Trekking Through History

The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador

Laura Rival

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231506229
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Ecologia

The Huaorani of Ecuador lived as hunters and gatherers in the Amazonian rainforest for hundred of years, largely undisturbed by western civilization. Since their first encounter with North American missionaries in 1956, they have held a special place in journalistic and popular imagination as "Ecuador's last savages." Trekking Through History is the first description of Huaorani society and culture according to modern standards of ethnographic writing. Through her comprehensive study of their extraordinary tradition of trekking, Laura Rival shows that the Huaorani cannot be seen merely as anachronistic survivors of the Spanish Conquest. Her critical reappraisal of the notions of agricultural regression and cultural devolution challenges the universal application of the thesis that marginal tribes of the Amazon Basin represent devolved populations who have lost their knowledge of agriculture. Far from being an evolutionary event, trekking expresses cultural creativity and political agency. Through her detailed comparative discussion of native Amazonian representations of history and the environment, Rival illustrates the unique way the Huaorani have socialized nature by choosing to depend on resources created in the past—highlighting the unique contribution anthropology makes to the study of environmental history.

CHAPTER ONE

Trekking in Amazonia

“Today I go walking in the forest” (ömere gobopa), usually implying “I cannot stay in the longhouse conversing with you,” is an apologetic explanation I heard repetitively during field-work, and it is not before I felt confident enough to accompany my Huaorani friends on day expeditions or longer treks that I truly started to understand their society. Men, women, and children spend a great part of their lives slowly exploring the forest. They hunt and gather, of course, but they also simply walk, observing with evident pleasure and interest animal movements, the progress of fruit maturation, or vegetation growth. When walking in this fashion, that is, when being in and with the forest, the body absorbing its smells, people never complain about getting tired or lost, which they do when transporting food loads from trading posts back to their homes or when marching off at the fastest pace possible to visit distant relatives.

I came to understand that the Huaorani territory is not definable from without as a well-demarcated space bounded by clear limits on all sides. It is, rather, a fluid and ever evolving network of paths used by people when ‘walking in the forest.’ Walkers keep these paths open through many small and careful gestures, such as the picking up of a thorny leaf fallen during the night, the breaking of bending branches, or the cutting of invasive weeds. As soon as they have fallen into disuse, paths revert to the forest, undistinguishable from the vegetation cover. Well-trodden paths, located at strategic intersections, have become the repositories of traumatic memories, in the same way that physical landmarks, such as creeks, particularly tall and old trees, lagoons, or hill formations recall bloody attacks or spearing raids. Other paths form a network criss-crossing unknown or forgotten land; they lead to exciting discoveries, especially food plants said to have been planted by past people. Trekking in the forest is therefore like walking through a living history book in which natural history and human history merge seamlessly. Walkers, while keeping the paths clear, move from direct observations of animals or people to detecting their presence; they also note material signs evoking violent deaths of times long gone.

It is walking through the forest with informants that I came to realize that there was no clear boundary between wild plant foods and cultivated crops or between gathering and cultivating. What Huaorani people call monito ömë ‘our land’ is a large stretch of forest comprising palm groves, patches of fruit trees, untidy and minimalistic manioc plots, abandoned gardens that still produce edible plantain, and crops once cultivated and now growing with no or very little human intervention, as well as a great number of useful plants, wild and domesticated, found in hunting camps or along river banks. In terms of choices and priorities, horticulture is often less important than foraging. People like moving through the forest and subsisting on wild food. They would not let cultivation prevent them from trekking. This is why, perhaps, my informants and their indigenous neighbors agreed that the Huaorani are poor gardeners because “they cannot stay put for very long.” Moreover, manioc gardens are planted not so much to obtain staple food but as part of wider alliance strategies involving feasting with unrelated or distant groups.

Maybury-Lewis’s (1967:48) remark that for the Xavante “the harvests were thought of less as providing the essentials for the life of the community than as bonuses to be used for celebration” applies equally well to the Huaorani. In the course of fieldwork, I saw family groups abandon their village dwellings and gardens without hesitation before harvesting their crops of manioc and plantain when the pleasure of aggregating and interacting suddenly gave way to fierce divisions and antagonism. I heard about the Tagaeri, a splinter group that separated itself from the rest of the Huaorani population in the 1960s. They have not only kept to themselves fiercely, refusing all contact and killing those who have attempted to contact them, but they have also given up gardening. And I spent time with families living in “modern” communities along airstrips or around state schools who complained bitterly about their growing dependence on agriculture and who were doing everything in their power to resist sedentarization, often choosing to use food crops primarily for ritual and political purposes.

