Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives 9781845459079

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
List of Contributors
Editor’s Preface
CHAPTER 1 Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives – an Introduction
PART I CIRCULATIONS: MOBILITY, SUBSISTENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
CHAPTER 2 Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani Ways of Knowing and Naming Plants
CHAPTER 3 The Restless Life of the Nahua: Shaping People and Places in the Peruvian Amazon
CHAPTER 4 Urban, Rural and In-between: Multi-sited Households Mobility and Resource Management in the Amazon Flood Plain
CHAPTER 5 Unpicking ‘Community’ in Community Conservation: Implications of Changing Settlement Patterns and Individual Mobility for the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve, Peru
PART II TRANSFORMATIONS: KNOWLEDGE, IDENTITY, PLACE-MAKING AND THE DOMESTICATION OF NATURE
CHAPTER 6 Domestication of Peach Palm (Bactris gasipaes): the Roles of Human Mobility and Migration
CHAPTER 7 Intermediation, Ethnogenesis and Landscape Transformation at the Intersection of the Andes and the Amazon: the Historical Ecology of the Lecos of Apolo, Bolivia
CHAPTER 8 The Political Ecology of Ethnic Frontiers and Relations among the Piaroa of the Middle Orinoco
CHAPTER 9 ‘Ordenar El Pensamiento’: Place-Making and the Moral Management of Resources in a Multi- Ethnic Territory, Amazonas, Colombia
CHAPTER 10 Plants ‘of the Ancestors’, Plants ‘of the Outsiders’: Ese Eja History, Migration and Medicinal Plants
CHAPTER 11 Weaving Power: Displacement and the Dynamics of Basketry Knowledge amongst the Kaiabi in the Brazilian Amazon
CHAPTER 12 Traditions in Transition: African Diaspora Ethnobotany in Lowland South America
Index

Citation preview

Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia

Studies in Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology General Editor: Roy Ellen, FBA Professor of Anthropology, University of Kent at Canterbury Interest in environmental anthropology has grown steadily in recent years, reflecting national and international concern about the environment and developing research priorities. This major new international series, which continues a series first published by Harwood and Routledge, is a vehicle for publishing up-to-date monographs and edited works on particular issues, themes, places or peoples which focus on the interrelationship between society, culture and environment. Relevant areas include human ecology, the perception and representation of the environment, ethnoecological knowledge, the human dimension of biodiversity conservation and the ethnography of environmental problems. While the underlying ethos of the series will be anthropological, the approach is interdisciplinary. Volume 1 The Logic of Environmentalism: Anthropology, Ecology and Postcoloniality Vassos Argyrou Volume 2 Conversations on the Beach: Local Knowledge and Environmental Change in South India Götz Hoeppe Volume 3 Green Encounters: Shaping to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development Luis A. Vivanco Volume 4 Local Science vs. Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development Edited by Paul Sillitoe Volume 5 Sustainability and Communities of Place Carl A. Maida Volume 6 Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies: Local Ecological Knowledge in Island Southeast Asia Edited by Roy Ellen Volume 7 Traveling Cultures and Plants: The Ethnobiology and Ethnophamacy of Migrations Edited by Andrea Pieroni and Ina Vandebroek

Volume 8 Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey: The Management of Natural Resources, Knowledge and Identity on the Eastern Black Sea Coast Ståle Knudsen Volume 9 Landscape Ethnocology: Concepts of Biotic and Physical Space Leslie Main Johnson and Eugene S. Hunn Volume 10 Landscape, Process and Power: A New Environmental Knowledge Synthesis Serena Heckler Volume 11 Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives Edited by Miguel N. Alexiades Volume 12 Unveiling the Whale: Discourses on Whales and Whaling Arne Kalland Volume 13 Virtualism, Governance and Practice: Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation Edited by James G. Carrier and Paige West

Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives

Edited by Miguel N. Alexiades

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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4/2/09

10:04 AM

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Published in 2009 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2009 Miguel N. Alexiades All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mobility and migration in indigenous Amazonia : contemporary ethnoecological perspectives / edited by Miguel N. Alexiades. p. cm. -- (Studies in environmental anthropology and ethnobiology ; v. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-563-7 (alk. paper) 1. Indians of South America--Amazon River Region--Migrations. 2. Migration, Internal--Amazon River Region. 3. Indians of South America--Amazon River Region--Ethnobotany. 4. Human geography--Amazon River Region. 5. Human ecology--Amazon River Region. 6. Biodiversity--Amazon River Region. I. Alexiades, Miguel N., 1962F2519.3.M48M63 2009 307.2089'980811--dc22 2008052518

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-84545-563-7 (hardback)

Dedicated to the memory of Darrell A. Posey

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

ix

List of Contributors

xi

Editor’s Preface 1.

Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives – an Introduction Miguel N. Alexiades

xiii 1

Part I. Circulations: Mobility, Subsistence and the Environment 2.

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani Ways of Knowing and Naming Plants Laura Rival

47

3.

The Restless Life of the Nahua: Shaping People and Places in the Peruvian Amazon Conrad Feather

69

4.

Urban, Rural and In-between: Multi-Sited Households Mobility and Resource Management in the Amazon Flood Plain Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez and Christine Padoch

86

5.

Unpicking ‘Community’ in Community Conservation: Implications of Changing Settlement Patterns and Individual Mobility for the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve, Peru Helen Newing

97

Part II. Transformations: Knowledge, Identity, Place-Making and the Domestication of Nature 6.

Domestication of Peach Palm (Bactris gasipaes): the Roles of Human Mobility and Migration Charles R. Clement, Laura Rival and David M. Cole

117

viii | Contents

7. Intermediation, Ethnogenesis and Landscape Transformation at the Intersection of the Andes and the Amazon: the Historical Ecology of the Lecos of Apolo, Bolivia Meredith Dudley

141

8. The Political Ecology of Ethnic Frontiers and Relations among the Piaroa of the Middle Orinoco Stanford Zent

167

9. ‘Ordenar El Pensamiento’: Place-Making and the Moral Management of Resources in a Multi-Ethnic Territory, Amazonas, Colombia Giovanna Micarelli

195

10. Plants ‘of the Ancestors’, Plants ‘of the Outsiders’: Ese Eja History, Migration and Medicinal Plants Miguel N. Alexiades and Daniela M. Peluso

220

11. Weaving Power: Displacement and the Dynamics of Basketry Knowledge amongst the Kaiabi in the Brazilian Amazon Simone Ferreira de Athayde, Aturi Kaiabi, Katia Yukari Ono and Miguel N. Alexiades

249

12. Traditions in Transition: African Diaspora Ethnobotany in Lowland South America Robert Voeks

275

Index

295

List of Figures and Tables

Figures 2.1. Huaorani territory.

54

3.1. Location of Nahua territory in the Madre de Dios/Purús basins, and twentieth-century migrations.

72

5.1. Location of the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve, Amazon River, Peru.

98

6.1. Approximate distribution of B. gasipaes var. gasipaes (light shading) in the lowland neotropics, with the approximate distribution of valid (defined by molecular characterisation and morphometric data) and still to be validated landraces.

122

7.1. Location of the Lecos of Apolo, Bolivia.

143

8.1. Piaroa territorial occupation (traditional and contemporary areas).

170

8.2. Territorial distributions of Piaroa aboriginal clans.

174

8.3. Traditional territories of Piaroa and assimilants.

180

9.1. The Department of Amazonas, Colombia.

200

9.2. Routes of forced displacement used by Casa Arana bosses to transfer indigenous slaves from Colombia to Peru.

201

9.3. The Resguardo Tikuna–Uitoto Km 6 y 11.

203

10.1. Ese Eja traditional territory and present-day communities in Peru and Bolivia. 11.1. Location of present-day Kaiabi indigenous lands (Terras Indígenas), Mato Grosso and Pará states, Brazil.

223 252

x | List of Illustrations and Tables

11.2. Kaiabi demographic trends in Xingu Park, Rio dos Peixes and Teles Pires (1955–2000).

255

11.3. Some Kaiabi basketry designs.

263

Tables 2.1. Comparison of Ka’apor and Guajá names for nine species of Inga.

51

2.2. Comparison of Ka’apor and Guajá names for three species of Theobroma.

51

2.3. Huaorani and Quichua names for twenty-one species of Inga.

60

2.4. Huaorani and Quichua names for seven species of Theobroma.

61

2.5. Huaorani and Quichua names for plants growing in alluvial and high forests.

61

4.1. Multi- and single-sited households in five villages in Amapá, Brazil.

89

4.2. Changes in average size (in hectares) of land-use types in a sample of twelve landholdings in Ipixuna, Amapá, Brazil.

92

8.1. Original clan (hænokwætɨ) names, mountain abodes and territories.

174

9.1. Estimated population size and ethnic composition of 198 indigenous communities within the Resguardo Tikuna–Uitoto Km 6 y 11, Amazonas, Colombia. 11.1. Plants currently used as substitutes for arumã by the Kaiabi people, Xingu Indigenous Park, Brazil.

260

List of Contributors

Miguel N. Alexiades, Honorary Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, Marlowe Building, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NR, United Kingdom. [email protected] Simone Ferreira de Athayde, PhD candidate, University of Florida, School of Natural Resources and the Environment, Tropical Conservation and Development Program/Center for Latin American Studies, 358 Grinter Hall, PO Box 115531, Gainesville, FL 32611-5531, USA. Associate Researcher, Instituto Socioambiental, ISA, Brazil. [email protected] Charles R. Clement, Senior Researcher, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Av. André Araújo, 2936 – Aleixo, 69060-001 Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil. [email protected] David M. Cole, PhD candidate, Botany Department, University of Hawai’i, 3190 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. [email protected] Meredith Dudley, PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, 1326 Audubon Street, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA. [email protected] Conrad Feather, PhD candidate, Centre for Amerindian Studies, Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews, 71 North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, Scotland, United Kingdom. [email protected] Aturi Kaiabi, Indigenous teacher and chief of Tuiararé village at Xingu Indigenous Park Tuiararé Village/Associação Terra Indígena Xingu – ATIX, Av. Mato Grosso, 607. 78640-000, Canarana, Mato Grosso, Brazil.

xii | List of Contributors

Giovanna Micarelli, Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 607 South Matthews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Consultant, Fundación Eutopia, Bogotá, Colombia. [email protected] Helen Newing, Lecturer, Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, Department of Anthropology, Marlowe Building, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NR, United Kingdom. [email protected] Katia Yukari Ono, Practitioner and ecologist, Xingu Program, Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), Av. Higienópolis no 901, sl 30, São Paulo, SP 01238001, Brazil. [email protected] Christine Padoch, Matthew Calbraith Perry Curator of Economic Botany, Institute of Economic Botany, New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY 10458-5126, USA. [email protected] Daniela M. Peluso, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Marlowe Building, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NR, United Kingdom. [email protected] Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez, Associate Research Scientist and Lecturer, Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, Columbia University, Schermerhorn Extension, 10th Floor, Columbia University, 1200 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA. [email protected] Laura Rival, University Lecturer, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Department of International Development, University of Oxford, 3 Mansfield Rd, Oxford OX1 4BT, United Kingdom. [email protected] Robert Voeks, Professor of Geography, Department of Geography, California State University, Fullerton, CA 92834, USA. [email protected] Stanford Zent, Investigador Asociado Titular, Centro de Antropología, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas (IVIC), Apartado 21827, Caracas 1020-A, Venezuela. [email protected]

Editor’s Preface MIGUEL N. ALEXIADES

This book focuses on the relationship between mobility and migration and human–environment relations in indigenous and folk Amazonia. Most of the chapters are revised versions of papers presented at the International Society of Ethnobiology’s Ninth International Congress, held at the University of Canterbury, Kent, UK, in June 2004. The motivation for putting together the panel – named ‘The Ethnobiology of Mobility, Displacement and Migration in Indigenous Lowland South America’ – and subsequently for compiling this volume grew out of several interests and concerns. The first of these, echoing the broader theme of the Congress – Ethnobiology, Social Change and Displacement – recognises mobility and migration as highly relevant, both theoretically and in more applied contexts, for all of us interested in a better understanding of how human societies perceive, experience and structure their symbolic and material interactions with the environment in an increasingly articulated, changing and contingent world. A second, more specific, motivation for collating these papers emerged from a personal sense that a disjuncture of sorts exists within the field of ethnobiology and ethnoecology in Amazonia – and perhaps beyond. While human ecologists, ethnobotanists and Amazonianists in related fields have become increasingly sensitive to, and interested in, the historical contingency of nature and of human–environment interactions, and while there has been a simultaneous, generalised and growing interest in the processual aspects of ethnoecology,1 there remains a strong residual 1. This interest in processual issues is exemplified by recent interest in questions relating to the dynamism, variability and transformation of ethnoecological systems. See, for example, Nazarea (1999), Berkes et al. (2000), Ellen et al. (2000), Zent (2001), Heckler (2002), Hunn (2002), Ross (2002), Zarger (2002), BarreraBassols and Toledo (2005), Reyes-García et al. (2005) and Balée and Erickson (2006).

xiv | Editor’s Preface

tendency, often implicit, to view these largely as the product of long-term historical emplacement and spatial stasis. Even when spatial stasis is not assumed, it is still not given the same level of attention as other historical processes. While the consequences of demographic collapse and integration into the state and market economy have drawn considerable attention, the other major impact of European colonisation – the spatial reorganisation of indigenous societies – has not been as extensively or systematically examined (cf. Taylor and Bell 2004: 1). Moreover, while there has been a considerable amount of discussion on the relationship between indigenous migration and changes in mobility and demography and health and subsistence (McNeill 1980; Kroeger and Barbira Freedman 1988; Roberts et al. 1992; Zent 1993; Hill and Hurtado 1995; Coimbra et al. 2002), relatively little attention has been directed at exploring the links with other aspects of human–environment relations, including ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge, the evolution, distribution and abundance of plant resources, or the symbolic representation of nature and landscapes (but see, for example, Cárdenas and Politis 2000; Little 2001; Posey 2002a; Rival 2002; Pieroni and Vandebroek 2007). The time seems ripe, therefore, to pay closer attention to the links and relationships between movement, mobility, migration and displacement and indigenous and folk ethnoecology. Contributing to the growing literature on the historical and political ecology of Amazonia (Schmink and Wood 1992; Balée 1994; Fisher 2000; Little 2001; Posey 2002b; Heckenberger 2005) and drawing on a wide range of perspectives, theoretical approaches and disciplines – including social anthropology, historical ecology, geography, ethnobotany, botany and evolutionary biology – this collection of case studies from different parts of the Amazon and Orinoco river basins in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela seeks to fill some of the existing gaps in our current understanding of the relationship between social change and ethnoecology in lowland South America. Rather than attempt to offer a systematic or comprehensive overview of what is an extremely broad and complex topic, this book aims to illustrate links, identify interesting patterns and trends, demonstrate a range of approaches and flag areas for future study. A substantial introduction is also included at the outset in the hope that it will provide a suitable background and help orient readers not familiar with some of the concepts, ideas or vast literature relevant to indigenous mobility and migration, and their relation to Amazonian history and ethnoecology. As the title suggests, the outlook of this volume is premised on the logic and coherence of certain geographical, social and epistemological boundaries and categories. Amazonia is used here in its broadest sense, and taken to include the Orinoco basin, as well as adjacent coastal areas (including the Brazilian Mata Atlântica), and the Andean piedmont. While

Editor’s Preface | xv

the clear-cut boundary between the Amazonian lowlands and the adjacent highlands is, as Dudley (this volume) underscores, a recent historical construct, and while the two regions have been thoroughly interconnected throughout much of their human history, the Andean highlands and Amazonia have experienced quite different historical trajectories and, though interconnected, are socially and ecologically quite distinct. The scope of this book is not restricted to people who self-identify as indigenous, but also covers so-called ‘folk’ societies; social collectivities with relatively long histories of occupation in Amazonia. This includes the detribalised descendants of indigenous peoples, many of whom extensively intermarried with Europeans and Africans, forging an Amazonian peasantry widely referred to as ribereños or caboclos. It also includes the descendants of runaway slaves – known as quilombos or cimarrones in Brazil and parts of Latin America, respectively – and more generally Afro-indigenous groups, who form distinct ‘traditional’ communities throughout much of the lowland tropics of South America. Deserving of treatment, but not included in this volume due to necessary limitations in size and scope, are the recent migrant and settler communities, who comprise an important proportion of rural and urban Amazonia, and whose background and reality pose a different, though clearly not mutually exclusive or unrelated, set of questions and problems for ethnoecologists.2 I would like to thank the participants of the panel, including Edmond Dounias, who acted as discussant, as well as those who were not able to attend in person but who subsequently prepared a chapter for the volume. Their contributions and lively discussions, during and after the conference, have been most instructive. I am especially grateful to Roy Ellen for his help and support in putting together the panel and for his subsequent editorial help, advice and patience. Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Simone Athayde, Rodrigo Bernal, Charles Clement, Oliver Coomes, Meredith Dudley, Phillipe Erikson, Alf Hornborg, Egleé López, Manuel Macía, Helen Newing, Dario Novellino, Manuel Pardo, Elizabeth Reichel, Laura Rival, Daniel Rodriguez and Steven Rubinstein all provided very useful comments on different chapters, including the introduction. I am particularly grateful to Daniela Peluso for her help with many aspects of the book and to Jana Traboulsi for her assistance with several maps. The background research, preparation and editing of this book were made possible thanks to the support of the Nuffield Foundation (Advanced Career Fellowship 2002–2005), the Darrell Posey Foundation (Field 2. For case studies discussing environmental and political issues relating to internal migration and colonisation in Amazonia, see, for example, Schmink and Wood (1984), Schumann and Partridge (1989), Goodman and Hall (1990) and Painter and Durham (1995).

xvi | Editor’s Preface

Fellowship 2005–2007), the British Academy (Small Grant 35207) and the University of Kent (2003 Faculty Grant). Miguel Pinedo-Vásquez has kindly assisted me over the past years with access to several key sources and journals during this time. Last but not least, I am indebted to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent for offering their facilities, and to Michael Fisher for his advice on a wide range of issues relating to digital technology.

References Balée, W. 1994. Footprints of the Forest: Ka’apor Ethnobotany – The Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People. New York: Columbia University Press. Balée, W. and C.L. Erickson (eds) 2006. Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology. Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands. New York: Columbia University Press. Barrera-Bassols, N. and V.M. Toledo 2005. ‘Ethnoecology of the Yucatec Maya: Symbolism, Knowledge and Management of Natural Resources’, Journal of Latin American Geography 4 (1): 9–41. Berkes, F., J. Colding and C. Folke 2000. ‘Rediscovery of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as Adaptive Management’, Ecological Applications 10: 1251–62. Cárdenas, D. and G. Politis 2000. Territorio, Movilidad, Etnobotánica y Manejo del Bosque de los Nukak Orientales, Amazonía Colombiana. Santafé de Bogota: Universidad de los Andes. Coimbra, C.E.A.J., N.M. Flowers, F.M. Salzano and R.V. Santos 2002. The Xavánte in Transition: Health, Ecology, and Bioanthropology in Central Brazil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ellen, R.F., P. Parkes and A. Bicker (eds) 2000. Indigenous Knowledge and its Transformations: Critical Anthropological Perspectives. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Fisher, W.H. 2000. Rainforest Exchanges: Industry and Community on an Amazonian Frontier. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Goodman, D. and A. Hall (eds) 1990. The Future of Amazonia: Destruction or Sustainable Development? London: Macmillan. Heckenberger, M.J. 2005. The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place, and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, A.D. 1000–2000. London: Routledge. Heckler, S. 2002 ‘Traditional Ethnobotanical Knowledge Loss and Gender among the Piraoa’, in J.R. Stepp, F.S. Wyndham and R.K. Zarger (eds), Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Ethnobiology. Athens, GA: International Society of Ethnobiology/University of Georgia Press, pp. 532–48.

Editor’s Preface | xvii Hill, K. and A.M. Hurtado 1995. Ache Life History. The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. New York: Aldine. Hunn, E.S. 2002. ‘Evidence for the Precocious Acquisition of Plant Knowledge by Zapotec Children’, in J.R. Stepp, F.S. Wyndham and R.K. Zarger (eds), Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Ethnobiology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, pp. 604–13. Kroeger, A. and F. Barbira Freedman 1988. ‘Cultural Change and Health: The Case of South American Rainforest Indians’, in J.H. Bodley (ed.), Tribal Peoples and Development Issues. A Global Overview. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, pp. 221–36. Little, P. 2001. Amazonia: Territorial Struggles on Perennial Frontiers. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. McNeill, W.H. 1980. ‘Migration Patterns and Infection in Traditional Societies’, in N.F. Stanley and R.A. Joske (eds), Changing Disease Patterns and Human Behaviour. London and New York: Academic Press, pp. 27–36. Nazarea, V.D. 1999. ‘Introduction. A View from a Point: Ethnoecology as Situated Knowledge’, in V.D. Nazarea (ed.), Ethnoecology. Situated Knowledge/Located Lives. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 3–20. Painter, M. and W.H. Durham (eds) 1995. The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Pieroni, A. and I. Vandebroek (eds) 2007. Traveling Cultures and Plants: The Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacy of Human Migrations. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Posey, D.A. 2002a. ‘Environmental and Social Implications of Pre- and Postcontact Situations on Brazilian Indians’, in D.A. Posey, Kayapó Ethnoecology and Culture. Edited by K. Plenderleith. London and New York: Routledge Harwood Anthropology, pp. 25–33. ——— 2002b. Kayapó Ethnoecology and Culture. Edited by K. Plenderleith. London and New York: Routledge Harwood Anthropology. Reyes-García, V., V. Vadez, E. Byron, L. Apaza, W.R. Leonard, E. Perez and D. Wilkie 2005. ‘Market Economy and the Loss of Folk Knowledge of Plant Uses: Estimates from the Tsimane’ of the Bolivian Amazon’, Current Anthropology 46 (4): 651–56. Rival, L.M. 2002. Trekking Through History. The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador. New York: Columbia University Press. Roberts, D.F., N. Fujiki and K. Torizuka (eds) 1992. Isolation, Migration and Health: 33rd Symposium Volume of the Society for the Study of Human Biology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ross, N. 2002. ‘Lacandon Maya Intergenerational Change and the Erosion of Folk Biological Knowledge’, in J.R. Stepp, F.S. Wyndham and R.K. Zarger (eds), Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Ethnobiology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, pp. 585–92.

xviii | Editor’s Preface Schmink, M. and C.H. Wood 1992 (eds) 1984. Frontier Expansion in Amazonia. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. ——— 1992. Contested Frontiers in Amazonia. New York: Columbia University Press. Schumann, D.A. and W.L. Partridge 1989. The Human Ecology of Tropical Land Settlement in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Taylor, J. and M. Bell 2004. ‘Introduction. New World Demography’, in J. Taylor and M. Bell (eds), Population Mobility and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia and North America. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–10. Zarger, R.K. 2002. ‘Acquisition and Transmission of Subsistence Knowledge by Q’eqchi’ Maya in Belize’, in J.R. Stepp, F.S. Wyndham and R.K. Zarger (eds), Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Ethnobiology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, pp. 593–603. Zent, S. 1993. ‘Donde no hay médico: Las consecuencias culturales y demográficas de la distribución desigual de los servicios médicos modernos entre los Piaroa’, Antropológica 79: 41–84. ——— 2001. ‘Acculturation and Ethnobotanical Knowledge Loss among the Piaroa of Venezuela: Demonstration of a Quantitative Method for the Empirical Study of Traditional Ecological Knowledge Change’, in L. Maffi (ed.), On Biocultural Diversity. Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 190–211.

CHAPTER 1

Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives – an Introduction MIGUEL N. ALEXIADES

Introduction A diverse group of scholars have, in recent decades, been challenging many of the stereotypes that have for a long time permeated scientific and public representations of Amazonia and its people. These new insights support the notion of Amazonian social and ecological systems as dialectically interrelated, and as more complex, diverse, historically contingent and dynamic across multiple spatial and temporal horizons, than was previously thought.1 This heightened historical sensitivity, shared by human ecologists, ethnoecologists, ethnobotanists and others interested in human– environment relations, does not extend equally to all domains of socioenvironmental experience, however. In particular, there seems to be a widespread residual tendency to view indigenous societies, and their associated ethnecologies, as historically emplaced: that is, as the product of a long history of engagement with particular locales. In other words, while many ethnoecologists and ethnobiologists are now comfortable with notions of social dynamism, and while some have incorporated these into 1. See, for example, Posey and Balée 1989; Balée 1994; Roosevelt 1994a; Lentz 2000; Cleary 2001; Denevan 2001; Oliver 2001; Heckenberger 2005 and Balée and Erickson 2006.

2 | Miguel N. Alexiades

their research agenda, there still exists an assumption, often implicit, of spatial stasis. Despite important continuities in the spatial, symbolic and material histories of many Amazonian societies (Heckenberger 2005), the historical record points to a long history of movements, exchanges, displacements and changes in the spatial – and not just social – organisation of Amazonian societies. As Paul Little (2001: 4) notes, ‘the history of Amazonia is filled with examples of people in movement: nomadism, group migrations, long distance trade, explorations, forced dislocation, colonisation, labour migration’. Indeed, different kinds of spatio-social processes and movements are associated with each of the major phases in the historical development of Amazonia: the early settlement of Amazonia by Pleistocene hunters, the rise of complex agricultural societies and the development of pre-Columbian regional systems of exchange, their subsequent demise, dispersion and reorganisation following European conquest, and, finally, the late twentieth-century demographic, political and social resurgence of indigenous societies and their increased articulation with global networks of exchange. Post-conquest demographic and political disruptions had a particularly dramatic effect on patterns of movement and settlement. By the nineteenth century, for example, the major tributaries of the Amazon – core areas of Amerindian social and political growth and environmental transformation in pre-conquest times – were largely emptied of their indigenous inhabitants. In many instances their surviving descendants live in fragmented territories along the margins of the basin (Roosevelt 1994a; Taylor 1999). As a result of post-conquest history, moreover, relatively few indigenous societies today occupy the same areas they did a century or, in some instances, even a few decades ago (de Oliveira 1994).2 2. Examples of significant displacements and migrations in recent history are found among the Piraoa (Zent, this volume), Wayãpi (Gallois 1981, cited in Meggers 1995: 27; Grenand 1982: 94, cited in Balée 1994: 27), Yanomamo (Hames 1983; Early and Peters 2000), Panare (Henley 1982: 10), Kagwahiv (1978, cited in Balée 1994: 4), Ka’apor (Balée 1994: 30–35), Guajá, Tembé and Timbira (Cormier 2003), Tapirapé (Wagley 1977, cited in Balée 1994: 4), Areweté (Viveiros de Castro 1992), Xavante (Coimbra et al. 2002), Bororo (Maybury-Lewis 1971: 11), Kaiabi (Athayde et al., this volume), Napo Quechua (Mercier 1985), Secoya (Casanova 1980), Siona, Kofán, Ingano and Huitoto (Hernando and Rizo 1991),Yagua (Chaumeil 1981), Nahua and Yaminahua (Townsley 1983; Feather, this volume) and Ese Eja (Alexiades and Peluso, this volume) and, further south, among Auracanian groups (Jones 1999: 169ff.). Among groups in the Rio Negro, Neves (2001: 283) reports on dramatic conquest-induced displacements up to the eighteenth century, after which language groups have remained relatively geographically stable. Even among groups with long histories of emplacement, there are subgroups that have moved out or expanded into other areas in recent times.

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The implications of widespread displacement, migration and spatial reorganisation for ethnoecology need to be re-examined in the light of recent advances in our understanding of Amazonian ecological and social systems. Ecological and botanical research, for example, has highlighted the diversity, patchiness and dynamism of lowland Amazonia at different spatial and temporal scales (Foster 1980; Tuomisto et al. 1995), linking these to different forms and scales of environmental disturbance (Pärssinen 2003a).3 The existence of a complex mosaic of Amazonian environments, each offering different sets of opportunities and constraints (Sponsel 1986; Huber and Zent 1995; Moran 1995), underscores the contingency of social and ecological relations following social change, migration and displacement. This in turn has profound and under-examined implications for such ethnoecological processes as the dynamics of incorporation, diffusion, transformation and innovation of environmental knowledge and practices, and their resulting material outcomes. The relationship between culture, myth, history and place, on the other hand, has recently been theorised in novel and exciting ways in Amazonia and beyond (Hill 1988, 1996; Rappaport 1990; Whitehead 1994; Basso 1995; Santos-Granero 1998; Rumsey and Weiner 2001; Bender 2002; Stewart and Strathern 2003). Weaving together symbolic, political and historical elements, these approaches can generate valuable insights into the social appropriation of ‘nature’, an endeavour central to the ethnoecological approach (Toledo 2002), particularly in the context of migration, displacement and the dynamics of territorialisation. Drawing from a wide range of disciplinary orientations and geographical contexts, this collection of case studies illustrates how some of these contemporary understandings and theoretical approaches can be used to examine the relationship between spatial mobility – including migration, displacement and dislocation – and a wide range of ethnoecological processes: processes such as the classification, management and domestication of plants and landscapes, and the incorporation and

3. There is an ongoing debate regarding the extent and significance of the spatial patterning of plant diversity at different spatial scales and taxonomic levels. For example, a number of authors have suggested that western Amazonian forests at least, ‘despite pronounced geographic floristic differences, tend to be dominated over wide areas by limited sets of plant species, genera and families’ (Macía and Svenning 2005: 623; see also Pitman et al. 2001). Nevertheless, the heterogeneity and diversity of environments and plant assemblages in Amazonia, which includes different kinds of rainforest, savannah, gallery forest, scrubland, swamp, coastal and riparian environments, is now clearly understood to be much greater than once considered (for a review see, for example, Daly and Mitchell 2000; Luteyn and Churchill 2000). Moreover, even within these different environments, there are differences between areas in soils, as well as in vegetation structure and composition.

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transformation of environmental knowledges, practices, ideologies and identities. In doing so, this volume seeks to contribute to the development of an ethnoecology that is historically informed, process-centred and attuned to the interplay between the symbolic and material forms and outcomes. The remainder of this chapter is divided into four sections. After providing some general definitions, I present a schematic overview of the history of indigenous mobility and migration in Amazonia, both before and after European conquest. I then discuss some of the common themes and questions raised by the different chapters of the volume, which are presented in two parts. Chapters in Part I, Circulations, explore the links between mobility and environmental knowledge, perceptions and resource management. Part II, Transformations, mostly focuses on how migration and the concomitant circulation of peoples, plants, technology and knowledge have transformed social and ecological systems and, hence, ethnoecologies. I conclude this introduction with some thoughts on emergent themes and questions for future research.

A Typology of Mobility and Migration As a ‘means to ends in space’ (Bell and Taylor 2004: 266), mobility refers to all forms of territorial movement by people. These movements take place at different spatial and temporal scales and reflect a wide range of underlying factors and motivations. One important distinction is between individual mobility – involving traders or peripatetic shamans (Schäfer 1991; Wrigley 1917), for example – and collective movements. Binford (1980, cited in Kelly 1992), uses the term ‘residential mobility’ to denote group-level movements between different dwelling sites, in contrast with ‘logistical mobility’, which refers to individual or small-group localised movements related to foraging and around a particular dwelling site. Territorial, circular or long-term mobility refers to the cyclic or centripetal movements of a group between different areas (Kelly 1992). Trekking is an often cited and extensively examined example of circulatory – in this case seasonal – mobility, subject to distinct environmental, socio-cultural and historical interpretations (Maybury-Lewis 1971; Turner 1979; Posey 1985; Balée 1994; Good 1995; Rival 2002). Permanent movements or migration, on the other hand, commonly refers to directional movements across larger temporal and spatial scales, and is associated with a change in residence of a minimum specified duration, usually from one to five years (Newbold 2004). Nomadism and sedentism represent extremes in a continuum of collective mobility; whereas the former involves frequent movement, often between permanent base camps, the latter refers to a condition of relatively reduced mobility (Kent 1989; Kelly 1992). Kent (1989) distinguishes between permanent and seasonal sedentism, and

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suggests at least six months a year of continuous occupation of a site as a defining standard. These categories are ideal types, delineating points along a dynamic range of movements, in which considerable overlaps in time and space occur (Clarke 1984). As Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch (this volume) illustrate for ribereños, for example, many individuals rotate between multiple, ‘multi-sited’ or transient households. This, in turn, is consistent with indigenous notions of ‘residence’, which are often defined on the basis of a region, as opposed to a particular locale, with processes of temporary mobility sometimes superimposed over longer-term and larger-scale migratory movements. Moreover, changes in one kind of mobility often presuppose adjustments in other kinds. For example, decreased residential mobility may sometimes entail an increase in logistical mobility. Case studies in this volume discuss and illustrate some of the many factors involved in shaping migrations and their outcomes. Demographers often refer to the complex interplay of ‘push–pull’ factors in both places of origin and destination as the mechanism triggering the decision to move. Clearly, these push–pull factors operate at different levels of social organisation: state or regional, communal, familial or personal (Kleiner et al. 1986). ‘Displacement’ refers to movements induced largely through environmental, political or economic ‘push’ factors, including crises. Likewise, drivers to migration involve experiential, symbolic, economic, ecological, and political dimensions, as well as the interaction between various indigenous and non-indigenous forms of agency. As the name implies, forced displacement or relocation refers to movements resulting from external coercion, nowadays most often linked to state-led development, colonisation or conservation initiatives (Brand 2001; Chatty and Colchester 2002; Escobar 2003; Geisler 2003; Redford and Fearn 2007) or, as in some Andean states – most notably Colombia and, until recently, Peru – due to war and conflicts relating to armed insurgency and the drugs trade (Segura 2000; Guevara 2004; Navarrete-Frías and Thoumi 2005).

Indigenous Mobility and Migration in Amazonia: a Historical Synopsis Archaeological, linguistic, ethnohistorical and genetic evidence suggests that Amazonian societies have undergone dramatic changes in their distribution, degree of mobility and spatial and social organisation, in both pre- and post-European conquest time frames. Environmental changes and disturbances, including mega-Niño events, droughts or tectonically induced relocation of entire flood plains (river avulsions), may have also

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induced and shaped human movements at different points in time (Meggers 1994, 1995; Pärssinen 2003a).

Early (Pre-colonial) Mobility, Migrations and Settlement Modern humans started their migration out of East Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years BP (Arsuaga and Martínez 1998; Lahr and Foley 1998). Ideas concerning the peopling of the Americas have been in a rapid state of flux in recent years. The commonly held view that the earliest inhabitants of the Americas – hunters specialised in large game using characteristic Clovis stone tool technology – crossed by land from the Bering Straits at the end of the Pleistocene (c. 11,000 years BP) has become increasingly questioned. Archaeological remains, distinct from those associated with the Clovis tradition and as old, if not older, have been found in several sites across the Americas (Roosevelt et al. 2002; Meggers and Miller 2003; Schurr 2004), suggesting an earlier migration date.4 Evidence also suggests that these early migrations probably followed a coastal route, with subsequent sequential expansions into the interior from different points along the west coast of North America (Dillehay 1999; Schurr 2004).5 Lithic tools used by foraging palaeo-Indians have been found in the Peruvian highlands and coast, as well as in the Amazon river (Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988; Roosevelt et al. 1996), suggesting a fairly rapid occupation of South America – including Amazonia – by the early Holocene; between 11,000 BP and 9,000 BP (Roosevelt et al. 1996; Dillehay 1999). The diversity of projectile points recovered from different sites in Amazonia suggests the presence of different human populations and overlapping colonisations by the early Holocene (Arroyo-Kalin, 2008). Archaeological and palaeobotanical research traces the early origins of plant and landscape domestication in South America to between 10,000 and 8,600 BP (Piperno and Pearsall 1998; Denevan 2001), with important modifications of soils and vegetation evident in many areas by 2,000 BP. The oldest known cultivated plants in South America are manioc and maize. Archaeological finds in the coast of Peru dated to 8,000 to 6,000 years BP suggest the domestication of manioc prior to that, most likely in south-western Amazonia (Pearsall 1992; Schaal et al. 2006). These early dates raise the possibility that plant domestication may have preceded

4. The timing of the peopling of the Americas is still a controversial issue, with estimates ranging from 11,000 to 45,000 years BP (Dillehay 1999; Jablonski 2002). 5. Contrary to some linguistic and ethnobotanical evidence suggesting early migrations by Polynesian with Andean populations, current genetic evidence does not support the notion that migrating Austronesians contributed to the origins of South American Indians (Schurr 2004).

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pottery making (Arroyo-Kalin, in preparation). Maize, domesticated in Mesoamerica before 6,000 BP (Buckler and Stevens 2006) was cultivated in parts of South America by 4,000 BP, reaching the Amazonian flood plains as early as 3,000 BP (Roosevelt 1993; Piperno and Pearsall 1998). The intensification of agriculture and concomitant emergence of different ceramic styles during what is known as the ‘Formative’ period (4,000–2,000 BP) is associated with an increase in population densities, sedentarisation in resource-rich areas and the emergence of socially stratified chiefdoms (Lathrap 1970; Spencer and Redmond 1992; Oliver 2001). This process of population growth and sedentarisation is evidenced, particularly after 1,000 BP, by extensive areas containing rich, dark anthropogenic soils, pottery remains and petroglyphs, often – but not always – along major rivers (Herrera et al. 1992; Eden et al. 1994; Pereira 2001; Petersen et al. 2001; Kern et al. 2003), as well as by earthworks, mounds and causeways in the mouth of the Amazon, the savannahs of Bolivia, Venezuela and Guyana and other upland areas (Roosevelt 1991; Denevan 2001; Pärssinen et al. 2003; Heckenberger 2005; Erickson 2006). The wide distribution of such language groups as Arawak, TupíGuarani and Carib throughout vast areas of lowland Amazonia suggests extensive movements of peoples, language, technology and ideas prior to European conquest. Arawak languages, for example, ranged across much of the subcontinent, forming ‘one of the great diasporas of the ancient world’ (Heckenberger 2002: 99), comparable to the great Bantu or Austronesian diasporas of the Old World. These Amerindian diasporas caught the early attention of linguists and archaeologists, prompting considerable debate and speculation regarding their origin, routes and causes (Lathrap 1970; Meggers 1973; Roosevelt 1994b). While still contested, most archaeological, and especially linguistic, evidence points to northwestern Amazonia, specifically the riverine area between the upper Amazon (Solimões) in Brazil and the Middle Orinoco in Venezuela, as the centre of origin, or at least early spread, of Arawakan languages (Heckenberger 2002).6 According to this model, by about 3,000 BP Arawak groups began to expand across the flood plain areas of the Negro and Orinoco rivers, reaching their broadest distribution by about 1,500 BP (Heckenberger 2002). Evidence from plant domestication, in contrast, points to a southwestern origin for Arawakan expansion (Clement et al., this volume).

6. Other proposed centres of origin for Arawakan languages have included central Amazonia, near present-day Manaus (Lathrap 1970), and southwestern Amazonia (Migglazia 1982, Urban 2002, cited in Clement et al. this volume).

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Proto-Tupí languages are thought to have originated around the headwaters of the Tapajós and Madeira rivers, in southern Amazonia, and Tupí-Guarani languages a little further north and east from there (Heckenberger and Neves 1998; Jensen 1999; see also Clement et al., this volume). The Tupí-Guarani expansion began 3,000–5,000 BP, eventually reaching and controlling the main river channels and the Atlantic coastal region south of the mouth of the Amazon by about 1,500 BP (Balée 1984; Monteiro 1999). Though not as widely dispersed as Arawak or TupíGuarani languages, Carib languages had, by the time of European colonisation, also undergone considerable expansion out of the Guiana uplands, covering much of the area between the north of the Amazon and the Lower Orinoco (Durbin 1977, cited in Santos-Granero 2002: 37) and extending as far west as the Andean foothills (Pärssinen 2003b). In contrast to these widely distributed language stocks, other Amazonian language groups – including many isolates – show a more restricted distribution, suggesting quite different ethnogenetic and historical processes and, in some cases, higher degrees of historical emplacement.7 The Gê languages, for example, form a fairly coherent cluster of related languages in the drier sections of the Brazilian Central Plateau, from where they are thought to have originated (Mason 1950, cited in Maybury-Lewis 1971; Urban 1992) Many of these groups formed multi-ethnic and multilingual regional networks of trade and exchange that connected floodplain and coastal chiefdoms with interfluvial and savannah groups (Arvelo-Jiménez and Biord 1994; de Oliveira 1994; Heinen and García-Castro 2000; Vidal 2000; Renard-Casevitz 2002: 131–32). A similar network of regional exchange linked parts of the high Andes with the Amazon lowlands (Kurella 1998; Taylor 1999; Pärssinen and Siiriäinen 2003; Dudley, this volume), and was itself part of a broader system of exchange, connecting the Pacific coast, the Andes and the Amazon since about 3,000 BP (Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988; Rostain 1999). The existence of large trade networks also meant that some ethnic groups adopted trade as a form of economic specialisation (Lathrap 1973). These regional trade networks also presupposed the ability for individuals to travel long distances. The Cerro de la Sal (‘Salt Mountain’), for example, located just north of the junction of the Chanchamayo and Perené rivers in eastern Peru, was visited by Arawak, Panoan and Andean people from as far away as Ecuador to trade and harvest rock salt (Brown and Fernandez 1992: 180; Renard-Casevitz 2002: 131–32). Likewise, lowland Indians made regular visits to Cuzco, the Inca capital, and Quito (Oberem 1974; Taylor 1999).

7. There are currently an estimated forty-eight language families and seventy isolates in South America, most of which are in the tropical lowlands (Kaufman 1994).

