Graham, personal communication, 2021). Responsibility for schoolhouses was decentralized between state secretariates of education and federally funded municipal secretariats of education in 1991. The Pimentel Barbosa Municipal Primary Education School was opened in 1992. The number of enrolled students boomed after 1998, mainly because it converted to bilingual (A’uwẽ/Portuguese) teaching in 1997 (Russo 2005). This major shift in educational logic was brought about by a 1996 national law establishing bilingual teaching and interculturality as basic principles of Indigenous education, which was an important move to implement the 1988 constitutional right of Indigenous peoples to use their own languages and learning processes.

Bilingualism implied hiring A’uwẽ teachers. The teaching staff was mostly A’uwẽ by 2004, when I arrived, and soon thereafter became exclusively A’uwẽ after implementation of a 2001 law providing for the autonomy of Indigenous schools and higher education of Indigenous professors. These changes stimulated community schoolhouses to become more consistently important features of community life. Students enrolled in much greater numbers with the educational experience then under the responsibility of mostly A’uwẽ teachers. Although the national school curriculum did not change, the indigenization of the teaching staff transformed the school into an A’uwẽ space, where the curriculum was taught in a language students understood and culturally interpreted to make it more relevant and intelligible.

When I first visited the Pimentel Barbosa community in 2004, numerous classes were attended by male students of diverse ages, covering the first eight years of primary education. For a time, classes for women were held in a separate building within the community, not in the schoolhouse at the post adjacent to the community. Some years later, the first female A’uwẽ teacher was hired to teach girls in a classroom in the main schoolhouse. More recently, there were two female A’uwẽ teachers at this school, from whom many of the community’s girls took classes.

When the Etênhiritipá community separated from the Pimentel Barbosa community in 2006 and moved just a half kilometer away, both continued to share the existing primary healthcare unit, but Etênhiritipá decided to construct its own new schoolhouse within the community. Whereas the Pimentel Barbosa school was municipal, the A’uwẽ at Etênhiritipá sought a state school, a project that took more than two years to formalize, during which no classes were held. Thereafter, for many years, school operation was funded by the state of Mato Grosso, but no resources were allocated for the construction of a schoolhouse. The school operated out of a long palm-thatched structure built with unfinished wooden poles by the community residents. Only later did the state pay for the construction of a provisional school with cement block walls, although the roofing continued to be made of palm thatch installed and maintained by the community. The last time I visited, plans were underway to improve the permanence of the structure and facilities.

Recently, both schools were fully functioning, offering all eight years of primary education. The Pimentel Barbosa school had also received state funding to complement the municipal school budget and thereby offer more comprehensive educational services. Development of the Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá schools contributed to their becoming considered virtually mandatory for all children. Part of this change occurred through the federal cash transfer program Bolsa Família, initiated in 2003, which provided monthly assistance payments to mothers or, in the case of underage mothers, fathers, if they met a series of conditionalities, which included children’s minimum school attendance and being measured, weighed, and vaccinated regularly at the primary healthcare unit. Unsatisfactory school attendance could cause suspension of a mother’s monthly benefit. The Bolsa Família program was therefore a major factor in stimulating contemporary sedentism (it is still too early to tell how the replacement cash transfer program, Brazil Assistance, will affect this trend).

Also, the perspectives of A’uwẽ parents changed substantially in the intervening years after the FUNAI school fell into intermittent use after 1976. There was now widespread recognition that learning to speak Portuguese and gaining knowledge about the non-A’uwẽ world benefited individuals and their communities. Formerly, this kind of intercultural education was only available by sending children away to study in distant cities while living with non-Indigenous host families. Now, children could attend their community’s school and gain important knowledge to prepare them for engaging with the outside world, especially Brazilian society but also people from foreign countries, such as myself (I was once asked to sing along while my age set peers performed “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in broken English, which they had learned from the school’s English curriculum).

Schooling recently became widely valued as a means to continue to higher education, as evidenced by the first generation of students who were currently studying at or had recently graduated from regional universities. Given the rapid pace of A’uwẽ entrance into university programs, I expect the educational landscape to change noticeably by the time this book goes to print. Schooling was also valued as a step toward accessing employment. Until recently, most advanced students sought employment as teachers at their community’s schools, while many others sought work in support positions at these schools, such as cooks and custodial staff, or as community health agents at the primary health-care unit. Nonetheless, recently, some individuals were looking beyond their communities for employment, which had not occurred since the 1970s, when some A’uwẽ worked for nearby mines, farms, and ranches, or for FUNAI. For example, in 2019, my younger adoptive brother Hernan passed the qualification process for hire as a municipal police officer. The last time I visited, he was taking classes in preparation for this job. Thus, schooling was a relatively new means to meet cultural expectations that a young A’uwẽ man provide for his wife, children, parents-in-law, and other kin. Through employment made possible by schooling, young women and men could purchase food and other supplies for their households and, through mostly female-coordinated reciprocity, contribute to other households as well.

Another way of looking at formal education as an emergent cultural value is through its potential power to engage and reorder the ongoing legacy of colonial relationships. Education was viewed by many A’uwẽ as a means to operate in a non-A’uwẽ world more competently and therefore to become less vulnerable to racially based inequality. By learning about the colonizers, one became able to engage them without sacrificing one’s cultural values and beliefs. I was told by several of the first A’uwẽ to receive formal education outside their communities in the 1970s and 1980s that they were refused service at some local restaurants despite constitutional law prohibiting racial discrimination. They told me that based on their education about their rights to equal treatment, they formulated a peaceful strategy for combating this form of discrimination. As they recalled, they began sitting down in local restaurants that had previously treated them poorly or refused them service rather than avoiding such establishments. They ignored disrespectful treatment by staff and customers, maintaining respectful composure or politely informing people of their right to receive equal service. As they reported to me, by persisting with this strategy, A’uwẽ customers were eventually treated more respectfully by these restaurants. When I arrived in 2004 and continuing to this day, A’uwẽ received stares and occasional disrespectful comments by some restaurant customers but no longer experienced unequal service. This example illustrates how some A’uwẽ valued education as a means to resist oppression and take steps to unburden themselves of the colonial inheritance of their contemporary social environments. Thus, schooling was valued by the A’uwẽ not only as a mechanism to facilitate receiving government assistance and obtaining salaried employment, but also for improving their broader intercultural circumstances in a region of Brazil where internal colonialism is recent and ongoing, associated with abundant racism and other dehumanizing experiences involving prejudice. I can attest to examples, such as my discovery in 2014 that a regional public hospital reserved two rooms near the garbage bins at the back exit with no furnishings other than old mattresses on the floor for A’uwẽ patients and their companions to rest and sleep. This arrangement was described to me by an A’uwẽ leader as a humiliating experience that was made worse when he overheard health professionals discussing who would do the undesirable chore of attending to A’uwẽ patients housed in these disheveled rooms. He said he knew he had a right to a clean bed elevated from the floor but was too shamed by this treatment to register a complaint, although he intended to in the future. Having been educated about legal guarantees against such discrimination, he considered it his right and duty to make it known that he did not accept it.

