Locating, restoring and recompiling my digital records and documents, following crashes of two of my external hard disks, I have come across many documents that I hadn’t viewed in a long time. Among them are the papers I wrote for different classes as an undergraduate student at Grinnell College in the United States of America between 1990 and 1994. I have decided to reproduce some of them here in my personal blog.
This is a paper I wrote for my Introduction to Anthropology class.
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Adaptations of Amazon Rainforest Mundurucu Culture to External Influences
The Mundurucu culture could be characterized as primitive and very traditional. However, under the influence of the outsiders, the Mundurucu underwent drastic changes. The changes came about as demanded by the forces that worked towards the establishment of the new way of life which incorporated a new set of symbols giving rise to, as it were, a new culture. What were the changes they went through? What were the forces that drove the Mundurucu to take the adaptive steps they undertook? How successful were they in their move towards this new way of life? To what extent were they held back by “cultural crystallization”? Before providing answers to these questions, first, traditional Mundurucu culture will be examined. Following that, the new society and its culture will be explored with the significant changes identified. Having done this, the forces and the motivations responsible for the changes will be presented. Lastly, the effectiveness of the adaptive and the symbolic changes undertaken will be analyzed.
The way of life of the Mundurucu living in small village communities in the wilderness and isolation of the Amazon valley was tied into the division of labor according sex and age. Hunting was the prime activity followed by gardening. The former was exclusively a man’s activity and the latter ( and gathering ) was, for the most part, a woman’s job. The primacy of hunting over other occupations must have been derived from their religion though it provided a smaller proportion of the food they ate.In their religion the game and the spirits are associated with each other. As for fishing which also they undertook, woman had only a marginal part in it. Young boys did not work as compared to girls who looked after the younger ones.
Men were the public figures and women essentially belonged to the house. A house too would be said to belong to a particular woman because it was the center of female activities and a woman (the oldest one) was the authority figure. Even the man who belonged to the house through consanguineal or affinal relation was under the control of the woman of the house. This could be attributed partly to the matrilocal mode of residence of married couples. The men would spend most of their time outside the house ( either hunting or spending time in the men’s house ), while the women worked within the periphery of the village. It was only occasionally that man spent any time at all in the house his wife and children lived in. Consequently there was, among the women, a strong sense of solidarity borne of lifelong companionship and cooperation. This was absent in men.
Men relied on an ideological solidarity. Male dominance was founded solely on the myths surrounding the musical instrument Karoko. It linked male superiority and hunting. According to the myths, the men are supposed to have gained control over the instrument which the women previously controlled and in the process they are supposed to have succeeded in subduing the women. The belief that the offering of meat to the instrument pleased the ancestors can be traced to the hunting the men pursued. It is then the role of a man as a hunter that is superior, and that of the women inferior. All men held on to this ideology.
Important aspect of Mundururcu society were the communal undertakings and sharing. All the men went hunting in a group. Women undertook both gardening and farina processing collectively. However, the men helped in the clearing of the land for gardening. What was brought home hunted and/or produced in the village became food for all. The women divided them equally among all the families or a limited few. The unit of both production and sharing was thus the community as a whole.
The concept of communality extended to belongings too. There were few material things to be owned. The individual houses in the village were not owned by the occupants as such. The houses because they moved the village every ten years did not have any value. The only things for which ownership could be claimed were articles of clothing, utensils, weapons, tools and few other portable objects. However, the utensils, tools and weapons could very easily be passed on from one person to another for usage by the second person. Thus ownership was not exclusive.
The changes started with trade of rubber. Rubber and surplus manioc flour were traded for foreign goods like metal utensils and household tools. What started as a part-time occupation of rubber tapping during dry turned into a full time occupation in time. Nuclear families began to move and settle permanently near rubber tapping site. The locality of the new settlement was determined by where the tapping was done. There was no evidence of conscious or unconscious effort to form any kind of a closed community even remotely resembling their traditional village. As a result, a lot of the features of their previous village got pushed aside.
The new “village” was formless and lacked important features of the earlier one. It didn’t have a men’s house; the men lived with the family in the house. It didn’t have the circular shape and there was no plaza. Both the female solidarity and the male “solidarity” too had weakened considerably. There were few occasions for women to get together and the men in turn had no musical instrument they upheld. In addition, matrilocal residence had yielded to patrilocal and neolocal residence, too. Individual ( or family ) fishing had replaced communal hunting. Communal sharing and cooperation was virtually unseen. The whole sense of community was gone. Each family was by itself and for itself.
Labor division by sex and age had broken down considerably. There was considerable overlap in the occupations of the sexes, and also more sibling involvement in everyday work was evident. The overlap of male and female work could be seen in child upbringing too. They utilized a lot of metal utensils and some machinery.
What caused the changes? What forces pushed them towards the change? The primary cause was the introduction of the foreign goods by the traders. This, as was mentioned in the beginning, induced a change in the symbolic value system. The women were the most active in coaxing their husband to get them what they wanted from the traders. What they generally sought were utensils and clothing. The fact that they weren’t aware of what else the traders had to offer them made them even more receptive to trading because they had been able to associate the trader’s goods with a different way of life with different meanings and symbols. They could see another life fraught with exotic materials. All that was required of them was some goading of their husband to leave the village and settle permanently in the rubber taping area. And they did.
The move made,the people found themselves going through adaptive changes with little opposition from cultural crystallization. It appears that the steps taken were almost unconscious involving very little or no difficulty at all. Necessity of mutual cooperation between the couple clearly rode over tradition. For instance, husbands helped wives in farina making. Women were more actively involved in fishing which replaced hunting. Child rearing practice changed included beating and scolding to get the youngster to help in the parents’ work which was unheard of in the traditional village. Beliefs in sorcery, witchcraft and shamanism were still prevalent.
The adaptive changes can be seen to have been very effective. Within the nuclear families, in the absence of the closed-in community, cooperation among the members fostered very easily. There is little account of dissatisfaction felt over having undertaken the move and that was only from the side of the men.
Individuals or small groups seem to perform better in a lot of the day to day work. A husband or a team of husband and wife could make enough catch of fish for the whole family. In the traditional village, on the other hand, even with greater effort, less food and useful material could be provided for the family.
Greater sense of well being seem to be evident in the new life style. With all the utensils, the machinery and the efficiency of providing food has come along a longer time of leisure. Both men and women don’t have to work as hard as before and still manage to get enough to sustain the family. There is little complaints from the women. The adaptations have evolved families, what used to be an insignificant unit, into a close-nit nuclear families in which each and every member now takes active part in the lives of the others.
For the time being, the change seems to have been for the better. The dichotomy between male and female role is not evident. They have been brought closer together, physically and emotionally, making the termination of a marriage harder to follow through. In the long run it could be said that the status of women in the Mudurucu society will reach the point as their counterparts in the industrialized countries have now when they will have to attempt at retrieving the solidarity they once had and lost. But that is looking too far out into the future.
