NOMADS OF THE LONG BOW — HOLMBERG 



19 



form the walls and roof. Pots are left on the dirt 

 floor. Houses are almost never cleaned. When 

 they become unbearable new ones are built. 



DRESS AND ORNAMENT 



No clothing of any kind is manufactured or 

 worn by the Siriono. The nearest approach to 

 clothing — a custom probably adopted from the 

 Brazilian Indians — I found among the eastern- 

 most Siriono. Here I observed some young boys, 

 and a few young men of puberty age, wearing a 

 twined G string of bark fiber wound tightly around 

 the waist; under this the foreskin of the penis is 

 tucked so as to lengthen it. Where clothes have 

 been introduced, however, they are greatly sought 

 after, not so much because of modesty 4 but be- 

 cause clothes both adorn them and protect them 

 to some extent from the ubiquitous insect pests 

 that continually harass them. That they are 

 mostly desired for adornment, however, is attested 

 by the fact that no matter how many clothes they 

 possess they always sleep stark naked at night 

 when the insects are most abundant. Moreover, 

 if a woman does possess a dress, before sitting 

 down she always lifts it up and sits on her bare 

 skin in preference to soiling her garment. 



Even though they wear no clothing, the Siriono 

 are rarely seen without some type of embellish- 

 ment. Most commonly employed to decorate the 

 body is a paint made from the seeds of the uruku 

 plant, which is extensively used for ornamental 

 purposes by many South American Indians. By 

 spitting on the hands and mixing the saliva with 

 a few uruku seeds a bright red paint is produced. 

 This paint, which is never applied in any type of 

 design, is rubbed especially on the face, but on 

 some occasions the entire body is covered with it. 

 Its function is both sacred and secular. Although 

 its magical significance is of prime importance on 

 such occasions as a birth or death, and in warding 

 off illness, the body is covered with uruku for 

 utilitarian reasons, namely, as a protection from 

 insect bites and cold weather when mosquitoes 

 are thick or when a cold south wind blows. Like 

 the channel swimmer who shuts out the cold by 



l In this connection, about the only thing a Siriono man is modest about is 

 displaying the glans of his penis, and when standing around he is constantly 

 tugging at the foreskin so as to lengthen it. Women likewise display little 

 modesty, but when sitting on the ground they always cover the vulva with 

 one heel. 



covering his body with Vaseline, the Siriono does 

 so by covering his body with uruku. 



Next in importance to uruku for decorative 

 purposes are various bright-colored feathers (So) 

 which are glued into the hair with prepared bees- 

 wax (iriti). Like uruku, feathers are extensively 

 employed to decorate the hair on festive occasions. 

 It is important to note that the same types of 

 feathers are always used no matter what the oc- 

 casion may be : a birth, a death, a drinking feast, 

 or a bloodletting rite. Those employed come 

 from the toucan (red feathers from the back, 

 yellow feathers from the breast, and white feathers 

 from under the wings), from the curassow (downy 

 white breast feathers), and from the harpy eagle 

 (also the downy white breast feathers). Although 

 there are many other brightly colored birds in the 

 area — the macaw, for instance — the types men- 

 tioned above were the only ones I ever saw used 

 for decorative purposes. The underlying reasons 

 for this, other than that the ancestors had followed 

 the same pattern, I was never able to ascertain. 



It is the women who pluck the feathers, prepare 

 them into tufts, and glue them into the hair. In 

 the case of the toucan, when the bird is killed the 

 breast skin is always removed with the feathers, 

 which are later plucked for decoration. In the 

 case of the other birds mentioned, the desirable 

 feathers are plucked after the dead animal has 

 been brought to the house. The tufts are made 

 by first binding 8 or 10 of the down feathers to- 

 gether at the base with a piece of cotton string or 

 bark fiber and then covering the binding with 

 prepared beeswax. The tufts are glued to the 

 hair by first softening the beeswax with a firebrand. 

 In addition to tufts of feathers, bunches of 

 quills of the peccary, porcupine, and paca are 

 sometimes glued into the hair of young boys so 

 as to make them good hunters of these animals 

 when they grow up. 



Necklaces (ewi) are worn both for adornment 

 and for magical reasons. Animal teeth are es- 

 pecially favored in necklace making. When a 

 coati is killed and after it has been cooked and 

 eaten, the eye teeth are extracted with the fingers 

 and small holes are gouged out in the roots of the 

 teeth by the men, who employ for this purpose an 

 eye tooth of a rat, a squirrel, or a paca hafted to 

 the humerus of a howler monkey. After a suffi- 

 cient number of teeth (no specified number) have 

 been obtained, they are strung on a piece of cotton 



