William T. Vickers

From opportunism to nascent conservation : The case of the Siona-Secoya.

Siona-Secoya hunters of the northwest Amazon strive to maximize short-term yields to provision their households with meat. The observed patterns of hunting more closely resemble the predictions of optimal foraging theory (OFT) than they do a conservation ethic. In the past the Siona-Secoya worried little about conservation because they believed that good shamans attracted abundant game. When hunting was poor, shamans performedyagé ceremonies and appealed to supernatural gamekeepers for the release of more animals from the underworld. The sustainability of Siona-Secoya hunting was aided by factors such as low human population density, dispersed settlements within large hunting territories, settlement movement, and limited hunting technology. Today, increasing involvement in the national economy is leading the Siona-Secoya to invest more time in agriculture and wage labor, and less in traditional foraging activities. Colonization, deforestation, and industrial pollution now pose the greatest threats to wildlife in eastern Ecuador. Because of these changes, the Siona-Secoya are becoming interested in environmental protection and conservation. Several of their efforts to protect forest resources and mitigate pollution are discussed and evaluated.

Tropical forest mimicry in Swiddens: A reassessment of Geertz's Model with Amazonian data

Geertzs famous hypothesis that horticulturalists practicing shifting cultivation intercrop their plots to mimic the protective structure of the tropical forest is evaluated in view of data on the structural ecology of the tropical forest and swidden plots in Amazonian Ecuador. The cultivation practices of the Siona-Secoya Indians reveal a three-fold typology of cropping patterns (high-diversity intercropping, low-diversity intercropping, and monocropping), with variation among the types in terms of plot size and distribution, cultigen inventory, structural complexity, and function. These gardens and the tropical forest are compared and analyzed in terms of morphology, ecological characteristics, and human manipulation and utilization. Gardens with high-diversity intercropping show certain similarities to the tropical forest, as Geertzs model predicts, but their highly transient structure does not function as a mature ecosystem. Furthermore, plots with low-diversity intercropping and monocropping show few similarities to the forest. Garden structure is best understood in terms of the economic utilization of tropical cultigens displaying specific habits, rather than by analogy to tropical forest physiognomy and function.

The religious ethnography of lowland South America

Hill, Jonathan. Keepers of the Sacred Chants: The Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. xix + 245 pp. including glossary, notes, references, and index.

Rural communities in South America: Recent studies

40.00 cloth. Wilbert, Johannes. Mystic Endowment: Religious Ethnography of the Warao Indians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. xvii + 308 pp. including bibliography and index.

Adaptive responses of native Amazonians

34.95 cloth,

optimal diet breadth theory as a model to explain variability in Amazonian hunting

24.95 paper.

Traditional Concepts of Power Among the Siona-Secoya and the Advent of the Nation-State

Ruggiero, Kristin Hoffman. And Here the World Ends: The Life of an Argentine Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. xvii + 226 pp. including notes, glossary, references, and index.

In the Eyes of the Beholder: Leadership and the Social Construction of Power and Dominance among the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon

32.50 cloth. Weismantel, Mary J. Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. xiii + 234 pp. including photographs, maps, appendix, references, and index.

The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place, and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, A.D. 1000–2000

33.95 cloth.