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Melanesian comparisons
Anthropologists have long been intrigued by some striking parallels between the
mens houses, sacred flute cults, myths of matriarchy, and other cultural features
found in the societies of Lowland South America and Melanesia, two regions on
different sides of the globe and with no known historical connections (see Gregor &
Tuzin 2001). Alongside the similarities, attention is also drawn to several features that
appear to set the two regions apart. On the one hand, the complex of domesticated
animals, bride-wealth, incremental ceremonial exchange, and elaborated material
objects, characteristic of parts of Melanesia, is not found in Amazonia, an area char-
acterized by bride-service, material simplicity, no incremental ceremonial exchange,
and no full domestication of any animal other than the dog. On the other hand, the
typically Amazonian complex involving hunting, shamanism, and the personification
of animals appears to be much less developed in Melanesia. It is differences such as
these that lead Descola, from the perspective of Amazonia, to describe Melanesia as a
kind of evolutionary template, one that presents the full range of combinations
between a set of structural potentialities of which Amazonia, for reasons yet to be
understood, offers only a very partial realization (2001: 92). This is certainly true
today, but whether it could also be said from the standpoint of a pre-conquest Ama-
zonia is another matter.
Gift exchange is another feature that seems to set the two regions apart: whereas
Melanesia is the locus classicus of the gift, it is frequently asserted that Melanesian-like
gift exchange is absent in Amazonia. The consensus appears to be that the nature of
Amazonian societies, with their relatively simple repertoire of material goods and their
lack of bride-wealth, domestic animals, and other related features, precludes the devel-
opment of gift exchange. In keeping with this view, the gift, as an analytic category,
figures hardly at all in the writings of anthropologists working in Amazonia, with some
authors explicitly denying its relevance in this context.
In a paper comparing the Northwest Amazonian Tukanoans with different groups
in Highland New Guinea (Hugh-Jones 2001), I have suggested that Stratherns (1988)
extension and reformulation of ideas derived from Mausss work on the gift not only
sheds fresh light on Northwest Amazonian initiation rites and ceremonial exchanges,
but also suggests new avenues for a more general comparison between Amazonia and
Melanesia. Here I want to take a different tack, to suggest that although it is undoubt-
edly the case that no contemporary Amazonian peoples engage in full-blown gift
exchanges of the kind represented by the Trobriand Kula or Highland Moka,
Tukanoan exchanges of food and other goods have a markedly gift-like quality and
that, in Northwest Amazonia and the upper Xing, such exchanges assume quite
elaborate proportions and form integral components of extensive regional systems
in which the values of sharing, generosity, peace, harmony, and mutual respect that
are typical of the intra-community relations in most Amazonian societies are
extended well beyond the residential group to become the foundation of inter-tribal
polities.
I also want to suggest that although such systems may not be typical of the majority
of contemporary Amazonian societies, categorical assertions that elaborated gift-form
exchanges are absent in Amazonia (Gow 2000: 48) and that the anthropologists notion
of the gift has no counterpart in indigenous thought (McCallum 1989: 27) stem as
much from theoretical preconceptions as they do from ethnographic reality. Whilst I
understand why Overing and Passes might characterize exchange and reciprocity as
reductive principles symptomatic of a colonialist anthropology which ignores the
language of indigenous poetics and aesthetics (2000b: 12), it seems to me that an
over-hasty rejection of such ideas runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the
bathwater and of shutting oneself off from the potential relevance to Amazonia of
fruitful debates concerning the nature of gift exchange in the ethnographic context of
Melanesia.
Although they have moved beyond the constraints of classic theories of alliance and
descent, recent attempts to begin a synthesis of the now copious ethnographic material
from Lowland South America, be they in terms of predatory exchange or of peaceful
production, are still rooted in kinship theory, albeit one now revised, extended, ampli-
fied, and culturally informed. Some of these syntheses have also moved the conversa-
tion beyond the level of the community or tribe to embrace much wider levels of
relationship, a move that parallels a more general and progressive abandonment of the
ahistorical, monographic approach that once characterized the ethnography of the
region (Descola & Taylor 1993: 21).
