Jrai 12037

Bride-service and the
absent gift
Stephen Hugh-Jones University of Cambridge
Building on a previous experiment to apply Stratherns discussions of Melanesian gift exchange to
ethnography relating to Tukanoan societies in Northwest Amazonia, this essay asks why other
authors should repeatedly afrm that the gift has no relevance in the Amazonian context. Two
answers are proposed. Firstly, the authors concerned tend to assume that a particular type of social
formation is characteristic of Amazonia as a whole. The Tukanoans, who engage in ceremonial
exchange of food and goods, do not t this rubric. Secondly, despite their differences, these authors
assume that Amazonian societies are bride-service societies where, axiomatically, there can be no gift.
The Tukanoans are not bride-service societies and, if anything, tend towards the bride-wealth
alternative. This Tukanoan exception serves to re-emphasize the diversity of Amazonian social
formations, one that would have been even greater in the archaeological past. It also warns against
the dangers of over-hasty theoretical closure.
Melanesian comparisons
Anthropologists have long been intrigued by some striking parallels between the
mens houses, sacred ute 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 :ooI). 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 personication
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 (:ooI: ,:). This is certainly true
today, but whether it could also be said from the standpoint of a pre-conquest Ama-
zonia is another matter.
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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,
gures 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 :ooI), I have suggested that Stratherns (I,88)
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:ooo: 8) and that the anthropologists notion
of the gift has no counterpart in indigenous thought (McCallum I,8,: :,) 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 (:ooob: I:), 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-
ed, 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 I,,,: :I).
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
exemplied by the works of Strathern (I,88), Munn (I,8o), and Turner (I,,,), one that
Bride-service and the absent gift 357
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
stratied societies of archaeological Amazonia, a eld where attention to material
phenomena is necessarily paramount.
Trade and theories of exchange
The negative stance taken with respect to the existence and theoretical relevance of the
gift in Amazonia versus Melanesia has much to do with the way in which exchange
theory has developed in the two regions. Building on the works of Mauss and
Malinowski, the exchange theory of Melanesian ethnography has been predominantly
that of gift exchange, with its emphasis on material objects, economics, and interper-
sonal transactions. Here Lvi-Strausss alliance theory has played second ddle, appear-
ing principally in connection to those societies which favour direct sister exchange over
the more common pattern of indirect exchange mediated by bride-wealth transfers.
By contrast, in Lowland South America, where some form of real or classicatory
sister exchange is the pattern favoured by most, but by no means all, of the peoples of
the region, the Amazonianists exchange theory also has Maussian roots, but, following
Lvi-Strauss, this version has been largely that of marriage alliance with its global
emphasis on system, category, and classication, a version developed in tandem with a
focus on mythology and cosmology. In this scheme and until quite recently, exchange
meant, above all, the exchange of women.
In connection with these contrasting histories of exchange, it is interesting to note
that whereas, in Melanesia, the pigs, pearl-shells, and feather ornaments of marriage
payments and ceremonial exchange were rst analysed mainly as valuables or wealth
and only later as the vehicles of elaborate symbolism, Amazonian feather head-dresses,
sacred utes, painted pottery, and similar prestige items have been analysed largely
from the perspectives of symbolism, art, and material culture and only sporadically as
valuables or wealth. References to wealth crop up more in historical and archaeological
contexts than in the ethnography of contemporary peoples, where the category some-
times appears as a contentious issue surrounded by heated debate (see, e.g., McCallum
I,88; Mentore I,8,, I,88). Where the category has been used at all, it has been applied
with reference to people more than things, with the political economy of Amazonia (or
a part of it the Guianas) characterized as being one of people rather than of goods
(Rivire I,8).
Though discussions of Amazonian societies have paid much attention to the
exchange of women, they have, till recently, paid relatively little attention to exchanges
of food and goods. In the earlier, ecologically orientated anthropology of the region,
transactions involving food were often subsumed under the rubric of a subsistence
economy, a label redolent of the material and environmental poverty that was suppos-
edly an inherent feature of life in the tropical forest.
