MULTIPLE SUBJECTIVITIES, GLOBALIZATION AND

HISTORY IN INDIGENOUS AMAZONIA

In this essay I present information aimed at correcting common misconceptions
about gender in indigenous Amazonia and I propose an alternative conception that takes
into account data overlooked in previous writing on this topic. The misconceptions I aim
to correct are first, that gender roles in Amazonia are so restrictive that neither men nor
women have any choice in how they construct their subject positions, and second, that
any variation encountered is a result of globalization. On the contrary, I argue that
gendered subjects in indigenous Amazonia have multiple discourses to choose from in
constructing their social personas, and that this multiplicity of discourses and subject
postions is not a recent product of globalization but rather a longstanding feature of
Amazonian sociality.
To challenge our current conceptions of gender in Amazonia, I employ Henrietta
Moores (1994) conception of multiple subjectivities, a very useful framework for
understanding variant social and self-constructions of femininity and masculinity among
indigenous Amazonians. Cecilia McCallum, in her recent critique of Amazonian gender
studies (McCallum 2001), attempted to apply Moores analytical framework to that field.
However, despite conducting a thorough critique of previous scholarship on Amazonian
gender, McCallum (2001:164) argues that the binarism of indigenous Amazonian thought
makes Moores ideas hard to apply, stating that among the Cashinahua only two
hegemonic gendered subject positions [are] considered open proper male and proper
female. By presenting case studies of womens lives and of male discourses on ideal
female behavior among the Marubo of western Brazil I argue that, in fact, multiple
discourses and subject positions are available to indigenous Amazonians, male and
female. I then extend the analysis to other indigenous Amazonians. Finally, I address the
ways in which these multiple discourses are related to processes of globalization. Bruce
Knauft (1997) has argued that, in Amazonia, the association of masculinity with
acquisition of trade goods adds new discourses from which men construct social roles,
generating reinforced masculine solidarity with the result that discourses of femininity
are reduced to a single, male-produced hegemonic discourse. By presenting data from
ethnohistorical sources and Marubo oral histories, I argue that, on the contrary, these
processes have great time-depth in Amazonia and are not results of globalization.
Theoretical Background
The framework used in this paper to reinterpret Amazonian gender identity and
roles is Henrietta Moores conception of multiple subjectivity. Moore (1994:54) critiques
the predominant anthropological models of the individual and the person, stating that
anthropology habitually deploys a notion of the individual almost completely untouched
by recent feminist and post-structuralist critiques of the humanist subject. Specifically,
she argues (Moore 1994:3335) that anthropological conceptions of the individual
generate an excessively unitary model of individuality and personhood, the autonomous
and unitary post-Enlightenment subject. Moore advocates the introduction into

anthropology of the post-structuralist subject, which may be differentiated not only

externallywith respect to other human beingsbut also internally:
The basic premise of post-structuralist thinking on the subject is that
discourses and discursive practices provide subject positions, and that
individuals take up a variety of subject positions within different
discourses. Individuals are multiply constituted subjects, and they can,
and do, take up multiple and contradictory positionings within a range of
discourses and social practices. Some of these subject positions will be
contradictory and will conflict with one another. Thus, the subject in poststructuralist thinking is composed of, or exists as, a set of multiple and
contradictory positionings and subjectivities.
(Moore 1994:55)
Moore situates her use of the post-structuralist concept of subject within an effort
to develop a theory of gender identity acquisition. She argues (1994:55) that the notion
of the subject as singular, fixed, and coherent does not provide an adequate framework
for the development of such a theory. The notion of the multiply constituted subject
provides us with a better basis for theorizing gender identity construction. It sets up an
image of individuals who are exposed to multiple discourses on gender, and who
construct identities through the negotiation of the contradictions between available
positions. Such an individual may arrive at an integrated subject position based on a
single discourse, but more often will be the site of mutually contradictory subject
positions (Moore 1994:55), which may be expressed and performed in different social
situations. The individual is the site of ongoing internal negotiation and thus, potentially,
of changing identity. This view of an individual with changeable and changing identity is
similar but not identical to that of shifting identity (Bhavnani and Haraway 1994). It is
set in opposition to the notion of passive identity acquired through socializaton (Moore
1994:53) and to studies in which sex and gender roles in non-Western cultures are seen as
reflecting acquisition of unitary cultural behavioral models. McCallum (2001:159163),
in applying new developments in gender theory to the Amazonian context, sees Siskind
(1973), Murphy and Murphy (1974) and Gregor (1985) as the chief exemplars of the old
approach to gender in Amazonia.
Moore (1994:56) argues that anthropology should move away from a simplistic
model of a single gender system into which individuals must be socialized towards a
more complex understanding of the way in which individuals come to take up gendered
subject positions through engagement with multiple discourses on gender. Although the
central contribution of post-structuralist conceptions of the subject, according to Moore,
is the possibility of understanding the individual as the site of contradiction and internal
difference, she does not reject the notion of locating multiplicity and contradiction
between the individual and the ideological/social (1994:56). Rather, Moore argues
(1994:56) that what is necessary is that both levels or moments of difference should be
analysed simultaneously. Multiplicity both within and between individuals must be
acknowledged: Anthropologists have only recently begun to discuss and to document
the existence of multiple models, and to look at the variation which exists within cultures
as well as between them (Moore 1994:34).

Moore calls on us not only to recognize intra-cultural multiplicity of discourses on

