Tapirapé

By Nancy M. Flowers, John Beierle

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The Tapirapé are a group of Tupi-speaking horticulturalists living at the mouth of the Tapirapé River, a tributary of the Araguaia which forms the border between the states of Mato Grosso and Goiás. There are at present [1966-1967] over 80 Tapirapé gathered in one village, a remnant population of a group which may have numbered close to 1,000 or more at the turn of the century (Shapiro 1968: 14). The Tapirapé share a reservation of 661.7 square kilometers with a group of Karajá, riverine Indians.

Around 1900, when the Tapirapé were still isolated, their population consisted of 1,500 to 2,000 individuals living in five villages on the Rio Tapirapé and neighboring tributaries of the Araguaia. Contact was sporadic until the 1940s, yet epidemic diseases to which they had no resistance, such as malaria, influenza, and even the common cold, rapidly reduced their numbers. In 1940 only 200 Tapirapé remained, living in one village. By 1947 there were only 100. In that year the Kayapó attacked their village, and the surviving Tapirapé scattered. Most of them reassembled and founded a new village at the mouth of the Tapirapé, but one small band, believing they were the only survivors of the Kayapó attack, wandered for twenty-five years in the forest until they were discovered by chance and reunited with their relatives. Since the 1960s, the Tapirapé population has gradually been recovering.

The Tapirapé speak a language that belongs to the Tupí-Guaraní Family of languages.

The remote ancestors of the Tapirapé were probably the Tupinambá, who lived in the coastal region of Brazil at the time of European discovery. The Tapirapé, like the other small Tupí-speaking groups in central Brazil, probably migrated from the coast sometime after 1500. The coastal Tupí were practically wiped out during the first 100 years of Portuguese colonial rule. Although many aspects of Tapirapé culture indicate that they are closely related to the Tupinambá, the Tapirapé have also acquired a number of traits from their neighbors, the Gê-speaking Kayapó and the Karajá.

The Tapirapé have a nucleated settlement pattern. In former times, the longhouses, which had the form of elongated overturned bowls, were placed in a circle around the village plaza, with a large men's house in the center. Houses were made by lashing together with bark strips a framework of wooden poles, which was covered with palm fronds. This circular village arrangement is still maintained, and there is still a men's house, but the dwellings, which are much smaller, now house only one or two nuclear families and are often built of wattle and daub in the rural Brazilian fashion.

Before contact the five Tapirapé villages were independent communities linked by kinship ties. Intervillage marriages occurred, and families occasionally migrated from one village to another. Non-kin associations were also found in each of the villages, helping to tie them into a sociocultural whole.

The rainy season is best for hunting, when high water drives game onto islands of high ground in the savanna and in the forest. Men hunt individually or in groups, but group hunts are more productive. Until recently, the hunting weapon was the bow and arrow, although men would run down game animals, especially peccaries, and kill them with clubs. Game includes monkeys, armadillos, birds, and coatis in the forest and deer, peccaries, ducks, and geese in the savanna. Traditionally, certain game animals were tabooed food to different categories of people; in particular, parents of young children could not eat deer. These rules favored a wide distribution of meat, since a hunter who killed an animal tabooed to him and his wife gave it to those who were permitted to eat the meat.

Fish were available primarily in the dry season, when people were encamped on the savanna. The Tapirapé used fish traps and fish poison. Because their present village is on the river, fishing has become a more important food source.

The Tapirapé are primarily a tropical-forest horticultural people who also exploit resources of the savanna and the river. In their habitat, wet and dry seasons are pronounced, with most of the rainfall between November and April. During the dry season, family groups would camp on the savanna while hunting, fishing, and collecting wild nuts and fruits. As horticulturists, they grow an extensive repertoire of crops, of which the most important is manioc, both sweet and bitter (twelve varieties). Among the others are maize, brown and lima beans, a variety of sweet squash, bananas (seven varieties), sweet potatoes, yams, peanuts, and cotton. Dry rice has become an appreciated crop. The Tapirapé clear their fields from June through September, either in groups or individually; planting areas, however, are always individually owned. Gardens are planted for two years and then abandoned; in the second year, only manioc is grown. Every five to seven years, as garden land within easy walking distance from the village was used up, the Tapirapé would move their village and not return to the same site for about twenty years, giving the forest time to grow again. On their reservation, they no longer have the same freedom to move, and suitable garden land may be several hours' walk from the village; some families therefore camp in their fields at planting- and harvest-times.

Canoes, which traditionally the Tapirapé did not possess, have been acquired by trading with the Karajá by the mid-twentieth century, and some Tapirapé have become excellent canoers.

The men clear the land for gardens, do all cultivation except for peanuts and cotton (a woman’s work), hunt, gather, and do most of the fishing. When a man is at home during the day, he works on the manufacture of bows and arrows, ornaments, or baskets. In the twentieth century men often manufacture masks and other traditional artifacts for the tourist trade, selling them to Brazilian traders who purchase them for resale to collectors.