School attendance affected many of the events and practices associated with age organization discussed in previous chapters. The schools at Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá generally followed the same calendars as their urban counterparts, with five days of classes per week, two-day weekends, and predetermined holidays and vacation periods. Unfortunately, these calendars were rarely congruent with the many rites and ceremonies associated with the A’uwẽ life cycle. For example, in 2005 my novitiate adult peers were all taking night classes, which started roughly at the same time they were expected to congregate in their novitiate adult council meeting in the community plaza and sing around the community after sunset. This conflict was resolved in two ways. First, the community forgave their absence in the community when they had class. Second, when they were on vacation, they made exemplary efforts to hold their meetings and to sing every night, and thereby reestablish their traditionalist routine and contribute to a cheerful mood in the community.

Other adaptations were also made to reconcile the ceremonial and school calendars. Sometimes, a school director sought permission from school secretariates to alter the class calendar to accommodate important rites and ceremonies that would otherwise create scheduling conflicts. For example, in 2011, special permission was obtained for the Pimentel Barbosa community school to close during key segments of the ceremonial events associated with the preinitiates’ initiation into novitiate adulthood. Thus, that year the boys could participate fully in all the capacities expected of them during the ceremonial calendar. In 2019, however, a different strategy was used to accommodate the next cycle of secular initiation rites in the Pimentel Barbosa community. The ceremonies that year, which had been delayed three years because of several deaths of important ceremonial officiants and spiritual initiation rites held in 2018, were consolidated from the usual span of approximately six months to a single month to coincide with the standard July school vacation. In consultation with elders, the rites were abbreviated to compact all the important ceremonial events into this four-week period and thereby retain the municipal school calendar unaltered.

These examples illustrate how important school attendance had become and show that even the ritual calendar had been modified to ensure boys and girls could continue to attend both school and their important rites of passage. Framed in terms of well-being, they demonstrated that considerable attention was dedicated to ensuring the ongoing viability of both traditionalist cultural values expressed through A’uwẽ age organization, which was considered integral to the proper social construction of adults from children, and emergent values of the importance of formal schooling for the wellness of young people and the whole community. It appears that neither was understood to be more important than the other. Rather, they were considered equally worthy of youth participation and community accommodation, such as when they came into scheduling conflict. Consequently, community schoolhouses provided a reason for youths in all households to remain close to their community for most of the calendar year, decreasing opportunities for these young people to participate in multiple-day excursions, such as treks, except on weekends and during official holidays and vacations.

A final factor encouraged residential permanence to retain access to established schools. Under the current decentralized organizational structure that delegates responsibility for Indigenous schools to states and municipalities, construction of new schoolhouses in recently established rural Indigenous communities was not automatic, and their residents had to advocate for allocation of state or municipal funds for schools to provide their children with local access to primary education. Once established, however, a schoolhouse was a powerful motivator for a community to remain where it was. The uncertainty of moving to a new location, where it may take years to regain access to local schooling, was an imposing deterrent to relocating a community.

Electrification

The third and final major pillar of sedentarization was more recent than the first two. Indigenous health posts and schoolhouses were first established for the Pimentel Barbosa community in the 1970s, or even earlier if one considers their former occupation of Wedezé in the 1950s near the SPI post at São Domingos. In contrast, electrification of A’uwẽ communities including Pimentel Barbosa and Etênhiritipá did not occur until 2011. Before that year, the drinking water well at the Pimentel Barbosa community had a diesel generator donated by a European nonprofit organization to power a pump. A few people diverted energy from this generator to their houses to run televisions intermittently.

Initiated in 2003, Brazil’s progressive rural electrification initiative Light for All (Luz para Todos) aimed to promote socioeconomic development and improve quality of life by providing universal subsidized domestic access to the electrical grid. Although this program sought to benefit all rural Brazilian households, special priority was given to the country’s diverse Indigenous population, as well as to other traditional communities who wished to participate. Over the course of a year beginning in 2010, multiple community meetings with representatives of all nine communities then present in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land were held to determine whether consent should be given to install electrical lines within the land. Debate touched on the many benefits of having access to illumination, refrigerators or freezers, and televisions within the home, as well as potential negative consequences of these changes, including cultural change through excessive television watching and alterations to food-ways through the introduction of refrigerators and freezers. Elders expressed concern that younger people would further lose interest in traditional foods and fail to learn how to gather and hunt wild foods because kitchen appliances would allow perishable food from supermarkets to be stored and accessed throughout the month following payday. Most people expressed to me that they welcomed the benefits of electricity in their homes while expecting its introduction to provoke some changes. The final decision to allow installation of power lines was eventually made through consensus by almost all communities. Many families began saving money months in advance to buy appliances. Some retail stores sent sales representatives to communities to offer appliances on credit.

Installation of power lines from the nearest highway to the communities was accomplished quickly in late 2011 by the local electricity distribution company. Each house received an electrical meter, which was read monthly by the power company. The corresponding batch of bills were picked up in town by a community representative, who distributed them to households. According to this representative in one community, a large portion of the bills each month were past due, and many people paid only when disconnection was imminent. Virtually all households came to have a refrigerator or freezer, as well as a television and electrical lighting. The near universality of televisions was an incremental change, considering that before the electrification project, about five households had televisions powered by the intermittent water well generator in the Pimentel Barbosa community, where relatives and neighbors gathered to watch the news, novelas, and movies on rented DVDs (see Graham 2016).

Implementation of this national infrastructure program contributed to recent changes in the local A’uwẽ food economy, with repercussions for the community’s food diversity and social relations of resource sharing. Freezers and refrigerators improved storage of foods and led to increased purchasing of industrialized perishables. For example, beef, chicken, and fish came to be purchased more frequently and in larger quantities. Wild game and fish no longer needed to be consumed or shared immediately. Although A’uwẽ cultural protocols for sharing wild and purchased meats and fish with extended family members and neighbors continued to be practiced, these new storage technologies, some of which incidentally hid food stores from sight during visits by members of other households, permitted greater retention within the household. With households purchasing more perishable foods after 2011, within-community sale of foods began to occur for the first time alongside traditional reciprocity and exchange. Increased reliance on purchased industrialized foods, which was also attributable to the general process of monetarization of community and household economies underway at the same time, discouraged physical activities associated with traditional food procurement, especially among youths. For similar reasons, comparing 2011 and 2019, household gardens came to be less common, smaller, and located closer to the community. These factors suggest decreased food sovereignty with potential health consequences.

