The Munduruku (Mundurucu or Wuy Jugu) are an indigenous people of Brazil living in the Amazon River basin. Some Mundurucu communities are part of the Coatá-Laranjal Indigenous Land. They had an estimated population in 2010 of 11,640.

Traditionally the Munduruku's territory, called Mundurukânia in the 19th century, was the Tapajós River valley. In 1788, they completely defeated their ancient enemies the Muras. After 1803 they lived at peace with the Brazilians.^{[citation needed]}

Today the tribe faces threats to their homelands from hydroelectric projects, illegal gold-panning, and a new waterway construction on the Tapajós River.

Also known as the Mundurucu, Maytapu, and Cara Preta, the Mundurucu's name for themselves is Wuy Jugu. Oral history says the name "Muduruku" comes from their enemies the Parintintin people and means "red ants," based on the historical Munduruku tactic of attacking en masse.

The Mundurucu have a distinctive residence pattern. Rather than a pattern based on conjugal or affinal bonds, in the Munduruku villages, all males over the age of thirteen live in one household, and all of the females live with all of the males under thirteen in another.^{[citation needed]}

Pierre Pica (born January 5, 1951), is a research associate (Chargé de Recherche) at the National Center for Scientific Research. He is a specialist in theoretical linguistics and more specifically of comparative syntax.

Dr. Pica has concentrated his research on the notion of parameters in linguistic. He has also shown that the respective properties of reflexive pronouns could be derived from their morphological properties. He is currently studying the distinction between the internal and external aspects of the Faculty of language and is also working on a fine grained distinction between competence and performance.

Over the last ten years, Pica has risen to prominence as a result of his work on Mundurucu (an indigenous language spoken in Para (Brazil). He is collaborating with Stanislas Dehaene and Elizabeth Spelke in a study of numerical expressions and enumeration in Mundurucu. This study stresses the importance of these data for the study of the interaction of the Language Faculty and restricted set of pre-verbal 'core knowledge'. This research stands in opposition to the hypothesis related to relativism as derived from Sapir and Whorf in that it tends to demonstrate that knowledge, even culture, can in part be reduced to a small set of universal principles and intuitions. The research has given rise to a series of publications in Science magazine. .