Women’s activities are involved in food preparation and cooking, spinning cotton, and harvesting crops.

Garden sites (not land) were the property of nuclear family groups. Objects of personal use--hammocks, containers, a woman’s cooking utensils, a man’s bows and arrows--were privately owned.

Severe depopulation brought a number of changes to Tapirapé social organization. Residence was formerly matrilocal, and the extended family in a longhouse consisted of related women of two or three generations and their husbands and children. The Tapirapé are monogamous, although marital infidelity is commonplace. This is socially recognized by a term equivalent to “co-father,” by which a child may address men other than the mother's husband who acknowledge having intercourse with the mother during her pregnancy and are therefore considered to have a biological role in producing her child.

The kin terminology that apparently once reflected a preference for cross-cousin marriage, is now Hawaiian in Ego's generation, so all cousins are addressed by the same terms as siblings.

Marriage is forbidden within a certain degrees of genealogical relatedness. In a shrinking population, people tend to be related in many different ways, making it difficult to find a spouse. Some Tapirapé men have married into the neighboring Karajá group.

For some time after the birth of a child, both parents were subjected to taboos limiting their activities, including sexual intercourse, and the foods they might eat. Formerly, the Tapirapé limited their family size to no more than three children, and no more than two of the same sex; any further children born were killed at birth. They cared greatly for the children they already had and gave as the reason for infanticide that three was the maximum number of children for whom a couple could adequately provide food. Before contact, this policy probably kept the population in balance with available food resources, but once diseases had diminished the population, it contributed to its rapid decline. By the 1950s infanticide was abandoned, in part owing to the efforts of missionary nuns, and at present couples often have five or six children.

Informants describe the Tapirapé household as it existed around 1900 as being composed of a matrilocal extended family consisting of a group of related females of two to three generation in depth, their spouses, and their children. Although the core of the household consisted of a group of matrilineally related females, the household head was a male, generally a man of forty years of age or more, and married to an older female. Information collected by both Wagley and Baldus in the period of their field work from 1935-1940 seems to indicate that this may have been an “ideal pattern” of household organization, and not actually based on reality (Wagley 1977; 93, 100).

Visitors to the Tapirapé since 1939-1940 indicate the presence of nuclear rather than multi-family households,  a fact confirmed by Wagley and  Shapiro in brief visits to the Tapirapé in 1953, 1957, and 1965-1967.

The Tapirapé divide the life cycle into a succession of age periods, which determine how an individual should behave and how he or she should be treated by others. When a boy became a young adolescent, his body ornaments were changed, and he began to wear a penis band, the only clothing worn by Tapirapé men until recent times. Boys of this age status were expected to live in the men's house for up to a year while they were trained in manual arts and techniques of escaping from an enemy attack. The coming-of-age ceremony that followed was a test of endurance: a boy was expected to dance with the other men for hours wearing an elaborate feather headdress, beads, and other ornaments weighing more than nine kilograms. After this ceremony he was allowed to marry and began looking actively for a wife. Girls had no equivalent ceremony to mark the transition to womanhood, and by the time of their first menstruation, they were usually already married. When women were young wives, they were subjected to painful facial scarification, which in Tapirapé eyes added to their beauty.

In each of the original five Tapirapé villages the men’s house was the center of activity for the six Bird Societies, which were divided into two ceremonial moieties. The three societies in each moiety were related to male age grades, one for young boys, one for mature men, and one for older men. A boy usually entered the moiety to which his father belonged. The members of each society were “hosts” to specific spirits that came to inhabit the men's house, and one of their tasks was to construct the masks that embodied those spirits. In ceremonies, many of the spirits were represented by pairs of masked dancers wearing elaborate costumes. The Bird Societies had economic as well as ritual functions. They formed work parties to clear garden sites and joined in communal hunts. The Bird Societies have continued up to the present.

Each Tapirapé village also had Feast Groups, which included both men and women. Generally, a man joined his father's group and a woman her mother's, although people could change membership, especially to keep a man and wife in the same group. Feast groups met specifically to eat together, each at its appointed place in the village plaza. This helped to distribute the food supply: a group would be called together whenever one of its members had an unusual amount of food (e.g., a large game animal) on hand.

In another redistributive ceremony, those people who accepted and drank what has been described by observers as a “nauseating beverage” called badkawi, a drink made of maize or bitter manioc, earned the right to claim personal possessions, even the most prized, from those who spat the drink out. The givers, however, gained prestige from their generosity.

Generally speaking Tapirapé social structure was acephalous. There was no village chieftain or leader; instead there were several leaders , who in no way formed an organized village council, but who achieved prestige and authority through a combination or roles (Wagley 1977). These leaders were all recognized as household heads in the village. Baldus, however, when he did his field work among the Tapirapé in 1935 and 1947, states definitely that there was a village chief by the name of Kamairaho who was the principal chief of Tampiitawa (Baldus 1970, no. 1). By 1965 Tapirapé society had become no more authoritarian, nor any better organized to reach village decisions than it was before. It was the policy of the Brazilian Indian Protection Service (SPI) at this time to recognize and nominate a village chief capitáo or captain through which the service could issue orders and secure the cooperation of villagers.

