Prophets of Agroforestry: Guaraní Communities and Commercial Gathering [1 ed.] 9780292761735, 9780292744875

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Prophets of Agroforestry

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Prophets of Agroforestry: Guarani Communities and Commercial Gathering

Richard K. Reed

^ U ^ f e University of Texas Press w Austin

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Copyright © 1995 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1995 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reed, Richard K., date Prophets of agroforestry : guarani communities and commercial gathering / Richard K. Reed, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-292-77067-7

1. Chiripa Indians—Agriculture. 2. Chiripa IndiansEconomic conditions. 3. Chiripa Indians—Social conditions. 4. Agroforestry—Paraguay—Mbaracayu. 5. Human ecology— Paraguay—Mbaracayu. 6. Economic development—Paraguay— Mbaracayu. 7. Mbaracayu (Paraguay)—Economic conditions. 8. Mbaracayu (Paraguay)—Social conditions. I. Title. F2679.2.C5R44 1995 338.1 '09892 '133—dc20

94-10634

ISBN 978-0-292-76173-5 (library e-books) ISBN 978-0-292-76174-2 (individual e-books)

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments i. Introduction

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vii i

2. Yerba, Society, and the State in Mbaracayu

32

3. Kinship, Households, and Community

74

4. Leadership and Religion

101

5. Chiripa Agroforestry

123

6. Patrones, Capataces, and Caciques

166

7. Conclusions

185

Postscript: The Chiripa and Recent Changes

195

Notes

221

References

233

Index

243

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Illustrations

Photos following page xiv i. 2. 3. 4.

Figures Paraguay and the Mbaracayu Region Indigenous Communities of Eastern Paraguay Itanarami (1982) Jesuit and Mestizo Movement through Mbaracayu

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Historic Setdements near Itanarami Kin Group A Kin Group B Kin Group C Avamaino's Garden (1983) Mbarbakua Yvate Mbarbakua Mbyky Mbarbakua T i

7 8 12 40

(1600-1750)

Tables 1. Gender Division of Labor 2. Aggregate Guarani Marketbasket (17 Households) 3. Income, Family Composition, and Garden Size (Itanarami, 1982)

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62 80 81 81 126

141 142 143

93 98 151

4 . Labor Allocation by Season

156

5. Sample of an Adolescent's Wage Expenditures

161

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Preface and Acknowledgments

My interest in the Chiripa originated with reports of genocide of indigenous groups in Paraguay (Arens 1976). Although stories of government atrocities were widely disseminated, a study undertaken by MayburyLewis and Howe (1979) suggested that the demise of forest societies in Paraguay, as throughout lowland Latin America, was not as simple as a specific policy or program of genocide. My own visit to Paraguay in 1981 reaffirmed the reality of the situation as a complex one. Political decisions in capital cities promote economic processes in rural areas with social consequences that are often unintended, but nevertheless devastating, for small-scale societies. Moreover, indigenous groups are not always destroyed in the process; they often fight back and sometimes garner a place for themselves in the larger system. The following is an exploration of these types of complex relations, linkages that develop between the larger world and lowland South America's indigenous population. I went to Paraguay to document the social and economic processes that are destroying its indigenous societies. Rather than work with a pristine, isolated ethnic group, I chose one that is reputed to be the most "acculturated" of the Guarani groups, the Chiripa (Metraux 1948, 71; Cadogan 1959, 83). In many ways, they appeared to be very poor Paraguayan peasants, dressing in the remnants of cheap imported clothes, living in singlefamily thatched huts within several hours walk of Paraguayan towns, and working for cash to supplement their meager gardens. Being a student of David Maybury-Lewis's, I envisioned a finished product entided The Ravaged and the Indigent. The first months in the field jnade several things clear. First, national colonization and commercial development are not new to the region; they began centuries ago. The arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century brought conquistadors into the forests of the Chiripa. Setders and merchants followed, developing an extensive network of setdements and trading centers that fed valuable forest commodities into the world's markets. The Chiripa have traditionally been linked to the larger society through

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Prophets of Agroforestry

these trading relationships, collecting herbs and resins for sale. Incursions of farming and ranching into the region are only the most recent in a series of waves of economic development. Furthermore, despite their long contact with, and apparent similarity to, the Paraguayan peasants, I discovered that the Chiripa maintain an identity, culture, and set of social relations that differ fundamentally from those of the dominant society. Community leaders invoke indigenous religious imagery; young men perform bride service upon marriage; even the Chiripa language differs from the Guarani used by the Paraguayan campesinos. Most importandy, the Chiripa identity derives from the forest that they live in, making them immutably different from the people they call "outsiders." Despite widespread familiarity with the national culture and society, fostered by centuries of commercial activity in their forests, the Chiripa have not been dispersed or assimilated into the larger society. Finally, it is becoming clear that intensive development will soon alter relations that the Chiripa have maintained for centuries with the larger society. In many areas of eastern Paraguay, ranching and intensive agriculture have already dispersed indigenous communities. Recent development in the forests of the Chiripa is bringing new pressures into the heart of this previously vast extractive region. This raises two questions. If the Chiripa have been in contact with the national society for centuries, how do we explain the present social and economic differences between the Chiripa and the national majority? Second, how was the previous economy different from the ranching and agro-industries that are eroding the position of Paraguay's indigenous groups now? Although I retained my interest in the social and economic links between the Chiripa and extractive industries, I shifted my perspective to explore the factors that have permitted the Chiripa to maintain their distinct culture and society into the present. I contrasted the ties fostered by extractive industries with those of the "second conquest55 that is now sweeping through lowland regions. The Chiripa case is important for understanding interethnic relations in tropical forest regions. At one time, extractive activities linked most of these indigenous groups to national societies and international economies. Although agriculture and ranching have largely replaced extractive industries, the Chiripa occupy one of the few regions where forest extractive industries continue to dominate rural commerce. Abundant forest resources remain available to these communities long after other Paraguayan indigenous groups have begun to suffer the effects of intensive land development. Chiripa agroforestry provides a model that would allow other ethnic minorities to integrate themselves into the larger system while still retaining a degree of control over the form and intensity of the interethnic relationship.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

There are no easy solutions to the conflict between indigenous peoples and larger societies. This research does not pretend to define strategies that are universally applicable, but it does identify factors that permitted Chiripa society to successfully contend with previous forms of national development. This understanding may allow other indigenous groups and ethnic minorities greater influence over their relations with larger societies. Research was carried out in Paraguay between 1981 and 1984, followed by numerous visits in subsequent years. During the two years that I was in residence in Paraguay, sixteen months were spent in Chiripa communities. A setdement called Itanarami was my primary research site and served as a base from which I visited other villages along the headwaters of the Jejui River, a region known as Mbaracayu. These included the villages of Mboi Jagua, Fortuna, Tapo, and Santa Carolina. My original intent had been to spend considerable time in all five communities, but I found it more useful to focus my attention on the situation and history of one group and content myself with censuses and periodic surveys in each of the others. My normal work schedule was comprised of spending approximately four weeks in the community, followed by three days to a week away organizing notes, resting, and exploring the archives in Asuncion. Transportation on the frontier varies with the weather. During the drier periods, it was possible to find transportation to within ten kilometers of Itanarami; when it rained, the nearest passable roads were two hundred kilometers away. When I began research in Itanarami, I spoke litde Guarani. A six-week tutorial near the capital city had provided me with only a smattering of basic phrases and conjugations. Only one man in Itanarami had any understanding of Spanish. So, in addition to swatting mosquitoes and building relationships in the community, the first months were devoted to language study. My speaking knowledge improved quickly and all research was done in Guarani. My knowledge of a second, ritual dialect of Guarani, called Guamniete^ remains basic. After the first months, I moved into the house of a recendy widowed older man, Kai Tani, and for the remainder of my stay, he shared his meager food supply and made his home (and relatives) mine. My life-style was necessarily simple. I brought my hammock, a few clothes, notebooks, and litde else. There was no privacy, and any goods I had simply created a disparity that made everybody uncomfortable. The litde food that I periodically brought in from the nearby mestizo community was distributed quickly by Kai Tani among friends and relatives. We hoped that their return gifts would provide for us when his crops were gone and traps empty. They didn't always, and we spent a good deal of time hungry. The forest's unlimited supply of caffeinated yerba mate (Ilex Parapfuayensis) made all of this more acceptable. My goal was not just to live with the Chiripa, but to live as close to

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Prophets ofAgroforestry

their material level as possible. It seemed to make little sense to try to understand Chiripa economy while surrounded by the technology and foodstuffs of my own society. Besides, as sharing was mandatory, my choice was to provide for the total community or do without. I chose the latter. The benefits of this perspective were enormous: I developed some understanding of hunger and work, and I created relationships that were less mediated by commodities and more based on shared experience. The approach had its disadvantages, however. I sometimes found myself hungry to the point of distraction, and the Chiripa understood that I had access to a good deal more than I had with me and were aware of the fiction of my condition. As a means of building alliances with my hosts, I began my research by working with them. I cleared fields, cut fence posts and hunted with anyone who would have me. I continued these activities throughout my stay in the community and, by the end, was considered a help in some of the less technical and arduous activities. Rest periods provided considerable time for conversation, which not only improved my language skills, but provided much of the information in this book. As my relationships improved, I began formal surveys of household production, consumption, and exchange. Agricultural records were maintained for twenty-one months. Allocation of household labor was recorded using random sampling as oudined by Johnson (1975). Every seven to fourteen days, during a complete agricultural cycle, income and expenditures were recorded in detail for each household. After the first year, I extended my research into four neighboring communities, doing genealogical and agricultural surveys, as well as collecting work histories of adult men. These employment surveys were complemented by surveys and interviews with regional patrons and merchants, both past and present. Since completing the basic research, I have returned periodically to visit friends and ask specific questions that have come to mind in the writing process. The recent changes offer some hope for the future, despite the deforestation that is bearing down on the region. Itanarami has recently gained tide to its land, one of the first Chiripa communities to do so. This has spawned increased pride and self-confidence, as well as a plan and contract to sell off any and all of the remaining valuable wood. The Chiripa have high hopes for a conservation program in their watershed, which would create a biosphere reserve of a major portion of their forests. Chapter Organization Description of any system demands that an arbitrary choice be made concerning where to begin one's analysis. The choice is problematic in explaining complex interactions between two distinct production systems

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Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

and two different social groups, especially in this case, where the Chiripa move between distinct production spheres. This work, then, will begin with extraction and the national system, move to Chiripa society and production, and finally return to cover ethnic relations. The first chapter introduces the topic, sets the social and ecological context for Chiripa life, and points to the importance of production in understanding interethnic relations. The second chapter analyzes the development of commercial extraction and its importance to the formation of the state. Of particular interest is the relation between labor and mestizo society in rural Paraguay. It is suggested that the debt bondage and institutionalized violence that kept workers in the isolated yerbals (stands of yerba trees) formed the basis for the authoritarian political structures that dominated mestizos on the frontier. In contrast, Chiripa residents of the region worked in the yerba groves without succumbing to coercive labor relations or this authoritarian society. The third and fourth chapters examine Chiripa society. The third chapter oudines Chiripa kinship and its importance in creating flexible social groups. Extended kin connections provide families with access to productive resources and create incipient leadership positions for older males. Nuclear family groups retain considerable social and economic independence, moving among kin groups to avoid domination. Chapter 3 explains the factors that keep Chiripa society egalitarian; Chapter 4 analyzes what holds it together. The Chiripa have retained their own religion, and it remains a fundamental organizing force in their society. Rather than organize around coercive class relations, families affiliate with religious leaders who forge cohesive groups from disparate groups. The fifth chapter analyzes the means by which indigenous production allows the Chiripa to avoid coercion from the larger society. Chiripa commercial agroforestry is notable for its diversity and flexibility. The two sectors' differing land and labor demands allow producers to move between commercial and subsistence production without creating conflict or hierarchies. Therefore, families have been able to maintain subsistence production despite involvement in the commercial sector. Chapter 6 discusses the social relations of production and the ethnic links they create. Chiripa capataces (singular: capataz) organize indigenous laborers into work gangs and mestizo patrones market their production. Given the economic independence of the Chiripa, patrones have not been able to create relations of debt bondage. Moreover, given the social flexibility of Chiripa families, indigenous capataces have been unable to assert themselves as coercive leaders within Chiripa communities. The final chapter points to the theoretical and applied implications of this research. After exploring similarities between this case and the models of Brazilian frontiers developed by Bunker (1985) and Foweraker (1981), I

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Prophets of Agroforestry

suggest that they have ignored the importance of indigenous peoples. Pointing to the economic power of the Chiripa in the face of extractive industries in the Mbaracayu region, I note that this helps explain the ethnic diversity that remains throughout the lowland forests and suggests the possibility of empowering other indigenous peoples in relations with larger societies. Indigenous agroforestry in Mbaracayu is threatened, however, and many indigenous communities have begun to feel the strain of forest destruction and intensive development. The postscript surveys the process and problems of recent changes and suggests possible scenarios for empowering small-scale societies and for saving the forest through indigenous commercial agroforestry. Although the writing process may be isolating, any project such as this is the result of a group effort. In Paraguay, I have had the benefit of professional affiliation with the Centro Paraguayo de Estudios Sociologicos (CEPS). I am particularly grateful for the support of CPES's director, Domingo Rivarola, and staff members Daniel Campos, Ramon Fogel, and Luis Galleano. The materials of the CPES Centro de Documentacion proved a valuable resource to my research. Melissa Birch provided considerable data about Paraguay's economic history. Norman Anderson introduced me to the Chiripa, and John Renshaw helped shape the focus of research. Renshaw's influence at the Instituto Nacional del Indigena (INDI) made it easier for myself and others to attempt responsible scholarship in a highly politicized environment. At INDI, General Marcial Samaniego and Graciela Ocariz deserve recognition for being accepting of and interested in the research. Marilyn Rehnfeldt, Wayne Robbins, and Miguel Chase-Sardi shared freely of their knowledge. David Maybury-Lewis guided my original work with the Chiripa. Tom Barfield, Janice Chernela, Jason Clay, Jane Guyer, Ken Kensinger, Ted Macdonald, and Robert Murphy offered extremely helpful comments on various drafts of the manuscript. John Donahue, Patricia Cummins, and my colleagues at Trinity University provided a caring environment and critical institutional support. Rick Adams, Greg Urban, and Charley Hale offered their own ideas of the material while I was resident at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas. Theresa May provided friendly guidance at The University of Texas Press. The bulk of the research was carried out in Paraguay between October 1980 and November 1982 with funds provided by a doctoral fellowship of the Inter-American Foundation. Funds for initial research were provided by the National Science Foundation as a predoctoral fellowship. Much of the manuscript was rewritten under a junior faculty fellowship from Trinity University. The

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Preface and Acknowledgments xiii final research and writing of the manuscript was supported by the Institute of Latin American Studies of The University of Texas at Austin and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Program. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in the text are my own. My parents deserve special thanks for shaping my world view: Ruth Knutson for her intellectual curiosity and Ed Reed for his interest in and enthusiasm for humanity. Lisa Chatillon has given constant support. Finally, a special thanks to Kai Tani, Avamaino, and the people of Itanarami, who accepted me among them. I hope to repay the favor. I am solely responsible for what this research says about their community; I hope they approve of and agree with its findings.

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Yerba gatherers returning to the mbarbakua during Industrial Paraguaya's boom years (Koebel 1917).

Vi

11 wMiiJi&m^P •1^

Imaginative nineteenth-century view of Guarani laborers cutting, drying, and packing yerba (Hield 1882).

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Proud patron, with his family and personnel, surveying jomgadas on the way to market (Macdonald 1911).

Avatataendy planting corn in his manioc plot (photograph by author).

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Spinning cactus fiber (Bromelia caraguatd) into twine for a hammock (photograph by author).

Bringing yerba in from the forest (photograph by author).

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Carrying yerba to market (photograph by author).