Before connection to the grid, the presence of a television at home was shown to be associated with physical inactivity (Lucena et al. 2016). After 2011, most households had televisions that were often left on day and night. With the ability to recharge devices and the installation of internet access at local schoolhouses, many students and teachers acquired smartphones and came to access social media regularly. Use of Bluetooth facilitated file exchange, even in the absence of internet. Exposure to idealizations of consumerism and other forms of media expression became nearly constant via such avenues as advertisements, television programs, and social media platforms. Child play and games seemed to reflect traditional subsistence and homemaking themes less than they had previously, although I did not investigate this dimension thoroughly.

Some households with less access to income appeared to be increasingly marginalized, unable to participate in the emergent food economy. Several households that did not purchase foods regularly for lack of income also reported having very little access to locally produced and acquired foods, perhaps due to the absence of knowledgeable residents, such as elders, who could procure these foods for the household. Emergence of socioeconomic differentiation between households in the same community and between communities was noticed in public health literature (Arantes et al. 2018; Welch et al. 2009). These studies showed that contrasts in income and industrialized household goods (as a measure of wealth) were associated with such health outcomes as dental caries and excess weight.

Since installation of the first electrical lines, the power company did not respond to requests for additional installations. Consequently, new houses tended to be positioned close to houses with an electrical meter so improvised lines could be run between them. New houses without this kind of access must go without in-home electricity but often stored foods in relatives’ freezers. Also, since the lines’ installation, eleven new communities were established within the land by splinter groups leaving other communities. This traditionally A’uwẽ demographic pattern continued despite new communities lacking access to grid connection. Residents in such communities expressed their hopes that power lines would soon reach them. Independently of their impacts, freezers, refrigerators, and televisions were desirable conveniences that contributed to the motivation to remain in an established community. Given the bureaucracy and delays in bringing electricity to a new community site, relocating a community, as was so common in the past, would introduce a great deal of uncertainty as to when these services and goods could be reacquired. Combined with the uncertainty of access to a primary healthcare unit and schooling, the impediments to relocation derived from stationary access to government services and policies were formidable.

Reflections on Contemporary Mobility

The multiplication of communities despite lack of access to electricity, schoolhouses, and health posts after relocation suggests these services were not significant factors in discouraging community divisions. They were, however, ample motivation for an existing community to remain where it was rather than following the historical pattern of moving community locations frequently and temporarily. This scenario led to a historically novel situation where communities continued to split but once established were not abandoned. In the past, community locations could be occupied for relatively short periods (as little as a few years) and, when unoccupied, served as trekking camps. For example, the Pimentel Barbosa community, which had given rise to eighteen derivative communities through successive divisions, continued to occupy the same location since it was (re)occupied in the late 1960s to early 1970s (it was previously occupied in the late 1940s to late 1950s) (Welch, Santos, et al. 2013). When the Etênhiritipá community split from Pimentel Barbosa in 2006, there was a cutting dispute over which faction would remain in the established community location and which would leave and open a new community elsewhere. This argument was resolved by the dissenting faction constructing its new community very close by and staking claim to the A’uwẽ language name for the site on which both communities—new and old—were located (Etênhiritipá). Not only did the new community wish to retain access to the primary healthcare unit, but it wanted to retain the reputation of being the traditionalist mother community that gave rise to many other newer communities within the land. The current (2021–2022) division of the Etênhiritipá community faced a similarly tense dispute, with both factions refusing to leave and thereby relinquish control of its infrastructure and services, as well as its historically valuable name.

Community sedentism had several benefits that were appreciated by many A’uwẽ. Many younger people preferred the new lifestyle and the security it offered, including the ability to raise larger, healthier families and enjoy perceptions of decreased hardship. Indeed, with sedentarization and monetarization of the local economy (in part promoted through the presence of a primary healthcare unit and schoolhouse salaries), younger people had greater liberty to abstain from strenuous subsistence activities including collecting, hunting, fishing, and gardening. With access to primary healthcare units and decreased mobility, elders reported that shorter interbirth spacing was possible, and infant mortality was greatly reduced. Women who so desire might therefore have more children during their lifetimes. In 2011 the total fertility rate of women in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land was 8.2, which was very high but represented a decrease from a maximum of 10.2 in 1999–2004 (according to the 2010 national census, the Brazilian total fertility rate was 1.9) (Bibiani 2018; L. G. Souza 2008). Men with jobs were no longer expected to provide food for their families by hunting and gardening if they now had the means to purchase industrialized and ultraprocessed foods, which were preferred by many people today despite their potential negative health consequences.

Sedentism within a circumscribed Indigenous land also had potential undesirable implications. Among these were loss of traditional environmental knowledge, diminishment of bodily and spiritual force, environmental overuse, and potential for social conflict. The current trends of economic emphasis on maximizing financial income and consuming foods purchased at supermarkets at the expense of products of traditional collecting, hunting, fishing, and gardening activities in the cerrado landscape contributed to a partial generational gap in traditional environmental knowledge. With many elders reducing the frequency of their self-provisioning activities outside their communities, and many younger people disinterested in learning A’uwẽ subsistence activities that take place in the cerrado, continuous knowledge transmission was concentrated in fewer young people than it had been just a decade ago. Should this pattern continue, it would likely have unfavorable impacts on traditional environmental knowledge viability as it transforms from general to specialized knowledge.

According to contemporary male common knowledge, physical stamina was required for acquiring bodily and spiritual force. Bodily force was achieved by walking and performing subsistence activities in the cerrado, as well as participating in strenuous ceremonial activities and competitions. Having participated in dialogue with public health researchers for years and increasingly observed the consequences of nutrition transition, A’uwẽ understood that not participating in these physical activities caused the body to lack strength, promoted accumulation of body fat, and facilitated development of cardiovascular diseases, which in turn discouraged participation in healthful strenuous activities. This catch-22 of physical inactivity also affected one’s capacity for developing spiritual force, which was gained by demonstrating resolute endurance and stamina during spiritual initiations and rituals. Lack of physical force due to sedentism could lead to lack of spiritual capability and therefore to lower capacity for healing one’s kin when they were afflicted by ailments or sorcery.

