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INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY— PUBLICATION NO. 1 2 



back, in an oxcart or, in a few cases, in a charrete; 

 or, in more recent years, had ridden, standing up, 

 in some truck which was going in the direction they 

 wanted to go. Contact with these towns, either 

 directly by way of traveling on the bus itself or 

 indirectly by seeking and talking to passengers 

 who go through the village, or to relatives and 

 friends who have returned from one of the towns, 

 is now a daily occurrence. Each of the four times 

 the bus passes through the village daily, as has 

 been indicated elsewhere, is an event eagerly an- 

 ticipated by villagers, bringing as it does a certain 

 excitement into their lives not previously known. 

 Curiosity about the outside world is stirred, es- 

 pecially in the minds of the young but to some 

 extent also in the minds of older persons, especially 

 of those women who have rarely been outside the 

 local community. Since the establishment of the 

 bus line, there has been a noticeable decrease in the 

 number of persons seen on the roads on horseback 

 and in charretes. Some persons have already sold 

 their horses, since they are used rather for travel 

 than for work in the field. As one man said, "It's 

 so much easier to go by bus. Wlien you get to 

 town, you don't have to look for a place to put up 

 your horse." Not only has travel on the part of 

 men increased, but travel on the part of women has 

 increased even more. "There were a lot of women 

 and girls on the bus this morning," said, recently, 

 one of the directors of the line. "Occasionally, the 

 women take the early bus after they've prepared 

 armoeo for the men in the fields and they come 

 back on the 2 o'clock bus in good time to get the 

 evening meal." Messages and parcels are being 

 much more readily sent and received than 

 formerly."' 



The regular passage of strangers through the 

 village has heightened the self-consciousness of 

 local inhabitants, a fact which is reflected in sev- 

 eral physical changes in the village. One of the 

 storekeepers has had a sidewalk of broken stone 

 and cement laid outside his store. Another store- 

 keeper has had his -aenda recalcimined and his 

 name, together with the word Casa (commercial 

 house), painted on the front. The third store- 

 keeper, in front of whose venda the bus regularly 

 stops, has had the building repaii'ed and the out- 



side recalcimined.^** The owner of the hotequirn'^ 

 has had the word Botequim painted near the front 

 door where passengers on the bus who might care 

 to take a glass of pinga, or other drink, during 

 the few minutes spent in the village, can readily 

 see it. The fiscal has had the praga cleared of 

 grass and weeds and recently arranged for a road 

 grader to come over from Boa Vista to improve 

 village streets. 



The painting of the word Botequim on one 

 building and of the name of the store on another, 

 were the first identifications of this kind to appear 

 in the village, where streets have never needed a 

 name plate, since everyone knows where everyone 

 else lives. The appearance of these markers thus 

 symbolizes the beginning of a shift from a con- 

 dition in which relations were almost exclusively 

 primary to one in which relations of a different 

 character are beginning to appear. Obviously, a 

 stranger who is passing through the village for 

 the first time is not expected to know, as does 

 everj' villager, where the botequim and the store 

 of Seu Augusto are. 



At the same time, local inhabitants are puzzled 

 at the formality they observe in the attitude of 

 these strangers. Contacts of other than a primary 

 and informal character are too new to be under- 

 stood. Strangers who do not give out informa- 

 tion about themselves are resented. They are 

 referred to as ^^genfe soierho" (haughty, proud 

 people), "genie sem educaqao'''' (people without 

 manners) and ''''granfi,nos da cidade''' ("high-hats" 

 from the city) . "They seem to want to hold you 

 a long way off as if they were afraid of getting 

 themselves dirty," ^*^ a villager remarked. 



Most local inhabitants merely remain silent, 

 looking at the strangers and thinking about how 

 different and incomprehensible they seem to be. 

 The manner in which villagers circle the bus as 

 it pulls up, however, and the expressions on their 

 faces, leave little doubt about the dominant desire 

 to approach these strange people and to establish 

 contact with them. If, by chance, one of the 

 strangers enters into conversation, he is soon 

 asked, matter-of-factlj', whence he came, what 

 brought him to this part of the country, where he 

 is going, if he is married and has a family, at 



3" See Isolation and Contact, p. 103. 



^^ More recently, he has purchased a radio, the second in the 

 village, for his store. 



'<» Trata a gente de longe como se tivessee medo de sujd. 



