Me Karõ
Kĩsêdjê · numen · Kĩsêdjê traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
The karõ is the spirit, shadow or image that constitutes a person's inner aspect and separates from the body at death. In Kĩsêdjê thought the dead do not vanish but re-form a parallel community, the village of the karõ, which mirrors the world of the living while remaining categorically apart from it. Because the karõ is bound up with the faculties of hearing and of song, the boundary between the living and the dead is porous to ritual knowledge: certain songs and powers are understood to travel across it. The concept anchors Kĩsêdjê eschatology and, through its links to sorcery and to the acquisition of song, connects the domains of death, music and witchcraft.
Domains
- death and the dead
Powers
- departs the body at death
- dwells in the village of the dead
Sources
- The karõ is the spirit or shadow-image that survives bodily death and joins a community of the dead.: Seeger, A. 1981. Nature and Society in Central Brazil: The Suyá Indians of Mato Grosso. Harvard University Press. (secondary)
- Notions of soul, hearing and spirit underpin Suyá understandings of song and personhood.: Seeger, A. 2004 [1987]. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. University of Illinois Press. (secondary)