Urarina

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Urarina

The Urarina are an indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon Basin (Loreto) who inhabit the Chambira

Chambira

The Chambira River is a major tributary river of the Mara??n River, and has been the traditional territory of the Urarina peoples for at least the past 350 years, if not much longer....
, Urituyacu, and Corrientes Rivers. According to both archaeological and historical sources, they have resided in the Chambira Basin of contemporary northeastern Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
for centuries.

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Encyclopedia

The Urarina are an indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon Basin (Loreto) who inhabit the Chambira

Chambira

Peru

Ethnonym

An ethnonym is the name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms and autonyms .As an example, the ethnonym for the ethnically dominant group in Germany is the Germans....
Urarina. The local vernacular

Vernacular

Vernacular refers to the native language of a country or a locality. In general linguistics, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to Lingua franca, official standards or global languages....
term for the Urarina is Shimaku, which is considered by the Urarina to be pejorative. The ethnonym "Urarina" may in fact be from Quechua

Quechua

Quechua is a Native American language of South America. It was already widely spoken across the Central Andes long before the time of the Inca Empire, who established it as the official language of administration for their Empire, and is still spoken today in various regional forms by some 10 million people through much of South America, in...
--uray meaning below, and rina referring to runa, or people. Urarina is thus rendered in Quechua as uray-runa or people from below or down stream people.

Society and culture

Urarina society

Society

A society is a group of humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and/or institutions....
and culture

Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
have received exceptionally little attention in the burgeoning ethnographic literature of the region, and only sporadic references in the encyclopedic genre of Peruvian Amazonia. Accounts of the Urarina peoples are limited to the data reported by Castillo, by the racist information relayed by the German ethnologist G. Tessmann in his magnum opus Die Indianer Nordost-Peru, and to the erratic and idiosyncratic observations of missionaries and contemporary adventure seekers.

The Urarina are a culturally vibrant, semi-mobile

Semi-mobile

Semimobile is an ethnological term for a practice noted among a number of Indigenous Peoples of the Upper Amazon, such as the Urarina. This symbiotic form of indigenous production, exchange and consumption articulates among nomadic patterns of residence, agricultural practices and extractive pursuits animated by the modernist desires of the g...
hunting and horticultural society whose population is estimated to be around 2,000. Urarina settlements are composed of multiple longhouse groups, located on high ground (restingas) or embankments along the flood-free margins of the Chambira Basins many rivers and streams. The embankments are bounded by low-lying territories (tahuampa and bajiales) that are susceptible to flooding during the annual rainy season (roughly November-May).

Urarina local politics are characterized by a mercurial balance of power between deme

Deme

In Ancient Greece, a deme was a subdivision of Attica, the region of Greece surrounding Classical Athens. Demes as simple subdivisions of land in the countryside seem to have existed in the 6th century BC and earlier, but did not acquire particular significance until the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC....
s united through affinal ties and episodic political alliances, exchange relations and disputation. Surrounded by the Jivaroan, and the Tupi-Guarani speaking Cocama-Cocamilla

Cocama-Cocamilla

Cocama-Cocamilla is an Indigenous peoples language spoken by thousands of native people in western South America. It is spoken along the banks of the Northeastern lower Ucayali, lower Mara??n river, and Huallaga River rivers and in neighboring areas of Brazil and an isolated area in Colombia....
indigenous peoples of the upper Amazon, the Urarina have an elaborate animistic cosmological

Cosmology

Cosmology is study of the Universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity's place in it. Though the word cosmology is recent , study of the Universe has a long history involving science, philosophy, esotericism, and religion....
system predicated on ayahuasca

Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca is any of various psychoactive infusions or decoctions prepared from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, usually mixed with the leaves of the Psychotria bush....
shamanism

Shamanism

Shamanism is a range of traditional beliefs and practices concerned with communication with the spirit world. A practitioner of shamanism is known as a shaman, , noun ....
, which is based in part on the profoundly ritual

Ritual

A ritual is a set of repeated actions, often thought to have symbolic value, the performance of which is usually prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community by religious or political laws because of the perceived efficacy of those actions....
ized consumption of Brugmansia

Brugmansia

Brugmansia is a genus of six species of flowering plants in the family Solanaceae, native to subtropical regions of South America, along the Andes from Colombia to northern Chile, and also in southeastern Brazil....
suaveolens.

