Barasana

The Barasana are an Eastern Tucanoan people of the Pirá-Paraná basin in southern Vaupés, one of the most isolated corners of the Colombian Amazon, with a handful of families across the border in Brazil. Their language is mutually intelligible with Eduria (Taiwano), and through the regional rule of linguistic exogamy most Barasana also speak Makuna and other Eastern Tucanoan languages. Society is organized into patrilineal, exogamous segments, and life centers on the maloca, the great communal house whose ritual dances are understood to bind the community to the cosmos.

Subsistence follows the classic Vaupés pattern: women cultivate bitter manioc and other garden crops, men hunt with blowguns and bows, fish, and clear gardens, and both engage in crafts — pottery for women, basketry and woodwork for men. Ritual life, including a restricted initiation complex that this archive names without describing, was documented at length by anthropologists Stephen and Christine Hugh-Jones, making the Barasana one of the best-described peoples of Amazonia.

Like their neighbors they suffered from the rubber economy, epidemics, and missionary pressure over the past 150 years. Today their communities lie within the large Pirá-Paraná indigenous territory, where local associations manage schooling, health, and cultural transmission.