Doí Wahirê

The Xerente, who call themselves Akwê, live on the right bank of the Tocantins River in central Brazil. Their dualist cosmology rests on a creation myth centred on a pair of mythic heroes dwelling in the sun and the moon.

The same pair divides the people. Society is split into two exogamous moieties, the sun moiety Doí and the moon moiety Wahirê, each made up of three or four clans, and a man must marry into the other half. The Xerente laid out their villages in a semicircle. Jesuit missionaries and the bandeirante expeditions of the interior reached them in the 1600s.