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VENEZUELA: Play Keeps Indigenous Cultures Alive

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Oct 20 2006 (IPS) - A new study found that play is an essential vehicle of socialisation and transmission of traditions and customs among indigenous groups in Venezuela, who often live in an uneasy coexistence with mainstream society while the survival of their cultures and languages is threatened.

A team of researchers found that indigenous communities in different parts of the country have maintained similar customs, beliefs and rituals surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, newborn care, the teaching of skills, the transmission of values, and the transition to adulthood, while they gradually incorporate schools, modern medicine and television.

Under the leadership of Emanuele Amodio, a professor at the Central University’s School of Anthropology, and sponsored by the United Nations children’s fund (UNICEF), the team studied nine areas of childbirth and childrearing among six of Venezuela’s 35 indigenous groups for two years.

According to the 2001 census, indigenous people in Venezuela number 500,000 out of a total population of 25 million.

“Our research was based on reflections on the construction, evolution and crisis of identities, and on the certainty that the roots of identity are traced back to the first five or six years of life,” Amodio explained to IPS. “We wanted to go to the roots of the identity crisis, where there was a large gap in the research.”

He said the team selected indigenous groups with varying levels of interaction with mainstream culture, from different linguistic groups, who live in a variety of ecosystems.


The ethnic groups chosen by the researchers were the Wayúu and Añú (part of the Arawak linguistic family) in the extreme northwest, the Ye’kuana (of the Carib linguistic family) in the south, the Warao (in the Orinoco River delta) in the east, the Jivi (at the confluence of the Orinoco and Meta Rivers) and the Piaroa (on the upper Orinoco River).

The first area studied was pregnancy, which is sought from the first week of marriage among Wayúu couples, while Ye’kuana women prefer to wait until the second year of marriage.

In some communities, couples want their first child to be a boy, so he can help out as soon as possible with the hunting and fishing. But in others, couples hope their firstborn is a girl, so she can help with the household chores.

Meanwhile, new couples in the Piaroa ethnic group have no preference, but do not want “more than three or four children, because everything is very expensive today, and we can’t afford to support more than that,” said one member of that community.

In all of the indigenous cultures studied, pregnancy entails special care and rules, including cultural taboos – which often extend to the father as well as the mother – with regard to consuming specific kinds of meat or species of fish that could affect the health of the unborn child.

Another shared preference is for small newborn babies, to make childbirth easier. And in all six of the ethnic groups, the placenta is carefully wrapped and buried, and is never thrown, for example, into the river.

There are also taboos against twins. In past centuries, the Piaroa would traditionally leave one of the twins at the spot where the placentas had been buried, so that anyone who wished to could pick the child up and keep it.

The choice of children’s names is steeped in ritual in some of the groups, but most of the names are of Spanish, or combined, origin. In addition, most children are given a nickname.

One Ye’kuana couple named their children Bebeto, in honour of a famous Brazilian football player who formed part of the team that won the 1994 World Cup; Macunaima, one of the manifestations of the sun god; and Curatay, the Ye’kuana word for grasshopper.

It is mothers and grandmothers who bathe the children, which they do frequently in the case of communities whose lives are closely entwined with the water, like the Warao in the Orinoco delta and the Añú on the Sinamaica Lagoon, whose children learn to swim and walk virtually at the same time.

Babies are almost exclusively breastfed in their first few months of life. The Piaroa even have legends about long-ago struggles by cultural heroes in favour of maternal lactation.

The first foods given to babies are pureed fruits, rice and fish broth. After the age of three, children eat basically the same diet as adults – mainly meat from hunted animals, fish, bananas and other fruits, mandioca, and a few industrially produced foods.

Wayúu children in rural areas (tens of thousands of people from that ethnic group now live in the city of Maracaibo and other urban areas in northwestern Venezuela) consume goat’s and cow’s milk and cheese.

And from the age of four or five, Ye’kuana children learn to collect, roast and eat “bachacos” (red leaf-cutting ants).

The researchers noticed nutritional problems in several communities, especially among the Warao, some of whom make frequent trips to Caracas and other cities to panhandle, and the Añú, whose nutritional problems are linked to the increasing scarcity of fish caused by the salinisation and pollution of the Sinamaica Lagoon.

The lagoon is connected to Lake Maracaibo, which in turn is connected to the Gulf of Venezuela. For decades, Lake Maracaibo has been dredged to allow the passage of oil tankers.

The researchers also studied play among the groups, all of whom use children’s games as a mechanism for learning, socialisation and preparation for adult life.

Starting at the age of three or four, there are marked gender differences in toys and games, with boys’ activities geared towards hunting, fishing, planting or selling, and girls’ activities towards cooking, weaving and taking care of the home and family.

The toys include canoes, bows and arrows, carved animals and dolls made of natural fibers, wood, shells or clay. But plastic, glass and metal toys from the city are also common now.

Adults often play games with children, or egg them on as they play. Warao children hold rowing contests, Ye’kuana children play “family”, and the Añú, who live near the border with Colombia, play a game called “border guards and smugglers.”

Diarrhea, vomiting and fever are common among the children in the indigenous groups studied, as is malaria. These health problems are blamed by the communities on their poverty, violations of tribal customs or taboos (like eating foods banned during pregnancy), or supernatural causes (the influence of evil spirits).

The groups turn for assistance to western doctors, in rural or urban health posts, as well as traditional healers or shamans, who fight evil spirits or spells using herbs and potions.

The education and development of children is the responsibility of mothers, grandmothers and aunts, grandfathers and uncles, older sisters and brothers, and the community at large, especially among the Ye’kuana and Piaroa who live in large community huts, or the Warao and Añú, who live in “palafitos” (houses on stilts) over the water, connected by walkways.

The mother tongue is predominant when it comes to transmission of knowledge among the Warao, Ye’kuana, Jivi and Piaroa, who communicate among themselves in their own languages, although they are happy to send their children to bilingual schools in their territories.

The Wayúu, on the other hand, are mainly bilingual.

By contrast, of the 10,000 people making up the Añú community – of whom around 3,000 still live along the edge of the Sinamaica Lagoon – only a few elderly people and one young person still speak the group’s mother tongue. The rest are now Spanish speakers.

What values are passed on to children? “Good things: how they should behave, to have profound mutual respect within the family, and that it’s wrong to steal, say mean things to other people, and mistreat other children,” said one father from the Jivi community.

In the indigenous villages where there are TV sets with satellite connection, the children gather as often as they can to watch cartoons, movies, sitcoms and soap operas.

“These are new factors of loss of traditional culture, just like Christianity and school taught only in Spanish were in the past,” said Amodio.

“My proposal is that educational curriculums should be modified so that in the first four or five years of school, indigenous children study in their own languages, and after they have become proficient in their mother tongues, they continue studying in Spanish, as a second language,” he said.

The study also found that the ethnic groups all had rituals to mark the end of childhood. For boys, the threshold is crossed when they can fend for themselves in hunting, fishing and other bread-winning activities, while for girls the transition occurs after their first menstruation, when they undergo purification and isolation.

The study “has revealed aspects that should bolster the development of new educational policies,” said Deputy Minister of Education Armando Rojas.

For her part, Anna Lucía D’ Emilio, UNICEF representative in Venezuela, said she hoped it would serve “as a tool to empower indigenous communities and organisastions.”

 
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