The Pumé people (or Yaruro) are a Circum-Caribbean indigenous people, native to the ecoregion of Llanos in Venezuela, located west of the Orinoco River."Yaruro." Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 14 Sept 2013. The Pumé people are divided into two subgroups: The River Pumé, living along major river drainages of the Orinoco River, and the more nomadic Savanna Pumé that reside on the Llanos.
Name The word "Yaruro" was employed by early Spanish explorers and colonists to refer to the Pumé and is still commonly used in Venezuela. The term has been used by neighboring indigenous groups such as the Guahibo, Hiwi, and Chiricoa, who likely are the source of this name adopted by the Spanish. "Yaruro" probably derives from the verb "yoro" in the Pumé language, that means "to give". The term "Yaruro" is pejorative, referring to requests for material goods or food from outsiders perceived as wealthy by the Pumé, and its meaning can be glossed in American English as the "Gimmees". The people refer to themselves as the Pumé (meaning "real human") which also serves as the name of their language. "Yaruro" has been replaced by "Pumé" in most anthropological literature and by some Venezuelan government use that is sensitive to indigenous issues. They have historically also been known by other names such as Llaruro, Yaruru, and Yuapín people.
Culture Language The Pumé language is unclassified, although it is considered a language isolate. Some good linguistic research has been published on the Pumé language. It is widely spoken by the Pumé people today, especially among Savanna Pumé who are primarily monolingual. Most River Pumé populations have at least some members, primarily men, who are bilingual in Spanish and Pumé. Portions of the Bible were translated into Pumé in 1999.
Housing The Savanna Pumé are a mobile group of hunter-gatherers who shift their primary residence during every dry and wet season. They live in small brush shade structures during the dry season, and more robust structures thatched with palm leaves during the wet seasons. In addition to these two major seasonal moves, the Pumé make temporary camps for fishing, raw material collection, and to stage the moves to their primary wet and dry season camps. River Pumé were formerly slightly nomadic (although not as much as the Savanna Pumé), but currently are sedentary. Many River Pumé now construct more hybrid forms of architecture combining traditional and Criollo-influenced materials and designs.
Subsistence
The Savanna Pumé are primarily hunter-gatherers who subsist on distinctly different diets during each of the dry and wet seasons. The River Pumé are horticulturalists who also practice some fishing, hunting and wild plant collection. Savanna Pumé men hunt primarily small terrestrial game during the wet season such as armadillos, tegu lizards, other small lizards, and rabbits. Men very infrequently obtain larger game such as capybara, deer, anteaters, or caimans. All hunting by Savanna Pumé is done with bows and arrows. Women collect several wild tubers, that are the main food during the wet season. Both sexes also perform some garden work that brings in complementary manioc as a dietary supplement without reducing their foraging for wild plants. Gardening is typical of swidden systems used by many tropical peoples throughout the world, however Savanna Pumé gardens are quite small compared with those of the River Pumé or other South American groups. In the past, foraging for turtle eggs was reported but is very uncommon today, possibly because of over-exploitation during the last 200 years. Other past game animals such as hunting for manatees are recognized as potentially edible, but no recent reports of their consumption are reported by the Pumé. During the dry season, Pumé men fish using bows and arrows, hook and line, and fish poison. The dry season also offers opportunities for bird hunting and capture of small numbers of turtles and tortoises. Women, accompanied by some men, collect feral mangos in prodigious quantities during the dry season as well as a few other species of small fruits that are much less important. River Pumé have less seasonal variation in their diet. They rely more on a diversity of cultivated crops, can fish year round in the major rivers, hunt and gather some foods, and may work in wage labor jobs for the local Criollos. River Pumé successfully raise small numbers of chickens and pigs, animals rarely husbanded by Savanna Pumé for more than a couple months before being consumed during periods of hunger
Material culture The Savanna Pumé population manufactures most of their material technology, except some market items obtained through trade, primarily with River Pumé who have greater access to these market goods. Items such as cooking pots, steel knives, machetes, shovels, and used clothing are the primary outside goods obtained by the Savanna Pumé through trade. Other desired market items include matches, tobacco, nylon hammocks, whetstones, and other tools. Bicycles first became common in 2006. Given the economic difficulties in Venezuela, it is unclear whether the Savanna Pumé even have the minimal access seen in the early 2000s to some of these goods. Some River Pumé communities are the beneficiaries of government programs that include some provisioning with manufactured products.
Savanna Pumé construct their houses primarily from materials collected in the llanos; wood, palm leaf thatch, and vines used to tie together the house framework. Moriche palms (Mauritia flexuosa) are the critical resource needed for palm thatch, roofing material, as well as other significant technologies. Their distribution is an important factor in the amount of land needed by Savanna Pumé to schedule future moves from areas with depressed availability of moriche and other palm raw materials. Some zinc lamina has been available for roofing, and is extensively re-used during camp moves. Architectural wood and thatch is often moved along with camps to re-build new structures. Traditional architecture is still common in Savanna Pumé communities, although modern construction materials increasingly dominate River Pumé house construction.
