REPRODUCTIVE PARALLELS
For Wari' females and males, respectively, childbirth and enemy-killing/seclusion constituted the two biggest changes in social status, the experiences that made narima (full adult women) and napiri (full adult men). Wari' conceive of these in parallel terms. The ritual management of the warrior's transformation encapsulated images, ideas, metaphors, and practices related to several dimensions of
Female Puberty/Maturation
According to the oldest men at Santo André, enemy blood/spirit enters the Wari' warrior's body through his genitals. In his genitals, layers of the enemy's blood alternate with layers of the killer's semen. Blood-plus-semen is, of course, the generative combination that Wari' believe produces female pubertal maturation, menstruation, and pregnancy. Enemy blood stimulates the growth of boys in a manner identical to how semen stimulates the growth of girls. Thus, for both sexes, maturation traditionally was conceived as a blood transformation stimulated by the genital incorporation of another individual's body fluid.
Menstruation
According to Santo André elders, the warriors' seclusion ideally was supposed to last through a full lunar month, so that it would end at the second new moon after the killing. Wari' traditionally believe that women menstruate at the new moon. Menstruating women and warriors in seclusion marked their special blood states with two of the same visual markers: annatto (red body paint) and hujam (the small mats that women used to cover their menstrual bloodstains). Warriors in seclusion smeared their bodies heavily with annatto, just as a woman smeared herself, her husband, and her young children with annatto when her period began. When a warrior in seclusion left the men's house (to urinate or defecate) or stood playing a flute, he tucked a hujam under his arm. His mat was adorned with a long scarlet macaw feather, which swayed gracefully above his head.
Pregnancy and Childbirth
Male elders commonly describe the appearance of warriors' fattening bellies as "like pregnancy" (ak ka nam wa). Munu ("to swell with fluid") is a verb that describes the fattening of both a warrior's belly and, as noted, a pregnant woman's abdomen. Nourishing the blood is a focal concern in both processes, and maize chicha is considered the most important blood-building food during both pregnancy and the warriors' seclusion.
Wari' also compare to childbirth the loss of the warrior's fat belly after he has sex. As one male elder described it: "The enemy blood enters the war-rior's body. The warrior gets fat. His belly swells. He gets really fat, like pregnancy. When the man has sex with a woman, the enemy blood goes out in the man's semen. It is like when a baby is born. The man gets thin. The enemy blood is gone, his fat is gone. The man gets thin, like a woman gets thin when a child is born."
Wari' thus projected a scenario of physiological changes in males similar to, but distinct from, female reproductive processes. (They say that it is like pregnancy, not that it is pregnancy.) This male transformation was procreative in its own way, for it produced the enemy spirit "children" who inhabit their Wari' "fathers." To call this parthogenesis (as Vilaça 1996 does) is to miss the point—which Wari' men make explicit—that this was not something that men accomplished on their own but a transformation that depended on a series of cross-sex transactions.