Yamurikumã
Mehinaku · numen · Mehinaku traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
The Yamurikumã are the women of myth who withdrew from the society of men and were transformed into fierce, autonomous spirit-women. Their story belongs to the same complex as the myth of the flutes, in which women once held the ritual powers now monopolized by men, and it inverts the ordinary order of the village: the women take up song, dance, and ceremony for themselves. The Mehinaku, like their Xingu neighbors, keep the memory of these spirit-women in a women's festival of the same name, in which the participants enact the mythic reversal. The tradition gives voice to the tension Gregor found at the center of Mehinaku life, between the men's guarded dominance and the women's remembered priority.
Domains
- womanhood
- ritual reversal
Powers
- abandon human life and become spirit-women
Sources
- The Yamurikumã are the mythic women who left ordinary society and became spirit-women, commemorated in the women's festival of the same name: Thomas Gregor, Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) (primary); Aristóteles Barcelos Neto, Apapaatai: rituais de máscaras no Alto Xingu (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2008) (secondary)