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Prophets of Agroforestry

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1. Introduction

The people of South America's forests have captured the attention of the larger world. Each foray by anthropologists and adventurers brings smallscale societies onto the pages of glossy magazines. These people are pictured like travelers from another world; their cultures are seen as relics of another time, exposed for the first time to modernity. It is generally assumed that isolation has permitted these small-scale societies to survive into the present. The forest is seen as both vast and unexplored, with a darkness that has repelled centuries of entrepreneurs and explorers. This suggests that an accident of history has protected indigenous peoples from civilization; only now is the forest's canopy that has sheltered their fragile cosmologies and communities being rent to expose them to the harsh forces of economic and social change. In fact, indigenous societies are neither pristine nor fragile, and few have had the good fortune to be isolated from national societies and the international economy. As early as the sixteenth century, the world thrust itself into the very heart of South America, searching for spices, dyes, and rubber. Settlers explored the forests and merchants plied the rivers, bringing markets, and disease, to the farthest corners of the region. Indigenous populations literally were decimated, workers exploited, and societies transformed by these new pressures and opportunities. Even as they suffered these effects over the last centuries, as they traded loincloths and bows for soccer shorts and machetes, most of the societies withstood contact with the foot soldiers of the world system. Rather than remaining isolated populations untouched by the "modern world," these groups bore the brunt of the world's destructive power and earned places for themselves in complex frontier societies. The Chiripa of the forests of eastern Paraguay's Mbaracayu region are one of the indigenous groups that have asserted a distinct ethnic identity and social organization, despite permanent and at times intense relations with the larger society. In 1536, conquistadors ascended rivers into their forests and were soon exporting yerba mate (also referred to as yerba), a

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Prophets ofAgrofonstry

caffeinated tea native to the region, as far away as Lima and Potosi. The mestizo descendants of the conquistadors stayed on and, for four centuries, devoted themselves to extracting wealth from the forest. Skins, honey, timber, and especially yerba financed the Paraguayan state and fostered the development of a thriving society in the forest frontiers. The Chiripa were forced to contend with the very worst that colonial Europe had to offer. The indigenous population plummeted as communities were declared reducciones and pressed into labor for slavers and missionaries, and the entire population was beset by the diseases the Europeans brought (Hemming 1978, 492-496). The extractive industries fostered a brutal society that rivaled that of the rubber boom in its savagery. The remaining Chiripa responded to the changes in their forests. They produced yerba and sold it to the merchants that followed the explorers, establishing relationships with the international market. Moreover, the Chiripa maintained their own communities, using kinship ties and religious leadership as organizing structures in this new context. Today, a Chiripa community called Itanarami stands on the site of one of the first Guarani reducciones in eastern Paraguay. The people of Chiripa communities like Itanarami have won a place for themselves within Mbaracayu's contemporary frontier society. This regional system is comprised of two distinct sectors, one indigenous, the other mestizo. Mestizos are descendants of early Spanish colonists and their Guarani women, a group whose numbers have been swelled by recent European immigrants. They call themselves Pamguayos, pay their respects to the Catholic Church, and identify with the national society. Mestizo settlers, attracted to Mbaracayu by the wealth of the forests, have long been dominated by powerful political bosses, caudillos, who control the region's commercial lifeblood. In contrast, the people of Itanarami, and Chiripa communities like it, reject the coercive patronage and religion of the mestizos in favor of their own more egalitarian communities. This is not to suggest that relations between the two ethnic groups have been singularly harmonious or that Chiripa society was not changed by the contact. The Chiripa have obviously suffered many tragedies at the hands of mestizos, and indigenous society has changed drastically over its history of relations with the larger system. However, the people of Itanarami have been neither isolated nor assimilated; they have become an ethnic minority within a regional system. The case raises important questions. If the Chiripa have not been isolated in the forest, how do we explain their survival as an ethnic group in the face of a brutal frontier? Why were they not assimilated direcdy into the national society with the rest of the nation's poor laborers centuries ago? The Chiripa case highlights conditions that permit small-scale soci-

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Introduction

3

eties to respond effectively to the larger world. In doing so, it calls attention to specific aspects of contemporary development processes that dislocate and disperse indigenous groups. The theoretical literature on the relations between larger societies and local systems is extensive, but most perspectives emphasize the role of national societies and international economies. Students of Latin American frontiers, such as Bunker (1985) and Foweraker (1981), have applied dependency models to conceptualize the expansion of Brazilian society into its hinterland. These models focus on the power of capitalist economies to determine their relations with peripheral societies and point to the recreation of the nation-state on the frontier. Although they define the power of expansive systems, the models are at once too general to help one understand how indigenous groups have won a place for themselves within larger systems and too vague to define the aspects of contemporary development that are undermining those positions. Anthropologists, always attending to the grass roots, stress that local systems themselves influence relations with larger societies and economies (e.g., Whitten 1985; Howe 1986). They emphasize the need to study the internal organization of indigenous societies to understand these relations. Thus, Smith (1984) saw regional systems as formed by the interaction of local and supralocal social forces, suggesting that the diversity of these regional systems is actively influenced by small-scale societies in response to pressure and opportunities created by the larger system. Wolf (1982) recognized that indigenous groups have never been isolated, that all are embedded in larger social networks that have shaped their structures and histories. He adopted the concept of "mode of production" to underscore the strategic historical relations within and between social groups, without reducing social organization to production relations or production relations to ideal types. This book uses Wolf's model to explore the Chiripa community of Itanarami, highlighting critical relations within the indigenous society, as well as between the Chiripa and the Paraguayan mestizos. Three factors are of primary importance in this analysis. The first is the production system that has driven the national frontier into the region: forest extractive industries. The larger society has organized around the commercialization of forest commodities, notably yerba mate. At the state level, yerba financed Paraguay's governmental apparatus, offered incentives to defend the country's borders, and dominated national policy over four centuries. In Mbaracayu, yerba extraction promoted extensive commercial networks in which workers collected in the farthest reaches of the high forest. Nonindigenous workers were kept in debt peonage to brutal patrones. They labored under grueling conditions in isolated camps under

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Prophets of Agroforestry

the close guard of foremen. For these workers, the demands of the boss were the law of the land. This set of coercive relations served as the basis for the power structure for mestizos in the developing frontier society. The second critical factor is Chiripa production, which integrates commercial extraction with various noncommercial production activities, including subsistence gardening, hunting, and fishing. The collection and sale of forest products does not conflict with the labor and land needed for subsistence. Rather than restricting household economies, commercial production has allowed them to diversify. Given that commercial extraction does not contradict hunting, gardening, and fishing, it can be seen that Chiripa production has not been dominated by the larger, more powerful system. With control of their own subsistence, the Chiripa have avoided the brutal involvement of mestizo patrones and managed to maintain a level of ethnic autonomy. It is not enough, however, to simply show that Chiripa production retained a level of independence from the commercial system and that the Chiripa of Itanarami could retreat from mestizo society. One must also show why commercial agroforestry did not disperse the Chiripa or infuse the community with coercive relations; why neither mestizo patrones nor indigenous leaders were empowered by the Chiripa commercial activities. Thus, Chiripa society itself is a third factor, and it will be analyzed to understand how it adapted and asserted its egalitarian, noncapitalist nature within the constraints created by extractive systems. Chiripa communities are based on the affiliation of nuclear families to kin groups, which are organized around older religious leaders. Although unified through residence and religion, nuclear families are largely autonomous as economic units. Individual families are free to labor in commercial extraction without undermining community structure. Moreover, with the autonomy of nuclear families, the Chiripa have been able to avoid the insertion of coercive structures within their communities. Under different circumstances, commercial relations could become brutally oppressive. In this case, the Chiripa became neither landless laborers outside their own society nor semifeudal clients within during four centuries of contact. The Chiripa are not unique in the manner of their integration into the larger society; extractive industries served as the mechanism for many indigenous groups to establish relations with frontier societies (Kracke 1978, 57; Seeger 1981, 186; Jackson 1983, 217; Murphy 1956). The Chiripa case, however, deserves close scrutiny. There are few areas where extractive activities continue to be important in regional economies and fewer in which indigenous groups still perform commercial agroforestry. Even as cattle ranching and agro-industries move into the region, sustained extraction continues to play an important role in many Chiripa communities such as Itanarami.

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Introduction

5

Several lessons can be drawn from an understanding of the Chiripa case. First, it suggests that Latin America's indigenous peoples are more powerful than generally assumed. Contemporary perspectives of Latin American lowland frontiers, such as those of Bunker (1985) and Foweraker (1981), have emphasized important characteristics of extractive economies and their alliance with state systems on the frontier. However, these studies have often portrayed indigenous peoples as passive elements in the frontier expansion process. The Chiripa case makes it clear that indigenous inhabitants have not simply been resources to be exploited or fragile societies to be destroyed, that some have retained considerable latitude to adapt indigenous social institutions to the new context and negotiate their position as a group within frontier societies. Second, it is clear that the present destruction of indigenous societies in Latin America's lowland forests is not caused by interethnic contact or development per se, but by particular aspects of contemporary development that are destroying time-tested systems by which indigenous societies have adapted to European colonization. In fact, recent agricultural and ranching development in Mbaracayii show that even the social and economic position of the Chiripa is vulnerable to change in the nature of capitalist development. Transformation of the form of such development in this area now threatens Chiripa relations with the mestizo majority. Finally, this work points to the need for alternative models of development. Commercial agroforestry is proposed as a means that empowers indigenous minorities and protects the forest environment. Exploring and developing these models might assist the Chiripa and also promote the self-determination of other small-scale societies. The Setting Walking into Itanarami, one does not find the noble savage of National Geographic fame. The residents are not clad in loincloths and do not have lip plugs. Men wear bright soccer shorts emblazoned with the name of the latest Brazilian star; the women's gingham dresses are imported from Taiwan. Young women comb their hair with plastic combs and young men wear wristwatches, albeit without batteries. In these people's eyes is litde of the innocence that one sees on the faces of newly contacted groups in video documentaries. Their manner is neither open nor rude. The stranger is watched carefully and treated solicitously. Ambling through the community, the casual visitor sees nothing of the striking circular villages of ethnographic classics. A large field at the end of a battered jeep track marks the most obvious village center. A bright pink wooden schoolhouse rises from this clearing, oddly out of place in

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Prophets ofAgroforestry

the green, forested landscape. Small thatch houses are carved into the forest at the edge of the clearing, others are set in small clearings placed apparendy at random throughout the forest. The jumble of worn aluminum pans and hand-carved wooden benches is indistinguishable from the homes of the mass of poor Paraguayan peasantry. More careful observation, however, shows ample evidence of a vibrant Chiripa culture when juxtaposed with the trappings of Paraguayan society. Some differences are subrie. Many houses lack walls, and most have handwoven hammocks hanging next to the fire. The small carved benches are zoomorphic, vaguely resembling armadillos, and small gourd ratdes, decorated with feathers, hang from the rafters. The cultural differences become more apparent as night falls. People gather at a house near the school yard, where a log has been hollowed out and filled with fermenting corn. Women begin to beat bamboo posts on the ground in a slow cadence, men accompany them with the sharp staccato of their mbaraka (gourd ratdes). The elderly man of the house gets up from his hammock near the fire and approaches a small altar under the eastern eave of the house, entoning a muffled, repetitive chant. As darkness envelops the group, their music and firelight fill the air, infusing the undistinguished group of homes and their residents with a transcendent quality. It is clear that these people are neither poor Paraguayans nor "decultured" Chiripa. This study focuses on the people of Itanarami and a small group of other Chiripa communities in the Mbaracayu region of eastern Paraguay.l This area is defined by the dendritic watershed of the Jejui River (see Fig. i). Physically, Mbaracayu's rolling hills are covered by the last of Paraguay's previously vast subtropical deciduous forests. As a social unit, the region's multiethnic society includes not only a variety of indigenous peoples, but the descendants of Europeans as well. Geography Paraguay has been called a "riverside nation"; the Paraguay River bisects the country's land mass into two discrete zones, the Chaco and the eastern regions. The western Chaco is a low, flat plain that is usually desiccated by the hot, dry Andean winds or inundated by rains from the south. The geography east of the Paraguay River is fundamentally different. The weather is temperate and the topography of modest relief. In contrast to the inhospitable environment of the Chaco, eastern Paraguay's forests are lush, leading the romantic travelers of the nineteenth century to call them a "second Eden" or a "vanished Arcadia." The topography of this region is characterized by low, rolling hills. As one moves eastward from the Paraguay River's broad valley, marshy flatlands 140 meters above sea level give way to hills and eventually Cordilleras

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Figure i. Paraguay and the Mbaracayu Region with peaks of 450 meters. The highest forest and lushest growth occur along the western border of the region near the Parana River. The relief is created by the western extension of the Parana Plateau, a low, basaltic shield of southwestern Brazil that extends 150 kilometers into the region. Erosion of its steep flanks creates the ranges of hills known as the Cordillera de Mbaracayu, Cordillera de Amambay, Sierra de San Joaquin, and Cordillera de Ca'aguazu (see Fig. 2), the primary areas of indigenous setdement.

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Prophets ofAgroforestry GUARANI COMMUNITIES • PaT-Tavytera • Chiripa • Mbya

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Figure 2. Indigenous Communities of Eastern Paraguay Eastern Paraguay is thoroughly drained by dendritic water systems that flow off the Parana Plateau to the Paraguay or Parana rivers. Streams and rivers move quickly and cut sharp reliefs into the highlands, slowing and broadening as they reach the marshy flatlands. Each of the major river systems—the Jejui, Ypane, and Tebicuary—forms discrete drainage areas that channel not only water systems, but the movement of indigenous and mestizo peoples as well.

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The Jejui River, a forceful waterway ranging from ten to fifteen meters wide, drains a broad circular region covering 3,200 square kilometers. The region is covered by subtropical deciduous forest, with a canopy that rises as high as forty meters, broken by lower transitional forests near rivers and dry, grassy uplands. Although wide near the Jejui confluence with the Parana River, floodplains narrow to several hundred meters in hilly regions of the Parana Plateau. Primary forests above flood levels cover 85 percent of the region. The subtropical forest is categorized as Formation Alto Parana (Fundacion Aloises Bertoni 1987) and is inhabited by many species whose range previously extended east to the Brazilian coast. Most of this arboreal growth is deciduous, characterized by such hardwoods as lapacho (Tabebuia ipe) and cedro (Cedrela tubiflora Bert.). Lower forest along rivers and streams includes softer woods such as coco palm (CocosRomanzoffiani) and yerba. Their thick canopies prevent sunlight from reaching the forest floor, reducing but not eliminating dense undergrowth. Floodplains are dotted with oxbow lakes formed by vestigial riverbeds and covered by an almost impermeable growth of brush and bamboos. The lush forest of eastern Paraguay provides debris for a thick layer of litter. Soils vary from residual lateritic ones in the highest hills to redyellow podsoils to the east. Although soils are poor, the temperate rain and temperature allow organic material to accumulate. Under the canopy forest, detritus averages .25 meters and in low areas it often accumulates to over 1 meter. On upland savannah or where forest is disturbed, this detritus layer is rapidly destroyed by sunlight and leaching. Disturbance exposes residual soils that have a depth off meters to 15 meters. These vary from sand to clay, with considerable quantities of ferrous materials released from the lava bedrock (Fundacion Moises Bertoni 1987, 10). Soils are ideal for swidden production of manioc, corn, and beans, but they generally lack the exchangeable bases necessary for permanent, unfertilized agriculture. Seasonal variation distinguishes weather conditions in this region from the more tropical systems of equatorial zones. Temperatures and rainfall range between February highs and July lows, resulting in a single annual seasonal cycle. Despite several forty-degree-Centigrade days and freezing nights each year, summer highs are about thirty degrees Centigrade and winter lows average sixteen degrees Centigrade. Rainfall varies between 1,500 and 1,700 millimeters a year, ranging from the March rainy season average of 180 millimeters to the August dry season average of 50 centimeters. It is noteworthy that rainfall differences within years are overshadowed by variation between years (Bertoni [1926] 1972). In Asuncion, rainfall in some years has climbed as high as 340 centimeters and fallen as low as 80 centimeters.