The notion of regional systems has been in the air for some time but, to date,
few coherent and comprehensive accounts of such systems have been produced.1 My
own view is that some notion of gift exchange and political economy, in the sense
exemplified by the works of Strathern (1988), Munn (1986), and Turner (1995), one that
pays full attention to indigenous notions of value, to exchanges of food and material
objects, and also to displays, performances and other forms of visual exchange, will
provide a fruitful complement to analyses rooted in kinship, a complement that will not
only allow us better to grasp the nature of contemporary Lowland regional systems but
may also provide clues to an understanding of the more complex chiefdoms and larger
stratified societies of archaeological Amazonia, a field where attention to material
phenomena is necessarily paramount.
she then extends these local ethnographic observations to make more general claims
concerning the nature of sociality in Amazonia as a whole. Following Collier and
Rosaldos (1981) distinction between bride-wealth and bride-service societies, McCal-
lum argues that, because there are only bride-service societies in Amazonia, the notion
of the gift cannot apply. In Amazonia, things stand only for relationships set up by
services and direct transfers of labour; no inalienable values are embodied in things
because debts are not recognized beyond particular dyadic transactions and because
things are not seen as transcendent of human mortality. Only in bride-wealth societies
such as those of Melanesia is social value embodied in objects, do things stand for
persons or aspects of persons, and do prestations create longer-term debt relationships
(McCallum 1989: 28-9, 260).
Against all this we might note that in Northwest Amazonian exchange feasts
(dabukuris), things such as manioc graters, baskets, and feather ornaments, fish, meat,
and beer do indeed stand both for relationships of exchange and for the persons
involved (see Hugh-Jones 2001). Also Tukanoan feather ornaments and other valuables
are collectively owned heirlooms that stand for both ancestors and aspects of living
people, are inherited across the generations, and buried with the dead; and finally
Barasana refer to whole groups of people as their long-term wahana or debtors,
variously their enemies with whom they once fought, their affines with whom they
exchange wives, and the partners with whom they exchange food, goods, and valuables.
The problems with this style of argument lie partly in treating particular social
formations and their allied native philosophies as typifying Amazonia as a whole and
partly in a tendency to treat native ideals concerning the aesthetics of the everyday,
localized community as if these exhausted indigenous philosophies of community or
sociality in all its forms. In Northwest Amazonia, visiting and other forms of inter-
community interaction are so frequent as to fall under the rubric of the everyday, and
the ideals of generosity, harmony, and mutual respect that characterize intra-
community relations are extended to inter-community relations across the region as a
whole, a situation not unlike that in the Xing (Basso 1995: 15ff.). Elsewhere in Ama-
zonia, wider, extra-community forms of sociality often combine trade conducted in a
peaceable, domestic idiom with various forms of predation (see below).
A focus on practice, on the everyday, and on affect certainly provides an important
corrective to the abstractions of structuralism and other grand theories and has
greatly enriched our knowledge and understanding of key aspects of Amazonian
sociality which these theories may sometimes neglect, but if an emphasis on indig-
enous voices and points of view (Overing & Passes 2000b: 2) is meant to imply that
anthropology should simply and uncritically reflect the views of indigenous peoples,
this seems unwarranted. Anthropologists may certainly be led astray when they
attribute their own concerns and preoccupations to indigenous peoples, but it is
none the less perfectly right and proper that some of the practice and concerns of
anthropologists should remain distinct from the peoples with whom they work.
Alongside indigenous voices and points of view, anthropologists are interested in
matters unrecognized, left unsaid, glossed over, or explicitly denied by indigenous
peoples; they are also concerned with issues such as regional synthesis, cross-cultural
comparison, or theoretical modelling about which most indigenous peoples neither
know nor care.
In their response to Viveiros de Castro, Overing and Passes agree that to restrict
discussion of sociality to the internal world of domesticity would indeed be reductive,
and they affirm that such sociality cannot be understood without the backdrop of the
wider cosmic and intercommunity and intertribal relationships (2000b: 6). This wider
backdrop they characterize as the obverse of domestic sociality, a realm of dark forces.
In an untransformed state, these forces threaten to destroy sociality, but when suitably
transformed and domesticated, they sustain it and give it life (Overing & Passes 2000b:
6). However, to suggest that inter-community and inter-tribal relations are a mere
backdrop, and to reserve the notion of (positive) sociality to the domestic level, risks
resurrecting the private/public opposition in the new guise of the everyday versus its
antithesis (feasting, trading, warfare, etc.) and would seem to downplay the significance
of the perhaps not everyday but none the less quite frequent inter-community gather-
ings and other practices that extend sociality well beyond the residential group. Such
gatherings conjoin, invert, transcend, or transform principles that operate in everyday
life and are often rhetorically marked in opposition to the everyday. In spite of this, the
very domestic and everyday idioms and practices of house, household, kinship, and
commensality also turn out to be constitutive of such gatherings and the everyday is
ever-present in their midst as when Barasana describe their grand exchange ceremo-
nies as visiting and structure them in a manner that is, at heart, no different from what
happens when a solitary neighbour drops by.4
Although the available information is patchy, it would seem that the Piaroa sari or
warime festival is an inter-community event of just this kind and one which could
hardly be described as asocial or as a negative example of just what sociality should
not be (Overing & Passes 2000b: 6). Like other such Amazonian feasts, the sari would
seem to be paradigmatic of some aspects of Piaroa sociality in its most intense form.
