Bororo

The Bororo people speak Bororo Proper, which belongs to the Bororo language family in the Macro-Ge language family. Literacy rates are under 30%. The language is written in the Latin script.[2]

The Bororo people call their original language Boe Wadáru. The majority of the population today speaks Portuguese and the Bororo language.[6]

This language is spoken by about a thousand individuals who constitute a small ethnic group of the Amazon named Bororo people; Its diffusion area is mainly found in the Brazilian region of Mato Grosso. In 1976, there was recorded a very low native number (four people) in the Bolivian district of Santa Cruz, in the province of Angel Sandoval, near the border with Brazil. However, today it is supposed that the Bororo language is extinct in Bolivia since it is thought to have been incorporated by other predominant linguistic realities. Today the Bororo language is spoken in Brazil in the state of Mato Grosso, mainly in the villages of Meruri, Sangradouro and Perigera. Even in Brazil, this language risked being extinct forever. Towards the end of the 1960s the use of the Bororo language was forbidden in the towns of Merai and Sangradouro where the Salesian mission was operating, but with the passing of time it was restored and the bilingual education was put into practice. All this led to a moderate revitalization of the language, but since then it is still spoken by just 1024 individuals, making it a so-called "extinct language" or threatened.

Description of the village given by Claude Lévi-Strauss

Funeral banquet of Bororo Indians in engraving by Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865–1926)

The Bororo are a small people in the Amazon rainforest living in the southwest of the Brazilian region of Mato Grosso. The literal translation of the word "boror" is "village courtyard". It's no coincidence that Bororo's homes are traditionally arranged in a circle that will be a kind of spatiotis or patio for them, which will act as the main space of Bororo's life. This square, if so called, is so important that it has given the same name to this group of people as it is within that typical courtyard that the Bororo people concentrate most of the social phenomena and spirit-Religious. In the complex social organization of Bororo, the classification of individuals is governed by several number of factors including clan membership, blood descent, and group of residence (referring to where a family lives in the village). This last detail is important because in the spatial distribution of homes each clan occupies a precise role. The aldeia (village) is divided into two exogamic half-Exerae and Tugarége-each divided into four clans, consisting of several families. A curious aspect for a people that may sometimes seem primitive is that woman has a very particular role in the concept of Bororo society, and indeed the rule of the offspring predicts that this is matriarchal, and that the infant then receives a name that Join the mother clan. The importance of these rules is also noted in marriage. After a Bororo wedding, the man will have to live in the house of his bride and will also have obligations to his family, such as fishing, hunting, working and, if necessary, making ornamental items for his bride's brother. Although it seems that man is totally devoted and devoted entirely to his wife after marriage, it is this complexity of conjugal relationships that is the cause of frequent separations, making it possible for a man to live in multiple homes throughout his life . Despite everything that has so far been explained, it may lead to thinking that the husband's obligations to his wife are at the top of the pyramid because of their importance, another truth of the Bororo culture is that a man always maintains a bond with his much more important family Of what binds her to her bride. It is true that an adult male, although married, maintains a number of obligations to the women of his family, namely his sisters. For example, it is their custom that a man is more concerned with his grandchildren, "iwagedu" in Bororo, than his own children; The only obligation of a father to his children is to banish them, a physical and non-cultural obligation. The complex organization of their lives also reflects on how one lives in the home. In fact, although two families of different nuclei (having blood ties even outside that exact space) live under the same roof, they can divide the interior spaces of the house; It is not by chance that the ends of the house are more private areas where you can put this division into practice, and the center of the house is a shared space devoted to visits, small daily rituals, and eating meals. The Bororo home is usually left with doors and windows open to allow it to be able to control what is inside (in the center), except when rituals are held inside which women can not attend or during mourning. One last interesting thing to consider is that, in mourning, the house becomes a space between the domestic domain and the public-legal domain (as Sylvia Caiuby Novaes observes) since the end of funerals must be destroyed after it has been completely empty throughout the mourning period.

Portrait of an Amerindian Bororo, by Hercules Florence, during the expedition conducted in the Brazilian Amazon by Grigory Langsdorff from 1825 to 1829.

Traditionally hunters and gatherers, under the influence of the missionaries and then of the Brazilian authorities more recently, were put into agriculture, which now ensures their subsistence. Men hunt and women, especially in the Rio Vermelho region, plant and harvest recently introduced cassava, maize and rice. Since agriculture is practiced only by women, they are becoming increasingly important, particularly as a result of the scarcity of game. The Bororos practice many rituals including:

• Corn Festival, a celebration of cereal gathering, important food in Indian food;
• The piercing of the ears and the lips;
• The funeral ritual, is a sacred celebration for all those who consider themselves Indians.

The rites of passage (in which individuals pass from one social category to another) the most important are:

• The naming ceremony;
• The initiation ;
• The funerary rites, which can last up to 2 months and which have attracted the attention of ethnologists by their complexity.