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Prophets ofAgroforestry

Itanaramfs Social Context Itanarami is not isolated in these forested hills; instead, it is integrated into a complex, multiethnic society. First, it is part of a group of dispersed communities considered to be the Chiripa people. Second, the Chiripa, the nearby Pai-tavytera, and the Mbya are part of a Guarani-speaking ethnic group that extends throughout eastern Paraguay and western Brazil. Finally, this indigenous population maintains permanent and close relations with a mestizo population that comprises the vast majority of eastern Paraguay's rural society. The Guarani are the remnants of a population that once dominated the region from the Paraguay River to the Adantic Ocean. These peoples, linked by related Guarani languages, today remain in small and dispersed communities throughout the low, forested hills of eastern Paraguay and southern Brazil. In addition, a small population has moved into the Paraguayan and Bolivian Chaco. There are approximately 17,000 Guarani 2 in eastern Paraguay. Anthropologists and indigenistas have conventionally divided this population into three ethnic groups, the Chiripa, Pai-tavytera, and the Mbya, 3 based on cultural and historical differences. The Chiripa population numbers 5,175, approximately one third of the total Guarani population of eastern Paraguay. It is dispersed throughout the departments of Canindeyu, Alto Parana, and San Pedro, extending from the western edge of the Parana Plateau to the border with Brazil. Most of the twenty-two Chiripa communities are located in the low hills of the Cordillera de Mbaracayu. Others lie as far south as the Cordillera de Ca'aguazii and the Monda'y River. Although several communities have over a hundred households, the majority contain far fewer. A population of Chiripa also lives in Brazil, but it is difficult to determine its exact size. Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg (1976) and Schaden (1962) identified groups of Nandeva-guarani in Dourados and near the Paraguayan border that they consider to be Chiripa. Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg suggested there may be as many as 250 Chiripa families living in southern Mato Grosso. These reports are corroborated by Chiripa in Paraguay, who recognize relatives in these communities, and by some who have lived there themselves. The Pai-tavytera and Mbya comprise the remaining two thirds of the Guarani population of eastern Paraguay. Most of the 5,500 Pai-tavytera are settled in thirty communities. These are predominantly located to the north of the Chiripa in the Cordillera de Amambay, an area that extends from the western limit of the Cordillera de Mbaracayu north along the Brazilian border to the Apa River. Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg list nine additional communities (about two hundred families) in Brazil along the headwaters of the Ivanheima, Amambai, and Iguatemi rivers. The

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11

population of Mbya is possibly equal to that of the Pai-tavytera4 and is scattered in over sixty small communities south and west of the Chiripa. These settlements extend from the Cordillera de San Rafael, near Encarnacion, through the Cordillera de Ybytyrusii and Cordillera de San Joaquin almost to the Brazilian border. In addition, there is reportedly a sizable population of Mbya in northeastern Argentina, concentrated in the department of Misiones (Metraux 1948, 71). This study was carried out in the five closely related Chiripa communities in the Mbaracayii region, along the upper headwaters of the Jejui River. Itanarami itself is a collection of twenty-eight households along a small stream by the same name. The community is set on fertile, forested land, with low hills that descend into the marshy grasslands along the Jejui River. The residents5 forebears inhabited the region for generations, but the first families settled at this specific site only twenty years ago. The population has swelled with births, marriage, and immigration until, in 1982, it comprised 132 residents related by a myriad of ties of consanguinity and affinity. Households are distanced from one another, set in small clearings in the forest. The primary social center of the settlement is the home of the principle religious leader. Nearby, the community has cut a large clearing and built a school and a local for community meetings (see Fig. 3). The community's land was held by the national government until 1986, when residents were provided legal title to their property as a Colonia National Indigena. Although Itanarami served as the primary research site, data were also gathered from four other communities throughout the Jejui headwaters. Mboi Jagua and Fortuna, along tributaries to the north and south, both have over three hundred residents, many with kin in Itanarami. These two communities have knowledgeable and experienced religious leaders to whom people of Itanarami look for help and guidance, y a p o , a smaller community, is located five hours' walk toward the Brazilian border. Santa Carolina, the fifth and most distant community, is to the east, near the mouth of the Jejui River. Although distant in overland travel, it has important historical links to Itanarami, dating from the years when the river was the primary means of transporting goods to market. These communities form a social group within which residents of Itanarami have especially high degrees of communication, interaction, and ethnic identification. It is within this group that they tend to marry, carry out religious activities, and, if they move, shift their residences. In terms of networks, the five communities form a series of nodes with a high degree of connectedness and with relatively weak links with other, more distant Chiripa communities in different watershed areas. Small clusters of communities such as these are not isolated, however. Geographical proximity influences kin networks, which serve as a basis for

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Figure 3. Itanarami (1982) religious leadership. Variation in the focus of the ties of each community links each group to other clusters and, eventually, links the entire Chiripa population. For example, Itanarami carries on close relations with four other communities, but these communities do not maintain strong ties only among themselves. Communities on the periphery of the Mbaracayu area also have kin ties and leadership loyalties outside the region, forming an extensive network with a common ethnic identity. Distinctions among the three subgroups are based on cultural factors

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13

recognized by the Guarani and by anthropologists; many are apparent to the casual observer as well. For example, until recendy the Pai-tavytera wore tembeta lip plugs and built large lodges for extended kin groups; Mbya and Chiripa have done neither within living memory, but Chiripa continue to call the Pai-tavytera TembcguL Although Guarani ideologies share many features, the three groups differ in religious rituals, mythology, and language. For example, languages used in religious settings are mutually unintelligible. One of the surest ways for the anthropologist newly arrived in a strange community to ascertain the ethnicity of the residents is to shift among religious vocabularies until smiles of recognition light the hosts' faces. Chiripa recognize a general stratification among these ethnic groups. Pai-tavytera are provided a higher status that is denied Mbya. Although the Pai-tavytera may be considered one notch better than the Chiripa themselves, the Mbya have more in common with the region's Ache, whose very humanity is doubtful, according to the Chiripa. One might find it acceptable to marry a Pai-tavytera and join in his or her religious services, but the hunter or traveler forced to board with Mbya during inclement weather will, on his return, entertain his compatriots and plead for sympathy with anecdotes of misadventures among these uncivilized people. Although the divisions among Chiripa, Pai-tavytera, and Mbya populations indicate general differences within the population, they create the illusion that these groups are internally homogeneous and that their boundaries are clear. This is not the case. In fact, each group is ethnically heterogeneous, and members often disagree over group boundaries. Ethnic groups encompass continua of social variation among increasingly disparate communities. For the Chiripa, membership in a kin-based community is critical to self-definition and social recognition of ethnic identity. Ethnicity is gready affected by kin ties and leadership loyalties that radiate from community groups. In more distant communities, as these factors become more tenuous so does the level of assumed cultural similarity. For example, residents of Itanarami tend to identify the five communities listed previously as the true Chiripa and suggest that other communities with whom they have no close kin relations do not understand Chiripa culture and are most likely Mbya or Pai-tavytera. As each community's affiliations are somewhat different, based on its unique, ego-centered network, the group of communities with which it identifies culturally will differ as well. This creates general disagreement over the location of ethnic boundaries. Thus, groups within Fortuna and Santa Carolina maintain close relations with a sixth community, Santa Isabel. People from Itanarami know litde of Santa Isabel residents, do not consider them Chiripa, and assume they are Mbya or Pai-tavytera.

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Even these definitions become complicated as individuals marry across ethnic lines that they recognize. It is not uncommon to find a Pai-tavytera or Mbya spouse in a Chiripa household, although the Mbya would be considered a social inferior. The progeny of these unions generally adopt the ethnicity of the community in which their parents choose to live. The confusion of Chiripa identities is evinced in the various names that are used to identify these populations. Although the residents of Itanarami accept the designation Chiripa used by Paraguayans, they prefer to call themselves Guarani. Other groups generally considered Chiripa refer to themselves as Ava, Ava-guarani, Ava-chiripa, Ava-katuete, and Guaraniete. Furthermore, groups in Brazil that are closely related have been known as Ca'agua, Nandeva-guarani, Apapokuva and Txiripa'i. Acknowledging the limitations to any objective boundaries or specific appellation, this study accepts the use of the category of Chiripa to provide continuity in the literature. The term means "loincloth" in Guarani and was first used by Ambrosetti (1894) to designate a group of indigenous peoples in the region of the Monda'y River. It has since been used by MuAer (1934,1935) to contrast this portion of the Guarani population with the Mbya and the Pan (Pai-tavytera). This use was adopted by Metraux (1948) and in most subsequent studies, such as Asociacion Indigena del Paraguay and Mision de Amistad (1977), with the exception of Bartolome (1977). The Chiripa of eastern Paraguay are not isolated from the nonindigenous population. The two social groups have been in close contact since the colonial period, and Chiripa communities have existed within the matrix of the national society and economy. For the last century, a dirt track has bisected the region and serviced the mestizo towns of Curuguaty and Igatimi. Conquistadors and priests, who arrived in these forests without European female companions, had children by Guarani women. Lacking the influence of subsequent arrivals of more people from Europe, these mestizos inherited their fathers5 privileges and religion, yet learned the language of their mothers, creating a curious nation of Guaranf-speaking Catholics who identified with the Spanish governors in Asuncion. 5 This mestizo population remained small throughout the colonial period, outnumbered three to one by Guarani setded in the surrounding communities and missions (Garavaglia 1983). The demographic tables were turned, however, when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 and thirty thousand Guarani were released from missions into Paraguay's rural communities. Sharing blood, language, and religion with the mestizo population, they quickly assimilated into the national society. By the time of independence in 1811, mestizos were the overwhelming majority of the national population.

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15

While the region surrounding Asuncion became the stronghold of national society, mestizo colonization in Mbaracayii remained tenuous into the era of independence. The town of Curuguaty was established in the seventeenth century, but for two hundred years was litde more than a frontier outpost, heavily fortified against hostile forest peoples, for yerba gatherers. Even as Igatimf was founded and the mestizo population burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, mestizo immigration was restricted to government land near major rivers by a yerba consortium that held most of the territory. The forests were inhabited only by the remaining Guarani communities and the roving expeditions of yerba gatherers. Situated almost as a "border" between powerful neighbors, Paraguay's national identity has been created and strengthened by its rejection of their imperialistic impulses. Paraguayans are neither European nor black, but mestizo; the language of the people is neither Spanish nor Portuguese, but Guarani. Songs and literature record in the sonorous language the devastating wars of national honor against Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia. Paraguay's contemporary national culture retains its Spanish and Guarani roots. Over 90 percent of rural Paraguayans speak Guarani, albeit with a smattering of Spanish words, and depend on Catholic priests to oversee the major transitions in life (Roett and Sacks 1991, 86). However, diverse influences are evident: The Argentine tango has infiltrated Paraguayan music, Italian pizza is served alongside boiled manioc and chipa (a rich cheese cornbread), and business is often conducted in German or Plattdeutsch. Today, the peasant speaking Guarani to the priest might just as easily be a blue-eyed blonde. The Guarani language has given Paraguay the reputation of being a nation of indios. Brazilians and Argentines refer disparagingly to this "uncivilized" country, painting the picture of naked savages, living in huts in the deep forest. (The intended slight is even more onerous in that Paraguayan mestizos share their neighbors' antipathy toward indigenous populations.) The mistaken tendency to conflate the categories of Guarani speaker and indigenous person finds its way into the academic literature as well. Hemming reported, for example, that in Paraguay's infamous war (1865-1870) against the Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, "The Guarani Indians of Paraguay—descendants of the Jesuits' converts— bore the brunt of the fighting . . ." (1987, 439). Other examples abound (Metraux 1948,77\ Warren 1949). Service and Service, in their classic analysis of Paraguayan peasants, offered a stinging rebuke to this type of misinterpretation, Certainly one of the most striking features of Paraguay is the use of an ancient Indian tongue in the modern context, but to go from this

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Prophets ofAgroforestry

fact to the conclusion that therefore the population is largely Guarani in either race or general culture is completely unwarranted and may result in a false characterization. (1954,27)

Although mestizos who speak Guarani confuse the categories constructed by foreigners and academics, there is little question in the minds of the mass of the population that Guarani are Guarani and mestizos are not. Both groups recognize that a Paraguayo is not an indio, indigena, Avi, or any of a plethora of other terms (derogatory and not) that refer to indigenous peoples. Paraguayans are members of the national society, with loyalty to the state and a political party—and are expected to spill blood for both. Chiripa are individuals beyond the realm of the state, incompletely integrated into the national polity, whose loyalties are primarily within their distinct ethnic group. Instead of language, religion and residence are used by Paraguayans and Guarani as principle markers of ethnicity. Chiripa identity, asserted in indigenous religion and community affiliation, will be explored later. Here it is useful to note its importance in distinguishing members of the national society. With respect to religion, attending church and paying allegiance to a priest are considered behavior of non-Guarani. Rather than refer to language or skin color, Guarani call mestizos Cristianos. Mestizos use the same criteria. A survey in 1972 found that the vast majority of mestizos considered Chiripa to be "nonhuman,55 as they had not been baptized by a priest (Chase-Sardi 1973). Residence also influences ethnicity. Although community affiliation defines a specific ethnic identity within the Guarani population, residence in the forest differentiates the indigenous population from the larger national society. To the Chiripa, all Guarani are "people of the forest55 (Ka'aguygua), whereas mestizos are "people of the outside55 (Okapejjua). This is not to say that residence unilaterally defines ethnicity or that Chiripa are resident in the forest throughout their lives. In fact, as will be shown in this book, many Chiripa spend many years in mestizo communities as laborers. Ethnicity refers to affiliation more than location; it is critical that Chiripa retain their links to their natal groups, which permit membership claims on the kin, political, and economic networks of forest communities. As will be detailed in the fourth chapter, these rights and identities are reinforced through indigenous concepts of differing Christian and forest souls. Early theoretical perspectives of ethnicity suggested that ethnic differences were artifacts of cultural contact that would disappear as minority populations assimilated into the dominant mainstream. Barth (1969)

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turned this idea on its head, suggesting that ethnic groups are viable entities that are created and maintained in opposition to one another. In this theory, social groups organize around particular resource bases, and cultural differences are emphasized as groups trade and compete for those resources. Barth shifted the analyst's eye from the internal structure of the group and the cultural content that it encompasses to the boundaries between ethnic groups. The cultural knowledge and social relations of a group are envisioned as constantly changing; they are manipulated by an ethnic group to maintain and communicate its position in a multiethnic setting. Since Barth's ground-breaking analysis, studies of ethnicity have focused on its subjective and objective aspects (Adams 1991), as well as its relation to culture (Cohen 1978), biology (Keyes 1976), and class (Williams 1989). Recent analyses of ethnicity in Latin America have returned to a focus on cultural features of population subgroups but discuss culture as an ideological framework that competes with that of emerging and colonial nation-states (Guidieri, Pellizzi, and Tambiah 1988; Urban and Scherzer 1991). These discussions have underscored the diversity of factors that influence ethnicity and power relations. This book explores relations between ethnic groups in a frontier setting and follows Chibnik (1991) in exploring the structural aspects of ethnic boundary maintenance in lowland South America. Thus, the analysis is of the bonds that form the community of Itanarami and distinguish it from other indigenous communities and from the larger nation-state. The data in this book suggest that the Chiripa, rather than being artifacts of a bygone era fossilized behind ethnic boundaries, adapt themselves to external influences and assert their ideas and institutions in relations with other ethnic groups. For example, as commercial relations between Guarani and mestizos intensified, nuclear family groups supplanted extended families in groups as the principle units of residence and production. Rather than lose meaning, kin connections have emerged as critical to both, linking these autonomous units into larger Guarani social groups and organizing Chiripa labor groups for commercial extraction. Some of these shifts have been self-conscious redefinitions of Chiripa institutions in a new social context. Where previously they administered large residences, elder religious leaders adapted their charismatic talents first to promote rebellion and millenarian movements and more recently to integrate networks of dispersed Chiripa households. Theoretical Perspectives Anthropologists have developed a variety of frameworks to understand interethnic relations on social and economic frontiers. The more common

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of these can be broadly characterized as modernization theory and dependency theory. Although they differ in ideological roots and assumptions, these models share two important misconceptions: first, that the structure of the expanding society is uniform worldwide, and second, that indigenous societies exert litde or no power in their relations with the larger system. Thus, studies of acculturation assume that "natives55 will adopt Western technology and culture when they understand its inherent superiority, and dependentistas suggest that the expanding capitalist system unilaterally dominates all societies on the periphery. Foweraker (1981) and Bunker (1985) refined and redefined the worldsystems concepts in relation to specific Latin American historical processes. Bunker analyzed the development of the Amazon frontier and Foweraker compared that frontier with the economic expansion into Brazil's southern forests. Both elucidated the important power of the world center in relations with this peripheral region; however, they retained the fundamental bias of conventional theories that focus on the logic of the larger system and its power over small-scale societies. After four hundred years of development and imperialism, close to a million native Americans of three hundred different ethnic groups continue to inhabit South America's lowland forests (Dostal 1972, 285). Despite the theoretical demise of ethnic diversity, anthropologists have documented the relevance of indigenous culture and society to South America's forest frontiers (e.g., Henley 1982; Taussig 1987). Indigenous societies are both disadvantaged and exploited by larger systems, but these models provide few tools for understanding the specific nature of the historical processes and the level to which the logic of a larger system impinges on the smaller societies. In Europe and the People Without History, Eric Wolf (1982) offered a vision of a world in which indigenous groups are actors on the world stage. Wolf pointed out that far from being isolated entities drawn into an international system, broader social networks instead have shaped the diverse histories of both Europeans and so-called indigenous peoples. Wolf demanded analyses of both small-scale groups and the larger systems to understand the logic of their relations and conflicts. He adapted Marx5s concept of "mode of production55 to highlight critical relations, within indigenous societies and in their relations with larger systems. Production, social relations, and ideology form a "system of internally 'articulated5 structures working on each other, but not all having the same power55 (Bloch 1985,154). Production provides the logic around which society and culture organize. Wolf identified three general modes of production: capitalist, tributary, and kin-ordered. The distinction between the former two rests on the difference between the means of surplus extraction: Capitalist extraction em-

