Demanding, Giving, Sharing, and Keeping: Panar a Ideas of Economy

By

Elizabeth Ewart
University of Oxford

Resumo
Este artigo trata das id eias Panar a sobre economia e modos de troca, atrav es de uma discuss ao sobre o que propriedade, dinheiro e partilha signicam para pessoas Panar a. Partindo da discuss ao de L evi-Strauss sobre comercio e guerra como aspectos de um unico processo social, e sugerido que as atividades econ omicas Panar a poo din dem ser entendidos como aspectos da relac a amica com a alteridade. O encontro o da gente Panar e a interac a a com dinheiro revela id eias importantes sobre valor, o entre pessoas equival encia, modalidades de troca, interdepend encia mutua e a relac a e objetos. [Brasil, povos ind genas, antropologia social]

Abstract
In this article, Panar a ideas of economy and modes of exchange are discussed by exploring what property, money, and sharing might mean to Panar a people. Building on L evi-Strausss discussion of trade and warfare as aspects of a single social process it is argued here that Panar a economic activities can be understood as aspects of their dynamic relation to alterity. The growing engagement of Panar a people in the monetary economy reveals important ideas about value, equivalence, exchange modalities, mutual interdependence, and the relationship between persons and objects. [Brazil, indigenous people, social anthropology]

[T]he mere fact that natural resources leave the reservation and trade goods and food enter does not imply the existence of markets, money equivalencies, or even barter (Fisher 2000:195).
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 3150. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN 1935-4940.
C

2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12002

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In late spring 2009, I received an e-mail from a friend working for a Brazilian nongovernmental organization. He sounded desperate: according to him, the Panar a were heading toward social disintegration and appeared to have lost all control over their spending habits.1 Money was being spent much faster than it was coming in and Panar a consumer behavior appeared to be completely out of control. Against this background, my friend was anxious to nd out what I thought it would take to place Panar a consumption habits into a framework of long-term self-sustainability. His concern arose out of an ambition that community projects among the Panar a should lead to their becoming self-sufcient and independent of nonindigenous monetary and material support. The realization that Panar a people were not pursuing these aims while engaging with the surrounding monetary economy gave rise to his questions to me. This article cannot claim to provide the answers, but rather serves as a starting point by exploring what property, money, and sharing might mean to Panar a people, and how their experience of recent history is implicated in their knowledge of these issues. The arrival of nonindigenous trade items in Amazonia and the widespread enthusiasm with which many of these items have been incorporated into Amerindian daily life could lend itself to a rather old-fashioned analysis in term of cultural change and loss of identity based on an articial opposition between tradition and modernity. However, as Gow has shown with respect to the use of western clothing among Piro people (Gow 2007), such an analysis would fail to answer an important question, namely, what do trade goods mean to the people in question? It is not my intention here to explore the ways in which concepts of acculturation express western ideas about identity and culture. Instead, and following earlier work (Fisher 2000; Gordon 2006; Hugh-Jones 1992), I consider how the take-up of western trade goods as well as money in Panar a society can be understood from within a dynamic indigenous cultural logic. The Panar a case is ethnographically interesting because of their historically recent contact with money. All adults over the age of about thirty-ve remember a time before money and before direct trade with nonindigenous people. With this basic premise in mind, this article explores aspects of Panar a consumption and acquisition strategies. This is a live issue for Panar a people since the past ten years have been characterized by unprecedented changes in their consumer practices propelled in part by a recent increased inux of money into their economy, and by the construction of a rough road through their land, which, for the rst time, provides overland access to the town of Guarant a do Norte, situated on the Cuiab aSantarem highway. In order to discuss property, exchange, and consumption among the Panar a, this work addresses aspects of Panar a material exchanges and consumer behavior based on a number of examples of Panar a economic transactions. By rst describing the particularities of nonmonetary transactions between Panar a and

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non-Panar a as compared with transactions among Panar a people themselves, I show how demanding and giving involve ideas of inequality and obligation that are not well captured by literature on barter, which would see barter trade as being reliant on equal and consenting trading partners: the very act of barter exchange creates equality out of dissimilarity (Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992:11). Instead, I suggest that a model of economic transactions based on a modication of L evi-Strausss idea of raiding and trading as aspects of a single social process (L evi-Strauss 1976) might be useful in explaining Panar a economic transactions with non-Panar a people. The introduction and now widespread use of money within the Panar a economy poses interesting challenges to Panar a ideas about money as an innite resource, as well as the search for enduring social relations with nonindigenous outsiders, and the question of how to conceptualize the monetary value of a thing such as land. In particular, I look at how Panar a people conceptualize money and grapple with the nite quality of a resource they consider to be an innite resource of white people. More specically, I argue that for the Panar a it is not money in itself that poses a problem but to what extent money becomes an ownable entity, and how monetary exchanges can be involved in establishing enduring and long-term social relations with others. However, before addressing the issue of money and its uses in this context, it is necessary to describe some aspects of a Panar a nonmonetized economy and in particular the distinction between exchanges among Panar a as compared to those that take place between Panar a people and non-Panar a others. The following experiences from eldwork set the scene.

