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0084-6570/96/1015-0179$08.00 179

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1996. 25:179200Copyright 1996 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

IMAGES OF NATURE AND SOCIETYIN AMAZONIAN ETHNOLOGY

Eduardo Viveiros de CastroDepartamento de Antropologia, Museu Nacional, 20940-040 Rio de Janeiro RJ, Brazil

KEY WORDS: Amerindians, society and nature, ecological anthropology, social anthropology

ABSTRACTThis reviewdiscusseschanges in Amazonian indigenous anthropologysince thesynthesis presented in the Handbook of South American Indians. The past fewyears have seen the emergence of an image of Amazonia characterized by agrowing emphasis on the complexity of indigenous social formations and theecologicaldiversityoftheregion.Thisnewimageofsocietyandnatureistaking

shape in a theoretical context characterized by the synergistic interaction be-tween structural and historical approaches, by an attempt to go beyond mono-causal explanatory models (whether naturalistic or culturalistic) in favor of adialectical view of the relations between society and nature, and by hopes of anew synthesis that could integrate the knowledge accumulated in the fields ofhuman ecology, social anthropology, archeology, and history.

INTRODUCTION

When the Annual Review of Anthropology last published an overall review ofthe field in 1975 (70), Amazonian anthropology was entering a period of un-precedented growth: In comparative terms, this literature seems to have in-creased more than that of any other region over the past twenty years. Thisphenomenon has been celebrated by various commentators (40, 61, 117, 140,151), who often mention a preboom collection of texts subtitled The LeastKnown Continent(87), and then add how fortunate the situation has changed.

The optimism is justified. If, as Taylor (140) observed, there were no morethan 50 monographs about indigenous Amazonia before the 1970s, then the

subsequent explosion at least quadrupled this figure. In the past twenty years,many societies have been described for the first time according to modern

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standards of ethnographic writing; some have been studied by successivewaves of researchers with different theoretical backgrounds; and for certaingeographical areas the bibliography has since achieved an impressive density.During the same period, ecology, history, and archeology have made equallyremarkable advances. This coming of age may be evaluated in five recentlypublished compilationsDescola & Taylor (41), Roosevelt (127), Carneiroda Cunha (23), Viveiros de Castro & Carneiro da Cunha (157), and Sponsel(134)all of whom present a good sample of research developments in differ-ent areas of knowledge about Amazonia, as well as various critical and com-parative overviews.

The following review focuses exclusively on the more general changes inregional anthropology. The past few years have seen the emergence of an im-

age of Amazonia characterized by a growing emphasis on the complexity ofindigenous social formations and the ecological diversity of the region. Thisnew image of society and nature is taking shape in a theoretical context char-acterized by the synergistic interaction between structural and historical ap-proaches, by an attempt to go beyond monocausal explanatory models (whethernaturalistic or culturalistic) in favor of a dialectical apprehension of the rela-tions between society and nature, and by hopes of a new synthesis (126) thatcould integrate the knowledge accumulated by the various disciplines.

THE STANDARD MODELThe calls for a new synthesis point to the obsolescence of the image of Ama-zonia derived from the monumental Handbook of South American Indians ed-ited by Julian Steward from 1946 to 1950 (135) and from the digest of thiswork published by Steward & Faron in 1959 (137). Combining a schema ofcultural areas, a typology of levels of sociocultural integration, and a theoryof the determining action of the environment over a societys cultural core,the picture of indigenous Amazonia that emerged from the synthesis presented

by Steward and his collaborators became deeply rooted in the ethnological tra-dition.

This model presented the societies of slash-and-burn horticulturalists of theTropical Forest as typological hybrids occupying an intermediate evolution-ary position. Similar to the circum-Caribbean chiefdoms (from whom theywere supposed to have borrowed a number of traits) in technology, from a so-ciopolitical angle, the Tropical Forest cultures differed little from the Mar-ginal Tribes of hunters-gatherers of Central Brazil and Patagonia (136, 137).1

NATURE AND SOCIETY IN AMAZONIA 180

1 The G and Bororo of Central BrazilMarginals in the Handbookwere reclassified ashunters and gatherers turned farmers by Steward & Faron (137) and placed closer to the Tropi-cal Forest type.

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The typical Tropical Forest tribe was organized in autonomous and egalitar-ian villages, which were limited in their size and permanence by both a simpletechnology and an unproductive environment, and were thus unable to pro-duce the requisite economic surplus to allow the rise of the craft specializa-tion, social stratification, and political centralization that had developed inother areas of South America. Steward recognized the existence of ecologicaldifferences between the riverine and interfluvial environments, as well as acertain variety in the Tropical Forest type due to different local conditions andto the relations with the centers of cultural diffusion. However, the overall im-pression was one of a largely uniform Tropical Forest: an environment hostileto civilization and of comparatively recent settlement, sparsely populated, so-ciologically stunted, and culturally dependent on more advanced areas. Nativesocieties that had stuck to their traditional ways were seen as moving fast to-ward assimilation into national populations.