Held in a special house under the auspices of a territorial leader, the sari brings together
all the members of a given territory, the widest political unit. It requires plant foods,
supplied from special gardens created by client labour, and collectively hunted meat
given in tribute by all the men of the territory to their leader, who then redistributes it
in a collective feast. It is centred on masked dancers and the playing of musical
instruments that women must not see. To be a territorial leader, a man must control a
set of these instruments and the secret knowledge that goes with them, forms of scarce
wealth that are ideally passed to a son or son-in-law and over which other men compete
for control. The sari also brings influential traders together and forms the linchpin of
a trading network that links the Piaroa to neighbouring groups (see Mansutti
Rodrguez 1991: 60-5; Overing 1975; Overing & Kaplan 1988: 383-4).
These and other features of the sari suggest a transformation of the secret mens
cults and ceremonial exchanges of the Arawakan and Tukanoan peoples living imme-
diately to the south and west of the Piaroa. In the Piaroa case, exchange, feasting, and
sacred musical instruments are combined; in Northwest Amazonia they are usually
distributed between two different but complementary ceremonial complexes.
sociality, here the focus is precisely on symbolically loaded exchanges that transcend
socio-political, cosmological, and ontological boundaries and play a constitutive role in
social reproduction, in the construction of collective identity, and in a sociality (versus
sociability) defined in more morally neutral and all-embracing terms. Again, whereas
the moral economy of intimacy sticks close to native views in treating affinity as
antithetical to the sociality of kin-based communities, here affinity is explored as a
central cosmological operator.
To take these points further in relation to the issue of exchange, I shall briefly
summarize parts of Viveiros de Castros masterly synthesis of Amazonian Dravidian
kinship systems (Viveiros de Castro 1993: Viveiros de Castro & Fausto 1993). Viveiros de
Castro argues that, in these systems, local, community relations are typically organized
by the symmetrical division (diametric dualism) between consanguines and affines
that has hitherto been the focus and idiom of much of the research on Amazonian
kinship. However, he observes that the distinction between consanguines and affines is
intersected by a gradient (concentric dualism) between close selves and distant
others, closeness and distance being defined according to combined social, genealogi-
cal, and spatial criteria.5
The interplay between diametric and concentric dualism results in a typically Ama-
zonian pattern in which, at the local level, there is a preference for endogamy and close
marriage with related others, and in which close affines are assimilated to the category
of consanguines; thus real affinity is encompassed by consanguinity. Further out, in
the middle distance, distant consanguines are assimilated to the category of affines or
cross-cousins, a category that includes potential affines and similar others. At this level,
affinity encompasses consanguinity. Yet further out, potential affinity is encompassed
by virtual affinity, predation, and cannibalism, the mode of relation appropriate to
enemies or total strangers. Thus, as we move from near to far, affinity progressively
loses its specific link with marriage to become the Relation as an abstract, general
principle, a transcendental value of affinity without affines which orders politico-
ritual relations with distant others in the widest extension of Amazonian sociality. For
Amazonians, says Viveiros de Castro , the real affine is one with whom one does not
exchange women but rather other things: deaths and rites, names and goods, souls and
heads (1993: 179).
