WEDDINGS 



505 



Indians. There is great similarity in all their ceremonies 

 and mummeries, whether the object is a wedding, the 

 celebration of the feast of fruits, the plucking of the hair 

 from the heads of their children, or a holiday got up 

 simply out of a love of dissipation. Some of the tribe on 

 these occasions deck themselves with the bright-coloured 

 feathers of parrots and macaws. The chief wears a head- 

 dress or cap made by fixing the breast-feathers of the 

 Toucan on a web of Bromelia twine, with erect tail plumes 

 of macaws rising from the crown. The cinctures of the 

 arms and legs are also then ornarciented with bunches of 

 feathers. Others wear masked dresses : these are long 

 cloaks reaching below the knee and made of the thick 

 whitish-coloured inner bark of a tree, the fibres of which 

 are interlaced in so regular a manner, that the material 

 looks like artificial cloth. The cloak covers the head ; 

 two holes are cut out for the eyes, a large round piece of 

 the cloth stretched on a rim of flexible wood is stitched 

 on each side to represent ears, and the features are painted 

 in exaggerated style with yellow, red, and black streaks. 

 The dresses are sewn into the proper shapes with thread 

 made of the inner bark of the tJaissima tree. Sometimes 

 grotesque head-dresses, representing monkeys' busts or 

 heads of other animals, made by stretching cloth or skin 

 over a basket-work frame, are worn at these holidays. 

 The biggest and ugliest mask represents the Jurupari. 

 In these festival habiliments the Tucunas go through their 

 monotonous see-saw and stamping dances accompanied 

 by singing and drumming, and keep up the sport often 

 for three or four days and nights in succession, drinking 

 enormous quantities of caysuma, smoking tobacco, and 

 snuffing parica powder. 



I could not learn that there was any deep symbolical 

 meaning in these masked dances, or that they commemo- 

 rated any past event in the history of the tribe. Some 

 of them seem vaguely intended as a propitiation of the 

 Jurupari, but the masker who represents the demon 

 sometimes gets drunk along with the rest, and is not 

 treated with any reverence. From all I could make out, 

 these Indians preserve no memory of events going beyond 

 the times of their fathers or grandfathers. Almost every 

 joyful event is made the occasion of a festival : weddings 

 amongst the rest. A young man who wishes to wed a 

 Tucuna girl has to demand her hand of her parents, who 