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While much of this intra- and inter-regional trade involved high-status goods such as precious stones and metals, basic commodities and food surpluses – including dried fish, shellfish and meat, turtle oil and cassava flour – were also exchanged in certain areas (Myers 1981; Whitehead 1994; Zent, this volume). Other items traded among and between groups in Amazonia and Orinoco and between the tropical forest lowlands and the Andes or circum-Caribbean region included arrows and blowpipes, baskets, medicinal plants, arrow poisons, dyes, vanilla and cinnamon, tamed animals and animal products from the lowlands, and cotton cloth, jewellery and metal tools from the highlands (Oberem 1974; Brown and Fernandez 1992; Taylor 1999; see also Zent, this volume). Present-day distribution of crop landraces (Clement et al., this volume) and direct observations among contemporary Amazonians (Kvist and Barfod 1991; Alexiades 1999; Alexiades and Peluso, this volume; Micarelli, this volume) further suggest that such exchanges must have also included plant cuttings, seeds, technology and knowledge (Butt Colson 1985). Whitehead (1994, 1999) argues that scholars have consistently underestimated the regional scale and supra-ethnic character of precolonial Amerindian social organisation (see also Neves 2001 and references therein). Building on contemporary understandings of ethnogenesis and regional trade, Hornborg (2005) proposes that Arawak expansion did not necessarily entail the actual movement of people (sensu Lathrap 1970), but more probably involved linguistic and social exchange and the adoption of a lifestyle by people already established in these areas. Arawak ‘expansion’, Hornborg argues, entailed the diffusion of Arawak as a trade language and a series of social forms – notably river navigation, trade, intensive agriculture, hierarchy and geographically extended identities – all suited to active involvement in an extensive regional exchange system. By the time the Europeans arrived in South America, then, a diverse range of societies with distinct and varied forms of political organisation and subsistence were established across much of lowland South America, interlinked through a complex and fluid network of trade, war and exchange. The emergence of a ‘differentiated political-economic structure’ (Hornborg 2005: 593) and regional system of exchange in parts of the Amazon by the first millennium BC, of socially ranked societies by ca. AD 400–500, and of complex chiefdoms by around AD 1000 (Spencer and Redmond 1992; Roosevelt et al. 1996; Neves and Petersen 2006), all point to considerable prehistoric social, demographic and political upheavals, including widespread migrations, displacements and shifts in patterns of mobility, all within a highly diversified and human-altered environment (Denevan 2001).

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European Conquest and Indigenous Migration in Amazonia Research over the past decades has shown how post-conquest contact with the expanding state in the ‘tribal zone’ (Ferguson and Whitehead 1992) has often involved a two-phase, recurrent cycle. The first consequences of contact – socio-demographic disruption and spatial dispersion – has followed from the catastrophic impact of ‘virgin soil’ epidemics.8 A second stage has involved the pull – often intermittent and uneven but eventually widespread – of indigenous societies into the orbit of the extractive or agro-extractivist economy and/or of colonial or post-colonial states. While often overlapping in time or space, these two stages are distinct, particularly in terms of their influence on ethnoecology, mobility and spatial organisation. The devastating speed and scale with which infectious diseases repeatedly and systematically decimated Amerindian societies – and their corresponding impact upon their social and institutions and production systems – were not fully grasped until recently. It is almost certain that the Amazonian societies first described by Europeans beginning in the midsixteenth century had already undergone substantial demographic and social transformations following the diffusion of early epidemics out of the circum-Caribbean region (Myers 1992). Increased mobility and dispersion have historically offered Amerindians a measure of protection against epidemics, war and colonisation, and have thus enabled strategic mediation of contact with the modern nation state and neighbouring enemy groups (Carneiro 1964; Hugh-Jones 1979; Oostra 1991; Stearman 1995; Fisher 2000; Coimbra et al. 2002; Santos-Granero 2002; Alexiades and Peluso, this volume; Zent, this volume).9 In effect, retreat was the only option available to those indigenous societies unable to mount an effective military resistance or who refused shelter and incorporation (for example, by missions), though in effect these three strategies were often adopted simultaneously or sequentially (Taylor 1999). Even active military resistance often entailed the disbanding of large settlements and a strategic reliance on dispersal and mobility (Vidal 2000; Coimbra et al 2002; Athayde et al., this volume; Zent, this volume). As a corollary, the more mobile groups were often those eventually able to resist colonial expansion most effectively and consistently (Wright 1999).

8. Epidemic contagion did not require direct contact with outsiders, having also taken place through human and animal intermediary agents (Posey 1987). 9. Indigenous peoples in other parts of the world have made similar strategic use of mobility following contact and, later, colonisation, by Europeans (for example, Bedford and Pool 2004: 45). As Zent (1993, 1997) points out, however, at other times epidemics have had an opposite effect, acting as a catalyst for spatial concentration around centres for the dispensation of medical services.

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The initial process of depopulation had a complex domino-type effect on indigenous patterns of spatial distribution. Heightened accusations of sorcery and revenge raids, the displacement into areas occupied by neighbouring groups, together with the emergence of a political economy centred around the procurement of steel tools and slave labour, all increased inter- and intra-tribal war, leading to further social atomisation, population loss and heightened mobility (Posey 1987; Ferguson 1995; Alexiades and Peluso 2003; Lyon 2003; Zent, this volume). The profound impact of this process is illustrated by Viveiros de Castro’s (1992: 15) characterisation of Araweté history as ‘an incessant movement of fleeing and dispersing’ where ‘a state of war seems to have been the rule and the custom’. The early colonisation of the Atlantic coast and the main waterways beginning in the sixteenth century led to a collapse of the centralised polities that had established themselves there a few hundred years earlier, and to a retreat from these core areas of colonial economic development. For TupíGuarani speakers, the consequent massive exodus west, ‘away from the centres of human extinction’ (Balée 1984: 256), reversed the pattern of eastward migration that had preceded the arrival of Europeans.10 This pattern of depopulation and dispersal recurred continuously over the following centuries, tracking waves of extractivist activity as these reached new areas or revisited old ones.11 The rubber boom (1850–1916) – Amazonia’s largest single extractivist bonanza – set off a wave of depopulation that swept westwards, leading to massive dispersal, spatial reorganisation and widespread retreat towards interfluvial and inaccessible headwater regions.

10. In terms of their scale and historical recurrence, Tupían millenarian migrations – which continued until the early twentieth century – are uniquely dramatic. In 1594, for example, three hundred Tupí arrived in Chachapoyas in the Peruvian Andes, ten years after setting off from the Atlantic Coast of Brazil on foot in search of ‘a land of immortality and eternal rest’ (Brown 1994: 290). Brown (1994: 290) and Clastres (1995) discount Balée’s (1984) view that these migrations reflect the social trauma of massive depopulation through epidemics. Rather, they see the millenarian quest for ‘the land without evil’ as an attempt to reconcile a series of contradictions inherent to Amazonian political systems, interpreting them as forms of resistance to increased social hierarchy, authority and political control. 11. In contrast to North America’s agricultural frontier, which involved a progressive and steady westward expansion, much colonisation in Amazonia unfolded within what Russel-Woods (cited in Fisher 2000: 17) called the ‘hollow frontier’. Little (2001: 2) also emphasises the existence of ‘a plethora of frontiers spanning centuries and coming in surges or waves’. Dudley (this volume) describes the interactive frontier between the Andes and the Amazon as being in a state of flux, ‘in response to historical restructurings of space and power’. The term ‘elastic frontier’, coined by Moore (2006: 19), seems particularly apposite. Even so, the most accessible regions, including the main waterways, were colonised and settled much earlier than other parts (Little 2001).

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Colonisation and depopulation through the combined effects of slave raiding and epidemics also brought down the multi-ethnic regional networks that had previously connected much of the Americas. Even though some of these extensive trade networks and inter-ethnic polities initially adapted, thrived, or sometimes even formed, in response to the demand for slave labour and metal tools, most had disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century (Dreyfus 1992; Whitehead 1994: 43–45, 1999; Ferguson 1995; Wright 1999, Zent, this volume). The Andes and the Amazon region also became increasingly disarticulated, contributing to the decline of those groups who had emerged in the context of the intermediation between the two zones (Taylor 1999; Dudley, this volume). In the meantime, however, a number of ethnic groups emerged as important mediators between colonial and indigenous economies, shaping inter-ethnic relationships to this day (Taylor 1999). The Ecuadorean Quijo and Canelo, for example, acted as intermediaries between the colonial highlands and such lowland groups as the Shuar, while the Caribs mediated between the Dutch and inland groups in Guyana (Oberem 1974; Harner 1984; Whitehead 1993). The initial dispersal and retreat from the agro-extractive frontier often entailed moving out of the most accessible or resource-rich areas. Interfluvial areas became important refuge zones and thus important sites of inter-ethnic contact and assimilation (Zent, this volume). Some of these interfluvial societies were eventually able to expand and occupy those fluvial areas which been emptied of their original indigenous inhabitants (Smole 1976; Henley 1982: 11; Hames 1983; Rival 2002; Alexiades and Peluso 2003; Johnson 2003; Zent, this volume). Coupled with depopulation, the process of spatial dispersion contributed to the adoption of looser, horizontal forms of political organisation, as well as a more mobile lifestyle and a subsistence emphasising foraging or dispersed forms of agriculture (Posey 1994; Zent, this volume). The de-intensification of subsistence practices, leading in some cases to the gradual abandonment of agriculture, is captured by Balée’s (1994) concept of ‘agricultural regression’. Moreover, the small-scale, atomised, mobile, dispersed acephalous societies with their heavy reliance on swidden agriculture and hunting and gathering, so widely associated with ‘tropical forest cultures’ (Lowie 1948; see also Steward and Faron 1959), is in many cases a historical artefact (Dreyfus 1992; Ferguson 1992; Denevan 2001).12 Roosevelt (1994: 13) notes how in the millennium prior to conquest most indigenous groups relied on seed crops and plant protein, and that post-

12. The arrival of steel axes and machetes, in particular, favoured the widespread adoption of shifting cultivation (Denevan 2001).

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conquest reliance on manioc and wild animal protein reflects wide scale depopulation and dislocation. Forced displacement, a growing dependency on externally produced goods and services, the desire to seek protection from violent or coercive encounters with outsiders, or the need or desire to connect with markets and outsiders, are among some of the historical factors favouring spatial concentration of indigenous Amazonians at different times. In contrast to the effects of the first phase of contact – with its concomitant depopulation, heightened conflict and retreat to inaccessible and interfluvial areas – the subsequent incorporation of indigenous societies into the market has often been associated with an opposite set of trends: downriver migration, sedentarisation, spatial concentration and increased contact with the market economy (Little 2001; Rival 2002; Alexiades and Peluso, this volume; Athayde et al., this volume; Zent, this volume). At the same time, however, epidemic outbursts and the tensions that followed from living at close quarters, often under conditions of coercion or increasing inequity and resource depletion, acted centrifugally, leading to periodic, if usually temporary, dispersal away from these population centres. This cycle, involving successive phases of spatial concentration followed by dispersal, contributed to multiple reconfigurations of indigenous society and subsistence. Depopulation and dispersion, for example, contributed to agricultural de-intensification and the widespread adoption of shifting agriculture (Denevan 2001), to a widespread substitution of maize for manioc as a dietary staple (Roosevelt 1994b) and, in some cases, to the abandonment of agriculture altogether (Balée 1994). Cycles of concentration and dispersion also tracked pulses and changes in the frontier economy. Whereas periods of intensified forest extractivism have often been associated with dispersion and social atomisation, with individuals and family groups forced to travel long distances and disperse into new areas, the emergence of an agro-extractive or agricultural frontier has at other times led to greater spatial concentration and sedentarisation (Fisher 2000; Little 2001). In other instances, concentration and dispersion have occurred simultaneously, but at different scales. Over the past century, for example, the Ese Eja (Alexiades and Peluso, this volume) have begun to live in concentrated settlements, but these have become increasingly dispersed, so that villages today are now separated by hundreds, as opposed to dozens, of kilometres. As the chapters by Alexiades and Peluso, Athayde et al., Dudley, Micarelli and Zent illustrate, many other indigenous societies have become decreasingly mobile, yet increasingly dislocated and fragmented. Demographic shifts continue to feed into cycles of concentration and dispersion. After a long period of population decline, many indigenous groups have, especially in recent decades, experienced a dramatic ‘demographic turnaround’, linked to increased fertility rates and

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decreased mortality rates (McSweeney and Arps 2005). While links between this demographic trend and new patterns of mobility and urbanisation are suspected, its relationship to other aspects of demography, as well as subsistence and resource management, is still poorly understood (McSweeney and Arps 2005; se also Newing, this volume; Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch, this volume). Nevertheless, the combination of spatial concentration and sedentarisation along roads and rivers, coupled with demographic growth – both indigenous and nonindigenous – has placed new strains on lands and resources and hence created new conflicts (Zent, this volume). The fragmentary and geographically uneven presence of the state in Amazonia’s extractivist and agro-extractivist economy (Brown 1993; Santos-Granero and Barclay 1999),13 has at times created a political vacuum, filled at different times by missionaries and extractivist or agricultural bosses (patrón in Spanish, patrão in Portuguese). These, in turn, have played a major role in the spatial reconfiguration and ethnogenesis of much of Amazonia. Missionary centres or ‘reductions’ (reducciones in Spanish, aldeias or aldeiamentos in Portuguese), extractive outposts (barracas or centros in Spanish, barracões in Portuguese) and agro-extractive estates (haciendas or fundos in Spanish, fazendas in Portuguese) have at different times concentrated the indigenous populations from sometimes vast catchments, acting as important centres for the transformation of indigenous identity, society and subsistence in ways that remain visible to this day (Block 1995; Chernela 1998; Taylor 1999; Micarelli, this volume). In much of the Amazon – particularly along the more inaccessible reaches – the rubber boom also marked the beginning of the consolidation of the nation state, a process exemplified by the emergence of important urban centres, such as Leticia, Manaus and Iquitos (Santos-Granero and Barclay 1999).14 Nation-building and state formation in Amazonia intensified in the post-war era, as reflected in government policies and programmes promoting agricultural colonisation, logging, mining, damand road-building, the provision of centralised health and education services or, more recently, the creation of extensive natural protected areas

13. Hill (1999) describes the sharp differences in the histories of indigenous–state relations between different regions. For example, while groups living in the Colombian and Venezuelan llanos and the Orinoco basin were caught up in the wars of independence and thus suffered additional demographic and social disruptions, other groups further south escaped the effect of these wars, experiencing instead a period of relative isolation and recovery. 14. In contrast, cities in the more accessible coastal areas and on the major rivers of eastern Amazonia, such as Belém, emerged during much earlier extractive cycles, often amidst military struggles for control among competing colonial powers.

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(Hemming 2003; Schmink and Wood 1984; Zent 1993, 1997). These processes, in some instances accompanied by land reforms and land titling or the creation of legally demarcated ‘territories’, have contributed to settlement, concentration, sedentarisation and, in some instances, displacement, dislocation and fragmentation, especially during the latter half of the twentieth century (Agrawal and Redford 2007; Athayde et al., this volume).15 As Rubinstein (2001) notes, this process of spatial reorganisation not only involved moving people – indigenous and colonist – and creating new boundaries – territorial and political; the nature of the relationship between boundaries has also changed. Whereas Shuar space once contained multiple, overlapping, often fluid, boundaries, for example, Shuar – like other indigenous Amazonians – now live and move within a space of nested, hierarchical, boundaries. Thus, centros are now contained within larger ‘associations’, which themselves are part of federations. The widespread twentieth-century tendency towards a more sedentary, riverine, existence relying on intensified systems of production and premised upon increased involvement in broader systems of economic exchange has, of course, an important historical precedent. Though the techno-economic and political contexts are different, this trend repeats an earlier, pre-colonial one, which was interrupted by the demographic and social disruptions following European conquest and colonisation.

Circulations: Mobility, Subsistence and the Environment The relationship between mobility, subsistence, social organisation and environmental cognition has been subjected to considerable attention, figuring prominently in some of the important theoretical debates in anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s. Mobility, subsistence and, more generally, differences in the social evolution of different regions were often theorised on the basis of environmental limitations (protein, carbohydrates or soils) of Amazonia as a whole and of interfluvial areas in particular (Meggers 1973; Gross 1975; Ross 1978; Hames and Vickers 1983; Milton 1984; Hill and Hurtado 1995). Another influential view suggested that mobile foragers represented vestiges of hunter-gathering populations pushed out of coastal and riverine areas by militarily more powerful agricultural societies, and into more marginal interfluvial environments (Steward and Faron 1959; Lathrap 1968). The infusion of political economy

15. Though the influence of the state is critical, it is important to heed Brown and Fernandez’s (1992: 176) warning not to ‘reify the state, as if it were a wellintegrated social unit following a consistent, rational policy of domination’.

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and historical anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a new ecological anthropology, one that incorporates the historical, social and political dimensions of the environment into more sophisticated and nuanced exploratory and explanatory models of mobility and subsistence (Orlove 1980; Biersack 1999; Kottak 1999; Rubinstein 2004). Drawing from experiences of societies exhibiting very different kinds of mobility patterns, the first four chapters examine the relationship between mobility and environmental interactions, both symbolic and material.

Mobility, Cognition and Social Understandings of Nature Whereas cultural ecologists have sought to explain patterns and changes in human mobility in terms of the distribution and abundance of limiting resources, historical ecologists consider social and historical factors as the key factors shaping indigenous subsistence (Balée 2006). In his comparative study of two Tupí-Guarani groups in eastern Amazonia, Balée (1992a, 1994) interprets the foraging, highly mobile, lifestyle of the Guajá as the result of cultural – or, more specifically, agricultural – regression, following post-conquest demographic collapse and social reorganisation. Having abandoned agriculture, the Guajá now depend on plant resources that are not ‘wild’ but which were, rather, concentrated in anthropogenic forests by an earlier group of people (see Oliver 2001).16 In the same vein, Posey (1998: 111), directly correlates successive waves of expansion and contraction of Kayapó ‘nomadic agriculture’ to ‘cycles of warfare–peace–hostility–stability’. Concomitant with this model of agricultural regression is the notion that mobility entails a process of loss of cultigens, practices and specialised knowledge (Posey 1994). Rival (2006, 2007, this volume) disputes the environmental and historical determinism implicit in the models used by cultural ecologists and historical ecologists, respectively. Instead, she proposes that the decision to avoid, move away from, remain in place, or indeed move towards, centres of economic activity and actively participate in broader systems of exchange, all reveal different and deeper sociocultural and political choices. ‘Renouncing the frontier’ (Fisher 2000: 45) is thus a political decision that favours dispersion, egalitarianism and isolation over spatial concentration, social hierarchy and inclusion in inter-ethnic networks of exchange, a decision that in turn shapes how the environment is understood and engaged with. Drawing on preliminary ethnobotanical data, Rival (Chapter 2) contests the notion that Huaorani botanical knowledge is more

16. Politis (1996), on the other hand, suggests that the practices of the highly mobile Nukak have the effect of creating patches of concentrated forest resources.

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impoverished than that of their agriculturalist neighbours – as cultural regression models have sometimes proposed. Instead, following Ellen (1999), she emphasises how a foraging lifestyle requires a more intimate relationship with the forest environment than one based on small-scale agriculture, even if much of this knowledge is substantive, not lexically encoded and profoundly embedded in bodily practices and in a social knowledge that privileges ecological over taxonomic relations. Whereas Rival focuses on the relationship between mobility and environmental knowledge, Conrad Feather (Chapter 3) examines the broader social and symbolic meanings attached to travel and mobility among the Nahua in south-eastern Peru. Drawing on Viveiros de Castro’s (1998) model of multinatural perspectivism, Feather suggests that movement in space entails, for a society not caught up in Cartesian distinctions between body and mind, a change in the body and in perspective and, concomitantly, in a person’s relationship with the world and his/her surroundings. Travel and mobility, then, become powerful tools through which individual and collective relations to, and memories of a place, are simultaneously erased and created, imbuing the landscape with complex and multilayered meanings, some of which are lexically encoded in the form of toponyms and in historical, moral or political narratives (see Santos-Granero 1998; Vidal 2003; Alexiades 2005; Dudley, this volume). Just as importantly, however, the Nahua see movement as a transformative process and a key mechanism of engagement with ‘the environment’ and its constituent ‘natural’ and ‘social’ elements. Whether it is seeking a particular forest resource with a patchy, localised or uncommon distribution or knowledge or manufactured goods from various powerful ‘others’, spatial movement thus enables the creative and transformative act of social reproduction.

Mobility and Resource Management As the case studies by Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch (Chapter 4) and Newing (Chapter 5) show, the proclivity towards travel and the tendency for high mobility are not restricted to social groups such as the Nahua, weakly linked as they are to circuits of market-based exchange. Mobility remains an important element in the diversified and flexible subsistence strategies of the Amazonian peasantry as well. Forged amidst the unstable fluxes of an extractive economy, much of this peasantry has long been used to high mobility, spatial dispersion and social atomisation. PinedoVasquez and Padoch draw a parallel between the ease with which ribereños dismantle their houses and disperse and the ‘ephemerality of their riverbanks and watercourses, as well as of agricultural fields … markets and labour opportunities’, suggesting that the practice of mobility itself constitutes a resource (Casimir 1992: 5; Crumley 1998: xii).

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Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch and Newing link the heightened patterns of individual mobility and a tendency towards ‘multi-sitedness’ and urbanisation to numerous ongoing trends: ‘de-agrarianisation’; increased dependency on centralised state services; the emergence of a regional service economy and an associated increase in the presence of state and non-state agents; the socially disruptive effects of urban alienation – including drugs, alcoholism and crime; the power of the media and improved communications; and, finally, a new set of aesthetics and values, including such notions as ‘recreation’.17 Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch emphasise, however, that, while salient and important, these demographic trends have recurred at different times over the twentieth century. Pinedo-Vasquez and Padoch note how long-standing links between urban and rural places have created complex social and familial networks, which, while poorly understood, clearly seem to enable the flow of knowledge, skills and resources in multiple directions. They point to the way in which the recent spate of urbanisation, for example, has resulted in a ‘ruralisation of tastes’ in Amazonian cities, and thus a market for a series of forest products, such as açaí, that are now produced in managed environments (see also Brondizio 2004). After working in large urbanbased sawmills during a recent export-based timber boom, on the other hand, some people returned to their household units, incorporating some of this newly gained experience into their forest management and rural activities. These examples underscore the dynamic and innovative ways in which Amazonian peasants respond to and strategically seize the opportunities created by broader social change. The high mobility and dynamic demographics of many Amazonian societies also raise important questions for environmental managers and land-use planners, a point that Newing explores in the context of communal reserves and natural protected area legislation in Peru. In effect, Newing notes, the core premise of community conservation, ‘that people who have permanent, exclusive rights to land and resources are more likely to manage resources sustainably in the long term’, does not take into account the high levels of spatial mobility that are tied to a diversified subsistence. Likewise, by assuming spatial stasis and social boundedness, external interventions often fail to appreciate the extent to which economic activities in the immediate vicinity of the protected area are but one component of wider, dynamic, economies. 17. The descriptions of ribereño mobility within extensive kin-based networks and between multiple residences in urban, peri-urban and rural locales resonate with the pattern of movements described for some indigenous groups in industrialised nations (Taylor and Bell 2004) and, since at least the 1980s, for many indigenous groups of the lowland Latin American tropics (Peluso and Alexiades 2005; McSweeney and Jokisch 2007).

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Transformations: Identity, Knowledge, Place-making and the Domestication of Nature The second part of this volume focuses on the complex biological, ecological and social transformations that have followed from the movement of peoples, ideas, technology and plants across time and space (see also Balée and Erickson 2006). Most of the chapters in this section deal with post-conquest transformations, not because these are more significant, but because they are presently more evident and thus accessible to systematic enquiry. Indeed, post-conquest demographic, social and ecological upheavals have led to the formation of new ethnic identities and subsistence systems and, concomitantly, to new bodies of environmental practice and knowledge, as well as to revised notions of place and territoriality. As the various chapters in this section illustrate, all of these constitute fertile areas of enquiry for ethnoecology.

Mobility and the Domestication of Plants and Landscapes Contemporary understandings of Amazonian social and ecological systems highlight their co-evolutionary past, underscoring the extent to which landscapes manifest human activity through time (see Crumley 1998). Traces of past human activity are visible not only in such physical remains as petroglyphs, potsherds, middens and earthworks, but also in living biological systems. Anthropogenic groves, forests and soils, together with an extensive assemblage of domesticates and semi-domesticates, all attest to a diverse and dynamic array of management practices and social configurations across different environments and points in time (Balée 1989, 2006; Roosevelt 2000; Lehmann et al. 2003; Clement 2006; Denevan 2006). As a result, for example, there is a broad correspondence between the distribution of anthropogenic soils and that of particular sets of domesticates and polities at the time of conquest (Clement et al. 2003). Such impacts are not only restricted to horticultural, agricultural or sedentary societies. There is evidence to suggest that the residential mobility and gathering of forest fruits by human foragers, for example, has shaped in subtle ways the distribution patterns of plants, leading to the formation of resource patches (Politis 2001; Balée 2006; Zent and Zent 2002; Rival 2006: 88). Domestication, as a process yielding new social, and not just biological, forms, exemplifies and provides a tangible context in which to examine the dialectical relationship between humans, plants and environments (Erickson 2006). The transformation of wild ancestors into domesticates such as manioc, maize, peanuts and sweet potato enabled the rapid expansion of agriculture and agriculturalists in Amazonia during the last 10,000 years, with hugely important social and ecological implications.

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Despite this, the roles of human mobility, migration and trade in the domestication process have received little attention. Using peach palm, the ‘premier neotropical palm domesticate’, as an example, Clement et al. (Chapter 6) revise previous domestication models (Clement 1988) in ways that explicitly consider the role of mobility and migration. Clement et al. suggest that human-mediated gene flow through trade and migration has historically counterbalanced the effects of human selection, which acting alone tends to reduce genetic variability. Whereas human mobility plays a role at a local level in the domestication of plants, human migration and trade are key factors enabling the diffusion and expansion of domesticates on a larger regional scale. It is the interaction between emplacement – with its concomitant effect of selection for certain traits – and mobility and diffusion – with their concomitant effects of increasing genetic diversity – that ultimately creates a ‘complex hierarchy of landraces’, each landrace originating in a geographically defined area but eventually diffusing more widely through trade and exchange. As a result, Clement et al. contend, the current distribution of peach palm landraces can productively be examined in the context of Arawak and Tupí migrations over the past 5,000 years. Noting how the early expansion of these two large agriculturebased language groups had to be sustained by a solid assortment of domesticates, the authors make a convincing plea for integrating evidence relating to crop domestication into historical migration models. The effects of anthropogenic activity on plant community structures are now thought to be noticeable over long temporal scales, perhaps up to hundreds of years (Balée and Campbell 1990; Heckenberger et al. 2003; Svenning et al. 2004, cited in Macía and Svenning 2005). The use of fire, salient in the last 10,000 years of human occupation, for example, has clearly had a profound impact on Amazonian landscapes, albeit one that is just beginning to be recognised and examined (Balée 1993; Erickson 2006). In effect, moreover, our understanding of the precise interconnections between social and environmental change is still very limited. As Miller and Nair (2006) point out, the interest in anthropogenic forests sparked by the work of Balée, Posey and others has not been sufficiently followed through with systematic ecological studies. The effects of historical changes in indigenous demography and mobility upon forest composition remain, in particular, largely unexamined (but see Balée 1992b, 1993; Posey 1994, 1998; Heckenberger et al., 2003). The piedmont area described by Dudley in Chapter 7 has gone through successive ‘historical restructurings of space and power’. Dudley’s case study focuses on the Lecos, an indigenous group whose early ethnogenesis appears to be closely linked to their role as historical mediators of exchange between highland and lowland regions in preColumbian times. This strategic role was severely undermined in colonial and republican times: first, because of the relative disarticulation that

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ensued between the lowlands and uplands and, secondly, because outsiders – first Franciscan missionaries and then secular elites – seized control of those exchanges. This reconfiguration of economic, political and social relations entailed a transformation of ethnic boundaries and identities (see also Zent, this volume), as well as of landscapes. In particular, colonisation gave way to the expansion of anthropogenic grasslands and a contraction of forest areas and, concomitantly, to a reconfiguration of subsistence and ecological relations. Dudley’s chapter not only provides an instructive case study in the historical transformation of landscapes and ethnic identity, but also illustrates the extent to which the same historical processes are experienced and responded to differently in different locales, even within the same region and language group. This is illustrated by a discussion of two communities, one located in the pajonal, or grassland, and the other in the monte, or forest, each one having ‘distinct interactions with and impacts on local environments and identities, with attendant differences in environmental knowledge and material practices’. The historical contingency of environmental practices and knowledge underscores the extent to which care must be taken not to assume ethnoecological and ethnobotanical correspondences among speakers of the same language or members of the same ethnic group. This is especially the case in areas where people have become dislocated and separated in space, or in instances where different groups of people have experienced or negotiated different historical trajectories.

Place-making and Territoriality Several other papers in this volume are also attentive to the ways in which indigenous notions of self, place, space and territory have been shaped by the historical experience of movement and displacement and by concomitant changes in symbolic, political, economic and social organisation in the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992). Zent (Chapter 8) shows how Piraoa ethnic and territorial boundaries have shifted over the past five hundred years, reflecting a strategic balance between population, resources, land, labour, power and socio-economic ties. During pre-contact and early contact times, Piraoa were actively immersed in a dense network of multi-ethnic regional exchanges through trade and warfare, and their society was internally subdivided into small but welldefined subgroups, each occupying fairly distinct territories. An interplay of factors, including the depopulation of fluvial areas and the increase in ecological productivity following the arrival of steel tools, contributed to a period of ethnic assimilation and, eventually, to territorial expansion, which in turn was accompanied by a relaxation of competition for resources, a simplification of social structure and a loosening of ethnic boundaries. In contrast, post-war downriver migration, spatial concentration and

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demographic growth have led to heightened contact, intensified competition and conflicts over land and resources. This is, in turn, associated with the emergence of new, multiple and all-encompassing social, ethnic and territorial identities, in ways that mirror other groups and case studies included in this volume (Alexiades and Peluso, Athayde et al., Dudley and Micarelli, this volume). Rather than fixed, clearly demarcated or bounded entities, indigenous territories were often, and in some cases still are, loose, unbounded, fluid spaces defined through notions of social – as opposed to geographical – distance (Chaumeil and Chaumeil 1983; Rival 2002; Feather, this volume). As a collective effort to ‘identify with, occupy, use, and establish control over the specific parcel of their biophysical environment that serves as their homeland or territory’ (Little 2001: 4), territoriality relates to the material and symbolic needs that humans derive from the environment (Casimir 1992). Clearly, state expansion and the emergence of the state’s ‘administrative frontier’ (Chaumeil and Chaumeil 1983: 15) have major historical determinants in shaping those needs, and thus historically played a key role in indigenous territorialisations, over time. At a symbolic level, this process of territorialisation sometimes goes hand in hand with the development of particular forms of historical and ethnic consciousness, which in turn may reflect externally induced notions of ‘ancestral’ spatial fixity and social stasis. Dudley (this volume) notes how such static and essentialist presumptions have informed land reform legislation in Bolivia, ultimately undermining the effectiveness and viability of the land reform process. Feather (this volume) notes how contact with an expanding state and an extractive frontier composed of loggers and oil companies is reshaping Nahua conceptions of territory in ways that incorporate state language (laws) and views (maps) of space (see García 2005; Zent, this volume). Micarelli (Chapter 9) also highlights the workings of indigenous agency in appropriating and transforming state notions and mechanisms of territoriality. Among the Gente de Centro (Uitoto, Muinane, Bora, Andoke, Nonuy and Ocaina) in Amazonas, Colombia, a multi-ethnic sense of identity is forged through a shared historical and ritual consciousness, which has found a place amidst the political space created by the new Colombian constitution, with its recognition of indigenous rights to selfdetermination. The process of territorial ordering, part of the formal statedriven agenda to develop land-use zoning for the Colombian tropics, has been appropriated by the Gente de Centro as a way to create a new social, territorial and moral order, in which traditional forms of power and knowledge – exemplified by the maloca and the ritual use of coca and tobacco – are strategically combined with social mapping exercises and the language of environmental bureaucracy.

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In effect, then, processes of displacement and emplacement, with their concomitant dynamics of territorialisation, are powerful contexts in which to examine the historical, political, symbolic and material mechanisms through which ethnoecologies are constituted and negotiated. This in turn highlights the need to examine the links between people, places and the environment as an ongoing, profoundly political and symbolic, as well as material, process.

Social Change, Identity and Ethnoecological Processes The formation of ‘tribes’ (Fried 1975) amidst the expansion of states and markets has generated a complex interplay of spatial and ethnic fragmentation and integration (Ferguson and Whitehead 1992; Schwartz and Salomon 1999; Taylor 1999; Rubinstein 2001; Zent, this volume). The Nahua, for example (Feather, this volume), were once part of a broader Purús Panoan complex – which itself probably underwent previous successive processes of disintegration and reassembly. In other contrasting instances, different groups have coalesced into a single corporate entity: for example, Waraoan, Carib and Arawak groups living in the Orinoco Delta in early colonial times eventually assimilated, giving rise to today’s Warao (Heinen and García-Castro 2000). Through their demand for human labour, extractive booms created massive displacements of people, decimating and dismembering some indigenous societies while promoting certain forms of inter-ethnic exchange and mixing in others. Rubber bosses in particular transferred – often forcibly – large numbers of individuals from different ethnic backgrounds across vast distances (Micarelli, this volume). About two thousand indigenous people from a dozen different ethnic groups were brought from as far away as the Pastaza, Ecuador, and from northern Bolivia into the south-eastern Peruvian department of Madre de Dios, for example (Delboy y Dorado 1913). Over the following decades many of these detribalised indigenous peoples, often self-identifying as mestizos, acted as important intermediaries – sometimes intermarrying – with local indigenous groups such as the Ese Eja. Alexiades and Peluso (Chapter 10) discuss how the Ese Eja in Peru and Bolivia identify these ‘outsiders’ as key sources of valued ethnobotanical information, a curious inversion of the stereotyped view of indigenous peoples as sources of medicinal plant knowledge for ‘outsiders’. In effect, downriver migration has entailed a spatial, social, ecological and symbolic reorientation of Ese Eja society towards the regional market economy. While this transition has inevitably entailed the abandonment of many practices and much knowledge – particularly those linked to a mobile lifestyle with hunting and foraging as central activities – other kinds of environmental knowledge and practices have been acquired. This process of social and ecological change is manifested in the symbolic

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appropriation not only of the landscape (Alexiades 2005, in preparation) but also of individual and generic classes of plants. Chapter 11 illustrates another instance of externally led migration and ethnic mixing: the resettlement by the Brazilian government of most Kaiabi from their ancestral territory in the Tapajós to the Xingu indigenous park. Athayde et al. examine the ways in which Kaiabi basketry and textile weaving – which have recently become valuable market commodities and symbols of ethnic identity – have been transformed, both in terms of their meanings, and in the ways in which the technical and ritual knowledge and skills associated with their production are distributed, transmitted and valued. Despite the environmental constraints presented by Xingu for basket weavers, basketry and other Kaiabi social institutions have flourished over the past decades. The authors trace the broader political success of the Kaiabi, with which the renaissance of basketry is related, to social skills gained through their earlier contact with rubber-tappers, which allowed them to act as mediators – ‘culture brokers’ (Pratt 1992) – between the more isolated Xinguanos, the park authorities and NGOs. The combined effect of support from state and non-state agents over the years, a secure territorial base and the particular dynamics of indigenous and identity politics of Xingu has encouraged a process of cultural revitalisation, one in which basketry and weaving have become important symbols of Kaiabi ethnic identity. The group of dislocated Kaiabi, removed from their ancestral territory thus find themselves in the ironic, though not unusual, role of keepers of traditional Kaiabi culture, encouraging the more politically and socially marginalised Kaiabi groups still living in their ancestral territory into the political process of cultural revitalisation. Though significant, the number of native Amazonians resettled by extractivist bosses, missionaries or the state is small compared with the number of Africans who over a period of three centuries were forcibly resettled in order to feed America’s voracious agricultural economy. Five million people, many of them Yoruba from West Africa, were taken to Brazil alone. Interactions between diaspora Africans and Native Americans were historically widespread, often intense and profound, even if poorly documented and understood (Schwartz and Salomon 1999). Voeks (Chapter 12) provides an overview of mutual transformations in diet, medicine, ritual and landscapes that resulted from the largest forced diaspora in human history, discussing some of the exchanges of people, plants and knowledge. Drawing on examples from north-eastern Brazil, the epicentre of the African diaspora in South America, as well as from other parts of lowland South America, Voeks presents specific examples to show how African immigrants developed sizeable ethnobotanical repertories in relatively short temporal frames, thus supporting the notion upheld throughout the volume that knowledge acquisition can in effect be a highly dynamic process.

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Voeks also provides an enlightening discussion of the different means through which African forced migrants maintained their relationship with some of their Old World plants and developed new relationships with newly-encountered American plants. The ‘homogenisation’ of New World and Old World floras resulting from intentional and unintentional postColumbian exchanges in both directions provided Africans with some degree of familiarity – and hence ethnobotanical continuity – with their surrounding flora. Most of the plants currently used by the descendants of African slaves, however, are not the product of these post-Columbian exchanges, and Voeks reviews the different ways in which African slaves learned to interact with a new botanical universe: exchange with other social groups (indigenous as well as colonial), experimentation and application of their previously acquired knowledge to new contexts, as in utilising other species within familiar genera. This collection of chapters highlights the complex and often multidirectional effect that migration, displacement and social change have had upon indigenous social and ecological systems. Together, they suggest the need for a more nuanced use of the ‘de-culturation’ model implicit in many ethnoecologial accounts of social change, involving the transformation and innovation, as opposed to simply the erosion, of knowledge systems (Ellen et al. 2000). The view that complex or sophisticated ethnoecological systems are mainly, or most commonly, the product of deep historical emplacement and largely the products of a long-term empiricist enterprise, involving the gradual accumulation of knowledge through trial and error and involving transmission primarily across generations is, moreover, not warranted in these chapters (see Berkes et al. 2000). Rather, each in their own way, these authors underscore the extent to which the relationship between historical emplacement and ethnoecological processes provides a fertile area of study, deserving of future attention.

Final Considerations While always situated in time and place, Amazonian societies have rarely been situated in the same place over time. People’s movements are not, like billiard balls, the result of intersecting forces acting on passive objects. As a ‘means to an end in space, a mechanism for balancing activities across multiple life domains’ (Bell and Taylor 2004: 266), mobility has served, amidst Amazonia’s turbulent past and uncertain present, as an effective vehicle for social and ecological, individual and collective (dis)articulation. As a result, Amazonians have responded to forces such as state and market expansion in numerous, often conflicting, ways: ‘accommodation, resistance, flight, increased intertribal warfare and banditry’ (Brown and Fernandez 1992: 176–77).

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Through their spatial – and thus ecological and economic – placement and through their relationship with space over time, individuals and collectivities make deeply political choices, even if these are clearly subject to numerous and varying constraints. Unique lifestyles, social and territorial identities and resource management and utilisation knowledges, ideologies and strategies are associated with these choices, spaces and periods of time (Little 2001; see also Lefebvre 1991). The intensification in global flows, the interpenetration of local and global processes, the revolution in transportation and communications and the extent to which new kinds of communities and attachments to place can be ‘imagined’, all provide a novel social context for mobility, suggesting that we revise how migration is theorised and incorporated into studies of indigenous and folk ethnoecologies. Hornborg’s (2005) call for indigenous historical migrations in Amazonia to be understood in the context of exchange and ethnogenesis, as opposed to strictly in terms of moving people, echoes Papastergiadis’s (2000) view that migration entails the circulation not only of peoples, but also of resources, symbols and information, all along multiple paths: as Swedlund (1984: 2) notes, ‘migration is communication’. Moreover, mobility entails a crossing of many kinds of boundaries – political, geographical, ecological and cultural. Some of these are tangible, relatively stable and clearly marked, while others are not. Most frequently, different people will understand, conceptualise and even draw many of these intangible boundaries differently (Rubinstein 2001). The distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is one such boundary (Descola and Pálsson 1996; Viveiros de Castro 1996, 1998). Several authors in this volume show how Amazonians move seamlessly, both literally and figuratively, between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ spaces, in ways that reveal different understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘society’. This does not mean that the Nahua, Huaorani or ribereños do not distinguish between natural resources and manufactured resources, or between cities and forests, but, rather, that the actions and interactions with these are viewed in distinct social terms and as the product of engagement within a larger network, formed by a diverse assortment of spaces and beings (Heinen and García-Castro 1999; García-Castro 2000; Rival 2002). In other words, economy and ecology refer to overlapping domains, or to different aspects of the same process (Rival 2002). An edited collection focusing on processes related to spatial relocation and reorganisation runs the risk of overstating the prevalence, scale and effects of displacement and mobility of Amazonian societies, and homogenising what is in effect a very different series of historical processes over a geographically, socially and ecologically vast, diverse and complex region. Clearly, Amazonian societies not only reveal a history of disruption and change; there are also important instances of symbolic and

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material continuity between past and present forms (Whitehead 1999; Neves 2001: 280; Heckenberger 2005; Micarelli, this volume). At other times, there has been a reassembling of institutions, knowledge and practices in ways that either create the appearance of continuity or suggest its underlying existence. The post-conquest dissolution of large inter-ethnic regional networks into more atomised ethnic groups, for example, has undergone a series of historical reversions. Examples of this include the Arawakan multi-ethnic confederacies of the eighteenth century (Whitehead 1994), the rubber boom millenarian movements (Hill and Wright 1988; Veber 2003), the multi-ethnic territories and organisations discussed by Athayde et al., Zent and Micarelli (all in this volume), or, more recently, the emergent national and international panIndian political organisations that operate at regional, national and international levels (Whitehead 1994; Hill and Santos-Granero 2002).18 These observations all suggest that emplacement and continuity, like migration and disjuncture, be neither assumed nor left unexamined, but rather that they be ‘understood as a complex and contingent result of ongoing historical and political processes’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 4), and thus used to understand the contexts in which indigenous and folk ethnoecologies are continuously re-formed. In some instances it is the interplay between opposing processes and notions – stasis and change, fixity and movement, dispersion and concentration, urbanisation and deurbanisation, atomisation and integration, de-territorialisation and reterritorialisation – that generates particular ideas about self and place among subjects (Stewart and Strathern 2001; Alexiades 2005). In other instances, many of these same opposing processes and notions operate simultaneously, but at different levels. Thus, the trend among many indigenous societies towards collective sedentarisation and territorialisation is often accompanied by increased mobility and de-territorialisation at an individual level (McSweeney and Jokisch 2007). Similarly, the ongoing process of political revitalisation and ethnic integration noted above is, among the Tukanoans in the Vaupés, concomitantly and ironically leading to new processes of fragmentation – as evidenced in the attempt to draw clear-cut ethnic and territorial boundaries among Tukanoan language groups based on outsider views and understandings of what constitutes the ‘indigenous’ (Jackson 1995; Schwartz and Salomon 1999).

18. Burns (1995) draws a similar comparison between contemporary Mayan mobility and international migration and pre-conquest times, when pochteca (Aztec merchant-diplomats) commercial networks and travel in general in the Mayan world were not as controlled as they became following conquest. As travel has become easier and border-crossing more common, the movement across borders has generated a fluidity of identity, evident in pan-Mayanism and pan-Indianism.

