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part III Indigenous Savoir Faire Overview Traditionalknowledgeisafragilephenomenon,aswehaveseen,inwhichlossofagriculture ,attritioninknowledgeaboutplantsandanimals,disappearanceofterms for biota and resources, and even the ability to make fire have occurred among native peoples over time as a result of external contacts and forces. It therefore makes sense to begin to try to understand traditional knowledge in its own living context , while it is still fresh and surviving inside indigenous languages and cultures. The forests people made in the past, we have in fact learned, are not only use­ ful; they have been sustainable—that means, people have continued to use them, withoutdegradingorimpoverishingthemintermsof species losses.For thatreason, the first philosophical voyagers, natural historians, and tropical biologists and ecolo­giststostudythemthoughttheywerepristineforests,justlikethenaturalforests ,andtheydidnothaveaseparatetermfororsystematicunderstandingofthem. In Chapter 7, I first examine the main aspects of traditional knowledge of Amazonianenvironments.Thediscussionishousedintermsoffourworkingprinciples , which are (1) Amazonian languages are rich indexes of biotic diversity; (2) traditional knowledge about Amazonian environments is essentially local; (3) languages and cultures encode a tremendous amount of knowledge that is accurate and independently verifiable; and (4) Amazonian peoples have transformed landscapes for centuries if not longer, and they know they can do this. That does not mean they always recognize contingent diversity in anthropogenic landscapes, or thattheyalwayshaveawordforculturalversusnaturalforests.Insomeareas,suchas the Llanos de Mojos of the Bolivian Amazon, it may be the case that no “natural” forests per se exist, a point origi­ nally stated by Allyn Stearman (1989) and sup- 120 Indigenous Savoir Faire ported in the pioneering work of William Denevan (1966). In such cases, people might be expected not to recognize anthropic versus natural causality. In other cases, indicator species might be growing in old village sites, and in forests that are anthropogenic, not because anyone planned it that way, but because there are numerous unintentional ways of modifying a landscape. In Chapter 8, I take up the issue of the extent to which genuinely ancient knowledge of Amazonian biota has been conserved, comparing groups’ native vocabularies across the Amazon Basin, as an index of how knowledge persists, and how it decays, and what kinds of knowledge are more resistant to such decay. I am looking at the Tupí-­Guaraní language family specifically, which is some twenty-­five hundred years old. Some things that might not be vitally important have clearly been retained over that vastly long time. The question is, why? In this chapter’s discussion of the ant ordeal among the Wayãpi and Ka’apor, as part of a pubescent girl’sriteofinitiation,IwouldreviseoneinterpretationthatIhadnotstatedclearly enough the first time. Whereas much of the rite of initiation of both groups has roots that probably go far back into the Tupí-­ Guaraní past, the fact that among Tupí-­ Guaraní groups, so far as is known, only the Wayãpi and the Ka’apor use cobra ants (Pachycondyla commutata) in this ordeal is more likely a shared innovation , rather than specifically something that pertained to Proto-­ Tupí-­ Guaraní society. The observation of a reasonably recent common past for the Ka’apor and Wayãpi is explored more broadly in Chapter 9 in relation to terms for the trees that chocolate is derived from. In Chapter 9, I show how economic forces from the outside world can change even the names and classification of things that tend to be the most resistant, in an examination of the origins of the word for cacao (chocolate plant) in the Ka’apor language. The nobility of Europe quickly got a taste for chocolate; it did not take long for that to spread to the general population. That led to European demand for a tropical Ameri­can product on a level comparable to that of the initial demand for gold and silver from South and Middle America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in an earlier time, for spices and silk from Asia. Chocolate can be very hard to resist, as many people know. I do not mean to add to debate on the origins of the domesticated cacao tree, whether both in Mesoamerica and South America independently, or in one or the other region alone; the debates over this matter of origins, distribution, and preparation of the first chocolate are well summarized in vari­ ous chapters of ­ McNeil (2006). In this context, I am specifically in agreement with Nathaniel Bletter and Douglas Daly (2006, 38) when they point out that “Theobroma cacao and its­cultivars—and perhaps chocolate—may not have been new to South America, but cacao as a trade product of overwhelming importance certainly was.” That was in the eighteenth...

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