The Huaorani lifestyle, not unlike that observed among other highly mobile native Amazonians (for example, the Cuiva, Maku, Sirionó, or Aché), entails a high degree of nomadism associated with a mode of subsistence based on foraging. They cultivate but spend more time, and are far more interested in, hunting and gathering. The primary objective of this book is to document and analyze these specificities and to show that they cannot be explained away with reference to the environment and its conditionalities, nor to history as a source of disruption and disintegration. A proper analysis of nomad foragers entails taking into consideration the anthropomorphic nature of their environment, as well as their cultural orientation, which strongly emphasizes life in the present.

Cross-Cultural Generalizations About Amazonian Societies

There is a staggering tendency in Amazonian anthropology to stress the cultural homogeneity of lowland South American societies. It is as if the more we ethnographically know about the societies of the Amazon-Orinoco drainage, the more we are inclined to agree that indigenous Amazonia is socioeconomically uniform. Cross-cultural analyses present Amazonia as a distinctively hunter-horticulturalist cultural area, with societies sharing the same broad material culture, subsisting through hunting, fishing, and cultivating gardens, and sharing the same basic social organization of small, politically independent, and egalitarian local groups formed through cognate ties (Overing 1983; Rivière 1984; Descola 1994; Descola and Taylor 1993; Viveiros de Castro 1996). Authors stressing Amazonia’s socio-technological homogeneity typically assume that variation in technology, systems of production, or social organization is not significant. A number of specialists also argue that Amazonian societies share a similar mode of representing their collective identity and ensuring their symbolic reproduction through warfare and ritual predation (Menget 1985; Viveiros de Castro 1992).

Authors who propose to show the limiting character of the environment¹ and those who oppose environmental determinism and try to prove the independent and irreducible nature of social structures and symbols² equally share the view that the tropical forest cultures of Amazonia correspond to societies in which politically independent residential groups, subsisting through shifting cultivation and foraging, and living in small and semipermanent settlements, constitute the basic social units. Furthermore, both schools of thought equally ignore the sociological significance of mobility patterns.

Whereas the proponents of these two conceptual frameworks implicitly agree, albeit for different reasons, that Amazonian societies are today socially and culturally homogeneous, archaeologists and anthropologists working in the cultural ecology tradition stress the social and cultural discontinuity between pre-Columbian and contemporary Amazonian societies, and discuss trekking as an indicator of historical change. The seminomadic, foraging-based lifestyle of interfluvial groups, they argue, does not reflect the pattern that predominated in pre-Columbian Amazonia, where elaborate autochtonous chiefdoms developed and flourished (Roosevelt 1991; Carneiro 1995). In the rest of this section, I discuss three main currents of thought on hunting, gathering, and trekking in Amazonia.

Mobility as a Sign of Regression

Authors working in the cultural ecology tradition, which combines environmental and historical factors to account for the higher mobility and lesser reliance on cultivated crops of some Amazonian societies, interpret trekking and foraging as part of a general process of agricultural regression. In this particular form of cultural evolutionism, contemporary foragers and trekkers are seen as resulting from the wreckage of former agricultural societies. Far from being surviving ancient foragers, they are the last representatives of late prehistoric complex societies destroyed during the European conquest (Roosevelt 1991:103–5, 1993:256, 1994, 1998).

The idea of agricultural regression grew out of the early observation that whereas the first Europeans who have had contact with Amazonian communities described them as intensive agriculturalists producing large quantities of manioc flour and living in densely populated settlements, later accounts (as well as many contemporary ones) mention the existence of communities far less engaged in the pursuit of agricultural activities. The thesis was further developed by Steward (1948), who used the contrast between moderate and intensive cultivation to differentiate “marginal” from “tropical” forest groups, thus correlating stages of cultural evolution with degrees of agricultural commitment (Rival 1999b). This thesis has subsequently gathered considerable momentum with the archaeological discovery of elaborate autochtonous chiefdoms. The work of Roosevelt (1991), in particular, is used as evidence to prove that prehistorical and historical Amazonian societies did achieve a certain degree of complexity and that historical events, rather than the poverty of tropical forest resources, prevented their sociocultural development.³

