Barasana (alternate names Barazana, Panenua, Pareroa, or Taiwano is an exonym applied to an Amazonian people, considered distinct from the Taiwano, though the dialect of the latter is almost identical to that of the Barasana, and outside observers can detect only minute differences between the two languages.Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.23Christine Jones,From the Milk River.p.12. They are a Tucanoan group located in the eastern part of the Amazon Basin in Vaupés Department in Colombia (Apaporis River) and Amazonas State in Brazil. As of 2000, there were at least 500 Barasanas in Colombia, although some recent estimates place the figure as high as 1,950.Determining their exact number is difficult, because inclusion in the group is determined by one’s father’s language. The figure of 500 refers to this Vaupés group, and excludes people whose mother language is Barasana.See For the figure of 1950 see , and A further 40 live on the Brazilian side, in the municipalities of Japurá and São Gabriel da Cachoeira.
The Barasana refers to themselves as the jebá.~baca, or people of the jaguar (Jebá "jaguar" is their mythical ancestor).
Geography, ecology Barasana territory lies in the central sector of the Colombian Northwest Amazon. The Barasana inhabit the Pirá-piraná river basin of the Comiseria de Vaupés between the two main river systems of the Vaupés River and the Japurá River . The area is a tropical rainforest, interspersed with occasional stands of Mauritia flexuosa or mirití palm and savanna with xerophytic vegetation. Rainfall averages around per year.pp.18-19Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.50
Its climate is marked by four seasons, a long dry spell from December to March followed by the wet season from March to August, a short dry season between August and September, followed by a rainy season from September until December. The average temperature varies between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius (68 and 86 °F). It is notorious for its treacherous rivers that are choked with dangerous rapids and falls. The number of faunal species is not rich, and individual animals not common, though hunting game is prized as the fundamentally male mode of procuring food. Fish also, despite the many rivers, do not abound. For a list of edible foods and animals in the Vaupés area see pp. 11-14, and Appendix 3, pp. 274-5
Ethnic group context The Vaupés area is inhabited by roughly 20 tribes or descent groups.Irving Goldman, writing in 1948, identified 18 sub-tribes of the Eastern Tukunoan group Irving Goldman, ‘The Tribes of the Uapes-Caqueta Region,’ p.764: The Taiwano taxonomy has 22 groups: Bará, Barasana, Cabinyari, Carijona, Cubeo, Curripaco, Desana, Letuama, Macú, Macuna, Pirá-Tapuya, Siriano, Taiwano, Tanimuka, Tatuyo, Tariana, Tucano, Tuyuca, Uanano, Yauna, and Yurutí. See François Correa Rubio, Por el Camino de la Anaconda Remedio, Univ. Nacional de Colombia, 1996 p.375 The word tribe is generally disdained by anthropologists, who prefer to define groups by such terms as sib, language group, exogamous group or phratry,Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.50,Elsa Gomez Imbert, ‘Conceptual categories and linguistic classification’, in John Joseph Gumperz, Stephen C. Levinson (eds.) Rethinking linguistic relativity, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Cambridge University Press, 1996 pp.438-469 .p.442Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, pp.22-23 living in an unbounded system, that is cosmopolitan and multilingual.’i.e. ‘a large geographical area in which people are basically similar and distance and differentiation are seen in terms of degrees rather than absolutes’ Jean Elizabeth Jackson, The fish people: linguistic exogamy and Tukanoan identity in northwest Amazonia, p.7: Reichel-Dolmatoff, following Goldman, called this system ‘cosmopolitan’ . See Irving Goldman 1963 p.15; Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff ‘Review of The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon by Irving Goldman ,’ p.1378. For multilingualism see Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.56: Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.21. Apart from the Maku and the Arawakan language families, the indigenous peoples of the Vaupés belong to Eastern Tukanoan languages, most prominent of them being, other than the Barasana, the Desana, the Bará, the Tukano proper, the Macuna, the Tatuyo, and the Cubeo.Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Shamanism and art of the eastern Tukanoan Indians: Colombian northwest Amazon, p.1 Despite the established system of intermarriage, their languages are mutually unintelligible.Jean Elizabeth Jackson, ‘Language Identity of the Vaupés Indians,’ p.53 A Creole-type lingua franca, called locally lingua geral, created by the Jesuit missionaries as a general language for communicating with Indians in the lower reaches of the Amazon,Michael Shermer, In Darwin's shadow: the life and science of Alfred Russel Wallace : a biographical study on the psychology of history, Oxford University Press US, 2002 p.67 is also spoken among them.