gender, but also the relations of power among multiple discourses, in which the different
discourses on gender are hierarchically ordered and various sub-dominant discourses
develop in opposition to dominant ones (1994:59). She argues that we must
conceptualize and analyse the overdetermined relationships between dominant and subdominant discourses on gender, the body, sexuality and sexual difference (1994:15).
And further, we should link what we might call dominant cultural models of gender to
the specific experiences and situations of particular groups or individuals within that
social context (1994:15).
In this essay, I make a preliminary effort, with very limited data, to apply Moores
ideas in the Amazonian context. I am not the first to make this effort. McCallum (2001)
has pioneered the incorporation of recent developments in gender theory to the
Amazonian context. The foremost influence in McCallums work is Marilyn Stratherns
The Gender of the Gift (1988), which she describes as like manna from heaven
(McCallum 2001:3). Drawing on Stratherns insights, McCallum critiques studies of
gender in Amazonia that uncritically accept men and women as units of analysis and
reduce the investigation of gender relations to the relationship between these
collectivities. McCallum argues that men and women cannot be simply accepted as
collectivities concerned with political control (McCallum 2001:6) and argues for a move
away from the relations between fixed terms (McCallum 2001:7), citing Morris (1995)
in siding with the growing consensus in the academy that gender cannot be portrayed as
a simple structure of fixed relations (McCallum 2001:157). She thus sets up the
argument that relations of gender and power in Amazonia are not merely about men
dominating women: It did not seem correct to posit universal male dominance in all
lowland South American societies (McCallum 2001:3).
To back up her arguments against the universality of male domination in
Amazonia, and against the conceptual framework that surrounds the belief in Amazonian
male domination, McCallum presents data from her fieldwork among the Cashinahua:
Neither men nor women consider that men dominate women in Cashinahua
communities (2001:3). However, although she enthusiastically incorporates Stratherns
contributions on gender theory in anthropology, she is less sanguine about the possibility
of applying other major recent theories of gender in the Amazonian context: I address
directly the issues raised by 1970s feminist anthropology, its development in the 1980s,
and the later, postmodernist, gender studies. And so I am able to throw into relief
some questionable aspects of performative gender theory and related postmodern
approaches to gender by demonstrating points of incompatibility with Amazonian
ethnography (McCallum 2001:4). Under the rubric of postmodern approaches to
gender, McCallum includes Butler (1990, 1993), Ginsburg and Tsing (1991), Bhavanani
and Phoenix (1994), and Moore (1994) (McCallum 2001:163164).
How do these ideas speak to gender and sociality in Amazonia and sit
with the Cashinahua ethnography? An initial answer must admit that there
are a number of problems in adapting them to this task, deriving from the
heavy emphasis on the notion of discourse, the insistence on its
embeddedness in situations of institiutionalized inequality, and the equally
problematic weight given to psycho-social identity. In the first place, in

the Cashinahua case, it is difficult to discern competing discourses about

possible human masculinities and feminities with which people may
identify themselves In practice there were only two hegemonic
gendered subject positions considered open to most of the young
Cashinahua I knewproper male (xanen ibu) and proper female (ainbu
kuin). Adolescents are simply not presented with any real choices. One
is tempted to say that any search for multiplicity despite indigenous
insitence on duality would run the danger of doing violence to the
ethnography by ignoring both those discourses that indigenous
Amazonians do develop, as well as the rich Amazonianist literature on
dualism that they have inspired.
(McCallum 2001:164)
McCallums rejection of the notions of gender identity and of multiple
subjectivity in Amazonia leads her to disagree with Bruce Knaufts arguments
concerning masculinity and modernity (McCallum 2001:158, 162, 167, 182183).
Knaufts central argument is that the encounter with modernity has caused changes in
indigenous Amazonian masculinity (Knauft 1997). The customary construction of
masculine self-worth, according to Knauft, is based on war and hunting, political success
through oratory and alliances, knowledge acquired through spiritual experience, magic
and ritual, and domestic influence gained through polygyny and affinity (Knauft
1997:240). The encounter with modernity, he says, causes a shift to a contemporary
construction of male self-worth based on monetary success, political success through the
amassing of goods and money, knowledge acquired through wage-earning and school,
and a domestic influence strictly limited to the nuclear family (Knauft 1997:240). The
loss of control over the means of obtaining prestige leads to insecurity, which itself leads
to a new emphasis on sexual control of women (Knauft 1997:246), reflected in increased
domestic strife and an undercutting of kinship institutions, including male collective
institutions (Knauft 1997:237238). He explicitly cites Moore to argue that the
encounter with modernity is leading men to adopt an alternative gender discourse to the
one previously dominant (Knauft 1997:238). McCallum argues that Knaufts attribution
of alternative gender identities to the encounter with the world system makes indigenous
people into victims rather than agents, which she calls a colonialist psychoanalytic
theory (McCallum 2001:167). The argument I make here follows McCallums
argument, citing Gow (1991), that change comes also from internal community processes
rather than only being forced from outside. I will not pause to consider the contradiction
between her critique of Moore and her critique of Knauft.
Dominant and Subdominant Discourses on Femininity
In contrast to McCallums perception of Cashinahua society as one in which
only two hegemonic gendered subject positions were considered open (2001:164),
during my fieldwork among the closely related Marubo1, I found that there were multiple
conflicting discourses on gender. This multiplicity closely accords with the conception
of the subject used by Moore (1994:58) in which individuals become engendered and
acquire a gender identity in the context of several co-existent discourses on gender, which
may contradict and conflict with each other. To be sure, as Moore indeed notes, there is

a hierarchical ordering of discourses on gender, such that the discourse produced by

prominent males concerning the proper behavior of women creates a dominant model,
while other subject positions are linked to strategies of resistance. However, women who
follow such strategies are not creating merely idiosyncratic schemes of social behavior,
but rather are selecting positions from various social discourses on gender, discourses in
which both men and women participate.
To show that Marubo women are not restricted to a single proper female subject
position and that the observable variety in womens social and sexual behavior is
grounded in multiple social discourses on proper gendered relations, I will present data
on masculine discourse concerning proper female behavior as well as on female behavior
itself. A review of male discourse on proper femaleness shows that there is indeed a
dominant discourse, which asserts that women should restrict themselves to serving
mens social and political needs, but there are also alternate discourses asserting that
women should have a substantial degree of autonomy. Masculine discourse on
femininity thus falls along a spectrum between what I call the poles of control and of
autonomy. Census data and ethnographic observations suggest that, while many women
adhere to the behavioral standards set by the dominant discourse, other women exercise a
level of sexual and social autonomy that relates to subdominant discourses on gendered
social relations.
The dominant discourse, what I call the pole of control in the spectrum of male
discourses on femininity, asserts that male control over female sexuality is right and
proper. A major expression of this discourse is in references to women as being
possessed by men. For example, I had a conversation with K., the second-in-status of a
shovo2 on the Itu River, in which he told me that, when receiving a foreign visitor to his
village, he had granted the latter sexual access to his thirteen-year old daughter. When I
asked him why, he simply replied, she is mine, so why shouldnt I give her to whom I
please? Likewise, W., a prominent shovo-owner on the Curu River, asked another
elder for the latters two young daughters in marriage. One of them refused to go with
W. and remained in her kins shovo. However, W. was still heard to say that she could
not marry anyone else because, according to my informant, he says she is his.
The dominant discourse on gendered relations found further expression in
February 1998, when the elders of the Itu River held a meeting to discuss the problem
of unmarried women. At this meeting, elders made an effort to publicly assert the
necessity of adhering to the standards set in the dominant discourse on gender and to set
limits on both male and female sexual activity. To understand the significance of this
meeting, it is necessary to understand the way women had been evading male control in a
shovo on the Itu River.
In the shovo of the aforementioned K., on the Itu River, the prominent men
openly advocated male control over female sexuality. This shovo pursued a social
strategy for demographic expansion that required conformity to a scheme of arranged
marriages based on relative clan membership. Deviation from the scheme would require
the elders to rely on chance in acquiring marriage partners for the younger men and
women of the shovo, and this the elders wanted to avoid, because it would threaten the
stability of their demographic growth plans. The ethic of male control here extended
beyond the realm of marriage and justified also the placement of women into forced
extramarital relationships, as the example of K.s daughter illustrates. It was thus a