At the time this synthesis was produced, Amazonian ethnology was domi-nated by a blend of diffusionism and geographical determinism, following theGerman historicocultural tradition under whose influence it had been formed.Adding to the mix a theory of social evolution, Steward transformed this tradi-tion into the new discipline of cultural ecology, which was to have a largeprogeny in North American anthropology and which has wielded considerableinfluence in Amerindian studies ever since. The heirs of Stewards cultural

ecology (and of Leslie Whites neoevolutionism) continued with Amazonia astheir choice field for speculation. An example is the heated debate on thelimiting factors responsible for the regions sociopolitical landscape, whichwas to monopolize the attention of researchers of this persuasion at least untilthe 1980s (see 59, 133).

European anthropology began, with Lvi-Strauss (8185), to break the he-gemony of this paradigm before the 1950s were over, but it was with the pub-lication particularly of his Mythologiques in the 1960s that structuralism be-came influential in regional ethnology. It proposed an analytical style and,

above all, a thematic agenda that was to have far-reaching repercussions.Lvi-Strauss emphasized the cognitive and symbolic value of the material di-mensions of social life studied by cultural ecologists from an adaptive view-pointrelations with animals, origin of cultivated plants, diet, technology.Thus the conceptual opposition between nature and culture, which hadunderlain the deterministic theories of Stewards heirs, Lvi-Strauss made in-ternal to indigenous cosmologies.

The late 1960s saw the first ethnographies derived from British social an-thropology, which until then had been absent from studies of tropical Amer-

ica. The landmark monographs of Maybury-Lewis (88) and Rivire (113),both clearly influenced by Lvi-Strauss, opened the contemporary phase ofAmazonian ethnology. In the United States, ethnoscience and symbolic an-

181 VIVEIROS DE CASTRO

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thropologycomplementary transformations of Boasian culturalism havingcertain affinities with some aspects of structuralismhad come to share thelimelight with Stewards and Whites cultural materialism. The wave ofmonographs on Amazonian sociocosmological systems that began in the1970s (e.g. 22a, 28, 103, 129, 131, 154, 155) shows a combination of influ-ences of European schools and North American neoculturalism, but no per-ceptible trace, except in the form of a hostile silence, of cultural ecological ap-proaches.

Thus there was increasing polarization over the following two decades. Onone side were the descendants of Steward and White, who adopted a four-fieldapproach, were interested in great historicocultural syntheses and macroty-pologies, and were guided by an adaptationist and energetic conception of cul-

ture that underscored its material ordering by nature and privileged the tech-nological interface. On the other side were the anthropologists who followed astructural-functionalist or structural-culturalist orientation. They were inter-ested in the synchronic analysis of particular Amerindian groups and in the in-stitutional and ideological dimensions of the societies they studied, thus privi-leging the symbolic ordering of nature by culture (and thereby the cognitiveinterface).

Despite this polarization, certain aspects of the picture generated by theHandbookwere common to both camps. Amazonia was still seen as the habi-

tat of small, dispersed, isolated groups that were autonomous and self-contained, egalitarian, and technologically austere. Cultural ecologists tried todiscover which environmental determinants accounted for this simple so-ciopolitical profilethat is, to what scarce natural resource (fertile soils, ani-mal protein) it was an adaptation. Social anthropologists saw this situation asa nonproblematic given and attempted instead to describe the complex andspecific cultural contents they saw as associated with this material simplicity.When they did try to generalize [for instance, Clastres (25, 26) and, on occa-sion, Lvi-Strauss (81)], they traced the autonomy, egalitarianism, and mini-

malistic economy of contemporary societies not to negative environmentallimitations but to positive sociocultural onesideological denial of historicalchange, social resistance to political centralization, and cultural impedimentsto economic accumulation.

THE PASSING OF THE STANDARD MODEL

The elements that contributed to the progressive demise of the situation out-

lined above have been gathering for a long time. They derive first from a revi-sion of the received ideas about the ecology and the cultural history of Ama-zonia. In fact, this revision is part of a general revaluation of pre-Columbian


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America, which has consistently tended to (a) raise the estimated Amerindianpopulation in 1492; (b) argue for earlier archeological datings; (c) attributegreater complexity to the social formations outside the Andean and Meso-American areas, upgrading various tribes to the category of middle-rangesocieties; (d) underscore the importance of regional systems articulating eco-logical zones and heterogeneous sociopolitical types; and (e) emphasize theaction of long-distance societal influences.

The other element responsible for the reformulation of the traditional im-age of Amazonia has been the consolidation of a theoretically renovated an-thropology of indigenous social formations. Here, too, much derives frombroader intellectual reorderings, notably (a) the critique of the classical para-digms of kinship theory, seen as relying on a regulative and mechanistic con-

ception of social life; (b) more generally, the critique of the concept of societyas a bounded and structured entity; and (c) the attempt to escape the classicaldichotomies, from the Great Divide theories to the nature-culture opposi-tion, from the antagonism between materialist and mentalist positions tothe antinomy between structure and process.

