The Awa Tribe Gender

Gender refers to the social identities, expectations, and privileges different cultures construct for members of the different biological sexes. In the Awa tribe the men are granted higher status in the symbolic plane. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case in everyday interactions. In this kind of society the task that have to be carried out don’t seem to be universally considered to be distinctly male or female task. The men in the Awa tribe are the hunters and fishers who create their own bows and arrows, but the women do play a very active and important role and do help the men in hunting sometimes by clapping and shouting to scare howling monkeys, and also to track game or even just wait for them to return to a meeting point. Even in some of the Awa groups it can be quite common for young women to go hunting on their own. In addition, the entire family, including the men, women and children perform the task of gathering fruits and nuts, which is usually thought to be the female’s job.

Furthermore, due to the reduction of the Awa’s land from the Western civilization the reduction of their mobility seems to be having a greater impact on the traditional females activities rather than the males. For example, the Awa men and women now both wash and mend their own clothes. Within the community the males can be seeing doing more and more work such as their traditional jobs in addition to new agricultural ones, while the women are doing less and less. The females mostly spend their time sitting in the hammocks, caring for their young, and periodically fishing or hunting small birds near their homes with their children.

The tribe may seem to have a female dominance with some of the women’s views playing an important role in decision-making internally. On the other hand, males are mostly the ones making the decisions on outside threats. In any case, the tribe is quite lenient on if some of the males choose to actively contribute to the community or avoid responsibility, likewise with the women taking part in male activities. On the contrary, it is believed that in the past the females in the tribe would have had a much great workload and were probably complimentary to the activities carried out by the males within the tribe. The females of the Awa tribe are also permitted to change husbands as often as she wishes and enjoys a great deal of freedom when it comes to choosing sexual partners to complement their relationship with their husbands, Furthermore, women may have two husbands at the same time if there are fewer women then men within the community. The females are also very open with abortion, and fee completely free to abort an unwanted pregnancy. Their fathers or even their brothers can give the young females around the age of 6 or 7 away in marriage to adult men, in which she will wait until she hits puberty to become this males wife.

In addition, the Awa women take care of small baby animals by breast feeding and taking care of them until they are old enough to return back to the forest. They usually have baby monkeys clinging to them wrapping their tails around the Awa women's necks, which is a very traditional act for the Awa and “enhances” the culturally valued image of the fertile female. In addition to this traditional act, the men have exclusively male ritual called the Karawara in which they perform during the full moon. The men are decorated by the females in King vulture feathers and one by one the men enter a takaya, which is a circular structure built with large palm leaves in which they chant until they go into a state of trance and can travel to another realm to meet their ancestral spirits.

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Hernando, Almudena 2011, Gender, Power, And Mobility Among Theawá-Guajá (Maranhão, Brazil).Electronic Document. http://www.academia.edu/1076736/Gender_Power_and_Mobility_among_the_Awa-Guaja_Maranhao_Brasil_._Journal_of_Anthropological_Research_67_2_189-211._2011, accessed November 5 2013.