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Introduction

19

ploys market exchange of labor power for wages; tributary production uses military or political power. Kin-ordered production, in turn, mobilizes labor power for production through kin ties. There are two varieties of kin-ordered societies, however. Areas of abundant resources engender small, dispersed domestic groups, whereas resource scarcity leads to extended kin structures that establish claim over larger bodies of social labor. French structural Marxists, such as Godelier (1977), pointed out that complex societies are formed by several, or even many, modes of production. Discrete production systems influence one another in technical and social organization (Klein 1985,11). Where the functioning of a mode conflicts with that of another, one of the two will be forced to change (Godelier 1977, 63-69). As conflict in the arena of production begets a hierarchy of modes of production, it leads to stratification between the contingent social groups. Capitalist systems create frontiers that establish relations with tributary and kin-ordered systems. As capitalism dominates resources and forces labor to produce a surplus, it demands raw materials and markets for its expanding production machine. This forces capitalist societies to forge links with other groups on its frontiers. The labor and resources of these peripheral systems are drawn into complex relations, simultaneously becoming aspects of two distinct systems. Attention to production systems focuses an analysis on specific arenas of conflict within and between sectors of the frontier. Within each social group, it calls attention to the effect of production on social relations, such as politics and kinship. Between groups, it highlights the critical nature of conflicts over the resources on which each group depends and permits an identification of specific areas in which development of one productive sector will impinge on the operation of another. In total, the model elucidates the complex effects of economic change in one group on social relations in others. The articulation model is especially useful in understanding interethnic relations on frontiers. First, it recognizes the role of the organization of indigenous groups in determining their reaction to the larger system. Being aware of structural differences between peripheral groups, the analysis can explain the diversity of experiences of small-scale frontier societies. Second, rather than portraying all expanding frontiers as a single universal process, this type of analysis of production relations can point out critical differences in the resources demanded by distinct expanding societies. Careful analysis of the organization of both large and small-scale societies shows the specific areas of conflict in which the expanding system has the potential to influence peripheral modes of production. Wolf was careful to emphasize that production does not determine social organization and that dominant societies do not necessarily re-create

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small-scale societies in their own image. For the former, culture and society develop in conjunction with a production system, not simply as a product of its functioning. Production creates critical constraints in some areas of social relations, just as more powerful production systems constrain weaker ones. As Godelier (1977, 52) pointed out, hunting activities determine the minimum and maximum sizes for social groups in bands, as well as their seminomadic nature. In relations unencumbered by these production constraints, however, social organization assumes historically unique and often arbitrary forms (Friedman 1975,163). Just as production creates constraints within which social relations are formed, more powerful production systems redefine peripheral modes only to the extent necessary to satisfy the former's needs. Beyond these constraints, peripheral production is neither dominated nor destroyed by the development of different modes in its midst. Careful analysis of systemic conflicts shows not only the arenas in which expanding systems collide with indigenous modes of production, but the sectors in which peripheral societies retain power. Although an analysis of production systems is integral to this book, there is litde to be gained from reducing social phenomena to abstract typologies or by developing distinct categories for each of the production systems encountered. As Wolf (1982, 76) suggested, "The utility of the concept does not lie in classification but in its capacity to underline the strategic relationships involved in the deployment of social labor by organized human pluralities." Rather than subsume small-scale and national societies to general categories, modes of production perspectives will be used to focus analysis on a historically specific set of technical and social relations between the indigenous society and the larger system within a regional society. Conceptualizing social relations in the regional system of Mbaracayu as articulated modes of production highlights the demands of each system and makes it possible to define their previous coordination and their present conflict. On the one hand, capitalist extraction has served as the organizing force for national society and economy for centuries. Mestizo laborers were drawn from the land-scarce regions near Asuncion. Employers bought labor power in markets where workers competed for the right to produce. Laborers were transferred onto immense forested estates where, under the watchful eye of bosses who controlled production, they worked for cash and goods by harvesting wild yerba. Concentrated power in the hands of landowners and merchants engendered an extremely stratified and authoritarian state system. Even as capitalism developed in the region, Chiripa continued to organize their social and productive relations through kinship. Social groups

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21

have been organized through bilateral kindred whose resources are held in common. Land and labor needed in gardening and hunting has been allocated through these kin links, rather than through wages and private property. Resources for agriculture and hunting have been abundant in the forests of Mbaracayii, and these resident groups have been small and dispersed, with very little coercion applied to them. Kinship has provided the structure and idiom for political relations. Charismatic religious leaders adopt the tide Grandfather (nandemmoi) and, as they extend their influence beyond their immediate kin, integrate a larger population as their "grandchildren" (mirariro). The Chiripa embraced commodity extraction as one of their productive strategies. Chiripa men gathered yerba from the forests surrounding their communities and sold it into the international market. Subsistence and commercial systems were not just two distinct sectors of the regional society, they were two aspects of a single system of Chiripa agroforestry. Hunting, agriculture, and commercial harvesting formed equal parts of a complex production system. Yet, even as the yerba industry created a market into which they sold the leaf they collected, the Chiripa did not abandon the kin-based social relations that have remained the basis of their communities and leadership. Using Wolf's model, it is possible to define how previous systems of commercial extraction and indigenous subsistence production coordinated to permit the survival of the Chiripa kin-ordered society. Two arenas of production are particularly important. First is the yerba industry, which created a market for Guarani commodities but did not destroy the resource base of the Guarani. The forest remained largely undisturbed, even during the periods of greatest extraction. Second, labor used in commercial collecting did not conflict with labor for subsistence production. Chiripa workers moved fluidly among yerba harvesting, subsistence hunting, and gardening. The following analysis focuses on the integration of land and labor demands between the capitalist and kin-ordered sectors, showing that commercial extraction has had litde effect on the resources needed by Chiripa in noncommercial production. Why did Chiripa involvement in extraction not disperse indigenous families into the larger society or infuse their communities with coercive relations? A modes-of-production analysis also calls attention to the relationship between production and the social relations that support it. In this case, extraction and agroforestry did not constrain egalitarian relations and the religious leadership of Chiripa communities. Chiripa social groups have been organized around nuclear family groups as the primary units of production and consumption, with independent access to land and few social demands on family labor. Even though workers entered commercial extraction, production resources were not concentrated in the hands of

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a Chiripa elite, nor has Chiripa involvement in commercial systems created the means to impose such a hierarchical system over indigenous communities. Extractive Industries For centuries, spices, dyes, minerals, and oil have been harvested from frontier regions to provide commodities for international trade and raw materials to feed the world's factories. These extractive activities deserve special attention. Not only have they been omnipresent, they also differ from conventional production, both in the process by which value is acquired for human use and the social ramifications of that process. Extractive economies appropriate value directly from nature (as material or energy), rather than create it in the process of transforming natural resources (Georgescu-Roegen 1975). Natural objects become commodities in being acquired as private property and transported to a marketplace. Thus, rather than allocating labor or capital to production and appropriating surplus value, extractive economies realize profits in the process of exchange. Bunker (1985) pointed out that regions characterized by extractive industries undergo a particular dynamic of development. Most notably, they are dominated by booms and busts that are even more catastrophic than in regions with productive economies. Given that it necessitates littie infrastructure and capital investment, extraction expands quickly to fill new demands, rendering high profits as entrepreneurs exploit resources that are both accessible and of high quality. The municipal theater in Manaus, for example, stands as a proud reminder of the massive profits earned in the early years of Brazil's rubber boom. Economies of scale in extraction differ from those of conventional production, however, and portend the demise of these booms. Unlike conventional production, where the marginal cost of each additional unit produced decreases, in extraction, the unit cost increases as extraction expands. Extractors react to demand by exploiting new resources, following what Gudeman and Bivera (1990) called the "production possibility frontier" for profitable economic development into new regions. These industries are forced to develop increasingly expensive infrastructures to exploit resources that are not only farther from markets, but usually poorer in quality and quantity. Increased costs cause higher prices and give consumers incentives to seek new sources for the commodities, as in the Malaysian plantations and laboratory synthetics that undermined Brazil's production of rubber latex. The bust of this cyclic economy comes as resource shortages, increased costs, and declining prices force extractors to abandon their activities.6

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23

Extractive industries remove resources from what Bunker called "extreme peripheries55 without fostering productive development. Commodities are destined to develop productive centers elsewhere. The infrastructure of extractive development is primarily for the removal and transport of goods rather than for actual manufacturing. With the demise of the extractive economy, the region is often left not only without the infrastructure for subsequent productive development but also devoid of resources for independent development. Displaced workers return to productive centers to await the next expansive cycle. This locks these regions into cycles of extraction and inferior positions relative to production centers. Bunker (1985) made a strong argument that extractive industries create strong alliances with state systems. Lacking previous claims of private property, tide, and tenure, extractable resources are often in the public domain. Because export taxes fill the coffers of the government and the pockets of officials, the state has a direct interest in promoting economic growth and uses its regulatory functions to facilitate extractive development. These policies permit environmental destruction, profiteering, and the displacement of previous economies and traditional residents. Extractive economies generate particular systems of labor and resource control. Labor is often subject to extreme forms of coercion (Weinstein 1983). Given the dispersed pattern of resources, workers are usually transported to extractive economies from more productive regions. Once there, they are forced to depend on their employers for the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and equipment. Moreover, as national governments perceive states5 interests as aligned with those of extractive industries, they sanction the establishment of civil and police authorities under the direction of these industries. Controlling all commerce between the extreme periphery and the larger system, and monopolizing powers usually reserved for the state, extractive industries exercise almost feudal control over their workers. Control of physical resources is also characteristically different in extractive economies. Notably, control of individual resources is more important than control of land. Extractive economies only demand specific flora, fauna, or minerals, which are often dispersed over vast regions. There is little economic incentive to manage other physical resources. Moreover, because many extractive resources are located in frontier areas, where state control is weak, industries often find it expensive and politically difficult to control access to these regions. Extractors often limit their administrative efforts to those resources defined as most valuable to larger markets. Many governments have chosen to sell single resources in public domains, such as oil or mineral rights, while retaining state ownership of other natural resources. The production-engendered national frontiers in Mbaracayu have been

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Prophets ofAgroforestry

characterized by forest extractive industries, which have dominated the area since the sixteenth century. While Brazilian traders were ascending the Amazon in search of spice to fill the snuff boxes of Europe, entrepreneurs in Paraguay were exploring the forests for yerba to fuel the workers in the mines of Potosi. Over the centuries, a variety of other goods, from citrus oils and skins to timber and fence posts, has attracted laborers to this isolated outpost of the European world. Although Mbaracayu's extractive economy has been long established, it has not been stable or constant. The economic frontier was not a line of steady economic progress and state incorporation but a series of waves of commercial activity across this forested region. The first extraction from the forest was that of Guarani workers, taken as forced labor by Jesuits, Brazilians, and the Spanish. As the Guarani population was decimated, the conquistadors continued to look to yerba mate for prosperity. Yerba, supplemented by honey, skins, and timber, drove the export economy for almost four centuries. It reached its apex of production and power in the first half of this century. Private corporations, most notably the latifundista Industrial Paraguaya S.A., owned most of the country's fertile land and exerted influence through hundreds of local caudillos. Since 1950, yerba extraction has been steadily replaced by other products in the regional economy. Logging was for several decades the mainspring of the extractive economy; in the 1970s, high prices for petit grain attracted collectors into the market for citrus leaves; trees were cut for fence posts; and, most recendy, the availability of heavy equipment has stimulated a new wave of logging. (In fact, this final extractive boom is destroying the region's forest resources.) The goods extracted from Mbaracayu have been harvested and sold into international markets with little labor or capital investment. Yerba leaves are dried and bagged; skins are sold untanned; timbers are sent to sawmills downriver; even petit grain, the commodity demanding the greatest productive input, is easily extracted from citrus leaves in a small, rudimentary still. Profits from these activities were not reinvested to capitalize extraction or develop the region's production base; they were diverted into unrelated activities, such as cattle raising in the south or international banking. Extraction in Mbaracayu led to strong alliances between extractive entrepreneurs and the Paraguayan state. From the colonial encomenderos to contemporary loggers (excepting Francia's famous nineteenth-century experiment [White 1978]), the state has supported efforts to win commodities and profits from these forests. Yerba merchants dominated the region's colonial economy and, with independence, wealthy entrepreneurs purchased it as a massive latijundio. As the government has had little presence outside Asunci6n, Mbaracayu has been beyond the political reach of the

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25

weak Paraguayan state throughout most of its history. (In fact, the government lost much of the territory by default to the Brazilians and Argentines in the late nineteenth century.) National officials were more than willing to manage these frontier regions by proxy through merchants and entrepreneurs in the region. It therefore has been the responsibility of extractive industries to police access to the region. This research focuses on yerba mate production to understand systems of sustained extraction. The Mbaracayu region encompasses the world's greatest stands of yerbals. The individual trees, reaching heights of twenty meters, grow in dispersed groups throughout the subtropical deciduous forests of the Parana River watershed. The twigs containing the small, dark green leaves are simply cut from the larger branches and dried over a slow-burning fire. The powdered foliage produces a highly caffeinated infusion, which is drunk from afilteredstraw. Yerba collecting dominated the rural commercial economy for centuries and was the primary activity around which mestizo settlers organized themselves. The legacy of the industry remains in the authoritarian relations that continue to dominate rural Paraguay. Of direct interest here, yerba extraction was the longest and greatest threat to indigenous autonomy, as the centripetal forces of this commercial economy pulled the Chiripa into market involvement and threatened to integrate them into the coercive patronage of mestizo society. Although few mestizos harvest yerba today, extraction remains the primary commercial activity among Chiripa with access to natural yerbals. Two aspects of this extractive process have important implications for this analysis of the frontier Mbaracayu society. First, extraction has focused on individual resources, without destroying or dominating the larger forest environment. Second, the extractive process has been characterized by a scarcity of labor in a region of abundant physical resources, forcing the expanding commercial system in Mbaracayu to dominate workers through systems of coercion and direct violence. Yerba extraction has not destroyed the fauna, forest cover, or soil of Mbaracayu. Scattered over an extensive area, it covers only a small portion of the arboreal cover. Harvesting yerba demands only that leaves and small twigs be removed, protecting the trunk and limbs for regrowth. The removal of this single element does not degrade the larger ecosystem. Moreover, producers and the government have protected these yerbals from destructive overexploitation. Even as the market for yerba grew in the twentieth century, gathering extended farther into the forest and into regions of lower productivity without destroying the yerba stands or the more inclusive environment. Extractors have not controlled all forest resources. Commerce in Mbaracayu has had narrow interests, primarily yerba plants, and there is little

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incentive to control all human use of other resources, such as soil and other fauna. Because private efforts to enforce control in the region are expensive, latifundistas with tide to the land have contented themselves with controlling the flow of yerba, timber, and other resources to markets downriver. Thus, extractive industries did not dislocate indigenous residents of the vast region. The nature of these resources have created unique problems in organizing a labor force in Mbaracayu. The stands of yerba are dispersed, isolated from towns and one another by many kilometers of dense forest. Moreover, each tree is harvested only once every three years, making it unreasonable to maintain a work force in each yerbal. Therefore, extraction has been carried out by expeditions into the forests. Laborers, organized in teams of ten or twenty, traveled to a region and spent weeks or months harvesting the foliage or timber to ship downriver to market. Under the direction of a patron, workers established camps with provisions, wooden mbarbakud to dry yerba, and thatched shelters in which to sleep and store the leaves. Each worker was assigned a tract of forest to harvest, searching out yerba trees and cutting and hauling the foliage to camp, where it was dried and pulverized before shipment. For yerba, workers were paid per arroba (ten kilos) of leaf cut. Twice a day each worker delivered a bundle of leaves, which was credited to his account. When the yerba trees of the region were stripped of their leaves, the team moved farther into the forest. Scarcity of labor has been a principle problem in harvesting commercial products in Mbaracayu. The forest populations were primarily indigenous and, with access to soils for gardens and fauna for hunting, did not need commercial work to be self-sufficient. Entrepreneurs solved the problem by bringing mestizo employees from other areas where land was scarce. Once in the yerbals, they fell under the control of caudillos. Removed from their home fields, workers were dependent on the patron for basic necessities that were charged against the credit they were accruing. After nine months, few had covered their costs and were free to return home. Patrones hired thugs to assure that workers remained to service their debt and that neither the debt nor profits became uncomfortably high. In addition to holding all the economic strings that bound the group together, local caudillos became the primary political and economic force in developing frontier communities. Without the backing of a strong state apparatus in this isolated area, judges and police cooperated with the patrones. At the national level, extractive bosses controlled the developing national government, assuring that their advantage in the forest would not be lost to political or economic upstarts in the capital city. The coercion of the patronage system became the governing mechanism in rural Paraguay.

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In sum, although the commercial economy penetrated the Mbaracayii area soon after the conquest, it did not destroy or unilaterally dominate the region's diverse resources. The developing commercial system focused on individual commodities, ignoring much of the region's resources and many of the indigenous inhabitants. Given the abundance of resources and the scarcity of labor, employers were forced to use coercion to maintain their workforce. This violence became institutionalized into stratified and authoritarian relations among mestizos on the frontier. Agroforestry Chiripa production integrates commercial extraction with subsistence hunting and gardening in a system of sustainable agroforestry. The Chiripa's distinct relation with the mestizo society derives to a large extent from this particular adaptation: They produce commodities without abandoning subsistence production. Rather than devote themselves to simple extraction, the Chiripa exploit commercial tree crops, such as yerba, citrus oils, and timber for fence posts; at the same time, they practice gardening, hunting, fishing, and gathering for subsistence. Chiripa agroforestry comprises three general activities. First, subsistence gardening is carried out using traditional slash-and-burn techniques. Annual food crops, such as corn and beans, are planted in small swiddens. As resources in these microenvironments are depleted and pests invade the plots, annual crops are replaced by plants, such as banana (Musa paradisiaca sapientum) and manioc, that produce over longer periods and require litde care. Eventually, valuable natural regrowth and planted species intermingle in these fallows, blurring the distinction between forest and field. Second, Chiripa producers trap, fish, hunt, and gather subsistence foods from the forest. Men trap small mammals in gardens and near homes and fish the floodplain's oxbow lakes to provide a dependable source of protein. Finally, the Chiripa practice commercial extraction, harvesting yerba mate, petit grain, skins, and timber for sale downriver. Yerba extraction has been the primary commercial work of the Chiripa of Itanarami. The leaf has been cut from trees on the rolling hills surrounding the community and sold to local patrones. Rather than simply harvesting foliage, however, yerbateros have developed techniques that protect the standing trees and promote the growth of new ones. Germinating yerba plants is difficult. It is said the seeds' hard pericarp is only permeable after passing through the digestive tract of a large ground bird called a jacii (Aburria jacutinga). Chiripa transplant seedlings away from competitors and cut away the undergrowth surrounding young plants, a subde system of silviculture. Thus, the forest of Mbaracayii has been transformed by centuries of human intervention.

