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Inventaire original MEG. Registres tapuscrits, volumes 19 à 59
Registres_tapuscrits/40957.pdf
"Amazonia" designates the Amazonian world, to be more precise a body of peoples distinguished by a specific culture which anthropologists also call "lowland societies" as opposed to those of the Andine world. Some of the peoples whose objects are shown here live outside the Amazon hydrographic basin. Others do not - or no longer - live in the humid tropical Amazonian forest but in savannah or dry forest ecosystems.
The Kayapó, some 9,000 people living in more than forty villages, occupy a territory covered by a tropical rainforest on the central Brazilian plateau. Like that of many other Amazonian groups, their history is studded with many disastrous encounters with non-indigenous populations: massacres, slavery, land despoilment and infectious diseases. The Kayapó's magnificent featherwork is mainly intended for collective festivals devoted to men or women, during the mérèrémeit, a rite of passage to confirm ceremonial name of children aged three or four.
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