pervasive ethos permeating gender relations in that shovo. However, women were far
from passive victims of this ethos; on the contrary, active resistance was common.
The system of male control at the shovo of K. was dealt a blow when a prominent
male elder of the shovo died, leaving behind three widows. This occurred before my
arrival in the field, but I observed its effects in the census data: all three widows left the
shovo with their children. One of these moved in with a nearby daughter and son-in-law,
taking along her two daughters and seven grandchildren. Another went to live with her
brother, taking along her five children and three grandchildren. The third went to live
also with her brothers, daughter, and son-in-law, taking along her five children and two
grandchildren. Demographically, these events dealt a severe blow to the shovo of K.,
resulting in the loss of twenty-seven people; and as bad as the loss of the people
themselves was the loss of the reproductive potential they represented. In an interview
with me, K. expressed intense distress at the loss of so many coresidents.
The loss of twenty-seven people at the shovo of K. was followed by two more
losses of marriageable young women. A young man from the Curu River visited the
Itu, looking for a wife, and eloped with a girl from the shovo of K. Together with his
mothers brothers, K. demanded her return, but to no avail since the young mans father
was a prominent elder with a streak of independence. Then, K. and his kin decided to
marry off a girl of thirteen to a prominent elder in a nearby village, but the girl took the
opportunity of a feast to slip away with her kin to the Curu River. Again, K. and his
kin demanded her return but to no avail. In this context, the members of K.s shovo were
experiencing female residential and sexual autonomy as a serious crisis.
The crisis brought on by female autonomy burst into the public sphere when it
was reported that a missionary had been engaging in sexual relations with women, both
married and unmarried, in exchange for gifts of goods. On February 16 1998, I went to
visit the son of the headman at Aldeia Maronal3 and he told me that the wife of a
missionary at Aldeia Vida Nova on the Itu River had caught her husband in sexual
relations with a Marubo woman in the mission pharmacy. The missionarys wife had,
according to my informant, reported her husband to mission authorities and his removal
had been ordered. Another informant later told me the missionary conducted a tearful
public confession and apology. The event created a sensation of crisis on the Itu River,
because the missionary presence is controversial and divisive for many reasons, and
because it came at the time when womens sexual behavior was already occupying the
attention of the Itu elders. The headmans son told me that the Itu elders were going to
have a meeting to discuss the issue of single women. He said that when women remain
unmarried for too long it creates complications in the community. Neither men nor
women should remain single for long, he said. Women should marry at fifteen, men by
the age of eighteen. He said that if they do not get married on their own, the leaders
should marry them off, assigning wives to husbands. That is what our ancestors did and
that it is their law, he concluded, using the Portuguese word lei to render the latter
concept.
The point of view expressed by the son of the headman of Aldeia Maronal, by K.,
and by the other elders of the Itu River, represents the dominant Marubo discourse on
gender and sexuality. This discourse emphasizes that male elders should have the
authority to control female sexuality, and, to a lesser extent, young male sexuality as

well. Men and women alike should conform to the social schemes valued by their elders,
which the Maronal headmans son referred to as ancestral law.
Not all men adhered to the notion that female sexuality should be controlled by
men. A small but self-confident minority argued that women should have a substantial
degree of autonomy in their sexual lives and marital choices. One of my main
informants, a man I will refer to as J., represents the pole of autonomy in the spectrum
of Marubo discourse on female sexuality. I discussed with J. the issue of a young girl
who was being forced against her will into a marriage with the brothers son of the
aforementioned W. in a nearby shovo. He told me that the strategy employed by W. was
wrong. These people just ask for the woman in marriage without having been with her
first. This doesnt work. You have to be with the woman first, then you ask her kin to
marry her. J. went on to say that if his daughter wants to get married, and the man
comes to ask for her in marriage, then he will let her go. But if she does not want to go,
he will not force her. Thus, while W. believed that women should be assigned marriage
partners by male elders, J. believed that marriage should be settled largely as a fait
accompli prior to formal consultations among male elders. His rationale for this was
functional, not moral: he asserted that marriages based on a strong mutual attraction, in
which the woman was a willing and active participant, worked better than marriages in
which the woman was assigned to a man with whom she has no prior liaison.
The beliefs of J. concerning the proper path to marriage were influenced by his
father, whom I will call T., a prominent leader who died in 1996. While he was alive, J.
told me, women loved T. He had at least five formal wives and a number of informal
liaisons. He paid a great deal of attention to making women happy. The example J. cited
was of meat at meals: T. would pay attention to whether or not the women, who along
with the children eat separately from the men, had enough meat left. If he noticed that
their meat had run out while the men still had some, he would get up and take them a
choice cut. This example shows that J. attributed to his father a very friendly attitude
towards women, and a conscious concern with their happiness and wellbeing.
J. shared and openly expressed the attitude of his father towards women. For
example, J. had been married polygynously to two sisters for twenty-five years, and the
trio were still very fond of one another. At no time had J. considered seeking out a
younger wife. In contrast, according to J., W. had a habit of seeking out very young girls
in marriage as soon as he felt that his current wife was too old. J. criticized W. for this,
again saying that this strategy doesnt work well. Indeed, W. had suffered marital
difficulties because his elder wives became upset when he sought out new, younger ones.
Because of this, although he had three living wives, only the youngest one lived with
him; the elder two kept residential, economic, and sexual independence. In contrast, as
previously stated, J. had a stable, successful plural marriage a quarter-century old.
The belief system held by J. was shared to some extent by others in his village. J.
mentioned at least one other man who had refused his daughter to a man who simply
asked for her, although according to J. the excuse was that she was still too young.
Nevertheless, this is evidence that the beliefs concerning female sexual autonomy are not
a mere idiosyncracy held by J. While the latter may be the most eloquent and open
advocate of this position, others, including his father and one of his nephews, held some
of the same opinions. And by openly expressing his opinions, J. created a subdominant
discourse on gender relations that contrasted with the dominant discourse.