History The various Tukanoan myths of origin refer to a westward upstream migration from Brazil, and Reichel-Dolmatoff believes that there is a ‘kernel of historical truth’ behind these uniform traditions.Jean Elizabeth Jackson, The fish people, p.21. Curt Nimuendajú thought that the east Tukanoan tribes invaded from the west, and that the autochthonous population consisted of the Makú, assuming that these smaller hunter-gatherers were older than the agriculturalist newcomers.Aleksandra Yurievna Aĭkhenvald, Language contact in Amazonia. Oxford University Press, 2002 reprint, p.24 Desultory Spanish contact with the Vaupés region goes back to the 16th century. But historical records show that the Tukano peoples shifted to the remote headwaters of the Río Negro as a refuge, in flight from the slave trade and diseases, and forced relocations introduced by the Portuguese in the late 18th.century.Jonathan David Hill, Made-from-bone: trickster myths, music, and history from the Amazon, University of Illinois Press, 2008 p.66Alcionilio Brüzzi Alves da Silva, A civilização indígena do Uaupés: observações antropológicas etnográficas e sociológicas, São Paulo, 1962 p.22, cited Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.21 It was Alfred Russel Wallace, in travelling up the Vaupés river in 1850Stephen Hugh-Jones,The Palm and the Pleiades, p.4.Irving Goldman, The Cubeo Indians of the Northwest Amazon, University of Illinois Press, 1963 p.12 puts the date as 1853. The difference may reflect the fact that Wallace’s book, Palm Trees of the Amazon and their uses, was published in 1853. who first took note of Indians like the Barasana and their dialects.He composed ten syllabaries and synonymies, published in the first edition of his account, but dropped from subsequent editions. See Michael Shermer, In Darwin's shadow: the life and science of Alfred Russel Wallace, p.67 and the rites of their Yurupary cult. According to his account, traders were already active in the area.Camilo Domínguez, Augusto Gómez, La economía extractiva en la Amazonia colombiana, 1850-1930, Corporación Colombiana Para la Amazonia Araracuara, 1990 p.124 Catholic and Protestant missionaries entered the area in the last decades of the 19th century. One major reaction to this evangelisation in the Vaupés, initiated by Venancio Aniseto Kamiko,Robin M.Wright & Jonathan D.Hill, ‘Venancio Kamiko: Wakuenai Shaman and Messiah,’ in E. Jean Langdon and. Gerhard Baer, (eds.) Portals of Power: : Shamanism in South America, University of New Mexico Press, 1992 1992 pp. 257-286. was to create a wave of messianic cults among the tribes.Stephen Hugh-Jones, ‘Shamans, Prophets, Priests and Pastors,’ pp.47ff. Missionaries were convinced that the central cult of Yurupary, their culture hero,Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, p.6. was the work of the Devil, though this was a series of rituals rather than a divinity.Goldman wrote that the "great spirit"called Yuruparí believed to be worshipped through the Vaupés was a fiction. ‘In simple fact there is no Yuruparí. The term is jargon from the trade language of the Amazon based heavily upon Tupían and is used indiscriminately by the Indians to refer to anything that is sacred and taboo.’ Irving Goldman, The Cubeo Indians of the Northwest Amazon, p.255. The result was widespread damage to the native culture. as ceremonial houses were burnt, ritual ornaments destroyed, and secret masks displayed to the tribe's women and children, who were previously forbidden to look at them.Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, pp.4.5 Messianic shamanism, strongly connected with jaguar shamanism, declined further with the establishment of Catholic missions in the first decades of the 20th century.Stephen Hugh-Jones, ‘Shamans, Prophets, Priests and Pastors,’ p.57 The German traveller Theodor Koch-Grünberg spent two years at the turn of the century (1903–05) travelling throughout the region and provided a classic account of the Indians’ material culture and languages, which long remained the authoritative source for information of these tribes.Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, ‘Review of The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon by Irving Goldman ,’ in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 6 (Dec., 1963), pp. 1377-1379, p.1377. Rubber-gatherers from the beginning of the 20th century began to aggressively exploit the area, as they did again the World War II when the urgency of improved rubber supplies led to a rubber boom in the area. Their violent presence caused considerable upheaval and suffering, finally driving the Indians, after fierce resistance, into the less accessible backwaters.Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, 1979 preface Population decline, as a result, has been a marked feature of the past one hundred and fifty years,Stephen p.25Jean Elizabeth Jackson, The fish people, p.21 The earliest professional ethnological fieldwork was done by Irving Goldman in 1939-40 among the Cubeo Indians.Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Shamanism and art of the eastern Tukanoan Indians: Colombian northwest Amazon, p.1 Postwar missionary work, colonizing movements, and the activities of the linguists attached to Christian proselytisation still engage, according to Stephen Hugh-Jones, in the ‘criminal folly’ of ethnocide by their programmatic hostility to traditional religionStephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades:Initiation and Cosmology ion Northwest Amazonia, p.5
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