Sponsel (1989) deplores that the strange breed of factual archaeology and evolutionism, which has now become the dominant paradigm to analyze pre-Columbian Amazonia, has done away with the environmental dimension that was at the core of the Stewardian model. If the historical key to the concept of agricultural regression as a form of cultural devolution is the European conquest, the ecological key is the contrast between the rich soils of the floodplains (varzea) and the poor soils of the interfluvial habitat (terra firme). Lathrap (1968b) suggested that a natural increase in the human population on the floodplains eventually led to resource competition resulting in warfare. Weaker groups were expelled from the fluvial zone and took refuge in the deep interior of the forest. In this poorer habitat, they were reduced to scattered, small, and mobile bands of hunter-gatherers. Consequently their horticulture was rudimentary, inefficient, and unproductive. These societies reverted to a much lower level of cultural complexity. In other words, it is through competitive exclusion from fluvial zones that societies underwent a process of cultural devolution.

Lévi-Strauss’s (1948) interpretation of Nambikwara seasonal treks, as well as his understanding of Bororo society (Lévi-Strauss 1955, 1963b) and, more generally, of “pseudo-archaic” societies (Lévi-Strauss 1963a), reflects the same view that groups disseminated by warfare and disease were forced into unproductive habitats, abandoned agriculture, and regressed from tribal to band societies. Consequently underneath the egalitarian social forms found among many Amazonian societies, in particular those of central Brazil, it is possible to uncover more complex and hierarchical constructs representing survivals from the past.

It is worth noting that cultural evolutionists challenge environmental determinism only to a point. If Roosevelt, for instance, is able to refute Meggers’s (1971, 1996) hypothesis that chiefdoms from an Andean origin devolved in Amazonia because the ecological conditions of the lower part of the Amazon River were not feasible to sustain their level of socioeconomic integration, and to claim that the ecology of varzea floodplains was rich enough to support the endogenous development of chiefdoms such as the one that gave rise to the Marajoa culture (Roosevelt 1991), ultimately she accepts the thesis that Amazonian societies are determined by environmental conditions and that the lack of complex and hierarchical sociopolitical systems is attributable to a lack of resource potentials. As she herself admits, whereas the poor-resource tropical rain forest model is inappropriate for much of the tropical lowlands in both South America and Mesoamerica, cultural ecology cannot be proven wrong until it can be shown that such complex developments occurred in resource-poor regions. Roosevelt even concludes that “these alternatives, however, all consider developmental and cultural processes in the environmental context. The problem for the future, then, is to improve, not to eliminate, the environmental determinist paradigm” (Roosevelt 1991:487–38).

An additional problem with cultural evolutionism, and with its assumption that the carrying capacity of the environment restricts cultural evolution by limiting the size, distribution, and permanence of the human population in the different environmental zones of Amazonia, is its normative and ethnocentric character (Sponsel 1989:38–39). If the shift from sedentariness, intensive agriculture, and relatively high population density to nomadic foraging can be seen from a cultural and historical viewpoint as being equivalent to devolution and social breakdown, from an ecological viewpoint it means survival and adaptation or, in Sponsel’s (1989:39) words, “the restoration of equilibrium.”

The Maximization Perspective on Mobility

Amazonian anthropologists who stress functional adaptation give priority to ethnographic information over cultural evolutionary theories and, in the process, tend to ignore historical factors. It is the unfounded character of much historical reconstruction underlying models of cultural evolution, particularly the correlation of environmental conditions and levels of cultural development proposed by Steward and his collaborators, that has led researchers working in this tradition generally to ignore historical factors (two notable exceptions are Ross 1980 and Ferguson 1995, 1998). If they accept that Amazon foragers and trekkers were excluded from fluvial zones by politically more powerful and aggressive riparian societies, and that consequently these populations shifted their adaptive strategy, what to them remains to be explained is the types of adaptive strategies and social development that are possible in resource-poor tropical rain forest regions. This is why they continue to argue that low population density, incipient warfare, transient slash-and-burn horticulture, and food taboos are all manifestations of human adaptation to environmental limiting factors, particularly to the depletion of critical natural resources.

