Nukak People - Social Aspects

Social Aspects

The marriage, base of the domestic group, is settled after the man has formally courted the woman with accepted gifts and she has acceded to live with him. In order to look for pair, a man must have gone through an initiation ritual in which he endures several penalties and difficulties, to demonstrate the fundamental abilities for the subsistence and consumes a hallucinogen (Virola sp.).

The most suitable couple is one made up by crossed cousins. Parallel cousins marriage is forbidden, that being the reason why each man looks for a suitable woman in groups where his maternal sisters and aunts are married and therefore the unmarried are eligible. If the woman still lives in the home of the father, the gifts must include him. If the woman accepts, she settles down in the encampment of the man and if they have a child then they are considered a formal pair, which establishes mutual relations of kinship, expressed in rights and duties of reciprocity.

A man can marry several wives, although a single wife is most common, and examples of three or more are rare. This polygyny coexists with a temporal polyandry during the pregnancy in order to improve the qualities of the baby.

Each domestic group is part of a territorial group and others groups that are established to perform specific duties like security measures, according to the different stations and situations. On the other hand each Núkâk is considered as part of a paternal lineage, "nüwayi", named with an animal or plant.

Ten territorial Nukak groups have been identified, at least each one with 50 or 60 people, who most of the year do not remain together but form different groups for harvesting and/or hunting that are distributed in accordance with the climatic seasonal changes and the security situation. In certain special occasions different groups join, after they practice a special ritual, "entiwat", in which the groups dance face to face, striking and verbally injuring each other until the ritual reaches a climatic moment in which they all embrace, weeping while they remember their ancestors and express affection. The groups practice a form of exchange, "ihinihat", especially when all the resources are not in the same territory.