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Chiripa production can be classified as a system of commercial agroforestry, in that it is a "sustainable land-use management system that combines the production of crops including tree-crops, forest plants and/or animals simultaneously or sequentially on the same unit of land, applying management techniques that are compatible with the cultural practices of the local population" (King and Chandler 1978). These systems are well adapted to the fragile natural resources of South America's lowland forests. Tropical ecosystems are among the most diverse on earth (Prance 1982, 1990), but they rest on a very thin soil base. Soils lack the exchangeable bases to capture nutrients and, when the forest canopy is broken, rain quickly washes and leaches fertility away. Agroforestry adapts to this environment by mimicking tropical ecosystems in both time and space. By integrating productive activities that exploit the soils, undergrowth, and canopy, agroforestry promotes a spatial distribution like that of the tropical environment (Hart 1980). In addition, agroforestry often integrates different activities as a series of stages in a production cycle, replicating the natural succession of the tropical ecosystem (Hartshorn 1980; Opler, Baker, and Frankie 1980). In Chiripa gardening, for example, gardens give way to fallows that are managed for foods, finally being replaced by tree crops that imitate the tropical forest. Unlike systems of intensely managed commercial agroforestry, indigenous production works within the existing forest system to produce a sustainable and substantial profit. Biologists and ecologists are discovering the complexity of lowland-forest indigenous production that was once considered simple (Hecht, Anderson, and Mey 1988). It is becoming increasingly evident that indigenous horticulture is not simply gardening; it integrates a variety of productive strategies, including fallows and forest management, into complex systems (Gordon 1982; Nations and Nigh 1980). Rather than being abandoned, the fallows are cared for and harvested. Managed fallows become managed forests, and human intervention inserts itself into so-called natural areas (Hart 1980). Thus, not only is this system adapted to the existing forest, it has managed the forest (Alcorn 1981; Posey and Balee 1989; Posey et al., 1984)By integrating extraction and production, the Chiripa have been able to mold the commercial system to their purposes and, in doing so, have acquired considerable power in the regional frontier society. Given the periodicity of the different systems and their demands for differing resources, it is possible to coordinate distinct production systems with litde conflict. Extraction, gardening, hunting, andfishingdepend on different ecological niches within the forest; sustained exploitation of one sphere does not infringe on the natural resources of another. The same integration can be seen in labor. Families coordinate a variety of subsistence and commercial activities in cycles determined by seasons, life-styles, and the economic

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fluctuations of the larger economy. In short, the success of the Chiripa in integrating commercial extraction into a system of agroforestry relies on the lack of "critical constraints" between the various activities. Given a dependable subsistence base, the Chiripa are able to remain independent from markets and debt bondage and avoid the authoritarian relations that has structured the developing mestizo society. Ethnographic Literature There is a surprising dearth of ethnography on the Guarani of Paraguay, especially for a group that has been in close relation with a larger society for centuries. From the first years of the conquest, knowledge of the Guarani was more a means to an end than an end in itself. When the Iberians arrived in the sixteenth century, there were hundreds of thousands of Guarani in the regions that came to be called La Plata and Guaira. Explorers Domingo de Irala (1510-1556), Alfavo Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1490-ca. 1560), and Ulrich Schmidt (1510-1579) documented Guarani groups from the Adantic coast to the foothills of the Andes. In 1534, Schmidt observed large settlements of Guarani at the confluence of the Paraguay and Parana rivers. The reports of the beleaguered settlers document their attempts to survive among this strong and populous nation. In 1541, after walking from the Gulf of Mexico to California, the region's first governor, Cabeza de Vaca, traveled from the Adantic overland to Asuncion, passing within ninety kilometers of Itanaramfs present location. He wrote of the Guarani communities: They are . . . the richest people of all the land and province both for agriculture and stock raising. They rear plenty of fowl and geese and other birds; and have an abundance of game, such as boar, deer, and dantes (anta), partridge, quail and pheasants; and they have great fisheries in the river. They grow plenty of maize, potatoes, cassava, peanuts and many other fruits; and from the trees they collect a great deal of honey. ([1555] 1891,118)

Government documents provided a litany of edicts concerning the use of indigenous labor and continued complaints by settlers of Guarani harassment. However, it is from the writings of Jesuit missionaries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that we learn most of what we know about the Guarani. As early as 1610, the famous (and martyred) Jesuit missionary, Roque Gonzalez (1576-1626), was describing Guarani life in reports to his superiors. In a literature that was usually designed to defend their Guarani missions against the claims of mestizos, the Jesuits

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provided a detailed account of two hundred years of their activities among the Guarani. As this extensive literature is surveyed elsewhere (Melia 1988), it will suffice here to mention just two of the more important chroniclers. The general cultural continuity of the Guarani people in the Mbaracayu region has been attested to by the work of a Jesuit priest named Antonio Ruiz de Montoya ([1647] 1876). In the seventeenth century, Montoya (1585-1652) lived among the Guarani along the upper Parana River and recorded their language with careful precision. His dictionary remains the most exhaustive study of the phonology and meaning of the Guarani language. Beyond official reports of Guarani belligerence in the eighteenth century, one of the few descriptive accounts of Guarani life in the forest comes from a Jesuit missionary, Martin Dobrizhoffer ([1784] 1822). Dobrizhoffer (1717-1791) followed Montoya in 1740, proselytizing among the Guarani and recording his observations of the indigenous groups. Although the continuity of Guarani societies in this region is clearly documented in these works, it is difficult to ascertain the groups5 specific ethnic identities. In La Plata, Jesuits and Spanish conquistadors used the generic term Guarani for many indigenous peoples, differentiating groups by geographical region or purported leaders' names, such as the Itatines of the Itati River and the Guarambares who followed the famous Guarani leader Guarambare. The difficulties in defining ethnic categories are exacerbated by the fact that Spanish colonization rapidly decimated the indigenous populations. Most of these early ethnic tides appear only briefly in the historical record, replaced with new designations by each wave of immigrants to the forest. Modern ethnography among the Guarani was initiated with the twentieth century. In 1912, Curt Nimuendaju compiled his famous ethnography of mythology and religious knowledge among a group of Apapokuva who had migrated from the Iguatemi River in the Cordillera de Mbaracayu to the Adantic Ocean south of Sao Paulo (Nimuendaju [1914] 1978). Schaden (1962) and Bartolome (1977) suggested that these Apapokuva are of the same ethnic group as the Chiripa. Not only does the similarity of mythology and worldview suggest this, so does the fact that the Apapokuva migrated from a site seventy kilometers from where Itanarami now stands. In the 1940s, James Watson carried out a field study among the Cayuaguarani (Pai-tavytera) of Mato Grosso, in Brazil (Watson 1952). The published account focused on acculturation and social change in Guarani society, documenting the effects of ranching on the indigenous groups in Brazil's southern forests. In 1962, Schaden presented one of the first comprehensive analyses of Guarani societies in Brazil, supplementing his own visits to diverse Guarani communities with material from Nimuendaju's earlier work on the Nandeva-guarani (Txiripa'i) and Cadogan's (1959b) work among the Mbya.

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Study of the Guarani in Paraguay was initiated in the 1920s by a naturalist and student of human nature named Aloises Bertoni. Bertoni compiled information about their religion and "morality55 from Guarani near his home on the Parana River and published several collections of descriptive essays (1922). Bertoni5s work was followed by that of Franz Muller, a missionary of the Catholic Order of the Divine Word who lived and worked with the Mbya. Muller5s ethnography (1934, 1935) provided a description of Guarani religious practice. In the 1950s, the study of Paraguayan Guarani groups was greatly advanced by the anthropologist Leon Cadogan. In close contact with the Mbya, and placed in charge of their affairs by the government, Cadogan devoted himself to understanding and recording Mbya religion and mythology. His publications (e.g., 1959a, 1959b) covered a wide range of topics, but each strove toward a profound understanding of the Mbya vision of both the mundane and spiritual worlds. More recently, Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg published an ethnographic survey of society and culture among the Pai-tavytera (1976). This work, based on considerable research with the Pai-tavytera, provides an outline of the major social and cultural systems of the group. Clastres (1977) employed ethnographic data about the Guarani in his more theoretical piece. Clastres (1986) and Hill and Hawkes (1983) compiled comparative material on the closely related Ache groups. Although such works have provided ethnographic detail about the Mbya and Pai-tavytera, little anthropology has been conducted among the Chiripa. Only two serious studies of the Chiripa exist to date, and these focus specifically on religion. In the first, Cadogan (1959b) provided a thoughtful description of Chiripa religious practices. More recently, Bartolome (1977) published an analysis of Chiripa religion and shamanism. Both of these studies stressed importance of traditional religious leaders in the maintenance of Chiripa communities, a point that will be pursued further in this book.

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2. Yerba, Society, and the State in Mbaracayu

Yerba mate, a dusty, dry, green powder, seems an unlikely object to ignite the passions of conquistadors and state builders. Yet the magic of the yerba trade spurred explorers into the uncharted forests and inspired politicians to organize the Paraguayan state in the wilderness. As yerba put Paraguay on the map, it drew the nation's population into a market economy, raising a few individuals to positions of power and wealth while reducing most people to poverty and subjugation. Throughout Paraguay's history, yerba's influence has been evident in the authoritarian arrangement of the country's rural society. This frontier legacy remains, even as yerba has been replaced by new commodities. Paraguay's economy has been called a case of "classic dependency" (White 1978,17). It has existed on the very periphery of the world system for its four and a half centuries of modern history. Until the end of the colonial period in 1811, European trade could only be carried out by way of Buenos Aires and Lima, over the isthmus of Panama. After independence, industrial countries such as Argentina and Brazil manipulated Paraguay's isolated and impoverished situation. Even today, Paraguay remains a distant and weak link in world trade networks. Although the rest of the world pays litde notice to this small country, Paraguay's commercial economy looks beyond the country's borders for its stimulus. The sale of its raw materials has been the single most important means of acquiring hard currency and manufactured materials from the world market. Most of these goods have been extracted from Paraguay's seemingly unending forests. In the seventeenth century, Brazilian slavers and mestizo merchants sold Guarani laborers and yerba mate. Later, yerba, timber, skins, and essential oils were harvested by workers who earned a wage. Through the centuries, the commercial economy intensified and shifted in response to international markets while remaining dependent on the extraction and export of these materials. Extractive production and marketing networks provided a foundation for the developing Paraguayan state. At the national level, yerba entrepre-

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neurs and the government formed an alliance, which often made the two groups virtually indistinguishable. Extractive industries also concentrated power in the hands of rural caudillos. In the forests of Mbaracayu, this economic arrangement created the conditions for the development of a highly stratified, authoritarian society. Caught in towns with little land that were near the capital city, peasants and laborers were drawn to the frontier to earn money to purchase salt from Bolivia and tools from Brazil. Once in the verbals, they found their lives dominated by caudillos who managed the forests as fiefs, enforcing their will and reinforcing their positions through institutionalized violence. When Chiripa entered the yerba trade, their history became shaped by national society and the international economy. The indigenous population of Mbaracayu was decimated by disease, and their residential groups dispersed into clusters of nuclear families. Nevertheless, the Chiripa survived the onslaughts of missionaries and slavers and avoided debt bondage in the verbals. They established ties to mestizo patrones that did not undermine indigenous concepts of leadership and religion. Even as the people of Itanarami marched off to work in the verbals, they held onto, indeed reaffirmed, their ethnic identity as Guarani and Ka'aguygua. Understanding contemporary ethnic relations demands an exploration of the history of national development. The following text analyzes yerba production as the central dynamic of frontier expansion; it demonstrates that yerba provided wealth to organize the Paraguayan state and power to subject most of the mestizo workers to very coercive wage labor. In contrast to this, the chapter argues that the contemporary Chiripa have avoided yerba trade's authoritarian hierarchies and have maintained a level of independence in the face of the larger society's imperialism. Two historical periods are of particular interest to understanding ethnicity and extraction. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Chiripa were harassed by slavers and missionaries who sought to enrich themselves through the harvesting and sale of yerba. The second concern is the latifundio period from 1883 to 1965, when the state and rural society achieved their contemporary forms. The Conquest, Yerba, and the Guarani Sebastian Cabot (1476?-1557) was first attracted to this flat river basin by visions of tremendous wealth. The explorer's dreams were fueled by gold and silver ornaments found among the indigenous residents and by rumors of a mountain of precious metal to the west. By the time that Domingo de Irala and his men reached the Andes in 1546, Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1475-1541) already had found the Inca empire. Irala and his company were left with little more than a river with the unlikely name of Rio de la

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Plata. They turned to the forests for other sources of wealth, discovering a massive indigenous population, fertile soils, and yerba mate. As Carlos Pastore, Paraguay's preeminent social historian, put it, c The colonial history of Paraguay is, in grand part, the history of its struggle to dominate its Indians, its lands and its verbals" (Pastore 1972, 6). The Spanish encountered a large indigenous population in the forests of the Paraguay River near the site that would become Asuncion, and the Spanish and Guarani 1 forged a fragile alliance. Drawn together by a common enemy—antagonistic Chaco groups—the Spanish and Guarani formed a military relationship that was strengthened as the conquistadors established households with Guarani women (Service 1954). With the support of Guarani friends and relatives, the conquistadors set out to carve a life from the wilderness. Parties explored and setried the territory; Santa Cruz de la Sierra was established at the foothills of the Andes, Buenos Aires was resetded at the southern mouth of the Rio de la Plata, and the region called Guaira was colonized in the deep forests east along the headwaters of the Parana River. As early as 1537, the year that the Spanish established a beachhead at Asuncion, explorers made their way up the Jejui River into Mbaracayu. The area quickly became important, both as the most direct transportation route to Spanish settlements in Guaira (Garavaglia 1983, 109) and for the resources that could be extracted from the deep forests. Mbaracayu, like Guaira, harbored dense stands of yerba and large populations of Guarani. As the colonists established themselves, Asuncion became an important node in transportation networks extending from southern Brazil to northern Peru. The conquistadors and their mestizo progeny searched for products that could be profitably traded. Although Paraguayans could produce ample cattle and sugar cane, they could not compete with the cheap hides, meat, and tallow coming from the pampas of Argentina or the abundant sugar from Brazil. They were able to enter the smaller and less profitable trade in honey, wax, hardwood, tobacco, and especially yerba mate (Williams 1979). The last of these became the colonists5 lifeblood. The greatest yerba forests were located in Mbaracayu and Guaira; thus, the colonists had a monopoly on the commodity in a rapidly expanding export economy. In a few short years, the yerba market grew from an insignificant local demand to a thriving international trade. At the time of the Spanish conquest of the Rio de la Plata, the Guarani considered yerba mate a powerful drug and used it during religious ceremonies and as a medicine (Metraux 1948, 89). Despite opposition from the Catholic church, which considered it evil, the cafFeinated infusion won wide popularity among mestizos; even the Spanish accepted it as a common drink. By 1600, over four thousand kilos of the dried leaf was being consumed each year in Asuncion alone.