Raid In October 1997, a group of Panar a men and women left their village to go on an armed raid of a cattle camp located within the borders of Panar a land. They left the village early in the morning, painted and adorned with bead and feather work, crowded onto the back of a trailer pulled by the community-owned tractor. They returned two days later, the trailer laden high with captured goods and accompanied by a lorry, similarly piled high. Beds, cupboards, tables, chairs, a fridge, satellite dish, television, clothes, toys, and bedding were unloaded and swiftly carried away to the new owners homes. The expedition was deemed a success and the amount of captured goods was commented on for days afterwards. Even when FUNAI regional personnel arrived in the village to discuss the events, Panar a people were adamant that none of the goods would be returned. At the time, Panar a people were in the midst of a lengthy bureaucratic process of demarcating their territory and the raid was intended as a way of speeding up the removal of the few settlers who remained on Panar a land. Simultaneously, timber

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loggers were targeting Panar a land and the community was receiving various offers from the loggers to make agreements on timber extractions. At the same time as the land claim was under way, the Panar a community was also pursuing a court case against the Brazilian government claiming compensation for loss of life and territory in the early 1970s during initial contacts with Brazilian national society. This claim was settled in 2000 and the Panar a community was awarded 2 approximately half a million US dollars in 2003. For many weeks after the raid, Panar a people retold the stories of their expedition, and they repeatedly highlighted the goods they had returned with. They also talked about the things they had had to leave behind for lack of transportation, such as several hundred head of cattle and a large tank of diesel. The expedition was considered a success, but what was highlighted in the aftermath was not so much the success at expelling the settlersthough their fear and the speed with which they left the area was noted; rather, success seemed to be related to the quantity of goods (soti) that they had secured and brought back to the village.3 Trade Many months before the above event had taken place, I had watched Panar a people trade with a visiting group of Kayabi people in the old Panar a village in the Xingu Indigenous Park. At rst, Kayabi bead necklaces and bracelets were exchanged for pieces of cloth, or for reams of glass beads; Kayabi gourds changed hands for Kayapo-style baskets woven by the Panar a. As the afternoon drew on, though, it became clear that the Panar a were running out of things to exchange. As Kayabi women laid down their necklaces and bracelets, demanding soap, for example, anxious calls were sent round the Panar a onlookerssoap, she wants soap, go and nd some soap. Or, she wants ip-ops, go on, where are some ip-ops? Woman after woman was called up and asked if she had the items demanded by the Kayabi. It became clear that the Panar a would go to great lengths to fulll their trading partners demands; the exchanges went on until the Panar a village was well and truly cleared out, as far as I and the visitors could tell. I was told later that fear of Kayabi witchcraft made it impossible for the Panar a to refuse their requests. The Historical Context Panar a people are descendants of a much larger population known in the literature as Southern Cayapo who inhabited lands in present-day Goias and Minas Gerais, far to the south and east of Panar a peoples current location. Southern Cayapo people were long held to have died out in the late 19th century, until Richard Heelas (1979) rst proposed that Panar a people, also known as Kreen

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Akorore, could be descendants of the Southern Cayapo. This hypothesis was later conrmed by Giraldin, who provides evidence to show that ancestors of the Panar a, known as southern Cayapo, lived in settled communities alongside colonists in the present-day state of Goi as up until the late 19th century (Giraldin 1997, 2000). The implication is that Panar a ancestors had a long history of engagement with nonindigenous trade goods, although there are no ethnographic data available regarding southern Cayapo trade relations and consumer habits.4 However, contemporary Panar a oral history makes no mention of this, and when Panar a people talk about the arrival of western trade goods, they identify the early 1970s and the FUNAI contact expedition as the rst sustained source of western goods, other than small quantities obtained through sporadic raids and ambushes. Manufactured goods have played a pivotal role in the emerging relationships between Panar a people and others since the early 1970s. Indeed, this engagement started with the rst approaches of the FUNAI expedition sent out to make peaceful contact with Panar a people in the early 1970s, when, as in many other contact stories, trade goods such as metal axes, knives, glass beads, and cooking pots were used as a way of signaling peaceful intentions and attracting the as-yet isolated group (Cowell and Schwartzman 1995). Over the more than 20 years that Panar a people lived in the Xingu Indigenous Park, after being moved from their land in 1975, western trade goods, as well as the goods of other indigenous groups in the Xingu, played a signicant role in Panar a daily life. Panar a people narrate that they arrived in the Xingu with nothing (simama) and there learned about canoes and hammocks, how to make dresses, and many of the other things that characterize their lives today. They moved out of the Xingu Park in 1997 to reoccupy what was left of the territory from which they had been moved in the mid-1970s. As L evi-Strauss demonstrates, trading and raiding can be understood as two sides of a single coin in Lowland South American societies, suggesting that violent conict and economic transactions be understood as two opposing yet mutually implicated aspects of a single social process (L evi-Strauss 1976). If the rst of the two anecdotes above illustrates raiding, from the point of view of the raiders, then the second is an example of trading but here told from the point of view of being (t)raided, which is how Panar a people appeared to experience the event. This was not trade in the sense of establishing value equivalences, but rather a form of trade in which demands had to be satised at almost any cost. That day, trading with the Kayabi, Panar a people were in the position of having to acquiesce to every demand of their trading partners since the unspoken threat of witchcraft was ever present. As such, although objects were exchanged, in the sense that goods were given and reciprocally received, it might be more accurate to dene the trading that went on as a form of redistribution, or a form of demand sharing, in which the visitors to the village made the demands and Panar a people responded. Although reciprocity and immediate return was involved, value equivalence seemed to be

