Substantiating the ancestors of an Amazonian Indigenous people in Central Brazil through their personal names

It is argued that in the case of the Mẽbêngôkre (Kayapó) of Central Brazil, with implications for other Northern Jê speaking peoples, those authors who equated kinship with the sharing of bodily substance diverted attention away from what corresponds more appropriately to soul-stuff, contained in names and prerogatives transmitted from the ancestors. The names of the mythological ancestors are perpetuated among the living in exogamous matrilineal Houses. The repetition of names in each generation produces genealogical amnesia, the unintended consequence of which is to maintain mythical time equidistant from the living. This interpretation approximates the Mẽbêngôkre to the matrilineal Bororo and the patrilineal Tukano-speaking peoples of Northwest Amazonia, suggesting that the supposed irrelevance of any notion of descent has proved to be premature. Amazonian First Peoples were long taken to be disinterested in their forebears, but recent research has nuanced this claim, putting the ancestors back into the picture.