Unbeknownst to the A’uwẽ at the time, the historical move from Wedezé and other communities to the Pimentel Barbosa community was a first step in ceding much of their traditional territory to private interests and restricting themselves to a small land circumscribed by agribusiness. Nevertheless, residents of the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land were fortunate in that they continued to have the smallest population density of any A’uwẽ land. This fact is largely the result of A’uwẽ political activism, which had significant success increasing the area of their land from 204,000 hectares in 1975 to 328,966 hectares in 1980. Also, continual A’uwẽ political activism from 2000 through 2010 resulted in identification of the nearby Wedezé Indigenous Land of 145,881 hectares, which currently remains contested in the courts. The population continued to grow at a fast pace, however, making it likely that their land could become inadequate, as illustrated by current challenges faced by hunters when planning appropriate hunting fires in the cerrado. Also, the dynamic of communities’ hybrid economies (Altman 2007) should not be presumed to be a unilinear course toward greater market participation. Should the current phase of increased access to financial resources prove to be yet another boom-and-bust economic cycle, economic resilience might be required to transition from acquisition of traditional foods mainly for limited ceremonial uses to daily consumption. Such a transformation would potentially place new strains on the restricted land available to them, especially near sedentary communities.

Another negative consequence of sedentarization for well-being was the potential for exacerbated political conflict. The most well-known historical community to be inhabited for many decades was Sõrepré, thought to have been continuously occupied from about 1890 to 1920 by the entirety of the A’uwẽ population (Lopes da Silva 1992). Sõrepré was also famous in A’uwẽ oral history for its acute interfamily conflicts and accusations of sorcery, which ultimately caused the population to permanently divide into about seven subgroups that never reunited, except for occasional isolated marriages and minor relocations of individuals and small families. Similarly, today the centrifugal forces of health posts, schools, and electrification that disincentivized residential relocation may lead to exaggerated conflicts, which might have been dissipated were communities more mobile. The ability to go on trek for months at a time with just one’s extended family may have provided a social escape valve that helped diffuse arguments before they became too intense (Maybury-Lewis 1967). Similarly, the flexibility of community subgroups to establish new, often temporary, communities may have contributed to checking disagreements before they grew overt and caused irreconcilable factional separations. This hypothesis is supported by A’uwẽ oral history, according to which communities often split and then rejoined several years later, rather than suffering from permanent ruptures. With the current pattern of sedentism, however, whereby people are motivated to reside continually in existing communities and trekking has been largely discontinued, tensions could escalate to dangerous levels before a subgroup or faction decided to establish a new community elsewhere. Thus, people embroiled in grave disputes potentially continued to occupy the same community for many months or years before splitting, during which resentment, distrust, and anger could grow.

One recent example suggests that the historical pattern of residential mobility did not become entirely obsolete. Wederã community left the Pimentel Barbosa community in 1996 in a storm of political tensions that continue to sour their relationship today. Some people who remained at Pimentel Barbosa, however, were close kin and friends of the group that relocated to Wederã, maintaining close ties with them over the years. When Pimentel Barbosa split again in 2006, many of these allies of Wederã moved to the Etênhiritipá community. Over the next few years, many households relocated from Wederã to Etênhiritipá, thereby reuniting extended families that had been ruptured by the 1996 split. This example suggests residential mobility in the form of temporary community divisions followed by amicable reunions remained a possibility under appropriate contemporary circumstances.

In closing this section, I would also like to call attention to the importance of recognizing that decreased residential mobility and trekking did not imply that all forms of mobility, some rooted in historical cultural values and practices, disappeared or lost their significance in recent times. Of the Mebêngôkre (Kayapó), Laura Zanotti (2014, 121) wrote, “Over the past 200 years, Kayapó communities have undergone a dramatic change from savannah-based semi-nomadism to living in villages in a federally protected reserve. Where these changes have been described as increased sedentism and decreased trekking, I suggest that such depictions of current Kayapó livelihoods conceal the fact that movement and mobility, in different ways, still play a role in everyday practices.” Similarly, contemporary A’uwẽ moved from place to place on foot, by bicycle, riding motorcycles, in cars, by truck, aboard buses, and on airplanes. They circulated between community, river, schoolhouse, primary healthcare unit, gardens, song rehearsal hideouts, collecting areas, fishing spots, hunting grounds, regional towns, universities, distant Brazilian cities, and foreign countries (see Graham 1995). During these travels they continued to procure valued resources to support their kin, ceremonial groups, and communities, although sometimes these benefits were immaterial. When they left the Indigenous land, it might have been to access bank accounts, register for social services, seek medical treatment, take classes, make political demands, visit kin, renew friendships with allies, participate in cultural presentations, or contribute to media products. Although their routes and modes of transportation changed, they continued to seek dispersed resources of benefit to their people while moving throughout their present-day landscape.

Camaraderie in the Preinitiate House

Among the most fundamental of social bonds that develop while boys live in the preinitiate house were the ones that united age set mates. Each cohort of boys, especially the first staggered groups to be inducted, became something of a second family to one another. On arrival, the boys were largely unknown to one another, except those who happened to be close relatives or neighbors. Promptly, however, any initial fears or inhibitions were shed, being replaced by fraternal joviality and eventually intimate camaraderie. Coresident preinitiates developed the kinds of friendships that only occur through living together, playing together, sleeping together, and passing trials together for an extended period. The living quarters were close, with the entire age set occupying a single-room structure with no partitions of any kind (figure 42). Much of what they did for up to four years, from the most mundane of activities to the most defining of formative experiences, was as a cohesive group.

Figure 42

Typical daytime scene in the preinitiate house (hö) in the Pimentel Barbosa community, 2005.