There are thus multiple competing discourses on gendered social relations and
sexuality among the Marubo. The dominant discourse can be related to Moores idea that
fantasies of power are fantasies of identity (1994:63), since it portrays an ideal in
which a major aspect of male identity is the exercise of power over female sexuality. The
subdominant discourse generates a different imagery in which men and women are
coparticipants in the production of social satisfaction, and in which successful marriages
emerge when men pay attention to womens desires and keep women happy. The subdominant discourses develop in opposition to dominant ones (Moore 1994:59), as J.s
ideas emerge when he reacts critically to W.s pursuit of the ideals embedded in the
dominant discourse.
It is important to keep in mind how the personal experience of gender and gender
relations is bound up with power and political relations on a number of different levels
(Moore 1994:63). Successful marriages are essential to the Marubo pursuit of status and
power (Ruedas 2001). A mans status and power derive primarily from the size and
quality of his immediate following, which must be produced through reproduction and
the addition of coresidents (cf. Turner 1979a, Melatti 1983). A wife that bears many
children and cooks well is the fundamental building block upon which traditional
political strategy is based (cf. Mentore 1987). Both J. and W. were very concerned with
status, power, and influence. They simply had different ideas about how to produce a
successful marriage. Whereas W. thought it was a matter of female submission to the
elders dictates, J. thought it was a matter of male attention to female needs. However,
by no means did J. advocate total sexual liberation for women. On the contrary, his goal,
like W.s, was to produce traditional women who bore children, cooked, made jewelry,
and supported mens traditional political activities (such as the organization of large
feasts). Nevertheless, the subdominant discourse represented by J.s opinions afforded
women a much greater degree of autonomy and coparticipation in the construction of
sociality.
Compliant and Resistant Subject Positions
Just as masculine discourses on female sexuality ranged from advocating control
to defending autonomy, womens actual comportment fell along a similar spectrum.
There was no lack of women who remained in stable marriages for decades, all the time
bearing children and supporting their husbands politico-economic strategies. These
women derived status and satisfaction from their investment (Moore 1994:6366) in
the female subject position related to the dominant discourse on femininity and its
associated practices. There were several women at the village I lived in who had gone
along with arranged marriages and remained in them years later, showing a strong
commitment to fulfilling the expectations of their husbands and kin. And there were
women, in the shovo of K. for example, who supported the notion that male elders should
firmly control the sexuality and marital choices of women, especially younger women.
However, as in the realm of male discourse, in the realm of female social behavior there
was a minority subdominant current.
If we look only at the economic roles of women, we might think that the
subdominant discourse has little impact on actual womens lives. There was only one
woman at Aldeia Maronal (then a village of 235 people) who did not follow a strictly

traditional economic role. It is not coincidental that this was J.s daughter, Amlia, the
only Marubo woman during my fieldwork that obtained employment and drew a steady
salary. J. had been a trailblazer for formal education on the Curu River for many years.
In the 1980s he invited a non-indigenous man to tutor his children in Portuguese and
mathematics in return for food, coffee, and tobacco. When this teacher left, J. went on
foot to Cruzeiro do Sul in the state of Acre, obtaining a spot in a Catholic nuns school
for Amlia, his oldest child. Upon his return, he spoke to his brother Alfredo, the
headman of his village. Alfredo had a daughter of the same age as Amlia, and J.
suggested that they should send their daughters to school together so that they could both
receive an education and avoid the loneliness of a monolingual indigenous person in a
city. However, according to J., Alfredo replied that women should not receive a
Brazilian education. He refused to send his daughter to the city. Undeterred, J. sent
Amlia to the boarding school anyway.
According to Amlia, many people in the village were scandalized by Joss
action. They said that formal education would destroy the adherence of women to
Marubo conceptions of proper behavior. J. told me, however, that he did not care: he
believed children should receive as much education as they wanted.
Amlias schooling continued until she was fully bilingual and literate. She
eventually advanced far enough in the schooling system that she was hired by the
municipality of Atalaia do Norte as schoolteacher for Aldeia Maronal. While I was in the
field, she drew a salary worth approximately 120 U.S. dollars per month. She spent
much of her day teaching and grading. She had also received some training as a village
health assistant and spent much time taking blood, making slides, and looking for
evidence of malaria under the microscope. Only on weekends did she spend much time
working in agriculture, cooking, or in womens crafts such as beading and ceramics.
In contrast to Amlia, all the other women at Aldeia Maronal had a traditional
economic role, focused on harvesting from the swidden, gathering water and firewood,
cooking, childcare, and beading, and, less frequently, spinning, weaving, hammockmaking, or ceramics. This being the case, we might assume that the subdominant male
discourse on female behavior had little impact on womens behavior. Only one woman
had been able to take advantage of her fathers beliefs to develop a subject position
outside the bounds of the proper woman position advocated in the dominant discourse.
However, a look at womens sexual and marital behavior makes it clear that some women
did, in fact, behave with an autonomy quite unlike the propriety envisioned in the
dominant discourse.
The widows of K.s mothers brother, mentioned above, did more than simply
move away from their affines to return to their kin. By leaving the home of their affines
they had already contradicted the discourse on female behavior prevalent at K.s shovo.
But some of them went further. I noted earlier that one of these women went to live with
her brother, taking along five children and three grandchildren. Her son married shortly
thereafter, then built an independent shovo. In this new shovo, the widow was the oldest
person and the one with the highest de facto status. There were no older men and she
was the mother of the nominal shovo-owner, thus acquiring a degree of authority and
autonomy that would have been impossible in the tightly controlled environment of K.s
shovo. This womans sister, M., took similar measures: when I encountered her, her sonin-law had formed his own shovo, but most of the population of this shovo consisted of