The virtue of this style of analysis lies in its emphasis on supra-local, multi-
community systems in which the external exchanges involved in warfare, cannibalism,
hunting, shamanism, funeral rites, feasting, and trade take on a more positive value as
essential components of social reproduction and the constitution of identity. However,
it must be noted that Overing and her ex-students are well aware that affines are
necessary (though threatening) others (Overing 1983-4; 1986) and that their focus on
the local, the affective, and the everyday stems not from any denial of the relevance of
inter-community relations but rather from a positive desire to highlight a dimension of
the ethnography of the region that has often been eclipsed by other styles of analysis.6
Despite Viveiros de Castros greater emphasis on regional systems and external
relations, certain problems remain. He notes the transitory character of Amazonian
local groups and regional networks, entities whose rise and fall depends upon the
fortunes of the leaders around whom they form, and which thus belong to the realm of
history rather than structure (1993: 195), but this important insight tends to get
lost under the conceptual framework of affinity and predation. This same historical,
political dimension, one that is analysed with great insight in Overings (1975) Piaroa
monograph and the focus of those concerned with the political economy of control
(see above), also tends to be submerged in her more recent work. Overing and Passes
(2000b) take pains to acknowledge the positive political dimensions of the aesthetics of
community, but their view of anger, jealousy, hoarding, coercion, and exchange as
destructive of sociality overshadows the more positive and creative manifestations of
these attributes and activities in the lives of influential men and women and in the
formation and maintenance of the communities that grow up around them.
Tough-mindedness, the generation of respect, the tactical storing and redistribution
of food and goods, skilful persuasion, and peaceful external exchanges allow autono-
mous and equal individuals and collectivities to fulfil their own ambitions and increase
their influence without necessarily compromising community values, a point made
with great elegance by Munn (1986) in her book on Gawa. This pursuit of ambition and
influence means that even though many, but certainly not all, Amazonian peoples may
express an antipathy to formal hierarchical structures (Overing & Passes 2000b: 2), an
informal, everyday hierarchy between individuals and collectivities, in tension with
ideals of equality, is an inherent feature of their sociality.7 As Santos-Granero (2000:
269) observes in a piece devoted to the role of leadership in processes of community
formation and dissolution amongst the Amuesha, attention to this historical and
temporal dimension allows us to move beyond a debate over Amazonian sociality
which sometimes seems to be cast as a stark choice between two opposed views of
Amerindian existence: peace and harmony versus conflict and strife.
A second problem emerges from Viveiros de Castros treatment of predation
hunting, ritualized warfare, cannibalism, and headhunting. Although these involve
relations with animals and with enemies often far removed from the domestic realm, he
emphasizes that predation should not be seen as negative reciprocity or negatively
evaluated exchange in which human or animal victims are objectified as mere things.
Far from being beyond the realm of the social, predation is itself rightly understood as
a social relation involving symbolic exchange between social persons. Viveiros de Castro
notes that, in the Amazonian context, these violent exchanges typically involve not only
a transfer of body parts or essences but also an exchange of perspectives whereby the
killer comes to assume the identity of his victim, a situation exemplified in his own
(1992) ethnography of the Arawet. It is here that his work echoes ideas explored by
Strathern, Harrison, and others working in Melanesia, and it thus comes as no surprise
when he states that predation belongs to the world of the gift and not to the world of
work (1993: 186).
Viveiros de Castro is surely correct to underline the social, relational character of
predation and, in this sense, to extend the notion of sociality to embrace all forms of
relatedness. However, from the perspective of Northwest Amazonia, I am less happy
with the suggestion that cannibalistic predation is the paradigmatic Amazonian form
of affinity or exchange (Viveiros de Castro 1993: 184). Themes of predation are certainly
present in Northwest Amazonian ceremonial exchanges between affines, but they could
hardly be said to be their single most salient characteristic; both in practice and in their
mythological charters, such exchanges are more concerned with how and why preda-
tion can be avoided (see Hugh-Jones 1979: 277-9, 298). This was one of the considera-
tions that also led Descola to query the paradigmatic status of predatory cannibalism
and to suggest that, despite its universality as metaphor, the ideological and sociological
weight of cannibalism is subject to considerable cross-cultural variation in different
parts of Lowland South America (1993: 185-6).
I have dealt with the details of Northwest Amazonian ceremonial exchange else-
where (Hugh-Jones 1996; 2001); here it is worth asking why Viveiros de Castro should
see predation as the paradigmatic form of the affinal relationship. Part of the answer
lies in his insistence that, from an Amerindian perspective, predation must be seen as
a positive form of social engagement and that, given that predatory activities take place
at the furthest limits of the socius, they must inevitably encompass all its other forms.
Here I think he is right. But another part of the answer seems to lie in the fact that the
proponents of the symbolic economy of alterity, like many of those who adopt its
moral, intimate alternative, work in societies of a particular kind. Such societies are
certainly widespread in Amazonia, but whether they can be described as being typical
of the region as a whole is open to question both today and even more so with reference
to the past.