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far less signicant than the need to meet the demands of the guests (Price 1975; Woodburn 1998). Unlike the verb to raid, English usage of the verb to trade does not account well for inequality in the relationship insofar as it accords agency to both sides while placing the material object of trade in the passive position. What I am describing here is trade, but one side demanded and refusal was not an option. In this respect, one of the apparently unspoken assumptions underlying Humphrey and HughJoness discussion of barter is that the partners involved in the transactions are equal in the sense that either side could pull out if the items transacted are not considered satisfactory: The very act of barter exchange creates equality out of dissimilarity. It does so because the bargain struck is that which satises either partner (Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992:11). This does not appear to apply to the trade taking place between Panar a people and those they suspect of negative mystical powers. Further, while L evi-Strausss idea, that both warfare and trade establish and express social relationships, is useful, his assumption that both are premised on some kind of reciprocity poses problems for the analysis of Panar a ethnographic realities, as it does to the analysis of many other Amazonian social systems (Fausto 2000:935). If the barter model does not apply well to the sorts of material transactions that went on between Panar a people and their visitors, it may be worth casting the analytical net somewhat wider. Writing about intimate economies of small-scale societies, John Price draws up a tripartite distinction between sharing, reciprocity, and redistribution. Sharing he considers to be universal and characterized by the allocation of goods and services without calculating returns within an intimate social group (Price 1975:4). Reciprocity is similar but contains an element of rationalistic egalitarianism, in other words, an idea of value equivalences, while redistribution, for Price, is a public system of unequal centralized allocation. He goes on to explain, The general ow of goods is asymmetrical and direct in sharing, symmetrical and direct in reciprocity and asymmetrical and indirect in redistribution (Price 1975:7). As Woodburn (1998:63) observes, however, it would be misleading to typify simple forms of social organization as premised on sharing in contrast to complex forms of social organization characterized by redistribution. In affective terms, sharing and redistribution may both be characterized by obligation, and a sense of coercion. In addition, the concept of demand sharing is applicable to some extent to Panar a material transactions, but it seems to fall short in the Panar a case insofar as varying modes of transaction are signicant characteristics of varying social relations that express varying degrees of alterity and of inequality. The idea and experience of inequality is present not just in exchanges of goods but also in exchanges of goods for money where, again, the idea that one might refuse to sell seems absent. Although Panar a people might complain bitterly that

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their Kayapo neighbors keep asking to buy chickens, for which they pay the going rate, they never refuse these requests, nor do they seem to consider this an option. If somebody asks to buy a chicken, a chicken will need to be sold. At most, people may try and lock their hens away when they fear somebody might come along and ask to buy one, so that it might look as though there are none available. Although they will receive something, usually money, in exchange for the hen, Panar a people do not seem to experience this as a fair trade but rather as a raid on their stock of poultry. In other words, reciprocity is underplayed while the power of the demand in demand sharing is explicitly emphasized. As Peterson notes, demand sharing as practiced among many hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists is much more than a strategy to satisfy economic needs:
Demand sharing is a complex behavior that is not predicated simply on need. Depending on the particular social context, it may incorporate one, some, or all of the following elements. It may in part be a testing behavior to establish the state of a relationship in social systems where relationships have to be constantly produced and maintained by social action and cannot be taken for granted. It may in part be assertive behavior, coercing a person into making a response. It may in part be a substantiating behavior to make people recognize the demanders rights. And, paradoxically, a demand in the context of an egalitarian society can also be a gift: it freely creates a status asymmetry, albeit of varying duration and signicance. (Peterson 1993:870)

For the Panar a, the act of directly demanding something, albeit in exchange for something else, is an act of asserting or acknowledging inequality. Denying exchange is an option of last resort, since failure to satisfy the demands of another carries with it the possibility of falling victim to that others witchcraft. Indeed, Panar a people could cite a number of cases where demands had not been met, either for things or for sex, and where the person denying the demand then fell terribly ill. Therefore, Panar a exchange practices are based more on a logic of predation (Fausto 2000) than they are on a logic of reciprocal exchange; Panar a people frequently experience themselves as being predated upon by others.5 To deny a request is to open oneself to the possibility of mystical attack. Similarly, the logic of trading is premised on the logic of raiding in the sense that the driving force is acquisition rather than reciprocity. While Panar a people quite often nd themselves subjected to the demands of their indigenous neighbors, they in turn demand things outright from others, and in particular from nonindigenous others (hipe). Like many anthropologists,6 I experienced an often unrelenting and sometimes materially as well as emotionally draining stream of demands from Panar a people. It seemed that no matter what I brought and how hard I tried to ensure that all who asked received something, there would always be somebody who would point out that she had no beads left, or

