Word: brazilianizing
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...schoolhouse-church. They have built a bridge and spur road to short-cut the trip to the Paraná River, are starting another school, a separate church, and several more frame houses for the Colaborer families soon to follow. They hold Sunday and evening services for hundreds of Brazilians, show film strips, pass out Portuguese-language Bibles and prayer books. George Sutton, 35, has trimmed off 35 lbs., put calluses on his hands lugging buckets of water. His wife, 34, misses lipstick ("but, after all, we don't want to look like painted women") and yearns for un-Brazilian...
...Brazilian spiritism has its European origins as well. Inspired by the lore of mediums and table-rapping in the books of Frenchman Allan Kardec, the Brazilian Spiritual Federation was founded 74 years ago, now claims 3,600 centers throughout the country. In the 1950 census some 900,000 Brazilians declared themselves spiritists, but best estimates are that about 10 million of Brazil's 61 million population now indulge in the cults. One, the Confederação Espirita da Umbanda, claims, in Rio alone, more than 1,000 centers, known as terreiros (earth places...
Tusked Apparitions. Slowly the frontier of Brazilian settlement was pushing west from the coast into the jungle that sheltered the shadowy Xetás. In 1952 a gang of land clearers captured a naked young Xetá girl. While they were still debating what to do with their prize, they found themselves surrounded by weird-looking Indian men with tusks sticking out of their lower lips. The Indians spoke no words. They drew back the arrows on their bows; the girl ran to join them; and they all melted silently into the jungle...
...dying people. Not more than 250 of them now survive. They live in bands of 15 to 25, moving camp every few days. They have no agriculture, know no metal, make no pottery. They sleep on the ground instead of in hammocks as most Brazilian primitives do. Their weapons are bows and arrows and stone axes. Their knives are sharp flakes of stone. They eat everything that they can find or kill in the jungle-fruit, insects, snakes, roots too fibrous for white men's stomachs. In times of plenty, they make fermented drinks and go on binges...
Scientist Loureiro believes the Xetás are the most primitive humans surviving in the modern world, is trying to persuade the Brazilian government to seal them off in a jungle preserve before they are pushed to the wall by the advancing frontier. "It would be a crime against science," he says, "to destroy Xetá culture now. The Xetás must be saved intact in their natural jungle surroundings-at least until we can complete our study of them...