South American Societies Research Articles

Subsistence productivity and hunting effort in native South America

The question of why people work more or less at various activities is an old one in anthropology and recently has surfaced in studies of native South American societies. Growing out of debates about protein scarcity, arguments have arisen over the reasons why people spend time on hunting and fishing. Some authors suggest that labor allocation and other societal features can be explained with reference to absolute minimum requirements for specific nutrients (e.g., protein). This study presents data from four native Central Brazilian societies on the time spent at various subsistence tasks and the productivity of those tasks. The evidence suggests that decisions to allocate labor to hunting and fishing are influenced more by the overall possibilities for production in an area than by the availability of animal proteins alone. Satisfaction of calorie requirements appears to take precedence over satisfaction of protein requirements. In those societies in which gardening is highly productive, people can spend more time on hunting and fishing and improve the overall quality of their diet.

What Can We Learn When They Sing? Vocal Genres of the Suya Indians of Central Brazil

what the is all about. The of these societies is truly a different in which (in most cases) everybody performs, there are no full-time musical specialists, the sounds are not always easy to listen to, a piece may last 15 hours, and there is no easily accessible vocabulary with which to discover what they are doing. One is not surprised that musicians have preferred to work with the of musical specialists in other parts of the world, nor that anthropologists have felt ill-equipped and left the matter to marginal comments on song texts and frequent statements to the effect that music is very important to the members of this society. Unsurprising as it may be, the resulting neglect is nevertheless unfortunate, because is indeed very important. Regardless of how importance is measured, the amount of time and resources devoted to by the entire population of most Lowland South American societies is eloquent. Analyses of work habits show that subsistence could be assured with 3 or 4 hours of work a day under traditional conditions (Carneiro 1961); members of many societies sing nearly this long every day for long periods of time. Yet how much more we know about the socio-economic features of these societies than the musical! Music is a special form of communication. Its very nonspeech features make it a privileged vehicle for transmitting values and ethos that are more easily musicked than put into speech. These are communicated not only through the sounds, but in the movements of the performers, and the time, place, and conditions under which they are performed. In the following pages I will discuss some of the things we can 0014-1836/79/2303-0373$0.66 O 1979 Society for Ethnomusicology, Inc.

On the Misuse of Statistics: A Reply to Hirschfeld et al

cast doubt on the findings of Divale and Harris' 1976 article were drawn from raw data made available to Hirschfeld upon his request. All the raw data used by Divale and Harris were made available. However, Hirschfeld et a!. chose to ignore the bulk of this information in order to concentrate on a small part of it, the part that deals with South American societies. On an ad hoc basis, Hirschfeld et a!. select parts of this small portion, criticize Divale and Harris' use of the familiar I test, and perform a series of complex statistical analyses employing a test widi which most social scientists are un­familiar. Nowhere do they come to grips with the theory relating male supremacy

On power in egalitarian societies

Clastres' book [ 1 ], his last before the tragic, fatal accident that overtook him in Bolivia last year (and the first to be translated into English), stirs our entrenched expectations of a familiar subject. The book consists of a col? lection of essays which have appeared in journals, primarily L'Homme, between 1962 and 1973. The focus is on South American societies, particularly the Tupi-Guarani and the Guayaki among whom Clastres conducted his fieldwork, and the connecting theme is the problematic of "power". The introductory essay confronts certain ethnocentric survivals in contemporary anthropology; according to Clastres, we tend to define primitive societies [2] by characteristics they lack; we equate "power" and "authority", abstractly conceived, with the privileged use of "force" and, consequently, classify primitive societies as those without power, without the state. This implies that primitive societies are not ready, or not able, to acquire whatever they lack; the preferential use of biological metaphors such as "embryonic", "nascent", "developing", and "acephalous" attests to our evolutionary, if not progressivist, determinism. Since our approach to complex societies postulates their maturity and viability, we should grant equal properties to primitive societies. Consistent with this request, Clastres proposes First Principles: "Power" must be understood concretely, and as such is a variable in all societies. However, primitive peoples reject coercive-monopolistic behavior. Hence, primi? tive societies are not merely without a state, but societies against the state. Clastres' discourse is so confidently revolu? tionary [3] that he often fails to do justice to works which have analyzed cultural data on the basis of similar assumptions, but did not proceed to the formulation of a general and explicit conclusion. An example is Wagley's article on "Tapirape Shamanism" [4] . In Tapirape society, shamans have the highest prestige, the greatest wealth, and significant social control; since every death is ascribed to the shaman's sorcery, the shaman, and partic? ularly the powerful one, is often suspected of killing. If suspicion is fixed repeatedly on a certain shaman, people will decide upon his death, after which the killer can cleanse him? self by means of a ritual. We could interpret such informal but customary execution as a means of controlling aspirations to socially destructive power and maintaining egalitarian ism. Several studies on the organization of egalitarian societies invite similar conclusions [5]. But Clastre's indignation at the equation of power with coercive force, is not as new as it ap? pears. Radcliffe-Brown's famous definition of political organization as Karin Andriolo is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, New Paltz.