2
More recently, theoretical empha-
sis has been rightly placed on role of food transactions involving the nurturance
of children in the creation of memory and kinship (Gow I,,I), and on the moral
and ethical values associated with the everyday production, generous sharing, and
consumption of food in the creation of sociality and conviviality within the commu-
nity (Overing & Passes :oooa).
Stephen Hugh-Jones 358
In keeping with Lvi-Strausss structuralism and theory of alliance, earlier writings
on Amazonia saw exchanges of goods, from allied but not always consistent perspec-
tives, as being systemically linked with marriage exchange. Chagnon (I,o8) treats
Yanomam trade in pots, bows, arrows, and other objects as a precursor to more solid
alliances based rst on mutual feasting and then on the exchange of women, an
argument not dissimilar to Lvi-Strausss earlier, more general argument that, in
Amazonia, trade is the threat of war averted and war the outcome of trade gone
wrong (I,,: I,o). As part of a wider theory of Amerindian chiefship, Lvi-Strauss
(I,) argued that the Nambikuara chiefs extra wives came as a reward for his chiey
functions and offset his generosity with food, goods, and words. Exchanges were thus
balanced and reciprocal across the three communicative domains of economy, mar-
riage, and language that make up society. Clastres then turned this argument on its
head by claiming that the chiefs extra wives were pure and simple gifts from the
group to its leader, a gift with no reciprocity (I,,,: ,I). Because the chief got more
wives than he gave and gave more words and goods than he got, there was no reci-
procity between him and his people. In Amerindian societies predicated on reciprocal
exchanges in three isolated domains women for women, goods for goods, and words
for words the chief was effectively placed outside society and political power was
neutralized.
In more straightforward terms, and with reference to the extensive trading networks
that once integrated the indigenous peoples of the entire Guiana region, authors such
as Butt-Colson (I,,,) and Thomas (I,,:) treat exchanges of goods in terms of simple
commodity exchange or barter. Rivire (I,8: 8o-,) noted that such trade serves both to
overcome the uneven distribution of skills or resources and to sustain socio-political
relationships beyond the level of the village community, and observed that trade both
depends upon, and reinforces, the inuence of leaders and other senior men, a point
well illustrated by Overing (I,,,; I,,:) and Mansutti Rodrguez (I,8o; I,,I) in their
ethnographic work on the Piaroa. Rivire (I,8: 8I) asks to what extent Guianas trade
is the outcome of a real scarcity of goods and to what extent this scarcity is an articially
created pretext used to establish and sustain socio-political relationships. Perhaps the
question is not usefully posed in this way because, in addition to use-value, part of the
value of the goods involved in Amazonian barter trade seems to lie in the fact that they
embody the powers, histories, and other qualities of the persons from whom they
derive. This gift-like quality of goods is independent of whether they meet real or
invented needs (see also Hugh-Jones I,,:).
Some of the recent theoretical developments in Amazonian ethnography can be seen
as attempts to move beyond or to abandon and break free from an exchange theory too
closely wedded to outdated, narrow conceptions of kinship, marriage, and alliance, a
theory also linked with totalizing notions of society. In his survey of Amazonian
ethnography, Viveiros de Castro (I,,o) detects three major analytical styles that char-
acterize these developments. These he labels as the political economy of control
developed in works by Turner and Rivire; the moral economy of intimacy in the work
of Overing and her former students; and the symbolic economy of alterity of
structuralist-inspired authors including Descola, Taylor, and himself.
In what follows, I use Viveiros de Castros typology as convenient shorthand, rec-
ognizing, as he does (I,,o: I88), that his three theoretical trends represent differences of
perspective on essentially the same body of material that may be combined together in
different permutations. My concern is with how these styles deal with the issue of
exchange, not with the accuracy or otherwise of Viveiros de Castros characterizations.
