The Ecology of the Barí: Rainforest Horticulturalists of Latin America

3. Social Environment and Ethnohistory

CHAPTER 3 Social Environment and Ethnohistory All human groups relate to a natural environment of land and climate, flora and fauna, and to a social environment of other peoples. As described in chapter 2, the natural environment of the Barí seems to have been fairly constant over the last millennium or so. It has always presented daily fluctuations and seasonal changes, but over time the rain forest has remained reasonably constant, with a landscape, climate, flora, and fauna similar from one century to the next, until extensive forest clearing began in the 1920s. The social environment is another story. It has manifested dramatic changes throughout the five hundred years for which we have written records. Thus this description of the social environment of the Barí is essentially an account of their history; and, vice versa, the study of their history is an indispensable part of a study of the ecology of these people. The main conclusion of an investigation of Barí history is that despite the profound transformations that the social environment has undergone, there have been two major forces originating in the social environment throughout most—but not all—of known Barí history. The first is that these people have been prey to stronger neighbors for most of the past half millennium, neighbors who enslaved and murdered them when they could find them. (There is reason to believe that this subjugation has deep pre-Columbian roots.) The second is that they have also been subjected to two documented—and several more possible—disastrous epidemics of Old World diseases, as well as the continuing threat of other, no less deadly endemic Old World diseases. Both the predations of neighboring humans and disease produced heavy death tolls. In one of those cynical ironies of history, the times of less intense human predation on the Barí have been those of the worst disease mortality. The dispersed Barí settle- 62 The Ecology of the Barí ment pattern and their semisedentary migration pattern played an important —probably decisive—role in saving the Barí from extinction in the face of these threats. Barí history can be conveniently divided into six periods on the basis of the availability and quality of the historical data, as well as by the seminal events in that chronicle (Table 3.1). The first period encompasses nearly a century, from the discovery of Lake Maracaibo in 1499 to the first use in a historical document of the word Motilón, usually in its plural form, Motilones—the name given to the Barí in all subsequent documents, until the name they used for themselves was learned half a century ago. (The Spanish word Motilón, from the verb motilar, means roughly “those who cut their hair short.”) The label seems always to have included the Barí, and it is clear that it was applied to them alone from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. In this period we know a fair amount about the Lake Maracaibo region in general but little that is specific to the Barí. According to known records, the label “Motilón” was first applied to an Indian tribe of the Maracaibo Basin in 1592. This appearance marks the beginning of the second period, which lasted until 1771. Like the first period of Barí history, this one was a time of considerable hostility and depopulation. Data specific to the Barí, although tantalizingly few, are available from this period. Table 3.1. Periodization of Barí history 1499–1591 From discovery of Lake Maracaibo to first use of tribal label “Motilón” Period I 92 years 1592–1771 From first mention of “Motilones” to the first pacification Period II 180 years 1772–1818 “Reduction to missions” of the first pacification Period III 46 years 1819–1911 From abandonment of the missions to beginning of the oil invasions Period IV 93 years 1912–1959 Oil and land invasions and intensification of warfare Period V 47 years 1960– Second pacification Period VI 52 years Social Environment and Ethnohistory 63 In 1772 peaceful contact with the Barí was established, and over the course of the next few decades many of them were “reduced to missions,” as the Spanish phrase of the time had it. The missionaries, Capuchin monks, were expelled from the Bolivarian countries in 1821 for their royalist sympathies; political infighting had already forced them from their missions to the Barí by 1818. In the course of this half century...