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that her ip-ops were worn out, or that the cooking pot was old and broken, and why had I not brought more beads, some new ip-ops, a new cooking pot? Such demands did not simply refer to what I had not brought, but extended forward into the future. Not long after my arrival in the village, discrete enquiries would begin as to my plans for my hammock, mosquito net, blanket, cooking pot, and other utensils on my departure. Quickly, people would lay claim to my items and projected demands forwards even further into the future, sometimes by giving me items, such as beadwork, and then listing what they expected from me, much later, on my next return: for example, cloth for dressmaking, a small pot, ip-ops, or a small tape recorder. As in many other parts of Amazonia manufactured objects have long been important to Panar a people, and the particular relationships they engage in with non-Panar a peoples are articulated in terms of the types of material objects these non-Panar a others might bring with them. When Panar a people talk of some of their early encounters with nonindigenous people, they do so in terms of the objects obtained, just as accounts of raiding trips also focus heavily on the goods thus acquired.7 For example, when Panar a people talk about the 1961 killing of Richard Mason, a young British explorer, they never omit to mention the small knife and other objects that they found on his body. They also talk at length about the machetes left by the rescue party that took away Masons body. To this day, these machetes are referred to as the hardest, most enduring, and overall best machetes ever acquired by Panar a people. Similarly, when describing the years leading up to contact with the FUNAI-led expedition in the early 1970s, the Panar a talk vividly about the objectspots, pans, mirrors, knives, and machetesthat the contact expedition hung in the forest as a way of signaling peaceful intentions. And after contact, their experience and their expectations of nonindigenous people as sources of valuable material goods was matched, since FUNAI pursued a policy of acquiescing to Panar a demands for things as a way of building a peaceful and sustained relationship. This policy of giving generously to the Panar a community petered out over the years in the Xingu park, and by the mid-1990s FUNAI was described as weak, by which Panar a people principally refer to FUNAIs failure to provide things for the community.

The Origins of Things Throughout my eldwork my offerings of beads and other goods were often explicitly compared to the huge quantities of beads, cloth, ammunition, and shing equipment brought to the Panar a by ethnographers who had come before me, most notably Kay and Richard Heelas, who had spent time with the Panar a in the early

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1970s. It was as though, no matter how much I was able to provide, it would never match what others had provided before me. This idea that valuable things come from others is to some extent pregured in Panar a mythology, as it is in the myths of other G e-speaking groups (Seeger 1993; Wilbert et al. 1978). Here it is animals, owning re, or important garden crops that are the source for Panar a people to obtain the things that allow them to live well as humans. In the case of re, this is stolen, whereas garden crops such as maize and peanuts are freely given by mouse and agouti, respectively, who according to the myths are tired of having them and want to go off to live as animals.8 As Seeger notes for the Suya, so also for the Panar a, The history of Suya society, as they construct it in their myths, is characterized by the acquisition of desirable things, taken from beings that are virtually always a mixture of humans and animals (Seeger 1993:439; my translation). In this sense, the myths of origin of valued things can also be read as myths of increasing differentiation, of a continuous process of turning similar beings into categorical others.9 Seeger argues that in the Suya myths of origin of valued objects, these objects are obtained from others, and that therefore theft from others in a contemporary context can be understood as part of a continuous logic of acquisition from others. However, when Panar a people tell myths of origin of valued objects, they are keen to stress that the owners of the things, maize and peanuts, were panar a, in other words, were humans albeit humans who had grown tired of owning these thing. In giving them away to Panar a people, they effectively went off to become animal and thereby properly different and other. It is notable in the myths that mouse and agouti, respectively, insist on Panar a people taking maize and peanuts. For example, mouse needs to jump repeatedly on the Panar a womans back, to show her the maize and tell her to take it in her basket back to her village. It is then possible to understand these origin myths as being not just about the acquisition of valued objects but also the origins of difference, thereby creating the conditions under which open demands and direct requests for things become possible. To demand something openly and directly from another is to assert a relationship of ontological difference. Panar a people openly demand things from non-Panar a (hipe) precisely because, given the mutual exclusivity of the categories of panar a and hipe, the latter are not Panar a. Similarly, Panar a people are well aware of their ontological difference to non-Panar a indigenous people, such as the Kayapo or Kayabi, and they go to great lengths to meet the demands of these others despite complaining among themselves about having to do so. In other words, Panar a people do not experience these transactions as exchanges but rather as strategies of acquisition, nding themselves either on the giving or, more desirably, the acquiring end. The avid and direct expressions of desire for the things of non-Panar a others contrasts markedly with the ways in which Panar a people express desire for things