Fibers made from moriche palm leaves as well as whole leaves, are some of the most important raw materials used by the Savanna Pumé. The River Pumé primarily use fibers from macanilla palms (Astrocaryum jauri). Palm leaf fibers are used to make string, rope, hammocks, basket containers, basketry mats, and many diverse woven containers and objects for subsistence, storage, and other critical technologies. Collection of this raw material is most common in the dry season when women process and accumulate the fine fibers from palm leaves needed for string/rope construction and weaving. Palm raw materials and products remain important trade items within Pumé culture, both among Savanna and River Pumé.
Women's subsistence technology includes carrying baskets made from whole palm leaves with tumplines for carrying, wooden digging sticks, and digging sticks with steel tips. Women may include synthetic feed sacks for carrying plant foods (especially for the collection of feral mangos and manioc), or cloth sacks or clothing as additional carrying additional resources. Most gathering of root foods involves only the use of traditional palm leaf baskets. Wet season collection of wild tubers uses untipped wooden digging sticks, because the primary tubers (Dracontium margaretae) are close to the ground surface. Steel tipped digging sticks are primarily used for collection of deeper-growing tubers (mostly Myrossma cannifolia), late in the wet season and during parts of the dry season. Women use these same technologies in gardening. Both men and women also use small shovels and machetes for garden work and harvesting.
Men's subsistence technology, at least for Savanna Pumé, uses bows and arrows for terrestrial hunting and much fishing, modern fishing line and hooks (if available through trade), specialized harpoons or arrows for caimans or turtles, as well as knives and machetes. Bows are made from palm wood (Astrocaryum jauri.) and are long (~2 m) as are most South American native bows. Bowstrings are made from a semi-cultivated bromiliad fiber (Ananas lucidus). Arrows, (also ~2m long) are made from domesticated arrowcanes, wooden foreshafts, fletched with anhinga feathers, and constructed with bromiliad fiber and a manufactured tree resin (Symphonia glubulifera). Scavenged, traded, and re-used pieces of metal are used for arrowpoints, probably at least since the mid 19th century. Bone is reported to have been used before metal was as common, and two wooden-tipped bird arrows are still occasionally employed. Some River Pumé men have access to guns for hunting. Because most hunted foods in the savannas are burrowing game (armadillos, tegu lizards, and small ameiva lizards), machetes and especially bows often are used as digging implements to capture these game. During the dry season, small rafts made from moriche plalm leaf stems are used to search for caimans and turtles in seasonal lagoons. River Pumé use dugout canoes for fishing, pursuit of caimans, and turtles in the major drainages of the llanos, as well as for transportation.
The Pumé manufacture a wide array of other traditional implements from string, woven materials, and wood. Manufactured clothing and cloth has been readily available to the Pumé since at least the 19th century, and probably much earlier. Although western style dress is common among all Savanna and especially River Pumé, among savanna dwellers some traditional elements of women's clothing have persisted and some older men recently still eschewed pants in favor of loincloths.
Kinship and personal names
Traditionally, the Pumé do not use names, but employ kin terms to reference each other. Even nicknames are not used. All Pumé people have Christian names used to interact with the local Criollo population, or given to them by the Venezuelan government for census or other administrative purposes, but they do not use them among themselves. These names may rarely be used when referencing people from distant communities where kin terms do not precisely identify a person. Spanish names used by Savanna Pumé often change throughout childhood and some adults' names also vary during their lifespan. Spanish names are sometimes used when speaking to or about children below the age of approximately 14, primarily because kin terms may not specifically identify particular young people. The Pumé use a Dravidian form of Dakota-Iroquois kinship classification.
Marriage By the age of 15, most Savanna and River Pumé girls are married. Boys also marry young, but the early marriage of Pumé girls is particularly important as a demographic indicator of relatively rapid maturation in response to living in an environment with low food availability, high disease exposure, and potentially high risks of mortality. Pumé girls work less than girls in comparable hunter-gatherer populations, allowing them to potentially spend more calories on growth rather than on foraging effort, and thus reach sexual maturity at a younger age. This may lengthen their reproductive lifespan, compensating for their shorter life expectancy and their high infant and later childhood mortality rates. Although early marriage is the general practice for Pumé hunter-gatherers, there is no evidence of coercion of girls to marry or begin sexual relations before they feel ready.
Marriage involves no formal ceremony, exchange of goods, or overt negotiations among adults. It simply consists of establishing co-habitation by the couple. There is some influence of parents on choice of marriage partners, but it is a very flexible system.