What follows is an outline of the most important instances of these pointsin recent anthropological literature on Native Amazonia.

Human Ecology

The most significant change in the field of ecology has to do with the growingemphasis on the environmental diversity of Amazonia and on the correlationsbetween this diversity and human activity. For a long time it has been known(74, 92) that there is a difference between the vrzea, the floodplains of thewhite-water rivers that receive sediments from the Andes, and the terra firme,the uplands of poorer soil drained by black- or clear-water rivers. However, asMoran (97, 98) and others (107) have insisted, the regions pedological, bo-tanical, and zoological variety do not fit into this simple opposition. In par-

ticular, it is not possible to continue subsuming profoundly different ecosys-tems into the blanket category terra firme (about 98% of Amazonia).In addition, there is more and more evidence that in several areas outside

the vrzea the soil is not as poor as was once thought, and that in some areasthere was intense and prolonged prehistoric occupation, indicated by the factthat anthropogenic forests cover at least 12% of the terra firme in BrazilianAmazonia (8). These forests tend to be favored by contemporary populationsbecause of their high fertility. In addition, they support vegetational associa-tions of great importance to indigenous economies, such as palm forests,

Brazil-nut forests, and others, which should thus be seen as arrested succes-sional forest on archeological sites, including prehistoric swiddens as well assettlements and camps (8:6). That is, much of the distribution of forest types


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and vegetation of the region is the product of millennia of human manipula-tion.2 Bale, who has drawn the most insightful conclusions from these find-ings, observed that Amazonian nature is therefore a part of and a result of along cultural history, and that indigenous economies previously seen as in-stances of adaptive responses (58) to a pristine and transcendent environ-ment are actually meta-adaptations to culture, or to the historical result of acultural transformation of nature (5a11). Incidentally, contrary to what onemight imagine, Bale has found that anthropogenic forests have more biodi-versity than undisturbed forests (12, 13).

The adaptationist outlook dominant in ecological anthropology has led tovaluable studies of certain quantitative dimensions of the subsistence practicesof Amazonian groups. However, there has been very little interchange be-tween ecological anthropology and social anthropology; the two approachesare as incommensurable as neoclassical economics and political economy(56). This is no mere analogy. Adaptationist theories take for granted the mar-ginalist postulates of resource scarcity and optimization of yield-to-effort ra-tios and assume an immanent rationality of an evolutionary kind, governed bythermodynamic parameters, whereas social anthropologists working in Ama-zonia have tended to underscore the structural constraints of socioeconomicregimes founded on reciprocity and symbolic exchange and have tended toemphasize the historical, socially determined nature of interaction with the

physical environment (although, as shown below, some forms of nonenviron-mental scarcity have been suggested as explanations of Amazonian socialmorphologies). In any caseafter the vogue of the limiting factor and thenthe optimal foraging theories (for evaluations internal to the tradition, see59, 119, 133; for a critique informed by a different paradigm, see 31, 33)thegap between ecological and social anthropology has been considerably nar-rowed by the advent of studies of resource management strategies of indige-nous populations (e.g. 106), which give pride of place to native conceptualiza-tions of ecosystems (11) and allow cultural ecology to mean not only ecol-

ogically caused aspects of culture but also culturally created aspects ofecology. There are pending empirical and theoretical problems in this ap-proachfor instance, the degree and nature (whether intentional or not) of hu-man environmental shapingbut nevertheless it suggests a welcome generaltendency of ecological anthropologists to acknowledge the formal causality ofculture [or to use more updated language, the capacity for cultural self-selection (43)]. This seems to be part of a wider shift away from the view ofsocieties as isolates in an adaptive tte--tte with nature toward an essentially


2Some, such as Denevan (29), have claimed that there were no longer any virgin tropical for-

ests in 1492, which seems unrealistic.

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historical conception of human ecology, which is beginning to bear fruit inAmazonia (15, 60).

PrehistoryIt was in the very camp of cultural materialism that there arose the most cur-rent and widely publicized reaction against the view of Amazonia as a regionunpropitious to social complexity. This is Roosevelts theory concerning thevrzea societies (119, 120, 123125), which is essentially a reaction to Meg-gerss thesis on the environmental limitations of cultural development inAmazonia that she originally formulated in the 1950s (9093). Confrontedwith the sophistication of the cultures that left the archeological remains of thelower Amazon and with early chroniclers descriptions of the societies they

found in the vrzea, Meggers tried to salvage the theory that the region couldnot support, let alone generate, a stratified and politically complex society byattributing these archeological complexes to Andean influence, or even to An-dean migration.