28 | Miguel N. Alexiades

An increased awareness of the spatial and historical contingency, dynamism and fluidity of indigenous environmental knowledge and relations, however, in no way undermines the legitimacy of indigenous claims to land on the basis of historical occupation. Recognising that indigenous societies have, like all human societies, complex histories, which necessarily involve movement and displacement, is, as several authors in this volume note, an important step in the direction of recognising that, as open-ended systems, Amazonian societies have a right to their social reproduction within a matrix of historically evolving social and ecological relations. The historical reality of dynamism and movement does not cancel the profound emotional, symbolic and material links that people establish with place, the environment or the life forms within it, sometimes in relatively short time frames, or the obligation of governments to legally recognise and honour these.

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PART I CIRCULATIONS: MOBILITY, SUBSISTENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

CHAPTER 2

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani Ways of Knowing and Naming Plants LAURA RIVAL

Given the unprecedented loss of biological, linguistic and cultural diversity in the world today (Maffi 2001), the documentation of the biological and ecological knowledge of food collectors and crop planters has become a matter of urgency. Authors who have recognised the importance of documenting folk biology models in regions of high diversity (particularly in Amazonia) have called for a new approach to ethnobiology.1 It is not enough to document how things are named and how named things are classified (Kohn 2002; Lenaerts 2004), although such activities are still considered to be central to how people come to know nature (Berlin 1992). Local people know much more about nature than their classifications reflect (Atran 1999).

1. See, for instance, Nabhan (2001: 147): [S]alvage ethnobotany missions only scratch the surface of ‘indigenous knowledge about the world’ by simply recording indigenous names for plants and cataloguing their uses. Such descriptive, purely utilitarian ethnobotanical surveys hardly tell us anything about how ‘the natural world works’ from an indigenous perspective because of the assumption of some that ethnobotanical fieldwork is no more than the elicitation of ‘folk taxonomies,’ which therefore allow correlations between indigenous names for plants and Linnaean species. In this way, ethnobotanists mirror ‘biodiversity systematists,’ who ignore ecological interactions while attempting to find regions of high species richness … Commonly published inventories of useful plants named in native languages typically appear to be lacking any ecology or evolutionary context.

48 | Laura Rival

Another emerging debate concerns the relative ethnobiogical knowledge of cultivators and non-cultivators sharing the same biologically diverse ecosystem. For Berlin, who argues that systems of ethnobiological classifications ‘reflect not only the biological constraints of nature, but also the modifying processes of cultural history’ (Berlin 1992: 268), there is a correlation between form of subsistence and type of ethnobiological nomenclature. Ellen (1999), however, has challenged the view that hunter-gatherers, whose taxonomic classifications appear to be less complex than those of agriculturalists, have a poorer knowledge of their environment than the latter do. After having reviewed various explanations linking domestication to the growth of ethnobiological taxonomies, I present a brief summary of Huaorani ecological knowledge. I then turn to two recent ethnobotanical surveys conducted in Huaorani land, and to some peculiarities of their plant naming system. What appears to characterise Huaorani plant taxonomy is not so much the shallowness of its nomenclature, but the central importance given to ecological relations and phenological criteria. I end with a few general remarks on knowledge, language and the environment in lowland South America.

The Role of Domestication in the Evolution of Ethnobiological Categories The development of agricultural systems is still considered today as one of the most significant moments of human evolution. As mentioned by Alexiades in the introduction, Bellwood’s ‘early farming dispersal hypothesis’, which relies on a synthesis of data from archaeology, linguistics and genetics, attempts to reconstruct the ways in which farming developed when early agricultural populations spread through various regions of the world formerly occupied by hunter-gatherers – killing the latter off, or converting them to the new food production system (Bellwood 2005: 273). In a similar vein, Berlin has long been interested in the impact of domestication and agricultural development on the evolution of ethnobiological categories (Berlin 1992: 260–90). In his summary of early research on hunter-gatherer taxonomies, Berlin (1992: 275–76) 2 stresses 2. The authors discussed by Berlin include: Turner’s (1974) studies carried out among various north-west coast Indian populations of Canada; Whistler’s (1976) study of Patwin speakers in California; Fowler’s (1972) comparative work among the Numic peoples of the Great Basin (USA); Waddy’s (1988) monograph on the Anindilyakwa of Groote Eylandt (Australia); Hunn’s various publications on the Sahapatin of Washington State (especially Hunn 1977); and, to illustrate the particular case of a once-foraging people, Hays’s (1983) discussion of Ndumba taxonomy (New Guinea).

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani | 49

what appears to be a common trait in these systems: the paucity – if not the absence – of taxa of specific rank. These early studies seemed to suggest that the ethnobiological inventories of foragers contain significantly fewer named categories of plants and animals than those of cultivators. Given the predominance of evolutionary thinking and the paramount place accorded to the Neolithic revolution in anthropology and archaeology, these studies were soon used to propose a new evolutionary typology. Brown (1985), for instance, compared the folk taxonomies of thirty-nine foraging societies, and found that they differ from those of small-scale agriculturalists in two major respects: ‘While foragers possess sizable inventories of labelled biological classes, the inventories of smallscale agrarian groups tend to be much larger. In addition, binomial names are very common in folk taxonomies of cultivators but very rare in those of hunters and gatherers’ (Brown 1985: 52). In a subsequent publication, Brown (1986) explored the evolutionary significance of the positive correlation between total number of taxa and form of subsistence, and concluded that the growth of ethnobiological nomenclature is driven by utilitarian needs linked to agricultural development. Because population density is much higher among small-scale cultivators, when crop failure occurs, he speculated, they must rely on wild plants and consequently be less selective than hunter-gatherers about what is edible or not. The exploitation of both domesticated and wild plants and animals by cultivators is far more intensive than the exploitation of wild plants and animals by hunter-gatherers. Consequently, cultivators develop greater interest in and knowledge of natural history than hunter-gatherers do. Berlin (1992: 283) agrees with Brown that farmers’ knowledge of plants and animals is vastly greater than that of non-cultivators, and that ‘domestication leads to the creation of folk specific taxa’ (Berlin 1992: 286). However, his preference for a cognitive approach to environmental knowledge3 leaves him unconvinced by Brown’s utilitarian argument. Non-cultivators are as good observers as cultivators of the perceptually distinctive features of form and behaviour in plant and animal species, but their curiosity is ‘passive,’ or at least not as ‘active’ as that of observers ready to modify the species they observe, and keen to create new varieties (Berlin 1992: 290). Furthermore, Berlin is well aware of the difficulties involved in relating the presence or absence of folk species to the form of subsistence (Berlin 1992: 98–99, 285–90). The first problem is that we know a great deal more about the ethnobiological classification systems of 3. ‘The human observer, psychologically endowed with innate capacities for categorization, almost spontaneously perceives the readily recognizable patterns inherent in the ways that evolution has worked. This unconscious recognition of nature’s plan ultimately emerges as the cognitive structure that we know as a society’s system of ethnobiological classification.’

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horticulturalists than we do about those of non-agricultural peoples (Berlin 1992: 274). The second problem is the degree of acculturation of the foraging societies included in these comparative studies, and the third one the relative paucity of species in the environments of those that have been studied. To compare the classificatory systems of traditional subsistence horticulturists living in areas of high biological diversity with those of acculturated hunter-gatherers living in regions where biodiversity is not as remarkable will not lead to conclusive results (Berlin 1992: 98–99). While maintaining the thesis that the knowledge of gardeners is more likely to be lexically encoded than that of foragers, Berlin thus acknowledges that his thesis can only be demonstrated through the comparative description of the ethnobiological knowledge of a non-cultivating population occupying the same highly biodiverse habitat as a population of cultivators. It is such a comparison that Balée (1994, 1996) undertook in his study of two Tupi-Guarani groups sharing the same forest environment in the Amazon region. He found that the horticultural Ka’apor, who create sizeable light gaps for their dwellings and gardens,4 exert greater influence on the forest than their foraging neighbours, the Guajá. The plant nomenclature of the Guajá, who exploit, use and name fewer resources in their habitat than the Ka’apor do, is less sophisticated than the latter’s. Let us examine three of the systematic comparisons offered by Balée in his various publications. Table 2.1 summarises the comparison of Ka’apor and Guajá folk specific names for nine non-domesticated species of Inga.5 Whereas the Ka’apor linguistically differentiate five of the nine species, the Guajá use a single name for all of them. Another major difference between the Ka’apor and Guajá plant nomenclature is that whereas the Ka’apor linguistically differentiate domesticates from phylogenetically related non-domesticates, the Guajá lump them together under the same generic name (Balée 1996: 480). For example, the Ka’apor use the terms kaka’i for domesticated cacaos and kakaran’i (literally, ‘cacao-false’) for non-domesticated ones, including Theobroma speciosum. By contrast, the Guajá use the same generic term ako’o’i for all the cacaos (Table 2.2). More generally, the Ka’apor have nine times more folk specific plant names than the Guajá (Balée 1996: 478), and the plant nomenclature of the former is closer to the Linnaean system than the plant nomenclature of the latter (Balée 1994: 333–62). These comparisons led Balée to conclude that, while the Guajá know their environment, ‘not all of this knowledge is so important as to be compartmentalized in encyclopaedic entries of that part 4. It is in these cultivated and formally cultivated areas that the highest rates of botanical diversity were found. 5. Taken from Table 8.1 in Balée (1994: 205).

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani | 51 Table 2.1 Comparison of Ka’apor and Guajá names for nine species of Inga. Botanical Name

Ka’apor Name

Guajá Name

Inga alba

ɨŋašiši'ɨ

čičipe'ɨ

I. auristellae

ɨŋaperë'ɨ

čičipe'ɨ

ɨŋahu'ɨ

čičipe'ɨ

I. fagifolia

kaŋwaruhuɨŋa

čičipe'ɨ

I. falcistipula

kaŋwaruhuɨŋa

čičipe'ɨ

I. heterophylla

ɨŋaperë'ɨ

čičipe'ɨ

I. marginata

ɨŋaperë'ɨ

čičipe'ɨ

I. myriantha

ɨŋaperë'ɨ

čičipe'ɨ

I. rubiginosa

tapi'iriŋa'ɨ

čičipe'ɨ

I. capitata Miq.

Source: Balée 1994: 205

Table 2.2. Comparison of Ka’apor and Guajá names for three species of Theobroma. Botanical Name Theobroma grandiflorum T. speciosum T. cacao

Ka’apor Name

Guajá Name

kipi-hu-ɨ

ako’o’ɨ

kaka-ran-‘ɨ

ako’o’ɨ

kaka

ako’o’ɨ

Source: Balée 1996

of the lexicon concerning the plants’ (Balée 1994: 206). Furthermore, he attributes the relative paucity of subgeneric data in the Guajá’s plant nomenclature to historical factors that have influenced their mode of subsistence. Whereas the Ka’apor have continued to use the domesticated, semi-domesticated and wild plants of their proto-Tupí-Guaraní ancestors, the Guajá, who reverted to foraging, lost the use of many of these plant species, as well as the specific terms to name them. For Balée, as for Brown (1986), ‘[W]ithout horticulture, there is generally less need to know the specific properties, potential uses or biological principles of a great range of plants, both domesticated and not’ (Balée 1994: 222). Following Brown, Balée thus attempts to provide a model that correlates rise of agriculture and development of ethnobiological categories, with the caveat that what is offered in the Amazonian context

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is a general typology of cultural devolution from cultivators to foragers, in which non-Tupí-Guaraní groups such as the Huaorani are included. Using Davis and Yost’s (1983a, b) brief description of the Huaorani pharmacopoeia, which contains only thirty-five medicinal plants (many with magical, rather than chemical, properties), Balée argues that the Huaorani inventory is relatively poorer than the Ka’apor’s, which contains at least 112 medicinal plants (Balée 1994: 113–15).6 In his view, the Huaorani’s relatively poor inventory validates the hypothesis that trekkers exhibit a truncated ethnobotany related to ‘a regression in knowledge due to the Conquest and its many aftershocks’ (Balée 1994: 112–15). As I shall argue in the next section, the actual breadth of Huaorani plant knowledge is lost in such comparisons. The greatest challenge with any attempt to relate ethnobiological classifications and forms of subsistence in Amazonia is that, as some authors observed long ago, plants that have not been fully domesticated remain important food sources, in fact, as important in some societies as domesticates (Lévi-Strauss 1950). Moreover, there is great fluidity in this region of the world between horticulture and foraging (Leeds 1961). This has led recent commentators such as Bellwood, for instance, to concede that ‘the transitions through time and space between hunting-andgathering and farming are rarely as sharp in the New World as in the Old’ (Bellwood 2005: 146). Moreover, there is another explanation of why the knowledge of agricultural peoples in areas of high biodiversity is more likely to be lexically encoded than that of non-agricultural peoples: that proposed by Ellen (1999). Ellen agrees with Berlin, Brown and Balée that subsistence specialisation plays an important role in shaping a culture’s folk biological knowledge. However, once formal – that is, linguistic – knowledge is distinguished from substantive knowledge, it becomes clear 6. For Davis and Yost (see also Davis 1997), the Huaorani are at once ‘exceptionally skilled naturalists’ and ‘restricted pharmacologists’. These authors were surprised, for example, to find that the Huaorani use no more than thirty-five medicinal plants, and that, moreover, many of these plants are used for their sympathetic rather than chemical properties – that is, according to magical beliefs that seek to achieve an effect by performing an associated action or using an associated thing, such as, for instance, when a plant with leaves shaped like a stingray is sought out to treat stingray wounds. Davis and Yost also noted with surprise that a plant species commonly used by Amazonian Indians to treat fever, Brunfelsia grandiflora ssp. schultesii, is only used as a source of wood by the Huaorani. ‘It seemed incredible to [us] that a people who had such a profound knowledge of the forest would have failed to recognize the medicinal properties of the plant’ (Davis 1997: 290). The two authors contrasted the Huaorani ‘limited and highly selective use of medicinal plants’ with that of ‘neighboring tribes such as the Canelo Quichua, a people who have been repeatedly ravaged by Western diseases for hundreds of years’ (Davis 1997: 292).

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that the knowledge required for effective low-intensity agriculture may actually be smaller than the knowledge required for hunting and gathering (Ellen 1999: 107). There is no necessary one-to-one correspondence between the way in which people label plants and codify knowledge and the actual knowledge they deploy in subsistence activities. Rather than treating the ethnobiological knowledge of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists diachronically, it might be more advisable to focus on social determinants, such as modes of communication and learning. Non-agricultural peoples living in smaller and less authoritarian groups than sedentary cultivators have less opportunity to share, organise and label their collective knowledge of the biologically rich environment (Ellen 1999: 91–92). Ellen’s solution, which avoids both utilitarian and cognitive premises, sheds new light on empirical evidence not easily fitted into Berlin’s nomenclature growth model. Morris (1976) and Gardner (1966), who worked among South Indian hunter-gatherers (the Hill Pandaram and the Paliyan), both remarked that their taxonomies of the natural world exhibit considerable variation. The knowledge these nomadic people have of their environment is at once utilitarian and idiosyncratic. Morris speaks of ‘individualistic cultures’ relying ‘upon an idiosyncratic ordering of reality’ and Gardner of ‘memorate knowledge’ entirely gained through direct personal experience. The eight foraging cultures subsequently compared by Gardner7 share the same characteristics. Their members are all skilled observers, whose environmental knowledge is, all at once, highly sophisticated, highly empirical, and highly personal. In all eight cultures, Gardner (2001: 14) found very little explicit verbal instruction. Direct individual observation, encouraged from an early age on, is far more important. The cultivation by each individual of a large and reliable body of factual data is particularly valued, while expertise is denied and authority resented (Gardner 2001: 18). Finally, the absence of systematisation and formalisation does not preclude communication or common understanding, as individuals compensate for the high diversity of terms and concepts with intense interpersonal sharing. Individuals simply spend a great deal of time checking each other’s personal knowledge and way of labelling. In the rest of this chapter, I propose to examine some aspects of Huaorani plant nomenclature that seem to share some characteristics with Gardner’s findings.

7. The Paliyan of South India are compared with two different Dene groups (one in Canadian subarctic, the other in Alaska), the !Kung of Botswana, the Yup’ik of the western Alaskan coast, the Aka pygmies and the Ulgunigamiut Inuit.

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Trekking and Knowing the Forest For hundreds of years, and until the mid-1960s, the Huaorani have lived as forest hunters and gatherers in the heart of the Ecuadorean Amazon (Rival 2002). Residential mobility was high, albeit confined to particular areas. Small groups related through kinship and residence moved continuously between their main residences, built on hilltops, and smaller houses and shelters dispersed throughout their hunting territories. The overall population was divided into dispersed networks of intermarrying longhouses separated by vast stretches of unoccupied forest. For greater security and autonomy, house groups tended to isolate themselves from those with whom no marriage partners were exchanged. Using only blowpipes and spears, they primarily hunted monkeys, as well as some birds and white-lipped peccaries. Fishing, largely restricted to creeks, was a marginal activity involving the use of fish poison and lances. Gathered fruit formed an important part of daily food intake. Located between the Napo and the Curaray Rivers, and extending from the Andean foothills to the Peruvian border, the Huaorani territory has no marked seasons (Figure 2.1). Annual precipitation averages 3500 mm and is more or less evenly distributed throughout the year. Atmospheric humidity

Figure 2.1. Huaorani territory.

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is constant and high (80 to 90 per cent), and the soils, renowned as the least fertile in Ecuador, are permanently moist. On the western side of the Huaorani territory, numerous streams and creeks cut across rugged terrain featuring sizeable hills (300 to 1000 metres above sea level) to form the Curaray’s headwaters. On the eastern side, rivers such as the Tiputiní and the Yasuní meander through more marshy lowlands at 280 metres above sea level. But, even there, 90 per cent of the forest grows on well-drained terra firme (non-flooded upland). Terra firme consists mainly of heavily dissected terraces, where differences in level may be as high as 40 metres. The Huaorani live in one of the hot spots of biodiversity (Gentry 1988), and, as I shall argue below, it is clear that their extensive ethnobotanical inventory reflects the high number of species found in their territory. Throughout Huaorani territory and within the Yasuní National Park, biodiversity is exceptionally high, although differences exist between lower eastern and higher western forests, the former being less biodiverse than the latter (Ter Steege et al. 2000).8 Game is found in abundance as soon as one leaves the immediate vicinity of human settlements (Rival 2002). No more than 600 at the time of contact in the 1950s, the population now counts around 1,850 people, of whom 60 per cent are under sixteen. The increased presence of oil companies in Huaorani territory has led to dynamic and complex population movements in recent years, resulting in the creation of new communities near oilfields. Despite their recent riverine adaptation and accelerated process of sedentarisation, the Huaorani have remained highly mobile forest trekkers, who continue to move between longhouses built on hilltops, secondary residences and hunting shelters dispersed throughout their territory. Traditional foraging has been somewhat undermined by the introduction of garden crops, shotguns, dogs and Western medicine, as well as the use of air transport and radio contacts. Petroleum development, the expansion of

8. In a fascinating study documenting floristic diversity in north-west Amazonia, Pitman et al. (2001) investigated the composition and structure of two tree communities located at the western margin of the Amazon basin, the Yasuní National Park in Ecuador (where the Huaorani hunt and gather) and the Manu National Park in Peru. Pitman et al. found that, despite significant differences between these two moist lowland forests (Yasuní is considerably more diverse than Manu at three different spatial scales), their tree communities are surprisingly similar in composition and structure. Most notably, species in a few key families consistently dominate these two forests, including the palm Iriartea deltoidea, which dominates both forests at identical densities. This led him to conclude that, although undeniably complex and diverse, these forests are far from unpredictable. Consequently, a person able to identify 100 tree species can identify a large proportion of the standing timber, even when these forests contain more than ten times as many species (Pitman 2000: 17).

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agriculture, tourism and the creation of airstrips and schools have all had an impact on settlement patterns. Traditional longhouses are on the wane. However, despite changing settlement patterns and new hunting technology, hunting returns are still high. Collared peccaries (Tayassu tajacu) and rodents such as agouti (Agouti paca) and capybara (Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris) are hunted much more often than monkeys. With increased sedentarisation and riverine adaptation, fishing has become as important as hunting. Fruits remain an essential part of the diet, particularly plantain, banana and peach palm (Bactris gasipaes, Arecaceae). Other important palm fruits include ungurahua (Oenocarpus bataua, Arecaceae) and morete (Mauritia flexuosa, Arecaceae). The fruits of numerous species of palms, trees or epiphytes are also regularly harvested and eaten. Although manioc cultivation has intensified, it largely retains its erratic character, with a few families cultivating fast-growing varieties that are widely shared upon harvest. In the twenty or so villages where the population has now agglomerated, families have added packaged food to their daily meals. Rarely purchased or individually owned, this food, like all trade goods, is widely circulated and subject to intense ‘demand-sharing’ (Rival 2002).

Huaorani Ecological Knowledge As discussed in Clement et al. (this volume), Huaorani people actively participate through cycles of residential mobility, foraging activities and food consumption in the concentration of useful forest species. They are experts in reading signs of past human activity in the forest, and quick to ascribe forest alterations to the intervention of a wide range of actors. As they see it, the forest exists to the extent that humans in the past lived and worked there. By doing so, they have produced the forest as it is today for the benefit and use of the living. Trekking for the Huaorani is more than a mundane activity linked to the pragmatics of subsistence or to environmental and historical adaptation. Trekking constitutes their way of reproducing society across generations (Rival 2002).9 Notwithstanding their relatively restricted pharmacopoeia, the Huaorani demonstrate a remarkably accurate knowledge of pollination, dispersal and animal behaviour. Hunters can predict where animals are, which path they will take or where they will spend the night. As Ellen (1999) has shown in the South-East Asian context, the knowledge required for effective hunting and gathering has to be exceptionally extensive, even if it is not always formally codified. I have field diary entries filled with

9. One could say that their culture predisposes them to be ‘historical ecologists’ (Balée and Erickson 2006).

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observations on the Huaorani’s familiarity with the ecology of the forest’s higher strata, which seems as developed as their understanding of what goes on at ground level. The Quichua whose sisters or daughters have married Huaorani men, and who often go hunting with their affines, or the Quichua teachers who live and work in Huaorani villages endlessly comment on the Huaorani’s superior hunting skills, which they attribute to the latter’s unique and intimate knowledge of the rainforest environment, as well as to their imputed magical connections with jaguars. The Huaorani’s close identification with the forest world is thus constructed as much from without as it is experienced from within. Every researcher and tourist guide I know has remarked on their intense interest in and knowledge of the flowering and fruiting cycles of all edible forest plants, as well as of the preferred foods of most forest animals. Wade Davis also remarked in his collected souvenirs on the depth of Huaorani ecological knowledge (Davis 1997: 276–77).10 Their extensive botanical knowledge confirms Ellen’s thesis regarding the substantive ethnobiological knowledge of hunter-gatherers. As mentioned above, Ellen (1999), like Berlin and the other authors discussed earlier, thinks that foragers in biologically rich areas do not necessarily develop generic inventories of greater size than those of foragers living in biologically poorer regions. Whether this conclusion equally applies to the Huaorani remains to be examined.

Huaorani Plant Classification – a Preliminary Analysis As a social anthropologist with no formal training in botany or ecology, what I know of Huaorani ethnobiological knowledge is based on observation, anecdotal evidence and intuitive inference. It is therefore with some gratification that I refer here to two recent ethnobotanical studies that confirm my interpretation of Huaorani understandings of the natural world. Cerón and Montalvo (1998) surveyed 625 species in total, all of 10. Wepe, like all the Waorani I met, turned out to be not only a keen observer but an exceptionally skilled naturalist. He recognized such conceptually complex phenomena as pollination and fruit dispersal, and he understood and could accurately predict animal behavior. He could anticipate the flowering and fruiting cycles of all edible forest plants, list the preferred foods of most forest animals, and identify with precision the places where they slept. It was not just the sophistication of his interpretations of biological relationships that impressed me; it was the way he classified the natural world. He often could not give you the name of a plant, for every part – roots, fruits, leaves, bark – had its own name. Nor could he simply label a fruit tree without listing all the animals and birds that depended on it. His understanding of the forest precluded the narrow confine of nomenclature. Every useful plant had not only an identity but a story: a pungent leaf used for fever, a poison capable of killing fish in half a mile of river, a solanum first planted by the jaguar, another employed as a treatment for scorpion bites (my emphasis).

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which have a Huaorani name, and very often more than one (see below), as well as some use, although the use is sometimes marginal, such as ‘can be used as firewood’ (414 species).11 Of these species 402 correspond to alluvial forest, 302 to primary high forest, thirty-eight to garden plots, twenty-seven to fallow forest and eleven to riverbanks.12 Mondragón and Smith’s (1997) study is less scientific and less extensive (109 species registered), but in many ways more insightful, as their research goal was to inventory plants that the Huaorani define as the most useful in their daily lives.13 The plants in the collection have sixty-six uses relating to artefact making and fifty-one relating to healing and health. Thirty are used as food, sixteen for ornamental purposes and eleven for ritual or ceremonial purposes.14 Both Cerón and Montalvo and Mondragón and Smith remark on the Huaorani’s ability to locate flowering and fruiting trees. Cerón and Montalvo mention the Huaorani’s great ability to climb trees and inspect treetops. Despite obvious methodological shortcomings (see footnote 1), these authors collected ethnobotanical data in the most ‘natural’ conditions: that is, walking in the forest with Huaorani collaborators. All remarked on the depth and salience of Huaorani ecological knowledge. All were equally struck by their collaborators’ unique way of identifying plants. Despite the constraints and limitations of narrow questioning, Huaorani informants could not bring themselves to name a plant without placing it back within its ecological context. Cerón, Mondragón and various other botanists told me that one of the most frustrating aspects of these ethnobotanical surveys was to have to record simply plant names, when so much else was being explained by indigenous collaborators. Cerón and Montalvo, who studied

11. There were 409 species identified primarily as food for mammals and 384 as food for birds; 150 species were identified as food for humans and 102 as having medicinal properties (Cerón and Montalvo 1998: 9). It cannot be overstressed that all the species collected by Cerón and Montalvo were named and used by the Huaorani. In fact, all plants in their environment are named and used directly or indirectly. By compiling all the plant names (including variants) reported by Cerón and Montalvo, Mondragón and Smith, Alarcón, Rival and Davis and Yost, I have reached the total figure of 1,330 names. More research is needed to determine how many of these constitute primary folk biological taxa. 12. Of these, 408 species are tree species, sixty-four treelets, forty grasses, thirtytwo vines, twenty-one creepers, sixteen lianas, twelve herbaceous treelets, and eight parasite trees (Cerón and Montalvo 1998: 22). 13. Interestingly, of these 109 species, only forty-one are also included in Cerón and Montalvo’s inventory. The collection was made in four different communities (Bataboro, Ñoneno, Bameno and Tigüino) and the forests surrounding them (Mondragón and Smith 1997: 21, 189). 14. No check has been made in these comparisons for synonyms.

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani | 59

the ethnobotany of several other Amazonian societies, noted that the number of wild species used by the Huaorani as plant food is the highest recorded for the Amazon basin.15 Furthermore, they indicate that, although name variation is surprisingly high, all their informants used the same nomenclature parameters to name plants. Although the comparative material that would allow us to draw a systematic comparison of the plant nomenclature of the Huaorani and that of their closest horticulturalist neighbours, the Napo Runa Quichua, is not yet available,16 the existing data, no matter how patchy, indicate that the Huaorani use many folk specific names, at least as many as the Ka’apor do. For the genus Theobroma, we can see that the Huaorani differentiate non-domesticated species from domesticated ones. 17 A distinctive aspect of the Huaorani plant naming system as it emerges from the studies of Cerón and Montalvo and Mandragón and Smith is that different names are often given for the same tree species (see Tables 2.3 and 2.4). Most often, once synonyms are eliminated, a tree will have only two names: one generic and one specific. For instance, many tree species with removable bark belonging to the family Annonaceae and used in the fabrication of barkcloth are called oñetahue (also spelt oñatahue or uñetahue from oñe, ‘bark’, and ahue, ‘trunk’ or ‘tree’) and something more specific. Crematosperma gracilipes, for instance, is called oñetahue and muncabatahue (or muncapata). Similarly, a number of species belonging to the family Lauraceae are named ocatoe (also spelt ocatohue, ocatahue or ocatue, from ocata, ‘calabash’, and ahue, ‘trunk or tree’), and something else.18 Another example is Pouteria bangii, called ontogamo or meñimo. In some cases, it appears that names encode habitat specifications. For instance, in the family Chrysobalanaceae, species from the genus Hirtella and the genus Licania appear to be named according to whether they grow in alluvial or high (hilltop) forest. This also appears to be the case for the genus Xylopia and the genus Guattaria in the family Annonaceae, as summarised in Table 2.5. To recapitulate, many tree species are known by at least two different vernacular names (six names for a single species is not uncommon), particularly in the families Burseraceae and Myristicaceae. This clearly needs further investigation. At this stage, there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that the number of names increases with either the use

15. Out of the 625 species listed, 409 were named as food for mammals, 384 as food for birds and 150 as food for humans. 16. The Huaorani names have been left as spelt by informants. There are obvious synonyms. Quichua names provided here are taken from Lescure et al. (1987). 17. Data provided by Rocío Alarcón, personal communication, June 2000. 18. However, Aniba hostmanniana is called ocatoe and guememoyibe (or guememoyihue); but Aniba guianensis, aff. Aniba hostmanniana, and Aniba sp. are simply called ocatoe.

60 | Laura Rival Table 2.3. Huaorani and Quichua names for twenty-one species of Inga. Botanical Name

Huaorani Name

Quichua Name

Inga acreana

anganahue, ebenbahue, mimontan

chunda pacai

I. acuminata

mimuntan, mimuntahue

pilingas, nina pacai

I. alba

anganahue, ebenbahue

sacha pacai

I. auristellae

mimoncahue, mimontan

pilingas, quina pacai

I. bourgonii

ebenbahue, behuetempoye

sacha pacai

I. capitata

mimontun, tuica aun, huehuetenpuyo, aahue, auñabo

poroto caspi, rumi pacai

I. chartacea

mimontan, hueibahue, mimuntahue

sacha pacai

I. coruscans

ebenban

sacha pacai

I. densiflora

nomonebe, ehueban

machetona pacai

I. edulis (introduced) ago, sampi (Shuar generic term for Inga)

coto pacai, turo pacai

I. leiocalycina

goihwagahue, noyhuagahue

sacha pacai

I. oerstediana

gontocan, contacahue

barizo pacai

I. punctata

noyhuagahue, oohue

canashi pacai

I. ruiziana

viriquiu

vaca pacai

I. sertulifera

au

sacha pacai

I. spectabilis

paven, anawenta

castella pacai, machetona pacai

I. tessmannii, aff.

huamuncahue

sacha pacai

I. thibaudiana

tecanamue

bariza pacai

I. umbellifera

ñuygüahue, tuhuicahue

pilingas

I. vismiifolia

igüabahue

sacha pacai

Inga sp.

begoguetempoe, ihua and ahue (Cerón and Montalvo collection) iwaao, ewemaowenemengo and hauwae (Davis and Yost collection), huerekeonhue, ahuatanghue and ahuatahue (Mondragón and Smith collection)

quillu pacai

Sources: Cerón and Montalvo 1998, Cerón, personal communication, September 2005.

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani | 61 Table 2.4. Huaorani and Quichua names for seven species of Theobroma. Huaorani Names

Quichua Names

Herrania nitida

bonguinca

cambig, cambia

H. nycterodendron

buikahue

cambig, cambia

Sterculia apeibophylla

bukahue

yacu puscala

S. colombiana

bukayahue

puscalan, acatuyo yura

Species of Wild Cacao

Species of Semi-domesticated and domesticated cacao Theobroma glauca

tuveraca, tuverancahue

sacha cacao

Theobroma sp.

tëpëña

sacha cacao

T. subincana

tepenca, tepencahue, pepencahue

puca cacao

T. bicolor (introduced by missionaries)

cupehuenca, cupemuenca

patas

T. cacao (introduced by missionaries)

cupehuenca, cupemuenca

sacha cacao

Sources: Cerón and Montalvo 1998, Cerón, personal communication, September 2005.

Table 2.5. Huaorani and Quichua names for plants growing in alluvial and high forests. Botanical Name

Huaorani Name (High Forest)

Huaorani Name (Alluvial Forest)

Hirtella triendra

guiñamuncahue

ayamuñihue, amungagive, amungabecamo

Hirtella excelsa and Licania gracilipes

meñingohue

—-

Xylopia sericea

yimatue

uñetahue

Guatteria multivenia

guinogohue

uñetahue, numatahue, ihuamagueme, begoe

Source: Cerón and Montalvo 1998

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made of a particular species or its area of distribution. The only strong correlation I could establish on the basis of the data collected by Cerón and Montalvo is that species with more names tend to be species found in either alluvial or both high and alluvial forests. Tree species exclusively found in high forests tend to receive only one name. A final characteristic, the encoding of ecological information, while being fairly common, applies most especially to culturally significant species, such as Bactris gasipaes or Oenocarpus bataua. Plants are named contextually, in relation to the state of regrowth of the forest patch in which they are found, or in relation to their own growth and maturation status. For Rocío Alarcón (footnote 17), an Ecuadorian ethnobotanist who has worked with various indigenous populations, it is clear that the Huaorani classificatory system is unusual in specifying the plant’s current developmental state, that is, whether the plant is immature; adult and flowering; adult and fruiting; or adult but sterile, and so forth. The plant name may also indicate whether the fruit are ripe or not. Each part of the plant and each phase of growth and fructification receives a distinct name. The more the plant is used, the more complete the set of names. For example, an ungurahua (Oenocarpus bataua) palm encountered in the forest will be named petohue if it is an adult palm, not currently bearing fruit. If it bears fruit, it will be referred to as petomo. If the palm is just about to start the fructification cycle, it will be called petoyepo. If it is a young, immature palm, it will be called petoyo. It the leaves are just coming out and opening up, it will be called petocagi. And so forth.19 These examples illustrate the fact that an individual plant is not considered simply as the mere, abstract representative of a particular species.20 Rather, it is treated as an individual member of a class belonging to a specific environment and as a specific living organism undergoing a continuous process of change. This is why phenology is so important in Huaorani folk biology. Going back to the contrast between the classification systems of sedentary horticulturalists and those of huntergatherers, it is now possible to argue that the Huaorani, although much more mobile and far less interested in agriculture than the Ka’apor, have developed an ethnobotanical knowledge of equal richness. Unlike the Guajá, they have not lost specific terms for different species in the same genus, nor are they prone to indulge in taxonomic and nomenclatural lumping. Their botanical nomenclature expresses phenological states and 19. Similarly, a peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) will be called yengmokahue if it is very young; tehue if it is slightly older (the stem fibres are still relatively soft, in contrast to dagenkahue, the mature palm with hardwood); and tehuemo when it starts fruiting. 20. Although the illustrations given in this chapter concern trees, the argument applies equally to the classification of shrubs.

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani | 63

ecological relations formally, and exhibits significant interpersonal variation (Gardner 2001). Such variation in a small, highly mobile population inhabiting a highly diverse environment requires further reflection and further investigation. We need to ask why some species seem to be known by different names, while others do not. Is there a relationship between name variation and morphology? For instance, are morphospecies lumped together? Is name variation a function of the difficulty of differentiating species on the basis of visual cues? Is there a relationship between name variation and dialectical differences? Or unevenness in knowledge distribution? Or use? This preliminary analysis has been offered for discussion on the understanding that it is highly provisional. Further research is needed to provide a systematic account of Huaorani ethnobotany, in particular to establish whether name variation is more often caused by dialectal differences, substantial ecological differences between the various regions making up Huaorani land, the phenological state of the plant, or other factors. It would be interesting also to examine the density and distribution of key tree species across all the forest types between the Rivers Napo and Tigre, and see whether their shared properties has led to the selection of one single name for the different and substitutable species encountered by mobile communities passing through a highly diverse environment at regular intervals. Furthermore, we need to know more about the mechanisms by which native Amazonians and western scientists experience and cope with the complexities of tropical ecosystems.

Mobile People and Megadiverse Plant Communities I provided in this chapter a precursory examination of a domain of Huaorani cultural knowledge – ethnobotany – which I could not properly analyse previously for lack of sufficient data. Such data are now partly available, thanks to the work of several Ecuadorian botanists and biologists. Much more research is needed to produce a full account of Huaorani ethnobiology, but the information currently available is sufficient to highlight various features that may be shared by other northwest Amazonian cultures. I offered some evidence to support the hypothesis that the Huaorani system of plant classification exhibits a linguistically codified knowledge that gives precedence to ecological relations over purely taxonomic or classificatory relations. This hypothesis requires, as I argued in the first section of this chapter, a new way of understanding the correlation between agricultural development and the growth of plant nomenclature in a region of the world characterised by high biological diversity and lack of clear boundaries between foraging and horticulture.

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After a brief ethnographic summary, I mentioned some of the most obvious methodological problems relating to the analysis of ethnobotanical data (that is, Huaorani tree names) recorded by botanists and ecologists during biological surveys directed at the study of the dominance and distribution of tree species in upper Amazonian forests. The two studies on which I mainly based this preliminary analysis stress the existence of a crosscultural agreement in folk taxonomic systems and recognise the importance of knowledge specialisation, particularly knowledge specialisation in the context of subsistence activities. In continuation, I discussed various features of Huaorani tree taxonomy, and showed the cultural significance of ecological and biocultural interactions. This approach allowed me to suggest that the psychological salience of ecological properties, for instance the contrast between high and alluvial forest or the importance given to phenological states, is formally expressed at the level of the lexicon. There has been considerable debate in the literature concerning the relationship between living kinds and the terms existing in a language to refer to them. Authors have disagreed on the principles that underlie naming systems and determine whether a species receives a distinct name or not. Whereas some authors have privileged perceptual discontinuities, others have prioritised utility. And, whereas some interpret the striking similarities existing between most folk taxonomic systems as resulting from the structural properties of the natural world, others interpret them in terms of universal properties of the human mind (Medin and Atran 1999). For authors such as Berlin, Medin and Atran, our perceptual system has evolved in adaptation to the biological world. Berlin, however, argues for a direct correlation between plant domestication and the growth and complexity of lexical encoding. The more a population intervenes in the reproduction of plants, the more its ethnobotanical inventory will expand, for both wild and domesticated plants, as well as for plants and animals. Brown chose to explain this causal link with reference to the need to secure a subsistence buffer in case of crop failure. However, one may equally propose, like Ellen, that a sound knowledge of ecological properties is essential for using a forest environment appropriately, or that successful hunting entails a deep knowledge of natural history. Moreover, it is far from unreasonable to propose that ecology may also be considered as a domain of intellectual interest in its own right, an argument that LéviStrauss (1966) made with force over forty years ago. Totemic thinking,21 however, has not been found in many foraging societies.22 Moreover, 21. That is, the use of facts and properties pertaining to the biological world to derive structural relations metaphorically applicable to the social world, and to articulate rules of exchange, in particular, kinship rules. 22. This has led Morris (1976: 556) to speak of a ‘totemic void’ amongst the Hill Pandaram.

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani | 65

animistic thinking often supersedes totemism in Amazonia (Descola 1996). For Bird-David (1999), the prevalence of animism in egalitarian foraging societies relates to a strong sharing ethos and a cultural preference for interpersonal relationships. For Lenaerts (2004), animistic beliefs, that is, the inclusion of natural beings in the social sphere, underpin many characteristics of the ethnobiological classificatory systems found in Amazonia, in particular their context dependence and their focus on interspecies relations.23 What is so interesting in the Huaorani plant naming system as it is partly sketched here is that conceptual ordering seems to result from recognising an order that exists in nature (Berlin 1992) as well as from the cultural priority given to ecological relations over taxonomic ones.24 As I have tried to show in this chapter, Huaorani knowledge of plant phenology is not only an implicit part of their extensive substantive knowledge of the rainforest’s biological diversity, but it also gets expressed at the level of the lexicon. In other words, it is formally codified, at least in part. The formalised expression of substantial ethnobiological knowledge about the environment in Huaorani plant taxonomy is puzzling. We need to know the extent to which their naming system results from cultural choices. As Atran (1999) has shown in his study of the Itzaj Maya’s preference for causally based ecological reasoning, classificatory systems can include cultural preferences without these being necessarily interpreted as resulting from arbitrary impositions. A thorough understanding of the cognitive and cultural processes at work in the Huaorani plant naming system will require a comprehensive study of the folk biology of both the Huaorani and their agriculturalist neighbours, particularly the Quichua speakers with whom they now intermarry. We 23. Lenaerts (2004) argues that the main objective of the taxonomic systems he studied in Peru and Brazil is not to achieve a complete and comparative description of animal and plant morphologies. Rather, it is to class the forms of sociability established between humans and non-human species, and inventory all the types of intentional behaviour found among living beings. Feather, in his contribution to this volume, focuses on other kinds of linguistic data and representations, toponyms, myths and moral discourses about journeying and restlessness, which he analyses as intrinsic to Nahua’s existential ‘mobility’. Amazonian anthropology is now at an analytical crossroads; progress in reaching a full understanding of Amazonian cultural ecologies entirely depends on how successful we are in integrating ethnobiological and symbolical ecological analyses within a single crosscultural comparative framework. 24. See Nabhan’s (2000) study of O’Odham and Comcaac names for plant and animal species. Nabhan argues that the languages spoken by these foragers encode their traditional knowledge of ecological interactions between plants and animals of the Sonoran desert, a habitat where they have lived for centuries.

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already know that Huaorani culture does not fit the cultivator/trekker/ forager typology used by Balée to classify Tupi-Guarani groups according to their specific historical ecology. As I have suggested elsewhere (Rival 2006), north-west Amazon trekkers and foragers, who are not easily classifiable as devolved agriculturalists, may have had a historical trajectory different from that of the Tupi-Guarani. Although there is no comprehensive Runa Quichua ethnobotany presently available, we know from partial studies25 that the Huaorani, who possess a vast botanical knowledge, are as generalist as their cultivating neighbours, if not more so. By combining taxonomic description (of the structure of folk biological categories) with an examination of how these categories are used in inductive reasoning (following the methodology developed by Atran and his collaborators), further studies will hopefully shed light on the dynamic interaction between plant classification and horticulture in the upper Amazon. Future studies will need to address two central questions: What knowledge transmission occurred between the warring tribes of horticulturists and trekkers in Upper Amazonia? And how has the kind of ethnobotanical knowledge outlined here, with its rich encoding of complex ecological data in various dialects, been passed from generation to generation within a society marked by intense warfare?

References Atran, S. 1999. ‘Itzaj Maya Folkbiological Taxonomy: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars’, in D. Medin and S. Atran (eds), Folkbiology. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, pp. 119–203. Balée, W. 1994. Footprints of the Forest. Ka’apor Ethnobotany – the Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— 1996. ‘On the Probable Loss of Plant Names in the Guajá Language (Eastern Amazonian Brazil)’, in S.K. Jain (ed.), Ethnobiology in Human Welfare. New Delhi: Deep Public, pp. 473–81. Balée, W. and C. Erickson (eds) 2006. Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology. Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands. New York: Columbia University Press. Bellwood, P. 2005. First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Oxford: Blackwell. Berlin, B. 1992. Ethnobiological Classification – Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 25. R. Alarcón, personal communication, July 2000.

Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani | 67 Bird-David, N. 1999. ‘“Animism” Revisited. Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology’, Current Anthropology 40 (S): 69–91. Brown. C.H. 1985. ‘Mode of Subsistence and Folk Biological Taxonomy’, Current Anthropology 26 (1): 43–64. ——— 1986. ‘The Growth of Ethnobiological Nomenclature’, Current Anthropology 27 (1): 1–18. Cerón, C.E. and C.G. Montalvo. 1998. Ethnobotánica de los Huaorani de Quehueiri-Ono, Napo, Ecuador. Quito: Abya Yala. Davis, W. 1997. One River – Science, Adventure and Hallucinogenics in the Amazon Basin. London: Simon and Schuster. Davis, W. and J. Yost 1983a. ‘The Ethnomedicine of the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador’, Journal of Ethnopharmacology 9 (2): 273–97. Davis, W. and J. Yost 1983b. ‘The Ethnobotany of the Waorani of Eastern Ecuador’, Botanical Museum Leaflets 3: 159–211. Descola, P. 1996. ‘Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice’, in P. Descola and G.Pálsson (eds), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 82–102. Ellen, R. 1999. ‘Models of Subsistence and Ethnobiological Knowledge: Between Extraction and Cultivation in Southeast Asia’, in D.L. Medin and S. Atran (eds), Folkbiology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 91–117. Fowler, C.S. 1972. ‘Comparative Numic Ethnobiology’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. Gardner, P. 1966. ‘Symmetric Respect and Memorate Knowledge: the Structure and Ecology of Individualistic Culture’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 22: 389–415. ——— 2001. ‘Rethinking Foragers’ Handling of Environmental and Subsistence Knowledge’. Paper presented at the Seventh Conference of Hunter-and-Gatherers Studies (CHAGS), Edinburgh, July 2001. Gentry, A.H. 1988. ‘Tree Species Richness of Upper Amazonian Forests’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA 85 (1): 156–59. Hays, T.E. 1983. ‘Ndumba Folkbiology and General Principles of Ethnobiological Classification and Nomenclature’, American Anthropologist 85: 592–611. Hunn, E. 1977. Tzeltal Folk Zoology: The Classification of Discontinuities in Nature. New York: Academic Press. Kohn, E. 2002. ‘Natural Engagements and Ecological Aesthetics among the Avilá Runa of Amazonian Ecuador’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Leeds, A. 1961. ‘Introduction’, in J. Wilbert (ed.), The Evolution of Horticultural Systems in Native South America: Causes and Consequences. Caracas: Editorial Sucre, pp. 1–12. Lenaerts, M. 2004. Anthropologie des Indiens Ashéninka d’Amazonie. Nos Soeurs Manioc et l’Etranger Jaguar. Paris: L’Harmattan. Lescure, J.P., H. Baslev and R. Alarcón 1987. Plantas Útiles de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana. Quito: Orstom, Puce, Incrae.

68 | Laura Rival Lévi-Strauss, C. 1950. ‘The Use of Wild Plants in Tropical South America’, in J.H. Steward (ed.), Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 6. Physical Anthropology, Linguistics and Cultural Geography of South American Indians. Bulletin 143, Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, pp. 465–86. ——— 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Maffi, L. (ed.) 2001. On biocultural diversity. Linking language, knowledge, and the environment. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Medin, D.L. and S. Atran 1999. Folkbiology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mondragón, M.L. and R. Smith 1997. Bete Quiwiguimamo. Salvando el Bosque Para Vivir Sano. Quito: Abya Yala. Morris, B. 1976. ‘Whither the Savage Mind? Notes on the Natural Taxonomies of Hunting and Gathering People’, Man 11: 542–57. Nabhan, G. P. 2000. ‘Interspecific Relationships Affecting Endangered Species Recognized by O’Odham and Comcáac cultures’, Ecological Applications 10 (5): 1288–95. ——— 2001. ‘Cultural Perceptions of Ecological Interactions: an “Endangered People’s” Contribution to the Conservation of Biological and Linguistic Diversity’, in L. Maffi (ed.), On Biocultural Diversity. Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 145–56. Pitman, N.C. 2000. ‘A Large-scale Inventory of Two Amazonian Tree Communities’. PhD dissertation, Duke University, Durham. Pitman, N.C., J. Therborg, M. Silman, P. Nunez, D.A. Neill, C. Cerón, W. Palacios and M. Aulestia 2001. ‘Dominance and Distribution of Tree Species in Upper Amazonia Terra Firme Forests’, Ecology 82 (8): 2101–17. Rival, L. 2002. Trekking Through History. The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— 2006 ‘Amazonian Historical Ecologies’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, special issue: S79–S94. Ter Steege, H., D. Sabatier, H. Castellanos, T. van Andel, J. Duivenvoorden, A. Adalardo, P. Maas and S. Mori 2000. ‘An Analysis of the Floristic Composition and Diversity of Amazonian Forests, Including Those of the Guiana Shield’, Journal of Tropical Ecology 16 (6): 801–28. Turner, N. 1974. ‘Plant Taxonomic Systems and Ethnobotany in Three Contemporary Indian Groups of the Pacific Northwest (Haida, Bella Coola, and Lillooet)’, Sysis 7: 1–107. Waddy, J.A. 1988. Classifications of Plants and Animals from a Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Point of View, 2 vols. Darwin: Australian National University. Whistler, K. 1976. ‘Patwin Folk-taxonomic Structures’. Unpublished MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley.

CHAPTER 3

The Restless Life of the Nahua: Shaping People and Places in the Peruvian Amazon CONRAD FEATHER1

One morning during my first stay with the Nahua, an Amazonian people of southeast Peru, I woke to see Shico, the father of my household, heading off to the river with a bunch of bananas and a machete. I asked where he was going and waving casually he said, ‘Puerto Maldonado’, a town over three weeks away by foot and raft. ‘When will you be back?’ I asked. ‘Oh, one year, maybe two,’ he said, and with that he was off, parting from his wife and two small children. Four days later Shico returned; he had forgotten to take enough manioc and had run out of food. This apparently whimsical and spontaneous attitude to travelling proved to be anything but extraordinary. It was and continues to be a daily feature of Nahua life. This ‘restlessness’ has persisted despite their settlement in the same village since 1990 and in spite of the social upheaval that accompanied their first direct encounters with Peruvian national society in the mid-1980s. They

1. Acknowledgements: My main debt is to the people of Serjali, who continue to welcome me with such warmth and tolerance, patiently responding to my repeated questions, and for teaching me the secret of travelling in style. Ongoing field research for my PhD since 2004 is made possible by the generous support of a Leverhulme Foundation Overseas Research Studentship, an Emslie Horniman/Sutasoma grant from the Royal Anthropological Institute and a Russell Trust Travel Grant from the University of St Andrews. I would particularly like to thank Peter Gow, Miguel Alexiades, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Aliya Ryan and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful, encouraging and stimulating comments on early drafts of this paper.

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continue to travel over great distances, disappearing overnight for weeks or months on end, and then, like Shico, reappearing just as suddenly and unexpectedly as they had left. This highly mobile lifestyle continues to shape the Nahua’s intimate knowledge and conceptions of their landscape, and to inform newly politicised notions of ‘territory’. As they travel through the forest, they name its rivers to describe geographical features, important events and the presence of spirits and mythic beings. For a people who are continually on the move, these naming practices are important because they transform new and strange spaces into familiar places. Despite recent changes in settlement patterns, the Nahua continue to abandon the village immediately after the death of a spouse, child or sibling. These trips are not only strategies to avoid the malevolent presence of the deceased’s spirit or yoshi but, I suggest, are also techniques of forgetting the dead through transformation of the body. Borrowing from Viveiros de Castro’s (1998) model of multinatural perspectivism, I suggest that these trips are part of a set of techniques the Nahua use to transform their bodies to adopt a different point of view, enabling them to physically ‘forget’ their grief and disentangle their relationships with the dead. Their mobility is not confined to journeys in the forest but extends to frequent visits to local towns, the wandering of their weroyoshi (‘eyespirits’)2 while they dream or take ayahuasca,3 and the epic journeys of their mythic heroes. These journeys through town and forest, body and spirit, present and past, enable the Nahua to procure spouses, food, remedies, material goods and powerful knowledge, often through a necessary engagement with powerful ‘others’. The Nahua’s mobile lifestyle not only shapes their relationship with, and notions of, their landscape; it also allows them to deal with the demands and challenges of everyday life, the need to find food, marry, acquire money, cure illnesses and cope with death. For the Nahua, their social ideal is best represented by the land of the dead and the land of the Iri (the immortal beings), whose inhabitants have no need to travel and simply stay still.

2. The animating life force possessed by all beings (humans, animals, spirits). 3. Nahua shamans prepare a hallucinogenic brew with the vine ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and other admixtures.

The Restless Life of the Nahua | 71

The Nahua The Nahua are a Purús-Panoan-speaking4 people who currently live in the village of Serjali on the Mishagua River in southeast Peru. According to oral histories, at the start of the twentieth century their ancestors were living in several dispersed villages in the headwaters (upper reaches) of the Purús River (Figure 3.1).5 After a violent internal conflict one group moved further upstream and then crossed to the headwaters of the neighbouring Manu and Mishagua rivers. Here they lived in three villages separated by a day’s travel, avoiding any direct or sustained interaction with other indigenous peoples (including other Purús-Panoans) or other members of Peruvian national society until the mid-1980s (MacQuarrie 1991).

4. Purús-Panoan languages are spoken by groups occupying a relatively continuous area of western Amazonia, extending from the confluence of the Ucayali and Marañón rivers southwards to northeastern Bolivia. Linguistic classifications show the Nahua to be part of a closely related group of languages spoken by a total population estimated to be about 6,000, which includes other Nahua groups, such as the Sharanahua, Yaminahua and Chitonahua (Shepard 1999). Townsley (1989) has shown that the different Nahua names do not correspond to distinct ethnic groups but rather to local groups who form part of the same ethnic complex of Purús-Panoans. 5. The term Nahua has been discussed in depth by several authors (Keifenheim 1990; Erikson 1993) who have worked with Panoan-speaking peoples. Simply translated it means ‘outsider’ and refers to a broad category of outsiders, who are contrasted with Yora (literally, ‘flesh’ or ‘body’), the people that intermarry, live together and as a result share bodily substance. The plethora of Nahua names that exist to describe these groups, including Yaminahua, Chitonahua and Sharanahua are ethnonyms ascribed to other groups rather than selfdenominations. Each of these groups consider themselves to be Yora rather than Nahua, and on this basis one could argue that Yora, rather than Nahua, is a more appropriate name. However, since their first contact in the 1980s, the people of Serjali have been known by many names, including Parquenahua (people of Manu National Park), X-nahua (some kind of unidentified Nahua group) and plain old Nahua. The term Nahua has been the most commonly used in anthropological and other literature, and, almost certainly as a result, the Nahua have also begun to use it themselves in situations where they need to identify themselves as a coherent ethnic group. The people of Serjali have simply taken a pragmatic decision to accept that other people know them as the ‘Nahua’. This is a conceptual problem for anthropologists but not for the Nahua, who, given their current political problems, are more concerned about avoiding confusion with other communities than finding an accurate name. This, of course, does create a confusing situation, in which the word Nahua refers both to ‘us’ and to ‘others’. Because the Nahua use the term to describe themselves, and despite its obvious imperfections, I use the term Nahua rather than Yora in this chapter. To avoid confusion, I spell the word Nawa when referring to ‘real outsiders’ from the Nahua’s point of view.

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Figure 3.1. Location of Nahua territory in the Madre de Dios/Purús basins, and twentieth-century migrations.

Rich in natural resources, this area has since the 1950s attracted increasing numbers of loggers and oil companies, as well as missionaries attempting to ‘contact’ the Nahua. There were frequent violent clashes between the Nahua, loggers and oil-prospecting teams. During this time they were popularly portrayed as a nomadic people with little or no horticulture living in temporary villages (SLOPA 1 1984) Despite their high mobility, however, the Nahua lived in communal longhouses and cultivated large gardens of maize, banana and manioc (MacQuarrie 1991). Their first sustained contact with national society was triggered in 1984 when four Nahua men were captured by a group of loggers. Within a year, a series of lethal respiratory infections had eliminated almost half the Nahua, as they had little or no immunity to these diseases (Dagget 1991). They subsequently became rapidly dependent on outsiders for medicines and material items such as machetes, clothes and salt. Today, the population has recovered to over 270 people, all living in Serjali, a village on the confluence of the Mishagua and Serjali rivers, halfway between their old villages in the headwaters of the Manu River and Sepahua, the nearest town.6 6. Serjali was established partly through encouragement by the local Catholic mission. Today Serjali possesses a small health post and primary school run by the Catholic mission.

The Restless Life of the Nahua | 73

A Restless People My initial fieldwork experience was frustrating. I had inherited an idea from classic ethnographies that any serious investigation takes place in the ‘village’. The problem was that the Nahua didn’t seem to agree. During one two-month stay in Serjali, the father in my household only slept in the house for five nights: the rest of the time he was logging in the forest, hunting upriver or travelling downriver to Sepahua. One day he arrived at midnight grumbling after spending three days shivering on a boat during a rainy trip upriver from Sepahua. At dawn I woke to find him heading straight back. Participant observation was a challenging task when people never stayed still to be observed or even to be engaged with in conversation. Just as I was getting to know somebody, I would wake one morning to find they had gone hunting or logging for a month, enlisted in the army or disappeared off to Puerto Maldonado to look for work. The restlessness of the Nahua became infectious and, like them, I too began to dream about trips from the village. The supply of meat and fish is irregular in Serjali; sometimes it is abundant and sometimes it is scarce. Trips away from the village where there is less pressure on fish and game represent excellent hunting and fishing opportunities and a chance for a feast away from their large families. As Maria, an elderly lady, once said to me as she spontaneously jumped into our boat as we headed downriver, ‘e pipaikai’, ‘I am going, wanting to eat.’ Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the Nahua jump at the chance to go travelling in the forest. The Nahua’s frequent visits to Sepahua7 are at first sight less easy to understand. Sepahua’s merchants wait eagerly to sell the insatiably curious Nahua cheap alcohol and herbal remedies, and its loggers try to bribe them for access to the valuable timber in Nahua territory. With little or no money, the Nahua survive off bananas, manioc and credit, living in a small concrete house adjoining the Catholic mission. On every trip there is almost always one person with an urgent reason for travelling, be it medical, to pick up an identity card, to meet returning relatives or to collect a wage packet. Inevitably, the small canoe with a seating capacity of anything up to eight rarely travels with fewer than fifteen or twenty and a common sight is of up to thirty people crowded into these tiny boats, most of them standing up, arms folded, shivering in the rain and biting wind but grinning broadly as the boat, flush with the water level, splutters its way along. The Catholic nuns, who have a permanent post in Serjali, wring their hands with exasperation, mystified at why the Nahua should want to endure the apparently miserable experience of travelling on the

7. It takes the Nahua one day to travel downriver to Sepahua from Serjali by motorised canoe; the return leg takes three days.

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river, the indignity of their time in Sepahua, as well as the inevitable transmission of diseases that results from these trips. One confessed to me that she would be unsurprised to wake one day to find that everyone had disappeared. While the Nahua’s trips to Sepahua are a new phenomenon, their geographical instability is not and is characteristic of many other PurúsPanoan peoples. Townsley (1989) shows that the multitude of Nahua names, such as Sharanahua, Yaminahua, Marinahua and Chitonahua, do not each represent a coherent ethnicity, but instead are local groups of the same Purús-Panoan complex that have broken up and then united with a different local group to form a new village. Many of these fissions and fusions resulted from the traumatic consequences of the rubber boom but also, as I have already noted, were a response to internal tensions and conflicts.

Knowing the Landscape Although the Nahua have been settled in Serjali since 1990, they still frequent the headwaters of the Mishagua and Manu Rivers, where they had lived since the start of the twentieth century. Moving downriver has meant a shift in modes of river travel from small canoes or on foot in the shallow headwaters to motorized canoes on a wider and deeper river. Increasingly, it is more difficult for them to travel to the headwaters because of the relative difficulty of rowing or punting on the fast-flowing lower section of the Mishagua River and the high cost of fuel. Despite these difficulties, they frequently visit the headwaters of the Mishagua on regular hunting, fishing and logging trips and every year several large groups of Nahua cross over to the headwaters of the River Manu to collect turtle eggs. The Nahua’s concept of territory is closely related to this mobile lifestyle. Their siwa is the area in which they wander, where they hunt and fish, set up campsites or collect forest products, a term opposed by the concept of bai, which refers to earth and cultivated land. Since 2002 they have been introduced to new concepts of territory as they have been attempting to secure a land title to provide greater legal protection for their territory from illegal logging operations (see Dudley, this volume; Micarelli, this volume; Zent, this volume). As part of this process they engaged in a mapping project, in which they documented their land and resource use and river names, thus claiming ownership over the land (Shinai 2005). Before the start of the mapping process, the Nahua already defined their territory as an area that other peoples could not enter or use resources from, without their permission. However, during the mapping process, the Nahua began to realise the significance of river names in

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clearly defining these limits and as evidence of historical occupation, and now make continual references to these names in dialogues with state authorities, loggers and oil companies. As the Nahua travel through their extensive forest, they name its rivers, describing anything from the characteristics of the forest to the presence of malevolent spirits. Similar naming processes have been well documented for indigenous peoples in North America (Basso 1996), Australia (Morphy 1995) and the Amazon (Santos-Granero 1998). Nahua names such as potaya8 (‘with turbulent water’) simply refer to a river’s geographical characteristics, whilst others refer to the ecological features of the surrounding forest, such as pacaya (‘with bamboo’) or cadabeweya (‘with macaw clay lick’). Other names refer to the Nahua’s use of particular forest products found there, such as bapoya (‘with bapo’ – a special type of clay used for making cooking pots), while others tell of hunting stories and other adventures, such as idopisiya (‘with smelly jaguar’ – where a Nahua hunter killed a jaguar and left it to rot). Other places are called yoshiya or wakaya (‘with spirits’) because they are inhabited by the spirits of the deceased. More names tell of the Nahua’s first encounters with non-indigenous Peruvians and their tools and machines. For example, nawawaiya (‘with the path of outsiders’) refers to a crossing point between two river basins and probably the infamous Istmo de Fitzcarrald 9 and aparakaya (‘with sleeping father’) are the resting place of some heavy machinery, possibly a helicopter that was abandoned by Shell in the headwaters of the River Manu during the 1980s.10 Finally, a few rivers bear the names of mythic beings whose actions in the past created the landscape’s particular features, such as a river full of huge boulders that the Nahua call inawashadoya (‘with grandmother of jaguar’). Inawashado’s body was brittle and hard as a rock and invincible until she was thrown into a fire by her sons and shattered into many fragments. Others refer to places still inhabited by these beings, such as udenawanowaya (‘with spirits of deep water’). Such mythological geographies have been documented by anthropologists working elsewhere in the Amazon (SantosGranero 1998), but it is particularly common in Australasia, where the features of the landscape are directly related to the actions of mythical beings during the dreaming (Morphy 1995).

8. Most river names have a suffix ya, which means ‘with’. 9. The Isthmus of Fitzcarrald was a crossing point between the Mishagua and Manu rivers that was famously used in the late nineteenth century by the rubber baron Fitzcarrald to access the previously untapped wild rubber of the Manu river. 10. Shell were exploring for oil and gas in the region; the Nahua thought that motors were the fathers of these strange outsiders.

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The Nahua’s ancestors only moved to the headwaters of the Manu and Mishagua some time in the early twentieth century after the collapse of the rubber boom, and yet their landscape is filled with names, names that testify to an intimate and much longer-term relationship with the forest and its inhabitants, some of them describing the mythic origins of certain geographical features. Richard Montag’s work with a Cashinahua group in Peru documents a similar process. The Cashinahua were forced to flee from Brazil in the early twentieth century after a conflict with rubber tappers, and moved to the River Curanja in Peru. Pudico, a Cashinahua man who lived through this migration describes how they began to name the rivers as they arrived in this new and unfamiliar space. ‘Intending to name it I think what does it have? It is with sun; nothing is hiding it and the sunlight is coming, I have made its name real today’ (Montag 1998: 21). I believe that this naming of places is a way of creating new relations with a new space, and this is especially important for Nahua11 groups precisely because of their high levels of mobility. Through naming unfamiliar spaces, the Nahua create the impression of a stable familiar territory in the context of continuous movement and migration (see also Dudley, this volume). In a parallel fashion the Nahua have incorporated recent phenomena such as the introduction of metal tools into previously existing myths. Gow shows that this historicity is a recurring feature of Amazonian myths. The incorporation of relatively recent historical phenomena such as the acquisition of metal tools, introduced diseases and encounters with white people into older myths ‘generates the appearance of stability, an illusion of timelessness that cannot be affected by changes in the world’ (Gow 2001: 11). As LéviStrauss states, ‘myths are an instrument for the obliteration of time’ (cited in Gow 2001: 11). In a similar way, naming new places helps the Nahua, a highly mobile people, to familiarise themselves with new spaces and thus disguise their frequent migrations, creating a geographical continuity despite spatial upheavals.

Mobility and the Making of Social Relationships The Nahua’s trips not only serve to construct relationships with unfamiliar places but are also a means of constructing new relations with unfamiliar

11. Place naming has been little documented amongst Nahua groups but Calavia Sáez’s work with the Yaminahua of Acre Brazil provides an exception, according to Calavia, the Yaminahua use few or no Yaminawa names (Sáez 2004).

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‘others’. Over the last thirty years anthropologists have documented how engaging with these ‘others’ is a pan-Amazonian concern, and yet, while it is necessary it is also conceived as a risky business (Belaunde 2005). For the Nahua, mixing is articulated as essential in all spheres of social life. At one extreme, meat or fish cannot be eaten without combining it with manioc or bananas. On a grander scale, all beings in the universe are divided into moieties, roa adiwo or nawa.12 A shaman can only be initiated by shamans from both moieties and men and women are supposed to find spouses from the other moiety. While some Amazonian peoples have adopted strategies as diverse as warfare and cannibalism to engage with and incorporate this otherness (Viveiros de Castro 1996), the Nahua travel. They journey to distant lands to engage with ‘others’ who provide them with the powerful tools and knowledge they need to be socially productive (see also Alexiades and Peluso, this volume; Athayde et al., this volume). The importance of these journeys is illustrated by their recurrence in Nahua stories of the shidipo (‘ancient ones’). Calavia Sáez has brilliantly shown through his analysis of Yaminahua mythology that a constant feature of these stories is that while ‘the hero kills, dies or transforms above all they wander’ (Sáez 2004: 124–25, author’s translation). The telling of any myth is peppered with apparently superfluous detail emphasising the length of the journey: ‘they walked one hour more – they walked for an entire day – they spent days, weeks or months travelling’ (Sáez 2004: 125, author’s translation). This is well illustrated by the Nahua’s story of the Iri, the immortal people. The Iri lived far downstream of the shidipo (ancient Nahua). One day, a group of Iri passed the village of the shidipo and continued to float downstream. A group of men decided to follow. They travelled and travelled and travelled, the dry season ended and the rains came and finally the men arrived in the village of the Iri. The men stayed for two more dry seasons, married Iri women and were given axes, machetes and beads before they returned to their own village with the spoils after another long and difficult journey. Calavia Sáez (2004) illustrates how gaining access to powerful knowledge or objects result from these long journeys. In many of these stories the central characters encounter strange spirits in the forest or other worlds beneath the water or in the sky and gain access to prized tools or knowledge after a long and arduous journey. The Nahua story of Dotishonowabadi (‘the canoe that was left’) tells of two brothers-in-law who set off to collect special stones for stone axes. During the journey one of the brothers-in-law is left behind by his companion at the edge of a deep pool.

12. Until recently, the two moieties lived in separate longhouses within the same village, and, though they intermarried, exchanged food and visited each other, the relationship was delicate and fraught with mutual suspicion.

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Here the man meets a water spirit who shares his real name (adekoi) and they realise they are brothers.13 The man is taken beneath the water, where he is given a basket of axes, machetes and knives. Later he is introduced to another brother, a giant vulture, who also shares his name, who takes him to his house in the sky, where he receives another basket laden with precious tools. The hero returns to his village, where he distributes the new tools to his people, who immediately abandon their stone axes and start to clear huge gardens. A pattern emerges from these myths, in which precious material objects and knowledge are acquired as a result of a long and challenging journey to a distant place, where they meet powerful ‘others’. The epic journeys of mythic heroes are paralleled in everyday life for the Nahua. They say that without travelling far they have no means of acquiring meat or fish. Animals that are close to the community are difficult to catch because they are unaya (‘with knowledge’) and wary of hunters. In more distant corners of Nahua territory, in contrast, they are unoba (‘without knowledge’). The relationship between an individual’s personal travel experience, the acquisition of knowledge and his political authority is also clear. Individuals within the community who have been to distant towns and neighbouring countries will frequently reel off a list of the places they have visited, to demonstrate that they are knowledgeable and speak with authority. Illnesses too are caused by ‘others’ in the form of spirits of animals or other beings, and their cures are found not only in the pharmacies of Sepahua but in the domain of shamanism, where it is not even necessary to physically leave the community in order to travel. The weroyoshi or animating life force of the person is conceived as a spiritual element only very loosely attached to the body; it looks like a very small person and lives in the eye; it ‘wanders’ constantly and its encounters with the weroyoshi of other animals, people or spirits produce the visions seen when taking ayahuasca (shori) or dreaming. Many Nahua travel in their dreams to distant towns, even if they have never been there, where they are surrounded by incomprehensible numbers of people, cars and material goods. One lady regularly finds herself in Sepahua drinking Inka Kola,14 whilst others travel to the land of the dead. 13. Adekoi or real names belong to one of the two patri-moieties; they are integrally associated with a soul type (weroyoshi) and are inherited through alternate generations. As Townsley (1989) shows, names indicate your position within a kinship system that is continually recycled. Sharing the same name is very important because it means you occupy the same place in the kinship system; hence the hero of the myth and the water spirit were brothers. Adekoi are associated with the weroyoshi or soul type of a person and if they are used unthinkingly or with malicious intent this can have significant consequences. Shamans can use these real names to harm or even kill a person. 14. A Peruvian soft drink.

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The Nahua also represent their ayahuasca or shori sessions as a journey. When experiencing its initial sensations, the Nahua sing rabi (non-curative songs) that describe an upward journey into the world of the owners of the shori. Each person’s rabi is distinct but they often include repetitive phrases such as ‘I am climbing a beautiful hill’, ‘I am climbing to sing’, ‘I am arriving with the owners of ayahuasca’. The rabi are then followed by curing songs or koshuiti, sung only by specialist shamans or ñowe. My Nahua friends explain to me that each koshuiti is a wai huitza or a different path. As Townsley (1993) shows for the Yaminahua, shamans use these paths to engage with the weroyoshi of the beings causing the illness.

Moving to Forget Halfway through my fieldwork a young Nahua lady drowned in Serjali. Even before her body had been found, her husband Mario saw her yoshi on a nearby beach and knew she was dead. Within moments of returning to Serjali, Mario had set fire to their house and her possessions. Her relatives wailed and shrieked, their bodies shook with tears, they shaved their hair and beat their heads with their hands. To me it appeared as if they had been overwhelmed by grief and had lost control of their bodies. After the burial, the lady’s mother and siblings went downriver to Sepahua, where they stayed for six months. The Nahua say that, when they lived in the headwaters of the Manu River, they would abandon an entire village, including its gardens, when an adult died. It is not just death, however, that makes the Nahua get up and go; during my fieldwork a man who was left by his wife immediately travelled to the distant town of Puerto Maldonado, where he stayed for a year before returning. For the Nahua, travelling is not only a means of engaging with powerful others or acquiring powerful knowledge but also a means of disentangling relationships, with both the living and the dead. The Nahua, like many Amazonian peoples, do not commemorate the dead; instead their often elaborate post-mortuary rites are ways of separating the dead from the living (Taylor 1993). For the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon, neighbours of the Nahua, this separation is essential because the presence of the dead can cause illness and death amongst the living, so the Machiguenga paint their faces and cut their hair to avoid recognition by the deceased (Shepard 2002). For the Achuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon, ‘forgetting the dead’ is a social rather than pathological imperative, as the Achuar conceive of themselves as part of a limited and scarce set of individual identities. ‘Forgetting them … is in every sense a vital necessity: if someone does not die then someone cannot be born’ (Taylor 1993: 659). Moreover, ‘… as long as the dead are remembered as recognizable and specific individuals, the existence they

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occupy remains unavailable’ (Taylor 1993: 658). Their post-mortuary rites involve erasing the particular identity, including the name of the deceased. Meanwhile, songs are sung to the wakan (the spirit of the deceased) to remind them they are dead, and tobacco juice is spat into people’s eyes to keep them awake and thus avoid seeing and dreaming of the dead. For the Nahua, when a person dies the body rots and, while the weroyoshi or eye-spirit, the animating life force of the person, travels to the land of the dead, another spiritual element, the disembodied yoshi, clings to the possessions of the deceased. Attached to the person’s siwa (where they wandered) or places frequented by its former self, it is sentenced for eternity to wander through its former gardens and hunting paths. Recently I travelled with the Nahua to the headwaters of the Manu River, where the epidemics of the 1980s wiped out over half the population. Gregarious people became subdued and tearful as we passed places where siblings, parents and children had died, and where living relatives, currently absent in a distant town, had slept.15 At night, people were unable to sleep as they were tormented by the yoshi of their long deceased relatives whistling to them or cracking branches in the forest. I asked an older man who had lived at the site of an old village to explain. He told me the names of its inhabitants in a sad and tender voice and then said, ‘I don’t want to see this any more’ and we moved on.16 From the Nahua’s perspective, then, the landscape is a repository of disembodied yoshi. They hang around in abandoned gardens and on hunting paths and beaches, throw stones at their relatives when they go to bathe in the river, petulantly scatter pots and pans in kitchens, and even tip sleeping people out of their hammocks. After a death, the burning of the house and possessions banishes the deceased’s yoshi to the centre of the forest, where it is forced to linger on hunting paths or in abandoned gardens. The Nahua used to avoid the yoshi by abandoning their villages; now they often travel to a nearby town. For the Nahua, like the Machiguenga and the Achuar, their postmortuary rites of head shaving, destruction of the material possessions of the deceased and travelling are essential processes for separating the dead from the living. Nevertheless, while the Nahua consider the yoshi to be a nuisance and sometimes a potentially dangerous one if it is that of a powerful shaman or ñowe, the Nahua dead are not as malevolent as the dead of the

15. The Nahua seem to know exactly who has set up camp at each and every beach or campsite. 16. Miguel Alexiades encountered similar discourses of ‘feeling sad’ when he travelled with Ese Eja to the headwaters of the River Sonene, on the border between Peru and Bolivia. (Miguel Alexiades, personal communication, 2006).

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Machiguenga or Achuar (Taylor 1993; Shepard 2002). Instead, Nahua discourse focuses on ‘forgetting’ the dead and the grief and emotional pain associated with the loss of a loved one.

Forgetting After the death of his wife, Mario was distraught. He lay in his hammock crying, hardly eating and singing a repetitive and mournful lament that described the beauty of the deceased ‘ewe rowa wake’ (‘my beautiful child’) and the effect on his own kin and body, ‘ewe yora chaka’ (‘my body/kin is bad’). However, just two weeks later he was once again a cheerful happy man, enjoying life to the full. When I asked people whether Mario was sad any more, they replied, ‘No, he has forgotten.’ At first I found this surprising. How could people with such obvious emotional attachment to their loved ones seemingly ‘forget’ them so rapidly? This apparent ability to rapidly ‘forget’ is not unique to the Nahua but common to many Amazonian peoples, who have developed elaborate post-mortuary rites specifically to ‘forget the dead’ and to separate the living from the potentially vengeful spirits of the deceased (Taylor 1993). The Nahua’s ability became less surprising when I realised that memory is not just a mental faculty but also a physical and bodily process. The closest translation of memory in Nahua is shinai. Shinai means to think or analyse, as well as to remember or think about someone with affection. The Nahua use it to describe the strong bonds of affection amongst kin or others, especially when they are absent. In this sense it is the closest possible translation of love. Memory is a physiological experience for the Nahua; in their healing songs Nahua shamans use the word shina to refer to the heart. Those who are sad or shinabitsai do not eat, and they often physically cannot rise from their hammock but cry and sing softly all day. Other Amazonian peoples articulate similar ideas of the relationship between memory and physiology (Conklin 2001: 143). Ken Kensinger and Cecilia McCallum show that the Cashinahua, another Purús-Panoan people, explicitly articulate the belief that the body remembers and knows. For the Cashinahua, a person’s body is the repository of knowledge; different parts of the body have different types of knowledge: the hands possess the knowledge for gardening, the skin possesses the knowledge to be a successful hunter and the liver possesses knowledge of a whole range of emotions (Kensinger 1995). Near-death experiences, hallucinations and dreams are all excellent sources of knowledge, which the body incorporates. As McCallum observes, ‘upon awakening the memory of these sights, conversations and sensations has already been transferred to the body’ (1996: 362). Similarly my Nahua friends tell me that the owiti or heart is the principal site for

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feeling emotions. When the Nahua are grieving and suffering from shinabitsai, they say that ‘noko owiti isi paicoi’, ‘our hearts have tremendous burning pain’. Rage or sidai is also located in the heart, as one Nahua friend explained to me; ‘ma sidai noko wichiato, noko owiti wishki’, ‘when rage grabs us our hearts are furious’. This rage in turn is necessary for acts of homicide. For the Nahua, like the Wari and the Cashinahua, there is no Cartesian separation between a mind that thinks and a body that acts. For them it is the body that remembers, knows and acts. The Nahua’s bodies can be changed by beating or shaving the head, and relationships with the dead disentangled by burning houses and possessions. However, because the Nahua cannot destroy the landscape or the yoshi that inhabit these places, they simply avoid them. They used to abandon the village upon the death of a relative, but now they simply move house or travel to a distant town never visited by those people. As they say, ‘no ana owekaspai’ (‘we don’t want to see this any more’). In part, the Nahua’s post-death trips are part of a set of techniques common to many Amazonian peoples to avoid the spirit of the deceased. Nevertheless, this process does more than merely avoid the yoshi; the Nahua say, ‘When one of your family dies you can travel somewhere where you will go to forget.’ In these places, especially distant ones, the Nahua say that you encounter people who are not sad, they are not affected by the grief of your loss. By surrounding yourself with joking, laughing people, you are able to quickly forget. Similarly, when the Nahua shave their hair after the death of a loved one they say that this is to ‘shinabakia’ or ‘make them forget’. For the Machiguenga, the cutting of hair after the death of a close relative is very important because hair can be used by malevolent spirits to attack the living and it is also used as a technique for disguising the living from these spirits (Shepard 2002). The Nahua have never explained hair cutting to me in terms of a disguise from the yoshi; instead they explain that hair, just like the house, garden or possessions of the deceased, is painful to see; ‘no owekaspai’ (‘we don’t want to see it’). Hair is particularly important because a loving relationship involves repeated head grooming, looking for head lice and their eggs. Consequently, the hair is infused with the memory of the deceased and has to be shorn to allow the mourner to forget. The Nahua do not articulate explicitly that travelling involves a bodily transformation, but instead explain it in terms of ‘forgetting’. I believe that the process of forgetting involves a bodily transformation, a transformation achieved by a whole range of means, including travelling. This approach is inspired by Viveiros de Castro’s (1988) model of ‘perspectivism’, in which he argues that, for Amazonian indigenous peoples, it is the body that determines the point of view on the world. The body gives a being their particular perspective on the world, and a person can transform the way they see the world by transforming their body. A shaman’s power comes from their ability to change form, adopting different

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perspectives to communicate with other beings responsible for causing or curing illnesses. Becoming a shaman involves processes of physical transformation effected through prohibitions of certain foods, sex and other activities that affect the body. Wari shamans of Central Brazil transform their bodies through wearing the pelts of jaguars and peccaries and thus acquire the point of view of these animals, communicating with them and their spirit owners, who are responsible for illnesses (Vilaça 2000). Viveiros de Castro’s definition of bodily transformation, however, is not limited to changing clothes or diet. He says that the body should be seen as the locus of the person’s habitus – the way they are and what they can do (Viveiros de Castro 1998). I believe that the Nahua’s journeys can be usefully understood through this perspectivist vision; the head shaving, self beating, wailing and singing are all ways through which the Nahua physically transform their bodies and emerge from a cathartic experience with new ones that are no longer infused with the thoughts, love and memory (shinai) of the deceased. Moving places, just like head shaving and wailing, is another way of ‘forgetting’ and of transforming a body. When a person moves across space, even if it is just to the other side of the village, they find themselves doing different things. They speak with different people, they walk on different hunting paths, they collect firewood from a different garden and they fish in a different stream. As a result of these changes, their point of view is transformed. As one Nahua man said about his cousin who went travelling after his wife died, ‘It is good, now he will no longer remember.’

To Stay Still or To Move The most important journey that all Nahua undertake is the one from which they never return. Death is the moment when the vital life force finally severs itself from the body and travels to the land of the dead (dai moera – ‘inside the sky’), where it lives with the weroyoshi of its dead kin (the weroyoshi nawa). The weroyoshi nawa share none of the Nahua’s existential problems; they live off succulent pineapples and do not have to leave the community to hunt or fish. When they die, the problems of mortal existence disappear and the Nahua finally stop moving. The land of the Iri, the immortal people, is a parallel paradise on earth. According to the Nahua the Iri, who still live far downstream, don’t get ill, lose their teeth or grow old and die and they have all the material goods they could ever require. The Iri, unlike the ancient and contemporary Nahua, don’t have to travel far to get meat or fish, material goods or money or to cure their ailments: the Iri just stay still. The Nahua were often described as ‘nomadic’ before their first contact, a label they reject indignantly. They themselves are disparaging about the

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itinerant lifestyle of a neighbouring indigenous people, the Mashco-Piro, who according to the Nahua are constantly on the move, don’t live in villages and don’t possess gardens. The Nahua call them tsaonawa or ‘sitting people’ as they say they don’t have hammocks and are forced to sit on the ground. This ambivalence between staying still and travelling is reflected in the dual meaning inherent in the concept of a diaywo or leader. In one context, diaywo literally means ‘he who stands’ and an ideal diaywo is represented as a man who stays in the village and sends people to collect food for communal purposes. But he is also responsible for regulating vital relations with the outside world. Often a diaywo is an important shaman who communicates with powerful spirits and leads political delegations who travel to distant towns to demand the recognition of their lands and rights. It is no surprise then that diaywo also literally means ‘he who walks’. The Nahua are a restless people at both a collective and individual level, in their myths and in everyday life. Their concept of territory as a place where people wander and the intimate knowledge they possess of their landscape reflects this lifestyle. Their naming practices are a response to this mobility: naming empty space transforms the strange into the familiar and helps them deal with the potentially traumatic process of migration. Their mobility does not just shape their notions of their landscape; the Nahua represent their mobile lifestyle as an existential condition that deals with the difficult realities of daily life for mortal beings and shapes the production of personhood. Moving places is also an experience that allows the Nahua to avoid the lingering yoshi of the deceased and to physically ‘forget’ their grief and carry on living despite the death of a loved one. In this context, their urban visits are not a new phenomenon but a variation on a theme paralleled by the journeys of their mythic heroes. The solutions to their problems might be in towns or in forests, in dreams or in death, but above all else they are far away. It is the process of reaching these distant places, the beings they encounter and the bodily transformations they incur along the way that are as important as the end itself.

References Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press. Belaunde, L.E. 2005. El recuerdo de Luna: Género, Sangre y Memoria entre los Pueblos Amazónicos. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Conklin, B. 2001. Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. Austin: University of Texas Press. Dagget, J. 1991. ‘Dilemas que se presentan en los primeros contactos con un grupo etnico aislado’, Amazonia Peruana 11 (20): 49–64. Erikson, P. 1993. ‘Une nébuleuse compacte: le macro-ensemble Pano’, L’Homme 33 (24): 45–58.

The Restless Life of the Nahua | 85 Gow, P. 2001. An Amazonian Myth and its History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keifenheim, B. 1990. ‘Nawa – Un concept clef de l’altérité chez les Pano’, Journal de la Société des Américanistes 76: 79–94. Kensinger, K.1995. How Real People Ought to Live: The Cashinahua of Eastern Peru. Illinois: Waveland Press. MacQuarrie, K. 1991. ‘Dissipative Energy Structures and Cultural Change among the Yora/Parque-Nahua (Yaminahua) Indians of South Eastern Peru’. Masters thesis, California State University, Fullerton. McCallum, C. 1996. ‘The Body that Knows: From Cashinahua Epistemology to a Medical Anthropology of Lowland South America’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10 (3): 347–72. Montag, R. 1998. ‘A Tale of Pudicho’s People: Cashinahua Narratives of European Contact in the 20th Century’. PhD dissertation, State University of New York, Albany. Morphy, H. 1995. ‘Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon, (eds), Anthropology of Landscape – Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 184–209. Sáez, O.C. 2004. ‘Mapas Carnales: El Territorio y la Sociedad Yaminawa’, in A. Surrallés and P. García H. (eds), Tierra Adentro. Territorio Indígena y Percepción del Entorno. Copenhagen: IWGIA, pp. 121–35. Santos-Granero, F. 1998. ‘Writing History into the Landscape: Space, Myth and Ritual in Contemporary Amazonia’, American Ethnologist 25 (2): 128–48. Shepard, G. 1999. ‘Pharmacognosy and the Senses in Two Amazonian Societies’. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. ——— 2002. ‘Three Days for Weeping: Dreams, Emotions and Death in the Peruvian Amazon’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16 (2): 1–30. Shinai, 2005. Aquí Vivimos Bien: Territorio y uso de Recursos de los Pueblo Indígenas de la Reserva Kugapakori Nahua. Lima: Shinai. SLOPA. 1984–1990 Informativo de las comunidades, ‘Los Shara, Nahua, Yora’, Partes 1–6. Sepahua: El Rosario. Taylor, A.C. 1993. ‘Remembering to Forget: Identity, Mourning and Memory among the Jivaro’, Man 28 (4): 653–78. Townsley, G. 1989. ‘Ideas and Patterns of Change in Yaminahua Society’. PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, Cambridge. ——— 1993. ‘Song Paths, the Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge’, L’Homme 126–128: 449–46. Vilaça, A. 2000. ‘“What does it Mean to Become an Other?” Shamanism and Interethnic Contact in Indigenous Amazonia’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 15 (44): 56–72. Viveiros de Castro, E. 1996. ‘Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 179–200. ——— 1998. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469–88.

