Word: bororo
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...Victor Englebert (Chronicle; $35). During the past 30 years a Belgian photographer-writer lived and traveled with the last nomads of Africa -- the Tuareg, Bororo and Danakil tribes. His diverting account shows many things these supposedly primitive wanderers have to teach the outsider about family values...
...Strauss had expected to find primitive and ignorant peoples frozen in cultural patterns, which, like the toys of childhood, civilization had long since put by. Instead, he found his intellectual peers. The Bororo, a naked tribe of the Brazilian interior, introduced him to a concept of life that might have been taken from the most sophisticated human thought. Whenever a native dies, the Bororo believed, "an injury is done not only to those near him but to society as a whole...
...world: "The face paintings confer upon the individual his dignity as a human being: they help him to cross the frontier from nature to culture, and from the 'mindless' animal to the civilized man." He decided that, "without any play on words," both the Caduveo and the Bororo "could be called in their different ways 'learned societies...
Except for this feral foible, the Bororos are quiet folk. Their hearing is abnormally acute, their language so low in pitch that it is difficult for a white man to hear them. They often sit on stumps at a considerable distance from one another and murmur softly. Apparently each Bororo is muttering to himself. Actually they are telling stories which are the primitive stuff of all humor. Sample: "Once upon a time the jaguar had a fight with the rabbit. The rabbit won!" Then all the Bororos burst out laughing...
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