Responses to Viveiros de Castros characterization, from the perspective of moral
economy, can be found in McCallum (I,,8) and Overing and Passes (:oooa). Some
more recent discussions have sought to push the debate forward by exploring friend-
ship as a kind of middle ground between consanguinity and afnity, or between
conviviality and predation (see Fausto :oI:; Killick :oo,; Santos-Granero :oo,).
3
I begin with the moral economy of intimacy because, in distancing themselves from
both Lvi-Straussian structuralism and classical kinship theory and in prioritizing
indigenous voices and points of view [over] grand structures of mind, culture or
society (Overing & Passes :ooob: :), the proponents of this style tend to see exchange
in an emically negative light. They have also been least sympathetic to the relevance of
notions of gift exchange in a Lowland context.
The moral economy of intimacy
As Overing and Passes (:ooob) make clear, the focus here is on indigenous social
philosophies that give value to the intimate, affective, convivial sociability that is
actively sought in the everyday lives of local, co-residential groupings throughout
Amazonia. This is manifest in practices of co-operative production, sharing of
food and possessions, and mutual care that express an aesthetics of community
in which values of generosity, harmony, equality, personal autonomy, trust, and
mutual respect are held to be as beautiful as they are right. This aesthetics also has a
political dimension, positively in that qualities such as greed, anger, or selshness that
constantly threaten to subvert community integrity are avoided and in that com-
munity cohesion and productivity depend upon the maintenance, by leaders and
others, of co-operation and high morale, and negatively in that Amerindians are
characterized as having an antipathy towards rules, regulations, hierarchies, and
formal structures.
Drawing inspiration from Stratherns critique of the domestic/public opposition, in
this scheme of things and in keeping with native views, kinship, the domestic, the
informal, and the social become one and the same whilst the extra-domestic and with
it (presumably) the public, the formal, and the ritual become the realm of the anti-
social, the location of afnity, alterity, danger, violence, and potentially cannibalistic
forces. To have value as pertaining to the social, these forces must be transformed,
mastered, and brought within. Here, exchange as a practice belongs to the extra-social
or asocial domain of relations with strangers and potential enemies, whilst exchange as
a principle is rejected as a reductive Western category that distorts the character and
tenor of Amazonian sociality (Overing & Passes :ooob: I:). In line with this view,
Overing states elsewhere that in Piaroa thought, the gift was not as innocent as it
presumes to be in anthropological theory, and that in both the Maussian theory of the
gift and in Lvi-Strauss theory of alliance but in contrast to indigenous understanding
it is through exchange that wars are prevented and peace achieved (I,,:: I,o-,,
emphasis added). This is a curious and partial rendering of a theoretical tradition that
has long emphasized not merely the contractual, systemic elements of gift exchange but
also its competitive, aggressive tone and its role as a vehicle for furthering political
inuence.
McCallum (I,8,; :ooI) adopts a similar line with respect to the Cashinahua, restrict-
ing the notion of exchange to external relations with strangers and opposing this
external exchange to the internal transactions involved in production and sharing. But
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 (I,8I) 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 I,8,: :8-,, :oo).
Against all this we might note that in Northwest Amazonian exchange feasts
(dabukuris), things such as manioc graters, baskets, and feather ornaments, sh, meat,
and beer do indeed stand both for relationships of exchange and for the persons
involved (see Hugh-Jones :ooI). 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 nally
Barasana refer to whole groups of people as their long-term wahana or debtors,
variously their enemies with whom they once fought, their afnes 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 I,,,: I,ff.). 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 :ooob: :) is meant to imply that
anthropology should simply and uncritically reect 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 afrm that such sociality cannot be understood without the backdrop of the
wider cosmic and intercommunity and intertribal relationships (:ooob: o). 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 :ooob:
o). 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 signicance
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 :ooob: o). 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-lawand over which other men compete
for control. The sari also brings inuential traders together and forms the linchpin of
a trading network that links the Piaroa to neighbouring groups (see Mansutti
Rodrguez I,,I: oo-,; Overing I,,,; Overing & Kaplan I,88: ,8,-).
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.
