The First Kĩsêdjê

The first Kĩsêdjê are the primordial people who established the village with its central plaza and men's house and set the pattern of proper social life. Distinctively, Kĩsêdjê self-understanding does not present their culture as complete from the beginning: a recurring theme, drawn out especially in Seeger's work, is that names, songs, ceremonies and much else were taken over time from enemies, from neighbouring peoples of the Upper Xingu, and from animals and spirits. The founding ancestors thus inaugurate not a fixed order but an ongoing capacity to gather in the powers of others and make them the community's own. This origin frames the Kĩsêdjê as a people constituted through incorporation, and it underlies both their ceremonial life and their historical openness to the wider Xinguan world into which they moved.

Domains

• origins and peoplehood

Powers

• founds the Kĩsêdjê people and their way of life
• acquires names, songs and ceremonies from other peoples and beings

Sources

• Kĩsêdjê origin narratives and self-understanding emphasise a founding people who established village life and then progressively acquired names, songs and ceremonies from enemies, neighbours and non-human beings.: Seeger, A. 1981. Nature and Society in Central Brazil: The Suyá Indians of Mato Grosso. Harvard University Press. (secondary)
• The name Kĩsêdjê and Suyá ethnohistory are documented in the ethnographic record from first contact by Karl von den Steinen (1884) onward.: Von den Steinen, K. 1886. Durch Central-Brasilien. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus. (primary)