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INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY PUBLICATION NO. 15 



Girls continue to have two names until puberty, 

 when they too receive an ancestral name. Until 

 children are weaned the father avoids making 

 bows, for it is believed to cause diarrhea in the 

 children. 



The birth of twins (mokoinwdt) and cripples are 

 considered a misfortune. If twins are born, all 

 men and women in the village take an emetic and 

 vomit. The father and mother continue vomiting 

 for several days. The husband leaves his wife 

 for a time, vomiting and fasting. He may even 

 leave his wife permanently. It is believed that the 

 mama'e are angry at the couple for sex misde- 

 meanor or for breaking the food taboos. 



Twins, like malformed children, are buried alive 

 by the relatives of the couple. This is also done 

 if an unmarried woman gives birth to a healthy 

 child. One of the members of the Expedition 

 related that he observed a bastard child being 

 buried alive and how horrified he was to hear the 

 infant crying even after it was covered with earth. 

 Some days later I observed the woman lying in 

 her hammock in the woods just outside the camp, 

 where she had to remain for several days without 

 food or attention near the grave of her child. 

 The poor woman was still bleeding and paid no 

 attention to the help which we tried to offer her. 



Women practice abortion by drinking a medicine 

 (pirai'i), made from the bark of a tree, and give 

 as their reason the fact that as they have to nurse 

 a child for 3 or 4 years they cannot have another 

 child during this period. Even casual obser- 

 vation appears to substantiate this claim. If a 

 woman conceives while nursing and abortion is 

 not successful, the midwife will strangle the child. 



The culturally determined practices of selection 

 at birth at first might appear difficult to correlate 

 with the unquestioned desire of the Camayura 

 for offspring. The Camayura want offspring, 

 and, as we have seen, will capture women and 

 children in order to increase the numbers of their 

 tribe. The demographic position of the Xingu 

 tribes is a precarious one. Since 1887, there has 

 been a great numerical decrease, whole tribes 

 have disappeared, their remnants uniting with 

 groups of the same linguistic stock. The killing 

 of malformed children in a society where survival 

 depends upon the economic efficiency of each 

 individual is understandable, but the killing of 

 twins and the spacing of children 3 or 4 years 



apart is not so clear. Infant mortality is high 

 and the families are small. 



The widespread prevalence of abortion and 

 infanticide among the Indian tribes of Mato 

 Grosso is a matter which appears to require a 

 thorough analysis by a medically trained person. 

 It may well be that these customs rest upon a 

 sound physiological basis. For instance, are the 

 nature of the foods eaten and the prevalence of 

 intestinal parasites such that a child has to depend 

 upon its mother's milk for 3 or more years in 

 order to survive? Are mothers unable to nurse 

 twins successfully? What is the relation of the 

 number of conceptions to the number of births? 



THE CARE OF CHILDREN 



For the first 3 or 4 years the child is practically 

 attached to its mother's body. During the night 

 it sleeps on the mother's body in the narrow 

 hammock and during the day it is carried strad- 

 dling the hip, held by the mother's arm. During 

 this period the child suckles whenever it pleases 

 and defecates and urinates without restrictions 

 of any kind. On numerous occasions when I 

 was speaking to a woman with a child on her hip 

 the child would defecate, whereupon the woman 

 would ask me to reach in a tree for leaves. After 

 she had wiped her thigh and leg with the leaves, 

 the conversation would continue. If the woman 

 had a boy child we had to be careful to stand at 

 some distance in order to avoid the stream of 

 urine. 



While nursing, the child would twist the nipple 

 of the other breast and even when not nursing, 

 a child would keep grasping the breasts and 

 twisting the nipples. At no time was a mother 

 observed restricting the movements or desires of 

 a child-in-arms. With male babies the mothers 

 paid particular attention to the penis, adjusting 

 it so that it would not be squeezed while sitting 

 on the hip. 



There appeared to be no explicit attempt to 

 teach a child to walk or to talk. In fact small 

 children were discouraged from crawling about on 

 the floor of the house. When not attached to 

 their mothers, they were held by the father or 

 some older child or were left to move around in 

 the hammock. This lack of early movement is 

 due in part at least to the fear of fire. As every 

 woman had a small fire near her hammock, hot 