The social collectivity of the preinitiate house both comprised and was parsed by a special bond that linked pairs of boys in a most intimate formulation of companionship. Before boys were inaugurated into the preinitiate house, their fathers selected one or two formal friends (da’amo) for each, who would be their closest comrades at least until their initiation into novitiate adulthood, when they might select an additional formal friend. Formal friends were a typical but nonuniform Gê idea that strongly affected one’s social life among the A’uwẽ and other groups (e.g., Carneiro da Cunha 1978; W. H. Crocker 1990; Lave 1979; Lopes da Silva 1986). In all A’uwẽ cases, formal friends belonged to opposite exogamous moieties, which lent them an aspect of balance and reciprocity, as well as symbolically differentiating them into actors (Tadpole moiety) and co-adjutants (Big Water moiety). These boys were not only close peers in formal or ceremonial settings, as described by Maybury-Lewis (1967), but also the closest of mates in daily life. They held hands during ceremonial song performances, often slept next to each other, shared food, and generally spent a great deal of time in each other’s company. It was a relationship of uninhibited jocularity and social interdependence. Although Lopes da Silva (1986) indicated that the familiarity of preinitiate formal friendships was systematically transformed into more distant relations of affinity as boys reached adulthood and married, my data show that those first formal friendships might be maintained for a lifetime should the individuals involved choose to do so. Formal friends were another dimension of social organization that promoted social well-being through their contribution to people’s sense of belonging, companionship, and support.

Not to be overshadowed by its communality, the fraternal milieu of the preinitiate house was also the social environment that enabled boys to come into their own as individuals. Under the gentle camaraderie of their mentors, preinitiate coresidents began the work of learning who they were to be as adults. Previously known outside their families by generic terms for child or adolescent (a’uté, watebremí, or ai’repudu), preinitiate coresidents bestowed on one another nicknames as each boy became known for his unique personality, quirks, capabilities, and shortcomings. The informality of these names was marked by frequent use of comical Portuguese language words, not proper A’uwẽ names. Beyond the social realm of age set peers and mentors, preinitiate boys came to be known as individuals by the whole community as they increasingly participated in public events. Through song performances, club fights (oi’o), wrestling matches, and soccer games, each boy was placed in public view and thereby became known for his unique composition. As Tsuptó told me, “Ceremonial contests are how we get to know what each boy is made of, what are his strengths and weaknesses.” Some of these trials involved suffering or pain, which was believed to strengthen the boy and, through his exposure, contribute to his social wellness throughout life.

Another more explicit way preinitiate individuality was recognized was through a series of age set leadership positions that were bestowed on some coresident peers, but not all, according to certain personal and genealogical characteristics. A first example of preinitiate age set leadership occurred early in the coresident experience, when several of the oldest (first to be inducted) boys were selected by mature men with certain heritable prerogatives to have their ears pierced years before the rest of their age set peers, who would do so as part of the age set initiation rites that marked their passage to the novitiate adult age grade. These boys, called aihö’oboni, composed a public class of age set seniors for the remainder of their term as preinitiates. They were considered elder representatives of their age set and were afforded the responsibilities of repeating their mentors’ lessons to reinforce them among younger age set members, speaking for their group, and intervening when their age set peers acted inappropriately. They thereby contributed to the betterment of the entire age set.

Another example of age set leaders, selected by elders as both the eldest and strongest of their age set, were ĩmurĩ’rada. They did not have a formally differentiated social role but assumed a somewhat informal status as senior members of the age set and leaders of ceremonial processions and competitions. Whereas the senior statuses of aihö’oboni and ĩmurĩ’rada leaders endured only while they remained in the preinitiate house, two other ceremonial designations within an age set distinguished individuals for the remainder of their lives. Pahöri’wa were designated by certain mature adult men who were owners of the heritable prerogative pahöri’wa’tede’wa, usually chosen from among their patrilineal descendants. Two such pahöri’wa leaders were selected from among the eldest (first to be inducted) preinitiates, reflecting the elders’ positive evaluation of their commitment to singing and competing in log races, as well as their physical strength and beauty (face, body shape, and musculature). Two tebé were similarly selected by elders from among the younger ranks of tepé’tede’wa heritable prerogative owners. Two pahöri’wa and two tebé leaders, four in total, were pierced a short time before the rest of their age set mates and expected to always conduct themselves in an exemplary manner.³ They held honored ceremonial roles in the age set initiation rites that marked their passage into novitiate manhood, and, thereafter, as adults, they retained permanent usage of the honorary titles pahöri’wa and tebé instead of usual kinship terms. These distinctions bestowed on just a few of the preinitiates were considered part of the beauty of the preinitiate experience and thereby expressions of good living through social differentiation within the unity of the group.

In addition to the intimate bonds that developed between age set peers while living in the preinitiate house, profound social relationships also developed between the boys and their mentors. The term danhohui’wa referred to all members of an age set that collectively mentor another age set, irrespective of any other, more specific bonds that might exist between them (the age set peers that collectively were protégés of their mentors were called hö’wa nõri). Another term, danimiwanho, referred to an individual boy’s personal mentor, chosen from among his age set mentors by his father, who gave him special attention, care, and guidance (this individual mentor’s personal protégé was termed hö’wa) (cf. Giaccaria and Heide 1984; Lopes da Silva 1986; Maybury-Lewis 1967). Contrary to my cultural expectations that mentoring relationships would be more about proctorship and tutelage, I found the relationship between mentors (danhohui’wa and danimiwanho) and their protégés (hö’wa nõri and hö’wa) to be much more about intimate comradeship and sponsorship, what Lopes da Silva (1986) characterized as another type of formal friendship, albeit, in this case, an unequal one. For the A’uwẽ, these feelings of friendship were bound up in the term ĩnhimnhõhu, often used reciprocally between protégés and mentors after the younger of the two had married and had children.

Mentors sometimes discussed with their protégés how to behave responsibly but did so in such a way that it came across as kind advice rather than an order or demand. A mentor might expound on the virtues of keeping their voices down, sticking together as a group, minding their own business, keeping the preinitiate house tidy, playing out of the way of others, treating elders with respect, and not responding to women’s calls. Yet, such guidance was not accompanied by a threat of policing or punishment, and the boys knew this. A mentor’s presence was not met by his protégés with notable deference and did not necessarily encourage good behavior. In fact, the quality of the relationships between them was notably horizontal despite their inherently asymmetrical positions in the secular age set system. In practice, mentors were extremely permissive and seemed to care more about their mutual reputation in the community than about how their protégés behaved while out of sight of the public. Mentors and protégés were equally vulnerable to community disapproval, and together they strove to put on a good show for others. Both mentors and protégés were bound to one another as comrades, and mentors did not seek to be the bosses of their protégés.

At the heart of this relationship was trust—to share, to lend a hand, to keep a secret. Even after they married and had children of their own, young males were expected to be providers to their mentors. In the preinitiate house, boys shared with their mentors the food their families sent them. In the event a young age set went fishing as a group, which was most common in the years immediately preceding and following their graduation from the preinitiate house, it was expected that protégés give a substantial portion of the yield to accompanying mentors. Mentors offered protégés guidance, interest, and confidence. Often, an individual mentor would bring his specific protégé a gift of food, accompany him to the river to take a bath, or instruct him on how to prepare his body to become strong. Mentors shared with their protégés privileged ethnobotanical knowledge about remedies that made one grow strong and run fast in inter-age-set competitions (figure 43). These remedies were known only to members of their own secular age set moiety, being passed down between successive generations of mentors and protégés. Such gestures implied mutual solidarity and allegiance between mentors and protégés.

