Aguaruna People - Customs

Customs

Living arrangements

Awajún families, either monogamous or polygamous, traditionally lived in dispersed neighborhoods of kin related through descent and marriage. Road construction and the establishment of bilingual schools and health posts has led to a more clustered settlement pattern and in some cases the appearance of densely populated hamlets.

Examples of Awajún towns include Yutupiza on the Santiago River and Japaime on the Nieva.

The towns for which there exists a pattern of nucleate population are called "yáakat" in their native language, and do not have streets, footpaths, or squares, but rather are constituted of houses of traditional construction. These houses are distributed in a kind of asymmetric form and the tendency is usually to place them in a linear form along the river.

Among the Awajún there is a traditional institution of mutual aid known in their language as ipáamamu, which can be seen in action primarily when they are constructing housing for young couples, clearing fields and, with less frequency, sowing yuca and peanuts.

The Awajún were traditionally a seminomadic population, relocating on a regular basis as soil fertility and wild game populations declined in the immediate vicinity of their houses. Such relocations have become rarer as Awajún find their range of movement increasingly confined to titled community lands, which in some cases are now surrounded by the farms and villages of non-indigenous colonists.

Hunting, gathering and agriculture

Major species of animals that are hunted by the Aguaruna include the sajino, the huangana, the Brazilian Tapir (sachavaca), the Little Red Brocket, the ocelot and the otorongo (jaguar). Species which are less commonly hunted include the majaz, the ronsoco, the achuni, the añuje, the carachupa, the otter, diverse classes of monkeys and birds.

The animals that they hunt not only provide meat; the skin, feathers, teeth and bones are also used. Hunting therefore has a double purpose: for dietary needs and also for making handicrafts, medicines and items used in witchcraft. Traditionally, the tribe hunted with a spear perfected with pijuayo (a palm tree of very hard wood) and the blowpipe. At present the spear has been almost completely displaced by the pellet shotgun but they also continue using the blowpipe.

They gather the wild fruit of some palm trees, like the uvilla some shrubs, and buds of palm trees, as well as stems, bark, and resins. They extract leche caspi and gather the honey of wild bees, edible worms (suris), coleopterous, medicinal plants and lianas. They use everything that they gather either for food, crafts, traditional medicine, in witchcraft or as fuel, adhering to an ancestral pattern of self-sufficiency. The Awajún are known among naturalists for their sophisticated knowledge of rainforest flora and fauna, which has been the focus of extensive studies by ethnobotanists and ethnozoologists.

As agricultural instruments, they use the traditional wái (a stick with a sharp end, made from the wood of the palm tree pijuayo), along with the axe, the machete and the shovel.

Other activities

The principal crafts are masculine activities like ropemaking, basketry, the construction of canoes, and textiles; and feminine activities like ceramics and making necklaces from seeds, insects' small wings and beads. The men make headdresses of exquisite feathers as well as cotton ribbons on the ends of which they place feathers and human hair. These adornments are kept in bamboo cases.