Opposing this view, Roosevelt argued that the vrzea was able to supportvery dense populations with maize and other seed crops (119) or by means ofa general intensification of production (123). She suggested that maize, ratherthan having been diffused from the Andes or Meso-America to Amazonia,may have been domesticated independently in the latter region and that, more

generally, the Andes were not a factor of cultural diffusion for Amazonia butthat the opposite was true. Although the vrzea societies took far longer thanthe Andes to reach a high level of complexity, certain pan-American culturalfeatures (pottery, sedentariness, agriculture) first appeared there. The late pre-historic societies of the floodplain, in particular the social formation that onceflourished on Maraj island (4001300 AD), were, according to Roosevelt,complex chiefdoms or even states of autochthonous origin that featured socialstratification, specialized manufactures, priests, ancestor worship, and otherso-called advanced characteristics.

Roosevelt concluded that the contemporary societies are geographicallymarginal remnants of the peoples that survived the decimation which tookplace in the vrzea during the European conquest (124:57; cf also 122:130),having involuted to a level earlier to that of the agricultural chiefdoms afterthey came to the unproductive upland environment. Thus one should avoid theethnographic projection (121) practiced by those ecological anthropologistswho see the regressive simplicity characterizing the situation of Amerindiansocieties in the present as representative of the inexorable limits of Amazo-nian nature.

Roosevelts studies gave much impetus to regional archeology; her view oflate-prehistoric Amazonian chiefdoms is the most sophisticated to date andhas been successfully received even by anthropologists who are distant from


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the theoretical context in which it was produced.3 However, Roosevelt wasnot the first to break the traditional continuity between approaches that attrib-ute to the physical environment a causal value in the interpretation of Amazo-nian social forms and the naturalizing ideology that since the sixteenth centuryhas depicted the inhabitants of the New Worldparticularly the peoples ofthe tropical forestas prime representatives of Natural Man, unable to at-tain civilizational autonomy because of their adaptive subjection to a hostile,restricting nature (31). Lathrap had already proposed the idea of Amazonia asthe cradle of complex societies and a focus of cultural diffusion and formu-lated the argument against ethnographic projection (74, 75). Carneiro (for arecapitulation, see 24) had already contested Meggerss notions about Amazo-nias agricultural limitations and offered a theory of the emergence of politicalcentralization, which in fact is adapted and used by Roosevelt. And as early as1952, Lvi-Strauss had mentioned the centers of civilization in Amazoniaand discussed the false archaism of several present-day peoples (82, 86). AsCarneiro observed, Roosevelt indulged in not a few self-serving anachronismswhen she treated the Steward-Meggers model as if it had survived unscathedto the present.

Moreover, these theses face a number of problems. The central role as-signed in Parmana (119) to the theory of technological change and to the cul-tivation of maize in the evolution of chiefdoms disappeared in Roosevelts

later work on Maraj (123). The later work is thus left without any specificcausal hypothesis, a weakness she herself had criticized ten years earlier in thework of other authors. In its insistence on a generic contrast between vrzeaand terra firme as the determining factor of Amazonian cultural evolution(119, 124), her model is outdated in relation to the more differentiated and lessnegative view of terra firme mentioned above and is a traditional example ofecological determinism (history seems to come into the picture only afterthe European conquest). At times the model seems to incorrectly assume thatthe uplands were uninhabited before the European invasion (24), or else that

all groups that happened (or still happen) to live there were marginal peoplescast out from the alluvial paradise, as if there were an irresistible tropism inevery society, whatever its regime of social production and reproduction, to-ward abstractly more fertile areas. The model also reifies the distinction be-tween riverine chiefdoms [which Roosevelt compared to the Indus valley, theMinoan and Mycenaean city-states, and the Ashanti (124)] and the social sys-tems of the uplands, past or present. It would be more reasonable, consideringthe cultural substratum common to all of Amazonia, to imagine a gumsa/gum-


3 See, for instance, S Hugh-Jones (66) and Rivire (118), who mentioned Roosevelts thesesabout the vrzea in order to suggest that the clan hierarchies of the Northwestern Amazon had amuch more marked socioeconomic significance in the past.

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lao-type dynamics (80; see 130:226 for this analogy in present-day Amazo-nia) subject to conjunctural contractions and expansions that articulated popu-lations of the vrzea and the terra firme in ecologically and sociopoliticallyheterogeneous regional systems.

The presence of complex developments inland from the alluvial areas,based on bitter manioc cultivation, is beginning to be substantiated by archeo-logical evidence (60).4 If this supports the picture of a pre-Columbian Amazo-nia sociopolitically quite different from that of the present, it also minimizesthe contrast between vrzea and terra firme and undermines the simple deter-ministic ecological model. It seems increasingly evident that the emergenceand persistence of simple or complex social structuresfor whateverthese characterizations are worth (smacking as they do of the old social evolu-tionism)cannot be explained by environmental factors considered withouttaking into account large-scale historical dynamics and social interactions, aswell as processes of political decision-making guided by value systems thatrespond to much more than extrinsically defined environmental challenges orproblems.