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Markets for yerba developed quickly in Buenos Aires and as far away as Potosi, Lima, and Quito. The leaf was shipped by raft to the Paraguay or Parana rivers, through Asuncion to Santa Fe, on the bank of the Parana. From there it was distributed throughout the colonial world. By 1616, Andean merchants had made the difficult overland trek to Santa Fe and upriver into the hinterland of Mbaracayu to purchase the product (Garavagliai983, 39). By the second half of the seventeenth century, yerba had acquired an importance as a stimulant for Potosi miners that rivaled coca. An estimated 200,000 kilos of yerba was being exported from Santa Fe to Alto Peru each year. By 1710 the Potosi market accounted for 53% of the yerba shipped through Santa Fe. In fact, by 1733, only cane liquor figured more prominendy in the Potosi market (Garavaglia 1983, 90-93). Encomiendas In the early years, conquistadors tried to win riches from the yerbals of Mbaracayu and Guaira by forcing Guarani to labor in the forests. Using the legal mechanisms designed to coerce unpaid Andean indigenous workers into Spanish mines, the setders in La Plata established labor drafts called encomiendas^ which for one hundred and fifty years sought to compel Guarani to collect yerba for export. The Spanish wanted Guarani women to minister to their personal needs and Guarani men to provide their sustenance. As early as 1538, indigenous groups of the area were setded into permanent communities, pueblos de indios^ from which conquistadors could draft laborers. Near Asuncion, Guarani were resetded into twenty-three communities from which the conquistadors supplied their needs for workers in their gardens and for defense. Near the dense stands of yerba in Mbaracayu, the colonists established four additional pueblos: Candelaria on a southern tributary of the Curuguaty'y River; San Francisco de Yvyrapariyara between the Curuguaty'y and Jejui rivers; and San Pedro de Terecani and San Verapoty de Mbaracayu near the site of the contemporary community of Igatimi (Azara [1790] 1904, 204-210). In the early years of the colony, the unregulated and amicable alliances with the Guarani degenerated into brutality and slavery. The Guarani took up arms in a series of early rebellions that threatened the existence of the small colonial outposts in Asuncion and Guaira (Service 1954). Therefore, in 1556, Irala, as governor of the region, produced an edict to regulate the use of labor in the encomiendas. Guarani were to remain in their communities; their lands, fields, and hunting areas were not to be disturbed, and the Spanish were prohibited from removing women. In return, the Guarani were mandated to provide a mita of one quarter of their labor

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time to a Spanish encomendero. A government inspector was ordered to visit these mitayo encomiendas every year to guarantee their rights. The basic structure of these encomiendas was similar to highland encomiendas in demanding that workers remain in indigenous communities and provide a portion of their labor to the grant holder. There were, however, several important, formal differences. First, the encomienda grants demanded that the tribute be provided in labor to the encomendero. Second, the amount of tribute was extremely high, up to half of a community's labor during the harvest. Third, the encomiendas were small, averaging fifteen workers. Finally, Irala's edict legitimized the direct personal servitude that many conquistadors had established previously. This type of encomienda, termed originario labor or yanacona^ demanded that indigenes reside with and work for the encomendero. The first encomienda grants distributed over 300,000 Guarani to the surviving conquistadors, a third in the area of Asuncion and the remainder in Guaira (Cardozo 1938: 17-21). In addition, the edict recognized the twenty-three communities of Guarani that had previously been settled near Asuncion, as well as the four communities along the Jejui River in Mbaracayii (Azara 1873, 258). It is doubtful that the edict did much to relieve the suffering of the Guarani working for the Spanish. Generations of Spanish visitadores, sent by the Spanish government's Consejo de Indias to monitor the encomiendas, reported the abuses that workers suffered at the hands of encomenderos. Many of their criticisms were vociferous. As late as 1780, Juan del Pino Manrique reported: The unhappy continuation of the cruel servitude that these originarios suffer exceeds that of slaves . . . when a resident acquires an encomienda of originarios, he believes that he has bought a family of slaves, with the difference being that he cannot sell them . . . a circumstance that exposes the miserable Indians to even greater hardships, so that what appears to be a privilege compared to the situation of slaves causes them to suffer greater hardships than if they actually were. (Service 1954, 63; translation by Service) Encomienda workers were intended to relieve the Spanish and their mestizo sons from working with their hands. In addition to gardens that most Asuncenos maintained in Asuncion, the colonists desired luxuries that were available only in the markets of Peru and beyond. The need for cash forced encomendados into the forests of Mbaracayu and Guaira to gather yerba. Guarani near the yerbals were expected to provide a continual supply of the leaf; when that proved inadequate, encomendados were sent from settlements near Asuncion.

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The unpleasant work of cutting and collecting the leaf in the forest was made more onerous by the fact that the workers were removed from their families and gardens, especially during the harvest. Furthermore, conditions in the verbals of Mbaracayu were harsh. Food and basic necessities were often in short supply and much of the harvest took place in the cold, wet months when temperatures could dip below freezing. Exposed to European diseases and in weakened states, Guarani died rapidly in the forest. In 1630 one leader complained to the governor that They have carried off our brothers, sons and subjects repeatedly to the Maracaju [Mbaracayu], where they are all dying and coming to an end . . . . Those mate forests remain full of the bones of our sons and vassals, and our church is used only to bury the bones of our old women. Maracaju is the place where the poor litde bones of our poor little vassals are piling up. We now have no more sons or vassals because of that Maracaju. It makes us sad. It means that we have no more houses or plantations and it impoverishes and annihilates us. We no longer wish to go to Maracaju . . . . (Jaime Cortesao, in Hemming 1978, 258-259, translation by Hemming) By 1630, Garavaglia (1983,160) suggested that by 1630, the regional indigenous population had been reduced to sixty thousand. The Guarani did not submit passively to the developing feudal system. First, many avoided and/or escaped from the encomiendas. Despite the fact that large populations were routinely named as encomendados, it should not be assumed that all of these Indians actually performed mita labor. Most Indians lived in areas that were distant from the Spanish settlements, and the colonists made no efforts to relocate them into encomienda communities. Even in encomienda communities, the Spaniards were ill-equipped to coerce tribute from their charges. Guarani also resisted with force. Violent retaliation against the Spanish began early and continued throughout the colonial period. Within two years of their arrival, Guarani leaders in Asuncion were jailed by Governor Irala; in 1542, it took all of the arms and allies he could muster to put down a Guarani rebellion. The regulation of encomiendas in 1556 was an attempt to prevent a more massive uprising, but it failed to defuse numerous limited revolts throughout the late sixteenth century. The most famous of the Guarani insurrections in Mbaracayu occurred in 1660, at the community of Arecaya on the Jejui River. Arecaya was established in 1639 for encomendados producing yerba in the forests. The uprising occurred after the royal visitador had presented himself to hear the workers' grievances. The Guarani believed the audience offered them very litde, and they staged a rebellion that killed the encomenderos and

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their representatives in the area. As the Guarani held the area in siege, the colonists in Asuncion massed the full force of their army to defeat the rebels. Although the militia annihilated the community, Arecaya remained a symbol of the tenuous colonial control of Mbaracayu (Velazquez 1965, 21-58).

Throughout the colonial period, many Guarani avoided the labor drafts and remained outside the pueblos de indios. As we will see in the next sections, the expansion of the yerba economy created opportunities for wage labor that placed even more pressure on forced-labor institutions. Jesuits and Bandeirantes Guarani became subject to a second form of labor tribute when early colonists were joined by missionaries. Catholic priests set out to convert the Guarani and put them to work in yerbals. As early as 1582, Franciscan priests had briefly established a mission at the mouth of the Jejuf River (Necker 1990, 76). By 1600, the forests east of the Paraguay River had been effectively divided between the Franciscans and the Jesuits; the Franciscans proselytized between Asuncion and the Aquidaban River and the Jesuits went farther north into the province of Itatin. The priests went wherever Guarani were to be found and established mission stations—reducciones—in communities claimed by the encomenderos. These reducciones setded Guarani under the direct observation and control of the resident priests. The Guarani reducciones were a tragic flaw in the Jesuits' plan. Rather than simply going to indigenous communities to proselytize, the Jesuits attracted the indigenous population into these large, dense settlements. Disease spread rapidly through the settlements, and the Jesuits were forced to recruit new communities of Indians to replace their dying peoples. The decimation of the Guarani population around Asuncion drove the Jesuits to seek converts up the Parana River in Guaira and Mbaracayu. As early as 1594, one of the first Jesuits in Paraguay, Alonzo de Barzana, reported from Asuncion back to his superiors in Spain that most Guarani of that region had already been killed by disease, mistreatment, and war. Consequently, they were refusing to join the priests, preferring instead their own communities and religious leaders (Hemming 1978, 243). Another form of death followed the Jesuits into Guaira, in the form of slaving armies of bandeirantes from the Portuguese colonies on the Adantic coast. Eschewing the small, dispersed, nomadic groups in the forest, the slavers focused their attacks on the concentrated populations kept by the Jesuits and encomenderos. The first isolated bandeirante attacks occurred in 1612. By 1628, the Guaira region was besieged on all its eastern borders. In 1630, the Jesuit missions collapsed under the weight of the attacks and the Portuguese took more than twenty thousand Guarani east

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in chains (Cortesao 1951, 336). Marshaling those remaining, the priests armed their charges and marched south. Of the thirteen thousand who stayed with the Jesuits, only four thousand finished the long and difficult march. Many Guarani died, but missionaries also abandoned masses of the remaining Guarani to the forests rather than allow them to be enslaved by the bandeirantes. It was a common belief among the Guarani that the Jesuits were in league with the bandeirantes and were concentrating the Guarani so as to make them easier to capture (Rehnfeldt 1983, 79). Thus, although thousands died at the hands of the slavers and in the hands of the Jesuits, many Guarani escaped both and returned to the forests. After destroying the Jesuit missions of Guaira, bandeirantes ranged east to attack Jesuit and Franciscan missions near the Paraguay River. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Franciscans abandoned their northern outposts and the Jesuits removed their missions from Itatin. In retreat, the Jesuits established two short-lived missions near Mbaracayu: San Ignacio de Ca'aguazu at the mouth of the Jejui lasted two years, from 1649 to 1651, and the mission of Santa Maria de Fe survived on the Aguara'ymi River from 1659 to 1669 (Hernandez 1913,12a). Forced out of the northern provinces of Guaira and Itatin, the Jesuits established new reducciones between the Tebicuary and Uruguay rivers. This region became known as Misiones and was essentially a separate nation of up to thirty missions under control of the Catholic fathers until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. In the south, the Jesuits cultivated yerba to supplement the sparse wild trees of the region. The estates of carefully maintained verbals soon produced over 20 percent of the national crop (DobrizhofFer [1784] 1822). When the Paraguayan state restricted the quantity of the Jesuit exports at the behest of secular producers, the Jesuits countered effectively by increasing the quality and price of their yerba. They carefully used only the leaves to make yerba, rejecting the stems and twigs that added weight without flavor. As this Ka'amiri was much desired in Asuncion and Buenos Aires, its value was soon three times that of the conventional product. 2 While the bandeirantes forced the Jesuits south into Misiones, mestizo settlers abandoned Guaira and retreated west across the Parana River onto the southern bank of the Curuguatyy River (see Fig. 4). This new settlement of Villa Rica brought the encomienda communities of Mbaracayu into new prominence. Not only were their people among the few laborers that remained in Guaireno hands, they were located in the midst of dense verbals that, for a time, were safe from bandeirante attack. As the commercial market for yerba continued to develop in Asuncion and Peru, the resources became important sources of wealth for the colonists. The Guairefios remained on the Curuguaty'y for over forty years, farming, hunting, and producing yerba for the growing commercial markets.

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Figure 4. Jesuit and Mestizo Movement through Mbaracayii (1600-1750) In addition to the Guarani in encomienda communities, the settlers on the Curuguatyy were forced to contend with a large population of Guaranithat remained in the forest. These people variously called Ca'agua, Jejuienses, Mbaracayuenses, and Monteses (Susnik 1965), resisted forced labor drafts, and harassed the encomienda communities and the encomenderos (Aguirre 1949a, 360). In addition, indigenous residents of the Chaco, the Mbaya (not to be confused with the Mbya mentioned earlier), Payagua, and Guaicuru, attacked progressively deeper into the forests of the Mbaracayu region throughout the seventeenth century. They eventually reached Villa Rica, killing and taking captives among the encomienda Guarani (Susnik 1965,191).3 In 1676, bandeirante attacks reached the Curuguaty'y. The various onslaughts made concentrated settlements of Guarani or mestizos impossible in Mbaracayu. The beleaguered setders were once again forced to move their homes, this time to within one hundred kilometers of Asuncion.4 The attacks along the Jejui and Curuguaty'y Rivers destroyed the pueblos of Mbaracayu, San Pedro de Terecani, and San Francisco de Yvyrapariyara, and the encomendados were lost to bandeirante enslavement or forest freedom. The negotiations of the retreating Guairenos were only

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able to secure control of the Guarani of Candelaria (Susnik 1965,195).5 The colonists who depended on yerba for their wealth were forced to send encomendados from Asuncion to work in Mbaracayu, including requisitioned laborers from Franciscan and Jesuit missions. Jesuits defended their charges against these labor drafts, pointing out the dangers of sending workers many leagues into the forests and forcing them to perform hard labor with litde food for up to two years at a time (Altamirano in Whigham 1991a, 59-63). Government reports of the day also cite the distressing loss of Guarani labor for defense, the building and repairing of forts, and the construction of canoes and boats (Susnik 1965,151). Disease and the predations of bandeirantes reduced the Guarani population drastically, but they cannot fully account for the failure of the missions and encomiendas in the forests of Guaira and Mbaracayu. Guarani did escape all four of these dangers and returned to, or remained in, the forests. The failure of encomienda and Jesuit systems to subjugate these individuals must be understood in part as a failure of the Spanish attempts to transform indigenous relations into tributary ties. In Mexico and Peru, the Spanish were able to manipulate indigenous social institutions to facilitate labor drafts, at least until direct control could be established over local populations and their land. Highland resources were under the control of an extensive, hierarchical social structure; the Rio de la Plata was sparsely populated by dispersed groups. The Spanish and missionaries had only a tenuous presence in the vast Mbaracayu forests. They did not inherit, nor were they able to create, a system to effectively coerce tribute from Guarani subjects. As Guarani could not be easily maintained as a tribute labor supply in Mbaracayu, other forms of labor recruitment became necessary. Barter, trade, wage labor, and debt bondage became alternative strategies to extract the leaf from the forest. Workers were drawn from both mestizo and indigenous populations. Although wage labor pulled peasants from the increasingly populated Asuncion area, it also attracted the Guarani away from their pueblos and dealt a serious blow to the faltering encomienda system. Wage Labor At the same time that the Guarani population was declining in the verbals, markets in Buenos Aires and Peru were demanding increased quantities of the leaf. In 1726,500,000 kilos were being produced in Mbaracayu. By 1801 this figure had risen to 2 million kilos (Lopez 1976, 24; Azara 1873, 87). The pressure of market demands and labor scarcity brought new forms of workers into the verbals of Mbaracayu. In particular, mestizo wage work-

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ers became an important portion of the yerba harvesting population. In 1707, between one third and one half of the eight hundred yerba workers in Mbaracayu were wage laborers. By 1729, the population of free laborers reportedly predominated over encomendados (Garavaglia 1983, 373), and remained so through the end of the century. One Asunceno reported that, . . . the greater part of the workers are Spaniards and few are indigenes, because of the latter there are few and in diminished numbers in their communities. (DobrizhofFer [1784] 1822) The need for labor in the verbals prompted the provincial government to instigate a resettlement program in Mbaracayu in 1715. One hundred Guaireno families returned from the south to the abandoned community site on the Curuguaty'y, where they were provided a substantial number of encomendados. 6 In addition to their encomienda charges, the setders discovered Guarani who had continued to occupy the region's forests. Refusing to assemble in reducciones and submit to forced labor, these Monteses harassed the newcomers. Although mortal aggression against the settlers was rare, crops were pilfered and possessions stolen under cover of darkness and the forest. The isolated setders repeatedly (and usually fruidessly) requested arms and soldiers from Asuncion to defend themselves and their possessions. The town, now named San Isidro de Curuguaty, grew quickly; by 1750, it had become the most important port on the Jejui River. Although rocks presented dangers during low water, the Jejui was one of the few rivers that was navigable by large rafts or boats. In any case, yerba from Curuguaty could also be shipped overland direcdy to Parana, Villa Rica, or Asuncion, assuring a constant flow of precious manufactured goods. The setdement became a market town, the center of the regional economy. Resetdement of the Mbaracayu region in the late eighteenth century occurred to the north and west along the Paraguay River. A community called Villa Real de Concepcion was established in 1773, and a road was cut eastward toward the Sierra de Amambay, now Paraguay's border with Brazil. This brought new yerba explorations into the previously little traveled region (Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg 1976, 173)- The importance of the region's verbals can be seen in that Concepcion boasted over seventy merchants and its own consul by 1770 (Cayetano 1804). By the second half of the eighteenth century, yerba had become a prime commercial industry for the Paraguayan peasant. In 1777, Governor Pinedo reported that, There are three activities that occupy the residents of this province, by inclination or necessity: the production of yerba in the forests where it

