The Ecology of the Barí: Rainforest Horticulturalists of Latin America

7. Conclusions

CHAPTER 7 Conclusions Perspectives After our examination of the ecology of the Barí, concentrating on their practices in production, protection, and reproduction, there remained the task of putting these matters in wider perspective. Several points of views might have been appropriate. The most obvious was ethnographic comparison . Two possibilities presented themselves in this connection. We might have compared Barí ecological strategies with those of the other speakers of languages in the Chibchan family, a linguistic category that includes the Barí and is found from Central America (where it may have had its origin around the Panama–Costa Rica border [Costenla-Umaña 1995]) down into Colombia and western Venezuela. This tack would have been based on the familiar anthropological assumption that people who speak related languages share other aspects of their culture, due to descent from a common ancestor. Implicit in such an exercise was the idea of diversification, “descent with modification” from a mother culture, resulting in a suite of distinct daughter cultures whose differences spoke to specific adaptations to differing natural and cultural environments as well as different historical trajectories. More broadly, we might have compared the Barí with all the other lowland neotropical horticulturalist peoples whose ecology had been adequately studied, irrespective of their linguistic and cultural affiliations. This second tack did not imply an assumption of diversification but rather implicitly invoked convergence as its main underlying process, as initially different cultures became similar enough to make comparison profitable when they adapted to similar environments in similar ways. In addition to these two sorts of basic ethnographic comparison, an- Conclusions 213 other useful perspective from which we might view the Barí material was with respect to enduring questions in the cultural anthropology and culture history of lowland South America. Old and conspicuous among these topics was the question of why the ethnographically known peoples of the neotropical rain forest exhibited such small and widely dispersed populations. The literature revolving around this issue went back over half a century and rested on a fundamental distinction between riverine peoples and interfluvial peoples.The Barí were interesting in this connection because they were both riverine and interfluvial, switching between these environments over the course of a seasonal round.The Barí material might offer insight into the question of why the neotropical peoples we see today live in much smaller settlements and at much smaller population densities than are known both historically and presently among paleotropical peoples in ecologically similar regions in Africa and Asia. A final perspective from which to view the Barí material related to its relevance to the ecology of human societies in general. Human ecology has been criticized as reducing culture to “digestion writ large,” and one of the themes of this book, with its tripartite division of the central text into chapters on production, protection, and reproduction, was to insist that there was more to human ecology than subsistence. Ethnographic Comparison In this final chapter we take up these three perspectives in the order mentioned above, beginning here with the matter of simple ethnographic comparison. It will be recalled that two types of comparison suggested themselves—resemblance and contrast with other daughters of a Chibchan or proto-Chibchan mother culture and resemblance and contrast with other lowland neotropical forest cultures irrespective of cultural descent —the former implying divergence and the latter convergence. The first of these possibilities we reluctantly but rapidly rejected. The current consensus of linguistic (Costenla-Umaña 1981, 1991, 1995, 2008), genetic (Torroni et al. 1994; Keyeux et al. 2002; Melton 2004; Melton et al. 2007), and archaeological (Cooke and Ranere 1992; Hoopes and Fonseca 2003; Cooke 2005) research coincided on a general scenario for the history of the Chibchan-speaking peoples. The ancestral Chibchan language arose in Central America, possibly in western Panama/southwestern Costa Rica, not much less than 10,000 years Bp. By 7000 Bp at the latest, the language and the people who spoke it had begun to spread 214 The Ecology of the Barí out both northwest and southeast and to diversify their material culture and their language, probably in response to climate change and the arrival of maize and manioc (the former first domesticated in Mexico, the latter in Amazonia) as subsistence crops. By 5000 B.p. there were ancestral subfamilies of Chibchan that had themselves begun to diversify into distinct languages. Of about twenty-five Chibchan languages known to be in existence in 1492...