As to her attacks on ethnographic projection, note that Roosevelt of-tenand naivelyused ethnographic analogy in her own reconstructions(123), resorting to contemporary literature to suggest, for instance, that Mara-joara society came close to being a matriarchy, which may be ideologically

pleasing but [pace Whitehead (163)] is theoretically problematic and ethno-logically improbable.

Social AnthropologyThe major contribution of the anthropology of contemporary peoples has beenin the area of social organization, which is given short shrift in the typologicaltradition derived from the Handbook. Steward (136, 137) attributed a centralrole to unilineal descent and believed Amazonia was filled with single- ormultilineage villages. Lvi-Strauss, in turn, could not say much about SouthAmerican kinship systems in the book that launched the theory of matrimonialexchange (85). At the time, they were little known and would have furnishedhim with more puzzles than solutions (83, 84). By the mid-1970s there wasenough ethnographic evidence to warrant an evaluation of the descent andalliance paradigms in the South American context (99, 104). The reexami-nation of Central Brazilian societies (89) undermined or qualified their earliercharacterization according to descent groups and simultaneously minimizedthe matrimonial implications of their pervasive dualism: Uxorilocality re-


4 Alternatively, we know of terra firme economies based on maize cultivation, though thesecases, curiously, seem to be the outcome of processes of agricultural regression rather than oftechnological progress (see 10).

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placed descent as an explanatory principle, and moieties were seen as regulat-ing onomastic and ceremonialrather than matrimonialtransactions. InGuiana, Rivire (113) and Overing (103) identified a combination of symmet-ric alliance, local endogamy, and cognatic kinship that turned out to be widelydiffused throughout Amazonia. Symmetric alliance came to be suggested asan invariant feature of social organization in the whole region (114). Relyingon Dumonts work on Dravidian systems, Overing, with much theoretical suc-cess, dissociated marriage alliance from any descent construct and from thesegmentary society prototype. Later developments in this field (117) weremarked by the exploration of the cultural idioms that counted as organiza-tional principles of indigenous societies (105, 132), by local and regionalcomparative syntheses (4, 64, 115), by attempts to describe in detail the for-mal features and sociological implications of Amazonian alliance regimes(61a, 139, 143, 156, 158), and by the exploration of new analytic categoriesthat might replace the notion of unilineal descent for true segmentary societiessuch as the G and the Tukanoans (66, 67, 77, 78).

For a long time, ethnologists tended to consider the village or local com-munity as the most comprehensive unit of analysis. The need to describe prac-tically unknown societies imposed this limitation at first, when it was not thesimple result of an objective situation (because various contemporary nativepeoples have been reduced to a single village). In other cases, the view of the

local community as a microcosm encapsulating the social structure of the peo-ple under examination seems to have derived from a reliance on native ideolo-gies, if not from an explicit theoretical-philosophical position (25, 26). How-ever, it has become increasingly common to emphasize the significance of su-pralocal networks of trade and politico-matrimonial alliance and to adopt aperspective centering on regional systems (for Guiana, see 21, 22; for theVaups, see 65, 71, 72; for the Upper Xingu, see 17, 94, 96; for Panoans, see46; for the sub-Andean Arawak, see 110). The political picture associatedwith the Handbooks ecological necessitarianism and Clastress philosophical

voluntarism has also been subjected to severe revision (34).There are three major analytical styles in contemporary studies of Amazo-nian societies. This classification highlights only theoretical emphases withina widely shared thematic field, and various ethnologists (including some ofthose mentioned below) combine more than one. The first is the politicaleconomy of control, developed by Turner for Central Brazil (145, 146) andRivire for Amazonia proper (115, 116), which shows the influence of thestructural-functionalist distinction between the jural-political and the domesticdomains. The ethnologists of Central Brazil (89) have denied the ethno-

graphic relevance of the concept of descent but have nonetheless preservedthe analytical substratum of the classical Fortesian model, attributing to com-munal institutions (moieties, age classes) the function of mediating between


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the domestic and public domains.5 To this, Turner added the uxorilocal con-trol of older over younger men through women, seeing the wifes fa-ther/daughters husband relation as the structural axis of Central Brazilian so-cial dynamics and elaborating a complex theory of the recursive dialectics thatgenerates the domestic (natal and conjugal households) and communal (moie-ties, age-sets) domains and hierarchically articulates them. Rivire general-ized the model by proposing (in opposition to the limiting factor theories) thatthe crucially scarce resource in Amazonia is human labor, which generates apolitical economy of people based on the distribution and control of women.From this he proceeded to explain the morphological variations present intropical lowlands by examining the correlation between the ways of managinghuman resources and the presence or absence of supradomestic institutions.