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grows, its transport by river to Buenos Aires and the cultivation of the soil. . . . This third group of agriculturalists also dedicates themselves to yerba transport. (Garavaglia 1983, 373) As mestizo workers migrated to the verbals, they quickly found themselves drawn into debt bondage to entrepreneurs from the capital city. Merchants from Buenos Aires petitioned the local government for the right to make yerba in a specific area of the forests. These merchants contracted with Asunceno patrones, who distributed clothes, tools, and all manner of "luxuries" to local peasants and poor laborers. In return, the debts were to be served in the verbals. After enlisting ten to twenty workers, a patron, called habilitado, would take the team to the verbals to labor until the debt was paid off. They were rarely so lucky, usually earning just enough to cover the costs of their advance and their sustenance in the forest. The manufactured goods were provided at many times their market value in Buenos Aires and yerba was purchased for only a small portion of its market value. Peasants were soon reduced to long-term debt bondage. In 1761, a bishop of Paraguay observed, Every arroba of yerba that the peon gathers there, isn't worth more than an inflated peso; and to pay for two hundred pesos of clothes (that isn't worth thirty pesos of silver) they remain in the forests for a year or more, poorly fed with scrawny beef, paying as if it were very fat; having as a bed the hard soil without more warmth than their meager clothing; sleeping with the snakes and other poisonous reptiles; and after this painful treatment, they have to rise early to look for yerba trees, at times many hours walk from their hovels; wear themselves out cutting branches, making bundles and bringing them on their backs as if they were donkeys . . . From this labor they pay for their clothes, and at the end of the work, they return poorly fed and clothed . . . passing a year or more until they complete their contract with death and are placed in the grave . . . . (Whigham 1991b, 69-70; my translation) Felix de Azara, visiting the rural outpost of San Isidro de Curuguaty in 1790, reported that, The Governor urges the men to stay in their houses and cultivate the soil in the months of August, September and October, because on the contrary, many abandon their families' annual food supplies as they go to distant verbals, where they live among the beasts without the least

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comfort and with much work fill their bellies with meat that they are given by their masters. (Azara [1790] 1904, 208-209) Guarani Wage Labor The expansion of the labor market further threatened the already tenuous encomienda system. As early as 1595, indigenous workers were allowed to contract freely for wage labor with yerba mate merchants. Governor Juan Ramirez de Velasco decreed that, . . . the Indians must be paid if contracted, at a rate that conforms to the trip they have made and the distance in leagues that they have traveled and that this pay will be in cotton clothes or sayas or hides such as they use in this area. (Susnik 1965,150) Decrees throughout the colonial period reiterated and confirmed the ruling of the Consejo de Indias. By the late eighteenth century, the demands for Guarani as paid workers were threatening encomienda communities. In some encomiendas, forty percent of the adult males were fugitives from their tribute obligations (Susnik 1965, 100). In 1770, Governor Pinedo reported that, . . . many of them do not return to their communities because they die in the isolated forests or flee and hide, sick and scared from the extremely bad treatment and painful work, and those that do return bring sickness and are worthless for work and litde assistance to their families. (Susnik 1965,150) The shortage of Guarani encomendados exacerbated the tension between the Jesuits and the mestizo population. Never a people to submit to papal authority, the Paraguayans chafed under the thought of the thousands of laborers that the Jesuits maintained on their estates in the south. This problem culminated in the Rebellion of the Comuneros, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, which resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Removed from the protection of the church and subject to new forms of exploitation, the Jesuits5 Guarani never became a significant tribute labor force for the Paraguayans. Most escaped into the national society and used their trade skills to find paid employment. Saeger (1981) noted the consequent growth in the number of Guarani setders in Brazil. Virrey

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Melo de Portugal reported in 1794 that encomendados escaping to Argentina left their communities, choosing instead to earn daily wages. They did not return to their villages (Mariluz 1953). The colonial government went to extreme measures to regulate Guarani wage labor. Although the government already retained state rights over yerba harvesting through licensing the producers and taxing the product, Governor Felipe Rege Corvalan instituted a system by which the government established checkpoints along rivers and roads to monitor the movement of Guarani between the encomienda communities and the verbals. The system had little effect. As Guarani left encomiendas and entered the free labor force, they lost the Spanish protector de naturales, a government bureaucrat who had theoretically been their defense against unscrupulous employers. As wage laborers, the Guarani were subject to exploitation by merchants as both producers and consumers. Labor in the production and transport of yerba was contracted through advances, called adelantados, of food, clothing, and equipment. The debt was to be paid off in quantities of yerba. In effect, it was impossible for laborers to reconcile their debts with the work for which they were credited by the merchant. These Guarani, like the mestizo laborers, were soon reduced to debt peonage. The movement of Guarani out of encomiendas and missions shifted the relative sizes of the ethnic groups in Paraguay. In 1682, polled Guarani outnumbered mestizos by almost three to one. Out of a total population of 39,266 people, 77 percent (30,323) were considered indigenous and 23 percent (8,943) were classified as mestizos. In 1761, of a population of 85,178, 62 percent (52,647) were classified as indio; 38 percent (32,531) were considered mestizo. By 1799, however, peasants outnumbered Guarani by more than two to one. In that year, 76,052 residents were recorded, of which only 30 percent (32,018) were indigenous, wheras 70 percent (76,052) were mestizo (Garavaglia 1983, 201).7 Azara, referring to encomendados leaving government encomiendas, reported that "they assimilate among the Spanish and strengthen their nations" (ibid., 326). This shift evinces changing identities of individuals, rather than simple growth of the mestizo population. As Garavaglia pointed out, the relative sizes of the two ethnic groups inverted in only forty years. Between 1761 and 1799, the total population rose 27 percent. However, the Guarani population declined by almost 40 percent, while the population of nonIndians rose 143 percent. Thus, the apparent reduction in the Guarani population in that period reflects their reclassification as campesinos. In fact, in most cases individuals' identity derived not from language or parentage, but from residence. Residents of reducciones were considered indigenous, and townspeople were determined to be mestizo. Individuals who left encomiendas and missions became, by definition, campesinos.

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Guarani who remained in or returned to the forest were considered outside the national society and lost to the censuses. The remaining indigenous peoples of Mbaracayu resisted attempts to find and reduce them. Ambitious priests saw the dispersed Guarani of the northern Mbaracayu forests as needing their protection, both from purgatory and encomenderos, but the forest Guarani often did not agree. They were usually able to evade the long arms of the church and the state. The experiences of the Jesuit missionary Martin Dobrizhoffer are a testament to the ability of Guarani to escape from the national society into the deep forests, where they lived in small hamlets removed from major waterways. In 1697 and 1723, bands of Guarani temporarily left the forests for a reduccione called Nuestra Senora de Fe, 150 kilometers south of the Jejui River on the banks of the Tebicuary River. The first time, four hundred Guarani stayed for almost twenty-five years. "But love of freedom at length bore them back to their original forests, whence they were in vain recovered . . . ." (Dobrizhoffer, 1822,53). The second time, Jesuits convinced the Guarani to stay almost ten years before they finally returned to the forests. Dobrizhoffer spent almost two years searching in vain for these lost charges. His chronicle provides a wealth of information about the region and its inhabitants. Dobrizhoffer slogged through swollen rivers and trackless forests for weeks at a time. His few contacts with Guarani were not along the large rivers that served as the region's highways, but along unnavigable streams. He did not encounter large communities, but felt fortunate when his efforts turned up a single family or a small settlement of scattered households. Finally, in 1735, the escapees were discovered by chance, near the headwaters of the Aguara'ymi River. Rather than trying to transport the Guarani again, the Jesuits constructed a community in their midst. However, "the Guaycurus or Mbaya began to devastate the neighboring estates of the Paraguayans with slaughter and predation," forcing them and their charges to "remove twenty-five leagues southwards" (Dobrizhoffer 1822, 54). There, in 1753, they established the mission of San Joaquin in the forests of the Cordillera de Ca'aguazu. Soon after, a second mission was opened in the forests of the Mbaracayu area, at San Estanislao (Santani), "for the Itatines, discovered by the joint efforts of the Indians and the fathers of San Joachin in the woods situated between the rivers Caapivary, Yeyuy [Jejui], and Tapiraguay. They were prevailed upon to assemble in one place and embrace the Christian religion" (Dobrizhoffer, 1822,56). The two final missions for Guarani of Mbaracayu, known as the "reducciones del Taruma" (Cadogan 1956, 295) never attained large populations.8

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Yerba, Society, and the State in Mbaracayu 47 Although its size is difficult to judge, the Guarani population that remained in the forest made its presence felt by harassing setders who entered the isolated yerbals. Correspondence from San Isidro de Curuguaty to Asuncion made continual pleas for arms and soldiers to fend off attacks by the forest Guarani (e.g., Bautista 1795). Traveling north from San Isidro de Curuguaty in the second half of the eighteenth century, Dobrizhoffer observed that although the Guarani sometimes traded yerba for axes and machetes, the yerbateros feared the forest groups. He recorded, The necessary preparations made, the Spanish were sent to the woods where die leaves were to be gathered. But their superintendent Vilalba lit upon a hovel, which, though empty, evidendy belonged to the savages. Struck with the unexpected occurrence, he hastened to his companions with the news, which instigated them to immediate flight, and to think of saving their lives rather than gathering the herb of Paraguay. ([1784] 1822,57)

Azara, writing in 1790, reported that, A few years ago the abundant and excellent yerbals of Caagua-gue (Caagua-cue) y Cariy were being exploited, but today they are abandoned due to fear of the barbarous Caaguas (Caingua-guarani) all around Villa.... ([1790] 1904,209)

In brief, from the first days of the conquest, the Guarani resisted colonial efforts to force them to perform labor tribute. Some Guarani retaliated with arms, attempting to overpower the weak colonial army; others simply abandoned the pueblos and assimilated into national society as wage workers. Most importandy, many Guarani either remained in or returned to the deep forests of Mbaracayu, thus evading the national society through the end of the colonial period. Extraction and the State By the time of Paraguay's independence from Spain in 1811, the commercial yerba economy had grown and extended into the far corners of Mbaracayu. The state struggled to control the industry throughout the first half of the century, finally capitulating to the power and profits of a multinational latifundio. This corporation, La Industrial Paraguaya S.A,, dominated Mbaracayu until recendy. The yerba economy drew both Guarani and mestizos into wage labor. But whereas mestizos were usually trapped

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in debt bondage to the largest and most rapacious producers, the Guarani seem to have avoided these coercive contracts. The memories of still living Guarani and their patrones suggest that, for the last century especially, Guarani worked without debt for secondary patrones. Rather than falling into bondage, these Guarani managed to maintain multistranded relations with specific patrones and their families. Thus, as mestizos in Mbaracayu fell under the power of wealthy latifundistas, the Guarani established a fundamentally different relationship to the developing system. After throwing off the Spanish yoke, Paraguay discovered it had become an economic vassal of foreign yerba merchants. Rural areas were dominated by yerba production, which in turn was controlled by Argentine and Peruvian marketeers. By holding sway over yerba production, these investors controlled both the urban markets and the rural yerbals. Goods from Buenos Aires and Lima filled Paraguay's tiny capital and profits accrued in these far-off ports. The first order of business was to wrest control of the economy from these foreign interests. The nineteenth-century Paraguayan state has been a subject of some of the best of the nation's mythology. Principle among the heroic figures is Doctor Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, "El Supremo." He took power in 1814, asserted dictatorial control over the nascent republic, and ruled with a singular and iron hand for a quarter century. Francia methodically disassembled the institution of government, confiscated the wealth of the church, and disenfranchised the elite. A fanatic isolationist, Francia reduced yerba exports by 95 percent, from 2,890,000 kilos in 1816 to 112,220 kilos in 1829, destroying the mercantile capitalists and the hierarchy of debt relations that had formed the social structure of production in the yerbals (White 1978,107). Production from the wild yerbals was particularly disadvantaged, as the small quantity of yerba that was exported by Francia came primarily from the cultivated southern yerbals that he had expropriated from the Jesuits. Natural yerbals in the north were placed under state ownership and declared no longer free for unrestricted settlement. Thus, commercial production all but stopped. This reduced the Paraguayan economy from an extractive commercial system to one of subsistence. In Mbaracayu, Francia's export policies reduced Curuguaty to a minor outpost along Paraguay's border with Brazil. Subsistence farmers tilled the soil and prospered. The observations of the English physician Johann Rengger (who was not always supportive of Francia's dictatorial machinations) deserve lengthy quotation: By these regulations he produced a complete revolution in the system of rural economy, which had been, up to that time, neglected so far, that the common necessaries, which would have grown spontaneously

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under the influence of the sun's rays, were imported from Buenos Aires and adjacent provinces. The Paraguaisians never thought of extending their care of any article beyond the tobacco-leaf, the sugar cane and the yucca root. The herb of Paraguay, which grows without the aid of any art, in the vast forests of the north and east, engrossed all hands. Every abuse was remedied under the superintendence of the Dictator: and, in the consequence of his directions to farmers, the produce being now considerably augmented. The suspension of the intercourse, which had been hitherto uninterruptedly maintained with other countries, contributed also very much to produce this fortunate result, as it turned to the cultivation of the soil all that industry which used to be applied, either to navigation or to the collection of the herb. The Paraguaisians were accustomed to migrate for a short time every year (to verbals). They were now forced to stay home. Here, therefore, were so many hands gained. Rice, maize, the two sorts of yucca-root, were now cultivated upon a more extended scale, and with much greater diligence; and vegetables, which were hitherto unknown in Paraguay, began now to cover the plains. (Rengger and Longchamps 1827, 47-48) In a period of rampant liberalism throughout Latin America, Francia's attitude toward indigenous communities was fundamentally conservative. As Simon Bolivar's reforms dismanded indigenous communities throughout the Andes, Francia strengthened the special status of indigenes in Paraguay. Even as he took the lands and wealth of the church and other latifiindistas, he recognized the lands of the indigenes. The half of the state territory that was deemed nongovernmental was divided equally between indigenous and mestizo peasant communities (Pastore 1972, 104). His leadership not only secured the lands of the Guarani, but also curtailed the unlawful exploitation of reservation resources by dishonest bureaucrats. More curiously, as Francia recognized the primordial rights of the Guarani, he sought to destroy ethnicity as a bastion of the elite. He forbade marriage between persons of the European elite. The dictator's fiat demanded that men of Spanish descent marry only indigenous, black, or mulatto women (Potthast-Jutkeit 1990, 219). His decrees went so far as to restrict Spanish-descent people from acting as godparents. Thus, Francia limited the elite's opportunity to replicate itself economically, socially, and biologically, while strengthening the special character of indigenous communities. With Francia's death in 1840, the responsibility of forging a state apparatus fell to Carlos Antonio Lopez. Lopez picked up the mande of dictator and set to work to create the edifice of a government from the ashes left

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by his predecessor. Lopez strengthened the army, developed the country's nascent transportation system, and set out to fashion Paraguay's few remaining intellectuals and politicians into a system of national administration. He opened the isolated republic to private enterprise, and the export economy recuperated quickly. Yerba production reached 764,090 kilos by 1863 (Williams 1979, 217) and flowed in unrestricted quantities south to Buenos Aires and east to Brazil. Curuguaty and the Mbaracayii region once again became the center of production, and smaller communities formed in the outlying districts. To the north, Igatimi was established on the Jejuimi (a major tributary of the Jejui), near the sites of the previous encomienda communities of Terecani and Mbaracayu. To the south, the community of Yhu was founded near the remnants of the Jesuit community of San Joaquin.9 To spur Guarani into wage labor and gain access to Guarani forest resources, Lopez liberated the indigenous population. His decree emancipated the Guarani but made them subject to military service and taxes, the latter of which were to be paid in yerba to the national government. Whigham (1991a, 124) estimates that as many as twenty-five thousand workers were thrown into the wage-labor market. In addition, the 1848 decree dissolved the communal lands of the Guarani. Communities such as San Estanislao and San Joaquin controlled valuable yerbals and important river access. The government used the decree to assume full and direct control of these resources, as well as of the fertile agricultural lands of many of the other twenty-one communities. The decree both recognized a process of wage-labor formation that had been pulling Guarani into the larger society and removed the last vestige of protection that the indigenous population had in the face of this process. Guarani yerbateros lost the protection of the lands they had held and were forced to work next to poor Paraguayans in the yerbals—a liberal reform that Bolivar himself would have welcomed as progress. The enfranchisement of the Guarani challenged the Paraguayan ethnic category of indio. Until that time, residents of Guarani communities were considered different, despite their language, religious, and economic similarities to the larger population. With the loss of the pueblos, the single clear marker of ethnic distinction was removed. Subsequendy, residents of San Estanislao and San Joaquin were categorized as peasants by local census takers. The recognized indigenous population dropped to less than 1 percent (Williams 1979, 435). After the abolition of Guarani communities and the assimilation of their residents into the national society, the recognized indigenous population was almost exclusively limited to that of the eastern forests, outside the reach of the weak church and state. It is impossible to determine the size

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of this population. Williams (1979, 434) made an educated guess that twenty-thousand indigenes roamed the forests north of Asuncion. Although this population is small in comparison with the 238,862 mestizos found by the census of 1846, Guarani probably predominated in most of the more isolated areas. Of the mestizos, over 180,000 (76 percent) were concentrated in the towns of Asuncion and Villa Rica. The remaining 58,000 people (24 percent) were scattered in small communities to the north, south, and east. As Williams pointed out, except for the town of Curuguaty, with a population of 4,i39, virtually no mestizos lived in the far eastern regions bordering Brazil, north of the Apa River, or in the inhospitable Chaco (1979, 426). In a pattern that had been unchanged since the seventeenth century, colonists' relations with the indigenous population of Mbaracayu remained tense through the end of the nineteenth century. Aguirre, during a trip to define state boundaries with Brazil reported, The forest Guarani alternate between war and peace with the yerba collectors. Killings are few and in general the Guarani are not bloodthirsty, what they want is to rob [gatherers'] camps for the tools. (1949b, 36-38)

The fears and frustrations of the yerbateros and colonists of Mbaracayu resulted in violent reprisals against the Guarani. Most of these went unrecorded, but several remain preserved in military reports to Lopez. One punitive raid reported in 1843 was against the Guarani north of the Jejui, at the site of Terecani. Fifty soldiers armed with eighteen guns, and with the support of nearby mestizos and their sixteen muzzle loaders, attacked a Guarani household, where they "killed five Guarani and captured three young women and four children," presumably for sex, slavery, and sale (Cadogan 1962, 15). The next year, soldiers assaulted a community that stood north of Igatimi, at the site of the contemporary community of Y'apo. They reported that, Eight indigenous "Caiguas" presented themselves; I had to kill seven, leaving the leader to act as our guide. A detachment of 120 men was sent with Sergeant Pedro Martin Troche, with sixteen chamvanas^ they arrived at a large tolderia at Nandurocai, a single house that measured fifty-eight paces long and twelve wide, surrounded by five more houses; they killed three women with their children at their breast and captured two children, a boy and a girl. One injured person escaped. They burned twenty-eight percheles of corn and all the houses. (Cadogan 1962,15)

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The pressure of these mestizo raids made it difficult for the Guarani to continue to reside in extended kin houses. Although until recently, large communal residences were evident in adjacent areas of northeastern Paraguay and Brazil, this record was the last one reported in Mbaracayii. Subsequendy, Guarani west of the Parana were found exclusively in singlefamily dwellings scattered in the headwaters of the region's rivers.10 In response to continued forest Guarani raids on yerbateros, Lopez constructed a series of military outposts in the verbals and demanded that soldiers produce the leaf for the state. In a decree that clearly reflects the preeminent position of yerba in the state's interests, Lopez instituted the death penalty, as in the case of military deserters from warfare, for yerbateros who fled attacks by indigenous groups on the verbals (Whigham 1991a, 125).