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among themselves. Panar a people rarely, if ever, demand things explicitly from one another and generosity is considered to be an important moral principle. However, the moral importance of generosity is actively invoked in order to persuade others to give freely. As such, the concept of generosity in Panar a refers not exactly to the principle of altruism, but rather describes the quality of not desiring things (soti sy n). A person should be seen to be passing material goods on, rather than retaining and accumulating them. As such, a leader who acquires large quantities of goods from the outside will gain approval and respect insofar as he redistributes the goods so obtained. This principle of passing things on is exercised from a very young age, when toddlers squabbling over some object are encouraged to give and give again: give it (masoni) is a frequently heard cry from adults watching over young children. No sooner has the young child been persuaded to give up the object than the same adult will say, give it back (py masoni). In other words, a central feature of Panar a generosity concerns the absence of attachment between people and their objects, rather than relations among people mediated by meaningful objects. That people give others their things is as much a sign of their lack of attachment to their own things as it is an expression of close social relations. Rather than asking one another for things, Panar a people express their desire for material things to one another in the most oblique of terms, such as no beads? preferably sending a child to make requests on their behalfor by eliciting food in particular by simply looking. In this context, lets go looking is something young women say to one another in the early evening if there is not much food in their own houses. A small group, or perhaps just a young woman with one or two of her children, will casually wander round the village and by their mere presence elicit some food from another house.10 In other words, to make a direct verbal demand is to assert difference and ontological inequality, while to give freely without being explicitly asked is part of the extension of care that characterizes proper social relations among humans. Amazonian sociality has been characterized as needing to be continually produced and fabricated through the actions of kinspeople and the wider community (Overing 1989; Vilac a 2002). One signicant aspect of this aesthetic of production is the almost complete absence of direct demanding for things, which, if it does occur, even indirectly, is met with a good deal of anxiety by Panar a people who experience it as a direct attack on the successful production of sociality.11 In summary, then, Panar a people desire things and give free expression to this desire as far as non-Panar a people are concerned, from whom they demand directly and who, in the past, they raided for the same reasons. The ability to acquire quantities of goods from others is an admired quality in political leaders because it was a measure of successful raids in the past. By contrast, the expression of desire for material things is carefully managed in internal relationships, where a

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lack of attachment to objects, and therefore the ability to give freely, is considered a moral virtue. In this sense, a really virtuous person is one who can acquire from outside and distribute within the group.

Money Having established that modes of transaction, ways of demanding, and avoiding demand establish and reect ontological differences between transacting partners, I now turn to the question of money and the way in which monetary transactions are involved in Panar a acquisition strategies. One obvious effect of the increasing availability of money among the Panar a is that they are in a better position to purchase goods themselves directly from shops rather than having to rely on outsiders to be persuaded to bring them the goods desired. Interestingly, however, this has not translated into a noticeable decline in Panar a demands for things from visiting nonindigenous people. A simple explanation would be to resort to ideas of moral decline and the loss of cultural dignity, either under pressure from traders and/or missionaries, or by the sheer power of seduction of western trade goods. As Hugh-Jones has pointed out, however, such an explanation would be partial and one-sided at best (Hugh-Jones 1992). When I rst started eldwork in 1996, FUNAI, NGOs, and visiting anthropologists were the only reliable sources of western manufactured trade goods in any quantity. Panar a people were keen to stress that the amount and quality of the things being brought was in decline; they rarely missed an opportunity to reminisce about the amount and beauty of goods brought by anthropologists before me. By the late 1990s, things were starting to change and, perhaps for the rst time, Panar a people were starting to own money in signicant quantities and therefore the means of acquiring western trade goods directly. While Panar a people were aware of the monetary economy since the contacts of the mid-1970s, they barely participated actively until well into the 1990s. On the other hand, while they hardly possessed money until this time, they knew that white people had destroyed their land and were keen to cut down trees in order to get money, which in Panar a is called leaves (p arass o). By the late 1990s, an initially small amount of money was trickling into the Panar a village, partly from the sale of artifacts to traveling traders and partly in the form of salaries drawn by the schoolteacher and health monitor. At this time, though, opportunities to spend money remained relatively rare and were mainly conned to visits to the town when accompanying patients in need of hospitalization. By the end of 2003, things had changed dramatically, however, and Panar a people had access to a considerable amount of money as well as increasing access to local towns. The money came principally from a court settlement paid out in 2003, awarding the Panar a community compensation for loss of land and

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lives during the contact era in the early 1970s. This case made history in Brazil, as it was the rst in which an indigenous community successfully pursued the federal government for compensation for loss of territory during and after the contact phase. Yet, by 2008, the Panar a community money was all gone, spent on various goods as well as numerous trips to local towns. New incomes then started to come from government sources such that by 2010 virtually every Panar a household had some form of regular monetary income, in the form of a salary, a pension, or the bolsa familia, the family allowance introduced by President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva in 2003. Meanwhile, a rough road connecting the Panar a community to the town of Guarant a do Norte had been established and trips to town and shopping opportunities have become regular facets of Panar a life. Certainly, having money has affected some aspects of Panar a life such as diet, where rice, pasta, oil, our, sugar, and coffee now feature with some regularity. However, in thinking about the role that manufactured trade items play, one reaches something of an analytical crossroad. The analysis of any object or practice that enters a social system at a given moment in time raises the question of how to locate it in relation to continuity and change. In other words, is one to foreground change, or to situate novelty within a pre-existing cultural logic? Sahlinss suggestion, that the very dichotomy which would oppose structure and history is problematic, would seem to be helpful. Following Sahlins, then, I argue that money, and indeed western trade goods more generally, are best understoodas they seem to be by Panar a peopleas embedded in a pre-existing framework of demand and acquisition strategies while also, in the process, modifying and changing this frame: Every practical change is also a cultural reproduction (Sahlins 1985:144). Cesar Gordon, discussing KayapoXikrin relations to money, makes a similar point, arguing that Xikrin inationary consumerism should not be understood as a sign of cultural deterioration resulting from contact, but as emerging from the complex interrelation between general Xikrin cosmological principles and historical conditions (Gordon 2006:399). Western trade goods were avidly taken up by Panar a people and are now omnipresent in their village. The concomitant partial loss of knowledge relating to hunting skills without shotguns, as well as the heavy reliance in Panar a households on foods cooked using metal pots, means that to some extent Panar a people are dependent on these goods. In this sense, the availability of western trade goods implies the need to establish enduring channels of access.12 On the other hand, we might also consider that irrespective of the material uses to which shotguns, cooking pots, and other objects are put, Panar a people actively desire and seek out the relations of dependence that ensure a reasonably steady ow of goods into their community. Furthermore, it is not the case that Panar a people desire only those goods that are particularly useful or indispensable. A new cooking pot or shhooks may be just as much in demand as a fourth or fth pair of ip-ops,