The second style is the moral economy of intimacy found in the recentwork of Overing and her former students (53, 54, 100102, 129). Influencedby the feminist critique of the domestic/public opposition (in particular by theideas of M Strathern), this tendency has produced stimulating work on the so-cial philosophy and the practice of everyday sociability in Amazonia, empha-sizing the egalitarian complementarity between genders and the intimate char-acter of native economies and rejecting a sociology of objective (natural or so-cial) scarcity in favor of a phenomenology of desire as intersubjectivedemand. This style tends to privilege the local groups internal relation-

shipsdefined by sharing and caring between relativesat the expense of in-terlocal relationships, conceived by native ideologies as defined by a reciproc-ity always on the verge of the predatory violence that also characterizes the re-lations between society and nature. It theoretically values production overexchange, practices of mutuality over reciprocity structures, and the morals ofconsanguinity over the symbolics of affinity. Although it rejects the notion ofsociety as a totality embodying a transcendent, a priori structural rationality,this model, with its essentially moral view of sociality, nevertheless pres-ents curious analogies with the Fortesian conception of kinship as Amity. In

addition, in a certain way its critique of the public/domestic opposition leadsto the reduction of society to the domestic level.The third style is the symbolic economy of alterity of structuralist-

inspired ethnologists (1, 22a, 32, 36, 45, 73, 95, 144, 154, 155). It has pro-duced analyses of complex multicommunity systems such as that of the Yano-mami [thanks to the outstanding work of Albert (1)] or of the Jvaro (30, 141),which by working with a strategic distinction between local endogamous net-works and the politico-ritual structures of interlocal articulation, provided an


5 Note also the influence of the developmental cycle of the domestic group theme as well asthe influence of a famous article by Leach (79) on these researchers interpretations of the G kin-ship systems.

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Amazonian version of the two-dimensional conception of social structurepresent in Central Brazilian ethnology.6 However, the groups orientation isclearly Lvi-Straussian. Interested in the interrelations between native soci-ologies and cosmologies, these researchers have concentrated on processes ofsymbolic exchange (war and cannibalism, hunting, shamanism, funerary rites)that cross sociopolitical, cosmological, and ontological boundaries, therebyplaying a constitutive role in the definition of collective identities. This hasled to a critique of the notion of Society as a closed, self-sufficient unit or mo-nad, counterposed to analogous monads that serve them as sociological mir-rors (156) or to a Nature that functions as a transcendental Other (39)tworecurring images in regional ethnography. This trend has explored the multi-ple meanings of the category of affinity in Amazonian cultures (a theme thatalso appears in the writings of such authors as Rivire or Overing, but in anemically negative form), indicating its value as a central sociocosmologicaloperator (156) and emphasizing the dialectics between identity and alteritythat is thought to be at the root of Amazonian sociopolitical regimes.

The most consistent attempt to confront the ecological and sociologicalviews of the relation between nature and society in Amazonia comes from arepresentative of the latterDescola. In his painstaking studies of the ecologyand economy of the Achuar Jvaro (32, 37), who definitely cannot be seen asregressive survivors of the European conquest, the author challenged several

theses that are dear to cultural materialism, demonstrating on the one handthat the difference between the productive potentials of the riverine and inter-fluvial habitats occupied by the Achuar is not economically or politically rele-vant and on the other that sociocultural limits on the duration of labor expen-diture, as well as on the general forms of social organization and the concep-tions of the relations with the natural world, lead to a homeostasis of theproductive forces on a low level of operation, which is nevertheless suffi-cient to keep the group in nutritionally luxurious conditions. ElsewhereDescola has developed a general model of symbolic ecology, which at-

tempts to de-reify the nature/culture opposition by differentiating it into dis-tinct practical-cognitive modes, according to the social regimes in which it isfound (35, 39). In particular, he has contrasted the naturalistic mode thatis characteristic of the Western tradition (where the relation between natureand society is metonymic and natural), the totemic mode privileged by clas-sical structuralism (in which the relation is purely differential and metaphori-cal), and the animic mode of Amazonian cultures (where the relation is me-


6

The similarities between the two-tiered models of social structure proposed by the ethnogra-phers of Central Brazil and Amazonia should not be pushed too far; in the former case there is anoticeable concern with totalization that is lacking in the latter. In addition, the place and functionof alterity in Central Brazilian and Amazonian social topologies are fundamentally different.

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tonymic and social). The notion of an animic mode might illuminate some tra-ditional ethnologic problems, such as the absence of animal domestication inAmazonia (38),7 and it is generally very promising, though it remains to bemore thoroughly tested in certain contexts where the totemic rendering ofthe nature/ culture opposition seems to be quite powerful, as in the CentralBrazilian cases [but see Seeger (131) and Crocker (28) for more nuancedviews of G and Bororo nature/culture dualism]. Descolas theory dia-logues with the ideas of Latour (76), and it shows possible convergences withthe nonpositivistic ecological anthropology of Ingold (e.g. 68, 69), twoauthors whose presence in the theoretical context of Amazonian ethnologyhas yet to be felt more fully, and who offer interesting rephrasings of the shop-worn antinomy between nature and culture that was for so long the hallmarkof Amazonian ethnology.