Figure 43

Preinitiate (wapté) washing his legs with a privileged plant remedy known by his mentors (danhohui’wa) to cause one to become a fast runner, 2006.

I found that preinitiate coresidents were rarely left alone because their mentors took turns away from their families to look after them. Mentoring preinitiates required around-the-clock coordinated presence, guidance, and companionship. A greater portion of the day-to-day responsibility fell on unmarried mentors, who had more available time and less competing responsibilities than their married peers. Yet, all mentors attended their protégés’ most important events, such as ceremonial presentations. New mature adult mentors were not alone in this effort, as they continued to be benevolently guided and encouraged by their mentors and other members of their age set moiety (their mentors’ mentors and so on). This chain of mentorship was what transformed the preinitiate experience into a social institution that transcended many generations and united allied age sets with a sense of common purpose and interest through intimate bonds of camaraderie.

The allegiance between mentors and protégés was nowhere as apparent as in the code of secrecy between them. The two were on the same side in all senses of the phrase. To be on one’s side had both literal and figurative meanings that I discussed in detail in chapter 3. In the present context of camaraderie, it is important to understand sidedness (pertaining to the same secular age set moiety) in terms of the fraternal bond between mentors and protégés. Importantly, they shared each other’s abundant secrets, many of them personal and many pertaining to ritual activities. They shared a presumption that when in the company of age set mates and mentors, self-expression and reasonable rule breaking was allowed. Absent were the tensions of hierarchy implied by authoritarian models. In the case of A’uwẽ mentorship, age asymmetry was not entangled with vigilance. Mentors and protégés indulged one another and kept it to themselves. This was their socially proper technique for promoting learning of expected adult behaviors and responsibilities among their protégés.

Perhaps the most cherished public symbol of the bonds between mentors and protégés was their joint song performances (danho’re). Graham explored in rich detail how group singing publicized the special relationship between protégés and their mentors (Graham 1994, 1995). She highlighted the individual and collective nature of these performances, arguing that song acquisition and performance were highly personal creative endeavors, while performances also emphasized group unity (Graham 1986). Mentors taught song repertoires to their young protégés, thereby informing them about appropriate song forms and performance techniques, so they might subsequently produce and perform songs on their own and, in turn, teach their protégés to sing. According to Graham, songs were initially owned by individuals but through their unified performance came to be owned by their age set collectively. Additionally, their songs came to be associated with their protégés, mentors, and the entire ensuing sequence of alternate age sets (Graham 1995). My evidence also shows singing to have individual and collective dimensions.

For the A’uwẽ, songs were learned by hearing them in dreams followed by imitation and practice. Novitiate adult males were generally thought to dream songs more prolifically than men of other ages (Graham 1995), but some dreamed more than others, and a few did not dream at all. Nevertheless, during song performances, all members of the age set were expected by the community to lead a song or two they dreamed, partly to contribute to the age set morality of sharing responsibility and participating equally and partly because admiration as a singer is earned by lead performances. The idea of everyone contributing as song leaders was connected to the acute need for abundant new songs that my age set peers reported were only presented publicly once, and performance opportunities were frequent.

In my age set, the most prolific dreamers gave songs to those who did not dream to perform as their own. We maintained the public lie that they had dreamed the songs they led in performance, but within the group everyone knew who its true dreamer was. Because I never dreamed a song, I always led songs others had dreamed. Hidden in the cerrado outside the community, the dreamer and I rehearsed the song together until I could sing it on my own. We then practiced it as an age set. As was customary for song dreamers, when I led, I began singing alone for a few seconds before the others joined in (Graham 1995). After the performance, I would sometimes be provoked by older members of the opposite secular age set moiety, who wanted me to confirm if I had dreamed my song. When I said I had, they often expressed disbelief. The lie was implausible, and no one believed me, but my age set peers insisted I maintain the fib to protect our reputation. People became known for their lead performances of songs they were believed to have dreamed, demonstrating that singing as an age set was an expression of both group solidarity and individual beauty.

Age Set Solidarity During Adulthood

The close bonds between mentors and protégés continued long after the boys left the preinitiate house. I experienced this when my age set (êtẽpa) was in novitiate adulthood. Several of our mentors (belonging to the hötörã age set) always accompanied us when we left the community as a group to fish, sing, or collect materials in the cerrado. On one such excursion to the other side of the Indigenous land to collect the inner bark of a special tree to make ceremonial ankle bands, we were joined by four of our mentors, who led us to the collecting location, organized the harvesting of some additional privileged ritual materials, and oversaw a song rehearsal. Being the most ignorant of our group about collecting this inner bark but expected to do so along with my age set peers, I needed special guidance. One of our mentors noticed this and made a point of keeping tabs on me. He showed me how to identify the proper tree, demonstrated how to cut a young sapling, strip its bark, clean the sinuous inner bark of its crisp outer bark, wash it in the river, and wrap it into a neat bundle for carrying. He did not force this lesson on me but asked if I wanted to learn. He showed me once, then discreetly watched from nearby as I did it on my own several times. Once he was satisfied I was on the right track, he drifted farther away without a word. I found this unimposing but thoughtful guidance style typical of mentors. To me it signaled a special attitude of respect, responsibility, and intimacy toward their protégés.

Similarly, in certain ritual contexts, mentors continued to guide their protégés long after they had graduated from the preinitiate house. For example, in May 2005 when we were novitiate adults, at the beginning of a large group multiday hunt, we were accompanied by the late Ronaldo, one of our age set mentors, into the cerrado to rehearse a song repertoire (figure 44). He took the opportunity to lecture us in his gentle manner, softly encouraging us to behave ourselves during the hunt, keep quiet, do our share of the camp chores, obey the wishes of elders, and not gossip about anyone. Finally, he said he did not want to hear later from members of competitive age sets that we had behaved poorly.

Figure 44

Novitiate adults (’ritei’wa) rehearsing song repertoire at hidden location in the cerrado, 2005.

