Abstract
Professional and popular publications have increasingly depicted native peoples of Amazonia as “natural” conservationists or as people with an innate “conservation ethic.” A few classic examples are cited repeatedly to advance this argument with the result that these cases tend to be generalized to all indigenous peoples. This paper explores the premise that many of these systems of resource conservation come from areas of Amazonia where human survival depends on careful management of the subsistence base and not from a culturally imbedded “conservation ethic.” Where resource constraints do not pertain, as in the case of the Yuquí of lowland Bolivia, such patterns are unknown. Finally, the negative consequences of portraying all native peoples as natural conservationists is having some negative consequences in terms of current struggles to obtain indigenous land rights.
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A shorter version of this paper was delivered on November 19, 1993, at the 92nd annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. Funding for research carried out since 1982 among the Yuquí has been provided by the National Science Foundation, the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, the Charles A. Lindberg Fund, the Explorer’s Club, the Amazon Research and Training Program of the University of Florida, and the University of Central Florida Summer Research Program.
Allyn MacLean Stearman is a professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida. She has been involved with the peoples of lowland Bolivia since 1964 when she first worked in the area as a Peace Corps volunteer. Stearman received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Florida in 1976. Her research interests and publications include community life in a lowland Bolivian peasant village (San Rafael: Camba Town, University of Florida Press, 1973), patterns of migration of highlanders to the lowland regions of Bolivia (Camba and Kolla: Migration and Development in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, University Presses of Florida, 1985), and the ethnography and cultural ecology of two lowland Bolivian indigenous groups, the Sirionó (No Longer Nomads: The Sirionó Revisited, Hamilton Press, 1987) and the Yuquí (Yuquí: Forest Nomads in a Changing World, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989).
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Stearman, A.M. “Only slaves climb trees”. Human Nature 5, 339–357 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02734165
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02734165