The Ecology of the Barí: Rainforest Horticulturalists of Latin America

1. Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Introduction The Barí are a group of native South Americans who live in the rain forests of Colombia and Venezuela. They are known in Spanish as the Motil ón Indians, or simply the Motilones, and their land is sometimes called Motilonia. This book is about them and what the study of their culture has contributed to anthropology. Anthropology at base is about the variability of human nature, about the limits and possibilities of being human. The anthropological justification for studying the Barí, or any other culture, is ultimately to find out what it can tell us about human capacities—the abilities, tendencies, and limitations of our species. Obviously, no one culture is able to inform us about the full range of human possibilities; but anthropologists presume that every culture has some aspects that can enlighten us about some part of the human condition. The kind of enlightenment we pursue depends on the theoretical perspective from which we ask questions. We write here from an ecological perspective. The sorts of questions raised—about the Barí in particular and about human nature in general—and the kinds of answers found come from ecological theory. The questions have to do with how people survive and reproduce in a given environment; and the answers have to do with people’s interactions with that environment and with each other. The core of this book, chapters 4 through 6, is arranged according to the three fundamental issues addressed by ecological anthropology: production , protection, and reproduction. Production concerns how people make a living—how they obtain, distribute, process, and consume food and other necessities. Protection concerns how people defend themselves against the dangers of life, from accidents and diseases and enemies. Re- 2 The Ecology of the Barí production concerns how people find mates, form and sustain families, and bear and raise their children. Chapter 4 is devoted to production—the farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering by which the Barí fed themselves in the “ethnographic present,” that time around first contact when their traditional culture was intact. (For purposes of this book, the ethnographic present runs from June 1960, the date of the first anthropological observations, to around 1975, when even the remotest Barí longhouses began to be overcome by Western culture.) Chapter 5, on protection, focuses on the various strategies the Barí traditionally used to defend themselves from the threats of malaria, Indian killers, and such dangers of rain forest life as drowning and poisonous snakes. Chapter 6, on reproduction, looks at the Barí way of courtship and marriage, family formation and child raising. We pay considerable attention in this chapter to the institution of partible paternity , in which all the men who have sex with a woman during a pregnancy are believed to share the fatherhood of her child. With respect to the universal human challenges of providing for production , protection, and reproduction, we focus on current debates and issues in ecological anthropology and use them to organize our information . These organizing issues are set out at the beginning of each of the three central chapters. As a study in ecological anthropology, this book must begin with a description of the two kinds of environment the Barí inhabit, the natural and the cultural. The Barí live in the southwestern lobe of the Lake of Maracaibo, a region bisected by the Colombia-Venezuela border. Their homeland is a pocket of lowland neotropical rain forest enclosed on all sides by different biomes. To the west and south, the lowland rain forest shades into submontane and montane forests, as one climbs the slopes of the eastern cordillera of the Andes, which divides, just south of Barí lands, into a giant Y whose arms enclose the Maracaibo Basin. To the north, rainfall diminishes and the rain forest gives way to lowland semideciduous and deciduous forest and eventually to savannah. Precipitation is also lower to the east, but there, instead of savannah and deciduous forest, most of the landscape is taken over by the swamps that fringe this section of Lake Maracaibo. Although the Barí certainly raided outside the area just described and may have had settlements there in some historical periods , there is some evidence that Barí territory often coincided with the limits of evergreen tropical rain forest. Although their forest has been inhabited by human beings for centuries and although the human inhabitants have introduced a few agricultural Introduction 3 domesticates, affecting the the...