Viveiros de Castros Arawet, Descola and Taylors Achuar, and Overings Piaroa are
all variants of the same basic social form. The members of these relatively small-scale,
isolated, and autonomous communities marry for preference within localized,
co-resident cognatic kindreds. There is a strong boundary between the inside and
outside, one that also marks a difference between co-residents who are treated as
consanguines and outsiders who are assimilated to affines and enemies. The openly
warlike Arawet and Achuar place a strong positive emphasis on hunting and killing as
manly virtues and as activities necessary for metaphysical reproduction, whilst the
Piaroa are, on the surface at least, peaceful, non-violent, and see external predatory
exchanges as necessary but also dangerous and anti-social. However, similarities
between their attitudes to trade suggest that the Piaroa are more like the Achuar and
other Jivaroan groups than might appear at first sight.
The Jivaroans extensive foreign trade is dominated by shamans and other men of
influence. In addition to its utilitarian role in allowing access to locally scarce resources,
this trade serves as a vehicle for the incorporation of the exotic, foreign powers of both
Canelos Quichua shamans and White people. These powers are a form of wealth and
can be obtained against other material valuables. Trade also acts as an umbrella for safe
travel and underwrites political alliances between powerful men living in widely sepa-
rated communities who would otherwise be enemies. These men treat each other not
as affines but as amigri or friends, affinity being the idiom for the predatory activities
of hunting, headhunting, warfare, and shamanic aggression. Through trade such men
gain influence in their home communities, and because others fear their powers, trade
allows shamans to accumulate significant material wealth and influence, which they use
to obtain the services of others and also, on occasion, to obtain wives without the
customary bride-service (see Harner 1973; and also Killick 2009; Santos-Granero 2007).
Piaroa trading activities and their links with political power and influence show
obvious parallels with all this. Trade is mainly in the hands of powerful shamans who
control large but shifting territories and who are at the top of an informal leadership
hierarchy with a tendency towards regional centralization. These shaman-leaders enter
into long-term alliances with trading partners in other territories or from other groups.
Partners sometimes arrange marital exchanges between their respective children but
otherwise avoid affinal references and treat one another as close kinsmen. As in the
Jivaro case, the power of traders has much to do with the power of the goods they trade.
Some of these, like machetes, axes, and guns, are potent means of production, some are
potent ritual objects, and all such foreign goods embody the powers of their producers
(Overing 1992: 184, 189). Such goods have a gift-like quality in that they objectify aspects
as metallurgy, weaving, sculpture, architecture, dance, song, rhetoric, and other arts
which require aesthetic, inspirational, and reflective knowledge of a different kind to
produce goods or performances that are seen as manifestations of intangible ancestral
powers located in the vertical space above a politico-ideological centre.
The Piaroa, Jivaro, and Arawet would all be examples of acquisitional polities: their
trading is focused on trophies and the horizontal space in which their trader- or
warrior-leaders operate is the domain of Viveiros de Castros affinity without affines.
Elsewhere (Hugh-Jones 1996) I have suggested that the regional systems of Northwest
Amazonia and the Xing region of Central Brazil, with their emphasis on elaborate
architecture, highly ordered notions of space, specialized craft activities, relatively
closed circulation of prestige goods, control over heirlooms, supra-local codes of
respect, and emphasis on hierarchy, correspond quite closely to Helms superordinate
societies. But two words of caution are needed here. Firstly, superordinate societies and
acquisitional polities may be systemically related as centre to periphery the Xinguanos
and their G-speaking neighbours would be a case in point. Secondly, these are ideal
types not separate kinds, so that each will combine features of the other. This is
illustrated in the coexistence of two different Barasana ideas concerning the souls of the
dead: that they return to ancestral houses located in the centre of their own territory
and that they live like White people far away in towns and cities a position also
occupied by virtual affines.
In the context of Amazonia, there are several attractions to Helmss schema. It
underlines the political and ideological symbolism of material goods in a region all too
readily characterized as one of material simplicity and with only very limited craft
specialization. This view does not square with the archaeological record and is only
partially true today (see Hugh-Jones 2009). The scheme brings together aesthetics,
economics, politics, and cosmology in a way that moves beyond more utilitarian
notions of scarcity or value and draws attention to the political and ideological signifi-
cance of a complex of objects, activities, skills, and knowledge that have not often been
considered together. It focuses more on regional interaction and regional systems than
on ethnic groups, and the periphery-core relation between acquisitional polities and
superordinate societies fits well with the periphery-core relation between elementary
(in Lvi-Strausss sense) Dravidian-like kinship systems and the more complex Iro-
quois systems probably associated with the Arawakan chiefdoms of the central
Amazon. Note here the Arawakan stamp of Xinguano culture and, circular villages
apart, of Northwest Amazonia too (see Heckenberger 2005). Finally the schema sug-
gests a different way of approaching the question of how and why societies that seem to
share elements of a common cultural repertoire none the less differ in important ways,
an approach that takes us beyond the older dichotomy between bride-wealth and
bride-service.
