INDIAN TRIBES OF NORTHERN MATO GROSSO, BRAZIL — OBERG 



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to wait for him, but the man would not wait and 

 continued walking and whistling. The fish-child 

 returned home and asked, "Why does my father 

 act like this, he does not like me for he always 

 leaves me behind." The mother then explained, 

 "You are not his son, you are a little fish." The 

 boy was very sad and answered, "As I have no 

 father I do not wish to live." He then went out 

 in the woods, climbed a tree, and began jumping 

 from one tree to another until he became tired 

 and fell down and died. The woman went looking 

 for him and found his body and brought it back 

 to her house. The woman was very angry with 

 her husband and explained who the boy was. 

 The husband was sorry for what he had done and 

 both of them went out and buried the fish-boy. 

 From his corpse grew the following crops: Sweet- 

 potatoes from his testicles, pepper from his eyes, 

 and beans from his ears. 



GHOSTS 



When a person dies his ghost (arumuntu) goes 

 into the sky, climbing up on a ladder made of 

 sipo vme. The ladder is guarded by a cotia, a 

 rabbitlike rodent, who calls out every time a ghost 

 is going up or down. Another version states that 

 in the old days the ghosts went up the ladder and 

 later came down as living beings, but one day the 

 cotia gnawed away the ladder so that when a 

 person dies today he can no longer go into the sky 

 and return to the earth as a living being but must 

 remain here as a ghost. The arumuntu sometimes 

 enter the bodies of birds and animals. The ghost 

 of an old bearded hunter is believed to enter the 

 body of a jaguar or an eagle so that he can con- 

 tinue hunting. When a jaguar is killed the Umo- 

 tina examine it carefully, for they believe that 

 they can recognize whose ghost lived in it. 



Some ghosts are good; others are evil and cause 

 sickness. The good ghosts are those who have 

 a living human representative whose body they 

 can enter during the annual ardueto ceremony 

 and who have living relatives who make offerings 

 to them. Evil ghosts are foreign ghosts or the 

 ghosts of Umotina who have died away from the 

 village or who have no relatives to make offerings 

 to them. When a person dies, the relatives in- 

 vite some man from another family to bury the 

 corpse. This man then becomes the ceremonial 

 or spirit father, mother, brother, sister, son, or 



daughter depending upon which relative died, 

 and once every year the ghost returns and enters 

 the body of the person who did the burying and 

 dances in the ardueto. But if the deceased has 

 no relatives who can offer the gravedigger gifts, 

 then the ghost becomes angry and does harm. 

 He makes people sick, breaks pots, and takes the 

 form of a jaguar or a snake and kills people. 

 Eventually, however, ghosts of this kind die. 



Thus the important religious rite of the Umotina 

 is the ardueto, which is given every year at the 

 beginning of the rainy season. Large quantities 

 of fish, meat, and manioc cake are prepared by 

 the family heads who have ghosts to whom they 

 must make offerings. The ghosts are imperson- 

 ated by the gravediggers dressed for the occasion. 

 There appears to be four classes of spirits: the 

 podopodo or ghosts of men who have living rela- 

 tives; the bakure or male ghosts who have no 

 relatives but must be appeased during the ardueto; 

 and the akakono and the hatori who are the female 

 correspondents of the above-mentioned male 

 spirits. The podopodo and akakono dancers wear 

 long mantles made from buriti leaves, which reach 

 from the shoulders to the ground. They wear 

 macaw feather headdresses, glue feathers above 

 their eyes, and pull their hair over their faces and 

 fasten it to their beards. The baMre mantle is 

 the same as that of the podopodo but it is tied 

 around the waist, the dancer wearing a mask made 

 from buriti bark. The hatori dancer wears a 

 costume made by suspending a buriti leaf mantle 

 from a large hoop about 3 or 4 feet in diameter. 

 A mask made from a net is placed on top of the 

 hoop. The dancer then gets underneath and 

 holds the hoop with his hands while dancing. 



While the dancers are performing at night the 

 women sing and the men play the flutes (kdto) and 

 shake gourd rattles. The flute is about 3 feet in 

 length and is made from taquara. It is played 

 from the side like a clarinet. 



The givers of the ardueto are those men who have 

 lost relatives since the ardueto the year before. 

 These men usually combine in collecting the food 

 and building a temporal house in which the 

 dancers dress for the ceremony. When the 

 ceremony is over the dancers give their mantles 

 to the givers of the feast, who use them for making 

 mats. 