M.s children and grandchildren. She was, like her sister, the oldest person in the shovo
and, as the shovo-owners mother-in-law, uniquely respected. She, too, had managed,
through a series of independent residential decisions, to find a space where she had much
more autonomy and authority than in the shovo that she and her sisters had left.
Residential arrangements in which older Marubo women leave their affinal homes
to form an agglutination of kin are common enough to be a recognizable pattern in the
census data. The Marubo have three types of emically recognized village composition
patterns: virilocal, uxorilocal, and avunculocal (Ruedas 2001:130). However, some
shovo, and some substantial portions of other shovo, cannot be explained in terms of
these categories. By comparing these emically unexplained shovo, I was able to discern
the common pattern (Ruedas 2001:170). An older woman, either a widow or a divorce,
chooses to leave her place of residence to join one of her kin. This new residence
becomes a focal point where the womans kin group re-forms as others choose to evade
unsatisfactory residential arrangements to rejoin their mother or siblings. To facilitate
recognition and discussion of this type of village composition, I named it anicular (after
the Latin word aniculus, old woman). It is important to recognize that anicular residence,
emically unrecognized and hidden in the census data, represents a conscious and
widespread Marubo womens strategy for evading male control and for forming instead
households in which they have high status and ample autonomy.
The exercise of autonomy in contradiction to the dominant discourse on feminine
propriety can also be found among young Marubo women. At Aldeia Maronal, for
example, nearly a quarter of all mothers (13 out of 54) were unmarried in early 1998.
While some of these had children that resulted from brief liaisons, and had not found a
permanent husband, others had actively resisted arranged marriages, apparently with the
support of their kin. One of these women lived in the shovo of W., and was W.s
brothers daughter. She had been sent to the Itu as part of an ongoing arrangement of
marital exchange with a shovo on that river. However, she had returned to her natal
home, dissatisfied with her husband. She had a child by her nominal husband and
another by a subsequent lover. Despite the fact that she lived with W., a great believer in
the ethic of male control, and despite remonstrations from her husband and husbands
kin, she remained with her father. With no direct evidence to confirm my supposition, I
must nevertherless conclude that her father (W.s brother) supported his daughter,
because otherwise it would have been impossible for her to stay at home given her
fathers brothers concern with maintaing marital exchange arrangements. This womans
case was not unique; several other women were in the same situation, evading
unsatisfactory arranged marriages with explicit or tacit support from influential male kin.
Womens exercise of residential and sexual autonomy is not merely a recent
epiphenomenon of increasing participation in national and global economies.
Independent women can be discerned in census data going back to the 1960s. One such
example is a woman named Rave, who died before my arrival in the field. Normative
women who follow the path advocated in the dominant discourse are easily pinpointed in
the census data because they have one long-term residence and all their children have a
single father. In contrast, Rave is the antithesis of normality, the Marubo unacceptable
woman (cf. Hurtado 2003:94).
Raves life, as read from the census data, involved a series of independent
residential and sexual decisions. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she was married to a

prominent Marubo elder, Jos Nascimento, in an apparently conventional, arranged

marriage. This couple had a son and two daughters. However, around 1964, a nonindigenous criminal fled from the police into Marubo land. Rave had a liaison with this
man, and as a result bore Ronpa, one of my main informants, who was living at Aldeia
Maronal during my fieldwork. The criminal was soon captured by soldiers and went to
prison. When Julio Cezar Melatti took his first census of the Marubo, Rave was living in
a shovo on the upper Curu River with her daughter, who by then was married to a man
named Saide. Here, she had a relationship with Santiago Comapa, a Peruvian man who
had been raised in the area and was married to a Marubo woman. Out of this relationship
came a son, Tae, who was living on the upper Itu River during my fieldwork. In
addition, I met another son of Rave, by an unknown father, on a visit to So Sebastio on
the middle Curu. Another son by an unknown father is discernible in Melattis census
data. Thus, after her proper marriage with an elder, Rave was linked to at least three
different men and had at least four sons by these men.
These examples of female autonomy and resistance are not idiosyncracies; they
constitute a clear pattern. Autonomous women are not the majority; based on census
data, I estimate that approximately one in ten Marubo women display these
characteristics. And this pattern can be found as far back as census data are available,
and in all areas where Marubo live.
By presenting them side by side, I have linked discourses on gendered social
behavior and forms of womens social behavior. I argue that these data show women
selecting subject positions from multiple social discourses on proper femininity. Most
men argue that womens sexuality should be controlled by men, and that women should
conform to the residential, marital, and sexual expectations related to mens efforts to
acquire social and political status. Most women comply with these expectations. In
contrast, some men argue that women should have a certain amount of autonomy in their
sexual and marital choices, and also in their selection of an economic role. The
availability of subdominant discourses to choose from, and therefore of alternative
subject positions to select, is reflected in the variety of womens sexual and residential
strategies. A substantial proportion of women choose to exercise marital, sexual, and
residential autonomy.
While there are clear gaps in these data, they strongly suggest the hypothesis that
multiple subjectivity is found among Marubo women. The main problem is the lack of
interview data with women. Although I have observations of and data on womens
behavior, and I have interview data with men, I do not have sufficient interview data with
women. Confirmation of my hypothesis must await these data. I suggest that such data
will reveal that womens discourse on proper behavior involves a wider spectrum of
appropriate forms than mens discourse on womens behavior, because womens actual
choices go much further in terms of resistance and autonomy than do even the most
critical of mens discourses.
Despite these lingering questions, it is clear that essentialist conceptions of
Amazonian womanhood do not apply to the Marubo. McCallums argument that there is
only one, proper female, position among the Cashinahua, and that, therefore, Moores
concept of multiple subjectivity is not applicable in the Amazonian context, is
contradicted by the data just presented. There are multiple subject positions available to
Marubo women, and they can choose a path that is different from that of the proper

female represented in the dominant discourse. McCallum (2001) criticizes the notion
that male dominance is the norm in Amazonia, and argues instead that coparticipatory
female autonomy is the norm in many cases. I argue that both these conceptions of
Amazonian gender are essentialist. The reality is much better approached through the
notion of multiple subject positions chosen from hierarchically arranged discourses, with
the dominant discourse favored by most women but the subdominant discourses creating
a space for the exercise of non-compliance.
Multiple Subjectivity in Amazonia
There is substantial evidence in the literature indicating that Amazonian gendered
relations are not as restrictive as some authors (Gregor 1985, McCallum 2001) have
claimed they are. Women are not restricted to a single, hegemonic, and traditional
gender role. On the contrary, there are a variety of subdominant subject positions that
women can choose from. These vary from area to area but involve various forms of
economic or cultural innovation through the exercise of uncommon autonomy. I will
focus this discussion on data from Fishers (2000) ethnography of the Xikrin Kayap,
then briefly discuss evidence from other areas to argue the generalizability of my
hypothesis on the Marubo to Amazonia in general. In the Kayap case, I will discuss
data on G mythology to argue that womens behavior has correlates in discourse genres,
again indicating that women can draw on discourse to select subject positions different
from those advocated in hegemonic male discourses.
According to Fisher (2000:191), Xikrin society is differentiated in more ways
than we could ever know by recording descriptions of cultural expectations regarding
age, gender, or ceremonial status. Activity is never an automatic response to a
preexisting cultural script. Fisher presents case studies of womens resistance to male
strategies for economic reorganization and of womens innovation in generating new
socioeconomic group forms. Interestingly, he also presents a case of female autonomous
cultural innovation from Xikrin oral history. Relating these data to the literature on G
mythology, it can be said that there exists a strand of G cultural discourse that women
could draw on to justify certain forms of cultural adventurousness.
According to Fisher, the ancestral aunt of a contemporary Xikrin chief onced
travelled to and remained in the village of the nearby Karaj in the mid-nineteenth
century, bringing back Karaj ceremonies that were incorporated into Xikrin festivals:
An adventurous (ancestral) aunt visited the Karaj village in order to
observe their customs During her time in the Karaj village she
maintained many amorous liaisons and, indeed, almost married into the
village Ngreinbeti closely observed the dance and other customs of the
Karaj, which she faithfully recounted in much detail to the assembled
Xikrin village The Xikrin ended up adopting only two of the
ceremonies When the aunt finally gave up any idea of marrying into
the Karaj village, she returned permanently to the village of Jaguars
ancestors and continued to oversee the correct performance of the festival
she had imported.
(Fisher 2000:1820)