CHAPTER 4

Urban, Rural and In-between: Multi-sited Households Mobility and Resource Management in the Amazon Flood Plain MIGUEL PINEDO-VASQUEZ AND CHRISTINE PADOCH

Rural Amazonians, especially the ribereños/ribeirinhos or caboclos1 that live on the region’s great flood plains (várzeas), move frequently. The mobility of people, impermanence of communities and transience of economic opportunities in Amazonia have been mentioned by many scholars and documented for several communities in both Brazil and Peru (Padoch and de Jong 1990; Nugent 1993; Chibnik 1994; Newing, this volume). In response to and mirroring the ephemerality of their riverbanks and watercourses, as well as of agricultural fields and agroforests, markets and labour opportunities, várzea households in the Amazon basin have long been ready to move, dismantling houses, dispersing communities and starting afresh in new locations. The community of Santa Rosa along the lower Ucayali river, which was founded as an agro-extractive enterprise or fundo called Monte Carmelo in the late 1920s, for example, has coalesced and dispersed repeatedly throughout its history; more recently Santa Rosinos moved from one riverbank to the opposite one about five times within a span of thirty years (Padoch and de Jong 1990; Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000:171).

1. Ribereño in Peru and ribeirinho or caboclo in Brazil refers to a member of the largely rural-based peasant class that are native to the region. Ribereños/ribeirinhos or caboclos come from varied and mixed biological and cultural backgrounds, including Amazonian, African and European.

Urban, Rural and In-between | 87

While rural–rural movements have not ceased, over the last several decades migratory flows in Amazonia have increasingly brought people to cities. Like much of the tropical world, the region has experienced a surprising rate of growth of urban areas. In 1980 a majority of Amazonians were already classed as urban (WinklerPrins 2002), but in the year 2000 the Brazilian census estimated that a full 70 per cent of residents of ‘Legal Amazonia’ lived in towns and cities (IBGE 2002). Geographer John Browder has characterised the pace of urbanisation in Brazilian Amazonia since 1980 as ‘breathtaking’ (Browder 2002: 22). The largest cities of the Peruvian Amazon, Iquitos and Pucallpa, also grew dramatically, beginning in the 1960s. Largely due to massive immigration from rural areas of the lowland Amazon department of Loreto, the population of Iquitos more than quadrupled between 1961 and 1993; in the same period the population of the city of Pucallpa along the upper Ucayali river increased more than sixfold (Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000). Amazonia is, of course a vast and highly variable region, with strikingly different environmental, economic, political and demographic conditions characterising the diverse communities of the basin. Although urbanisation has been an overwhelmingly important trend throughout the region, population changes have by no means been simple, unidirectional or linear. In this brief chapter we outline a number of complexities in the recent history of demographic flows and economic relationships between rural and urban places that have characterised several areas of the basin where we have worked, in particular the estuarine areas of the Brazilian state of Amapá and the lowland Peruvian Amazon. We briefly review demographic exchanges between rural and urban areas in recent decades, including shifts that temporarily reversed present urban-ward trends; we discuss the current situation of household ‘multi-sitedness’, as well as a trend towards rural-to-urban migration and on to suburban residence; and, finally, we discuss several implications of these demographic processes for resource management in the flood plains of the estuary and elsewhere.

Rural to Urban and Vice Versa While the exact numbers and dates of the demographic movements between the rural and urban sectors of the estuarine flood plain of Amapá and neighbouring areas of Pará state are still undocumented, our preliminary research indicates that, in the 1940s and early 1950s, many towns and cities in the region lost up to 50 per cent of their population due to migration to rural areas. At this time, particularly during the Second World War, estuarine forest resources were in demand to supply European markets with raw materials for soap and other products that had

88 | Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez and Christine Padoch

depended on resources from South-East Asian and Pacific areas, then occupied by the Japanese army. In other regions of the Amazon flood plain, thousands of soldados da borracha (‘soldiers of rubber’) penetrated várzea forests to collect latex for the Allied war effort. During those decades in Amapá and Pará, workers, including many from the region’s towns and cities, moved to the forests of the estuary to work collecting and processing oil-rich palm nuts and other forest products. These dramatic urban-to-rural demographic movements were reversed two decades later in the 1970s. At that time, the promotion of buffalo ranching throughout the islands of the estuary for the production of meat to supply the demands of oil-rich countries such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia led to large tracts of land being purchased. This resulted in the displacement and migration of rural dwellers to towns and cities. Flood plain areas were deemed by experts to be highly suitable for buffalo ranching and unsuitable for farming, despite many decades or even centuries of caboclo agricultural experience. State and federal government resources were used to subsidise the construction of houses on the periphery of cities to relocate farmers who lost their lands in the islands and other várzea regions. In the 1990s, the rural population in much of the rural estuarine region of Amapá and some neighbouring parts of Pará states fell to less than 60 per cent of what was in 1960, while the urban population increased more than fivefold in the same period. Similar population movements affected both urban and rural populations in other parts of Amazonia, including the Peruvian province of Loreto. Some of the more dramatic shifts in Peruvian Amazonia occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s when large numbers of young men – including both rural and urban dwellers – found employment in distant forests where oil exploration was under way. The installation of oil facilities, especially the pipeline that brought petroleum from the Corrrientes river basin to the Pacific coast, also drew many – including one of the authors – from city and village to the oil zone in search of well-paying jobs. When the labourintensive phase of oil exploitation ended, the ex-petroleros returned, but many, having acquired at least some cash, settled not in their small home villages but in urban pueblos jovenes or shanty towns.2 These numbers and narratives delineating the ebb and flow of people between urban and rural areas present, however, a deceptively simple

2. In the early 1980s some of the returnees from oil exploration formed a union in the city of Iquitos and pressured the regional government to help them solve the overwhelming problems of unemployment and poverty that plagued these new urban immigrants. The result was an agrarian colonisation project along the road that links Iquitos and the town of Nauta. That settlement, named Expetroleros, still exists, but has now become a suburb of Iquitos as the city has grown.

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picture of demographic relationships between urban and rural places. While people in Amazonia, as elsewhere, are simply classed as residing in either urban or rural places, it has been noted by several researchers, that the distinction is often difficult to make (see also Newing, this volume). Apparently discrete rural and urban categories have actually always been, and remain today, indistinct and inextricably linked in numerous ways (Wagley 1953; Nugent 1993; WinklerPrins 2002). And the historical swings that we have mentioned in demographic and economic patterns have resulted in complex social and familial networks that are still little understood by policy makers and social scientists.

Both Urban and Rural: Multi-sited Households Our research among rural-to-urban migrants in the cities of Macapá and neighbouring Santana revealed that a great many poor shanty-town or slum-dweller households are actually ‘multi-sited’, ‘multi-local’ or dispersed; that is, they maintain houses and, commonly, economic activities in a rural area as well as in one of the shanty towns or slums that surround the city. Preliminary research on sources of income shows that a considerable percentage of their household income depends on resources such as açaí (Euterpe oleracea) fruit, timber or other products, managed or extracted by household members in rural areas. Corresponding research in five rural communities in and near the flood plains of Amapá confirms these findings. The great majority of households in the five villages have a house in Macapá or Santana (Table 4.1). We found that every one of the households that did not own a house in an urban setting was a very young couple who had just recently built their house in the community with the help of their parents and other relatives. All of these couples, however, are planning to build a house in a shanty town of Macapá or Santana when their households grow.

Table 4.1. Multi- and single-sited households in five villages in Amapá, Brazil. Community

Multi-sited Households

Single-sited Households

Total Households

Mazagão

78

15

93

Ipixuna

63

18

81

Bacaba

62

16

78

Santo Antonio

93

12

105

106

20

126

Lontra Pedreira

90 | Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez and Christine Padoch

Dispersed or multi-sited households are not new to Amazonia, although recent changes in communications and transportation, markets and labour opportunities have greatly increased the incidence of this residence pattern. In 1993 Nugent described how several such large extended families or ‘kindreds’ in the region of Santarém maintained firm residential bases in both city and village, relying upon the resources of both. More recently WinklerPrins (2002) has also described smaller groupings or households that maintain such dual residence patterns in the Santarém region. This pattern characterises the villages of Amapá state as well. Multi-sited households throughout the estuarine zone are most commonly composed of an extended family that maintains both a house and farm in a rural area and a house in the city. Most families include one or more members who tend to stay in the urban locale more permanently, while others circulate between village and town. Short- and long-term changes in opportunities for labour and natural resource and agricultural products, as well as changing market conditions, stimulate the continued circulation of people and resources between country and city, and a series of familial and other social networks are critical for maintaining this flow. The exact number and composition of residents of either rural or urban homes frequently varies with agricultural seasons and school schedules. For varzéa-based families, especially those of the middle and upper Amazon basin, variations in the height and duration of the annual floods is another important determinant of residence.

Rural to Urban and On to Suburban Greater speed and ease of transportation and more effective communications have made the multi-sited Amazon household a common phenomenon throughout the region. But, when interviewing rural families who had come to the city from villages on distant tributaries, we found that another, more complex residence pattern is common. Some households that reside in the slums or shanty towns that ring Pucallpa, the second-largest city in the Peruvian Amazon, maintain not two residential locations but three. The third house is often built in a nearby ‘suburban’ or peri-urban location. Along the highway that links Pucallpa to the cities of the Andes and the coast, for instance, settlements are cropping up where multi-sited families can manage extensive gardens, orchards and agricultural and forest product processing facilities to supply the urban-based family members with daily necessities, including fruits and vegetables, as well as some marketable items. Other products such as timber, game meat and often fish are, on the other hand, supplied from the more distant rural family base. While economic reasons are undoubtedly important in explaining such dispersed patterns, a preference for a more rural, and yet accessible,

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setting is also cited. Such suburban living is especially preferred by older folk who enjoy rural life and agricultural work and yet also value the ease of access to important services, including medical care, which the periurban location offers.3

‘De-agrarianisation’ of Activities and ‘Ruralisation’ of Tastes Many of the residential patterns we have described in Amazonia coincide with a trend towards ‘de-agrarianisation’ of rural societies that is transforming the countryside throughout the tropics. De-agrarianisation is usually construed as a process of diversification in economic activities and income sources as well as a change in social identification of agricultural producers. Researchers argue that farmer households are moving increasingly towards non-agriculture-based activities (Bryceson 1996; Ellis 1998). This trend is global in its scale: for example, a review of change in sub-Saharan Africa concluded that 60 to 80 per cent of rural household incomes in the late 1990s was supplied by non-farming sources, in contrast to an approximate 40 per cent in the 1980s (Bryceson 1999). Relocation from rural to urban areas often accompanies this livelihood shift (de Haan 1999), as do a shrinking and unravelling of peasant communities. While most studies of de-agrarianisation have been done in subSaharan Africa and Southeast Asia (Bryceson 1996, 1999; Barrett et al. 2001; Rigg and Nattapoolwat 2001; Booth 2002), diversity of occupations accompany the patterns of rural–urban mobility and multi-sitedness that we and others have described as typical of households in the Amazon flood plain as well (Nugent 1993; WinklerPrins 2002). Research carried out by Pinedo-Vasquez and others in communities of the Amapá flood plain has recently documented a strong ‘de-agrarianisation’ trend (PinedoVasquez et al. 2001). Agriculture as a source of income has been waning, and most households in rural settlements rely on cash generated by members that not only live but also work in Macapá and Santana. The turn away from agriculture is visible in the landscapes surrounding rural settlements in the estuarine flood plain. As Table 4.2 shows, farms around the village of Ipixuna in Amapá have been rapidly shrinking in size over the last decade. The reasons for this trend are complex and include the penetration of local markets by the products of Brazil’s southern 3. It must be noted, however, that medical needs also prompt movement from urban to rural areas as urban-based residents decide to use rural remedies and consult rural-based healers. One important medical condition that often spurs extended visits, if not permanent migration, to rural communities in the Peruvian Amazon is the addiction to drugs, particularly freebase cocaine, for which the help of a curandero, or healer is often sought.

92 | Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez and Christine Padoch Table 4.2. Changes in average size (in hectares) of land-use types in a sample of twelve landholdings in Ipixuna, Amapá, Brazil. Land Use

Year 1992

1998

2004

Agricultural Fields

4.7

1.3

0.7

Fallows

5.6

7.2

9.8

Forests

9

House gardens

0.5

12 1.2

18 2.6

agribusinesses, as well as social and economic policies that provide pensions for retired smallholders. Urban–rural multi-sitedness is both a product and a cause of the decline in importance of agricultural production especially for the market, and its replacement by myriad income sources in the estuarine flood plain. Both rural and urban-based factions of these families have been contributing a variety of resources to household needs; we are currently carrying out research to determine the exact content, volumes and direction of these resource flows. Resources that circulate within multisited households are not confined merely to forest, river and farm produce. Important resources that are exchanged include new production technologies, labour, tools, consumer preferences and capital, as household members live in cities, engage in off-farm labour, work for resource extraction and processing enterprises, government agencies or NGOs, and learn from those experiences. The land use, production and consumption patterns of these multi-sited households come to reflect combined rural and urban patterns, needs and opportunities. For instance, Brondizio and his colleagues have found that the most significant economic activity in the estuarine region today, the production of açaí palm fruit, developed in response to an increase in demand for the preferred village staple food prompted by the migration of rural açaí consumers to the cities of the estuary after 1970 (Brondizio 1999, 2004; Brondizio et al. 1994, 1996, 2002). They cite IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) data showing that between 1975 and 1991, production of açaí fruit rose fivefold (Brondizio et al. 2002: 72). The increased market for açaí is manifest in the flood plain landscapes in several ways. The cultivation of the palm has extended its range far beyond its usual estuarine habitat, and the management of açaí stands has been greatly intensified. Brondizio et al. (2002) report that manipulation of stands to increase production per area is ever more effective. In Amapá we have also

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noted that farmers are using technologies to control the times of the palms’ fruiting and some are successfully producing açaí fruit year-round. In the case of the great increase in demand for açaí, a food preference shifted – with reportedly some small changes in taste and form – from rural to urban places. The households resident in the shanty towns of Macapá, Belem and other urban centres continue to maintain ties and share tastes with the surrounding rural zone, while doubtless also acquiring new urban preferences. The recent spread of açaí consumption to urban populations without rural experience may be seen as a form of ‘ruralisation’ of tastes and consumption patterns in the fast-growing cities of Amazonia and beyond (Alexiades and Shanley 2004). In another example from our previous research, we have found that Amapá households whose members worked for large-scale urban-based sawmills during recent export-based industrial timber booms in the estuary brought experience and knowledge of timber processing back to their household production units, and incorporated it into their forest management and other rural activities (Pinedo-Vasquez et al. 2001). These members of multi-sited households subsequently established family-run mills and now provide a great variety of inexpensive timber products for a growing urban market. These families can also be credited with greatly expanding the number of species that are locally used for construction. While the hardwood-based and export-oriented timber industries in the Amazon estuary previously processed and marketed a mere six hardwood species, the new rural/urban lumber industries are using up to forty-five species of both hardwoods and softwoods, with many of them produced in agroforestry systems. Drawing upon experience gained in both urban and rural settings, multi-sited households in the várzea of Amapá have developed new patterns of timber production, processing as well as marketing, and have thus transformed lumber and construction markets in Macapá and other Amazonian cities. Currently, the large timber industries have been largely replaced by small-scale, family-run and diversified forestry practices and industries. These non-linear and multidirectional flows of human and other capital and contributions of both urban and rural members of multi-sited families vary across the region and to date remain largely unstudied.

Urban-Rural Networks and Organisations We have emphasised households and others have highlighted larger kinbased groups – such as Nugent’s kindreds – as central to the maintenance of rural–urban ties. There are, however, numerous examples of other types of social networks and organisations that have both historically and at present helped to mobilise and move resources, capital and labour between

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rural and urban centres and thus have helped support rural migrants and multi-sited households in their new locales. While these urban/rural institutions are highly variable in size, membership and structure, they all tend to be flexible in their functions and are extensively networked. Among such organisations that operate in our geographical areas of research are various farmers’ associations, such as the Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais do Amapá (the Rural Workers’ Union of Amapá), which is invaluable in helping farmers petition government bodies to gain access to capital and financial resources in their rural settings, but also assists multisited families in negotiating a variety of issues in urban locales. An innovative training institution, the Escolas de Familia (or ‘Family Schools’), which train rural-based youth in various areas of Brazil (including estuarine villages in Amapá), serves some of the same functions. While it is ostensibly charged with helping young members of farm households remain in rural areas, the education offered by the Escola de Familia in effect helps them deal more effectively with both rural and urban needs and thus promotes the multi-sitedness that we have observed. Counterpart organisations and networks in Peruvian Amazonia include comités municipales, groups organised at both district and provincial levels to help farm households identify and access government aid programmes that can provide crucial support in unfamiliar peri-urban as well as urban environments. Similar groups on a yet more local level in Peru include organizaciones vecinales or ‘neighbourhood organisations’, which also help link rural dwellers to development opportunities such as those offered by the WAWASI programme, which focuses specifically on assisting women, including single mothers. These organisations help families to secure access to health, legal and credit services as well as to get temporary jobs in cities. Amazonian cities and towns also feature a variety of more and less formally organised village-based associations that link immigrants from specific rural communities and help them maintain and strengthen rural/urban ties. For instance, the Asociación de Dos de Mainos (Association of People from Dos de Mayo), which brings together immigrants to the city of Pucallpa from the distant Ucayali river village of Dos de Mayo, has been crucial in helping the newly arrived to deal with housing, employment and various government permit processes, and is critical to the continued functioning of rural/urban economic and social ties. The association works largely by linking up new immigrants with those who arrived earlier and who are relatively more successful, well connected and/or working in key positions in public and private institutions in the city. For instance, a nurse member of the group has played an important role in helping members of the association to find appropriate urban health services. Comparable social organisations have aided immigrants all over the world and in many periods to assimilate into their new locations without cutting ties to their areas of origin.

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We have pointed out only a few of many ‘complexities’ of urban–rural movements over the last several decades in Amazonia that are sure to emerge as more attention is devoted to this increasingly important aspect of Amazonian societies. This research has been long in coming as the rapidly urbanizing basin has continued to be portrayed as the ultimate forested or, at best, rural place. What must be remembered, however, is that, while processes of urbanisation, de-agrarianisation, multi-sitedness and even suburbanisation may be increasing or strengthening dramatically, these trends are not simple, unidirectional or linear, nor are they the products of novel trends produced by recent forms of ‘globalisation’.

References Alexiades, M.N. and P. Shanley. 2004. ‘Productos Forestales, Medios de Subsistencia y Conservación. Estudios de Caso sobre Sistemas de Manejo de Productos Forestales No Maderables’, in M.N. Alexiades and P. Shanley (eds), Productos Forestales, Medios de Subsistencia y Conservación. Estudios de Caso sobre Sistemas de Manejo de Productos Forestales No Maderables. Bogor, Indonesia: CIFOR, pp. 1–22. Barrett, C.B., T. Reardon and P. Webb (eds) 2001. ‘Income Diversification and Livelihoods in Rural Africa: Cause and Consequence of Change’, Food Policy 26 (4), special issue. Booth, A. 2002. ‘The Changing Role of Non-farm Activities in Agricultural Households in Indonesia: Some Insights from the Agricultural Censuses’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 38 (2): 179–200. Brondizio, E.S. 1999. ‘Agroforestry Intensification in the Amazon Estuary’, in T. Granfelt (ed.), Managing the Globalised Environment: Local Strategies to Secure Livelihoods. London: IT Publications, pp. 88–113. ——— 2004. ‘From Staple to Fashion Food: Shifting Cycles, Shifting Opportunities in the Development of the Açaí Palm Fruit (Euterpe oleracea Mart.) Economy in the Amazon Estuary’, in D.J. Zarin, J.R.R. Alavalapati, F.E. Putz and M. Schmink (eds), Working Forests in the Neotropics: Conservation through Sustainable Management? New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 339–65. Brondizio, E.S., E. Moran, P. Mausel and Y. Wu 1994. ‘Land Use Change in the Amazon Estuary: Patterns of Caboclo Settlement and Landscape Management’, Human Ecology 22: 249–78. Brondizio, E.S., E.F. Moran, P. Mausel and Y. Wu 1996. ‘Land Cover in the Amazon Estuary: Linking of the Thematic Mapper with Botanical and Historical Data’, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 62 (8): 921–29. Brondizio, E.S., C. Safar and A.D. Siqueira 2002. ‘The Urban Market of Açaí Fruit (Euterpe oleraceae Mart) and Rural Land Use Change: Ethnographic Insights Into The Role of Price and Land Tenure

96 | Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez and Christine Padoch Constraining Agricultural Choices in the Amazon Estuary’, Urban Ecosystems 6: 67–97. Browder, J. 2002. ‘The Urban–Rural Interface: Urbanization and Tropical Cover Change’, Urban Ecosystem 6: 21–41. Bryceson, D.F. 1996. ‘Deagrarianization and Rural Employment in SubSaharan Africa: a Sectoral Perspective’, World Development 24 (1): 97–111. ——— 1999. ‘African Rural Labour, Income Diversification and Livelihood Approaches: a Long-term Development Perspective’, Review of African Political Economy 80: 171–89. Chibnik, M. 1994. Risky Rivers: The Economics and Politics of Floodplain Farming in Amazonia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. de Haan, A. 1999. ‘Livelihoods and Poverty: the Role of Migration – a Critical Review of the Migration Literature’, Journal of Development Studies 36 (2): 1–47. Ellis, F. 1998. ‘Household Strategies and Rural Livelihood Diversification’, Journal of Development Studies 35 (1): 1–38. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) 2002. Tabulação Avançada do Censo Demografico 2000. Resultados Preliminares da Amostra. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE. Nugent, S. 1993. Amazonian Caboclo Society: An Essay on Invisibility and Peasant Economy. Providence: Berg Publishers. Padoch C. and W. de Jong 1990. ‘Santa Rosa: the Impact of the Forest Products Trade on an Amazonian Place and Population’, in G.T. Prance and M. J. Balick (eds.), New Directions in the Study of Plants and People. Advances in Economic Botany 8. New York: New York Botanical Garden Press, pp. 151–58. Pinedo-Vasquez, M., D. Zarin, K. Coffey, C. Padoch and F. Rabelo 2001. ‘PostBoom Timber Production in Amazonia’, Human Ecology 29: 219–39. Rigg, J. and S. Nattapoolwat 2001. ‘Embracing the Global in Thailand: Activism and Pragmatism in an Era of De-agrarianisation’, World Development 29 (6): 945–60. Santos-Granero, F. and F. Barclay 2000. Tamed Frontiers: Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia. Washington, DC: Westview Press. Wagley, C. 1953. Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. WinklerPrins, A.M.G.A. 2002. ‘House-lot Gardens in Santarém, Pará, Brazil: Linking Rural with Urban’, Urban Ecosystems 6: 43–65.

CHAPTER 5

Unpicking ‘Community’ in Community Conservation: Implications of Changing Settlement Patterns and Individual Mobility for the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve, Peru HELEN NEWING1

Introduction Perhaps the core premise of community conservation is that people who have permanent, exclusive rights to land and resources are more likely to manage resources sustainably in the long term (McCay and Acheson 1987; Acheson 1989; Oglethorpe 1990; Ostrom 1990; Lynch and Alcorn 1994; Hanna et al. 1996). Such an approach is based on a clear definition of those who hold permanent or long-term resource rights to a specific area. However, mobility and migration – the subject of this book – represent a basic challenge for this approach. Rural communities are not fixed, bounded entities; they move in location, change in composition as people move in or move away, and do not necessarily have a clearly defined membership. Whilst these issues are increasingly recognised in the

1. The fieldwork described in this chapter was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Particular thanks are due to Pablo Puertas, Miguel Antúnez, Zina Valverde and the administrative staff of WCS for their assistance; also to Gerardo Bertíz of the Rainforest Conservation Fund.

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academic literature (Uphoff, 1998; Agrawal and Gibson, 1999; Kumar, 2005), they are often still overlooked in the implementation of community natural resource management projects, which have typically treated the ‘community’ as ‘a distinct social group in one geographical location, sharing common cultural characteristics, in harmony and consensus: images that actually may be quite misguiding reflections of reality’ (Kumar 2005). At a time when collaborative approaches to conservation are subject to an increasingly strong critique (Oates 1999; Terborgh 1999; Terborgh and Peres 2002), there is an urgent need to move beyond this rather simplistic approach to ‘community’. The first step is to build up a body of case studies that unpick the concept of ‘community’ in community conservation, in order to inform the development of a more realistic framework for community conservation projects. This chapter attempts to provide such a case study, with a particular focus on changing settlement patterns and individual mobility of local residents, based on communities neighbouring the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve in Amazonian Peru. Peruvian Communal Reserves are an innovative category within the Peruvian National System of Protected Areas, which secures exclusive use rights over large, natural areas ‘for the benefit of neighbouring rural populations’ (Newing and Wahl 2004: 38). The category is broadly

Figure 5.1. Location of the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve, Amazon River, Peru.

Unpicking ‘Community’ in Community Conservation | 99

perceived by government officials and conservationists to be most relevant for remote populations that range over large areas and use resources nonintensively. Potentially high-impact activities such as settlement, the clearing of new agricultural land and commercial logging within communal reserves are prohibited.

Case Study: the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve The Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve (TTCR) was established in 1991 and was designed to give local ribereño communities exclusive rights to certain natural resources within its boundaries, in order to prevent largescale commercial exploitation by outsiders. Fieldwork carried out ten years later as part of this study aimed to examine how community participation in the management of the reserve had adapted to changing social conditions – particularly changes in settlement patterns and community composition. The TTCR is located some 100km south of Iquitos between the Tamshiyacu and Tahuayo rivers in the District of Fernando Lores, Maynas province, Loreto (Figure 5.1). Most of the local population is distributed in riverside communities of between ten and one hundred households, each with a primary school and a meeting-house. They have been broadly characterised as ribereño peasants2 with a mixed economy dominated by small-scale agriculture, hunting, fishing and extraction of other forest products (Coomes 1992). Ribereño culture (and its counterpart in Brazil, caboclo culture) is frequently characterised as a very successful adaptation to ecological and socio-economic conditions in Amazonia (Moran 1981; Hiraoka 1985; Parker 1985; Redford and Padoch 1992; Harris 2000; Schmink 2003), which involves a high level of mobility as individuals and populations move in response to patchy resource distribution and changing market demand for extractive products3 (see also Alexiades, this 2. A definition for ribereños in current use is provided by Padoch (1986: 4, quoted in Chibnik 1991: 173): ‘a rural mixed population of detribalised Amazonian natives and their descendants, former immigrants from the neighbouring Peruvian Departments of San Martin and Amazonas and their descendants, the children and grandchildren of immigrants from other South American countries and a few from overseas, and the descendants of any unions between members of the above groups’. 3. Ribereños and their Brazilian counterparts, caboclos, are in an anomalous position in Amazonian discourses on indigenous identity (Wagley 1953; Moran 1981; Parker 1985; Harris 2000). They are recognised as having a distinct culture and traditional ecological knowledge passed down over some 400 years since European colonisation, and yet are contrasted to truly ‘indigenous’ tribal peoples, who are generally less integrated into national society in genetic, cultural and economic terms (Chibnik 1991; Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000: 270–77; Little 2001: 7).

100 | Helen Newing

volume). Several authors suggest that this is so especially among Peruvian ribereños, due not only to ecological and economic factors, but also to cultural ones. The former include the poorer soils in the upper Amazon, which are less suitable for settled agriculture; the lesser early impact in Peru of European colonisation on settlement patterns of indigenous populations (Little 2001: 42–43, 61); differences in the structure of trade (Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000); and differences in the economy of the rubber boom, due both to differences in law4 and to differences in techniques for exploitation of the two dominant rubber tree species.5 An important cultural factor is the pioneer image of the ribereño, which romanticises exploration and adventure (Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000); thus, movement between different places may be seen as having value in itself. Clearly, this perspective fits uneasily with approaches to community conservation based on fixed land and resource rights. The history and economy of the Tahuayo Basin up to the early 1990s has been well documented in previous studies, particularly by Coomes (1992, 1995, 1996). This chapter focuses specifically on the inhabitants of the Blanco river, a small tributary to the Tahuayo that was the main location of community support to create the reserve in 1991. Three communities have been created on the Blanco since the late 1980s and therefore do not feature in the earlier socio-economic studies; the only published research on them focuses on hunting and community involvement in management of the reserve (Bodmer et al. 1988, 1997; Bodmer 1994, 2001; Bodmer and Puertas 2000; Puertas et al, 2000; Bodmer and Lozano 2001; Newing and Bodmer 2004).

Methods The study was based on a review of previous studies of the region, material collected from archival sources and approximately eight months’ fieldwork by the author in the communities along the Blanco between April 2001 and March 2004. The original aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between the local people and the Communal Reserve and how this had changed since its creation in 1991. Fieldwork

4. In Brazil, but not Peru, it was possible to gain ownership of forests rich in Hevea rubber (Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000: 51). 5. Castilloa ulei (‘caucho’), which is more widely distributed in the upper Amazon (including the Peruvian Amazon), is felled by mobile work teams. Hevea brasiliensis (‘jebe’) is more common in the Amazonian lowlands, is tapped repeatedly and can therefore be harvested by a settled workforce. However, after 1900, exploitation in the upper Amazon also turned to Hevea. See SantosGranero and Barclay (2000: 51) and Little (2001: 49, 68) for further details.

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began with unstructured techniques (participant observation and informal interviews) and focused on gathering information on people’s attitudes to the reserve; a basic demographic survey was also conducted. The first field trip revealed that, in fact, many of the people living on the Blanco had not been involved in its creation, having moved to the area in the 1990s. On the other hand, families that had been involved in the lobbying to create the Reserve attributed the decrease in commitment to its management partly to the departure of some key individual community members who had been leaders in the original initiative. Subsequent visits therefore focused on social change and, specifically, mobility of local people. Oral histories were recorded both of the Blanco river basin and the reserve (through individual and group interviews and, at the end of the fieldwork, through community workshops) and of the individual lives of all adult residents. Methodology for the latter is described in more detail below.

Changes in Settlement Patterns The principle underlying the creation of the reserve was that the granting of permanent, exclusive rights to natural resource use for existing resident populations would keep resource use low and stimulate local enforcement of restricted access by outsiders. However, population densities, settlement patterns and resource use have undergone a series of major transformations over the past 120 years and continue to evolve. The following description is based on work by Coomes (1992), supplemented by material collected during this study with specific reference to the Blanco. Population densities of indigenous peoples prior to colonisation are not known, but it is likely that overall populations rose during the rubber boom with immigration of rubber workers, dropped substantially after its collapse, and since then have gone through successive periods of relative stability and sharp increases according to changing external social and economic conditions. The focus moved from an indigenous subsistence economy (pre-1880s) to commercial extractivism in the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then to intensive riverside commercial farming supplemented by the extraction of a succession of forest products from the hinterlands (Coomes 1992, 1995). The oldest families currently resident in the area arrived to work either in the rubber boom or on the haciendas (farming estates) that developed immediately after its collapse. Up until the 1950s, commercial extraction of forest products from the upper Tahuayo and Blanco rivers was severely limited by the presence of hostile Matses Indians. Following several violent encounters between the Matses and outlying camps of forest workers, in the early 1950s the

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Peruvian army carried out a ‘purge’ of the area (‘correría’), massacring or driving away any Indians who were encountered, thus opening up the area to further exploitation.6 A second group of the current inhabitants – including many relatively isolated households on the upper Blanco river (quebrada Blanco) – are the descendants of men who arrived from the time of the military purge up until the 1970s, with financial backing from hacienda owners and others, in order to extract forest products such as tree resins, timber and animal skins. A further period of intensive change occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, due both to the 1969 Land Reform, which dissolved the hacienda system, and to improved transport links with Iquitos, as motorised boats brought the Tahuayo and Blanco within a single day’s travel of markets. Along the Tahuayo, many farm workers became independent producers who practised a mixture of subsistence farming and cash crop production, supplemented by the sale of forest products. Due to ease of access to markets, communities on the lower Tahuayo tend to be larger, more fully integrated into the cash economy and more reliant on cash crops. On the upper Tahuayo and particularly on the Blanco, on the other hand, communities are smaller, and most households practise subsistence farming, in some cases together with small-scale production of cash crops and extraction of forest products for subsistence or sale. Thus there is a gradation along the river in terms of community size, socio-economics and natural resource use.

The Agrarian Associations In the late 1980s, a government incentive programme for the creation of new settlements in agricultural frontier regions triggered a new wave of immigration. The Peruvian government offered plots of land and loans for agricultural tools and labour to communities that registered as Agrarian Associations. This was an effort to consolidate remote areas and increase food production, in line with measures taken by other governments throughout Latin America (Little 2001: 106–7). The Tahuayo basin was a major focus for the settlement programme. As a result, its total population rose by 72 per cent (from 1,816 to 3,130) between 1981 and 1989 (Coomes 1995, 1996), and by another 54 per cent by 2001 (Arévalo 2001). A survey in 1989 recorded that 54 per cent of heads of households along the Tahuayo had arrived in the 1980s (Coomes, 1995). Thus, a third group of the current residents arrived from the late 1980s onwards. 6. ‘Correrías’ were common in the rubber boom, with the ostensible purpose of capturing indigenous women and children as slaves for the rubber estates, but also to purge areas of hostile indigenous populations in order to permit colonisation. Occasional correrías continued purely for the latter purpose until the 1950s and 1960s (for more detail see Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000, chapter 3).

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The more remote Blanco river was also affected by Agrarian Associations. Previously, its only inhabitants were isolated households of people who had moved there from the 1950s to early 1980s to work in extraction of forest resources. There was also one extended family from the community of El Chino, who for some years had been moving seasonally to the higher ground near the mouth of the Blanco to escape annual flooding. However, in the late 1980s, as part of the Agrarian Association process, a group of sixty settlers arrived from Iquitos by boat with a government technician, in order to mark out parcels of land along the Blanco to form a new Association to be called Nuevo Ingreso. The El Chino members succeeded in blocking the creation of Nuevo Ingreso on their existing farms, partly by forming their own Agrarian Association and eventually, with support from biologists working in the area, by blocking government support for the new association, which in turn resulted in the departure of all the new immigrants. The new residents from El Chino stayed permanently on the Blanco, forming the independent community of San Pedro.

Crisis in Natural Resources and Creation of the Reserve The Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve was created in response to several of the changes in settlement and natural resource use described above. The sudden opening up of access as the old estates disappeared caused a crisis in fish stocks for local people, as freezer boats began to travel from Iquitos to trawl the local oxbow lakes. Some communities, with support from biologists working at a research station on the Blanco, mounted twenty-four-hour guard systems to protect the fish stocks (Pinedo et al. 2000). Biologists at the research station were also concerned about increasing hunting and logging in the upland forests. In the late 1980s, both locals and biologists were alarmed at the immigration associated with the Agrarian Associations (Newing and Bodmer 2004). Local communities, seeking to secure land-use rights and credits, reacted to the threat of invasion by immigrant communities by forming their own Agrarian Associations, typically behind their existing communities on the riverfront. Coomes (1996) has shown how the Agrarian Association scheme resulted in deforestation of a band of land parallel to the Tahuayo, as both existing communities and newcomers cleared the land in order to gain from government credits – only to abandon the land again a few years later as it became clear that the newly cleared areas were economically unviable.7 However, this process did

7. Chirif (1989: 189, cited in Little 2001: 108), Martínez (1990) and Painter (1995: 9) have documented similar economic failure and environmental costs of colonisation projects elsewhere in Amazonian Peru and Bolivia.

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result in a longer-lasting increase in the population, and its dispersal to areas further from the river into the hinterland. Meanwhile, biologists presented a series of proposals to regional and national government for the creation of a reserve. Whilst accounts of the extent of active community involvement in this process vary, the proposals had support from a significant proportion of the local population, largely because of their own recent experiences of resource overexploitation and land invasion by outsiders. Two communities on the Tahuayo – El Chino and Buenavista – were particularly involved in the lobbying to create the reserve because they were the nearest to the Blanco, which was both the main access point to the forest uplands that became the reserve, and also the site of the biological research station where proposals for a reserve were formulated. The communal reserve was finally created in 1991, after several years’ lobbying, and its creation put a brake on forest extraction and the spread of settlements further upriver. No new logging concessions were granted after the late 1980s, and many extractivist workers left the Blanco as a result.

Changes in Settlement Patterns since the Creation of the Reserve Although the invasion by Nuevo Ingreso appeared to have been successfully countered, immigration to the Blanco continued for the next twelve years. Although the original immigrants in Nuevo Ingreso had left, friends and relatives – hearing about the good farmland and the abundant animals in the area – continued to arrive over the following years. As a result the population on the Tahuayo continued to increase. Fieldwork carried out for this study showed that, by the early 2000s, the Nuevo Ingreso-related immigrants dominated the population of the Blanco, making up 55 per cent of the ninety-four adults living there. Moreover, immigration related to the Agrarian Association project had not slowed by the late 1990s; twenty-three individuals (45 per cent) arrived after 1995 and thirteen (25 per cent) in 2000 or later. The newcomers established two new communities (Diamante and 7 de Julio) further upriver on the Blanco, between the reserve and the communities that had lobbied for its creation (Figure 5.2). Since the law on communal reserves defines the beneficiaries as ‘neighbouring rural populations’ it could be argued that the only new communities – the immediate neighbours – should be beneficiaries. Social relations remained extremely strained between former inhabitants and the new immigrants, and this has been a significant barrier to implementing existing inter-community agreements on resource use. The implications for communal reserves and broader co-management models will be discussed in the final section of this chapter.

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Individual Mobility During the study period, individual mobility was so prominent that residency in the Blanco was hard to define. Although the total population size was stable from 2001 to 2004, in the twelve-month period from April 2002 a total of nineteen adults (20 per cent of the total) moved out of the Blanco, apparently permanently; but by January 2004, seven were back again. Only one adult had lived on the Blanco for his entire life, although there were residents who had been there since the 1950s. Mobility of individuals and households raises additional challenges for community approaches to conservation based on fixed, long-term resource rights. In the case of the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve, the original reserve management agreement in 1992 defined those with rights to the reserve as people born in the two communities of Chino and Buenavista (Newing and Bodmer 2004). This has clearly been insufficient and, more recently, beneficiaries have been defined more simply by membership of participating communities, which now include the new communities of San Pedro and Diamante–7 de Julio. Nonetheless, the high degree of mobility makes even this hard to define. In order to better understand individual and household mobility, and also to shed further light on changing demographics, oral life histories were collected from adult ‘residents’ of the Blanco that were present at the time, as well as from a sample of those in El Chino on the Tahuayo. Particular attention was paid to moves in location and their underlying motivations. At the end of the interview, if necessary, people were asked specifically why they had come to the Blanco and whether they knew anyone there before they came. The information gathered was cross-checked in subsequent interviews, except in a small number of cases where individuals were not present during any of the subsequent field trips. Between one and four interviews were carried out per person, depending on the completeness and consistency of the information collected. A total of ninety-two life histories were collected in this way, which represents all except two of the inhabitants registered during field trips. The following account gives a summary of common choices and types of movement at different stages in an individual’s lifetime, and examines the variations in this general pattern between the three subsets of the population that have been described above, hereafter referred to as the ‘older farming families’, ‘extractivist workers’ and ‘post-Agrarian Association immigrants’. One striking feature of the life histories was that sixty-six individuals (72 per cent of the total sample) had at some time lived in the city of Iquitos, in some cases for extended periods; thus, the characterisation of local people as rural subsistence dwellers is over-simplistic. Common reasons given for moving to the city were access to schools, to seek work, to seek a husband

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or wife or simply to spend time with family. Twenty-one individuals (23 per cent) had spent a period of time in the city either for their own schooling or, if they could afford it, for that of their children. Fifteen (44 per cent) of the women born in rural locations had gone to Iquitos as teenagers, ostensibly to work – either for income or to assist relatives – but also to seek a husband; all but three of them met their future husbands there. Young men also went to the city to sign up for national service, which until recently was compulsory, or to seek employment. Much manual labour takes the form of short-term contracts for the extraction of forest resources and, since the 1960s, oil, for which workers are recruited in Iquitos. Young men commonly work in numerous locations, during periods ranging from months to years, according to changing demand and local depletion of resources, returning to Iquitos in between jobs to look for further employment. Over half (55 per cent) of men in this study had worked on short-term contracts of this type and, partly as a result, 51 per cent of men had lived in more than three different rural locations, with a small minority (five men, or 10 per cent) having lived in more than ten different rural locations. Wives and children might accompany their menfolk on contract work or stay in either the city or a rural community. As a result, women are less mobile; only six women (15 per cent) had lived in three or more locations and none had lived in more than six. When men are unable to find work in Iquitos, a fallback option is to move to a rural community and set up small-scale farming for subsistence. Seventeen men (33 per cent) reported that they had had to do this at some time in their lives, and several mentioned specifically that this had happened in the early 1990s at the time of economic collapse during Alan García’s presidency. However, a switch from city life to farming was also reported as a positive choice by some young couples, so that they could spend time together as a family. Similarly, three middle-aged couples had chosen to return to live in the countryside after their children had grown up, in two cases while also maintaining a household in Iquitos, explaining that they did so not just to grow crops or collect forest produce, but because they preferred the rural lifestyle to the noise and bustle of the city. One elderly resident from an old farming family, who also has a house in the city, explained as follows: I would spend all the time here if I could; the only reason for going to the city is so I see my grandchildren. The life is not good there, with all the noise and pollution and heat; and you sit up until midnight watching television. Here I sleep much better, and we eat better, it’s a better life.

Indeed, part of the reason why residency was hard to define was because of the constant movement of individuals between households in the Blanco and family households in Iquitos. Seven of forty-nine households (14 per cent) in the Blanco also owned a house in the city, and

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the members of the households moved back and forth according to both economic needs and lifestyle choices. A further twenty-five (51 per cent) households had close kin – parents, children or siblings – who lived in the city and could therefore stay there, or send their children to school there, for extended periods at low cost. Children at school in Iquitos often came back to the Blanco during school holidays; in some cases their mother stayed with them in the city during term-time and the whole family joined the father in the holidays and helped with smallholder production. During each field trip, some individuals would be reported by locals to have moved away permanently from the Blanco, only to reappear a year or more later, having been living with family in Iquitos.

