Exchange, Friendship and Regional Relations in the Upper Xingu¹

Troca, amizade e relações regionais no Alto Xingu

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