According to Tapirapé cosmology, the world is filled with spirits of all kinds, most of which are dangerous to humans. These spirits were controlled and manipulated by the shamans or panché. The Tapirapé had no true religious rituals in the sense of the manipulation of sacred objects and prayers to influence supernatural beings. Likewise, they had no priests who, through their knowledge of ecclesiastical rituals and prayers, influenced and controlled animistic beings and forces (Wagley 1977). Nevertheless their religious and ceremonial system, as it existed, did provide a relatively coherent view of man’s relationship to both the natural and the supernatural world.

Treatment of the sick was the shaman’s most common duty. This was accomplished by a combination of blowing tobacco smoke over the patient, massage, and the extraction by sucking of a malignant object from the body of the ill person. Another method of collective curing when a village was threatened by an epidemic of fever was to spray a mixture of honey and water from the mouth of the shaman over the inhabitants and their houses. It was believed that while the honey alone did not have a therapeutic affect against fever, the fact that it was sprayed from the mouth of the shaman did.

Other major functions of the shaman were to protect the Tapirapé against ghosts, and to control the pregnancy of women.

The chief religious functionary among the Tapirapé was the shaman who had the ability to manipulate and control the spirit world. The culture heroes, who made and organized the world as we know it, are believed to have been master shamans. The dream experiences of living shamans parallel those of mythical culture heroes: in both, spirits are outwitted and subdued. In an annual ceremony, the shamans as a group would pit their powers against those of the formidable thunder spirit. Shamans have healing powers, but when a person died from disease, which traditionally was always assumed to have a supernatural cause, a shaman was often suspected of having caused the death and might be killed by the victim's relatives. During the epidemics, this led to a series of revenge killings.

The Tapirapé say that the shamans of the present day (mid-twentieth century) are only “little shamans” who can treat children and minor ailments but cannot cure the sickness of grown people, who are more likely to resort to Western medicine.

Most Tapirapé ceremonies involve large-scale food distribution in the form of communal feasting, and community and moiety participation. Two of these major ceremonies include the elaborate coming-of-age rituals for adolescent boys as they assume adult status in the society, and the Thunder Ceremony held in late December and January in which shamans, in deep trance, match their powers against the supernatural being Thunder in an attempt to bring protection to the villagers against the wrath of this being as represented by heavy thunder showers, lightning, and strong winds. Other ceremonies include the ceremony of tawá, the ritual representation of hostilities perpetrated against the Tapirapé by their Kayapó and Karajá enemies; the ceremony of káo involving singing and dancing by both men and women according to moiety affiliation; and the maciró, or communal clearing of gardens ceremony.

The dead were wrapped in the hammocks in which they had died; they, along with their personal possessions, were buried in the floor of the house where they lived. House burial is no longer the custom; there is a small cemetery just outside the village.

When a Tapirapé dies the anchunga (soul or spirit) leaves the body, sometimes wandering near the fires of the living in their villages, sometimes just lingering in the forest; there does not seem to be a special other world for the anchunga of ordinary people. Some individuals believe that there is a place in the sky where the Tapirapé go after death; a belief probably introduced by the missionaries in their concept of Heaven. The Tapirapé, however, are certain that there is a village of deceased shamans far to the west called Maratawa  or panché iungwere (place of the souls of the shamans).

Baldus, Herbert (1970). Tapirapé, tribo tupi no Brasil central. São Paulo: Companhia Editôra Nacional.

Oliveira, Roberto Cardoso de (1959). A situacão atual dos tapirapé.” Boletim do Museo Paraense Emílio Goeldi, n.s., Antropologia, no. 3.

Shapiro, Judith (1968). “Tapirapé Kinship.” Boletim do Museo Paraense Emílio Goeldi, n.s., Antropologia, no. 37.

Shapiro, Judith (1968). “Ceremonial Redistribution in Tapirapé Society.” Boletim do Museo Paraense Emílio Goeldi, n.s., Antropologia, no. 38.

Wagley, Charles (1977). Welcome of Tears: The Tapirapé Indians of Central Brazil. New York: Oxford University Press.

Baldus, Herbert (1935). “Ligeiras notas sôbre os índios tapirapés.” Revista do Arquivo Municipal de São Paulo 1683-95.

This culture summary is based on the article “Tapirapé” by Nancy M. Flowers, in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Vol 7. 1994. Johannes Wilbert, ed. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall & Co. The section on death and the afterlife was expanded, and new sections on division of labor, land tenure, domestic unit, political organization, religious practitioners, and ceremonies were added by John Beierle in August 2007, along with the synopsis and indexing notes.