Variations between Subgroups The broad outline given above was common to all three subgroups of the population, but some more detailed variations between groups will be described here. Among the older farming families from the Tahuayo, although individuals moved between their home community and the city or other rural locations for all the reasons given above, larger extended family groups were present, because many young adults had returned to live near their parents. Thus, the community of San Pedro consisted almost entirely of one extended family, originally founded by two brothers and their wives, who were sisters. The closest two communities on the Tahuayo also each contained a small number of large extended families. The economic and social links with Iquitos appeared to be stronger further down the Tahuayo river; during a two-day visit to Buenavista, local residents stated that every household except one had a second house in the city, and many family members came upriver seasonally to harvest tree crops such as avocado and camu-camu, and to escape from the heat and noise of the city. Livelihoods were based mainly on farming and people frequently commented on the beauty and peacefulness of the community, contrasting it to the noise and dirt of larger towns and cities. Some staff of non-governmental organisations even commented that the Tahuayo appeared to be moving away from subsistence or commerce, towards hobby farming. Moving on to the extractivist workers, all had arrived in the Blanco on short-term contracts with financial backing from local or city-based patrons, or were the children of those who had done so. Those who had stayed were only a small fraction of the original workers, and now lived principally from small-scale agriculture, in at least three cases supplemented substantially by hunting. Several people explained that they wanted to escape from the pressures of waged labour (‘I prefer it here. Noone controls my work’) or simply that they liked the peaceful life in the forest. An old extractivist in his seventies liked to tell how: ‘Before,

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there were no people. Everything was silence; there was absolutely nobody, no houses. Pure silence, silence, silence. Nobody, nobody, nobody … afterwards the people arrived, they have destroyed everything.’ The post-Agrarian Association immigrants included a small number of wealthy middle-aged couples – six of the seven families who owned a house in Iquitos were in this category – and a much larger number of young couples or singles. The reasons given most frequently for choosing the Blanco as a destination included the abundant wildlife and good farming land (n = 21) or visiting relatives or moving to be near them (n = 22). However, many of the men appeared to be living primarily from hunting and frequently talked of the adventure of the hunt; members of the other two groups stated that most of the post-Agrarian Association immigrants had come specifically to carry out commercial hunting in the reserve, although the subject was too sensitive to allow for this to be confirmed directly. Moreover, the husband and wife in a single family often gave different reasons for such moves, no doubt reflecting their different priorities: Sometimes I went to the Pacaya Samiria Reserve, but there was the risk of having the game confiscated by the park guards. I came to the Blanco because there’s a lot of hunting. [Husband] We came to the Blanco because my mother lived here. She invited us. I came to visit her and I liked it; I made my chacra. I live in Iquitos, but we have our chacra here. [Wife]

All except five post-Agrarian Association immigrants had arrived through contacts that stretch back to just two of the original group that came through the Agrarian Association scheme, and came from a small cluster of communities on the River Marañon neighbouring the PacayaSamiria National Reserve. Twelve were born in a single community – Shapajilla – which has suffered repeated floods and violent conflicts between local people and park guards over access rights to natural resources. The remaining five had come from a second region, where they had been displaced from their natural resource base by the creation of a protected area – the Allpahuayo Mishana Reserve. Four of the five stated specifically that the reserve and the subsequent loss of resource rights were the reason why they had come. Thus there is evidence that immigration to the Blanco was connected to displacement of local people by stricter protected areas elsewhere.

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Discussion The case study raises several important issues in current debates about community conservation. These are divided below into those related to changes in local settlement patterns and those related to personal mobility.

Changing Settlement Patterns and Population Densities The greatest challenge for effective community participation in management of the communal reserve has undoubtedly been caused by the continuing trickle of immigration that has its origins in the Agrarian Association scheme. To a certain extent this fits in with conventional approaches to conservation based on secure resource rights for defined ‘insiders’, since the problem arose because there were areas of untitled land neighbouring the reserve, and this allowed the influx of newcomers who gained rights to resources within the reserve. At least three other communal reserves in Peru – the El Sira, Asháninka and Machiguenga Communal Reserves – have prioritised the securement of community land rights in a complete band along the borders of the reserve in order to avoid this problem (Newing and Wahl 2004). However, once this is done, communities cannot move on in response to local depletion of natural resources, as they would have done in the past. As a result, the perimeter of the reserve is likely to suffer increasing resource depletion. Meanwhile, prohibition of even temporary settlement within the reserve means that its core is largely inaccessible. Thus, rather than supporting the low-impact, extensive use of natural resources by mobile populations as originally conceptualised, communal reserves are more likely to accelerate the settlement process, increase local depletion of resources on the perimeter, and prevent – or criminalise – use of resources at the centre. Such problems are not unique to communal reserves in Peru; Little (2001: 167–69) argues similarly that the collaborative management plan for Cuyabeno Reserve in Ecuador favoured those indigenous communities that just happened to be within the reserve boundaries at this time, and discriminated against those that happened to be outside, given that communities were traditionally highly mobile. The result was to break traditional patterns of mobility and resource use: ‘By tying them to specific areas indelibly etched in maps, the establishment and expansion of the Cuyabeno Reserve negated the traditional practice of resettlement practised for centuries by indigenous peoples of the area.’ When the category of communal reserves was created in the Peruvian protected areas system, it attracted much interest both within Peru and internationally as an innovative mechanism that could address these issues and ‘fit in’ with traditional extensive resource use patterns (Newing and Wahl 2004). However, the above case study demonstrates that the

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mechanism for the management of communal reserves needs to be redefined if they are to meet the purpose for which they were originally envisaged. One possible direction would be to allow settlement within the reserves and to work with communities to prevent resource depletion in other ways. A broader conclusion is that community conservation based on exclusive, permanent resource rights and systems of zoning for different levels of use may solve immediate problems of invasion by outsiders, but may be inappropriate in the longer term in places where people have traditionally used resources non-intensively over large areas.

Community Composition and Personal Mobility The case study has shown that individuals on the Blanco are highly mobile, typically moving several times in their lives between different rural and urban locations. Again, this throws up some specific challenges for current approaches to community conservation. Most obviously, for approaches based on exclusive resource rights for local residents, it exposes the difficulty of defining who is resident – and therefore a member of the group with rights to resources in the communal reserve – and indeed raises questions about the level at which membership of this group should be defined. To date, this has been done at the level of individuals, but, in terms both of local systems of social organisation and of subsistence economics, it would make more sense to do so at the level of households or even multi-locational extended families. Extended families act as the basic unit for social and economic organisation in many traditional non-indigenous Amazonian societies (Nugent 1993; Little 2001: 37), and there is increasing documentation of the importance of multi-locational families that maintain households and economic activities in both urban and rural locations (Nugent 1993; Pinedo-Vásquez and Padoch, this volume). However, to take account of these networks would raise new challenges in defining where the limits of membership lie. Conservation projects based on a livelihoods approach (for example, Fisher et al. 2005) also need to take such links into account if they are to understand the economic context of natural resource use. Lastly, drivers of individual and household mobility in the Blanco include not only economic need and social networks, but also, at least for a small minority of families, lifestyle choices. Whilst some local families are driven to rural farming by economic necessity and are thus susceptible to economic incentives, a small number of families are motivated more by the aesthetic aspects of farming and life in the countryside. It is unclear to what extent this is likely to increase in the future, but some staff of nongovernmental organisations working along the Tahuayo commented on the possibility that the area would be increasingly dominated by hobby farming. A last issue raised by the case study, then, is the possibility that

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support for conservation may increase with increasing local valuation of natural landscapes per se. This is an area that has yet to be extensively researched, but recent work elsewhere has shown that the aesthetic aspect of forest living is more widespread in Amazonia than may be expected (for example, Kaimowitz 2002: 234). Whilst unpicking the concept of ‘community’ in community conservation involves far more issues than can be discussed here, mobility is one complex factor that deserves more attention. These issues have only recently started to be discussed in international conservation policy fora (Chatty and Colchester 2002; Dana Declaration 2002), but the creation of the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP) at the 2003 World Parks Congress has put the issue of conservation and mobility firmly on the international agenda.8 It will be important now that social scientists provide in-depth studies to inform the development of new policy approaches to this complex issue.

References Acheson, J.M. 1989. ‘Management of Common Property Resources’, in S. Plattner (ed.), Economic Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 351–78. Agrawal, A. and C. Gibson 1999. ‘Enchantment and Disenchantment: the Role of “Community” in Natural Resource Conservation’, World Development 27 (4): 629–49. Arévalo, E. 2001. ‘Distrito Fernando Lores: Capital Tamshiyacu’, Kanatiri 900: 3–11. Bodmer, R. 1994. ‘Managing Wildlife with Local Communities in the Peruvian Amazon: the Case of the Reserva Comunal Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo’, in D. Western and R. Wright (eds.), Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-based Conservation. Washington, DC: Island Press, pp. 113–34. ——— 2001. ‘Integrating Hunting and Protected Areas in the Amazon’, in A. Entwhistle and N. Dunstone (eds.), Priorities for the Conservation of Mammalian Diversity: Has the Panda Had its Day? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 277–90.

8. At the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN’s) 2003 World Parks Congress, a World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP) was created to explore areas of conflict and synergy. WAMIP is affiliated to IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (CEESP) and is defined as ‘a global alliance of nomadic peoples and communities practising various forms of mobility as a livelihood strategy while conserving biological diversity and using natural resources in a sustainable way’ (http://www.iucn.org/themes/ ceesp/WAMIP.htm).

112 | Helen Newing Bodmer, R. and E. Lozano 2001. ‘Rural Development and Sustainable Wildlife Use in Peru’, Conservation Biology 15: 1163–70. Bodmer, R. and P. Puertas 2000. ‘Community-based Co-management of Wildlife in the Peruvian Amazon’, in J. Robinson, and E. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 395–409. Bodmer, R., T. Fang and L. Moya Ibañez 1988. ‘Ungulate Management and Conservation in the Peruvian Amazon’, Biological Conservation 45: 303–10. Bodmer, R., J. Penn, P. Puertas, L. Moya and T. Fang 1997. ‘Linking Conservation and Local People through Sustainable Use of Natural Resources: Community-based Management in the Peruvian Amazon’, in C. Freese (ed.), Harvesting Wild Species: Implications for Biodiversity Conservation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, pp. 315–58. Chatty, D. and M. Colchester. 2002. ‘Introduction: Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples’, in D. Chatty and M. Colchester (eds), Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement, and Sustainable Development. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–20. Chibnik, M. 1991. ‘Quasi-Ethnic Groups in Amazonia’, Ethnology 30: 167–82. Coomes, O. 1992. ‘Making a Living in the Amazon Rain Forest: A Study of Peasants, Land and Economy in the Tahuayo River Basin, Northeastern Peru.’ PhD thesis, Department of Geography. University of Wisconsin: Madison. ——— 1995. ‘A Century of Rain Forest Use in Western Amazonia: Lessons for Extraction-based Conservation of Tropical Forest Resources’, Forest and Conservation History 39: 108–20. ——— 1996. ‘State Credit Programs and the Peasantry under Populist Regimes: Lessons from the APRA Experience in the Peruvian Amazon’, World Development 24 (8): 1333–46. Dana Declaration 2002. http://www.danadeclaration.org/text%20website/ declarationenglish.html. Fisher, R.J., S. Maginnis, W.J. Jackson, E. Barrow and S. Jeanrenaud 2005. Poverty and Conservation: Landscapes, People and Power. Cambridge: IUCN. Hanna, S.S., C. Folke and K.-G. Maler 1996. Rights to Nature: Ecological, Economic, Cultural and Political Principles of Institutions for the Environment. Washington: Island Press. Harris, M. 2000. Life on the Amazon: The Anthropology of a Brazilian Peasant Village. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hiraoka, M. 1985. ‘Cash Cropping, Wage Labor and Urbanward Migrations: Changing Floodplain Subsistence in the Peruvian Amazon’, in E. Parker (ed.), The Amazon Caboclo: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Williamsburg: Studies in Third World Societies, pp. 199–242. Kaimowitz, D. 2002. ‘Amazon Deforestation Revisited’, Latin American Research Review 37: 221–35.

Unpicking ‘Community’ in Community Conservation | 113 Kumar, C. 2005. ‘Revisiting “Community” in Community-based Natural Resource Management’, Community Development Journal 40: 275–85. Little, P. 2001. Amazonia: Territorial Struggles on Perennial Frontiers. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lynch, O. and J. Alcorn. 1994. ‘Tenurial Rights and Community-based Conservation’, in D. Western and R. Wright (eds), Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-Based Conservation. Washington: Island Press, pp. 373–92. Martínez, H. 1990. Las colonizaciones selváticas dirigidas en el Perú: antecedentes actualidad y perspectivas. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. McCay, B. and J. Acheson (eds) 1987. The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Moran, E.F. 1981. Developing the Amazon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Newing, H. and R. Bodmer 2004. ‘Collaborative Wildlife Management and Adaptation to Change: the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve, Peru’, Nomadic Peoples 7 (1): 110–22. Newing, H. and L. Wahl 2004. ‘Benefiting Local Populations? Communal Reserves in Peru’, Cultural Survival Quarterly 28 (1): 38–41. Nugent, S. 1993. Amazonian Caboclo Society: An Essay on Invisibility and Peasant Economy. Oxford: Berg. Oates, J.F. 1999. Myth and Reality in the Rain Forest: How Conservation Strategies are Failing in West Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oglethorpe, E. 1990. Tenure and Sustainable Use. Gland: IUCN. Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Painter, M. 1995. ‘Introduction: Anthropological Perspectives on Environmental Destruction’, in M. Painter and W.H. Durham (eds) The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 1–21. Parker, E. 1985. ‘The Amazon Caboclo: an Introduction and Overview’, in E. Parker (ed.), The Amazon Caboclo: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Williamsburg: Studies in Third World Societies, pp. xvii–li. Pinedo, D., P. Summers, R. Chase Smith, J. Saavedra, R. Zumaeta and A. Almeyda 2000. ‘Community-based Natural Resource Management as a Non-linear Process: a Case Study in the Peruvian Amazon Varzea’. Paper presented at Eighth IASCP Conference, Bloomington. Puertas, P., R. Bodmer, J. Lopez Parodi, J. del Aguila and A. Calle 2000. ‘La importancia de la participacion comunitaria en los planes de manejo de fauna silvestre en el nor oriente del Peru’, Folia Amazonica 11: 137–56. Redford, K.H. and C. Padoch 1992. ‘Folk Societies: Introduction’, in K. Redford and C. Padoch (eds), Conservation of Neotropical Forests: Working From Traditional Resource Use. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 131–33.

114 | Helen Newing Santos-Granero, F. and F. Barclay 2000. Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia. Boulder: Westview Press. Schmink, M. 2003. ‘No Longer Invisible, but Still Enigmatic: Amazonian Peasant Identities and Cosmographies’, Reviews in Anthropology 32: 223–37. Terborgh, J. 1999. Requiem for Nature. Washington: Island Press. Terborgh, J. and C. Peres 2002. ‘The Problem of People in Parks’, in J. Terborgh, C. van Schaik, L. Davenport and M. Rao (eds), Making Parks Work: Strategies for Preserving Tropical Nature. Washington: Island Press, pp. 307–19. Uphoff, N. 1998. ‘Community-based Natural Resource Management: Connecting Micro and Macro Processes and People with their Environments’. Plenary Presentation, International CBNRM Workshop, 10–14 May 1998, Washington, DC. Wagley, C. 1953. Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics. New York: Macmillan.

PART II TRANSFORMATIONS: KNOWLEDGE, IDENTITY, PLACE-MAKING AND THE DOMESTICATION OF NATURE

CHAPTER 6

Domestication of Peach Palm (Bactris gasipaes): the Roles of Human Mobility and Migration CHARLES R. CLEMENT, LAURA RIVAL AND DAVID M. COLE1

Introduction The domestication of plant populations and landscapes set the stage for the expansion of humans over the last 10,000 years (Bellwood 2005). Given the speed with which agricultural peoples expanded their populations and territories, it is curious that the roles of human mobility and migration have not been included more explicitly in definitions and discussions of domestication, although Diamond and Bellwood (2003) have recently presented a hypothesis to explain the migration of agricultural peoples, their crops and their languages. We believe that mobility is just as important, although on a local scale. In this short chapter we shall try to show its importance, especially with respect to plant domestication. This chapter will synthesise what is known and hypothesised about the origin and domestication of peach palm (Bactris gasipaes), the neotropics’ premier palm domesticate. Peach palm was once a staple of numerous indigenous groups, ranging from western Amazonia – near its probable centre of origin – to southern Mesoamerica – the northernmost limit of its pre-Colombian diffusion. The roles of human, and consequently seed,

1. Acknowledgements: We thank Eduardo Goés Neves, Universidade de São Paulo, Michael Heckenberger, University of Florida, Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, University of Cambridge, and Rodrigo Bernal, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, for numerous useful suggestions to improve this manuscript.

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mobility and migration in producing the current variability within and among landraces are our topic. To analyse the role of human movement in domestication, we shall start with observations in modern populations and work backwards towards the beginnings of peach palm domestication, developing explanatory models at each step. These models are designed to expand the first model of peach palm domestication (Clement 1988), which concentrated on individual swiddens and failed to integrate fully the roles of human mobility.

A General Model Plant domestication2 starts as a single founder event: that is, the selection – conscious or not – of a plant or plants for propagation. This founder event may occur in one place at one time or, more rarely, as multiple events in space and time. It becomes a process if the results of the propagation are successful in the eyes of those who initiated it. After the founder event(s), which may already involve movement of seeds from a natural population to a human settlement or other domesticated landscape, seed movement by humans is essential for the domestication process to move forward, because it isolates the next generation from its ancestral population. This isolation reduces gene flow,3 via pollen or seed dispersal, between the human-propagated and the ancestral populations, and allows the propagated population to diverge from the ancestral population according to human selection criteria. In addition, seed movement brings the plant population selected and propagated by one group of humans into contact with new populations, which may be either natural or selected by other groups of humans. This allows for hybridisation4 among the various 2. Both plant and animal domestication occurs at a population – not species – level, creating new populations that are distinct from the ancestral ones. Populations are groups of individuals within relatively restricted geographical areas that can mate with each other (Hartl 1988). We shall also refer to ‘subpopulations’ and ‘meta-populations’. The former are restricted to smaller areas with higher probabilities of mating, while the latter refer to groups of populations with some mating among the populations, generally by longer-distance pollen or seed dispersal. 3. Gene flow is the movement of distinct alleles of genes from one population to another via natural or human-mediated dispersal. Alleles are the alternative forms of genes, differing by one or more changes in the chemical make-up of the gene, and may cause different plant characteristics in the same population – remember Mendel’s peas! 4. Hybridisation occurs when individuals of genetically different populations cross-pollinate and produce viable offspring, resulting in a mixture of population-specific traits and, more rarely, in enhanced vigour and fitness – called hybrid vigour by geneticists.

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populations, which results in new genetic combinations for human selection to act on. Once the human group that initiated the process decides that the selected population is worth keeping, seeds of the selected population are traded with neighbours – initially of the same ethnic group, later with others – and taken along as the human group moves around its territory and when it migrates from one region to another. Many of the plants that migrating peoples are most intimate with are not ones that are particular to any one place, but ones they take with them – the domesticates. In this way, trade, mobility and migration result in the diffusion of domesticates. This continual movement of humans and their domesticates creates metapopulations, whose subpopulations are continuously selected, traded with relatives and neighbours, used to create new populations, or abandoned and allowed to go extinct. Abandoned populations of a perennial domesticate may persist for long periods of time, however, and different peoples occupying the same space at different times may create a generational overlap – an additional dimension of the meta-population. Human selection within the subpopulations reduces genetic variability,5 whereas seed trading will enhance genetic variability and the subsequent creation of new populations may reduce or increase genetic variability. Observations of a domesticate’s performance and adaptation to new environments generate new traditional knowledge about that particular plant population, which may be transferred among human populations and generations. By increasing genetic variability – either intentionally or accidentally – human mobility provides a key counterbalance to the effects of human selection, keeping the domestication process from stagnating.

A Little Biology6 and Ethnobotany The peach palm is a medium- to large-sized palm with multiple stems that occurs in the wild across the southern fringes of Amazonia and along the foothills of both sides of the Andes in open-canopy humid tropical forests. It is well adapted to the nutrient-poor acid soils of the neotropics and thrives on moderately good to good quality soils. It is a monoecious palm, which means that male and female flowers occur on the same inflorescence. Male and female flowers are not normally receptive at the same time within a given palm; thus self-pollination occurs very rarely.

5. Genetic variability is commonly defined as the number of different alleles present in genes of interest or the number of morphological variants observed in a given population (Hartl 1988). 6. All biological information is fully referenced in Mora Urpí et al. (1997).

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The wild populations that Native Americans found when they reached the Isthmus of Panama, the northern inter-Andean valleys and Amazonia are generally small and scattered along the slopes of streams and rivers and on interfluvial plateaus (Clement et al. 1989, 1999; Silva and Clement 2005); this demographic pattern has genetic implications. The principal pollinators are weevils of the Curculionidae and Nitidulidae families, whose flight autonomy is thought to be about 200 m (and probably less than 400 m), which effectively isolates small palm populations from pollination with others. This isolation favours inbreeding, resulting in reduced genetic variability within populations. Seeds may be dispersed by rodents or birds, the latter providing much longer-range dispersion. Seed dispersal from one small population to another may introduce new genetic variability to counteract the inbreeding. There are three types of wild peach palm grouped within the botanical variety chichagui7 (Henderson 2000): type 1 has one-gram fruit and occurs across southern Amazonia; type 2 has one-gram fruit and occurs in the northern Andean foothills of Colombia and Venezuela; type 3 has fruit that varies from three to ten grams and occurs in south-western Amazonia, along the eastern Andean foothills of Bolivia and Peru, then along the western Andean foothills of Ecuador and Colombia, and through the isthmus of western Panama to southern Costa Rica. Types 1 and 3 and all the cultivated populations have the same seed shape (Ferreira 1999, personal communication, 2006). Huber (1904) suggested that type 1 and type 3 hybrids may have given rise to the domesticated peach palm in south-western Amazonia. Based on molecular genetic evidence alone, Rodrigues et al. (2004) proposed that south-western Amazonia is where peach palm started to be domesticated. Mora Urpí (1999) proposed that peach palm was domesticated several times in several places within the distribution range of types 1 and 3, a proposal supported by Hernández (2005). Based on archaeological evidence, Morcote-Rios and Bernal (2001) proposed a northern inter-Andean origin within the range of type 3. Recent observations from Rondonia (Ana Vilacy Galúcio, Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, personal communication, 2005) and western Acre (Jorge Vivan, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, personal communication, 2004), Brazil, identify indigenous methods of preparation and use of the wild peach palm. In Rondonia, type 1 fruit are cooked and

7. Henderson (2000) offered a revised systematic treatment of Bactris, and a new phylogenetic hypothesis about the peach palm, the only domesticated neotropical palm. The wild populations united by Henderson under the variety chichagui had previously held species status within Guilielma, as either a genus or a subgenus. Following Henderson, all cultivated populations are now classified into variety gasipaes, and are seen as having originated from the wild variety.

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eaten, much like domesticated fruit; unlike domesticates, however, they have only 10–20 per cent edible fruit pulp (versus 80–95 per cent in domesticates). In Acre, type 1 fruit are softened in warm water, the pulp mashed and separated from the seed and the thick juice is drunk. This form of preparation is similar to that used for açaí (Euterpe oleracea, E. precatoria) and other Amazonian palm fruits. There are several ideas about what may have motivated the domestication of peach palm. Carl Sauer (1952) thought that it was domesticated for its starchy fruit – a reasonable idea considering that the modern starch-rich fruits are relished by native peoples and eaten like a boiled potato or prepared as a mildly fermented drink. This thesis is less reasonable when looking at wild peach palm fruit, however: only type 3 has a small amount of starch, while types 1 and 2 consist predominantly of oil and fibre. In light of this, Clement et al. (1989) suggested that the initial attraction was oil, since energy is a prime consideration in all subsistence, and that only subsequently did unconscious selection for larger fruit indirectly select for starch. The new information on use of wild peach palm collected by Galúcio and Vivan outlined above seems to support this hypothesis. Patiño (1989) raised the interesting idea that the initial attraction may have been the wood of the stem, since this is widely used and generally preferred for numerous technological artefacts, such as wooden machetes, harpoons, blowpipes and spears (Rival 1996), as well as fishing poles, bows and arrows, flooring and panelling for houses (Clement 1988). Bellwood (2005) observed that species with technological uses might have been among the first to be domesticated, since they were often essential for hunter-gatherer subsistence. The domestication and diffusion of peach palm resulted in a complex hierarchy of landraces (Figure 6.1), each landrace having different fruit characteristics resulting from selection within a geographically defined meta-population. A single ethnic group may have originally created each landrace, but landraces are now distributed among numerous ethnic groups as a result of trade of seeds and migration of people. The microcarpa landraces (with fruit weighing 15 to 25 grams) tend to have oily-starchy fruit, with more fibre; these are consumed primarily as cooked fruit, generally as snacks, suggesting that they were of minor importance to the communities that grew them. The mesocarpa landraces (with fruit weighing 20 to 70 grams) tend to have starchier though still somewhat oily fruit, with less fibre; these fruits were nutritionally more important to the communities that grew them, and were often fermented for festivities. The macrocarpa landraces (with fruit weighing more than 70 grams and reaching up to 200 grams) tend to have very starchy fruit and are ideal for fermentation; they were nutritionally very important, often serving as a seasonal staple and for consumption in harvest festivities. It is quite likely that the degree of change between wild and domesticated forms is related to the social importance of

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Figure 6.1. Approximate distribution of B. gasipaes var. gasipaes (light shading) in the lowland neotropics, with the approximate distribution of valid (defined by molecular characterisation and morphometric data) and still to be validated landraces. Central American and north-western South American landraces: 1 – Rama (microcarpa); 2 – Utilis (mesocarpa); 3 – Cauca (mesocarpa). Amazonian landraces: 4 – Tembé (microcarpa); 5 – Juruá (microcarpa); 6 – Pará (microcarpa); 7 – Pampa Hermosa (mesocarpa); 8 – Tigre (mesocarpa); 9 – Pastaza (mesocarpa); 10 – Inirida (mesocarpa); 11 – Putumayo (macrocarpa); 12 – Vaupés (macrocarpa). Source: Reprinted with permission from Rodrigues et al. 2004

peach palm (Clement 1988). If this is the case, then the wide distribution of the macrocarpa varieties suggests the widespread importance of peach palm in western and north-western Amazonia (Figure 6.1).

Huaorani Peach Palm Management Different social groups manage peach palm differently, according to its subsistence importance. Throughout its modern distribution it is generally treated as a crop, grown both in home gardens and in swidden-fallow systems. In some areas, however, people manage it principally in fallows. In both management systems, human mobility is important but until recently only the Huaorani case had been examined (Rival 1993, 1998). We

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shall examine their practices to identify components that are relevant in the light of the general model, before going on to genetic studies. The Huaorani8 of Ecuador are best described as foragers (Rival 1993, Chapter 2, this volume). They practise a range of subsistence activities including hunting, fishing and collecting wild fruits, tubers, palm nuts, honey and insects. They are characterised by a close-knit egalitarian social organisation based on strong kinship ties and shared communal patterns. Until ten years ago, and unlike their indigenous neighbours – all groups with a strong sense of identity as horticulturalists – the Huaorani chose to cultivate manioc (Manihot esculenta) and plantain (Musa spp.) only sporadically, and then mainly for the preparation of ceremonial drinks consumed during festivities. Even today, many families prefer to secure their daily subsistence through hunting and gathering. Given their hunting-and-gathering mode of life, it is not surprising that the Huaorani tend to assimilate the peach palm, despite its status as a fully domesticated palm (Clement 1988), with a wider category of very useful wild palms, especially Oenocarpus bataua (known as ungurahua in Ecuador and petohue in Huaorani), and Iriartea deltoidea (known as pambil in Ecuador and tèpahue in Huaorani). Oenocarpus bataua is primarily used for its fruit, and I. deltoidea for its wood. The great advantage of B. gasipaes is that it provides both in abundance. The peach palm or daguenka, as the Huaorani call it, is as ubiquitous in the Huaorani’s territory between the upper Tigre and upper Napo rivers as it is in most parts of western Amazonia. Many Huaorani villages are within the range of the Pastaza mesocarpa landrace (Mora Urpí and Clement 1988). Although it is not yet clear that the Huaorani are responsible for the origin of this landrace, they are certainly responsible for part of its conservation and use today. Among the Huaorani, two different terms are commonly used to designate the peach palm: tehue and daguenka. Tehue refers to the young growing palm, whose wood is preferred for the manufacture of blowpipes, while daguenka(hue) refers to the mature palm with hard stem wood, preferred for machetes and spears. The Huaorani consider the daguenka to be a gift from their cultural hero and creator god, Huègöngui (Rival 1996), a gift that saved them from genocide. Before receiving the daguenka, the story goes, people were forced to make their spears out of balsa (Ochroma pyramidale) wood. Soft wood spears were totally ineffective, and no weapon could protect the Huaorani from enemy aggression. Huègöngui’s daguenka was magical; it produced blowpipes, machetes and spears at will. These artefacts could be collected from the palm in very much the same way as fruit are collected, that is, without killing the plant.

8. The Huaorani language is an isolate that does not belong to any Amazonian language phylum (Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999).

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The daguenka bear fruit from February to April. Some palms have a second smaller fruiting season later in the year, but it is not granted much cultural importance. The division of the year into three main seasons illustrates the cultural importance of daguenka and, more generally, of hunting. The first season, the ‘peach palm fruit season’ (daguenka tëre), runs from January to April, and the people even stop hunting and substitute fruit for game; the second is the ‘season of fat monkeys’ (gata tèquè guèpempa tëre), which ends in August, and during which the bodies of humans and animals alike grow softer, fatter, and bigger; finally comes the ‘season of wild cotton’ (bobeca tëre), when kapok (Ceiba pentandra), an essential part of hunting gear, becomes available in large quantities. The months from February to April are usually the months of greatest mobility, as house groups converge on the sites where the daguenka fruit is ripening. The location of daguenka groves in the forest is well known. Each grove is associated with a specific group of intermarrying longhouses, and each is seen as the product of the activities of long dead kin: ‘the daguenka grove belongs to our grandparents’ (monito memeiri qui inani). ‘Ancestral’ groves,9 which are typically located on hilltops, the favoured location to build a longhouse, are maintained through a range of ‘light touch’ management activities, such as clearing dead wood, pulling out sun-obstructing weeds or saplings, camping and cooking fruits; these activities favour plant growth and certainly contribute to grove longevity. Older, no longer productive stems are felled for their hard wood. It is not yet clear how many different types of daguenka the Huaorani cultivate, or which ones they consider ‘theirs’. Extreme variability is 9. Old peach palm groves that developed from seeds deposited around longabandoned hearths are full of domestic debris (bits of broken clay pots and stone axes), which further confirm that ‘the grandparents lived there’. Their role as seed banks requires more investigation. Reichel-Dolmatoff’s (1996: 80–81) description of Tukano management practices in The Forest Within suggests this and confirms Cole et al.’s (2007) observations: Ancient garden and habitation sites can be recognised by the presence of certain cultivated trees and other plants. In the Vaupés territory, we can observe the following: peach palm, umarí, inga, calabash tree and papaya … the entire aggregate is known as … ‘seeds-ancients’. None of the food plants should be eaten; their consumption would cause serious dysentery, but all seeds can be used. As a matter of fact, these places are considered to be valuable store-houses where present generations can find a supply of seeds of the best quality … To go to an ancient garden site to collect seeds for planting is called ohtéri~aíri [‘seeds to take’], but a more precise expression is … ‘seeds-isolatedto-take.’ … What is referred to is that the seeds one can collect now are not contaminated (cross-fertilised) from the outside … The seeds selected from an ancient garden are said to be highly productive because they developed in a ritually pure environment. To use ancient garden sites, some of them going back for centuries, as genetic reservoirs of wild varieties, points to a degree of awareness of plant evolution which certainly deserves further study.

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common in peach palm landraces and different types may even have different uses (Clement 1988). The Huaorani prefer bright orange to red fruit, but do not reject yellow fruit, thus acting to conserve diversity like other Amazonian peoples. The preferred method to start a new palm is by planting a seed, rather than by propagating shoots as with banana and plantain. Seed preparation involves bathing the seeds in monkey blood, given the perceived symbolic association of monkeys and daguenka groves. Occasionally, Huaorani families receive seeds from Shuar families, who have recently migrated into the area from Shuar homelands in MoronaSantiago Province. Missionaries and government agronomists have also introduced seeds in the largest sedentarised villages, such as Toñampari. More research is needed on these forms of human-mediated seed dispersal and their relative historical depth, as they are important for the general model we are proposing here. Like many Amazonian peoples, the recently sedentary Huaorani now plant daguenka in their gardens and around their houses. However, people value these differently from those that grow in the ancestral groves they visit each year. These groves, which last longer than human lives, represent a concrete and material sign of continuity, and are a source of pride, security and rejoicing. When passing through them, people recall their deceased, usually a grandparent or great-grandparent of the oldest members of the house groups who come to collect the fruit. And, when a conflict occurs and a family group decides to move to a different village (a rare and risky undertaking), the out-migrants make a particular point of felling all their peach palms before leaving.10 No such care is taken with banana and manioc plantations, which are simply left to whoever wishes to harvest them. The identification of a group with its daguenka is far stronger than with any other food crop. When a man dies, only his direct kin are allowed to collect and consume the fruit of the daguenka he planted. Groups at war with each other fell one another’s daguenka, and appropriate the enemy’s wood to make their own spears. Splinter groups who isolated themselves and refuse all contact, such as the Tagaeri (Rival 2004), sometimes travel hundreds of kilometres to visit their ancestral daguenka groves for the fruiting season, knowing full well that they risk being discovered and killed en route. The cultural significance of peach palm in old fallows has also been observed by Cole et al. (2007), not just as

10. As pointed out by Rodrigo Bernal (personal communication, 2006), only complete elimination of a clump will guarantee destruction, as a clump may contain offshoots that will grow after the stems are cut and will start fruiting in five years if there is sufficient light. Hence, this destruction is a political or symbolic statement, as it will show the enemy or newcomer that adopting the area will not be easy.

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an abundant source of food when in season, but, more importantly, as providing a significant link between past and present generations. Before contact in the 1950s, the Huaorani were divided into highly endogamous groups separated from each other by vast no man’s lands, a pattern that is still partially visible today. It is likely that the seasonal mobility linked to their visits to their ancestral groves contributed to maintaining peach palm diversity in their territory. While the Huaorani may not have been the keenest breeders or the most assiduous selectors, their mobility, their high reliance on hunting and gathering and their quite unique grove-management practices have certainly influenced the patterns of genetic change or stability in the peach palm populations of this particular region of the upper Amazon. A few of these influences are worth emphasising in light of the general model above. Their high level of patterned mobility has probably mediated gene flow via seed movement throughout the region between the upper Tigre river in Peru and the upper Napo river in Ecuador, and certainly within the Pastaza mesocarpa landrace. It is most likely that their management practices have enhanced gene flow between discrete parts of the region, especially into and among ancestral groves over time. Even so, one group’s ancestral groves would not contribute alleles to another group’s groves because only a person’s kin can utilise the palms they planted.11 Also, groves are destroyed before a group abandons them permanently, potentially limiting the generational overlap defined in the general model. What is interesting about Huaorani management of peach palm from a genetic perspective is that at the same time that the Huaorani are contributing to gene flow and hybridisation among subpopulations and possibly distinct meta-populations over large scales of space and time, they also follow practices that limit gene flow within individual sub-populations, which is also a mechanism to maintain genetic diversity within the metapopulation as a whole. Too much gene flow within/among subpopulations would homogenise them, reducing the amount of genetic diversity the

11. Ancestral groves correspond to endogamous nexus, that is, to groups of two or three longhouses that intermarry. Marriage across endogamous nexus are actively discouraged. If such marriages are forced through war and raiding, residence becomes virilocal instead of uxorilocal (that is, women are forced to go and live in their husbands’ native longhouses, rather than the usual inverse), and they never return to their own ancestral groves, although this may be possible in the next generation. If a marriage across endogamous boundaries is contracted peacefully, a whole longhouse group may move into the new ally’s territory, leaving its ancestral groves in the care of the kin left behind. There are also some rare cases of groups moving far away and abandoning their groves altogether; these are then returned to ‘no man’s land’, forest tracts belonging to no particular group and completely deserted for one or two generations.

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meta-population encompasses. A reduced level of gene flow between partially isolated populations is necessary for the long-term persistence of genetic variability (Wright 1946; Zhivotovsky and Feldman 1992).

Peasant Peach Palm Management In this section we shall shift from ethnographic information to genetic information and from foragers to horticulturalists, always identifying practices that highlight the importance of mobility to peach palm domestication. Recent work on the molecular genetics of peach palm in Peru has highlighted the role of human mobility, which geneticists see as contributing to gene flow among cultivated populations. Adin et al. (2004) sampled genetic diversity in two meta-populations of the Pampa Hermosa mesocarpa landrace along the Paranapura and Cuiparillo rivers, in the central Peruvian Amazon. These two rivers lie 45 km apart, near the regional centre of Yurimaguas on the Huallaga river. Adin et al. found a surprising amount of genetic variability within both meta-populations, especially given that farmers seem to select for consistent fruit types, that is, they tend to reduce genetic diversity. More importantly, they found an extremely low level of subpopulation genetic differentiation12 and no significant relationship between genetic differentiation and the geographical proximity of populations, suggesting that there is considerable seed exchange among farmers along each river system, as well as between the two rivers. Both indigenous Chayahuita language-speakers13 and peasant farmers along these two river systems are known to collect seeds for propagation from preferred types seen growing on their farm, their neighbour’s farm, and at local markets in Yurimaguas, where a large majority of the region’s produce is bought and sold (Weber et al. 1997). Brodie et al. (1997) investigated the origins of fruit and timber tree seeds cultivated on farms in Peruvian Amazonia, and found that 40 per cent of tree seeds were obtained from off-farm sources in the near vicinity. Given the genetic evidence and observed human practices, it is clear that human mobility in this region essentially joins the two rivers’ meta-populations into one regional meta-population, the Pampa Hermosa landrace.

12. Genetic differentiation is the degree to which two adjacent populations have different allele frequencies, due to different adaptations to their local environment or to random loss (genetic drift) of alleles due to inbreeding in small populations. Genetic differentiation tends to increase as geographical distance increases, unless there is gene flow among the populations. 13. The Chayahuita language is one of two Cahuapanan languages, which appear to be unrelated to the major Amazonian languages (Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999; Gordon 2005).

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Cole et al. (2007) sampled the genetic diversity and structure of two cultivated meta-populations in north-eastern Peruvian Amazonia, within the geographical boundaries of the Putumayo landrace. While, again, levels of genetic diversity were higher than expected given the amount of inbreeding detected, the low level of genetic differentiation among all groups of populations suggested exchange of genetic material among farmers throughout the two river systems over a long period of time. This process of exchange among farmers in effect joined these different populations into one regional meta-population, the Putumayo landrace. The authors also reported that 13 per cent of the palms sampled from the Yahuasyacu and Ampiyacu rivers originated from seeds that had been obtained from up to 600 km away. The indigenous population of these rivers includes communities speaking Huitoto, Bora, Ocaina and Yahua languages.14 In contrast, among the peasant population of the Tamshiyacu and Tahuayo rivers, all seeds had been sourced much closer to a given farmer’s home, mostly within a range of 10 km. Cole et al. (2007) also found that populations with the highest occurrence of first-generation long-distance migrant individuals exhibited the highest genetic diversity. In addition, along the Yahuasyacu and Ampiyacu rivers 33 per cent of the palms sampled were said to be descendants of seeds originating from the homeland of the farmers’ grandparents and parents, 250 km to the north in the IgaraparanáCaquetá region of Colombia. From 1924 to 1930 these people had been systematically removed by the infamous Casa Arana – first to settlements along the banks of the Putumayo and later – in 1937 – further south to their present location in Peru (see also Micarelli, Chapter 9). The migrating tribes brought with them seeds and cuttings of their traditional crops; often men and women were sent ahead to clear and plant fields so that the rest of the tribe had food and shelter when they arrived (San Román 1975). For many Amazonian indigenous cultures, not just the Huaorani, remnant peach palms provide a sense of generational continuity and play an important role in revisiting memories of the ancestors who planted them (Schultes 1974; Chaumeil 2001; Erikson 2001; Rival 2002). In this case, these memories pertained to their ancestral homelands, and the horror and trauma that brought them to Peru as well. When populations of these remnant palms occur close to subsequent swiddens, they may create overlapping generations and genetic migration through time, which in this case seems to reduce genetic drift and the severity of genetic bottlenecks, leading to the maintenance of variability within populations.

14. The Huitoto, Bora and Ocaina languages are part of the Witoto language trunk, and the Yahua language is one of two surviving languages of the PebaYaguan language group and is unrelated to the major Amazonian languages (Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999; Gordon 2005).

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These new genetic data highlight the dynamic nature of horticulturalists’ peach palm management, with different-aged swiddens and home-garden plots contributing selected seeds with somewhat different genetic histories, all within a complex matrix of trade and mobility. These peach palm metapopulations are much like the maize (Zea mays L.) populations described by Louette (2000) in Mexico, the essential difference being that Amazonian farmers do not identify multiple named landraces in their areas, whereas Mexican farmers manage several distinct landraces in one area. In summary, the people who cultivate and those who manage peach palm in agroecosystems and secondary forests are mobile, on both a daily and a seasonal basis, and migrate occasionally under pressure or by preference. This human mobility within defined territories, as well as migrations beyond these territories, is the mechanism for seed dispersal that maintains genetic variability in the numerous meta-populations and their respective subpopulations; the dispersal of selected seeds is also the mechanism for genetic advance in the system. In other words, human mobility and migration explain how the modern genetic variability of peach palm is accumulated and maintained. The next question is: ‘What might the beginnings of peach palm domestication look like?’ To model this, we shall concentrate first on domestication for wood (Patiño 1989) and then on domestication for oily fruit (Clement et al. 1989).

Extrapolating into the Past Rindos (1984) developed an important model of the beginnings of plant domestication via landscape domestication, which in turn can inform our conjectures about the beginnings of peach palm domestication. The first stage in his model is called ‘incidental domestication’ and involves landscape management activities without conscious selection of plants or special attention to their seeds. Many of the ‘light touch’ management activities currently practised by the Huaorani are mentioned by Rindos. Clement (1999) lists various others used to ‘promote’ landscapes. Wild peach palm populations today are small and somewhat scattered, generally occurring on slopes near watercourses of various sizes and on the crests of such slopes in open forests. At the end of the Pleistocene, when humans entered the southern half of the Amazon river basin,15 open forests were probably more extensive than they are today (van der

15. Not enough is known about the ecological requirements of var. chichagui type 3 west of the Andes to include them in the current discussion. This does not mean that the same scenario did not play out in those regions, as suggested by Mora Urpí (1999).

