Tiwi And Yanomami Similarities

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The Tiwi and Yanomami are two different cultures that are settled in different places. The Tiwi are indigenous groups of Australia that lived on the Melville and Bathurst islands. The Yanomami are indigenous groups of Brazil and Venezuela that lived in the Amazon rainforest. Analyzing the relationship between the Tiwi and the Yanomami culture, we can have a brief understanding about the comparisons and contrasts of their religion and practices.
The similarities/alike of the Tiwi’s and Yanomami’s religion beliefs are their shared myths. The Tiwi’s shared myth is about continuity of death. This is after the death of an abandoned Purukupali’s son. This culture hero carries his son’s body while walking into the sea proclaiming that in the future
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The Tiwi group believed that there are three worlds: the world of the unborn (spirit children), the world of the living, and the world of the dead (static world). On the other hand, the Yanomami believed that the universe was constructed into four layers: The uppermost layer (contains nothing, but it had ancient beings who brought down to the lower layers), the second layer is the sky (which is the souls of the dead and looks similar to earth), the third layer is the earth, and the fourth layer is the underworld. Furthermore, both the Tiwi and the Yanomami have different ceremonies. The Tiwi’s ceremony is called the Kulama. The Kulama is a yam ceremony that is held each year at the end of the wet season. The ceremony is part of a new start of adulthood that spans about several days. The ritual begins with digging up a kulama yam, which symbolizes reproduction and health. The Yanomami’s ceremony is called a mortuary. The mortuary ceremony is when dead bodies are taken into the jungle and are wrapped with bark and are set in the trees until they are composed. After the body is composed, the bones are burned and a ash-drinking ceremony takes …show more content…
The Tiwi assume that the spirits are the reason why they sometimes have bad luck, sickness, accidents, or even death. The spirit of someone will want a loved one to send illness and death to a former companion. But even so, when sickness occurs it is a person’s responsibility to not get other people sick. To get treatment the Tiwi had to either use first aid or use preventive medicine. In first aid: they used bloodletting and application of to cure any illness, burning sticks cauterizing the wounds, and practice of bleeding the area around a snake bite. And in Medicine they used portion of boiled glass or the drinking of the patient 's own urine. The Yanomami believed that hekura spirits caused illness. The hekura spirit harmed people by feasting on the soul of his/her body. This is usually caused by people who are from an enemy village. To cure someone who has an hekura spirit in his/her body is to have a shaman to use his own hekura to get rid of it. When the shaman get rid of the hekura spirit the person will be cured. Also, the Tiwi and the Yanomami both had spirits of the dead. The Tiwi spirits of the dead address how they can’t be seen, even though many of the Tiwi people have seen them. Sometimes the healthy people and the

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