Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes

5. Vanishing Plant Names

5 Vanishing Plant Names We must be very cautious in assuming that elements of culture are so useful or so important that they would never be allowed to disappear. —William H. R. Rivers (1926, 206) In Italic (i.e., Latin) the birch reflex shifted to “ash.” . . . The shift to “ash” in Latin, like the total loss in Greek, is of­ten thought to have been motivated by the absence of birch in these climes. —Paul Friedrich (1970, 29) Although a transition from horticultural to foraging society may be seen as far less common than the development of horticulture in a slow process that began with foraging as the exclusive means of human subsistence (Clastres 1989, 201; Gellner 1988), an increasing amount of empirical work is suggesting that such a transition has occurred repeatedly in the forested lowlands of South America. It has probably happened in other parts of the world as well, such as south­ern Africa, the Philippines, and equatorial Africa (Bailey and Headland 1992; Headland and Reid 1989). This observation does not imply, however, that all contemporary and recent foraging peoples were once horticultural. Many Australian Aborigines, the Inuit Peoples, the California Indians, peoples of the Great Basin, and the Selk’nam and other peoples of Patagonia no doubt lacked domesticates (with the possible exception of the dog) altogether before contact. Some contemporary, pristine foragers lived in environments in which early Neolithic technology could not function; in other words, the lands were habitable but not arable. Antarctica was both un­ arable and uninhabitable and has been until quite recently for the human species as a whole. It is not an example of environmental determinism or cultural ecology to make the rather trivial point that, under given technological conditions, agriculture and perhaps even human occupation were impossible in certain parts of the globe until quite recently. Rather, environmental determinism has tended to fail in explaining differential modes of production where, as in the humid tropics, technological and geophysical conditions do not present severe and absolute constraints . Here, his­tori­cal ecology would seem to offer a foundation for more penetrating insights into the relations of peoples, cultures, biota, and regions. His­ tori­ 90 Contact and Attrition cal ecology essentially holds that people and their landscape can be understood as a dialectical, and dynamic, whole (Crumley 1994). Lévi-­Strauss(1950,466–467)postulatedthatmanyofthedifferencesinplant usageamongnativesocietiesacrosstheAmazonBasin,suchasthedisjunctboundaries of the use of tapa cloth, could not be explained in terms of the plant materials at hand—wild fig trees used for making tapa cloth are found through­ out the region . And numerous fruit trees, hallucinogenic vines and trees, and even domesticated crop plants that constitute part of a pan-­ Amazonian wealth of common plants are paradoxically used, if used at all, in different ways by different sociocultural groups (also see Balée 1994, 99–100; Milton 1991). Lévi-­Strauss (1950, 467) aptly noted that such unlike utilizations of the same plant species result from cultural differences, what one may in several empirical instances now consider to be differences of his­ tori­ cal ecology. Differences of plant utilization, some of which can be explained by fundamentally unlike modes of production, such as the distinction between foraging and horticulture, do not connote differences in the human potential to perceive, classify, name, exploit, manage, and even domesticate the biota and landscapes of given environments. It is important to understand, rather, in historical-­ ecological terms, how and why the relations between peoples and plants may vary quite substantively, especially in the same region (Balée 1994, 99–100; Milton 1991). Contemporary foraging (or hunting and gathering) as a mode of production has tended to be associated with low population density as well as a generalized absence of po­ liti­ cal institutions other than age and gender hierarchies; also, little surplus food tends to accrue from gathering, fishing, and hunting, and permanent or semipermanent settlements are uncommon. Some apparent exceptions to this pattern included certain Northwest Coast societies (as is widely known), the Ainu of Sakhalin Island and environs (Ohnuki-­Tierney 1984; Watanabe 1972, 59–64, 80), and perhaps a number of late prehistoric societies of south­ east­ ern North America (Kidder and Fritz 1993; Marquardt 1992), where the exploitation of marine resources was evidently sustainable and highly efficient. WiththepossibleexceptionoftheestuarineWaraoofnorth­ernSouthAmerica(cf. Steward 1977, 135), however, the foraging societies of the humid tropics of South America may have generally regressed from a horticultural mode of production in the past (Balée 1992a, 1994, 1995; Lathrap 1968...