The symbolic economy of alterity
Inspired by structuralism and associated with the work of Albert, Descola, Taylor, and
Viveiros de Castro, the symbolic economy of alterity adds a second tier to the endoga-
mous communities that are the main concern of the moral economy of intimacy,
focusing instead on the dialectical interplay between these communities and the wider
politico-ritual structures that underlie supra-local relations, an interplay that is also
one between consanguinity and afnity, identity and alterity. Whereas the moral
economy of intimacy casts exterior exchanges in a negative light as destructive of
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) dened in more morally neutral and all-embracing terms. Again, whereas
the moral economy of intimacy sticks close to native views in treating afnity as
antithetical to the sociality of kin-based communities, here afnity is explored as a
central cosmological operator.
To take these points further in relation to the issue of exchange, I shall briey
summarize parts of Viveiros de Castros masterly synthesis of Amazonian Dravidian
kinship systems (Viveiros de Castro I,,,: Viveiros de Castro & Fausto I,,,). Viveiros de
Castro argues that, in these systems, local, community relations are typically organized
by the symmetrical division (diametric dualism) between consanguines and afnes
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 afnes is
intersected by a gradient (concentric dualism) between close selves and distant
others, closeness and distance being dened 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 afnes are assimilated to the category
of consanguines; thus real afnity is encompassed by consanguinity. Further out, in
the middle distance, distant consanguines are assimilated to the category of afnes or
cross-cousins, a category that includes potential afnes and similar others. At this level,
afnity encompasses consanguinity. Yet further out, potential afnity is encompassed
by virtual afnity, predation, and cannibalism, the mode of relation appropriate to
enemies or total strangers. Thus, as we move from near to far, afnity progressively
loses its specic link with marriage to become the Relation as an abstract, general
principle, a transcendental value of afnity without afnes which orders politico-
ritual relations with distant others in the widest extension of Amazonian sociality. For
Amazonians, says Viveiros de Castro , the real afne is one with whom one does not
exchange women but rather other things: deaths and rites, names and goods, souls and
heads (I,,,: I,,).
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 afnes are
necessary (though threatening) others (Overing I,8,-; I,8o) 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 (I,,,: I,,), but this important insight tends to get
lost under the conceptual framework of afnity and predation. This same historical,
political dimension, one that is analysed with great insight in Overings (I,,,) 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
(:ooob) 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 inuential 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 full their own ambitions and increase
their inuence without necessarily compromising community values, a point made
with great elegance by Munn (I,8o) in her book on Gawa. This pursuit of ambition and
inuence means that even though many, but certainly not all, Amazonian peoples may
express an antipathy to formal hierarchical structures (Overing & Passes :ooob: :), 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 (:ooo:
:o,) 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 conict 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 fromthe domestic realm, he
emphasizes that predation should not be seen as negative reciprocity or negatively
evaluated exchange in which human or animal victims are objectied 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 exemplied in his own
(I,,:) 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 predationbelongs to the world of the gift and not to the world of
work (I,,,: I8o).
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 afnity or exchange (Viveiros de Castro I,,,: I8). Themes of predation are certainly
present in Northwest Amazonian ceremonial exchanges between afnes, 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 I,,,: :,,-,, :,8). 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 (I,,,: I8,-o).
I have dealt with the details of Northwest Amazonian ceremonial exchange else-
where (Hugh-Jones I,,o; :ooI); here it is worth asking why Viveiros de Castro should
see predation as the paradigmatic form of the afnal 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 afnes 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 rst sight.
The Jivaroans extensive foreign trade is dominated by shamans and other men of
inuence. 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 afnes but as amigri or friends, afnity being the idiom for the predatory activities
of hunting, headhunting, warfare, and shamanic aggression. Through trade such men
gain inuence in their home communities, and because others fear their powers, trade
allows shamans to accumulate signicant material wealth and inuence, which they use
to obtain the services of others and also, on occasion, to obtain wives without the
customary bride-service (see Harner I,,,; and also Killick :oo,; Santos-Granero :oo,).
