Kuikuro

The Kuikuro people today are the most populous group in the Upper Xingu. They constitute a Karib sub-group, alongside other groups that speak variant dialects of the same language (Kalapalo, Matipu, and Nahukuá) and are part of the multi-lingual system known as the Upper Xingu. They live in three villages in the southern section of the Xingu Indigenous Park. The largest and most important village was Ipatse, a little way off the left bank of the middle Culuene, home to more than 300 people. In 1997, the village of Ahukugi was founded on the right bank of the river, upstream from Ipatse, with a current population of around a hundred. More recently, a third village was founded on the site of the former Lahatuá site by a family group of a dozen people. The Kuikuro total population today is around 650.

The spatial organization of the village, centered around a plaza, reflects the political and ritual organization. Ceremonial activities take place in the plaza, above all those related to the main rites of passage that characterize the trajectories of chiefs. A complex system of ‘masters’ and ‘chiefs’ controls political dynamics and ritual life; in other words, the very existence and reproduction of the village. Chiefs and their families constitute a type of ‘noble’ social stratum distinct from the ‘commoners’.

Traditional Kuikuro narratives tell why the universe exists just as it is and explain the origin of singing, festivities, cultural goods, cultivated plants, categories of beings. Like many other Amerindian groups, the Kuikuro believe that originally humans and non-humans were the same, spoke the same language and lived together in the same village. Humans also lived amidst the itseke, supernatural beings that live in the forest and at the bottom of the waters, with whom only shamans have the power to communicate (illness and dreams, however, are states that can put humans in general in contact with itseke.). There is also a heavenly world, kahü, where the dead and the itseke inhabit the same village, whose “lord” is the two-headed vulture, often represented on zoomorphic stools.

Traditional production, artifacts such as stools, mats, baskets, and feather adornments, continues to be used for everyday and for ceremonial purposes, for payment of services such as traditional healing or for sealing marriage alliances, as well as for the ritual exchanges within and between villages known as ulukí. The Kuikuro, like other Karib groups, participate in the economic and ritual system of the Upper Xingu as specialists in the production of necklaces and belts made from the shells of land snails, high value goods.