Tukanoan marriage
In the Northwest Amazonian context, it makes little sense to talk of types of marriage
without some reference to politics, hierarchy, and social space and time. As rhem
(1981b) has shown for the Makuna, Tukanoan marriages can be ranked along a spec-
trum that, in general terms, reflects the relative social and spatial distance separating
those involved. At one end are marriages where women are abducted, usually from
remote communities. This either exacerbates existing tensions or, alternatively, results
in a retaliatory seizure or more peaceful negotiations which may lay the foundations for
less violent exchanges between the communities involved much depends on the
respective strengths and dispositions of those involved. In the middle are marriages in
which there is an explicit and immediate exchange of women. Such marriages are
typically between people in communities who live some distance apart and/or between
those with little or no previous history of inter-marriage. At the other end are marriages
with no immediate return. These are typically between geographically close neighbours
who are already closely related. The expected return is either held in abeyance or
occasionally rendered through bride-service. Bride-service is rare, avoided, and looked
down upon, and most close marriages are of little political significance.
In local thinking there is a strong preference for direct exchange and, contrary to the
predictions of the bride-service model, people often speak in terms of waha or debt in
the context of marriage negotiations,9 a concept that also applies to commercial trans-
actions, ceremonial exchange, and feuding. They are well aware that what is exchanged
in marriage is not whole women but only certain aspects of their sisters and daughters,
and aware, too, that, despite being exchanged, these female relatives still remain a part
of their own group. In this sense such women are gifts they embody their source. But
what is counted as direct or as an exchange is a moot point that is open to political
negotiation. Where no sister or daughter is given in exchange, some longer- or shorter-
term substitute is expected the promise of a future sister or daughter or more
immediate bride-service in the form of work for the new wifes parents during tem-
porary uxorilocal residence or extended visits to the wifes natal community. In this
ideally virilocal society, uxorilocal residence tends to have inferior, client connotations
and those living uxorilocally for extended periods are typically men from low-ranking
and/or numerically weak clans (see also rhem 1981a: 229; Chernela 1993: 163). Gifts of
food and goods at ceremonial exchanges also form an integral and ongoing component
of the various transactions associated with marriage, and gifts of goods, increasingly
those of Western manufacture, typically accompany marriage and may be used as a
partial substitute for bride-service. Finally, powerful and influential men may some-
times substitute high-value goods such as feather ornaments or guns for the exchange
of a sister or daughter (see also rhem 1981a: 163; Goldman 1979: 138, 145).
A further political dimension to these different forms of marriage emerges from
Cabalzars (2000; 2009) work on the Tuyuka. Here members of the highest-ranking,
chiefly clan, most of whom live in the centre of Tuyuka territory, show a statistical
preference for distant, exchange marriages whilst the lower-ranking groups on the edge
of the territory tend to marry close. High-ranking people organize the building of large
longhouses, control boxes of feather ornaments, and count specialist dancers and
shaman-priests among their number. In short, it is they who dominate ritual and
ceremonial life. The final part of the picture is that, in Northwest Amazonia, members
of higher-ranking clans often express a preference for marriage with those of equal
status, a preference that appears to be quite often realized in practice; this may be one
explanation for historical references to the existence of three classes: chief, common-
ers, and servants (see, e.g., Chernela 1993: 57; Hill 2001: 55).
In Collier and Rosaldos model, bride-service and sister exchange go together as
parts of the same complex. In Northwest Amazonia, bride-service and sister (or
daughter) exchange emerge as differently ranked alternatives in a system in which
things, labour, and people may, in some contexts, be seen as mutually substitutable.
That influential, higher-ranking Tukanoans sometimes use luxury goods as a bride-
price no more makes them a bride-wealth society than the few, generally low-status,
men who live uxorilocally and work for their in-laws make them a bride-service
society. But although I see no need to try to force whole social systems into one or
other type in different contexts, social actors can exploit a range of different pos-
sibilities the bias appears to lie in the direction of gift and bride-wealth and not
towards bride-service.