This story in and of itself constitutes a discourse that women could draw on to justify
cultural innovation. Ngreinbeti travelled beyond the village to the locus of cultural
others, discovering cultural forms that her own kin found valuable enough to incorporate
into their cultural repertoire. Hypothetically, Xikrin women could be inspired by the
positive precedent of Ngreinbeti to take up the subject position of culture hero venturing
outside the realm of the villagea domain with profound cosmological and emotional
associations (Turner 1979b, Fisher 1998)to bring back the knowledge of important
cultural practices.
The positive slant placed on womens cultural innovation in the oral history of
Ngreinbeti is unsurprising, given the presence of significant women culture heroes in G
myth, of which Xikrin Kayap myth is a transformation. In the Kayap-Gorotire myth of
the origin of cultivars, a woman is bathing alone when a rat tells her of the existence of
maize (Lvi-Strauss 1964:175). She returns to her village to get the young men so they
can cut down the tree where the grains are. The Kayap-Kubenkranken version (LviStrauss 1964:175) is similar, except it is an old woman bathing with her granddaughter,
and the rat shows her a tree from which corn cobs have fallen. The Sherente myth of the
origin of maize (Lvi-Strauss 1964:176) involves more interactions between the woman
and the rat. In this version, the woman, with her child, weaves a fish-catching basket by
the side of a lake when a rat in human form invites her to come eat maize with her. He
lets her take a maize cake, admonishing the woman and her child not to reveal the secret.
The child is seen eating his maize cake, however, and the villagers find the swidden and
take it over. These stories have a structure similar to that of the oral history of
Ngreinbeti: a woman acts alone, venturing into the forest, encountering strangers,
journeying to their residences, and returning with important cultural knowledge.
If the story of Ngreinbeti resonates with G myths of women culture heroes, it
also resonates with the actions of contemporary Xikrin women. Indeed, Fisher portrays
Xikrin women as autonomous shapers and creators (Matthews 1984:19) of social
reality. Xikrin socioeconomic organizational forms are in flux. A tension exists between
the efforts of chiefs to organize production around chief-led groups, and the important
role of autonomous household production. Groups of cooperating female kin control a
good deal of agricultural production, but chiefs attempt to harness their labor by urging
them to cultivate fields the products of which would support chief-led work groups
(Fisher 2000:176181). However, women resisted by withholding all but minimal labor,
causing low yields for the chiefs swidden while retaining control of production on their
own swiddens. Women thus resisted the extension of public chiefly influence over
conditions of production in the domestic sphere (Fisher 2000:181). In this environment
of contested organizational efforts, women created their own forms of economic
production group. This organizational creativity emerged in response to changing
contemporary conditions and the cutting of a new logging road:
The logging road has also become a favorite collecting spot for single,
divorced, and widowed women. Small groups of women silently paddle
across to the road. They would spend the day along the road and its
immediate perimeter looking for tortoises in their makeup, these parties
resembled male hunting parties rather than garden groups of related
women. While individual women go out foraging, other women in the

household can engage in garden work, cooking, and child care. In many
ways the male/female division of labor between the husband who hunts
and the wife who remains in the village is mimicked by this new
organization of female foraging. The practice seems to be a response to a
complex social situation that includes a dramatic increase in single
mothers and a rise in the self-sufficiency of young men. We need to see
such differentiation of roles and initiatives as part of a complex interplay
of contradictory social trends rather than as something given by a cultural
charter for masculinity or femininity.
(Fisher 2000:190192)
Available evidence on the Xikrin thus indicates that women are portrayed as
cultural innovators in some myths, that women are reported as cultural innovators in oral
histories, and that women both create new forms of economic organization and defend
old forms against change when they believe it advantageous to do so. All these data
suggest the hypothesis that there are multiple subject positions available to Xikrin women
to choose from, drawn from forms of discourse available to all Xikrin. It will be
necessary to interview Xikrin women concerning their interpretations of and reactions to
oral narratives of women cultural innovators in order to confirm this hypothesis, but the
theory of multiple subjectivity does explain these data satisfactorily.
This argument should not be read to imply that Kayap in general favor an
autonomous innovator role for women. Contrary narratives exist in which terrible
consequences ensue from female violations of social norms (Fisher 2000:18), raising the
possibility that such discourses are used in efforts to control womens behavior. The
resistance of autonomous female household producers is precisely to chiefly efforts to
control domestic economic labor. And there is no indication that women innovators are
anything but a tiny minority. However, the theory of multiple subjectivity asserts that
subdominant positions will not be taken up by a majority of gendered subjects. What it
does assert is that subdominant positions exist and will be chosen by real persons, and
that these positions are not idiosyncratic rebellions but rather follow from interpretations
of socially disseminated discourses on gender.
Evidence from other areas in Amazonia indicates that innovation, autonomy, and
the adoption of subject positions outside of the hegemonic female gender role are to be
found, as minoritarian practices, throughout the region. For example, Rival (2002:157
159) reports the actions of Dayuma, a Huaorani woman who left her home due to intense
violence, brought missionaries to a place near her village, and attracted many members of
her native group to a new village. This village later incorporated formerly enemy bands,
an event which Rachel Saint [a missionary] and Dayuma engineered and orchestrated
(Rival 2002:158), and Dayuma exercised an important leadership role in organizing
weddings between members of formerly enemy bands (Rival 2002:159)4. Whitehead
(2002:152154) reports the existence of women prophets among the Patamuna of
Guyana. He mentions also Warao and Patamuna women starting religious movements
similar to cargo cults (Whitehead 2002:144145). Brown (1986) reports on the use of
suicide as expression of anger and grief among Aguaruna women. Historically, Jesuit
missionary Francisco Figueroa reported that a Maina woman, who had been captured by
Spaniards and had married an indigenous man who was allied to the Spanish, formed the
crucial link that permitted the establishment of relations between Mainas and Spaniards

