This article is an analysis of value as explored from the perspective of a Native Amazonian group. Focusing on the Napo Runa, a Quichua-speaking people from the Ecuadorian Amazon, it demonstrates that processes of production, gender transformation, kinship, and cosmology create value in Napo Runa society. The article provides a symbolic and social analysis of the production, consumption, and circulation of meat and manioc beer. It is argued that the value of these foods derives not just from labour, but also from cultural notions of desire and cosmology. Value in this system is a consistent pattern of thought and action modelled on a complex, multi-stranded theory of kinship and substance transformation.
In the Quijos/Upper Napo region of the Western Amazonian frontier,long-distance exchange, markets, and verticality represent significant aspects of social organization that can be found in historical sources. It is argued that local and regional exchanges followed a social logic where human transactions such as marriage—not “commercial”goods—occupied the highest tier of value in the circulation process. These principles are explored through an analysis of ethnohistorical sources and data from fieldwork in contemporary Upper Napo communities. It is suggested that the lowland societies of Quijos/Upper Napo and the highland societies of Upper Napo were of a similar structural type, contrasting in principle with the more hierarchical social orders of the Central and Southern Andes.
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