Review Essay

Materiality, Exchange, and History in the Amazon:

A Growing Eield of Study

Juan Luis Rodríguez, Southern Illinois University

Jonathan D. Hill, Southern Illinois University

The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality

and Personhood. Edited by Fernando Santos-Granero. (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 2009. 277 pp., introduction, figures, tables, index. $55.00
cloth.)
Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia. By Bar-
tholomew Dean. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. xvii + 324
pp., introduction, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $69.95 cloth.)
Editing Eden: A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Ama-
zonia. Edited by Frank Hutchins and Patrick C. Wilson. (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 2010. xxxi + 273 pp., introduction, figures, map,
index. $35.00 paper.)
Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia. By Norman E.
Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten. (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2008. xxvi + 304 pp., preface, maps, glossary, bibliography, index.
$65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.)
Anthropologies of Guayana: Cultural Spaces in Northeastern Amazonia.
Edited by Neil Whitehead and Stephanie Alemán. (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2009. viii + 300 pp., foreword, introduction, bibliography,
index. $70.00 cloth.)
We divide this essay in two sections. The first section addresses the works of
Fernando Santos-Granero; Bartholomew Dean; Norman E. Whitten Jr. and
Dorothea Scott Whitten; and Frank Hutchins and Patrick C. Wilson. Sec-

Ethnohistory 58:3 (Summer 2011) DOi 10.1215/00141801-1263875

Copyright 2011 by American Society for Ethnohistory
526 Review Essay

tion two deals with Neil Whitehead and Stephanie Alemán's book Anthro-
pologies of Guayana. In dividing the essay in this way, we do not intend to
isolate the work done in Guayana from the rest of lowland South America
or to imply that this book is disconnected from the rest of the materials in
this review. Instead, we intend to recognize the uniqueness of this book
with regard to its multidisciplinary and more eclectic character while at the
same time calling attention to the themes of exchange and history that are
common to the other volumes.
We center our reading of these five books in certain ideas developed
in Santos-Granero's edited volume The Occult Life of Things and use these
ideas as anchors for our discussion of the first set of books. The reason for
this choice is that Santos-Granero's book can be read as part of the South
Americanist response to studies of exchange and materiality that sprouted
out of Melanesian, Australian, and European Anthropology. In our view,
one of the most powerful conceptualizations coming out this approach
is what Santos-Granero identifies as a change of perspective from view-
ing things as moving across regimes of value (à la Appadurai) to looking
at things' subjective force. He argues that the essays in his edited volume
focus on three domains: tbe "subjective life of objects," tbe "social life of
things," and the "historical life of things" (3). Santos-Granero presents an
elegant synthesis for these multiple approaches to "things" and points out
that understanding things as having subjectivities allows us to better under-
stand Amazonian tbeories of objectivity and materiality. In this sense, we
could probably summarize this new South Americanist approach as one to
the "historical subjectivities of things."
This book is divided into three parts. The first part is dedicated to
the relation between objects and personhood. This part presents essays by
Stephen Hugh-Jones on the Tukanoan myth of creation ex nihilo that he
uses to prove a complementary cosmology to that presented by Viveiros
de Castro among the Tupi and that helps him make the case for the diver-
sity of cosmologies that can be found representing object regimes in Ama-
zonia. The other two essays in this part, Joanna Miller's on the Mamaindê
and Harry Walker's on the Urarina, stress the relation between the devel-
opment of people's bodies and personhood and the role of objects such as
hammocks, clothes, and body ornaments in this process. Part two deals
with the multiple ways in which subjectivity can be attributed to objects in
Amazonia and the social consequences of these attributions. Here, Santos-
Granero warns us that not all objects can be treated equally and that it is a
matter of ethnographic and ethnohistorical investigation to find the relevant
categories and cosmological attributions of specific objects.
An example of bow to deal witb this variety is Aristoteles Barcelos
Review Essay 527

