RAIN FOREST EXCHANGES

📖 The Scoop

Xikrin Kayapo of Brazil's eastern Amazon are divided in their support of logging and gold mining on their reservations. Their outlook has been shaped by decades of life on a boom-bust frontier as well as increasing reliance on trade goods to maintain traditional subsistence activities. More isolated than other Kayapo groups, they have become dependent during the past fifteen years on extractive companies to provide not only basic tools such as canoe motors, mechanical manioc grinders, guns, and machetes but also "luxury" manufactured foods. With such goods siphoned only through the village's chief, daily life for Xikrin Kayapo has become more competitive and politicized.

Drawing on both historical sources and indigenous informants, William H. Fisher argues that decisions to cooperate with frontier industries are best understood by taking into account the power of native social systems to shape the acquisition of trade goods. Charting the history, politics, economics, and ecology of the region, he tells how subsistence practices such as hunting and gardening have been altered by sedentarization and how notions of barter or sale only loosely describe the transfers of goods that take place in the village.

In Rain Forest Exchanges, Fisher contends that efforts to encourage conservation and sustainable practices among indigenous Amazonian groups remain problematic unless, in addition to the influence of the frontier, the dynamics of each group's social and economic organization are recognized.

Genre: Nature / Ecosystems & Habitats / Forests & Rainforests (fancy, right?)