Caça, domínios e passagens: a produção e reprodução dos corpos Tembé na sociabilidade com o cosmos

Abstract

This paper has as its central theme the connections between hunting activity and the puberty ritual of the moqueado festival, among the Tembé, in the Alto Rio Guamá Indigenous Land. The moqueado festival is the third and final stage of the transition of the Tembé girl and boy to the condition of adult subject. The production of their bodies during this ritual is done from elements and instruments of belonging to the non-human domains, such as forests and rivers, and which are handled to attribute conditions and behaviors desirable by Tembé morality. In this aspect, hunting enters as a necessary activity in the promotion of this corporality as it provides specific and critical animals for the mobilization and transmutation of these attributes. For this discussion, we draw on the theoretical contributions of Fausto (2008), Da Matta (1977), Gennep (2011), Turner (1974; 2005), Galvão (1955), Ponte (2022, 2014), Coelho (2022) among others. As a methodological resource, we used participant observation, in a specific hunt for the ritual, as well as in the ritual itself that takes place immediately afterwards. The research sites were the villages of Sede, Ytwaçu and Pyno’á. The universe of knowledge for operationalizing hunting reinforces tangible and intangible variables of importance in this activity. Hunting takes place in the forests, in the domain of karuwars, with whom the hunter interacts in order to be able to take, among other things, food to the village. The moqueado festival, in turn, takes place in the center of the village and seeks to avoid, as much as possible, connections with forests and rivers. Thus, we have that hunting and ritual bring to the perspective of liminality, whether of the hunter or of the young people involved in the ritual, who cross, by choice or by imposition, dominion and dehumanizing boundaries in potential for the preservation of the humanity of their collective, in the constant production and reproduction of the “real woman and man”.