Piaroa trading activities and their links with political power and inuence 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 afnal 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 I,,:: I8, I8,). Such goods have a gift-like quality in that they objectify aspects
of persons. Renowned as warriors, the Jivaroans appear to stand in marked contrast to
the peaceful Piaroa, but, as Overing notes, because of the particular dangers of foreign
objects, land and people, successful trade told of the power of the warrior (I,,:: I8,).
Mansutti Rodrguez (I,,I) goes further, suggesting that an absence of physical violence
masks the fact that, on a metaphysical level, the Piaroa live in a state of chronic internal
war waged between shamans who head rival factions.
8
Types and typication
Generalizations about what is typical of Amazonia on the basis of societies of the kind
discussed above reect not only what is statistically most common (Descola :ooI) but
also the ethnographers point of reference. As Viveiros de Castro and Descola both
recognize, the societies of Central Brazil and the Northwest Amazon region do not t
this mould (Descola :ooI; Viveiros de Castro I,,o: I,o, fn. o; Viveiros de Castro &
Fausto I,,,: I,, fn. o). This point is not trivial for these generalizations are offered with
the aim of providing some kind of synthesis of our present understanding of Amazonia
as a whole, one seen either in terms of a set of topological transformations or in terms
of a common aesthetics of community. If other exceptional cases, such as the societies
of Central Brazil, fall outside Amazonia proper, the Tukanoan and Arawakan groups of
Northwest Amazonia are truly Amazonian. Gow (I,,I: :,,) has suggested that, instead
of seeking some basic structure, we should follow the clues suggested by the Amazo-
nian systemof topological transformations into the terrain of history and ask questions
such as why, for example, the peoples of Northwest Amazonia might be good at
forming elaborate inter-communal relations. Our present knowledge of the history of
this region may not allow us to explain why they are good at this, but we can certainly
ask how they do it. An answer would be that, guided by men of power and inuence,
they do it, positively, through gift exchanges of food, mundane goods, and valuables
and through the virtual gifts of dancing and display in the context of inter-community
feasting and, negatively, by trying to avoid interpersonal violence and downplaying
accusations of sorcery not always successfully. As we already know that the typical
Amazonian societies of today are not typical of the chiefdoms and regional systems of
prehistoric Amazonia (see McEwan, Barreto & Neves :ooI), the answer may also have
historical and archaeological relevance in providing clues to how such systems were
organized.
With reference to global ethnography, Helms (I,,,) draws attention to the political
and ideological signicance of long-distance trade and skilled crafting as two alterna-
tive but equivalent modes by which political elites can demonstrate the values, qualities,
and ideals associated with positions of leadership by acquiring or creating exotic,
valued goods that serve as signs and vehicles of cosmic powers. She draws a contrast
between two ideal types that she labels as acquistional polities and superordinate
centres. In the former, powerful individuals are typically those who excel in trade and
other predatory activities involving acquisition of exotic goods and trophies from a
source located in horizontal space far beyond the community. These aggressive activi-
ties allowthemto demonstrate the values, qualities, and ideals associated with positions
of leadership and reect political values that see the domination of the outside and the
other as a means to strengthen and legitimate a political centre. Polities of the latter
type form structured regional systems that seek to expand the inuence of an ordered
centre by defensive control of external powers that threaten its integrity. Here powerful
individuals are those who perform or commission skilled and highly valued crafts such
as metallurgy, weaving, sculpture, architecture, dance, song, rhetoric, and other arts
which require aesthetic, inspirational, and reective 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 afnity without afnes.
Elsewhere (Hugh-Jones I,,o) 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 afnes.
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 :oo,). 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 signi-
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 ts 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 :oo,). 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.