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or indeed a spare television kept out of sight. Therefore, regardless of whether we see material objects as the basis for dependence, or whether we foreground dependence as a social relation, Panar a people are concerned with establishing and maintaining enduring social relations with nonindigenous others. Money plays a pivotal role in this economy of needs and desires. Money, in the form of the large court settlement paid to the community, as well as in the form of the regular income provided by salaries and pensions in principle, affords Panar a people the chance to develop self-sufciencyprecisely the opposite of dependency. With respect to the court settlement, this was precisely the hope of outside organizations involved in securing the ruling on behalf of the Panar a. Such a sum of money, it was hoped, would ensure that the community would be able to acquire the trade goods deemed necessary for everyday life, while no longer relying on the largesse of outsiders in securing them. Panar a people, it transpired, did not share these assumptions about the possibility or even desirability of becoming self-sufcient. After the compensation was paid in 2003, the money was deposited in a Panar a community account and Iakio, a community-based association, was established.13 The association was to be governed by a council of elder men and women and an executive committee of younger men who were to deal with the day-to-day running of the association and matters relating to the bank account. When the account was established, the Panar a collectively and with outside advice decided to invest the money, drawing only on the monthly interest to purchase things needed by the community. By 2005 these arrangements had fallen into disarray; the members of the executive committee changed with increasing frequency as Panar a people voiced dissatisfaction with them. They were regularly accused of squandering the money, not buying good things for the community, and generally not taking proper care of community needs. Expenditure had also escalated dramatically, the capital was being eaten away, and by early 2009 no money remained. Cesar Gordon (2006) discusses a similar experience among the KayapoXikrin, although the sums of money involved are much greater than in the Panar a case. Among the KayapoXikrin regular community, income from a mining company was paid into a community account managed by four leaders. These leaders came under pressure from the community, being accused of not purchasing the right things and in sufcient quantities: soon, expenditure had risen well beyond income. Gordon argues that what might look from the outside like uncontrolled expenditure can, from the Kayapo point of view, be understood as an attempt precisely to gain greater control over money and therefore over the social relations involved in monetary transactions. During a eldtrip in 2005, I mentioned the possibility that all the money would be used up unless expenditure was controlled; several Panar a men suggested to

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me that in that case they would request more money from the government, since the loss of land had been extensive. In other words, they did not consider this to have been a one-off settlement but perhaps a new avenue for demand sharing and possibly the beginning of a new, ongoing relationship with the Brazilian government. Panar a people were well aware that the money they had received from the Brazilian government was in compensation for the land they had lost in the 1970sthey referred to the payment as the lands money (kypa yo n p arass o). The idea that land was an ownable entity, in turn, was one with which they had Indigenous Park. However, it is become acquainted during their years in the Xingu not clear that they ever fully accepted that the land they had lost could have a nite price put on it. The loss of their land and their kinspeople during the contact years is experienced as an enduring loss, and the idea that it could be closed off with a single paymentthat the Brazilian government had set a monetary gure on the land they had lostdid not sit comfortably. Therefore, the idea that they would ask the government for more money suggests that Panar a people understood the government to be tied into an enduring debt relation with them. Panar a leaders who return from shopping trips with lots of goods, or who in the past were successful at bringing things to the village by means of agreements with timber loggers, were expected to distribute these goods immediately and completely. By the same token, it is expected that the Brazilian government should distribute generously and repeatedly, and it was sometimes suggested to me that I too could ask my government for money in order to purchase things for Panar a people. In other words, it appears that Panar a people imagine money to be the thing through which white people generate morally proper ways of living based on principles of generosity, in the sense of giving when asked and lack of accumulation. To the Panar a, then, what was worrisome was not exactly that their community money would be nished but rather how they could activate a social relation capable of generating more. The community money, constituting a large sum, and thus the potential to buy and distribute large amounts of goods, was used by some members of the Iakio executive committee in just this way. Indeed, this behavior was expected by Panar a people in the village. On the other hand, the fact that the money was turned into goods far away, in the town, where people could not see what was happening, also gave rise to speculation and gossip about the ungenerous and self-interested consumer behavior of those in charge of the money. These accusations led to a regular turnover in members of the executive committee. Since, in the eyes of the community, the money was visualized as the acquisition and distribution of potentially large quantities of goods, it was difcult and ultimately impossible not to use it for precisely this purpose. The favorable ruling in the Panar a court case was heralded as a victory for Panar a people and for indigenous rights in Brazil more broadly. Indigenous rights