The environmental explanation, reformulated during the 1960s and 1970s and known as the “limitation hypothesis” or the “optimal foraging theory,” is based on a range of cost/benefit models inspired from biological ecology and the study of animal populations. These models are used to develop a conceptual framework within which researchers can carry out real cultural ecology research (rather than hypothetical reconstructions within a cultural evolutionary perspective) “as a means to the end of documenting and explaining human adaptation” (Sponsel 1989:37). Departing from Meggers’s narrow focus on soil fertility to look for other limiting factors in the environment, authors such as Hames and Vickers (1983), Harris (1984), and Ross (1978) have examined the social and ecological factors that lead groups to favor adaptation to environmental unpredictability through flexibility and exploitation of heterogeneous resources, and have differentiated the groups who stress specialization in the obtainment of high yields from stable resources. Other authors have looked more particularly at the relative costs and benefits of collecting and cultivating.⁴ Even Meggers (1995:19), who now stresses that the strength of Amazonia’s environmental constraints is reflected in the large number of traits these horticulturalist societies share with hunting-gathering societies, by which she implies that hunter-gatherers subsist in environments that do not allow for cultivation, a more evolved and complex system of adaptation to, and exploitation of, the environment, seems to have adopted an optimal foraging perspective.

Cultural ecologists who have shown an interest in the relative mobility of Amazonian foragers (Hill and Hurtado 1996, 1999), trekkers (Gross 1979), and hunter-horticulturalists (Vickers 1989) correlate a region’s natural resource base with the cultures and social structures of its peoples. They frame their research using the basic questions of cultural ecology, notably: (1) How do tropical forest horticulturalists meet nutritional needs such as protein?; and (2) What is the carrying capacity of various Amazonian sub-ecosystems and particular environments? Gross (1975) interprets the form of Amazonian indigenous settlements, which are typically small, widely scattered, and often deserted for months by residents who have gone off on long treks and foraging expeditions, as evidence of cultural adaptation to game scarcity. But Milton (1984), who notes the relatively low accessibility of most wild plant resources in the interior forest, identifies carbohydrates as a limiting factor for the Maku Indians of Northwestern Amazonia. Hill, in the article he wrote with Hawkes and O’Connell (Hawkes, Hill, and O’Connell 1982), and in his subsequent work on the Aché (Hill and Hurtado 1996), advances the hypothesis that the rational economic behavior of Amazon foragers is expressed not in their tendency to maximize proteins but in their inclination to minimize time. Instead of arguing, as Gross (1975) would have, that faunal resources are a limiting factor for the hunter population in its local environment and that game availability, which influences population dynamics and culture, is an adaptive challenge to foraging societies, Hill formulates his deductive thinking on protein procurement in cost-benefit terms and explores the reasons why, according to this model, Amazon foragers value meat over plant food.

By contrast, Gross (1979) analyzes trekking in central Brazil from an ecological perspective informed by a cost-benefit approach. He contrasts hunting-gathering, a risk-minimizing subsistence strategy, with agricultural techniques, which are production-maximizing, and explains the lack of fit between the nomadic and simple subsistence economy of Gê speakers, who spend much of the year dispersed into small nomadic foraging units, subsisting on wild plants and animals, and their complex social structure, as a particular form of adaptation to, and opportunistic (i.e., maximizing) use of, their transitional environment. Gê speakers trek seasonally into the savannah to take advantage of its unique hunting and gathering potential, while cultivating their crops in forest galleries along rivers. During much of the year, they split up into small, highly mobile foraging groups to exploit food resources far from the village and its cultivated fields; when the harvest season approaches, they congregate back in the village. The alternance between seasonal trekking, with its predominantly foraging subsistence activities, and village life, with its predominantly horticultural way of life, corresponds to two distinct social forms. In other words, seasonal trekking represents a form of environmental adaptation, which allows for the development of elaborate social structures corresponding to ceremonial life among central Brazil Amerindians. Gross concludes that his model of seasonal cycle and cultural adaptation, or trekking, can take either the form of band-size units t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Orthography
• Chapter 1. Trekking in Amazonia
• Chapter 2. The Upper Amazon from Omagua Expansion to Zaparo Collapse
• Chapter 3. The Time and Space of Huaorani Nomadic Isolationism
• Chapter 4. Harvesting the Forest’s Natural Abundance
• Chapter 5. Coming Back to the Longhouse
• Chapter 6. Eëmë Festivals: Ceremonial Increase and Marriage Alliance
• Chapter 7. Schools in the Rain Forest
• Chapter 8. Prey at the Center
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Illustrations