The Matis

The Matis are classic slash and burn agriculturalists and expert hunters. They live in the vast Vale do Javari indigenous Park, an area of 32,000 sq miles, in the far west of Brazil. Despite all that’s happened to them since first contact in the mid-1970s, the Matis remain a bibrant cultural force. They are a remarkably playful people for whom the longhouse remains a cultural focus and the skills needed to use a 3.5 metre-long blowpipe are deeply respected.

Once semi-nomadic, moving their villages every few years or so when game ran low or the fields infertile, the Matis now live in just two villages. Waves of western diseases have devastated their population in the post contact years. Crucially, after these epidemics the Matis lost confidence in their own cultural identity, believing the disaster was brought about by their own belief in the power of xo, the balance between all the sweet and bitter forces in the world. Many traditional Matics ceremonies and practices were rejected.

Matis Life

Matis villages have no fixed shape, but are usually clustered around a longhouse on top of a low hill. The longhouse remains s key anchor in Matis cultural and village life. Imposing triangular structures, some 6m high and covered in a carefully woven thatch, they can be built by anyone who has sufficient political and material support. Decorated with the jaw bones of large peccary and tapir, the longhouse is where poison is applied to blowpipe darts, where blowpipes used to be kept and where a host of rituals take place.

In the past all Matis lived in longhouses. Now only a few sling their hammocks between the sturdy uprights, although cooking and communal eating is common. It was once tradition that you had to be naked to enter the longhouse. Most Matis now live in small ‘nuclear’ family groups in a one or two-roomed stilt house similar to those of the neighboring Marubo people.

Matis Culture

Traditionally the Matis have interpreted the world through taste, which they divided between two forms: bata xo (sweet) and chimu (sour). Bitter or sour things have great power, but it’s the balance between the two that produces xo, an excess of which can lead to disaster.

Ritual & Adornment

Outsiders have long believed that Matis adorn themselves to imitate the jaguar, but the Matis are fed up with being referred to as the ‘Jaguar people’. whilst they admire (and fear) the stealth and cunning of the jaguar, Matis adornment have nothing to do with the jaguar.

Many Matis rituals are about having fun in the longhouse and many involve the representation of animals. During txawa tanek (peccary dance) participants paint themselves red with urucum ( annatto juice) before dancing in a line and entering the longhouse imitating the guttural and haunting sounds of the txawa (collared peccary, an Amazonian forest pig), whilst the lead dance bangs two peccary skull together. The ritual is designed to attract peccary to the hunters during the following day’s hunt.

The Future

Matis society has changed over the last 30 years thanks to demographic change and acculturation. Many children are now being educated in town, learning Portuguese, listening to Brazilian music and gathering material possessions. Elders may complain that young men don’t hunt, they just play football, but more authority is shifting to young Portuguese speakers, who can take the lead in negotiations with outside authorities.

 





(bbc.co.uk/tribe)