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organizations were hopeful that Panar a people, having secured the payment themselves, rather than relying on selling off their natural resources to timber loggers, would use the community pay-out to establish an independent, self-sufcient, long-term sustainable economic base. However, the idea that you can set a price on land, pay money, and thus close off a social relationship does not sit comfortably within the Panar a moral economy. In fact, Panar a people did not consider access to the money as an avenue for self-sufciency, because this was not, and had never been, in their eyes, part of the motivation for pursuing the case in the rst place. In a similar vein, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, describing the losses suffered by Yanomami people, makes the following point: all the trade goods of white people will never be enough in exchange for all the trees, the fruits, the animals and the sh. The paper skins of their money will never be numerous enough to be able to compensate for the value of the burnt trees, the scorched earth and the polluted waters (Kopenawa and Albert 2010:373; my translation). As Gordon also notes in his discussion of money among the Kayapo, among the Panar a, ideas of collective ownership, community, and self-sufciency sat more comfortably with interested outsiders than they did with Panar a people themselves. Taken at face value, we could see the past few years in Panar a history as a depressing story of potential nancial sustainability destroyed by the desire for consumer goods. The idea of community and the self-sustainability upon which success of the Panar a economic strategy would have depended turns out to be a largely nonindigenous ideal, just as Cesar Gordon describes for the Xikrin experience with their income from the Companhia do Vale do Rio Doce mining company (Gordon 2006:200). The idea that monetary transactions are an avenue for developing enduring social relations is also evident when considering Panar a consumer behavior in the local town, Guarant a do Norte. Guarant a is one of a string of small towns along the BR-163 that sprung up in the wake of the gold rush of the late 1970s. Founded in the mid-1980s, Guarant a today is a quiet place, relying heavily on agriculture. Certainly, to the shop owners of Guarant a, the Panar a until about 2006 must have appeared exceedingly wealthy. Even now, with more limited funds, Panar a people continue to be conspicuous consumers. Since most households now have some form of regular monetary income, many if not a majority of Panar a adults also have bank accounts for which they hold bankcards. Many of these cards are kept in Guarant a in the safekeeping of one nonPanar a individual who claims to take care of Panar a nancial matters. Typically, Panar a people buy things on credit in the town, a practice that is locally widespread; the person looking after their bankcard periodically settles their account on their behalf. Similarly, when Panar a people go to Guarant a to purchase goods, they do not consider the purchase as a single, self-contained event. At the end of the purchase, a relation has been established with the vendor. In this context, Panar a

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people have no fear of indebtedness, but instead seem to take being in debt as a sign of friendship with their creditor. In some cases, young Panar a men look after the pension accounts of their parents, since older generations tend to be neither numerate nor literate. In practice, according to one elderly couple, this has meant that when they wanted to go and buy something for themselves, a new mattress, with their own money, they were told by their son that there was no money left in their account. Although the parents were angry and expressed deep disapproval of their son, who had spent their money on himself, they showed no sign of wishing to safeguard their own bankcard or in any other way to ensure that they alone might spend the money. The early part of this article was concerned with demonstrating how different modes of acquisition implicate varying ideas about identity and difference, suggesting that exchange between Panar a people and others was premised on an idea of ontological inequality or difference. The emergent insertion of Panar a people into the wider monetary economy, along with their powerful desire to establish enduring social relations with others, perceived as potential sources of goods, places Panar a people in a position of inequality vis-` a-vis traders and others with commercial interests in the town of Guarant a.

Conclusion Let us at the end return to the account of the raid with which this article began. Thus far, I have stressed the idea of social relations and the ways in which objects are transacted as expressing particular ideas about identity and difference. However, we should not forget to ask what the materiality of the objects themselves might tell us. In other words, my argument has been that Panar a avidity for things is principally about establishing enduring social relations, but it would be wrong to neglect the fact that Panar a people desire particular material things and devote a considerable amount of time to discussing the qualities and aesthetics of purchased goods. In other words, the goods in themselves do matter. The day after the Panar a returned from their expedition, laden with goods and adamant that they were returning none, the head and two other representatives of the regional FUNAI ofce ew into the village for a meeting to discuss recent events. The morning was taken up by speeches from Panar a eldersmen and two women who had accompanied the raidemphasizing their anger at white people for consuming their land, their frustration at FUNAI for not having provided more support, describing the raid, and repeating that no matter who was sent to the village to negotiate, Panar a were not returning any of the goods. In the words of one village leader, you can send IBAMA,14 the police, and the army, but we are not returning anything.

