“When Women LostKagutuFlutes, To SingToloWas All They Had Left!”

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This paper concerns the relations between men’s sacred music played on kagutu flutes and women’s tolo songs among the Carib-speaking Kuikuro of Central Brazil. The research for this paper is part of a multi-year documentation of the Upper Xingu Carib language being done by the Kuikuro themselves, with non-indigenous researchers serving as consultants. The men’s kagutu flutes and their music are regarded as highly powerful and potentially dangerous, and women are strictly forbidden from seeing these musical instruments. Women’s tolo songs are said to “imitate” the melodies of the men’s flute music, yet this process of “imitation” is full of irony and tricksterish deceit, especially when women are singing of their lovers. Women say that they are “lying” when they are singing tolo. Building on Ellen Basso and Bruna Franchetto’s works on the indigenous concept of auN (deceitful speech), the paper explores asymmetries and complementarity between genders through analysis of the musical and poetic dimensions of relations between the music of men’s sacred kagutu flute and women’s tolo singing. Sound is a crucial link not only between humans and spirit-beings but also between male and female social domains. Kagutu and tolo form a trans-ritual system in which a relation between spirits and men and women is established. While kagutu music is conceived as a faithful and subordinate reproduction of itseke (spirit-being) songs by men, tolo songs, by means of their creative poetics and musical power, bring women into a kind of competitive relation with itseke.