Abstract
Abstract The aim of this work is to describe and analyze the different types of relationships established between the peoples of the Upper Xingu through their regional rituals. Starting from a description of the uluki exchange ceremony, we will discuss how this ritual, by mobilizing Xinguano ideas about friendship, produces contexts of interaction in which characteristics of intra-village sociality are extended to regional sociality. At the same time that the uluki defines, together with other regional rituals, a certain “Xinguano interiority” (the world of multi-community rituals), it is also one of its main forms of opening, having the potential to attract to the Xinguano world not only singular persons, but entire groups.
Highlights
The aim of this work is to describe and analyze the different types of relationships established between the peoples of the Upper Xingu through their regional rituals
This article considers how the uluki, a regional ritual concerned with the exchange of objects, contributes to the constitution of the Upper Xingu regional system
Starting with a description of the ritual and comparing its formal aspects to two other inter-community rituals, the Quarup and the Jawari, we discuss how the diverse aspects of the uluki engage Xinguano ideas of friendship, producing interactional contexts within which the characteristics of intra-village sociality are broadened to regional sociality (Hugh-Jones 2013)
Summary
This article considers how the uluki, a regional ritual concerned with the exchange of objects, contributes to the constitution of the Upper Xingu regional system. As well as common participation in regional rituals, another characteristic of humanity among Upper Xinguanos is exchange, whether through marriage, knowledge transmission, rituals, or, in the case we will analyse here, objects. Exchange being a central element in the constitution of Xinguano “people”, our aim is to understand how the uluki contributes to the constitution of this “regional system” – that is, to the establishment of a multi-ethnic constellation which identifies as a common humanity in opposition to its neighbours, and which extends out toward the scale of inter-community relations elements that, elsewhere in Amazonia, seem to be the preserve of the sociality of local groups (Hugh-Jones 2013; Andrello, Guerreiro, and Hugh-Jones 2015).
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