Conclusion
This article builds upon a previous essay (Hugh-Jones 2001) in which I tried to show
that Stratherns reworking of the gift and her critique of theoretical understandings of
secret mens cults in a Melanesian context might also be relevant to Amazonia. My
point there was comparative: to move comparisons between Amazonia and Melanesia
beyond the level of similar substantive phenomena or cultural traits flute cults and
their associated mythology to the level of different theoretical languages and regional
of the fish they bring just as the donors of meat are animals. In an inversion of
predatory cannibalism, the guests detach parts of themselves, metaphorically their
children or kin, and offer these up as sacrificial substitutes for consumption by their
hosts. Though I cannot go into this here, beer, too, is amenable to the same kind of
analysis, one that suggests both strong parallels with and inversions of the symbolism
surrounding beer amongst predatory Tupi-speaking peoples (see Journet 1995 and cf.
Stolze Lima 2005; Viveiros de Castro 1992).
Northwest Amazonian secret mens cults and ceremonial exchanges may not be
typical of Amazonia more generally, but when we look at the symbolic operations they
involve we find continuity between them and other forms of exchange. The more
Maussian gift-like form of Tukanoan exchanges may be unusual in Amazonia, but they
are clearly one particular transformation of the beer feasts that play such a major role
in the lives of all Amazonian peoples (see Stutzman 2000; Vilaa 1992). Although the
label gift exchange may, in itself, add little to the understanding of such feasts, they
certainly seem to operate along at least some of the principles that Strathern has
explored under the rubric of the gift. Furthermore, given that the exchanges that take
place in such feasts are part and parcel of much wider cycles of domestic and intra-
community exchange, it would be a mistake to bracket them off in a discrete ceremo-
nial sphere lying beyond the everyday and convivial.
By the same token, it would seem that to relegate exchange to the extra-domestic,
asocial sphere risks mistaking ideology for practice. Though Piaroa territorial leaders
received gifts as tribute and in payment for ritual services (Overing 1975: 63; Overing &
Kaplan 1988: 383), in her discussion of Piaroa trade, Overing tells us that no social
prestige was attached to the ownership of trade goods and that they served no basis for
internal social differentiation (1992: 185). Her argument is based, in part, on the Piaroa
distinction between palou, exchange, external barter-trade, and mifona, intra-
community gifts, some free and some to be reciprocated later. Gifts between leader and
followers fall within the latter category (see also Overing 1975: 63, n. 2). Beyond control
over items such as sacred instruments, ownership of goods may carry no social prestige
in the societies of the Guianas, but their acquisition and redistribution as free and
generous gifts is certainly used to gain influence and control over others. Howard
describes how the WaiWai, for whom generosity, love, and care epitomize an ethos of
serenity and sociability much like that of the Piaroa, use gifts given freely in a spirit
of care and generosity to domesticate and subordinate still isolated groups through a
diffuse but inexorable indebtedness (1993: 236). Their Trio neighbours used similar
tactics to domesticate Akuriyo hunter-gatherers as their servants (Grotti 2007). Like
gifts that make peace between warring groups, gifts given freely in an ethos of com-
munity can also conceal hidden perils.
The other part of the answer to the question, posed above, as to why the gift figures
so little in ethnographic writings on Amazonia lies in the bracketing off of the gift on
one side of Collier and Rosaldos distinction between bride-wealth and bride-service
societies. As a blunt instrument for crude, global comparisons of Amazonia and Mela-
nesia, the distinction between bride-wealth and bride-service may have its uses. At this
level, Descola is correct that the principle of substituting objects for persons is con-
spicuously absent in Amazonia: bride-wealth is replaced by bride-service (2001: 110).
But this is one particular understanding of substitution, and, even here, when we look
at the historical and archaeological evidence (see Boomert 1987; Steverlynck 2008), we
find hints of something akin to bride-wealth.
Strathern writes that bride-wealth societies evince a profound symbolic shift away
from their bride-service counterparts (1985: 198). The Tukanoans sacred musical
instruments, feather ornaments, and sets of personal names, inalienable possessions
passed between the generations within lineal groupings or houses, suggest a shift in
that direction. Why this shift should have occurred, why different societies should opt
to exploit either the more predatory or more prestational potentials of exchange
(broadly understood), and why some Lowland South Americans should build regional
systems upon what others leave to the sphere of individual links of trade or friendship
are questions I have neither the space nor the expertise to answer. But this shift itself
leaves the Tukanoans somewhere between the two poles, in a space that remains open
for exploration. If this space seems atypical of the Amazonia of today, the archaeologi-
cal evidence suggests that it was probably much less so in the past.