Neto's essay on the Wauja in which he addresses Wauja ideas about the
mutual influence between the individual and the individual's material world.
The last chapter of this part is Terence Turner's essay on the power of naming
and the construction of value among the Kayapó. In this essay Turner shows
the process of transformation that persons and objects undergo as part of
the total process of social (re)production. Finally, part three addresses the
process of making occult subjectivities into visible, material, and audible
signs, or, as the title of the book suggests, making those occult agencies take
on material forms. In this final part, the essays turn to a more performative,
action-oriented relation between the construction and use of objects and
the constitution of objects as processors of certain subjectivities. The essays
by Philippe Erikson (on the Matis theory of materiality). Els Lagrou (on
the Cashinahua materialization of knowledge), Maria Guzman-Gallegos
(on the use of identity cards in Amazonian Ecuador), and Jonathan Hill (on
Wakuénai linguistic classifiers and the materialization of sensory, audible,
corporeal ontologies) all show different aspects of this process.
These ideas form the background through which we approached
Dean's book on the Urarina. As Dean points out, his book is an ethnographic
account of the role of exchange and circulation in Urarina cosmology dur-
ing their engagement with "modernity" in the twentieth century. This book
then forms a single case study of the issues raised in Santos-Granero's edited
volume. Chapters i through 5 form the ethnohistorical core of the book. In
these chapters. Dean provides the much-needed historical background for
understanding the historical disjunctions and changes in Urarina social and
cosmological worlds. Starting in chapter 6 the book then turns to issues
of exchange and regimes of circulation of objects and commodities. This
exploration ranges from the circulation of palm artisanal products to the
practice of mitayos or sharecropping. Dean shows a profound understand-
ing of the cosmological basis of exchange and the historical (dis)continuities
in this system. Where this book departs from Santos-Granero's is in Dean's
emphasis on regimes of value and his analysis of commodities as circulating
across multiple regimes. This is not to say that this theoretical posture is in
contradistinction to Santos-Granero's approach, but it is fair to say that an
approach to the subjective life of things would do more to foreground the
Urarina ideas of materiality and allow the reader a different perspective on
this ideological process.
A different approach to materiality and indigenous conceptions of
things can be found in Hutchins and Wilson's edited volume. Even though
the intention of the book itself is to address issues of identity politics and
cultural representations, we can find in it a pervasive preoccupation with
the role of things and material signs in this process. Tlie two essays that
528 Review Essay

take the lead in this approach are Beth Conklin's "For the Love of Money?
Indigenous Materialism and Humanitarian Agendas," and Alcida Ramos's
"Worlds at Cross Purposes." In both, the authors analyze the idea that
indigenous Amazonian people are fascinated by nonindigenous commodi-
ties and that the consequence of this fascination is the destruction of their
traditional life. In both cases they contextualize these tendencies within
indigenous theories of moral obligations and exchange and within the full
historical circumstances in which these exchanges with the Brazilian and
other nonindigenous populations are unfolding. Whereas Santos-Granero's
edited volume is interested in indigenous ideas about the subjectivity of
things and Amazonian ontologies, Hutchins and Wilson give more atten-
tion to interethnic conflict and friction.
The rest of the essays in Hutchins and Wilson's volume address a
variety of other topics. Maria Clemencia Ramirez's and Patrick Wilson's
chapters are both concerned with issues of economic development, and
each brings a much-needed view of capitalist expansion in Amazonia and
the confrontation between indigenous leaders and multiple regimes of value
in which they navigate. The main difference between these essays is that
whereas Ramirez analyzes the new trends in development studies of "social
capital," Wilson aligns himself with Conklin and Ramos in his attention
to material exchange and leadership. Margarita Chaves's chapter analyzes
the complex relation between the transformation and emergence of indige-
nous identities and their territorial claims in the Putumayo area. Although
this chapter does good service to studies of ethnic identities in the area, the
reader is left with the sense that it is disconnected from the relevant litera-
ture on ethnogenesis and ethnic transformation in the larger Amazonian
area.
The articles by Hutchins and Whitehead bring us to a different discus-
sion about the commoditization of culture. Both chapters address tourism
and its implications for cultural representation. Hutchins's chapter deals
with the boom of ecotourism in Amazonia and especially in Ecuador, where
the need for selling authentic culture to European and American tourists
has profound consequences for the reproduction of cultural manifestations.
Similarly, Whitehead makes the case for a process of profound transforma-
tion in the conditions of engagement in an era of global flows and gives us
a comparative perspective between South America and the Caribbean, pre-
senting the case of Dominica and the cultural representations developed for
tourism on that island.
Finally in this volume Michael Uzendoski brings us a brilliant discus-
sion on fractality and the benefits of multi-scalar analysis to understand
how Amazonian societies articulate with wider processes of globalization.
Review Essay 529

