Ehjcreere’Catiji: ritual de iniciação à vida adulta dos Krikati: mudanças e (re)significações (séculos XIX e XX)

Abstract

This study has as main objective to analyze the Krikati initiation ritual for adult life called Ẽhjcreere', regarding its change and continuity in the movement of time, as well as its importance for the social organization of the referred people. The ritual is one of the ceremonies used in the transition from childhood to adulthood, involving placing adolescent prisoners aged between twelve and fourteen years, in a structure that they identify as a “little house”. The period of confinement is close to three months, which coincides, at present, with school holidays, with the apparent objective of body change with weight gain. The research has as its time frame the 19th and 20th centuries, and extends to today. It is a history of the present time, considering that from that century onwards, cultural updates began among them, mainly due to the relationship with non-indigenous society. Among them, the struggle for land that they always considered theirs, the pastoral and agricultural expansion, the introduction of the school in the villages, which incorporated in the social and mythical aspect, customs and values of contact. Cultural dynamism brought the sense of ritual up to date and in context. The thesis is directed to affirm that implications of temporal and historical nature promoted the resignification of the ritual, in the sense that not only boys, but also girls should prepare themselves for adult life in community, as well as nurture the cultural tradition of a people who, based on the “Big Village” myth, built ethnic autonomy within their own group of belonging. The oral sources in this investigation pointed out that re-signifying both myth and rite is a historical process, in such a way, even if some young people decide not to participate in the ritual or choose to live rites of passage for non-indigenous people, or by studying and not by marriage; to reduce the confinement time or accommodate the vacation period; that there are still changes in rules and diets at the time of seclusion and the replacement of traditional artifacts by industrialized ones, despite all this, the ritual remains important. The result of this study points out that the Ẽhjcreere' ritual has been reframed from the interaction between young people with their social and cultural environment, mainly in the post-contact, being an important element for the dynamic process of permanent transformation of their society.