Abstract
The aim of this work is to describe and analyze the different types of relationships established between the peoples of the Upper Xingu through their regional rituals. Starting from a description of the uluki exchange ceremony, we will discuss how this ritual, by mobilizing Xinguano ideas about friendship, produces contexts of interaction in which characteristics of intra-village sociality are extended to regional sociality. At the same time that the uluki defines, together with other regional rituals, a certain “Xinguano interiority” (the world of multi-community rituals), it is also one of its main forms of opening, having the potential to attract to the Xinguano world not only singular persons, but entire groups.
Keywords:
Amerindian peoples; rituals; exchange; friendship; Upper Xingu