Bride-wealth and bride-service
A second reason why Viveiros de Castro might see predation as the paradigmatic form
of afnal exchange has to do with the fact that, like McCallum (I,8,), he takes at face
value Collier and Rosaldos distinction between bride-wealth and bride-service socie-
ties and their concomitant modalities of exchange. He writes that only bride-wealth
societies show a Maussian exchangeability between persons and things, whilst in
bride-service societies the transcontextual value of objects is absent (Viveiros de
Castro I,,,: I8,), an argument also espoused by Descola (:ooI), but now in terms of
Godeliers (I,,I) contrast between heterosubstitution and homosubstitution (roughly,
substitution/exchange of elements of different kinds vs substitution/exchange of ele-
ments of the same kind). As there are no bride-wealth societies in Amazonia, by
denition there is no substitutability between persons and objects and thus no gift
exchange either or so it would seem.
However, Maussian gift exchange is here being characterized as a direct substitution
of whole persons for whole objects. Stratherns Melanesia-based critique (I,8,; I,88) of
the commodity logic behind this straightforward reading of bride-wealth and gift
exchange, thenotionthat menexchangewomeninmarriageas if theywereobjects, would
also apply to Amazonia. This characterization of gift exchange is also out of kilter with
Viveiros de Castros important insight concerning the gift-like quality of predatory
cannibalismasasymbolicexchangewhichcirculateshumanbodypartsandmetaphysical
properties(I,,,: I8).Oncethesepartsoraspectsof peopletheirheads,bones,andteeth;
their names, souls, and songs enter the picture, then the constraint relating to whole
persons no longer applies and the material becomes amenable to a more Strathernian
reading of the gift, a point explored by Kelly (:oo,). In addition, though Viveiros de
Castros predation is intended more as an abstract principle than a concrete activity,
muchof theempirical workonthesymboliceconomyof alterityhas beenconcernedwith
the exchange of body parts of enemy others in the violent contexts of warfare, head-
hunting, andcannibalismthat are consideredtobe paradigmatic of Amazoniansymbolic
exchange. Thus far, relatively little attention has been paid to more peaceful exchanges of
food,mundanegoods,andceremonial valuablesseen,inMaussianterms,asparts,aspects,
or objectications of persons. Munns (I,8o: ,:) rephrasing of Lvi-Strausss views on
marriage exchange in terms of food and Stratherns observation that food should be
treated to the same range of objectifying operations as indicated for wealth items and
persons(I,88: :,8)seemespeciallyappositeinanAmazoniancontext,aboveall inrelation
to beer, the quintessence of convivial sociality and Amazonian civilization (see Erikson
:oo; Renard-Casevitz I,,,: ,o; Stolze Lima :oo,; Stutzman :ooo).
A further problem lies in the very contrast between bride-wealth and bride-service
societies. Collier and Rosaldo make clear that their model is an ideal-type theoretical
construct which identies a particular complex of features not all of which will occur
in the same form or combination in any particular instance (I,8I: :8o). But, as Strath-
ern has shown with respect to differences between African and Melanesian systems of
bride-wealth, the model may hide some signicant differences between systems of the
same general type. Strathern contrasts bride-wealth as part of the African role/ofce
complex with Melanesian gift transactions. In the former, persons and roles are notion-
ally detachable, positions are hierarchically related, kin groups constitute estates, and
inter-generational succession gures as the counterpart of Melanesian gift-giving in
which women emerge as the prime form of movable property (Strathern I,8,: I,,).
Conceptually, Northwest Amazonia would seem to lie somewhere between the two. On
the one hand, we nd lineage-like houses dened in relation to an estate, a naming
system that cycles the living through xed and hierarchically ranked role-like name
positions in a manner more akin to replacement and substitution than to succession
(Hugh-Jones I,,,; :ooo). On the other hand, we nd a less elaborated form of gift-
giving associated with the movement of women as property in direct exchange and a
strong Melanesian-like emphasis on gender as a coding for the division between trans-
actor and gift (see Hugh-Jones :ooI). In the Tukanoan case vis--vis Melanesia, Collier
and Rosaldos claim that any commonalities between the exclusive male ritual practices
of bride-wealth and bride-service societies should be seen as the product of distinctive
processes in radically different social formations (I,8I: :8o) smacks of special pleading
and is difcult to accept (see Hugh-Jones :ooI). More plausibly, the commonalities
between the Northwest Amazonian and Central Brazilian ute cults and their Melane-
sian counterparts would seem to suggest instead that neither the Tukanoans nor the
Xinguanos t easily into the bride-service rubric that Collier and Rosaldo (I,8I: :,,)
and their followers assume to apply throughout Amazonia.
