Mythologies of the Marúbo Tribe



The Marúbo Tribe are an indigenous group who primarily inhabit the western Amazon rainforest in BrazilThe Marubo live in the far west of Brazil, in the Vale do Javari Indigenous Territory, an area covering 83,000 square kilometres (32,000 sq mi)Access to the Vale do Javari Indigenous Territory is limited by the government of Brazil to protect the indigenous groups inhabiting the area and the environment on which they depend for their traditional lifeways from exploitation by loggers, miners, poachers, drug traffickers and others. Several other indigenous peoples live in this territory, including the Kanamari and the Tsohom Djapa, who speak languages in the Katukina family, the Matis, the Kulina Pano, the Korubo and the Matses or Mayoruna, who speak Panoan languages like the Marubo. The region is also home to certain other groups of uncontacted peoples. Contact with uncontacted peoples is prohibited by the government of Brazil, even with respect to other indigenous groups living traditional lifeways, but state capacity is low in these areas and monitoring or enforcement is difficult. The origins of the Marúbo people are not definitively documented, but according to Marúbo tradition, their language originated from the Chaináwavo, a now-extinct subgroup of the Marúbo. This suggests significant cultural interaction between the Chaináwavo and other Marúbo subgroups in the past, and implies that the Marúbo may have developed from several tribes converging culturally or one tribe dispersing and diversifying over time. The Marúbo were first contacted in the early 20th century by Peruvians looking to harvest latex from local trees. When many Brazilian rubber workers came over during the Amazon Rubber Boom the Marúbo suffered greatly due to contact with new diseases. During this time they were also forced into debt by local rubber barons being forced to trade local resources for outside technologies. This gave them a technological edge over the other tribes because they were the first to have access to guns. During this time many social and religious norms were uprooted in order to get more rubber and the majority of the Marúbo were involved in the rubber industry. By the times the rubber industry crashed in 1912 the Marúbo were nearly extinct, though the rubber industry did not totally disappear until 1938.


In Marubo cosmology, new entities are formed through the aggregation or transformation of parts of dead and mutilated beings. In just the same way, the Marubo people seem to have resulted from the re-organization of indigenous societies decimated and fragmented by rubber tappers at the height of the rubber boom. But this movement of dispersion and regrouping may well extend back into more ancient times, since the names of Marubo sections appear among other neighbouring Pano peoples. As they are generally known by this name, the Marubo accept its use. However, it is not a self-designation, of which none in fact seems to exist. Their language is a member of the Pano family. The ethnologist Philippe Erikson, based on the linguistic and cultural similarities between the Marubo and the Katukína-Pâno, Nukiní (Rêmo) and Poyanáwa in Brazil, as well as the Kapanáwa in Peru, classifies the set of their languages as the central branch of the Pano family. The Marubo say that their language is that of the Chaináwavo. This claim raises a number of questions about their past, since Chaináwavo is the name of one of their sections (see below), nowadays extinct. As a section, the Chaináwavo could not have lived in isolation since they would have had to marry members from another section; and there would have been at least two more sections along with whom they must have been living: namely, those of their fathers and mothers. Did each of these sections speak its own language? Or did these four sections speak the same language, distinct from that of other aggregates of sections? Are the contemporary Marubo a result of a fusion of various four-section aggregates, each speaking its own language which ended up adopting just one of them? Or was the situation actually similar to that found in north-western Amazonia, where each exogamic group has a distinct language? The contemporary Marubo language possesses a ritual counterpart. A parallel vocabulary exists in myths and curing chants, substituting many of the words of daily use. In formal discourses, exchanged between the maloca owner and his visitor at special moments, phrases are pronounced with a musicality distinct from profane situations. Nowadays, young Marubo men are able to communicate with each other in Portuguese. Since the region was explored in the past by Peruvian rubber tappers, older people tend to know some words in Quechua and Spanish.

Last year, a remote Amazon tribe called the Marubo received access to the internet for the first time ever via Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service. The 2,000-member tribe is one of hundreds who have received Starlink since it first came to Brazil in 2022. The newfound connection has allowed the community to keep in close contact with friends and family and even call for emergency medical evacuations. However, this development has not come without downsides. In part due to their isolation, the Marubo have been able to preserve their culture and way of life for hundreds of years. Now, tribal leaders report that many young people are quickly becoming addicted to their phones, preferring to scroll social media, watch pornography, and play violent video games rather than take part in traditional tribal activities. The shift is leaving some elders concerned that access to the internet may have changed their culture forever.















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