WaiWai Yana Komo: Rotas de transformações Ameríndias. Um estudo de caso na região das Guianas

Abstract

WaiWai is a complex Amerindian collective, with most speakers of the Karib language family, who until the 1950s lived in collective Uumana houses located between the two sides of the Acaraí Mountains, Brazil's border with Guyana. This collective, from the contact with missionaries, decided to unite and live in large agglomerations called WaiWai communities. That is why I consider that we are a mixed people. And with this statement, I wonder what the so-called WaiWai today correspond to those people who have known each other for a long time, make visits and establish millennial exchanges, and today, when they question their origin, they say they are the WaiWai. Unlike those who lived in the last century, before living in the conglomerations, when this question was not part of their concerns and kept differences between them, today everyone knows how to recognize their similarities and differences. Today it is very common to hear the speech that before the missionaries the WaiWai were "pure" and after that they began to live all together in great communities they were "mixing". The young people believe that there are still "pure" WaiWai and say they are in Guyana. This issue has already been addressed by many other anthropologists who have worked with the WaiWai and now it also becomes the focus of my research. To address this issue, I conducted a study to find out what the other anthropologists said and also had the opportunity to talk to the old leader of the Karapau yana, Pararaka. He was the leader of the last residents of a Collective House drawn to living in the WaiWai clusters in the mid-1980s by Ewka, my paternal grandfather.