and the eventual formation of the Spanish settlement of Borja (Figueroa

1986[1661]:160). In a series of important papers, Chernela (1988a, 1988b, 1997) writes
about how Uanano women perform mythic narratives differently from men, thus
producing discourses that contest masculine hegemony over the imagination of social
reality. More research along these lines is necessary to understand how native
Amazonian women draw on discourse to select gendered subject positions.
The literature on native Amazonians is sprinkled with cases of innovative women
and women who follow uncommon paths in their social lives. It is necessary now to see
these cases not as idiosyncratic exceptions to an unbending hegemonic gender role, but
rather as exemplifying a recurring social pattern. We must understand these women as
taking up subject positions related to subdominant discourses on gendered behavior.
These subdominant discourses will never inform the majority of women, but will
recurrently influence the choices of a small minority of women. The choices of the
minority of culturally innovative women, however, are just as much a part of the social
dynamics of any given community or society as are the choices of the compliant
majority.
Masculinities and Modernity in Amazonia
Bruce Knauft (1997) has argued that, in Amazonia, the association of masculinity
with acquisition of trade goods adds new discourses from which men construct social
roles, generating reinforced masculine solidarity with the result that discourses of
femininity are reduced to a single, male-produced hegemonic discourse. However, data
on Marubo masculinity, economic activity, and discourse on women contradict Knaufts
argument. There is evidence that, not only among the Marubo but elsewhere in the upper
Amazon in particular, the orientation of men towards obtaining goods from outside their
ethno-cultural vicinity is a feature of indigenous masculinity that has deep historical
roots. The image of traditional Amazonian masculinity as being oriented towards
autarkic economics is an artifact of ahistorical twentieth century ethnography.
There exists a general tendency for Marubo men to work outside the indigenous
area to obtain money and trade goods, while women travel much less. However, this
tendency is complexly nuanced in ways that are significant for understanding the relation
between masculine outside orientation and historical context. Firstly, Marubo men tend
to work for outsiders in their youth, later delegating responsibility for such work to
younger household members. Secondly, within any given household there is often a
division of responsibilities such that some men remain focused on external economic
contacts while others focus on swiddens, hunting, and household maintenance. This
means that tradition and modernity are not conflicting masculinities, among which a
choice must be made; rather they can be complementary or coexistent in male subjects.
The elder leaders at Aldeia Maronal in 19971998 rarely travelled outside the
indigenous area except for medical treatments and never worked for wages outside the
village. However, in interviews they told me that prior to marrying they had travelled far
afield. The headman, Alfredo, had travelled downstream as far as Manaus and Roraima,
and overland to numerous places in the state of Acre, working for ranchers, loggers,
rubber tappers, and other businessmen. He said that after returning home from one of
these trips, his father told him it was time to marry, and he settled down to successfully

pursue traditonal leadership. His brother Jos followed a similar trajectory, working
outside the indigenous area in his youth before settling down to marry, build a shovo,
raise a family, and pursue leadership in traditional ways, i.e., through feasting, healing,
and the production of kin networks. Several young Marubo seemed to be pursuing
similar strategies, working outside the Marubo area during their youth while expressing
plans to marry and pursue traditional leadership in their thirties. Thus, it is not a matter
of choosing to forsake tradition for an appropriation of modernity; rather, both these
masculinities are experienced as normal parts of a male life cycle.
There is evidence that the orientation of Marubo youth towards external economic
relations is a historically rooted one. A myth narrated by the elders, entitled Getting the
Inka Axe, tells of how ancestral Marubo young men travelled up the Maran and
Ucayali to trade for Inka stone axes with an intermediary indigenous group that lived
along the Ucayali. This shows that the need to travel far away from the village to obtain
goods that cannot be manufactured locally is not a product of globalization or an
appropriation of modernity. On the contrary, it is a traditional aspect of Marubo
masculinity.
If it is true that Marubo masculinity traditionally involves long journeys for trade
goods, evidence exists to suggest that this is also the case across the upper Amazon.
Lathrap (1973) carried out the pioneering research on this phenomenon. Reeve
(1994:112113) describes several trade routes connecting lowland and Andean peoples.
Large amounts of Amazonian feathers have been found preserved in remains of the
Peruvian coastal Chim Empire (Rowe 1984), strongly indicating trade5. Cashinahua
oral history and myth tells of villages relocating so as to work Inka coca fields in return
for trade goods (Renard-Casevitz, Saignes, and Taylor 1988). These relocated villages
served as intermediaries in trade with their relatives further inland. Indigenous
lowlanders were regularly in attendance at Inka trade fairs and festivals in the highland
cities (Renard-Casevitz, Saignes, and Taylor 1988). Among the lowlanders themselves
trade was extensive: the Cerro de la Sal, a source of highly valued native salt, was a
trading center that was jealously guarded by its Arawakan owners (Varese 1973), while
other salt sources linked Jivaroan and Huallaga peoples into trade networks (Reeve
1994:125). Harner (1972) describes trade networks linking Jivaroans to the Canelos
Quichua. Further east, the Amerindian societies of the savannas of Colombia and
Venezuela had developed a complex interaction network known as the System of
Orinoco Regional Interdependence (Gassn 2003). It is clear that external trade was a
major feature of pre-Columbian indigenous social life in the upper Amazon. It is equally
clear that some of this trade involved long-distance journeys by men, often young men.
The image of indigenous Amazonians as isolated, autarkic village-level societies
is a product of ahistoricity in twentieth century ethnography and should not be taken as
representative of historical reality (Ruedas forthcoming; pace Rival 2002). The native
Amazonians encountered by ethnographers of the past century had been decimated by
centuries of colonization, slavery and other forms of forced labor, genocide, and disease.
Yet ethnographers typically treated these groups as if what was seen in the twentieth
century represented what had always been. Knaufts categorization of masculinities into
traditional and modern follows directly from this misperception. Knauft (1997:240)
argues that the customary construction of male worth is based on success in war, hunting,
political success through oratory and alliances, knowledge of magic and ritual, and