Through a multi-scalar approach, we can see how the body is used to pro-
duce perspectives not only among indigenous people but in wider histori-
cal processes. This new theoretical perspective has the potential to bring
the insights of Viveiros de Gastro's perspectivism, and his emphasis on the
body as the locus of intersubjective relations, to bear on understanding
the multi-scalar situation in which indigenous communities are entangled
nowadays.
If there is a single book that is capable of condensing and address-
ing all of the issues of exchange, articulation with global economies, and
ethnogenesis in Amazonia, it is Whitten and Whitten's book Puyo Runa.
After their prolonged career of doing fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Ama-
zon, no other ethnographers have the same long-term view of the ethnog-
raphy of the transitional zone between the Amazon Basin and the Andes.
This experience transpires in this book, which takes us from the creative
power of potters to the longtime struggles of indigenous peoples with the
nation-state. The authors engage with the issues of exchange and relations
with the ontology of things that are addressed in Santos-Granero's edited
volume. But Whitten and Whitten go a step further by showing us how
these images, objects, and representations are used to produce social mobi-
lization. They show how images are deployed in protests and cultural per-
formance, resulting in an ethnography and ethnohistory of the naturally
occurring deployment of imagery and its uses in contradictory contexts
of interethnic conflict. If Santo-Granero's volume presents us with a new
approach to Amazonian ontologies, and Dean's ethnography gives us an
understanding of the regimes of value in Urarina life, Whitten and Whitten
give us the processual view of these issues with their vision of ethnohistori-
cal transformations among the Gánelos in Amazonian Ecuador.
In contrast to the other two edited volumes reviewed here, White-
head and Alemán's Anthropologies of Guayana: Cultural Spaces in North-
eastern Amazonia brings a wide range of disciplinary perspectives together
within the geographic space of northeastern Amazonia. This region, called
Guayana, includes not only the three Guianas (Guyana, Suriname, and
Guyane) but also adjacent areas of Venezuela south of the Orinoco and
Brazil north of the Amazon. Whitehead's introductory essay, "Guayana as
Anthropological Imaginary: Elements of a History," is a beautifully written
synthesis of historical, literary, archaeological, and ethnographic perspec-
tives on Guayana as a region in which national societies "overtly construct
themselves through a contrast between the historically settled coasts and a
still-unexplored or unconquered interior" (i). Whitehead uses this theme
to weave a fascinating narrative that explores the many ways in which the
dialectic between cultured-coastal-selves and savage-interior-others played
530 Review Essay

out in the emergence of imperial anthropology and the cultural politics of

ethnology in colonial Guiana.
The editors have organized Anthropologies of Guayana into three parts:
(i) Archaeology and Ecology, (2) Ethnography and Ethnology, and (3 ) Theo-
retical and Imaginative Spaces. The chapters in part i provide a useful
introduction to long-term environmental and cultural changes in Guayana,
including Mark Plew's overview of the earliest human inhabitants; Stephen
Rostain's account of the rise of ceramics and larger, more sedentary and
hierarchical settlements; Per Stenborg's examination of Curt Nimuendajú's
archaeological work in northern and eastern Brazil; and Janette Bulkin
and John Palmer's discussion of the environmental history of interior for-
ests. The chapters making up part i of the volume demonstrate the great
antiquity of trade relations and other interactions between peoples living in
downstream river basins and coastal floodplains, on the one hand, and in
remote interior forests, on the other. Moreover, the archaeological and eco-
logical chapters do an excellent job of anticipating the ethnological essays
in part 2 by showing how contemporary and historical indigenous commu-
nities continue, albeit in radically new political and economic contexts, to
participare in trade relations over long distances and across profound lin-
guistic and cultural differences.
Part 2, "Ethnography and Ethnology," begins with Peter Riviere's
revisiting of his classic 1984 work. Individual and Society in Guiana, exam-
ining some of its deficiencies from a contemporary point of view while also
acknowledging its significance as a unique attempt to formulate a compara-
tive theoretical framework for an anthropology of Guayana. Rivière calls
for shifting from a more static metaphor of the Guiana mosaic to a more
dynamic one of the kaleidoscope as "a way of representing both the invari-
ance and the variance within the area in a more dynamic and relational
manner than the mosaic analogy" (95). Following Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Janet Carsten, and Hugh-Jones, he suggests that the concept of "house" as a
semiautonomous bodily, social, and cosmological construct can be used as
a point of departure for developing more historically nuanced and dynamic
comparative understandings of the Guiana kaleidoscope. Rivière also sug-
gests how a kaleidoscopic approach to internal variance and invariance
can be usefully applied in other well-documented areas of lowland South
America, such as the upper Xingu, the Northwest Amazon, and the sub-
Andean montaña regions of Ecuador and Peru. Riviere's essay complements
Whitehead's introduction by showing how a modernist anthropology of
Guayana from the 1960s and 1970s has transformed to accommodate more
contemporary concerns for integrating history and cosmology into studies
of social organization.
Review Essay 531