The Urarina customarily practice brideservice

Brideservice

Bride service has traditionally been portrayed in the anthropological literature as the service rendered by the bridegroom to a bride's family as a bride price or part of one ....
,, uxorilocal paterns of post-nuptial residence, and sororal polygyny

Polygyny

Polygyny is a form of polygamy, where a man has more than one recognized female sexual partner or wife at the one time. It is distinguished from a man who has a sexual partner outside marriage, such as a concubine, casual sexual partner, paramour, or other culturally recognized secondary partner....
. While men are esteemed for their hunting prowess and shamanic skills, Urarina women are likewise recognized for their craftsmanship: the women are consummate producers of woven

Woven

A woven is a cloth formed by weaving. It only stretches in the bias directions , unless the threads are elastic. Woven cloth usually frays at the edges, unless measures are taken to counter this, such as the use of pinking shears or hemming....
palm-fiber bast mats, hammocks, and net-bags.

Language

Documentation of the Urarina language, or which has been classified as a language isolate

Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common to any other language....
or unclassified language

Unclassified language

Unclassified languages are languages whose genetic affiliation has not been established, mostly due to lack of reliable data. The question of the genetic affiliation of languages belongs to the domain of historical linguistics....
by Terrence Kaufman

Terrence Kaufman

Terrence Kaufman is an United States linguistics specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena....
(1990) has deemed is now under-way. Linguistic work among the Urarina was first pioneered by SIL International

SIL International

SIL International is a United States, worldwide Evangelicalism non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document lesser-known languages, in order to expand linguistics knowledge, promote literacy and aid minority language development....
. The Urarina continue to tell elaborate myths

Mythology

The word mythology refers to a body of folklore/myths/legends that a particular culture believes to be true and that often use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to explain the nature of the universe and humanity....
and stories about the violence

Violence

Violence is the expression of physical force against self or other, compelling action against one's will on pain of being hurt. Variant uses of the term refer to the destruction of non-living objects ....
that they experience from outsiders, which historically has included forced-labor conscription

Conscription

Conscription is a general term for involuntary labor demanded by an established authority. It is most often used in the specific sense of government policies that require citizens to serve in the military....
, rape

Rape

Rape, also referred to as sexual assault, is an assault by a person involving sexual intercourse with or sexual penetration of another person without that person's consent....
, disease

Disease

A disease or medical condition is an abnormal condition of an organism that impairs bodily functions, associated with specific symptoms and Medical signs....
, concubinage

Concubinage

Concubinage is the state of a woman or youth in an ongoing, matrimonial relationship with a man of higher social status. Typically, the man has an official wife and, in addition, one or more concubines....
, and abusive treatment at the hands of outsiders. Portions of the Bible

Bible

The Bible is the central religious text of Judaism and Christianity. The exact Books of the Bible is dependent on the religious traditions of specific denominations....
were first published in Urarina in 1973, nevertheless the complete Bible is yet to be published.

Mythology

The Urarina have a deluge-myth, in which a man saved himself from the deluge while climbing a cudí (amasiza, Erythrina elei) tree; the man's wife was transformed into a termites' nest clinging to that tree, while their two sons became birds. Afterwards that man acquired as wife a different woman, one who had at first summoned successively a pit viper, a spider, and a giant biting ant in an unsuccessful attempt to evade him. In another Urarina deluge-myth, a deluge was produced, on the occasion of a cassave-beer festival, by the urination by the daughter of the ayahuasca-god, "giving rise to the chthonic world of spirits".

Survival

Despite challenges to their on-going cultural survival, including ecocide

Ecocide

The neologism ecocide can be used to refer to any large-scale destruction of the environment . An early reference in 1969 described it as "Ecocide - the murder of the environment - is everybody's business." The term was also used in relation to environmental damage due to war such as the the use of defoliants in the Vietnam War....
, inadequate health-care, and cultural appropriation

Cultural appropriation

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It denotes acculturation or Cultural assimilation, but often connotes a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture....
, the Urarina have both been inspired by and resisted the violence of the colonial

Colonialism

Colonialism is the extension of a nation's sovereignty over Territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler or exploitation colony in which Indigenous people populations are direct rule, Population transfers, or Genocide....
and postcolonial encounters in Amazonia, particularly during the Alberto Fujimori

Alberto Fujimori

Alberto Ken'ya Fujimori is a Peruvian politician who served as President of Peru from July 28, 1990 to November 17, 2000. A controversial figure, Fujimori has been credited with uprooting terrorism in Peru and restoring its macroeconomic stability, though his methods have drawn charges of authoritarianism and human rights violations....
dictatorship.

Indigenous rights

Contemporary indigenous

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples....
resistance has involved intercultural education projects , as well as Urarina political mobilization

Mobilization

This article describes military mobilization. For other meanings, see Mobilization .Mobilization is the act of assembling and making both troops and supplies ready for war....
.

External links

Defensoría del Pueblo, Peru
Language Museum
by Jonathan Harris

Urarina

Society and culture

Language

Mythology

Survival

Indigenous rights

See also

External links