On December 28, 1973, Miriam began to bleed. She was eleven and a half years old, and it was her first menstruation. As soon as she realized what was happening, she told her mother, Betty, who told her father, Roberto--and he told everybody in the village of Camarare.
It was mid-morning, and some people had gone hunting. But those who were around--the women of Roberto's household, Miriam's sister's father-in-law, and several boys--set about building a seclusion hut as fast as they could. They gathered saplings (from which they had not even stripped the leaves), stuck them in the sand in the form of a circle, tied the tops together, and covered this framework with whatever was at hand--some fronds of bacaba and buriti (which are not very good thatching materials), old pieces of galvanized iron, and even rags.
During all this scurrying about, Miriam waited inside Roberto's house, a board shack with a tin roof and dirt floor, just a few feet away. Roberto knew how to make a rain-proof thatched house, but that was no longer the fashion.
When the seclusion hut was ready, Miriam came out and took a bath beside it, with her mother pouring water. The amount of water used was not enough for Miriam to get really clean, but having gone through the motions, Miriam crawled into the seclusion hut. Her mother and sisters set about shelling urucu seeds, getting enough pigment to paint her red all over. Roberto made plans to build a better seclusion hut the next day--a little bigger, and more waterproof. It was the height of the rainy season, and Miriam would have to live in the hut for a long time.
Camarare, in 1973, was a fairly remote village of approximately sixty people (ethnically Nambiquara) in western Mato Grosso, Brazil. I had just returned there after an absence of three and a half years. From earlier visits I had gained some knowledge of the language, and the villagers had learned what kinds of things anthropologists are interested in. Roberto lost no time in telling me that I could record Miriam's puberty festival in exchange for a few gifts for himself and his family.
Preparations for the Puberty Festival
The Nambiquara believe that a woman is in a very delicate condition when menstruating. In large part, what Miriam had done at her first menstruation is what all Nambiquara women do when they menstruate: they refrain from bathing in the stream, which would carry their blood away; they stay indoors, out of the hot sun; and they do not cook, because food contaminated by menstrual blood would make a person very sick. A menstruating woman must let someone else, such as her husband, do the cooking.
While the Nambiquara realize that a woman becomes fertile after her first menstruation, they do not seem to recognize that menstruation is periodic or accept is as a natural condition. Perhaps the menstrual cycle is irregular for Nambiquara women because of dietetic deficiencies and extended lactation. In any case, menstruation is seen as a kind of illness to which women occasionally fall prey. When a Nambiquara woman menstruates, she takes an herbal medicine to make the bleeding stop. Some outsiders have supposed the herb to be a native contraceptive, but this is a misunderstanding. The Nambiquara medicine is
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