Part 2 continues with a set of seven chapters that amply demon-

strate how current researchers are employing more historically nuanced
approaches to ethnography and giving greater attention to shifting power
relations at regional, national, and global levels. Denise Fajardo develops a
new model of Guayanese social organization through exploring the native
category of "genealogical continuation" (ittpt) among the Tiriyó and the
interplay between the closure of local groups and their openness to inter-
communal networks of trade and alliance. Gérard GoUomb and Francis
Dupuy analyze processes of ethnogenesis and ethnic transformation among
two Garib-speaking groups, the Wayana and Kali'na, which have brought
these groups to their current positionings within French and Surinamese
nation-states. Susan Staats focuses on the long-term historical importance
of communicative ideologies in the Areruya (or Alleluia) religion among
Garib-speaking groups of Guyana and adjacent areas of Venezuela. Staats's
unraveling of wai—a multivocal indigenous term referring to a vessel con-
taining manioc drink, a boom box, and a mythical musical instrument that
gives sacred music to Areruya worshipers—illustrates how detailed studies
of indigenous cultural creativity and communicative practices can con-
tribute important new ways of understanding indigenous histories. Other
chapters in Part 2 include Alan Passes's comparison of language practices
and choice in two subgroups of the Arawak-speaking Pa'ikwené of Guyane
and Brazil; Maria Garmen del Moreno's study of cultural revival and the
impact of national policies among the Arawakan Lokono of Guyana; David
Hinds's historical analysis of the "nondevelopment" of a coherent national
ethos in Guyana due to unbridled racial competition between African and
East Indian Guyanese; and Joan Mars's account of how an occupational
subculture of violence from Guyana's colonial past has erupted into a sharp
escalation of police violence in recent years.
Part 3, "Theoretical and Imaginative Spaces," offers a panorama of
literary, historical, and ethnological approaches to Guayana as an imag-
ined cultural space. Lucia Sa demonstrates how native genres of oral story-
telling, singing, and speaking have influenced written novels in Guyana,
Venezuela, and Brazil. Alemán explores the symbolically overdetermined
linkages between the Waiwai of Guyana and their placement in the "Deep
South," or the most remote interior forests. Over the border in Brazil, Evelyn
Schüler Zea artfully meanders across Waiwai notions of imagining and spa-
tial distance. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg's concept of detour (umweg)
and its Waiwai equivalent (yesamarî). Schuler Zea develops an innova-
tive analysis of indigenous ways of knowing and imagining as processes of
transcending spatial distances through dialectical acts of seeing and being
seen and of not seeing and not being seen. Dominique Tilkin Gallois exam-
532 Review Essay

ines similar processes of imagining and space making among the Wajâpi,
a Tupi group in Amapá, Brazil. However, Gallois's focus is not so much
on fine-grained local practices and ways of knowing as on the inscription
of Wajâpi cultural and territorializing practices into broader national and
international imaginaries, as "Brazilian cultural patrimony" and as a United
Nations "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity."
In a final chapter, Alissa Trotz and Terry Roopnaraine provide two angles
of vision on Guayana: a coastal story about how Amerindian women from
the interior became discursively entangled in the Guyanese government's
anti-trafficking campaign in 2004 and a hinterland "story about a story
about a story" that explores the social meanings of stories told by small-
scale miners of gold and diamonds known in Guyana as "porkknockers"
(244). It is highly appropriate that Anthropologies of Guayana concludes
with a stereoscopic essay in which relations of gender and power—helpless
indigenous women from the interior being forcibly removed to coastal
areas versus powerful male adventurers choosing to travel into the remote
interior—are inscribed once again into the ancient and all-pervasive histori-
cal dialectic between cultured-coastal-selves and savage-interior-others.
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