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Indigenous Shifting Cultivation and the New Amazonia: A Piaroa Example of Economic Articulation

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Abstract

This article argues against the idea that indigenous cultural change and knowledge loss are inevitably bonded to one another, with particular reference to agro-productive transformations. This view has not only ignored the potential of these productive systems—well documented in recent decades—but has often threatened them by promoting development policies based on mistaken premises. It is suggested here that some indigenous peoples’ productive responses to market integration may in fact offer alternatives to the paradoxes of development in seemingly fragile tropical environments. This article reports, in particular, on the strategies developed by the Piaroa, from southern Venezuela. Contemporary large and permanent Piaroa communities, which resulted from their involvement in aspects of national society, have been able to sustain the forests on which they depend while satisfying their food and market necessities. This has been possible due to a series of market strategies based on their agroforestal tradition, which have emphasised the commercialization of secondary forest products. The article proposes that these strategies have been underestimated due to the market conditions in which Piaroa farmers are immersed, and from which they have learnt the very principles of “capitalism.” Oil dependent and saturated with corruption, the Venezuelan market hampers their full economic integration, contributing to the idea that their agroforestry system can only produce at subsistence levels.

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Notes

  1. William Balée (1989) estimated in the 1980s that at least 14% of Brazil’s forests were anthropogenic, and pointed out that these were precisely the forests that Native Amazonians occupy at present. These forests, more interestingly, did not show reduction of natural biodiversity as a result of human intervention. Brown and Lugo (1990:40) re-estimated later that about 40% of the tropical forests in South America were anthropogenic, and most of the remaining had had some modification in the past. Denevan has gone further, asserting that “there are no virgin tropical forests [in America], nor were there in 1492.” (1992:375).

  2. Information for ground-truthing was mainly collected between 1999 and 2000, and included folk classifications of vegetal composition, landscape categories, plot-histories, and family histories of samples from all the productive units in San Pedro de Cataniapo (about 22 households divided into four –labour sharing– factions) and a sample of 20 households (out of 46), belonging to different factions, from Gavilán and its surroundings (Merey, Sardi, la Primavera and Fundo Pérez-Pérez). The data included here also comes from censuses of the two communities (2000); observations and participation in several hunting and foraging expeditions; and cartographic reconstruction of the territory with community leaders (see Freire 2003). I also recorded information of products sold and bought in the market (prices, units, etc) in the upper Cataniapo (1999–2000) and in Betaña de Topocho (1997). Most data, however, come from observations made through participant observation and involvement in many aspects of community life in these and other communities.

  3. Although for practical reasons Piaroa people and family might be presented as rather monolithic categories in this article, age, gender, and other demographic categories are highly variable in contemporary communities. These patterns, which no doubt influence their market and agroforestal strategies, are analysed elsewhere (Freire 2004).

  4. This, of course, does not take into account very old fallows, their tabotihamina resaba, which might still be in use but are difficult to assess with satellite and aerial imagery. The delimitation of these forested areas requires a detailed and systematic examination of floristic composition, such as that carried out by Zent (1992, 1995) in other parts of Piaroa land, which has not been within the scope of my research in Cataniapo so far.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Peter Rivière, Stanford Zent, Stephen Nugent, Kay Tarble, Omar Tremont, Laura Martinez, Josep Gari, and Elisabeth Ssenjovu for aid and advice generously given during the realisation of this article or the thesis on which it is based (Freire 2002). The satellite images used in this article were generously provided by the Venezuelan Ministry of Environment, and the research was sponsored by the Fondo Nacional para el Avance de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (Venezuela), the Overseas Research Scheme (UK), and an Oxford University Overseas Bursary (UK).

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    Germán N. Freire

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Freire, G.N. Indigenous Shifting Cultivation and the New Amazonia: A Piaroa Example of Economic Articulation. Hum Ecol 35, 681–696 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-007-9120-y

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