[2][3] They are a Tucanoan group located in the eastern part of the Amazon Basin in Vaupés Department in Colombia (Apaporis River) and Amazonas State in Brazil.
The number of faunal species is not rich, and individual animals not common, though hunting game is prized as the fundamentally male mode of procuring food.
[16] Apart from the Maku and the Arawakan, Vaupés Indians belong to Eastern Tukanoan language family, most prominent of them being, other than the Barasana, the Desana, the Bará, the Tukano proper, the Macuna, the Tatuyo, and the Cubeo.
The various Tukanoan myths of origin refer to a westward upstream migration from Brazil, and Reichel-Dolmatoff believes that there is a ‘kernel of historical truth’ behind these uniform traditions.
[20] Curt Nimuendajú thought that the east Tukanoan tribes invaded from the west, and that the autochthonous population consisted of the Makú, assuming that these smaller hunter-gatherers were older than the agriculturalist newcomers.
But historical records show that the Tukano peoples shifted to the remote headwaters of the Río Negro as a refuge, in flight from the slave trade and diseases, and forced relocations introduced by the Portuguese in the late 18th.century.
[35] Population decline, as a result, has been a marked feature of the past one hundred and fifty years,[36][37] The earliest professional ethnological fieldwork was done by Irving Goldman in 1939-40 among the Cubeo Indians.
[38] Postwar missionary work, colonizing movements, and the activities of the linguists attached to Christian proselytisation still engage, according to Stephen Hugh-Jones, in the ‘criminal folly’ of ethnocide by their programmatic hostility to traditional religion[39] The Barasana are slash-and-burn swidden horticulturalists[10] who supplement their food with hunting and fish-gathering, with different roles allocated to men (poisoners) and women (gatherers of the poisoned catch).
[41] but they also harvest maize, bananas, cooking plantains, yams, sweet potatoes, pineapples, sugarcane and considerable quantities of fruits picked in the forests or from cultivated trees like the Pithecellobium dulce, the "Madras thorn" or mene.
[42] Fishing supplies most of the protein in their diet, supplemented by game, rodents and birds mostly, but woolly monkeys and peccaries[43][44] are also culled, traditionally with blowguns, but most recently also with shotguns.
[53] The Vaupés social system may be divided in four units in ascending hierarchy, namely (a) the local descent group, (2) the sib, (3) the language-aggregate, and finally (4) the phratry.
Men and women enter dwellings by different doors, pass most of their lives in separation, a reality reinforced by their ceremonial Yurupari rites.
[60] The Barasana were the subject of Disappearing World (TV series), episode 4, The War of the Gods, aired on 22 June 1971 for British Granada Television.