domestic influence developed through polygyny and affinity; the contemporary

construction of male worth, in contrast, is based on monetary success, wage-earning, and
amassing goods. As I have shown, however, success in amassing goods is a customary
aspect of the construction of male worth, at least in the upper Amazon, and the categories
of customary and contemporary male laid out by Knauft are not mutually exclusive.
These categories emerge from the perception of native Amazonians as being selfenclosed, isolated societies, which is a misperception based on the temporary condition of
these peoples at the demographic low point of the twentieth century, coincident with the
arrival of ethnographers on the scene.
If the notion that modernity makes masculinity shift its basis to the acquisition of
goods is not supported by these data, neither is the correlary asserted by Knauft
(1997:238), that modernity makes men clamp down on female sexual autonomy. This
notion is related to the theory of sexual antagonism in Amazonia (Murphy 1959; Siskind
1973; Divale and Harris 1976; Gregor 1985; Chagnon 1988). This theory has many
problems, discussed by McCallum (2001). Among the worst of these is the assumption
that all men are insecure. This unverified and probably unverifiable, and therefore
unscientific, assumption is the basis of the argument that men oppress women to enhance
the solidarity of male corporate groups. Information on the Marubo strongly contradicts
Knaufts interpretation of the data. Marubo oral histories indicate that sexual control was
strongest when the population was lowest, in the early twentieth century when there were
less than two hundred Marubo. At that time, control of female sexuality was stringent.
With increasing population, sexual controls have become less stringent even as
participation in national and global economies and ideologies have intensified.
CONCLUSIONS
Applying Moores concept of multiple subjectivity opens new vistas for the
interpretation of gendered social behavior in indigenous Amazonia. McCallums
argument that duality structures the performance of gender identity throughout Amazonia
resonates with earlier beliefs in the strict male enforcement of female submission in the
area. However, throughout the Amazonianist literature we find evidence of rebellious,
non-conformist, and uppity women, whose existence has been ignored in the construction
of models for understanding Amazonian gender. The concept of multiple subjectivity
allows us to see these women as part of a broad pattern of womens resistance and
cultural innovation throughout indigenous Amazonia. I argue that this is a recurring,
historically rooted pattern.
Since there has been no systematic effort to describe culturally resistant women in
Amazonia, I have only bits and pieces of evidence culled from various ethnographies to
back up my suggestion that this pattern is a generalized Amazonian one. My evidence
from the Marubo is much stronger. There are clearly not one, but several discourses on
proper femininity among the Marubo. Both men and women can choose from among
these several discourses. As in discourse, so in observable behaviour there are mutliple
relationships between real women and the dominant discourse on Marubo womanhood.
While the dominant discourse paints a classic portrait of women as supporters of their
husbands political strategies, the reality is that women are frequently seen to pursue their
own interests. The most fascinating manifestation of autonomous womens life strategies

is their conscious, planned construction of residential arrangements in which they have

the highest status in a settlement dominated by their siblings and children. The
recurrence of these residential patterns, which I have termed anicular, clearly indicates
that they are not idiosyncratic, but part of a cultural pattern that is not reflected in the
emic categories of the male elders but is somehow understood as a definite social option
by Marubo women. Although evidence to generalize this view of women to the rest of
Amazonia is very limited, I suggest that further research informed by the concept of
multiple subjectivity will reveal similar patterns of resistance in other Amazonian
societies.
It would be easy, however, to explain the results of any research into subdominant subjectivities as reflecting not an indigenous pattern, but rather the intrusion of
modernity into Amazonian tradition. My critique of Knaufts ideas on Amazonian
masculinity points out the danger of such simplistic dismissals. The notion that anything
different from what twentieth century ethnography portrayed is a non-indigenous
intrusion reflects an ahistorical view of indigenous Amazonia. The twentieth century,
however, in no way represents the only possible definition of authentic Amazonian
indigeneity. A hisorically contextualized view of Amazonian masculinity and femininity
reveals that these so-called intrusions of modernity in fact have deep historical roots in
indigenous Amazonian culture.
This paper does not pretend to offer definitive proof, but only to outline a
hypothesis that could inform further research. Such research should begin with a close
analysis of gender differences in discourse production, along the lines of Chernelas
(1988a, 1988b, 1997) work on the Uanano. Such research should also connect discourse
production to behavior observed during extensive fieldwork, connected to as much
historical data, both recent and distant, as possible. Similar research has been conducted
in folklore studies (e.g., Jordan and Kalik 1985, Stoeltje 1988), and in the anthropology
of South Asia (Appadurai, Korom, and Mills 1991, Ramanujan 1991). But wholistic,
historically contextualized research on discourse production and social behavior informed
by the concept of multiple subjectivity has not been carried out in Amazonia. Such
research could serve to clarify the reason why women who are apparently cultural rebels
are so commonly found in ethnographies and histories of the area, and situate these
women as representative of a historically rooted pattern of womens resistance in
indigenous Amazonian cultures, rather than as inexplicable and isolated aberrations.
NOTES
1. The Cashinahua and Marubo are speakers of closely related Panoan languages.
According to Marubo informants there is a limited mutual intelligibility. The Marubo
and Cashinahua also share identical names for some of their kinship groupings, as well as
having some shared myths and social practices.
2. Shovo (singular and plural) is the Marubo term for a longhouse, called maloca in the
regional Portuguese. Shovo are the basic Marubo residential units. They can contain
nuclear families numbering less than ten people, or extended families numbering over
sixty. Villages can consist of single shovo or assemblages of as many as a dozen shovo.
3. The Portuguese word aldeia can be translated as village or hamlet. In this
context, aldeia connotes a distinct village.

4. It should be noted here that Robarchek and Robarchek (1998) suggest that Huaorani
women are normally autonomous and independent, a cultural norm applying both to
Huaorani men and women: In contrast to many Amazonian societies, men and women
are not seen as fundamentally different in character. There is no dichotomy in ideal
personality or temperament. Both men and women are autonomous, independent, selfconfident, and assertive (Robarchek and Robarchek 1998:105). Thus, in the Huaorani
cultural context, Dayumas behaviour may not reflect selection of a sub-dominant subject
position. Nevertheless it indicates that Huaorani women are not restricted to any given
formula for behavior in the first place, and also caution us about arguing that gender
dualisms restrict gendered behavior to dual hegemonic subject positions throughout
Amazonia.
5. Some have argued that these feathers were the result of direct acquisition rather than
trade (Verrano, personal communication). However, the difficulties that pre-conquest
highland peoples had in venturing into the lowlands, and the other evidence of trade
between highlands and lowlands, makes the trade hypothesis more likely in my opinion.
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