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After lunch, the meeting shifted onto another issue: timber loggers had made repeated visits to the village and had offered gifts and some money in return for wood, which conveniently had already been cut and was just going to rot if it was not sold to the loggers. A few individuals had in fact already entered into such agreements and had therefore been in a position to generously distribute comparatively large amounts of goods to the community, which in turn had brought them respect and esteem. However, at this meeting, and bearing in mind the overall view, which was that selling off timber was an undesirable strategy, the discussion turned on how to stop succumbing to the seductive approaches of the timber loggers. As the meeting progressed, one of the village leaders called up each mature man in turn and asked whether he wished to deal with loggers. They all declined, as I recorded in my eld notes at the time. A. ends by saying there were three, K., T., and himself who had done deals with the loggers, but now they would no longer do so. They would not buy rice, no oil, no sugar, no biscuits. Quietly, we will stay without these things, he says. T. delivers a long speech, saying it is ki a kr aa (Kayapo) who started them on coffee, sugar, rice, because they have all these things. As T. speaks, K. stands up, dramatically strips off his shorts and underpants, cuts them up with a knife and ties a string round his foreskin. . . . . Someone says: Flip-ops; K. cuts up his ip-ops. A visiting Kayapo man who is staying in Ks house points at Ks watch. He slices it off his wrist and stamps on it. The visiting Kayapo man picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Then, K. delivers a long speech: You will be without shorts, without ip-ops, no hammocks, no mosquito nets, no blankets. So you will sleep naked on the oor, like they did in the olden days (swankiara). You will go barefoot, cut your hair short, shave the crown. Do I grab things? Do I want things? You ask for things, cry for them, grab things when they come. You dont want to give the timber, so you will go without. I myself will go to Brasilia and tell IBAMA to come and close down the loggers. He looks up at the out-of-order TV (in the mens house). You can throw the TV in the river and also the radio. Throw away the medicines FUNAI brought. Men throw out your shorts, women throw out your dresses, your ip-ops. [Field notes 19/10/97; p. 1900] So, on the one hand we can see the Panar a avidity for the goods of others as part of a long-standing desire for relations with non-Panar a people, whereby anything made by others is by denition more beautiful and desirable than almost anything that Panar a people themselves can produce. On the other, dramatic as this mans rejection of all things hipe (non-Panar a) was, by the afternoon he was wearing a new pair of shorts and was negotiating a space on a passing plane bound

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for Guarant a in order to buy supplies. In rejecting all the goods of hipe, then, he was not making a statement about the desirability or otherwise of western commodities, but dramatically closing off one avenue for their acquisition. That other avenues would open up, and were in fact already open, was surely not lost on him or his audience. The momentary glimpse of self-sufciency, of living without all the things of white people, of living as in the olden days, was soon eclipsed. Although Panar a people might be said to depend materially on some of the trade goods they have come to appreciate, it would make little sense to interpret the rapid return to ordinary ways of living after the elders outburst as evidence for the inexorable lure of western commodities. Arguably, the reason why he and the others did not pursue the possibility of living without all the accoutrements of hipe was because this would have implied Panar a people becoming self-sufcient and relying on nobody for their material welfare. Panar a people desire material things, manufactured trade goods in particular, with avidity and in quantity, and they do not hesitate to make their desires known to non-Panar a visitors. However, at the same time, they do not invest emotional energy in their material goods, nor do they see these goods as the material objectication of social relationships. Having material goods that can be acquired and given away is useful, even essential in the maintenance of social relationships, but objects could never come to stand for, much less replace, the stuff of real lifenamely, land on which to live and kinspeople with whom to live.

Acknowledgements Research among the Panar a has been funded by the ESRC, The British Academy, and the University of Oxford. I thank all the participants of our panel at the International Congress of Americanists in 2009, Evan Killick, Peter Gow, and the anonymous JLACA reviewers for their helpful and insightful comments and advice.

Notes
was the perspective of the NGO, which has had a long-term relationship with the Panar a community. It is not a view shared by the author. 2 The court settlement and what happened to the money will be discussed later in this article. 3 Seeger mentions a similar episode among the Suya. Here, too, the quantity of goods obtained during a raid seems to be central to the success of the expedition (Seeger 1993:441). 4 Although Kupfer, writing about the Cayapo of Mato Grosso in 1870, mentions their interest in glass beads and red cloth (Kupfer 1870). 5 It is not my intention here to pursue the idiom of predation further but see, among others, Fausto (2000), Viveiros de Castro (1992, 1996), and Rival (2002:185) for contributions to the issue. For a critique of perspectivism, see Turner (2009).
1 This

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examples, see the introductions to many ethnographies on indigenous Amazonian societies (e.g., Basso 1973; Fisher 2000; Hugh-Jones 1992:43). 7 It is clear that material goods and their control have played and continue to play an important role in the colonial and postcolonial histories of indigenous people in many parts of the world. However, what interests me here is the fact that Panar a people themselves perceive material objects as central to their relationships with others; it is therefore Panar a history of material goods that is at issue in this article, rather than a global or more precisely Euro-American-style historymore Sahlins (1994) than Wolf (1997). 8 Note Viveiros de Castros observation that it is widely held in Amazonia that animals evolved out of a common condition of humanity, rather than the other way around (Viveiros de Castro 1998:472). 9 See Viveiros de Castro (2005:40). 10 See Ewart (2008) for a fuller description of the use of space in the generation of sociality among Panar a people. 11 For example, see Ewart (2008:514). 12 See Fisher (2000) for a discussion of dependence, trade, and western commodities among the KayapoXikrin. 13 Much of what follows regarding Iakio and the community money was related to me by NGO project workers as well as by Panar a individuals. I was not present when the association was founded, nor for most of the duration of the community account. 14 Brazilian environmental police.

6 For

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