The Rhythm of Life on the Amazon Floodplain: Seasonality and Sociality in a Riverine Village

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between seasonality and sociality in a village of caboclos (Portuguese-speaking peasants of mixed descent) on the banks of the River Amazon. The aim is to revive Mauss's initial attempt to treat seasonality as intrinsic to the current and quality of social life, rather than simply as part of a framework of external environmental constraints. However, Mauss's argument was stuck in the contradictions generated by a strong nature/culture dichotomy. Contemporary dissolutions and revisions of this dichotomy provide the opportunity to return to Mauss. I shall argue that in the case of floodplain dwellers of the Brazilian Amazon, seasonality is constituted by the movements of people and the rhythmic structure of their social activities, which resonate with and respond to periodic changes in their floodplain environment. I conclude that this environment can be seen as work in motion, in which people's activities are a crucial part of that work, and seasonality is the periodicity of the creative movement itself. This article examines the seasonal rhythm of social life in a community of Portuguese-speaking floodplain dwellers (caboclos) on the River Amazon. My aim is to show that social life in this community has an intrinsic rhythmic character which is embodied in the history of practices and social relations in the environment. This undertaking is inspired by Mauss's brilliant study of the Eskimo (1979), in which he attempted to treat seasonality as inherent in the stream of social life rather than as part of a framework of external environmental constraints. My argument here is that the full force of this analysis has virtually been ignored in subsequent analyses of seasonality (see Evans-Pritchard 1940, for example), and in recent revisions and attempted dissolutions of the naturesociety dichotomy (see for example Croll & Parkin 1992; Descola & Palsson 1995). Like Mauss, I focus on a region where seasonality takes a pronounced and dramatic form. The floodplain of the Brazilian Amazon is a site of considerable economic, social and political importance in the area's history (Meggers 1971; Ross 1978). The middle reaches of the Amazon river (from Parintins to Santarem) are estimated to have a floodplain forty kilometres across. The variation in river height is about six to ten metres from wet to dry seasons. The whole area is more or less covered every flood, as it is an immense and flat landscape. These changes are not just visually dramatic, for they clearly have a profound influence on the ways in which people organize their annual activities.