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Hammen and Hooghiemstra 2000). It is thus likely that wild peach palm populations were also more widely – though not necessarily densely (although this too is possible) – distributed at this time. The arriving human populations found a tree with very useful wood (Patiño 1989), especially for crafting into hunting and fishing gear. They may have set up camp in or adjacent to these peach palm populations in order to make vital tools such as harpoons, spears and machetes, which they could take to other areas. Setting up camp entails, at the very least, opening the undergrowth; if done within a population or adjacent to a clump of wild peach palm, this would stimulate the palm’s future growth by trampling or cutting competition and perhaps opening the canopy. Felling such a tough palm stem would probably require fire, as the edge of a stone axe would rapidly wear-off, which would in turn further open the undergrowth. The next time these people returned to this now familiar palm population it would have recovered and perhaps – fertilised by the ash – have become more abundant, even without any seeds having been planted. It would also probably be fruiting more abundantly, as the opening of the undergrowth and parts of the canopy would allow additional light, which in turn stimulates fruiting. If the fruit were not used during the first visit to a population, they might be more attractive during the second visit because they would probably be more abundant. The mere soaking of the fruit softens them, allowing them to be mashed into a nutritious juice; an additional benefit of this soaking is that seed dormancy is probably reduced and seeds germinate more rapidly. Seeds discarded into the camp’s dump heap16 would have germinated more rapidly, and would be in a somewhat richer than normal soil, thus increasing population density. As plants became more numerous, people may have shifted the location of their camp somewhat; peach palms are densely armed with spines. This would in turn expand the area disturbed by humans. Alternatively, fruits might have been cooked for consumption, which would have killed the seeds and not have contributed to population enhancement. Either way, however, the palm population would be remembered for return visits in order to collect wood and fruit. As in Rindos’s (1984) original model, all of this may have taken place without conscious selection or propagation by humans. Even so, sections of the landscape gradually became more attractive to humans because of the presence of useful technological materials and food near a watercourse, and the human group was likely to continue returning to

16. The dump heap is an integral part of Anderson’s (1952) model of plant population domestication and certainly deserves more attention than it has received recently.

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that site to harvest these, much as the Huaorani return to their ancestral peach palm groves today for both wood and fruit. Notice also that human mobility is important, but not yet for plant population domestication, as all activities take place in the immediate vicinity of an existing palm population and no selection or propagation of selected seeds has yet taken place. In this model, numerous populations might be promoted (sensu Clement 1999), but not necessarily domesticated in the way that Patiño (1989) imagined. Nonetheless, this model supports Mora Urpí’s (1999) hypothesis that peach palm was domesticated numerous times in various locations, because numerous human groups would be interacting with numerous wild peach palm populations. At this point we move out of Rindos’s phase of incidental domestication into the ‘specialised domestication’ phase, where selection, propagation and promotion interact, gradually stimulating the development of agroecologies and crop plants with more useful traits. In this second phase of the model, promotion gradually becomes management, with more intensive and increasingly purposeful interventions in the landscape following growing dependence on the plant and the concentration of other useful plant resources in the area – via the dump heap or through purposeful introduction. This is what most people consider to be the beginning of the domestication process, and what Clement (1999) called incipient domestication. At the beginning of this process, seeds of a favoured tree will be moved from their original location to another location, perhaps accompanying the next season’s trek to a different set of resources. This is the founder event mentioned in the general model and the essential first step in plant population domestication. Founder events take a set of alleles17 out of its original distribution into a new ecosystem, where natural selection pressures would be somewhat different. If the randomly chosen set of alleles adapt in the new environment, the palms would continue to be useful, hence attractive to people, and the process of domestication could continue. This early seed movement might also have brought different wild peach palm populations into contact, preparing the stage for the hybridisation that Huber (1904) hypothesised was at the origin of peach palm’s domestication. In this case, the selection after hybridisation would have been for fruit traits, because peach palm appears to have been selected primarily for its fruit rather than its wood. The movement of a small set of alleles from one wild population to another, via the seeds taken by

17. Most of these alleles would be randomly chosen, since only one or two characteristics would attract the first selector – perhaps fruit size and/or flavour, or just useful wood.

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humans, would increase genetic diversity in the recipient population, perhaps even contributing to hybrid vigour in the next generation – this is especially likely if these populations were of different types. The increased diversity and perhaps vigour would attract attention, and seeds would be taken to other locations for continued propagation. Once selection started for fruit, the increase in starch content would follow naturally, rather than being the stimulant for domestication as Sauer (1952) thought. The reason is that selection for size in an oily fruit tends to select for increased starch. This is because starch is easier for the plant to produce than oil, as starch contains less chemical energy than oil. As starch content increases, the likelihood of juice fermentation also increases; in contrast to oils which tend to go rancid, starch ferments easily. As a result, peach palm juice would become more attractive and would eventually become central to annual festivities. In this model, human mobility and the seed movement it implies are an essential feature, as they are responsible for initiating the process and later enhancing genetic diversity in palm populations. This model is fully compatible with the general model presented at the beginning of this chapter. Human mobility would have also been responsible for the diffusion of the original domesticate(s) from south-western Amazonia (Rodrigues et al. 2004), reaching their modern distribution via migrations of human populations and trade among these populations.

Diffusion via Migration During the last decade, the interaction of archaeology, linguistics and crop genetics has led to an ‘emerging synthesis’ to explain the dispersals of some major languages and farming systems (Renfrew 2003), including their crops. Bellwood (2005) examined evidence from around the world, including a short section on Amazonia, in which he observed that Donald Lathrap (1970, 1977) was the first to suggest that development of reasonably efficient food production systems would fuel population dispersals in Amazonia. Although Lathrap favoured manioc as the foundation crop of an Amazonian horticultural system, he also discussed peach palm at length (Lathrap 1977). As Rindos (1984) pointed out, however, no single crop is sufficient to create a reliable system. Different human groups have access to different species at different times and will gradually domesticate these and integrate them into a system. Only when the system consistently yields well can it truly fuel a dispersal, as Bellwood (2005) showed for the south-west Asian system that fuelled the expansion of the Indo-European languages, for example. Piperno and Pearsall (1998) reviewed the still rather scarce archaeological evidence for Amazonia and suggested that lowland horticultural systems probably

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reached the appropriate level of efficiency between 4,000 and 3,000 years BP. The pattern of peach palm landraces (Figure 6.1) is certainly related to this development and to subsequent population migration. The question is, who diffused peach palm? If peach palm domestication started in south-western Amazonia (Huber 1904; Clement 1995; Rodrigues et al. 2004), it is possible that the ancestors either of the Arawak or the Tupi language speakers, or possibly both, were involved. These two languages represent the largest diasporas (to use Heckenberger’s 2002 terminology) of horticulturalists in lowland South America. Additionally, both languages are hypothesised to have originated in south-western Amazonia (Migliazza 1982; Urban 2002), with the Arawak in south-central lowland Peru and the Tupi between the eastern tributaries of the upper Madeira river and the upper Xingu river.18 This apparent coincidence of language origins and peach palm origin allows us to speculate about peach palm diffusion and the current pattern of landraces. The majority of the Arawak languages are spread throughout the western half of the Amazon basin today (and northward into the Caribbean, which will not concern us here) (see map 4 in Urban 2002; map 4.1 in Heckenberger 2002; and figure 2 in Hornborg 2005), as are the majority of the starchier mesocarpa and macrocarpa landraces (Figure 6.1), while the less starchy microcarpa landraces are in south-western and eastern Amazonia. It seems reasonable to hypothesise that the human migrations that led to this Arawak distribution also diffused the preference for starchy peach palms and the seeds of these palms, with starch increasing in importance as the landraces developed outside the range of wild peach palm in south-western Amazonia, as expected in the model developed above. During these migrations, the Arawak interacted continually with other peoples, introducing them to this use for the plant. Even non-agriculturalists, such as the Huaorani, would have been attracted to the use of the starchy fruit as a drink for feasts.19 As different ethnic groups adopted different founding populations of peach palm during this Arawak-mediated seed diffusion, the stage would be set for continued domestication based on new human preferences, each with slightly different genetic starting points. Note also that the starchiest,

18. The other current hypotheses about the origin of the Arawak languages concentrate on north-western Amazonia (for example, Aikhenvald 1999), which is seen as the origin of the Maipure, the most cohesive part of the Arawak language family. 19. Curiously, Hornborg (2005) does not mention the importance of peach palm beer in his discussion of feasting, concentrating on maize and manioc beer, even though the Arawak in north-western Amazonia consider peach palm beer to be very important (e.g. Patiño 1963, 2002).

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largest-fruited landraces are found today in western and north-western Amazonia, the hypothesised homeland of the Maipure, the most closely related group of languages in this language family (Aikhenvald 1999), but where few wild peach palms are found.20 This region is also rich in other fruit domesticates (Clement 1989, 1999). The Tupi languages are as widespread as the Arawak, but accompany a different distribution of peach palm. The southern Tupi groups, especially the important Guarani branch of this language family, do not have peach palm, while the northern Tupi groups have the Pará landrace peach palm, with its smaller, oilier fruit, itself suggesting less selection for fermentation and less social importance. As with the north-western diffusion possibly mediated by the Arawak, the north-eastern diffusion possibly mediated by the Tupi migrations may have brought the Pará-type fruit into contact with other language groups in the central and eastern Amazon basin, bringing together a different set of peach palm genetic traits and human preferences. As the Tupi’s neighbours adopted peach palm, they also adopted its uses and the Pará landrace did not become as diversified as the western landraces. Patiño (1963) observed, however, that the distribution of peach palm in eastern Amazonia is restricted to the main Amazon river and the lower reaches of its tributaries. Indigenous groups on the middle and upper reaches of these tributaries do not have words for peach palm, unless they moved there recently from the main river (Henri Ramirez, Universidade Federal de Rondonia, personal communication, 2006). This may mean that the expansion of peach palm in this region was later and slower than in western Amazonia. Many of our readers will certainly ask why we accept Migliazza’s (1982) and Urban’s (2002) south-western-western Arawak and south-western Tupi hypotheses, rather than other hypotheses. For example, Aikhenvald’s (1999) north-western Arawak hypothesis, which has been well received and is supported by ceramic styles and dating (Eduardo Neves, personal communication, 2006), is in sharp contrast to our position. The major reason is that these two important groups are horticulturalists, who became important and widespread during and after the period (4,000–3,000 years BP) when food production systems finally became the major sources of subsistence for many groups in Amazonia (Piperno and Pearsall 1998). It seems reasonable to infer that their expansion was

20. The Yukuna, a group in the Maipure language family living along the Miriti river, a tributary of the Caquetá river in Colombia, call peach palm pipiri and have names for wild peach palm, janina-pipiri and kanumá pipiri, although no wild peach palm occurs in their territory (van der Hammen 1992). This suggests that they migrated from a region with wild peach palm, such as the proposed Arawak homeland in south-central Peru or south-western Amazonia.

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partially due to their horticultural systems, as occurred with other important horticulturalists worldwide (Diamond and Bellwood 2003; Bellwood 2005). They needed a crop repertoire to fuel their expansion. Where did it come from? Heckenberger (2002: 112) mentions the typical Arawak crop complex of manioc, maize, sweet potato, hot pepper, urucu or annato and tobacco, to which we shall add peach palm and certainly other fruit crops. Southwestern Amazonia has recently been proposed as the origin of manioc, based on molecular genetic analysis (Olsen and Schaal 1999, 2001; Schaal et al. 2006). Maize is Mesoamerican and a late arrival in Amazonia (Piperno and Pearsall 1998). Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is thought to have originated in northern South America (Bohac et al. 1995), making it a candidate for a north-western Arawak-mediated domestication. The hot peppers (Capsicum chinensis and C. frutescens) are thought to have originated in western and south-western Amazonia, respectively (Heiser 1995). Urucu (Bixa orellana) was unknown in the wild in 1984, but thought to be derived from B. excelsa in south-western Amazonia (Schultes 1984), while William Balée (University of Tulane, personal communication, 2003) has observed apparently wild plants in northern Bolivia and south-eastern Pará. One of the tobaccos, Nicotiana tabacum, is thought to have originated as a polyploid in extreme southern Amazonia or the Andean foothills a little further south (Gerstel and Sisson 1995), and was the most important tobacco in Amazonia. If the majority of the Arawak crop complex21 originated in south-western Amazonia, it seems reasonable to suppose that the proto-language family, at least, might also have originated there. Needless to say, this is only a hypothesis for linguists, archaeologists, ethnologists and geneticists to work on. Any group of horticulturalists that started expanding during the relevant time frame and became enormously successful thereafter must have had a significant repertoire of crops to start with (Bellwood 2005), as well as adopting others as their expansion continued. Clement (2006) suggests that few important crops originated in central Amazonia or in north-western Amazonia; most native crops originated in the southwestern and western parts of the periphery of Amazonia. Migliazza (1982) and Urban (2002) suggest that the most important language groups in Amazonia also originated in the southern and south-western periphery. The integration of ethnobotany, archaeobotany and modern genetics into these discussions of language origins will certainly enrich our understanding of Amazonian prehistory.

21. Manuel Arroyo-Kalin (personal communication, 2006) points out that three of these species are candidates for very early domestication as they are used for body painting (urucu), condiments (hot peppers) or stimulation (tobacco).

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Conclusions The general model presented here highlights the roles of human mobility and migration in the domestication and diffusion of plant populations, and can certainly be extrapolated to most, if not all, other crop species. The specific modern information on peach palm appears to support the general model on the importance of mobility and allows a consistent extrapolation into the past when combined with Rindos’s (1984) domestication model, which starts with landscape domestication before proceeding to plant domestication. It also supports the view, upheld at the outset of this volume (Alexiades, this volume), that mobility and migration constitute a key, and yet largely unexplored, dimension in the process of domestication, and thus of the symbolic and material appropriation of nature. If the extrapolation into the past is valid and then continued into the present in combination with the expansion of two of Amazonia’s most important language groups, the model also helps explain the diffusion of peach palm to its current hierarchy of landraces, distinguished as it is by fruit size and by the ratio of starch to oil in the fruit pulp. We hope that this model will provide a framework for anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists and geneticists to explore the domestication and current management of peach palm and other tree crops in Amazonia and elsewhere in the neotropics.

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Domestication of Peach Palm | 137 the Ucayali Region, Peru. Research report. Nairobi: ICRAF; London: ODI. Chaumeil, J.-P. 2001. ‘The Blowpipe Indians: Variations on the Theme of Blowpipe and Tube among the Yahua Indians of the Peruvian Amazon’, in L.M. Rival and N.L. Whitehead (eds), Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivière. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–100. Clement, C.R. 1988. ‘Domestication of the Pejibaye Palm (Bactris gasipaes): Past and Present’, in M.J. Balick (ed.), The Palm – Tree of Life. Biology, Utilization and Conservation. Advances in Economic Botany 6. New York: New York Botanical Garden, pp. 155–74. ——— 1989. ‘A Center of Crop Genetic Diversity in Western Amazonia’, BioScience 39 (9): 624–31. ——— 1995. ‘Pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes)’, in J. Smartt and N.W. Simmonds (eds), Evolution of Crop Plants, 2nd edn. Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical, pp. 383–88. ——— 1999. ‘1492 and the Loss of Amazonian Crop Genetic Resources. I. The Relation between Domestication and Human Population Decline’, Economic Botany 53 (2): 188–202. ——— 2006. ‘Fruit Trees and the Transition to Food Production in Amazonia’, in W. Balée and C.L. Erickson (eds), Time and Complexity in the Neotropical Lowlands: Studies in Historical Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 165–85. Clement, C.R., J.P.L. Aguiar, D.B. Arkcoll, J.L. Firmino and R.C. Leandro 1989. ‘Pupunha brava (Bactris dahlgreniana Glassman): progenitora da pupunha (B. gasipaes H.B.K.)?’ Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, série Botânica 5 (1): 39–55. Clement, C.R., J.P.L. Aguiar and S. Aued-Pimentel 1999. ‘A pupunha brava (Bactris dahlgreniana) no Estado do Amazonas, Brasil’, Acta Botanica Venezuelica 22 (1): 29–44. Cole, D.M., T.L. White and P.K.R. Nair 2007. ‘Maintaining Genetic Resources of Peach Palm (Bactris gasipaes Kunth): the Role of Seed Migration and Swidden-fallow Management in Northeastern Peru’, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 54: 189–204. Diamond, J. and P. Bellwood 2003. ‘Farmers and their Languages: the First Expansions’, Science 300 (5619): 597–603. Dixon, R.M.W. and A.Y. Aikhenvald (eds) 1999. The Amazonian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erikson, P. 2001. ‘Myth and Material Culture: Matis Blowguns, Palm Trees, and Ancestors’, in L.M. Rival and N.L. Whitehead (eds), Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivière. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101–22. Ferreira, E. 1999. ‘The Phylogeny of Pupunha (Bactris gasipaes Kunth, Palmae) and Allied Species’, in A. Henderson and F. Borchsenius (eds), Evolution, Variation and Classification of Palms. New York: New York Botanical Garden, pp. 225–36.

138 | Charles R. Clement, Laura Rival and David M. Cole Gerstel, D.U. and V.A. Sisson 1995. ‘Tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum (Solanaceae)’, in J. Smartt and N.W. Simmonds (eds), Evolution of Crop Plants, 2nd edn. Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical, pp. 458–63. Gordon, R.G., Jr (ed.) 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. Dallas, Texas: Summer Institute of Linguistics International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/ Hartl, D.L. 1988. A Primer of Population Genetics, 2nd edn. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates. Heckenberger, M. 2002. ‘Rethinking the Arawakan Diaspora: Hierarchy, Regionality, and the Amazonian Formative’, in J.D. Hill and F. SantosGranero (eds), Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 99–122. Heiser, C.B., Jr 1995. ‘Peppers, Capsicum (Solanaceae)’, in J. Smartt and N.W. Simmonds (eds), Evolution of Crop Plants, 2nd edn. Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical, pp. 449–51. Henderson, A. 2000. Bactris (Palmae). Flora Neotropica Monograph 79. New York: New York Botanical Garden. Hernández U., J.A. 2005. ‘Descripción de la diversidad y estructura genética de las poblaciones silvestres y cultivadas de pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes Kunth), utilizando marcadores microsatélites’. MSc thesis, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José. Hornborg, A. 2005. ‘Ethnogenesis, Regional Integration, and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia’, Current Anthropology 46 (4): 589–617. Huber, J. 1904. ‘A origem da pupunha’, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi 4: 474–76. Lathrap, D. 1970. The Upper Amazon. London: Thames and Hudson. ——— 1977. ‘Our Father the Cayman, our Mother the Gourd: Spinden Revisited, or a Unitary Model for the Emergence of Agriculture in the New World’, in C.A. Reed (ed.), Origins of Agriculture. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 713–751. Louette, D. 2000. ‘Traditional Management of Seed and Genetic Diversity: What is a Landrace?’, in S.B. Brush (ed.), Genes in the Field: On-farm Conservation of Crop Diversity. Rome: IPGRI; Ottawa: IDRC; Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers, pp. 109–42. Migliazza, E.C. 1982. ‘Linguistic Prehistory and the Refuge Model in Amazonia’, in G.T. Prance (ed.), Biological Diversification in the Tropics. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 491–519. Mora Urpí, J. 1999. ‘Origen y domesticacíon’, in J. Mora Urpí and J. Gainza Echeverria (eds), Palmito de Pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes Kunth): Su cultivo e industrializacíon. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, pp. 17–24. Mora Urpí, J. and C.R. Clement 1988. ‘Races and Populations of Peach Palm Found in the Amazon basin’, in C.R. Clement and L. Coradin (eds), Peach Palm (Bactris gasipaes H.B.K.) Germplasm Bank. Final report (revised), U.S. Agency for International Development (grant number

Domestication of Peach Palm | 139 DAN-5542-G-SS-2093-00). Manaus, Brazil: Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, pp. 78–94. Mora Urpí, J., J.C. Weber and C.R. Clement 1997. Peach palm. Bactris gasipaes Kunth. Promoting the Conservation and Use of Underutilised and Neglected Crops, 20. Gatersleben: IPK; Rome: IPGRI. Morcote-Rios, G. and R. Bernal 2001. ‘Remains of Palms (Palmae) at Archaeological Sites in the New World: a Review’, Botanical Review 67 (3): 309–50. Olsen, K.M. and B.A. Schaal 1999. ‘Evidence on the Origin of Cassava: Phylogeography of Manihot esculenta’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96 (10): 5586–91. Olsen, K.M. and B.A. Schaal 2001. ‘Microsatellite Variation in Cassava (Manihot esculenta, Euphorbiaceae) and its Wild Relatives: Further Evidence for a Southern Amazonian Origin of Domestication’, American Journal of Botany 88 (1): 131–42. Patiño, V.M. 1963. Plantas Cultivadas y Animales Domésticos en América Equinoccial. Tomo I. Frutales. Cali, Colombia: Imprensa Departamental. ——— 1989. ‘Comportamiento de plantas nativas colombianas bajo cultivo: Situación actual del cultivo del chontaduro’, Revista de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias 17 (65): 259–64. ——— 2002. Historia y Dispersión de los Frutales Nativos del Neotrópico. Cali, Colombia: CIAT. Piperno, D.R. and D.M. Pearsall 1998. The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics. San Diego: Academic Press. Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. 1996. The Forest Within: The World-view of the Tukano Amazonian Indians. Dartington: Themis Books. Renfrew, C. 2003. ‘The Emerging Synthesis: the Archaeogenetics of Language/ Farming Dispersals and Other Spread Zones’, in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds), Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp.3–16. Rindos, D. 1984. The Origins of Agriculture – An Evolutionary Perspective. San Diego: Academic Press. Rival, L.M. 1993. ‘The Growth of Family Trees: Understanding Huaorani Perceptions of the Forest’, Man 28 (4): 635–52. ——— 1996. ‘Blowpipes and Spears: the Social Significance of Huaorani Technological Choices’, in P. Descola and G. Pálsson (eds), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 145–64. ——— 1998. ‘Domestication as a Historical and Symbolic Process: Wild Gardens and Cultivated Forests in the Ecuadorian Amazon’, in W. Balée (ed.), Advances in Historical Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 232–50. ——— 2002. Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— 2004. ‘Ecuador: The Huaorani People of Amazonia: Self-isolation and Forced Contact’, World Rainforest Movement, Bulletin 87, online at: http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/87/AM.html#Ecuador

140 | Charles R. Clement, Laura Rival and David M. Cole Rodrigues, D.P., S. Astolfi Filho and C.R. Clement 2004. ‘Molecular Markermediated Validation of Morphologically Defined Landraces of Pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes) and their Phylogenetic Relationships’, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 51 (8): 871–82. San Román, J.V. 1975. Perfiles Históricos de la Amazonía Peruana. Lima: Ediciones Paulinas. Sauer, C.O. 1952. Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. New York: American Geographical Society. Schaal, B.A., K.M. Olsen and L.J.C.B. Carvalho 2006. ‘Evolution, Domestication, and Agrobiodiversity in the Tropical Crop Cassava’, in T.J. Motley, J. Timothy, N. Zerega and H. Hugh (eds), Darwin’s Harvest: New Approaches to the Origins, Evolution, and Conservation of Crops. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 269–84. Schultes, R.E. 1974. ‘Palms and Religion in the Northwest Amazon’, Principes 18: 3–21. ——— 1984. ‘Amazonian Cultigens and their Northward and Westward Migrations in Pre-Columbian Times’, in D. Stone (ed.), Pre-Columbian Plant Migration. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, volume 76. Cambridge: Harvard University, pp. 19–38. Silva, J.B.F. and C.R. Clement 2005. ‘Wild Pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes var. chichagui) in Southeastern Amazonia’, Acta Botanica Brasilica 19 (2): 283–6. Urban, Greg. 2002. ‘A história da cultura brasileira segundo as línguas nativas’, in M. Carneiro da Cunha (org.), História dos Índios no Brasil, 2nd edn. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, pp. 87–102. van der Hammen, M.C. 1992. El Manejo del Mundo – Naturaleza y Sociedad Entre los Yukuna de la Amazonía Colombiana. Bogotá, Colombia: Tropenbos. van der Hammen, T. and H. Hooghiemstra 2000. ‘Neogene and Quaternary History of Vegetation, Climate, and Plant Diversity in Amazonia’, Quaternary Science Reviews 19: 725–42. Weber, J.C., R.A. Labarta-Chávarri, C. Sotelo-Montes, A.W. Brodie, E. Cromwell, K. Schreckenberg and A.J. Simons 1997. ‘Farmers’ Use and Management of Tree Germplasm: Case Studies from the Peruvian Amazon Basin’, in A.J. Simons, R. Kindt and F. Place (eds), Proceedings of an International Workshop on Policy Aspects of Tree Germplasm Demand and Supply. Nairobi: ICRAF, pp. 57–63. Wright, S. 1946. ‘Isolation by Distance under Diverse Mating Systems’, Genetics 31: 39–59. Zhivotovsky, L.A. and M.W. Feldman 1992. ‘On Models of Quantitative Genetic Variability: a Stabilizing Selection-balance Model’, Genetics 130: 947–55.

CHAPTER 7

Intermediation, Ethnogenesis and Landscape Transformation at the Intersection of the Andes and the Amazon: the Historical Ecology of the Lecos of Apolo, Bolivia MEREDITH DUDLEY

Introduction Strategically located at the intersection of the Andes and the Amazon, the piedmont region of Apolo, Bolivia, is an interactive frontier in which indigenous communities have long been transformed by the movement of persons, resources and cultural practices between the altiplano (Andean high plateau) and the tropical lowlands. Drawing on recent ethnographic research, I shall discuss the history of the Lecos people indigenous to this region, changes to Lecos identity and mobility and resulting transformation of ecological relations. Different forms of mobility that have affected the Lecos include locally situated seasonal movements associated with subsistence activities, as well as involvement in inter-regional intermediation routes that traversed the piedmont. Inhabiting a region of high mobility and shifting ethnic territories, piedmont groups played a historic role as mediators of exchange, or intermediation, between adjacent highland and lowland regions (Saignes 1985; Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988; Meyers 2002). Dynamic routes of intermediation are analysed using Nuñez and Dillehay’s (1995) concept of movilidad giratoria (‘revolving mobility’), in which interactive frontiers expand and contract in response to historical restructurings of space and power. The most important restructuring took place during the colonial encounter, which resulted in a disarticulation of

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Andean and Amazonian spheres of interaction, and the subsequent marginalisation of ethnic groups indigenous to the intermediary region (Saignes 1985; Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988). The theme of this volume takes up the challenge of incorporating historical sensitivity into investigations of human–environmental interactions in lowland South America. In the introduction to this volume, Miguel Alexiades recognises that ‘not infrequently, indigenous societies have become decreasingly mobile and yet increasingly dislocated’. This statement captures the situation of the Lecos, which contributes to the current discussion of migration, displacement and dislocation by introducing the themes of AndeanAmazonian intermediation, ethnogenesis and historical ecology. After being displaced from primary circuits of intermediation along the eastern slopes of the Andes, the Lecos became increasingly dislocated from both Andean and Amazonian spheres of interaction. Historical changes to Lecos mobility affected both the cultural identity and territory of the Lecos, leading to novel processes of ethnogenesis and landscape transformation. Challenging traditional notions of indigenous peoples as essential givens, the concept of ethnogenesis acknowledges the ways in which social groups are historically constructed through a ‘continuous cultural process that is simultaneously reproductive and transformative’ (Powers 1995: 9; see also Alexiades and Peluso and Zent, this volume). Transformations to Lecos society occurred during the Inca empire, the mission period, extractive booms, postrevolutionary agrarian reform, and the recent movement to recuperate Lecos indigenous identity. The contemporary Lecos of Apolo are the consequence of transculturation and change that took place during these time periods. Historical events likewise initiated environmental changes to the contracting physical territory of the Lecos. The most profound transformation included the expansion of anthropogenic grasslands and recession of tropical forest patches that mediate locally situated seasonal movements tied to subsistence activities. Investigations into the current knowledge, use, and management of natural resources must therefore take into account anthropogenic transformations to the landscape and the ways in which these are linked to changes in cultural practices and identities. The historical ecology of the Lecos of Apolo, by definition, is an investigation into these changes (Crumley 1994; Balée 1998). Linked to the broader field of ethnobiology, historical ecology is a research programme ‘concerned with interactions through time between societies and environments and the consequences of these interactions for understanding the formation of contemporary and past cultures and landscapes’ (Balée 2005).1 1. William Balée (2005) clarifies the relationship between historical ecology and ethnobiology by stating that, whereas ethnobiology is a field involving the description and analysis of human–biotic interactions, historical ecology is a research programme with a set of interdependent postulates regarding the nature of human–biotic interactions through time.

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Figure 7.1. Location of the Lecos of Apolo, Bolivia. Inset: Approximate location of the Lecos de Apolo TCO, Lecos communities, and surrounding natural protected areas and indigenous territories (TCOs).

This chapter traces the history of Lecos mobility, outlines subsequent changes to the identity and territory of the Lecos and provides a brief comparison of the differential effect of ethnogenesis and landscape transformation in the communities of Inca and Irimo. Finally, I shall comment on how historical ecology research relates to the current movement to recuperate Lecos identity and territory, and can inform similar land-based indigenous movements throughout lowland South America.

The Bolivian Piedmont and Apolobamba As a zone of transition between the Andes and the Amazon, the Bolivian piedmont encompasses a diverse range of ecological habitats, and was formerly characterised by high cultural diversity and contact. Due to its strategic location and geographical conditions, Apolobamba served as a particularly important setting for cultural encounter and exchange.

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Biogeographical Setting Located in northern La Paz, Bolivia, Apolo is situated along the eastern slopes of the Andes between the yungas and the interior lowlands to the north and east (Figure 7.1).2 This piedmont region was historically referred to as Apolobamba, a combination of the terms ‘Apolo’, which may derive from the Lecos word for puma/jaguar (polo), and a Spanish corruption of the Quechua word pampa, meaning flat plain (Machicao Gámez 1990). Andean and Amazonian bioregions overlap in Apolobamba, which contains diverse habitats, including cloud forest, tropical dry and wet forest and tropical savannah, or llanos (MACPIO 2001). The llanos of Apolo are flanked by undulating hills and tropical forests (monte), and contrast with the precipitous slopes of the adjacent yungas. The climate is tropical with a marked dry season, while heat and humidity are mitigated by temperate breezes (Hilari 1991). European explorers often commented on the scenic beauty of Apolobamba (e.g. Bolivar 1906 [1621]); yet the broad open plains of Apolo also supplied an optimal space for cultural encounters and trade (see Steward 1948).

The Chunchos Tribes The central Andean piedmont was inhabited during the late pre-Hispanic and early colonial periods by a diversity of ethnic groups generically referred to as the chunchos (Steward 1948).3 Ethnic composition before Spanish entry can only be reconstructed through the documentary accounts of Inca chroniclers and early Spanish explorers, which, while ambiguous, provide a general picture of the different people who inhabited Apolobamba at the time of contact. Early European explorers produced the first documentary records that explicitly named the chunchos tribes, and described the Lecos as inhabiting the llanos of Apolo and the humid forests to the south (Métraux 1948: 505; Machicao Gaméz

2. The term montaña is used in Peru to indicate the forested slopes between 400 and 1,800 metres above sea level, whereas the term yungas is often substituted in Bolivia (Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988: 43). However, the yungas generally refer to the steep slopes immediately adjacent to the Andes and specific Bolivian provinces. To clarify, the term piedmont is used to refer to the elevation range in which Apolo falls (900 to 1,500 metres) (Hilari 1991). 3. The Inca distinguished between the chunchos and the antis, who inhabited the upper Madre de Dios basin, and the sacharuna, or ‘forest people’, of the Amazonian interior (Saignes 1985; Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988). The term chuncho also differentiated between the feared Chiriguanos to the south and the indigenous nations of eastern Bolivia, particularly the Mojos of the Mamoré basin (Quiroga Gismondi 1991: 21).

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2000: 9).4 Located along the western frontier of chunchos territory, the Lecos were often one of the first tribes encountered by Spanish expeditions (Saignes 1985; Meyers 2002).5 The Lecos were generally mentioned together with the Aguachile, a neighbouring tribe that occupied the north-eastern section of Apolobamba. Both the Lecos language, Rik’a, and the Aguachile language are linguistic isolates, unrelated to each other and to the languages of the Tacana family, widely spoken in the tropical lowlands to the north (Montaño Aragón 1987, 1989; see Alexiades and Peluso, this volume).6 To the south-east, the Lecos were bordered by the Mosetene, who likewise speak a linguistically unclassified language (Métraux 1948). Like other piedmont groups, the Lecos practised swidden horticulture and seasonally dispersed to hunt and gather. The Lecos were renowned navigators of lightweight rafts (balsas) and relied heavily on fishing (Métraux 1948). Due to their subsistence strategies, Steward (1948) classified the Lecos and other piedmont tribes as ‘tropical forest cultures’, although they appear to have shared many characteristics of both Andean and Amazonian influence.7 Furthermore, these groups were not as isolated

4. The following chunchos tribes were recorded in 1678: Lecos, Aguachile, Arionas, Uchupiamonas, Pasaracionas, Antonios/Pasaimos, Maises, Araonas, Pacanaguas, Sarionas, Saparunas, Chumanos, Suquitunas, Ubamonas, Yuvamonas and Toromas (Chávez Suárez 1986: 14). Most of the groups listed after the Lecos and Aguachile are Tacana-speaking peoples, considered by Saignes (1985) to comprise the chuncho classification sensu stricto. Saignes (1985) admits that less is known about the situation of Lecos, Aguachile and other independent language groups in the region who were less sedentary and more warlike than neighbouring Tacana peoples. 5. The first documentary reference to the Lecos was recorded in 1594 by P. Miguel Cabello de Balboa, who encountered Lecos Indians in the town of Camata and travelled from there into the valley of ‘Apolopampa’, recognised as the land of the Lecos (Cabello de Balboa 1906 [1594]). 6. The Leco language, also referred to as ‘Leca’ or ‘Lapalapa’, is called Rik’a in the Apolo region and Dialecto in the neighbouring province of Larecaja. The Leco language is recognised as a linguistic isolate (Ibarra Grasso 1985; Van de Kerke 2000). Although no longer spoken, word lists were documented by Weddell (1853) and Cardús (1886) and a grammatical sketch was published by Lafone Quevado (1905) and Van de Kerke (2000). No studies exist of the Aguachile language, although some scholars suggest that Lapacho or Apolista was spoken by the ancestral Aguachile (D’Orbigny 1944, Métraux 1948) (see note 9). 7. For instance, the Lecos lacked vertical looms, hammocks and other ‘typical’ Amazonian traits, while utilising garments (tipoys) and ornamental styles more commonly associated with the highlands (Steward 1948). Bolivar (1906 [1621]) also recorded the existence of specialised roundhouses that served in a regional ceremonial complex, as well as alliances between supra-local political leaders called maranis.

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from one another as much as Steward (1948) presumed. In fact, the Lecos and other chunchos tribes were long transformed by historical engagements with neighbouring Andean and Amazonian peoples, making attempts to provide a static, pre-contact ethnographic picture futile.

Lecos History The history of the Lecos people must be understood as a part of the movement of persons and resources along the eastern slopes of the Andes, and the ways in which this interactive frontier expanded and contrasted according to historical restructurings of space and power.

Kallawaya Intermediation A long history of inter-regional contacts characterises the piedmont region. Different production zones along the eastern cordillera were historically connected by exchange networks that provided ecological complementarity (Murra 1972). This adaptive strategy was well established in the central highlands and significant to the intermediation strategies of the Kallawaya kingdom that emerged prior to the expansion of the Inca empire (AD 900 to 1300) (Moseley 1993). Four vertical environmental zones yielded ecological complementarity in Kallawaya territory: (1) glacial peaks that provided abundant, year-round water; (2) high, humid pastures (punas) for camelids; (3) temperate valleys for tuber and cereal cultivation; and (4) semitropical yungas, in which tropical products were gathered or grown (Meyers 2002). The llanos of Apolo were situated immediately interior to the Kallawaya yungas, and marked the fluctuating frontier of direct influence by the famed medicine men and merchants that spoke Puquina, an Arawak-affiliated language.8 The chunchos played a collaborative role in securing trade goods from the lowlands, particularly medicinal and dye plants that were vital to Andean liturgical practices (Saignes 1985; Meyers 2002). The late historian Thierry Saignes (1993) contrasted the situation of the highly visible and yet historically unnamed Kallawaya Indians with the seemingly invisible and yet named chunchos Indians that occupied adjacent downhill territories. In her ethnohistorical examination of Kallawaya intermediation, Rodica Meyers (2002) explores the mystery of Kallawaya ethnicity. According to Meyers (2002), interactions between the ‘mobilesedentary’ agro-pastoralists of the highlands and the ‘mobile-sedentary’

8. The ritualistic language currently employed by Kallawaya herbalists is a professional jargon that combines Quechua morphology with a Puquina lexicon (Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988; Adelaar 2004).

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horticulturalists/ hunter-gatherers of the yungas resulted in a slow process of ethnogenesis, ultimately culminating in the recognition of a group of people called the Kallawaya. As the intermediation sphere of the Kallawaya expanded and contracted in accordance with the concept of movilidad giratoria, so did the number of ethnic groups that participated in this ethnogenetic continuum. At its ultimate phase of expansion, Kallawaya control extended into the llanos of Apolo and included the chunchos who lived in this region, most probably involving the Lecos, given their territorial position at the time of European contact (Meyers 2002). The Lecos were clearly involved as key players in the movement of resources at that time, and were recorded by Cabello de Balboa ([1594] 1906) as trading goods from Apolobamba in the Kallawaya town of Camata. In other words, the ethnogenesis of both the Lecos and the Kallawaya may be a product of intermediation, and, as a result, there are many – even if poorly understood – mutual influences between these two groups.

Inca Empire Kallawaya trade routes were considered vital to the lowland expansion of the Inca empire; as such, the Inca employed the Kallawaya as intermediaries in their efforts to annex the central piedmont. The military campaign south-east of Cuzco began during the second half of the fifteenth century, and was consolidated through more diplomatic methods due to the resistance of chunchos tribes (Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988; Julien 2000; Meyers 2002). Once integrated into a single continuum of interaction, the eastern slopes of the Andes were bifurcated into two administrative divisions, a Carabaya province and a Chunchos province, which extended from the heart of Lecos territory into the interior lowlands. The Chunchos provincial capital was Ayaviri Zama, an ancient ceremonial centre located north-east of Apolo (Saignes 1985; Meyers 2002). The Inca built overland roads through Apolobamba to connect these regions (Armentia 1897, 1905; Maúrtua 1907). The most important trade good secured from the piedmont was coca, which was cultivated for tribute in Apolobamba (Meyers 2002). Regional production systems were also restructured around imperial mines near Apolo, including Chipilusani (‘silver hill’ in Aguachile) (Saignes 1985; Montaño Aragón 1989). In order to fulfil labour demands and stabilise this important frontier, the Inca established mitmaqkunas, or colonies of persons from other regions loyal to the empire. New processes of ethnogenesis emerged as a result of Inca social engineering, especially through the introduction of Quechua language and culture. By choice or circumstance, some Quechua-speaking colonists remained in the region after the fateful arrival of the Spanish (Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988).

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Colonial Encounter Territorial and administrative restructurings of the early colonial period eventually led to the disarticulation of Andean and Amazonian realms of interaction, although this divide was never as absolute as later ethnographers (for example, Steward 1948) assumed (Lyon 1981; Saignes 1985). During the first century of colonial rule (AD 1530 to 1630), the administrative limits of the Audencia de Charcas extended to Ayaviri Zama in Apolobamba (Saignes 1985). Subsequently abandoned, this site was encountered by some of the first Spanish conquistadores who descended the eastern slopes in search of fame and gold (Quiroga Gismondi 1991). The mythic gold city of Paititi inspired early expeditions, which utilised Inca roads to penetrate the Provincia de Chunchos (Saignes 1985; RenardCasevitz et al. 1988). These expeditions failed, however, due to the resistance of local populations. During this time, the Lecos and Aguachile were referred to as ‘indios de guerra’ (‘war Indians’) and gained fierce reputations for their overt hostility towards territorial incursions (Machicao Gámez 1990). As a result, the limits of colonial administrative jurisdiction retreated to the yungas town of Camata in the Provincia de Carabaya, as the Provincia de Chunchos slipped out of direct Andean control (Saignes 1985; Renard-Casevitz et al. 1988). The region between the previous limit of Inca authority and Spanish colonial jurisdiction coincides almost exactly with the extent of Lecos and Aguachile territories in Apolobamba. In the process of administrative disarticulation, the intermediate territory of the Lecos lost its former strategic significance and became increasingly unfamiliar to adjacent centres of power in the highlands and lowlands. The transformation of Apolo from a dynamic zone of interaction to a more static and dislocated region had important consequences for the ecological and cultural strategies of the Lecos in the following centuries.

Missions of Apolobamba Although no longer embedded in primary intermediation networks, or maintained under direct administrative control, Apolobamba remained important to missionaries that wished to establish lowland conversion routes. After numerous failed attempts the Augustinian and Franciscan orders finally reduced Lecos and Aguachile populations into multi-ethnic missions by the end of the seventeenth century. In 1615, the Augustinians established the first mission of Apolo, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, at the base of Chipilusani (Torres 1972). The mission was twice abandoned due to the hostility of its Lecos and Aguachile inhabitants. Rather than simply accepting or resisting the missionaries, indigenous groups actively positioned themselves to

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compete for favours. In response to missionary incursions, the Lecos, Aguachile and other chunchos nations convened a grand assembly to decide the future of indigenous–missionary relations (Quiroga Gismondi 1991). The principal outcome was a stated desire to establish reciprocal trade and ensure continued possession of tribal lands. When promises were not met or advantages not forthcoming, indigenous groups rebelled. Unable to secure enough support to prevent rebellions, Augustinian missionaries withdrew (Machicao Gámez 1990; Quiroga Gismondi 1991). Franciscan missionaries entered Apolobamba at this time and incorporated native populations under Spanish authority (Ballivián 1898; Armentia 1905; Maúrtua 1907). In 1696, the Franciscans reoccupied the former mission of Apolo and moved it to its present location. The mission of La Inmaculada Concepción de Apolobamba was reconstituted with Lecos and Aguachile as well as Pamainos Indians recruited from the north. Apolo became the regional centre of the expansive ‘Missions of Apolobamba’ and a place of embarkation for lowland expeditions (Quiroga Gismondi 1991; Machicao Gámez 2002). In this multi-ethnic mission centre, a slow process of ethnogenesis resulted in the creation of a new ethnic category – Apolistas. Although treated by D’Orbigny (1944, 1946) as a distinct ethnic group, the Apolistas appeared in the documentary record at the same time as accounts of Aguachile and Pamainos disappeared. Certain scholars (e.g. D’Orbigny 1944; Métraux 1948) believe that the Apolistas are the ancestral Aguachile, whereas Montaño Aragón (1987: 81) concludes that they are the descendants of the Pamainos. Given complex processes of ethnogenesis in the missions, a one-to-one correlation is probably not realistic. The term Apolista clearly derives from the name for this multi-ethnic mission centre, and was associated with the Lapacho language, which has been classified as an Arawak language and which may have functioned as an indigenous trade or ritual language, similar to that of the contemporary Kallawaya (Créqui-Montfort and Rivet 1913; Montaño Aragón 1987).9 Distinctions among the different ethnic groups continued to blur due to mission practices that negated rules of endogamy and promoted Quechua as a common language (Armentia 1905). Established prior to Spanish arrival, Quechua influence intensified during the mission era (MACPIO 2001).

