Godparents and Trading Partners: Social and Economic Relations in Peruvian Amazonia

Killick, Evan

doi:10.1017/s0022216x08004008

Cited by 26 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Their system of delayed reciprocity (Killick 2008) serves to maintain dayto-day commercial relationships as well as providing access started secondary school but not completed, = 5 completed secondary school, = 6 started superior school but not completed, = 7 completed superior school b Agricultural income refers to last 12 months, non-agricultural income to last 6 months (approximately 1 Nuevos Soles = USD 3) c The farmers' seed lot is not located by river (refers to the largest seed lot: only one farmer had seed lots located both by and off river) to unrelated brides for young men. The system encompasses village households and also outsiders, such as mestizos, who also base some of their economic transactions on reciprocity (Killick 2008(Killick , 2009). The main collective action institution in the study area is locally (and in other parts of Peru such as the Altiplano) known as minga.…”

Section: The Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Seed Systems and Farmers’ Seed Choices: The Case of Maizein the Peruvian Amazon

2010

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This paper analyzes how local seed system institutions support seed diversity, itself a requirement for agrobiodiversity maintained on-farm. The paper focuses on maize seed diversity in the central Peruvian Amazon. Using household and community level data from three different cultural groups from the central Peruvian Amazon, empirical results show the importance of collective action and the mediating role of ethnicity in the functioning of informal seed systems that in turn affect farmers' choices regarding conservation of seed diversity. This implies that policies are needed to protect the relatively open seed exchanges of such local practices as a way to sustain onfarm agrobiodiversity.

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Section: The Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Seed Systems and Farmers’ Seed Choices: The Case of Maizein the Peruvian Amazon

2010

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“…Changes arising from their presence are therefore merely ‘material’ rather than ‘social’ in nature. Killick (2008) has more recently argued that Asheninka assimilate present‐day commercial traders to their traditional indigenous ayompari trading partners, as a way of ensuring a balanced and mutually beneficial relationship.…”

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confidence: 99%

Demonic trade: debt, materiality, and agency in Amazonia

Walker

2012

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article examines Amazonian Urarina engagements with the system of debt peonage in light of the conceptual and ontological premises of the traditional subsistence economy. It argues that to view debt as a mechanism for harnessing indigenous labour is inadequate for comprehending the wilfulness with which Urarina indebt themselves to outsiders today, which should instead be considered in terms of local theories of agency and an aversion to immediate, market‐style exchange. This relational and hierarchically distributed view of agency is further implicated in ideas surrounding industrial goods, which are ascribed to the Devil as their putative maker and owner, and who is seen as the source of their power over people in this life and the next. If this brand of commodity ‘fetishism’ expresses moral ambivalence towards capitalism, it also mediates otherwise contradictory forms of production and exchange, repudiating the possibility of total rupture between persons and things. Résumé L’auteur examine ici l’engagement des Unarina d’Amazonie dans un système de servage pour dettes, à la lumière des prémisses conceptuelles et ontologiques de l’économie de subsistance traditionnelle. Il avance que la vision de l’endettement comme d’un mécanisme visant à capturer la main‐d’œuvre indigène ne convient pas pour comprendre la bonne volonté avec laquelle les Unarina s’endettent aujourd’hui vis‐à‐vis de parfaits inconnus. Au lieu de cela, l’approche doit s’appuyer sur les théories locales de l’agent et sur l’aversion des Unarina envers les transactions non différées, de type marchand. Cette notion d’agency relationnelle, distribuée de façon hiérarchique, se retrouve dans les idées liées aux marchandises industrielles, dont le fabricant et le propriétaire supposé serait le Diable, considéré comme la source de leur pouvoir sur les gens dans cette vie et la vie future. Quoique ce mode de « fétichisme » des marchandises exprime une ambivalence morale à l’égard du capitalisme, il médie par ailleurs des formes de production et d’échange qui seraient sinon contradictoires, réfutant la possibilité d’une rupture totale entre les gens et les choses.

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“…The individual and long-term kin-making process involved in the trading partnerships that used to tie the Trio and Wayana to their maroon neighbors is similar to other forms of interethnic trading relations performed in other parts of Amazonia (Killick 2008;Santos-Granero 2007). By being associated repeatedly with bodily intimacy and process, without the potential for affinity, the maroon trading partner has come to represent an ideal in which trust was truly lived, against which other forms of trading partnership are compared.…”

Section: The Wealth Of the Body 21mentioning

confidence: 97%

The Wealth of the Body: Trade Relations, Objects, and Personhood in Northeastern Amazonia

Grotti

2013

J Latin Amer Carib Anth

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This article is an analysis of trade among the Trio (Suriname), and their relationship with objects and persons in their quest for manufactured goods. Based on data mostly collected in the Trio village of Tëpu in southern Suriname, it discusses trade from the point of view of Amerindian sociality, with regard to the nature of the interpersonal relations involved. I examine trade through the prism of an Amerindian understanding of personhood, the body and materiality, and show how these relationships tend to be fabricated over a lifetime, eventually becoming an integral and material part of the actors involved. This is manifested in the way Trio social space is constructed and inhabited as an extension of the body, and how objects acquired through trade come to elicit narratives of past exploits and travels to distant spheres of alterity. [Brazil, Guyana, indigenous people, social anthropology, Surinam]They found a Nation of Indians, which never had seene white men, or Christians before, and could not be drawne to any familiar commerce, or conversation, not so much as with our Indians, because they were strangers to them, and of another Nation (Harris 1928:111).1 WHEN EXPLORER AND COLONIZER Robert Harcourt reports the first inland journey that his brother Michael organized with Captain Harvey, a few of their own men, and sixty Amerindian helpers, he dwells on this surprising encounter with a group of indigenous inhabitants who refuse to trade with them. It is the first time since their landing on the northeastern shores of the Guiana region in the early 17th century that the party of English adventurers have come across Amerindians who refuse to engage with them in any form of social interaction; the incident is so remarkable that it is deemed worthy of a detailed description. Elsewhere, Harcourt recounts with satisfaction the ease with which the "friendly" nations of Indians have engaged in commerce since the English landed by the mouth of the river Wiapoco in May 1609.2 In his dry prose he repeatedly emphasizes that the riches of this new land are to be found in its commercial exploitation and the extraction of its natural resources such as timber rather than in the deluded search for gold mines. These attainable riches are readily provided by the local inhabitants in exchange for "toies, and such like trifeling things " (1928:106). Laden with the long lists that became a regular feature of early explorers' accounts (see Stedman 1806:(I) 417-9, (II) 197; Williamson

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Godparents and Trading Partners: Social and Economic Relations in Peruvian Amazonia

Cited by 26 publications

References 5 publications

Seed Systems and Farmers’ Seed Choices: The Case of Maizein the Peruvian Amazon

Seed Systems and Farmers’ Seed Choices: The Case of Maizein the Peruvian Amazon

Demonic trade: debt, materiality, and agency in Amazonia

The Wealth of the Body: Trade Relations, Objects, and Personhood in Northeastern Amazonia

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