The problem of differences within one and the same type (see African/Melanesian
bride-wealth above) also applies with respect to bride-service in Amazonia. Collier and
Rosaldos bride-service model is not intended to handle variations between societies of
the same general type, the issue at stake when seeking a comparative synthesis of
different Amazonian social systems; nor does it deal with different marriage strategies
within one and the same society. One of the dening features of house societies is their
use of a combination of different forms of marriage and inheritance as strategies to
husband and enhance their estates, a feature that dees easy typication in terms of
classical kinship theory. It was this that led Lvi-Strauss to develop his ideas on the
subject. Where strategy and exibility are of the essence, there is little to be gained in
thinking in terms of types or total systems. Although it would make no sense to call
Northwest Amazonian Tukanoans bride-wealth societies, characteristic features such
as their system of hierarchically ranked clans which own estates made up of material
and immaterial wealth, which command the labour and resources of lower-ranking
groups, and which have differential access to natural resources mean that they cannot
be described as egalitarian and make it doubtful that they could come under the rubric
of bride-service societies either. But most important of all is the fact that the
Tukanoans preferred form of marriage is a direct exchange of sisters or daughters with
immediate virilocal residence and no bride-service at all.
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
(I,8Ib) has shown for the Makuna, Tukanoan marriages can be ranked along a spec-
trum that, in general terms, reects 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 signicance.
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 I,8Ia: ::,; Chernela I,,,: Io,). 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 inuential 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 I,8Ia: Io,; Goldman I,,,: I,8, I,).
A further political dimension to these different forms of marriage emerges from
Cabalzars (:ooo; :oo,) work on the Tuyuka. Here members of the highest-ranking,
chiey 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 nal 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 I,,,: ,,; Hill :ooI: ,,).
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 inuential, 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 :ooI) 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 ute cults and
their associated mythology to the level of different theoretical languages and regional
traditions by means of an experimental cross-over, transposing the theoretical language
of the Melanesian gift to the ethnographic context of Amazonia in which this language
was rarely, if ever, used.
Part of this work also involved a consideration of Northwest Amazonian exchange
feasts. I hope that I have said enough there to convince the reader that such feasts do
indeed involve gift exchanges in which beer, sh, meat, and both mundane and luxury
goods or wealth serve as objectications of aspects of the individual and collective
persons who transact them and that exchanges of women, objects, and food and also of
performances dancing, singing, chanting, and speech-making are one of the prin-
cipal foundations of a regional system. This demonstration led me to ask why it should
be that the gift was notably absent in ethnographic writings on Amazonia, why some of
those who took inspiration from Stratherns work should none the less deny the
relevance of the works central theoretical construct in this context, why exchange
should be held to be asocial, and why predation should be seen as paradigmatic of
afnity the themes of this article.
Part of the answer lies in the fact that both the form of Northwest Amazonian
ceremonial exchanges and the features of their social organization with which they are
associated patriliny, virilocality, exogamy, hierarchy, mens cults, and so on are
atypical of the ethnographers Amazonia. Here the Tukanoan exception really does
prove the rule. It draws attention to the fact that Amazonia was, and still is, home to
considerable diversity.
Descola acknowledges this diversity but seems intent on limiting its force. Linking
Tukanoan secret mens cults with their unilateral descent and with homologies made
between bodies, body parts, or bodily substances and artefacts or natural kinds, Descola
suggests that the Tukanoans sacred instruments as embodiments of their ancestors
may constitute an intermediary gure between homosubstitution and heterosubstitu-
tion: they alone stand for something else, and they alone cannot enter the network of
reciprocity (:ooI: II,).