In another instance, our novitiate adult age set covertly went to a location in the cerrado for a song rehearsal. We were accompanied by a large contingent of older men in our age set moiety, including five of our mentors, two of our mentors’ mentors (from the sada’ro age set), and one of their mentors (from the nozö’u age set). Thus, four alternate age sets united by a continual series of mentor-protégé bonds were present and involved in ensuring that the youngest among them were prepared to give a flawless performance. During the rehearsal we were directly guided by our mentors, but on several occasions, they consulted with or were corrected by their mentors. The eldest man present looked on from a cool spot in the shade of a tree and did not give direct input. This sort of encouraging oversight by members of multiple same-side age sets was typical. It illustrates that the special relationship between mentors and protégés transcended the preinitiate house experience, continuing throughout life and leading to a sense of unity and mutual dedication among members of a secular age set moiety.

Other scholars have correctly noted that these age sets tended to act less cohesively later in life, as family and political concerns took priority (Maybury-Lewis 1967; Graham 1995). Nevertheless, the bonds between age set mates lasted a lifetime. I became acutely aware of this in the aftermath of a sad episode in which Raimundo Serezabdi, a member of one of the oldest secular age sets with living members at the Pimentel Barbosa community (ai’rere’rada), died at a hospital in Brasília. According to my A’uwẽ consultants, FUNASA representatives failed to inform the community of the death in a timely manner, performed unacceptable postmortem (autopsy) procedures on his body without permission, and delayed transport of his body to the community. The A’uwẽ viewed these as gross violations of their cultural and moral rights. When the body was finally delivered and inspected, and the funeral rites were complete, the four living members of Raimundo’s age set, including women and men, met to assess the offense and determine a course of action. I was not present for that meeting but was told that under such grave circumstances as these, surviving age set mates had the right and responsibility to begin deliberating a course of action. Subsequently, the affair became the business of the entire community, being discussed in the men’s council. This example of the continuation of secular age set solidarity from approximately adolescence to old age was a testament to the camaraderie that bound them throughout life.

I mention in chapter 1 that I heard apparently contradictory comments by elders that the preinitiate house experience was unchanged since ancestral times and yet also irreparably misconfigured such that its value had diminished. I interpreted these expressions in terms of a contrast whereby mentorship and preinitiate coresidence were viewed as irreproachable social arrangements rooted in “our traditions, our culture” (wahöimanazé) but to the extent the preinitiate house was a collection of fallible young individuals (i.e., preinitiates and mentors), it was a constant reminder of the inevitability and undesirability of change. From my point of view as an outsider, I perceived continuity in the protégé/mentor relationship, affirmation that there was truth in elders’ characterizations of it as similar to ancestral times and integral to the construction of their resilient identity as A’uwẽ Uptabi (The True People) despite the magnitude of sociocultural, economic, and environmental change that had occurred over the prior seventy-five years. I participated in lengthy and exhausting ceremonial activities all day in the hot sun during which mentors seemingly tested their physical limits to demonstrate strength in the face of hardship for their protégés to emulate, as well as to invigorate the boys with their supportive presence. I passed entire nights hidden in the cerrado, assisting our protégés with their song rehearsals, accompanied by several of our mentors and several of theirs. I accompanied age set fishing expeditions during which adult protégés labored cheerfully to provide sustenance for their mentors. These activities were sure to have suffered change over the decades because cultural resilience involves modification, but the age set activities I experienced were thought of as traditional, as were the special enduring social relations between mentors and protégés. In this sense, camaraderie among age set peers and between mentors and protégés, as well as the rites, ceremonies, and activities they entail, continued to provide an avenue for the promotion of male unity of purpose and duty to society in contemporary times. My recognition of these examples of cultural continuity is not for the sake of nostalgia but to identify how some activities thought to be traditional by A’uwẽ involve resilience of social identity and relations (see Graham 1995, 2005). Camaraderie, sometimes expressed through willingly suffering together, bound these groups of people together for life.

The movement to protect Indigenous knowledge provides the insight that what makes knowledge traditional is not its antiquity, but rather the culturally specific social process of sharing and learning it (Battiste and Henderson 2000). This point applies equally well to the social identity processes discussed here. A’uwẽ elders seemed to share this point of view regarding manhood, mentorship, and camaraderie, and by extension the construction of A’uwẽ ethnic identity among young males. I would elaborate on this point by reemphasizing that a man’s commitment to his protégés, his mentors, and his age set moiety was mirrored by his dedication to watching vigil over younger members of the opposite age set moiety and fulfilling one’s duties as a husband, son-in-law, and father. The former implied the latter. Considered together, it became apparent that manhood involved service to all of society through proximate and distant respect relationships that sought to contribute to the betterment of others.

This optimistic note does not imply that the A’uwẽ were free of conflict and dissent. To the contrary, political factionalism is one of their most famous anthropological features (Maybury-Lewis 1967). Yet, the mentorship relationship and sense of camaraderie derived through the preinitiate house experience were not the source of the problem and might have helped mitigate against it. When I participated in exhausting and painful spiritual rites of initiation (darini) in the Pimentel Barbosa community over several weeks in 2018, one of my secular age set mates who had moved to the Etênhiritipá community during the division in 2006 returned to dance with us to help reinforce our endurance. I believe it was the first time he had returned in twelve years, but he was received as a comrade as though he had never left. The bond that united our age set was, in that moment, stronger than the smoldering conflict between adversarial communities.

Mentorship and Rivalry as Service

A final point to close this discussion of camaraderie and well-being is the evident association between mentorship and suffering. Protégés service to their secular mentors was extremely physically challenging, just as mentoring as a service to one’s protégés was a demanding role. Preparations for and execution of such ceremonial activities as daylong song performances were an example, requiring sleepless nights and feats of physical endurance in the hot sun for many hours without rest. As one older man explained to me, sharing challenges and suffering with one’s protégés supported them, increased their ability to endure hardship, and provided them with a behavioral example of what was expected of them now and when they became mentors to their own protégés. Sacrifices based in affection and duty promoted endurance and force, which were important for one’s age set moiety. Service to one’s protégés furthered the interests of their age set moiety and society at large. Thus, this form of suffering was positively valued in A’uwẽ society as an important instrument in the proper construction of adults and should therefore be considered a dimension of well-being rather than unwellness. This was increasingly the case for women as well, because they recently sought to begin holding some women’s secular age set ceremonies, one of which included daytime singing performances by mentors and their protégés. The last time they did so, in late 2021, they invited men of the same age grades to join them to build solidarity between them and help support the protégé women in enduring the physical challenge.