History

The historiography of Amazonian peoples is a fast-growing area (161). Thisreflects a general theoretical tendency, though a more immediate cause is thesoul-searching brought about by the fifth centennial of the invasion of Amer-ica. Professional historians began to work on the region. Ethnologists foundthat secondary sources were no longer enough and resorted to the abundant ar-chival material. In turn, ethnographic knowledge has been applied to historical

sources, such that hypotheses are being advanced to clarify information oftenof a vague and contradictory nature. A consequence is the revaluation of theethnographic content of old sources, no longer interpreted as mere records ofEuropean prejudices and interests. The interpenetration of anthropology andhistory has particularly benefited Guiana (5, 42, 47, 57, 159, 160, 162) and thepre-Andean region (27, 109, 111, 128, 142), but other areas are also beingwell examined for the first time, such as northwest Amazonia (164) and Cen-tral Brazil (153), not to speak of peoples who have long been the object of his-torical interest, such as the Guaran.

The growth in the study of oral traditions has generated some works in eth-nohistory proper (16, 50, 63) that demonstrate the importance of a specificallyhistorical consciousness in Amazonian cultures, challenging the traditional vi-sion that reduces Amerindian memory to the timeless world of myth. The rela-tions between myth and history have been analyzed particularly in the contextof the indigenous experience of the colonial situation (62). The implicationsof these relations for the wider cultural history of Amazonian peoples are yetto be explored.


7 On the question of the relations with the animal world in Amazonia, see also the importantwork of Erikson (44). On the critique of the totemizing reading of Amazonian sociocosmolo-gies, see also Viveiros de Castro (155).

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The historical turn of regional ethnology has led to widespread interest inthe interaction between native societies and Western sociopolitical structures.This theme, long favored by some local theoretical traditions (108), has beenbrought to the foreground by a metropolitan anthropology in the advancedstage of its postcolonial crisis. This change of analytical orientation reflects, inthe case of Amazonia, objective historical changes: The massive incorpora-tion of the region into the world economy that began in the 1970s has not re-sulted in the extinction or wholesale assimilation of native peoples, as wasonce feared. Rather, they are experiencing population growth, have preservedtheir sociocultural identity, and have emerged as political actors on the do-mestic and international spheres. Anthropologys response to this process hasbeen a welcome breakdown of the traditional division of labor into specialistsin pure and acculturated societies. That division of labor was character-ized by an ahistorical approach, a view of native societies as passive or reac-tive entities, and by an orientation away from the present, whether toward apast of adaptive integrity or toward a future of disaggregation and anomie. Weare finally giving up the conception of native societies as manifestations oftimeless structural principles, which made social change a theoretical mystery,if not the exclusive result of determinant factors external to indigenous socie-ties. The emergence of approaches that consider both local and global dynam-ics responsible for the trajectory of indigenous societies reveals an anthropol-

ogy that both addresses contemporary ethnographic reality and the historicalagency of native peoples. Examples of this new ability to articulate cosmol-ogy and history, ethnicity and ritual, political economy and symbolic analysisare the works of Turner (147150), Albert (2, 3), Gow (54, 55), Gallois (51,52), Brown & Fernandez (1820), and Taussig (138), among many others.

Another factor responsible for the demise of the contrast mentioned abovehas been the progressive conviction that groups considered exemplary of apristine condition when recently contacted by national societies have turnedout to owe fundamental aspects of their demography, morphology, economy,

and ideology to a long history of direct and indirect interaction with the colo-nial frontier (149, 160). The same may be said of the meaning and intensity ofvarious practices seen as expressions of original environmental adaptations orimmanent sociocultural principles, such as war (48, 49) or a foraging way oflife (10). Alternatively, a theoretically sophisticated consideration of peoplesthat at first sight would seem irremediably acculturated has shown that theymanage and preserve their identity by means of political strategies and cosmo-logical categories that are very much similar to those described by ethnolo-gists of traditional societies (54).


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CONCLUSIONS

What are the theoretical and ideological implications of the new image of

Amazonia as an originally populous areawith an ecology significantlychanged by human interventionand as sociopolitically complex, a picturethat makes the impact of European invasion and colonization all the more de-structive? I accept practically all of its features but cannot avoid a certain feel-ing of discomfort caused by the excessive emphasis on the distance betweenthe indigenous societies as they once were and as they are now. The revalua-tion of the impact of the conquest seems perfectly reasonable, but its impliedgreater victimization of native peoples might warrant a degenerationistic viewof present-day groups that would deny them any capacity for historical

agency. Such a view would ultimately lead to the absurd conclusion (that ofcourse none of us would subscribe tobut Amerindians have powerful ene-mies) that contemporary societies, since they do not represent the originalwholeness, are expendablethat is, they may be assimilated into the nationalsociety. If ethnographic projection has its dangers, one should not underesti-mate the opposite danger of an archeological perversion, particularly at atime when native peoples are using their historical continuity with the past asa means of legitimating their existence in the present world political context to