As a matter of fact, exchanges of sacred utes can and do occur, but they are indeed
relatively rare. By contrast, exchanges of feather ornaments, the publicly visible coun-
terparts of these instruments and equally the embodiments of ancestors, occur quite
often. Those who exchange ritual goods, typically inuential men living in communi-
ties far apart from one another, become hee tenya (ancestral afnes); this afnity
without marriage is in some ways equivalent to that established by exchanges of women
and may accompany or lead to the latter.
10
Just occasionally, when ornaments are
substituted in lieu of a sister, the potential and symbolic equivalence between persons
and things is made actual.
But to focus on sacred items and rare events would be to miss the point. In the
middle distance are more frequent ritualized exchanges of more mundane goods that
are, ideally, the specialized products of different Tukanoan groups. I have never
observed such exchanges nor have they been adequately described by others, but if the
everyday exchanges of such goods amongst the Barasana and their neighbours is
anything to go by, these, too, involve the objectication of aspects of the donors
identities in the goods they transact. As discussed above, this is also a feature of
Amerindian barter trade.
Closer to home, and as I have tried to show (Hugh-Jones :ooI), the personications
and objectications manifest in sacred utes and feather ornaments reappear in food
and drink. At exchange feasts, donors of sh are sh people who incarnate the spirits
of the sh 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 sacricial 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 I,,, and cf.
Stolze Lima :oo,; Viveiros de Castro I,,:).
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 nd 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 :ooo; Vilaa I,,:). 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 I,,,: o,; Overing &
Kaplan I,88: ,8,), 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 (I,,:: I8,). Her argument is based, in part, on the Piaroa
distinction between palou, exchange, external barter-trade, and mifona, intra-
community gifts, somefree and some to be reciprocated later. Gifts between leader and
followers fall within the latter category (see also Overing I,,,: o,, n. :). 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 inuence 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 (I,,,: :,o). Their Trio neighbours used similar
tactics to domesticate Akuriyo hunter-gatherers as their servants (Grotti :oo,). 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 gures
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 (:ooI: IIo).
But this is one particular understanding of substitution, and, even here, when we look
at the historical and archaeological evidence (see Boomert I,8,; Steverlynck :oo8), we
nd hints of something akin to bride-wealth.
Strathern writes that bride-wealth societies evince a profound symbolic shift away
from their bride-service counterparts (I,8,: I,8). 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 (I,,o) three
analytical styles? In what I have written above, I have tried to keep politics rmly 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 I,8; I,8,; Turner I,,,;
I,8). As indicated above, and as Rivire (I,8,) himself noted, the virilocal Tukanoans
do not t 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 (I,8) economy of people rather than of goods, the Tukanoan economy is
rmly one of both.
Despite my reservations concerning cannibalistic predation as paradigmatic of
afnity 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 (I,,,) suggests, and as I have tried to explore in recent work
(Hugh-Jones :oIo; 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 (:ooI); Heckenberger (:oo,); Renard-Casevitz (I,,I); and Whitehead (I,88)
stand out as exceptions.
2
See Crpau (I,,o) for a survey of the debates surrounding ecological determinism in Amazonia. Gow
(I,8,) uses the term subsistence in a quite different sense.
3
Material gifts gure in both Santos-Granero and Killicks discussions of trading partnerships but the gift
as a theoretical construct is not discussed.
4
See Hugh-Jones (I,,,; :ooI) on commensality and on rituals as houses and Strathern (I,88) 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 (I,8,).
6
See Viveiros de Castro (:ooI: ,,). The diagram and accompanying text on this page neatly summarize the
gure-ground relation between consanguinity and afnity for both Amerindians and their ethnographers.
7
See, for example, Grotti (:oo,) 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 :oo,: I,).
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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Service du gendre et absence de don
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 dnition, 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 ance. Cette exception permet de rafrmer 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 CB: ,RF, UK.
sh::o@cam.ac.uk

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