9. Although Chamberlain (1910) defined Lapacho as a linguistic isolate, other linguists have classified Lapacho as an Arawak language (Marcou 1913; Rivet 1913; Créqui-Montfort and Rivet 1913; Greenberg 1960). Given the propensity of Arawak peoples to be involved in long-distance trade, an Arawak substrate to the Lapacho language is not surprising, nor is its potential historical function as a trade language in the mission centre of Apolo.

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Missionaries also implemented a concentrated settlement pattern and more sedentary lifestyle, in which indigenous production was divided between meeting subsistence needs and producing a mission surplus. Trade routes were re-established connecting Apolo to the highlands in order to sell native-produced coca (Quiroga Gismondi 1991: 62). While Apolobamba once again functioned to connect lowland and highland regions, the Lecos neither controlled nor were empowered by mission trade. Furthermore, while coca cultivation pre-dated the Spanish, the llanos were not previously managed for grazing large animals.10 Spanish missionaries considered the open savannahs of Apolo optimal for the introduction of European livestock, and this new form of production initiated profound environmental transformations (Armentia 1905; D’Orbigny 1946). While the llanos may have been partially anthropogenic in origin, the balance between savannah and forest ecosystems shifted as more grasslands were cleared and burned at the expense of surrounding monte. Processes of ethnogenesis and landscape transformation, however, were not uniform among the Lecos.11 The mission of Atén (1699) constituted a secondary pole of activity south of Apolo. Although established as a multiethnic mission, Lecos heritage and the Rik’a language remained prominent in Atén (D’Orbigny 1946; Quiroga Gismondi 1991). Furthermore, the forested environs played a strategic role in the guerrilla strategies of the Lecos during the Wars of Independence (1809–25). Beginning with local protests against indigenous tribute demands, the Lecos Aaviomarani Santos Pariamo organised an army of archers from Atén to defeat the Spanish royalists in Apolo and offer resistance throughout the piedmont (Oblitas Fernandez 1970). Hunted down and killed by Spanish colonial forces in 1816, Santos Pariamo remains a venerated martyr and cultural symbol for the region of Apolo and the Lecos (MACPIO 2001; Machicao Gámez 2003). Yet despite this reverence, the condition of indigenous people changed little with the creation of the Bolivian republic.

10. Native camelids, such as llamas, are unable to thrive in the tropical climate of Apolo. Camelid caravans travelled only as far as the yungas town of Camata (Meyers 2002). 11. A large segment of the Lecos population migrated south and became incorporated in the mission system of Guanay. The Lecos in the province of Larecaja have their own indigenous organisation, PILCOL (Indigenous Lecos People and Original Communities of Larecaja), and have experienced radically different pressures affecting their identity and environment. Having retained the Lecos language, which they call Dialecto, and a riverine lifestyle distinct from that of neighbouring Aymara colonists, the Lecos of Larecaja have received more treatment by scholars, and will not be addressed in this chapter (Zalles Cueto 1993; Hilaquita Marca 2002).

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The Republic Period The Republic Period (1826–1952) initiated the first significant penetration of non-indigenous society in Apolobamba, with profound consequences for the Lecos and their environment. Immediately prior to independence, Franciscan missions were converted into secular parishes as native inhabitants retreated back to ancestral lands. The creation of the Caupolicán Province in 1826 coincided with international demand for quinine to treat malaria, and the Bolivian government granted Cinchona tree concessions to attract Bolivian criollos (of European descent) and foreigners (Jimenez 1991; Luisa Soux 1991).12 Apolo, the provincial capital, and Atén, located in the heart of extractive forests to the south, emerged as exportation centres. Trade routes linking these regions, however, were as ephemeral as the quinine boom itself, which declined after 1860. Indigenous communities that reorganised to take advantage of the economy, particularly the Lecos near Atén, were hard hit by tribute demands in the wake of the bust (Armentia 1905; Jimenez 1991; Luisa Soux 1991). By 1880, international demand for rubber again changed productive and power relations in the province as the first hacienda estates were established and a powerful elite (vecinos) emerged (Luisa Soux 1991). By the twentieth century, numerous haciendas were dedicated to rubber extraction, sugar cane and coca production and cattle ranching, which rapidly expanded to feed the growing population of indentured indigenous workers. Although the Lecos did not experience the large population displacements imposed on interior tribes (see Alexiades and Peluso, this volume), the indigenous peoples of Apolo were gravely exploited by a hacienda system located on the periphery of state control (Luisa Soux 1991: 120–24). Indigenous subsistence strategies existed along with hacendado-controlled market activities, although the wealth generated neither compensated indigenous peoples, bound by debt peonage, nor led to the development of the province. As with the quinine boom, the rubber boom collapsed abruptly in 1912 and left the region isolated and impoverished. The extractive cycles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tentatively linked Apolobamba to the altiplano and adjacent lowlands, although under conditions that created a situation of dependency rather than development (Jimenez 1991). Indigenous peoples, whose identities became buried in the politics of subordination, bore the brunt of the region’s economic isolation and remained dependent upon the haciendas, which continued to encroach on traditional lands and resources (MACPIO 2002).

12. To honour the indigenous people who fought for independence, the province was named after the Araucano war leader Caupolicán. Renamed Franz Tamayo in 1967, the territorial boundaries of the province approximate the former mission system of Apolobamba (Machicao Gámez 1990).

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Revolution and Agrarian Reform The 1952 Bolivian revolution and subsequent agrarian reform brought sweeping changes to the region. The most important was the dissolution of the hacienda system and the acquisition of communal land titles for indigenous households that organised in accordance with the national union model. Newly formed communities affiliated with the National Peasant Union (CSTUB), which reinforced a generic identity as campesinos, or peasants, as the mestizo ideology of the state promoted policies of assimilation (Ströebele-Gregor 1994; Healy and Paulson 2000). Moreover, the revolution valorised a campesino identity as an alternative to the ongoing discrimination confronting indigenous peoples and the negative stereotypes affiliated with being an indio, or Indian. In the post-revolutionary decades, the Bolivian government simultaneously sought to promote lowland economic development, ease political pressures in the highlands and reintegrate highland and lowland regions through programmes of Andean colonists. These development programmes did not have a significant impact on the renamed province of Franz Tamayo. Circumvented by national currents, Apolo remained isolated and economically stagnant throughout the second half of the twentieth century (Hilari 1991). This had particularly adverse consequences for indigenous campesinos, who, without sufficient access to economic markets, struggled to make a subsistence living under increasingly degraded environmental conditions. Conversion to pastureland accelerated in the post-revolutionary decades and became near total in the valleys and hills surrounding Apolo. Unfortunately, local grasses are ill-suited to sustaining introduced livestock, which suffer from malnutrition and disease, and the exposed soil is vulnerable to erosion. On the ecological maps of Bolivia, the region appears as a swathe of degraded grasslands surrounded by tropical forests; the conversion to pasture is even noticeable in satellite images from space (Martínez 2000; Erickson, personal communication, December 2005). These changes to the environment created an acute scarcity of available monte suitable for traditional cultivation of subsistence food crops. Furthermore, the disappearance of nearby forests limited opportunities to gather forest resources or hunt wild game, which had an impact on nutrition, material culture and ecological knowledge among a people once associated with both forests and savannahs.

Lecos Indigenous Movement The current movement to recuperate Lecos ethnic identity arose from concerns about land and resources, as well as the desire to recover a sense of cultural pride in the wake of historical repression. In 1994, the

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Indigenous Centre of the Original Peoples of Apolobamba (CIDEPOA) was created and helped organise the Planning Committee of the Lecos and Aguachile Peoples (MACPIO 2001). The organisation positioned itself in relation to all autochthonous peoples of Apolobamba, recognising the importance of regional identity while giving particular attention to the mutual and overlapping strands of Lecos and Aguachile heritage. Interestingly, Pamainos heritage is not overtly recognised, although the Lapacho language is, reinforcing the complex historical relationship between language and identity in the region. Furthermore, the incipient movement encountered resistance due to unwillingness to acknowledge indigenous identity in a region where the majority of individuals strongly identify as campesinos. The local peasant union also organised strong opposition to the indigenous organisation, which was perceived as a challenge to political hegemony. In 1997, the indigenous movement reorganised and formed the Indigenous Centre of the Lecos People of Apolo (CIPLA), which focused on recuperating the most salient strand of indigenous heritage (MACPIO 2001). The movement to recuperate Lecos identity and territory must be understood in the context of broader trends related to neoliberalism and the rise of ethnic-based political organisation during the late twentieth century (Alexiades 2003; Zent, this volume). The movement must also be situated among the different trajectories of highland and lowland indigenous mobilisation in Bolivia. According to Giordani (1995: xi), ‘explorations of the political links between Lowland and Andean South America are critical for an understanding of contemporary ethnogenesis in these two broad, yet historically connected, geographical regions’. In contrast to the long history of mobilisation in the Andes, indigenous peoples of the tropical lowlands did not effectively mobilise until the 1980s (Albó 1994; Gamarra 1996; Healy and Paulson 2000). Lowland indigenous groups formed the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB) and organised the famous ‘march for territory and dignity’ that captured national and international attention in 1990 (Brysk 1994; Ströebele-Gregor 1994; Albó 1995). International concern for the environment in general, and the Amazon in particular, drew further attention to the movement (Brysk 1994). Central demands for territory and autonomy were addressed in constitutional and policy reforms carried out as a means to enhance state legitimacy (Betancur 2000; Van Cott 2000). The Agrarian Reform Law (Article 276 of the 1997 regulation) specifically recognised rights to territory by establishing the ability of indigenous groups to solicit a demand for a Communal Land of Origin (Tierras Comunitarias de Origen, TCO), provided that the soliciting groups establish markers of indigenous ‘authenticity’ (Martínez 2000). In September of 1999, CIPLA presented a demand for a Lecos of Apolo TCO, which was recently approved by the Morales administration (MACPIO 2002; Dudley 2005).

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Despite legal recognition, the Lecos of Apolo TCO remains a source of active conflict with the both the local campesino federation and the Apolo civic committee (vecinos), which are attempting to annul the TCO (Bolivia.com, 24 September 2007). Unfortunately, the primary strategy of the opposing parties is to attack the ‘authenticity’ of the indigenous organisation CIPLA and its members. In addressing this struggle, it is important to realise that neither the lands being claimed nor the social actors involved represent bounded, static entities. Instead, Lecos territory and ethnic identity have been actively shaped through historical interactions that must be taken into account in order to understand contemporary social and environmental relations.

Comparative Historical Ecology of Two Lecos Communities A multi-sited ethnographic study among the Lecos of Apolo revealed that processes of landscape transformation and ethnogenesis were neither uniform over the region nor consistent among the group. Different historical trajectories led to distinct interactions with and impacts on local environments and identities, with attendant differences in environmental knowledge and material practices. The most salient contrast exists between communities located in the pajonal close to Apolo and those situated in the monte periphery near Atén. Important subsistence activities in the pajonal regions include the pasturing of sheep and cattle and the maintenance of huertas, or small agroforestry plots intensively cultivated using animal dung. Due to the declining availability of nearby monte, individuals must walk great distances to reach swidden horticultural plots, chacras, and even further to hunt and gather. Involvement in and knowledge of these activities in pajonal communities are declining as a result. Pajonal regions, however, are more closely linked to intermediation routes, and proximity to Apolo provides greater economic opportunities based on limited income from coca, coffee and citrus production. Located further from the provincial capital, communities in the monte are surrounded by a rich patchwork of chacras and forest in different stages of succession. Rice is intensively cultivated along riverbanks and provides the primary source of income, although access to markets is more difficult given the lack of infrastructure. Livestock and huertas, if present at all, are less important to production, whereas hunting, gathering, and fishing remain central components of subsistence and identity. The communities of Inca, situated in the pajonal, and Irimo, located in the monte, are representative of these two general types of community. A brief comparison illustrates locally situated variance that should be taken into account when addressing land-based needs of contemporary indigenous

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populations. There are sixteen communities affiliated with CIPLA and listed as beneficiaries of the Lecos of Apolo TCO (MACPIO 2001, 2002).13 While all indigenous campesino communities in the Apolo region share similar histories of ethnic interaction, approximately twenty-one remain affiliated with the campesino syndicate rather than the indigenous organisation CIPLA. Quechua is the principal language spoken throughout the region, although both Rik’a and Lapacho were formerly present. The political structure of indigenous communities roughly parallels that of the campesino communities, although with different titles for elected positions and different national affiliations (e.g. CIDOB).14 Communities are small, ranging from ninety to 350 individuals, generally semidispersed and usually a day’s walking distance from nearby communities (MACPIO 2001, 2002). Most have a small primary school, a football field and access to potable water through collaboration with the only locally operating NGO, CARE-Bolivia. Outside the provincial capital of Apolo, there is no electricity and limited phone service. Dirt roads are poorly maintained and further isolate rural communities.

The Community of Inca The community of Inca is located twelve kilometres from Apolo along the principal road to La Paz, and has been greatly influenced by its strategic location along vital trade routes (Hilari 1991). As the name indicates, Inca was reportedly founded near a former tambo, or waypoint, along the Inca road to Apolo (MACPIO 2001). Inca imperial, Spanish missionary and hacienda presence was particularly strong along this major artery of intermediation. Resulting processes of ethnogenesis appear to have reinforced a Quechua-campesino identity and a strong pride in being native to Apolo. Local inhabitants are conscious of their links to Inca ancestry and proud of their Quechua heritage. The primary language spoken in the community is Quechua, even though both Rik’a and Lapacho were spoken until two generations ago. 13. Membership of CIPLA has oscillated over the years, with sixteen communities in 2003, consisting of Mulihuara, Correo, Inca, Chirimayo, Ilipana Yuyo, Yuyo Franz Tamayo, Trinidad, Santo Domingo, Irimo, Pucasucho, Muiri, Munaypata, San Juan de Yanaloma, Sarayoc, Tupili and Cauli. Several communities not affiliated with CIPLA also maintain a strong sense of Lecos heritage. The distinction between indigenous and campesino affiliated communities appears to be more political than ethnic; or, rather, political identities are organised according to different criteria. 14. In 2003, the CIPLA leadership changed the name of the president to Capitán Grande and the vice-president to Baba Vitaka, in order to represent traditional Lecos political titles. Local community leadership titles were changed to cacique and Segundo cacique, while various secretary positions remained the same.

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The location of the community has exposed Inca to greater forces of assimilation and discrimination, on the one hand, and provided greater access to economic and political opportunities, on the other. Inca is one of the larger communities in the region, with a population of approximately 350 adults. Not unexpectedly, many leaders of CIPLA have come from Inca, which remains of strategic importance to the indigenous movement, despite local ambivalence about what it means to be ‘indigenous’ in an increasingly cosmopolitan community. Inca has also experienced profound environmental transformations, which affect cultural identity and the material ability to make a living from the land. Sheep and cattle pasturing has been the principal productive activity affecting human–environmental interactions in the community. Communal lands are frequently burned to stimulate new growth preferred by livestock, although the region’s grasses generally provide insufficient nutrients to maintain healthy herds. The conversion of forests to grasslands in the vicinity of Inca is virtually complete, and has created an acute crisis in forested land suitable for swidden horticulture and traditional hunting, gathering and fishing activities (MACPIO 2002). A desire to gain access to the monte drives local interest in the TCO, as well as dissatisfaction with the nearby Madidi National Park. In contrast to communal pastures, swidden plots are owned by families who generally travel one to two hours to reach their chacras. As fertility in these plots rapidly declines and the length of adequate fallow time increases, community members are frustrated in their attempts to locate new productive lands. Many families have abandoned distant chacras to focus production in nearby huertas, where animal dung from livestock pens can be used as a natural fertiliser to provide continuous cultivation of fruits, vegetables, tubers and herbs. Managed trees within these agroforestry systems provide a source of shade as well as food, medicine, firewood and construction materials, which have become increasingly important as access to wild monte resources declines. Fenced-in huertas also function as islands of biodiversity within open expanses of grasslands, and serve as a refuge for birds and other wild animals that community members are most familiar with. Huertas are generally located adjacent to homes and closer to roads, facilitating the sale of coffee, coca and citrus, although the income generated from this surplus production is rarely sufficient, given the stagnant economy of the region. The shifting productive importance of huertas in relation to traditional swidden plots may be reflected in the greater knowledge that community members have about these agroforestry systems and account for the greater variety of plant resources that are commonly managed in these local plots versus the distantly located chacras. Individuals must travel even greater distances to hunt or gather wild products, leading to the virtual abandonment of these activities, particularly among younger generations and families that have relocated

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along central transportation corridors. The majority of adult men in Inca no longer engage in hunting due to the distance required to travel to the monte. Only a small number of potential game animals are commonly recognised, and more sophisticated trapping techniques, as well as rituals to encourage hunting success, are no longer practised. Plant and animal resources formerly gathered from the monte are now harvested from huertas or substituted by market purchases. These substitutions have led to the abandonment of artisanal activities in the community. The most important gathered resources are currently located in the pajonal, including paja or ichu grasses for roof fabrication of traditional adobe homes. Yet paja roofs are being increasingly replaced by corrugated tin roofs, which symbolise modernity and access to the market. Even fishing productivity has declined due to soil erosion from surrounding grasslands and the use of dynamite and broadcast fish poisons. As a result, many community members no longer engage in fishing, and a growing number of adult men and women claim to no longer know how to perform the activity. The abandonment of former subsistence activities has led to a concomitant decline in associated cultural practices, knowledge and identification with the monte. Not only is knowledge of plant and animal species less comprehensive in terms of numbers of wild species recognised and named (as compared with Irimo), ethnobiological terms are exclusively in Quechua or Spanish rather than Rik’a or Lapacho. Children in particular have little knowledge of the plants and animals of the distant monte, given their greater exposure to the pajonal and nearby huertas. Knowledge about mystical attributes and folklore surrounding the monte is no longer embedded in daily activities, nor are rituals associated with agricultural production, such as ceremonial offerings of coca, tobacco and alcohol (ch’alla). The most robust domain of ecological knowledge involves natural medicine, which remains extremely important in a region with limited access to formal health care. The majority of commonly used and sharedknowledge medicinal plants are grown in huertas or located in disturbed areas along the road. Several curanderos retain knowledge of how to utilise and locate more specialised medicinal plants in patches of monte set aside by the community for this purpose. Curanderos also trade medicinal plants that grow in entirely different ecological zones, indicating the lingering importance of Apolo’s intermediation routes in the exchange of medicinal plants between the lowlands and the highlands. Most importantly, coca from Apolo, principally from Inca and surrounding pajonal communities, is preferred by Kallawaya herbal specialists and is actively traded in Charazani. Yet, while herbal medicines are commonly employed to treat ‘physical ailments’ in Inca, Christian sects have cast suspicion on the use of curandero practices to treat ‘spiritual ailments’, which have become associated with witchcraft, the ‘primitive past’ and the monte.

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Rather than identifying with the monte, daily interactions with pajonal landscapes inform cultural identity in Inca. Livestock not only translate into material and social capital, but open grasslands are associated with cleanliness and civilisation, sources of pride and indicators of the ‘modern’ status of the community. The pajonal zones are contrasted with those of the monte, which, while imbued with greater ‘authenticity’ due to their association with Lecos history, are also associated with primitiveness. Similar to lowland Quichua conceptions of tropical forests and ‘Auca savagery’ in Ecuador (e.g. Whitten 1976; Reeve 1985), the ambivalence towards the monte in Inca may reflect ambivalence towards indigenous identity and the past. Curanderos from Inca even explicitly link the origins of medicinal plant knowledge to past Lecos shamans from the monte community of Irimo, which remains endowed with both positive qualities of spiritual potency and cultural heritage and negative assumptions of ‘backwardness’ and witchcraft. These contrasting images of identity and landscape must be understood in their historical context and addressed by contemporary efforts to examine the use, knowledge and transformation of natural resources by Lecos communities that inhabit the pajonal.

The Community of Irimo Located deep in the monte, the community of Irimo represents the other end of the savannah–forest continuum. Furthermore, the association with the monte and the unique history of the community has established it as a marker of Lecos heritage in the region. In the early nineteenth century, relatives of the Lecos war hero Santos Pariamo fled Atén to avoid Spanish persecution and retreated into the forest, where they established the community of Irimo near an important ceremonial site of the Lecos people (Mollinedo et al. 2000). Processes of ethnogenesis and landscape transformation in this refuge community differed greatly from those experienced by communities more directly tied to intermediation routes in the llanos of Apolo. Many ‘traditional’ cultural and material practices were maintained in this community, including aspects of Lecos religion, still evident in ritual practices performed at the ceremonial site. Yet the rich cultural traditions evident in Irimo are not remnants of an unchanged past, but the living expressions of an equally rich history of transformation. Having come from the former mission of Atén, the founders of Irimo brought a Lecos cultural heritage long influenced by Quechua and neighbouring lowland tribes. Furthermore, Irimo never remained completely isolated, but maintained overland trade north with Apolo and riverine trade south with the Lecos of Larecaja, with whom they share a dialect. Trade with Apolo peaked during the quinine and rubber booms, while southern transportation routes remained important until the completion of the La Paz–Apolo road in the 1980s.

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Irimo’s mixed lowland and highland heritage is expressed in folklore and ritual practices reflective of Amazonian influence, along with beliefs and practices derived from the highlands (ch’allas). Community members are conscious of their historical links to the Inca and with pride speak Quechua, a marker of identification with the Apolo region. Yet, unlike the community of Inca, inhabitants of Irimo also explicitly identify with their Lecos ancestry, and until very recently most members were bilingual in Rik’a. Irimo encompasses a vast forested territory between the Yuyo and Atén rivers, and is located atop a series of ridges near their confluence. A poorly maintained dirt road connects the community to Atén during the dry season, although it becomes impassable once the rains begin. During the wet season, riverine transport via balsas connects Irimo to the adjacent province of Larecaja. The large expanse of community territory is cognitively carved into different named and historically recognised sectors. Knowledge about the ecology, history and cultural importance of different ecological and productive sectors is literally mapped across community territory through a complex indigenous cartography employed to describe the surrounding landscape (see also Micarelli, this volume). Ethnoecological terms employed in Irimo reflect the community’s multiple heritages. For instance, the riverine sector yemo yamo refers in Rik’a to the abundance of surubí catfish, while the ubito pampa sector refers in Quechua to the abundance of motacú palms. Other aspects of community history and culture are more directly encoded in the cultural geography of Irimo. For instance, the sector chinkana yuyo (‘hidden’ in Quechua) refers to the river valley where the community hid during the Chaco war. The incara sector refers to the presence of presumed Inca ruins, which also function as an important ceremonial site for the practice of Lecos religion. Even mythological beliefs are encoded in the landscape. The ahuari sector refers to a forbidden section of forest where a malicious folkloric animal by the same name was buried in the ground by a powerful shaman. Not only is information encoded in the naming of ecological sectors, but locals are also knowledgeable about the environmental characteristics, biological species and productive activities appropriate to each. Furthermore, Irimo families have traditional ties to one or several sectors where their chacras are located. Swidden horticulture is the most important subsistence activity in Irimo, and, with ample land, each family manages five to ten chacras in various stages of succession. Monoculture plots are located to take advantage of different micro-environmental conditions optional for the growth of plantains (platanal), sugar cane (cañaveral), rice (arrozal), manioc (yucal), peanuts, maize and beans, although the latter are often intercropped with secondary cultivars. Rice is the most important cash crop and is intensively cultivated along riverbanks, where families

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maintain a secondary shelter for storage and use during harvesting. While mules and asses are used to transport rice to town, other livestock are no longer maintained in the community in order to mitigate damage to crops. Animal husbandry focuses on pigs, chickens, ducks and guinea pigs, which often fall prey to small cats and other predators from the monte. Likewise, few households maintain huertas, which tend to be smaller and for personal consumption. The abundant presence of monte underscores the continued importance of complementary subsistence activities such as hunting, fishing and gathering of forest resources. Irimo inhabitants are extremely knowledgeable about locally abundant wildlife and can name species in Quechua, Spanish and even Rik’a. Charismatic species, such as Andean bears, jaguars and monkeys, play prominent roles in local stories that encode social and ecological information. Familiarity with animal behaviour and the location of salt licks and dens enhances hunting success, considered an important masculine attribute. Men hunt alone or in pairs, and do so both opportunistically and during planned, overnight outings to strategic locations. A variety of techniques are employed, including traps, machetes, shotguns, slingshots, hunting dogs and daily rituals to ensure hunting success. Both men and women fish over twenty species found in local rivers, and employ a range of techniques appropriate for wet or dry seasons, including hooks, nets (lleka), traps (chapapa), weirs and barbasco fish poison. At certain times of the year, locally caught fish and bush meat provide important sources of staple protein. Individuals also travel seasonally to different sectors in order to gather forest products. Palms and other fruit trees are particularly important in providing a variety of subsistence needs, as are trees for firewood, construction and timber. The community considers its reserve of valuable hardwoods to be an important resource for future development. Many adult males excel at carpentry activities and continue to practise basketweaving and musical instrument fabrication, while women still weave objects of daily and ritual importance. An impressive array of medicinal plants and animal parts are also commonly collected and employed by households and local curanderos. While most herbal preparations address routine physical ailments, spiritual beliefs and fears of sorcery continue to guide curing rituals, and community visits to the ceremonial site may be employed in dire situations. Several medicinal plants found deep in the high forest (monte alto, or poroma) are traded with other parts of the region, while coca is generally imported from pajonal communities. While access to productive land is less problematic in Irimo, isolation and lack of infrastructural development present important challenges to the social, economic and political integration of this community. Even so, the community’s connection to Santos Pariamo, the Lecos ceremonial site, and the monte serves as a symbol of indigenous ‘authenticity’ and is

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considered important to the current movement to recuperate Lecos identity. Although the remote location of Irimo makes coordination with CIPLA difficult, its conception as a ‘refuge’ community underscores perceptions that link authenticity to cultural ‘purity’ and the presumed absence of change. At the same time, the community’s location deep in the monte adds symbolic potency of a ‘primitive past’ considered at odds with the currents of history and modernity. Such essentialist notions of authenticity are ironic since the contemporary Lecos of Apolo are the product of a rich history of ethnic interaction, and the experience of Irimo represents one type of transformation, rather than the lack thereof. Throughout their territory, the Lecos embody a range of ethnogenetic processes, as they have interacted with landscape transformation and environmental interactions across the savannah–forest interface. Nevertheless, essentialist notions of ‘authenticity’ continue to guide popular discourse and policy decisions in Bolivia, and are used by social sectors that seek to discredit Lecos claims to land, resources and ethnic identity. On the other hand, members of the Lecos indigenous movement likewise draw on these images in their effort to recuperate identity and territory. This situation highlights the challenge of reconciling anthropological critiques of cultural essentialism with the uses of those notions as employed by both indigenous organisations and their opponents. Perhaps by providing more nuanced representations of ethnic identity, anthropologists may be able to assist indigenous peoples in their struggles for justice by helping shape narratives in ways that are more attuned to situated histories and thus less vulnerable to deconstruction and strategic manipulation.

Movement to Recuperate Lecos Territory and Ethnic Identity Understanding historical transformations to identity and territory is crucial for the establishment and protection of policies that allow indigenous people to live and prosper off of the land. Essentialist stereotypes not only distort interpretation of ethnobiological data; they also affect the ability of people with whom ethnobiologists collaborate to implement projects and gain legal recognition for land and resources. Unfortunately, the ‘politics of authenticity’ that inform policy and funding priorities continue to assume a static relationship between indigenous people and places (Balza 2001). These assumptions present challenges to the Lecos of Apolo as they struggle to define their relationship to other peoples and places. According to anthropologist Roberto Balza (2001: 4; my translation), ‘territorial demands include a fundamental justification … a historicalanthropological argumentation that references the indigenous character

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of the solicitants and the relations they maintained with the Western world, which resulted in the progressive reduction of their spaces’. Balza (2001) points out that the logic underpinning TCO legislation is flawed in its assumption of an ahistorical relationship between people and their land. The situation of the Lecos of Apolo likewise challenges this assumption. The diverse cultural heritage of the Lecos of Apolo defies presumptions that ‘indigenous character’ is something static and essentialist, without agency or historical change, as Amazonian peoples are often portrayed (Peluso 1993; Zent, this volume). If the Lecos of Apolo are in the process of ‘recuperating’ and reconstituting their ethnic identity, they do so with historical precedent, whose meaning is continuously negotiated in accordance with contemporary needs, the most pressing of which relate to land and natural resources. Balza (2001) concludes that territorial demands should take into account the present needs of indigenous peoples, as based on past realities, rather than assuming a one-to-one correlation between the two. Balsa critiques the concept of a static relationship between indigenous peoples and places since territorial boundaries were not fixed but shifted over time – similar to the concept of movilidad giratoria. The situation of the Lecos also challenges the notion of static territory, since geographical boundaries of interaction expanded and contracted along the frontier of the Andes and the Amazon, leaving the Lecos increasingly dislocated. Furthermore, the reduction of productive space in Apolo resulted from both incursions into indigenous territory and corollary environmental transformations. The conversion of forests to grasslands and the concentration of these lands in private estancias (ranches) by former hacienda families have had important health, economic and cultural consequences for communities with diminishing access to monte. On the other hand, communities isolated in the monte lack access to goods and services critical for the self-determination of a people long defined by their role in intermediation routes. These are some of the difficult realities that provide the social and territorial justification for the Lecos of Apolo TCO, which remains a highly contested space. Hopefully, situated analyses of historical transformations to landscape and cultural identity can contribute to an understanding of similar local conflicts that emerge in larger spaces of ethnic reconstitution and resource competition.

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The Historical Ecology of the Lecos of Apolo, Bolivia | 165 Lyon, P. 1981. An Imaginary Frontier: Prehistoric Highland–Lowland Interchange in the Southern Peruvian Andes. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Archaeological Association. Machicao Gámez, C.A. 1990. Historia de Apolo y de la Provincia Franz Tamayo. La Paz: Prefectura del Departamento de la Paz. ——— 2000. Historia de los Pueblos del Norte Paceño. La Paz: Independente. ——— 2002. Las Misiones de Apolobamba y la Congregación Cisterciense. La Paz: Artes Gráficas EURO. ——— 2003. Módulo Educativo: Historia General de Apolo. Apolo, Bolivia: Municipio de Apolo. MACPIO. 2001. Caracterización Demanda Tierra Comunitaria de Origen TCO Leco de Apolo. La Paz: Ministerio de Asuntos Campesinos, Pueblos Indígenas y Originarios. ——— 2002. Informe de Necesidades Espaciales para la Demanda de TCO Leco Apolo. La Paz: Ministerio de Asuntos Campesinos, Pueblos Indígenas y Originarios. Marcou, P. 1913. ‘Review of Créqui-Montfort, G. de et Rivet, P. Linguistique bolivienne. La langue Lapacu ou Apolista’, Journal de la Sociéte des Américanistes 10: 654–55. Martínez, J., (ed.) 2000. Atlas Territorios Indígenas en Bolivia: Situación de las Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (TCOs) y Proceso de Titulación. La Paz: CPTI/CIDOB. Maúrtua, V. 1907. Juicio de Límites entre el Perú y Bolivia. Memoria de Observaciones y Tachas á la Prueba de Bolivia. Buenos Aires: Compañía Sud-Americana de Billetes de Banco. Métraux, A. 1948. ‘Tribes of the Eastern Slopes of the Bolivian Andes’, in J. Steward (ed.), Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 3. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 465–506. Meyers, R. 2002. Cuando el Sol Caminaba por la Tierra: Orígenes de la Intermediación Kallawaya. La Paz: Plural Editores. Mollinedo, L., Quispe, F. and W. Townsend 2000. El Motacú (Attalea phalerata) en la Comunidad Leco Irimo, La Paz, Bolivia. Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Publicaciones Proyecto de Investigación-DFID. Montaño Aragón, M. 1987. Guía Etnográfica Lingüística de Bolivia: Tribus de la Selva. Vol. I. La Paz: Editorial Don Bosco. ——— 1989. Guía Etnográfica Lingüística de Bolivia: Tribus de la Selva. Vol. II. La Paz: Editorial Don Bosco. Moseley, M. 1993. The Incas and Their Ancestors: the Archaeology of Peru. London: Thames and Hudson. Murra, J.V. 1972. ‘El “Control Vertical” de un Macimo de Pisos Ecológicos en la Economía de las Sociedades Andinas’, in I. Ortiz de Zúñiga (ed.), Visita de la Provincia de León de Huánaco [1562], Vol. 2. Huanaco, Peru, pp. 429–76. Núñez, L. and T.S. Dillehay 1995. Movilidad Giratoria, Armonía Social y Desarrollo en los Andes Meridionales: Patrones de Tráfico e Interacción Económica (Ensayo), 2nd edn. Antofagasta, Chile: Norprint.

166 | Meredith Dudley Oblitas Fernandez, E. 1970. ‘El Legendario Guerrillero de la Independencia Capitán Santos Pariamo’, Pukara 3–4: 1–11. Peluso, D. 1993. ‘Conservation and Indigenismo’, Hemisphere Winter/Spring: 6–8. Powers, K. 1995. Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis and State in Colonial Quito. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Quiroga Gismondi, M. 1991. ‘Expediciones Militares y Colonización Religiosa en Apolobamba’, in M. Luisa Soux, M. Quiroga Gismondi, R. Jiménez, L. Cardenas and R. Hilari (eds), Apolobamba, Caupolican, Franz Tamayo: Historia de Una Región Paceña. La Paz: Prefectura del Departamento de La Paz, pp. 15–81. Reeve, M. 1985. ‘Identity as Process: the Meaning of Runapura for Quichua Speakers of the Curaray River, Eastern Ecuador’. PhD thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Renard-Casevitz, F.M., T. Saignes and A.C. Taylor 1988. Al Este de los Andes: Relaciones entre las Sociedades Amazónicas y Andinas entre los Siglos XV y XVII. Vol. I. Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos. Rivet, P. 1913. ‘Review of Chamberlain, Alexander F. Linguistic Stocks of South American Indians’, Journal de la Société des Américanistes 10: 652–53. Saignes, T. 1985. Los Andes Orientales: Historia de un Olvido. Cochabamba, Bolivia: CERES. ——— 1993. ‘Hacia una Geografía Histórica de Bolivia: Los Caminos de Pelechuco a Fines del Siglo XVII’, DATA, Revista del Instituto de Estudios Andinos y Amazonicos 4: 123–32. Steward, J. 1948. ‘Tribes of the Montaña,’ in J. Steward (ed.), Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 3. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 507–33. Ströebele-Gregor, J. 1994. ‘From Indio to Mestizo … to Indio: New Indianist Movements in Bolivia’, Latin American Perspectives 21 (2): 106–23. Torres, B. 1972. Crónicas Agustinianas del Perú. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) – Instituto Enrique Florez. Van Cott, D.L. 2000. ‘A Political Analysis of Legal Pluralism in Bolivia and Colombia’, Journal of Latin American Studies 32: 207–34. Van de Kerke, S. 2000. ‘Case Marking in the Leko Language’, in H. Van der Voortand and S. Van de Kerke (eds.), Indigenous Languages of Lowland South America. Leiden: Research School CNWS Universiteit Leiden, pp. 25–37. Weddell, H. 1853. Voyage dans le nord de la Bolivie et dans les parties voisines du Pérou ou Visite au District Auifere de Tipuani. Paris: Chez P. Betrand. Whitten, N. 1976. Sacha Runa: Ethnicity and Adaptation of Ecuadorian Jungla Quichua. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Zalles Cueto, A. 1993. Balseros, Horticultores Itinerantes y Barranquilleros. Lecos, Quechuas y Aymaras en Tierras de Transición. La Paz: Edición La Ceja del Alto.

CHAPTER 8

The Political Ecology of Ethnic Frontiers and Relations among the Piaroa of the Middle Orinoco STANFORD ZENT1

Introduction Until very recently, South American rainforest Indians were portrayed either as timeless, bounded and atomistic societies adapted intimately to their natural surroundings or as historically altered, deculturated and marginalised groups corrupted by colonial or global agents. This dichotomous viewpoint has been overturned by a spate of new studies that have emphasised dynamic processes of ethnogenesis and identity construction, historically situated strategies of resistance and accommodation to shifting environmental forces, the complex interplay of political, economic and cultural factors operating at different scales, and the creative collective consciousness and representations of local groups in the process of their (re)formation (Hill 1996, 1998; Pérez 2000; Hill and Santos Granero 2002; Whitehead 2003; Heckenberger 2005). As Alexiades points out in the introduction to this volume, a key theoretical impact of

1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at a conference on Environmental Dimensions of Cultural Conflict, held at Xerox Document University, Leesburg, Virginia, USA, 18–22 June 1995, and later submitted for a proposed volume of the conference proceedings, which, unfortunately, was never published. The author wishes to thank the participants of the conference, as well as Egleé Zent, María Elena González, Francisco Tiapa, Jeyni González and Miguel Alexiades, for their comments and criticisms but relieves them of any responsibility for the final product.

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this work has been to leave behind essentialist and primordialist conceptions of ethnicity in favour of a more historical, processual, variable and situational perspective (see also Alexiades and Peluso, Athayde et al., Dudley and Micarelli, this volume). A dynamic, interactive formulation of ethnicity was anticipated by Barth’s (1969) seminal work, which puts the critical focus on the boundaries between ethnic groups in contact. If ethnic identity is defined only in relation to a complementary notion of alterity, then it is potentially responsive to any external or internal factor that causes inter-group relations to change. Thus ethnic boundaries may expand or contract, open or close, in response to the vicissitudes of surrounding environmental conditions and the agencies of the people who are affected. Cohen (1978) developed this point further by drawing attention to the utter variability, multiplicity, volatility and contextuality of such boundary placement. The present study focuses precisely on the shifting ethnic frontiers and relations over time that have constituted and reconstituted the Piaroa group of the Middle Orinoco region in Venezuela. Whereas much of the new ethnicity research has been more concerned with the subjective, symbolic and reflexive dimensions of identity politics, the approach that I take looks at broad diachronic trends of boundary movement in relation to changing demographic, economic, political and ecological factors. Two main theoretical frameworks or arguments structure my analysis of Piaroa ethnic processes. First, Vincent (1974) has advanced the highly ephemeral, essentially political quality of ethnic categorisation. Borrowing from Weber, she notes that ethnicity can be broadened or narrowed in boundary terms according to the specific needs of political mobilisation. Ethnic identities are articulated by interest-seeking individuals when it is appropriate and advantageous to do so and ignored when otherwise. Ethnic groups are thus conceived as arbitrarily created, temporarily sustained, situation-responsive, goal-oriented groups. Secondly, Despres (1975) has proposed a resource competition model of ethnicity, in which ethnic differentiation is treated as a function of different groups competing for access to scarce resources, first by limiting their membership and secondly by monopolising or dominating as a group certain resource units. Inter-group relationships are thereby regarded as derivative of people’s relationships to environmental resources. This model predicts that the boundaries surrounding ethnic groupings become more restrictive and rigidly drawn as the resources they control become ever more scarce and more valuable (see Trosper 1976; Salzman 1978), whereas ethnic barriers should be lowered and distinctions less salient as competition withers. From this I adopt the principle that ethnic delineation is (partially) influenced by group adaptation to a competitive resource environment but I do not intend that such delineation is totally determined by it. A third source of analytical direction is the historical ecology research

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perspective (Balée 1998; Balée and Erickson 2006) which highlights the reciprocal influences and transformations over time of human sociocultural formations and environmental components. Piaroa anthropogenic landscapes are sociopolitical and biophysical entities, and human agency within them is expressed through biological processes (population growth and migration) as well as socio-symbolic ones (territorial zonation and meanings attached to places) (see Dudley, this volume).

Evolution of Piaroa Ethnicity The Piaroa are one of the most numerous and longeval indigenous groups inhabiting the Middle Orinoco region. They have a population of ~15,000 living in Bolívar and the Amazonas States of Venezuela (INE 2002) and another ~800 in the Vichada department of Colombia (Arango and Sánchez 1998). Their language is classified in the Salivan family, whose geographical centre of origin is the Middle Orinoco (Krute 1989). Their name begins to appear in historical documents towards the end of the seventeenth century, soon after the first Europeans arrived in that area (Del Rey Fajardo 1977: 112). Both written and oral histories converge in placing the traditional or original Piaroa homeland within the hilly and heavily forested region rising between the Orinoco and Ventuari rivers, which the Piaroa call huthokiju (Figure 8.1). The following reconstruction of their socio-ethnic history was assembled using the literary works of archaeologists, historians and ethnographers and the oral traditions of contemporary Piaroa.

Pre-contact Period Macroregional exchange networks, high ethnolinguistic diversity, interethnic social interaction and inter-cultural hybridisation stand out as key themes in recent investigations of the pre-Columbian and early historical cultural landscape of the Orinoco basin (Tarble and Zucchi 1984; Biord Castillo 1985; Arvelo-Jiménez et al. 1989; Whitehead 1993, 1994, 1996; Arvelo-Jiménez and Biord 1994; Gassón 2000, 2002; Heinen and GarcíaCastro 2000; Vidal 2002). According to this emerging viewpoint, the precolonial Orinoco was inhabited by many diverse ethnic groups that coexisted and interacted extensively and interdependently through a broad range of commercial, social, military, ideological and artistic exchanges. The archaeological record displays a bewildering plurality and complexity of ceramic styles and their distributions, which suggests a regional prehistory punctuated by considerable movement and mixing of

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Traditional territorial limits (huthokiyu) Contemporary territorial limits

Figure 8.1. Piaroa territorial occupation (traditional and contemporary Areas)

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peoples and material items (Tarble 1985; Zucchi 1985; Gassón 2002). The first chroniclers (