Not all suffering was associated with positive A’uwẽ cultural values and well-being. Also, the meanings attached to different kinds of suffering were undergoing changes. For example, young A’uwẽ women today would be unlikely to suffer their shins being beaten with sticks by men while on trek to test their stamina and promote strength in their legs. According to Sereburã, this was a typical occurrence for generations that was thought to promote well-being but was recently no longer understood in those terms. Similarly, the women’s naming ceremony was discontinued around the same time because it involved activities no longer thought to promote wellness. Specifically, it could entail extramarital sex between young women, some who were already mothers, and men in the elder adjacent secular age set. This practice was recast by a new generation of women and men as involving undue suffering by women and their husbands. Thus, the kinds of suffering thought to be associated with good living had and would continue to change as A’uwẽ people gained exposure to non-A’uwẽ social values and as formerly muted segments of society sought new social spaces to be heard and to express agency. In the case of mentors’ challenging services to their protégés motivated by a shared sense of camaraderie, it is my impression that the association between suffering and well-being was as strong as ever, being freely maintained by new generations of female (who recently assumed these roles of their own initiative) and male mentors.

The camaraderie enjoyed by male secular age set peers, their mentors, and members of their age set moiety transcended other kinds of intimacy and friendship associated with kinship, formal friendship, and other sodalities. It emerged from secular coresident age set fraternity and extended to the entire sequence of alternate age sets that composed an age set moiety through intergenerational bonds of mentorship. Thus, it divided male society into two halves, each with its own interests and privileged knowledge and practices. Relationships between the two age set moieties was rivalrous and competitive. Both moieties, however, worked toward the same goals of bettering all youths through respect relationships with contrasting logics. Whereas intramoiety relations were permissive and intimate, intermoiety relations were antagonistic. Yet, both types of relations entailed strategies to encourage youths and younger people to learn, behave themselves, and represent their age set moiety well to the rest of the community. In this sense, the two moieties were united in their objectives to promote the construction of responsible men from children of both moieties.

This logic of service for the betterment of subordinates through respectful antagonism was apparent in other contexts, independent of the secular age group system. For example, the two exogamous moieties Tadpole (poreza’õno) and Big Water (öwawe) had a complementary relationship with one another imbued with competitiveness and a moderate dose of antagonism. They were hierarchically ranked, with members of the Tadpole moiety usually being community leaders and initiators of action, and members of the Big Water moiety being voices of dissent or approval and the executers of action. Consequently, they were often cast in opposing roles whereby, for example, Tadpole members wanted to act quickly while Big Water members preferred to pause to think and discuss first. According to some Tadpole members, Big Water members were argumentative and hesitant. According to some Big Water members, Tadpole members were prone to cause blunders that the Big Water moiety must clean up. Nevertheless, their unequal and rivalrous relations were understood according to traditionalist viewpoints as proper social relations that benefited society through their oppositional complementarity. Thus, when a Tadpole member spoke in the men’s council, a Big Water member often responded. When a Tad-pole member proposed action, a Big Water member likely voiced agreement or disagreement. Their interdependent strategies were equally motivated by the desire to treat one another with respect and reach the best decisions for the sake of the whole community.

Competitive relations also existed in the spiritual age group system, with certain age sets in opposing spiritual moieties treating one another with considerable antagonism. Specifically, adjacent age sets (those that were initiated immediately before or after one another) partook in highly adversarial relations, whereby the older adjacent age set exercised authority to police the younger, control its food consumption, require it to undergo suffering, and punish its transgressions. The younger adjacent age set sought to conceal its transgressions from the older to escape punishment. These contrastive roles were most apparent during spiritual initiations and rituals, when their antagonism was performed publicly. During these events, it became apparent that their opposition entailed great sacrifices by the elder age set for the benefit of the younger, to encourage their spiritual vigor and development. Behind shows of antagonism was an underlying intentionality to promote well-being among their subordinates. Their expressions of hostility were a cultural formulation of respect that was executed with near militaristic severity for the ultimate goal of promoting betterment among youths in the form of acquisition of spiritual force.

Social distance was also a characteristic of traditionalist relations between parents-in-law and sons-in-law. When two young people were promised in marriage after the approximately quinquennial secular age set rites of initiation (danhono), their parents, often good friends, began to treat each other with a new form of respect whereby they stopped visiting one another at home and avoided direct communication. For example, a mentor whose daughter was promised to one of his protégés would cease to act as a socially proximate mentor to that specific protégé. Two men who arranged a marriage between their children would express their mutual respect by avoiding speaking directly against one other in the men’s council. According to traditionalist expectations that were changing among some younger people, when a new husband moved into his parents-in-law’s house, he must avoid speaking directly to them or even looking at them to show them respect (Graham 1995). Eyes cast down or turning his back to his parents-in-law to avoid meeting their glance embodied his respectful subordination in the relationship. A son-in-law gained the esteem and support of his parents-in-law, and perhaps eventually relaxation of these expectations of social distance, by providing them with food and performing his husbandly and fatherly duties well. Thus, the expectation of social distance between sons-in-law and their parents-in-law encouraged responsible behavior by young husbands and fathers, benefiting his wife, children, and the whole residential unit.

These select examples of competitive, antagonistic, and distant social relations shared the feature of contributing to the well-being of the community. A’uwẽ society did not expect that good social relations be amicable, at least not all the time. It also did not expect that all people with close social ties would treat one another affectionately. Sometimes A’uwẽ traditionalism called for other kinds of respect relationships, characterized by rivalrous interactions, for the sake of one another’s betterment. These examples elaborate on the special camaraderie relations highlighted in this section. Whereas camaraderie was fraternal and friendly, many other interrelated and mutually constituted forms of proper social relations were not.

Social well-being among the A’uwẽ involved diverse forms of relating to other people, some affectionate and some oppositional, depending on multiple culturally celebrated forms of difference paired with equality that placed value on social contingencies with the potential to inflect the options available for interactions between creative social actors. Good social living involved caring for one’s comrades while adopting authoritative postures toward one’s rivals, embracing as congruent contextual shifts that recast one’s juniors as seniors and one’s masters as subordinates, just as they provoked a trading of places between equals and unequals or allies and competitors. It also involved individuals’ liberty to creatively interpret these multiple configurations in ways that promoted mutual respect and best contributed to other’s social wellness, even if they did so in ways that generated discomfort or suffering. These cultural expectations for healthy adult social relations in service to community demanded skillful alternation between appropriate social stances of meekness and boldness or gentleness and callousness, which was learned and practiced at early ages through observation and imitation of one’s seniors and practice as young participants of formal age group systems.