ensure their future survival.I believe also that we should think twice before attributing any problematicaspect of Amerindian societiesas a rule, any aspect that is difficult to reduceto adaptive explanations or that we find politically incorrect, such as wartothe devastating impact of Western civilization. This kind of explanation, forall its well-meaning radicalism, tends to treat native peoples as helpless play-things in the grip of the all-powerful logic of State and Capitalas, in anothertheoretical context, they are treated as puppets of ecological or sociobiologicalimperatives. Caught between European (or world) History and American (or

human) Nature, indigenous societies are reduced to mere reflexes of a contin-gency and a necessity that are equally extrinsic. We should perhaps recall thatthe history of these peoples did not begin in 1492 (on the contrary, for manyof them it ended then), just as it was not from 1492 on that adaptation to na-ture was replaced by adaptation ofnatureeven if the effects of human inter-vention on the Amazonian environment have undergone a dramatic change inscale and even more in direction [destroying biodiversity instead of stimulat-ing it (12)] since national states were implanted. Above all, we should not rea-son as though up to that point the indigenous populations of Amazonia were

following a natural evolutionary path, determined exclusively by the inter-action among technology, demography, and environment, a trajectory thentruncated by the irruption of History.


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It seems quite clear that the vrzea was a densely populated area at the timeof the invasion, that this region is the most propitious for growing cereals, andthat the vrzea societies showed more political centralization and economicspecialization than contemporary groups. Almost certainly some of these con-temporary groups are descendants of the vrzea peoples, who fled into the up-land forests to escape disease, missionaries, and slave raiders. It is just as clearthat many of the contemporary foraging societies were forced to give up agri-culture because of direct or indirect pressures of the conquest (14), just as it isclear that activities such as war increased in intensity or changed direction asan effect of European invasion (149). However, if Amazonia can no longer beseen as the exclusive habitat of egalitarian hunters-horticulturalists living insmall villages, it would be just as misguided to take for granted the vestigial,

degenerative, and marginal condition of the terra firme peoples. Above all, itshould be stressed that such phenomena as agricultural regressionor,more generally, present-day Amerindian ways of lifeare not evolutionaryevents, but rather the consequence of political choices (112), historical deci-sions that privileged certain values (e.g. political autonomy) at the expense ofothers (e.g. access to commodities).

There is yet another intriguing problem with the picture of an Amazoniadominated by agricultural chiefdoms. Much of the available ethnographic evi-dence points to the overwhelming ideological importance assigned to hunting

in contemporary indigenous cosmologies (even those present in full-blownhorticultural societies), a view of the relations with nature that privileges so-cial and symbolic interactions with the animal world and in which shamanismis the central institutionhere the similarities between Amazonian culturesand the hunting populations of the North American Subartic and elsewhere areremarkable (39)and a widespread ideology of ontological predation as a re-gime for the constitution of collective identities (156). All of this seems some-what at odds with the ideological regimes associated with agriculture and/orpolitical centralization in other parts of the world, and it would be insufficient

to explain this away as a cognitive atavism manifested by societies in regres-sion. If this point is accepted, instead of evaluating the contemporary socie-ties according to a standard defined by the intensive agriculture and politicalcentralization in the past, it might be necessary to reconsider the effective so-ciopolitical expressions of these old chiefdoms in the light of a cultural hori-zon that is still present. Further, if we accept (as I do) that the state of produc-tive homeostasis attributed by Descola to the Achuar is intrinsic to this societyand owes nothing to any post-Columbian adaptive regression, and if we notehow similar it is to what is known about other contemporary societies, we

shall be forced to reopen the entire discussion about what type of extra-technological mutation might have led to the emergence of the vrzea socie-ties.


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As to the hopes of a theoretical new synthesis, I believe that any unifica-tion still lies somewhat ahead. Although researchers from opposite traditions,united by the unanimous desideratum of transcending the classical antinomiesbetween nature and culture, history and structure, political economy of changeand analysis of monads in cosmological equilibrium, mentalism and mate-rialism, and so on, are certainlyand auspiciouslyedging closer, it is diffi-cult not to see the persistence of attitudes that were characteristic of earlierphases of the discipline. For example, one cannot help but feel that resourcemanagement theories are themselves adaptations of the adaptationist view-point to an intellectual environment that favors the concepts of history andculture; that Roosevelts critique (122) of Meggerss ecological determin-ism does no more than transform environmental factors from inhibitions intostimuli, preserving the same reactive view of indigenous societies; and thatDescolas theses on the historical constraints of the Amerindian animic re-gime or on Jvaro homeostasis may not be all that different from Lvi-Strausss rephrasing of the nature/society contrast as an internal feature ofAmerindian cosmologies (totemism aside), or from Lvi-Strausss and Clas-tress ideas (metaphysics aside) of the structural self-limitation that kept Ama-zonian societies away from productivism and despotism. I am not quite surethat this is a pessimistic conclusion; it may be the case that allopoietic andautopoietic perspectives on the nature/society pair are alternative descrip-

tions that imply each other (152)and, accordingly, that any synthesis mustbegin by acknowledging their necessary complementarity.

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