Finally, where do I situate myself in relation to Viveiros de Castros (1996) three
analytical styles? In what I have written above, I have tried to keep politics firmly in the
picture. But this is not because I wish to throw my lot in with the political economy of
control, at least in the classic formulations of this line (Rivire 1984; 1987; Turner 1979;
1984). As indicated above, and as Rivire (1987) himself noted, the virilocal Tukanoans
do not fit the common uxorilocal Amazonian pattern in which fathers gain control of
their in-married sons-in-law by controlling their own daughters. Furthermore, against
Rivires (1984) economy of people rather than of goods, the Tukanoan economy is
firmly one of both.
Despite my reservations concerning cannibalistic predation as paradigmatic of
affinity or exchange, my overall sympathies lie in the direction of symbolic economy. In
the present context this is partly because the line points outwards towards wider
systems and partly because it offers much greater scope for comparison and synthesis
if it is true, as proponents of the moral economy line assert, that generosity, sharing,
and conviviality are values common to all Amazonians, then further research showing
that this is so will not be of great interest. But what is often missing from more
structural or symbolic discussions of alterity is precisely some political and historical
dimension. As Turner (1995) suggests, and as I have tried to explore in recent work
(Hugh-Jones 2010; in press), alongside the circulation of gifts and valuables, capacities,
identities, statuses, values, and subjective states may be indexed by specialized verbal
performances and visual displays directed at an audience as virtual gifts. Where these
virtual gifts circulate in tandem with their human and material counterparts, politics
and symbol are fused.
NOTES
1
Francetto & Heckenberger (2001); Heckenberger (2005); Renard-Casevitz (1991); and Whitehead (1988)
stand out as exceptions.
2
See Crpau (1990) for a survey of the debates surrounding ecological determinism in Amazonia. Gow
(1989) uses the term subsistence in a quite different sense.
3
Material gifts figure in both Santos-Granero and Killicks discussions of trading partnerships but the gift
as a theoretical construct is not discussed.
4
See Hugh-Jones (1995; 2001) on commensality and on rituals as houses and Strathern (1988) on
domestic/cross-sex idioms in public/single-sex contexts.
5
A localized precursor to this argument, referring to the Yanomami, can be found in Albert (1985).
6
See Viveiros de Castro (2001: 37). The diagram and accompanying text on this page neatly summarize the
figure-ground relation between consanguinity and affinity for both Amerindians and their ethnographers.
7
See, for example, Grotti (2007) on the Trios hierarchical relations with their encapsulated Akuriyo
servants.
8
The long history of missionary activity in the upper Orinoco region, where the Piaroa live, and its effects
on inter-group warfare would also need to be factored in here.
9
Accounts are kept of the women who enter or leave a descent group and where there is no direct
exchange, a debt remains for the woman handed over. Men also take great care to monitor what their
daughters or sisters produce (Cabalzar 2009: 143).
10
Indigenous politicians and leaders in the Pir-paran region today extend the category hee tenya to
their non-indigenous allies, the NGO personnel, anthropologists, and others who support their cause and
work on their behalf.
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Rsum
Le point de dpart de cet essai est une exprience antrieure dapplication lethnographie des socits
tukanos du nord-ouest de lAmazonie des analyses de Strathern sur le don mlansien. Il interroge
linsistance de certains auteurs nier limportance du don dans le contexte amazonien et propose deux
rponses possibles. Dune part, les auteurs en question ont tendance supposer lexistence dun type
donn dorganisation sociale dans toute lAmazonie. Or les Tukanos, qui pratiquent lchange crmoniel
de nourriture et de biens, nentrent pas dans cette rubrique. Dautre part, malgr les diffrences, ces auteurs
supposent que les socits amazoniennes pratiquent le service du gendre dans lequel, par dfinition, il ny
a pas de don. Or les Tukanos ne connaissent pas le service du gendre, tendant plutt, la rigueur, vers la
pratique du prix de la fiance. Cette exception permet de raffirmer la diversit des structures sociales en
Amazonie, qui a probablement t encore plus grande dans le pass archologique. Elle constitue aussi une
mise en garde contre les dangers dune conclusion thorique trop htive.
Stephen Hugh-Jones is Emeritus Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Department of Social
Anthropology.
University of Cambridge, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, UK.
sh116@cam.ac.uk