Despite the massive quantities of yerba exported under Lopez, the Paraguayan crop never fully recovered its primary position in the markets of Brazil and Argentina. While the price of national production remained low, Lopez guaranteed state income by fixing the price of exported yerba at a rate that proved high relative to Brazilian and Argentine production (Whigham 1992a, 45). Whereas Francia's export embargo had given foreign producers incentive to develop their own nations' verbals, Lopez' policy gave them a continued price advantage in the international market. Lopez' son, Francisco Solano Lopez, embraced his father's statebuilding program with enthusiasm. He sought to fashion Paraguay into a model of the new Latin American nation-state, with all the latest accoutrements, including a telegraph system, iron smelter, and a railroad line. Not the least, Paraguay was developing its military power to assert control over verbals that it had always claimed along its borders with Brazil and Argentina. This belligerent militancy destroyed the new state's developing infrastructure. Lured into a battle with Brazil, the young republic found itself at war with the Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Soon the effort to defend its land turned into a frantic attempt to save itself. The government and its army withdrew to defend the capital and, failing that, the dictator and his remaining troops sought refuge in the deep forests of Mbaracayii. He ensconced himself in a small estate outside Curuguaty, where he lived for the final three months of his presidency. In 1870, Lopez was hunted down and killed by Brazilian troops. Soldiers besieged the town, and once again, its 1,400 residents were evacuated in the face of Brazilian marauders. La Industrial Paraguaya The economic policies by which the Paraguayan state rebuilt itself after the War of the Triple Alliance created an integrated yerba production sys-

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tern that shaped the frontier society and economy to the present. In effect, the desperate government turned over the wealth of the state to an entrepreneurial elite. The elite formed itself into the nation's greatest landholder and proceeded to rule Mbaracayu as its private fief. The rise of Industrial Paraguaya is important for three reasons. First, it demonstrates the means by which yerba production dominated the state apparatus. Second, as most yerba collectors were mestizo, Industrial Paraguaya became the structure for authoritarian domination of mestizos in Mbaracayu. Finally, the Chiripa avoided the debt bondage and authoritarian domination of Industrial by collecting yerba for minor patrones and indigenous capataz, who maintained multifaceted relations with their workers. The nation that emerged from the War of the Triple Alliance was beset by demands for land and war reparations from both Brazil and Argentina. In 1872, Brazil annexed the yerba forests north and east of the Jejui Biver basin, including all land north of the Apa Biver and northeast of the Cordilleras of Mbaracayu and Amambay. Four years later, Argentina negotiated control of the prime yerba forests between the Parana and the Uruguay rivers, roughly 40 percent of Paraguay's yerba forests. Adding insult to injury, the Brazilians demanded a payment of gold that threatened to reach $300 million (Warren 1985). Only the mutual antipathy of Argentina and Brazil prevented the total dismemberment of Paraguay. The beleaguered government looked for fantastic solutions to its insurmountable problems and found willing accomplices in British financiers, who were willing to float gold bonds on the London market. In 1871 and 1872, bonds of $1 million and $2 million respectively, were sold to the British public. The entire scheme was shady, if not fraudulent, for it ignored Paraguay's war debt and benefited traders and government officials more than investors or the Paraguayan nation. The funds were immediately disbursed into bureaucrats' pockets and the market crashed, leaving a mass of very angry investors who organized as the Council of Foreign Bondholders to investigate the affair with an eye toward justice. The loans created yet another claimant on the state. In 1880, Bernardino Caballero seized power, bringing Paraguay into a new era of laissez-faire economics. Caballero had been the trusted confidante of Solano Lopez throughout the War of the Triple Alliance and presented himself as the rightful heir to the dictator's mande. The new government advocated a strong private-business sector and favored the prominence of foreign capital. After seventy-five years of a state-managed economy, in which verbals were owned by the state and licenses provided to private merchants, Caballero and his successors sold tides to state verbals to private corporations, hoping to stimulate the commercial sector and bring cash to their empty coffers.11 Under the Land Act of 1883, the government began to sell its vast state holdings at auction to the highest bidder. Given the success of this initial

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sale, it enacted a second law in 1895 to map and sell all public verbals. The most valuable state lands were the forests of the Jejui Biver basin, desired less for their agricultural potential than for lumber and verbals. Their fertility had been proven and their resources surveyed, and, unlike Chaco groups, the Guarani of the Jejui were not considered to be a military threat (Caballero Aquino 1983, 42). The government was successful in attracting large venture capitalists. Foremost among the corporations that came to control the yerba trade was La Industrial Paraguaya S.A., formed in 1883 by the elite of Asuncion's monied citizens.12 Investors included Paraguay's president, its Ministro de Hacienda, and its wealthiest man, Luiz Patri.13 The only foreign capital involved in Industrial Paraguaya's organization was that of an Englishman, Rodney B. Croskey, who represented the British foreign bondholders. Industrial Paraguaya purchased the best of the verbals the government sold. Few investors were willing to bid against the president, treasurer, and cabinet that comprised the company's directorate. By 1890, Industrial had purchased over 2,500,000 hectares of forest, including 855,000 hectares of the country's most valuable verbals. In total, Industrial acquired 85 percent of the country's natural verbals, including 60 percent of the land within eighty kilometers of the community of Igatimi (Pastore 1972, 254).14 The company quickly organized a system to assert control over the regional economy and harvest the yerba crop. It employed administrators in each of the major yerba regions to manage production and transportation. These individuals set up bulking centers and company stores, where provisions were sold and yerba was collected for shipment. Each administrator employed middle managers to supervise gangs of workers who cut the leaf. The relations among the participants were based on credit—from the company to the administrator, from the administrator to the patron, and from the patron to the men who wielded machetes to do the harvesting. The small and medium producers who had controlled the harvesting of yerba before the Land Act of 1833 lacked the capital to buy into the monopoly and were reduced to working as foremen for the latifundistas. The debt relations that had always governed yerba laborers now became integrated into a single hierarchy, creating a virtual fief in which the company controlled not just production, but merchandising and police systems as well. The venture was successful, and the value of the company quadrupled in the first year (Caballero Aquino 1983, 235). National yerba production increased dramatically. In 1873,1,512,110 kilos had been produced. The figure rose to 8 million kilos in the boom year of 1890; half of it was exported to Argentina and Brazil. From 1910 to 1920, the country exported an average of 4 million kilos (Warren 1985,205). Approximately one tenth of the

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nation's yerba was produced by Industrial Paraguaya and processed in mills in Asuncion, Corrientes, and Buenos Aires. The corporation's land and financial resources became so great that Industrial Paraguaya was forced to expand beyond the simple production of yerba to banking and cattle ranching. Industrial Paraguaya was not without competition, which came primarily from Industrial Matte Larangeira, founded in 1879 by a Brazilian named Tomas Larangeira. "La Matte," as it was known, set about acquiring both Paraguayan land and labor. In 1885, Tomas Larangeira bid for Paraguayan verbals, driving up land prices and acquiring prime verbals west of Conception. Like Industrial Paraguaya, Industrial Matte Larangeira expanded rapidly. Profits were used first to secure yerba transport and then to diversify into cattle ranching. In 1890 it produced 2 million kilos of yerba and owned five estancias, fifty thousand head of cattle, thirty river rafts, five hundred ox carts, and a narrow-gauge railroad that carried the leaf from the hinterland to the Parana, for shipment to Buenos Aires (Warren 1985, 206).15 In 1902, La Matte consolidated its position in the regional yerba market by merging with two Argentine concerns to become Larangeira, Mendez y Cia. In addition to acquiring capital, the merger provided the company with control over Argentina's verbals in Misiones. Thus, despite the fact that these two major verbals fell into opposing hands after the War of the Triple Alliance, they were soon reunited as a single force to compete with Industrial Paraguaya. Although the company was a BrazilianArgentine binational corporation, selling to markets in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, it depended on Paraguayan labor. Young men traveled by river, either north to Conception or south to the Parana, where habilitados were happy to contract peons for the verbals. They were, it was said in 1902, lured by the deceitful legend of the workshops and verbals, because they lacked their own land to work and even did not know . . . the attractions of an established home and because daily employment is not sufficiently remunerative to attract them. (Warren 1985,185) As the Paraguayan yerba elite consolidated its position in the rural areas, it sought a government that could protect it from political graft at the national level and economic competition at the international one. Industrial Paraguaya's directorate used its considerable political power to force the Paraguayan government to handicap La Matte through taxes and labor restrictions. When President Juan Antonio Escurra not only backed free labor movement to Brazilian verbals but also resisted increased duties on La Matte shipments through the republic, Industrial Paraguaya's directorate bankrolled a successful putsch. Among its financiers were Industrial

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Paraguaya directors Pedro Jorba, Juan Bautista Gaona, Guillermao de los Rios, Antonio Plate, and Rodney Croskey, as well as Jorge Casaccia (Warren 1985, 127; Industrial Paraguaya 1901). With arms purchased in Europe and a ship commissioned in Buenos Aires, the revolutionaries launched an attack. After several months of fitful fighting, Escurra stepped down and was replaced by Industrial Paraguaya's own vice-president, Gaona. Paraguayan national borders subsequendy provided Industrial Paraguaya the protection it needed for unfettered expansion; La Matte restricted itself to growth in Brazil and Argentina. The rise of Industrial Paraguaya was accomplished largely on profits won in Mbaracayu; by 1895, the forests of the Jejui were producing 2,970,960 kilos of yerba, 60 percent of the reported harvest (Industrial Paraguaya 1895). Igatimi, the regional headquarters, was surrounded by the area's prime verbals. Its network of producers and merchants soon expanded into the most isolated headwaters of the forests.16 Just as the consortium demanded the allegiance of the national government, it operated at the local level to reduce Mbaracayu to a virtual private estate. In an area where, and time when, the Paraguayan national government had little power to assert itself outside the capital city, social control in Mbaracayu was managed through hierarchies of authoritarian relations. Thus, in the final years of the nineteenth century, Igatimi was the center of a network of political and economic powers that organized the relationships of mestizos in Mbaracayu. The facilities in Igatimi included a bulking depot, an office, and a company store. The warehouse stood on a rise over the Jejuimi River, an imposing wood-frame building among thatch huts. In 1895, the company employed 743 workers in Igatimi to harvest the leaf, five patrones to manage production, and dozens of capataces to keep order among the workers and to ensure the efficient and careful exploitation of each verbal. Gatherers were variously called rnineros, peones, personnel, yerbateros, and mensu; the last of these deriving from the payments they ostensibly earned monthly, called "rnensual" Yerba and goods were transported along the Jejui River on rough flatbottomed rafts called chata^ formed from flattened timbers held together with cable. Launched from ports on the Jejuimi and Jejui-guazii rivers, the chata could carry up to five thousand kilos of yerba downriver.17 The unwieldy crafts were directed along the tortuous river path by teams of six men, who used long poles to keep them in the center of the river, safe from overhanging branches and submerged deadfalls. At the port of San Pedro near the Paraguay Biver, the goods were loaded onto small steamboats to be transported to a bulking center at Rosario. On return, the chateros would load merchandise from the stores in the capital city and slowly return, poling the heavy rafts against the current. Their shoulders

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would be padded with thick unspun cotton to protect against the pressure of the poles. Fluctuating water levels, which made transport difficult and hazardous, had an immediate impact on profit. Strong rainstorms caused the Jejui to overflow its banks and flood its wide, shallow valley; dry periods dropped the water to dangerously low levels. For example, after Igatimi's highly profitable first year, in 1896, a full year's production was lost when water levels were low for ten months. The bulk of the mensu in the yerbals of Mbaracayu were mestizos, who came from the more populated central areas around Asuncion. They signed on for work teams in Asuncion or San Estanislao and were transported to the yerbals. Many men worked nine consecutive months, spent three months with their families, and then returned to the yerbals for another year. As in previous centuries, workers were provided an advance to purchase goods for themselves and their families in Villa Rica or Asuncion. Once in the forest, workers were restricted from planting crops or even hunting, making them dependent on patrones for sustenance. Food and necessities were brought to the yerbals from the company store. Rice, hardtack, beans, and other staples were provided on demand by the company store. Every two weeks, they slaughtered a steer from Industrial's ranches in the west. The costs of these goods were figured against each individual's production, and workers couldn't leave the forests until they were free of debt. Rafael Barrett, one of a small group of Paraguayan intellectuals at the turn of the century, observed the same misery that the Spanish visitadores had reported in the yerbals 250 years earlier. Peons worked under miserable conditions to pay off ruinous debts, were restricted from leaving and could not even have outside visitors. Although the price of goods in the yerbals was triple that of those in Asuncion, the yerba, for which the peon was paid .6 pesos in 1908, was sold by the habilitado for four pesos and by the Industrial Paraguaya for thirty (Barrett [1908] 1984). Those who did not clear a profit were forced to continue to work and, as Roa Bastos (1979) describes in his classic narrative of the nightmarish yerba camps, men who tried to escape risked torture at the hands of company police. Survivors of the yerbals still remember that workers who fell too far in debt, and those who earned too much, suffered the same ignominious death at the hands of hired killers. Although conditions were brutal, yerba production was one of the few opportunities for wage labor in Paraguay. Besides yerba mate, the country's economy depended on only a few commercial agricultural crops, such as tobacco. Furthermore, Paraguay's population was concentrated in the district of the capital city, where its growing numbers were rapidly stripping the fertility of the soil. Thus, yerbateros left communities without land, where there were no other opportunities to earn a living, and worked

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for needed cash. Labor was scarce and productive resources abundant in Mbaracayu, but Industrial Paraguaya was able to maintain mestizo workers in a state of artificial dependence on patrones by restricting their activities to commodity extraction. As early as 1871, the postwar assembly had passed legislation that reduced yerba collectors to low-wage slaves. Suggesting that it was the responsibility of the national government to protect commercial enterprises from the abuses of peons in the verbals, labor laws mandated that yerba workers could not leave employers without written consent. Those who attempted to escape their duties were to be taken "prisoner of the establishment," with the assistance of the local authorities. The expenses of their capture and transport would be charged to their account. Whatever small defense that might remain in the constitution for the yerbateros was easily ignored. Contracts between patron and peon needed to be ratified and enforced by local governmental authorities, who were under the pay of both the state and the yerba corporations. As Barrett ([1908] 1984,122-123) noted,

[The president] said, in 1877, that the constitution is suspended in the Jejuf River. Supposing that a peon was able to draw from his aching head a bit of independence and from his pains the energy to cross the immense deserted forests in search of justice, he would find a judge who is in the pay of the Industrial, the Matte or the large landholders of Alto Parana. The local authorities are bought off monthly with a payment over and above their salary, according to the report of the accountant of Industrial Paraguaya. The judges and the local leaders, as well, are in the bag. They always are simultaneously federal authorities and yerba patrones. Although the state was supposed to monitor yerba production, its inspectors devoted themselves to preventing unauthorized production and yerbateros from destroying yerba plants. Scant attention was given to the inhuman conditions under which many workers labored. As Industrial Paraguaya asserted itself forcefully over mestizo society, the Guarani of Mbaracayu worked to retain greater control over their relations with the commercial system. Although it kept close tabs on mestizo workers, Industrial Paraguaya had litde idea of the size and location of the Guarani population on its land. Industrial saved the costs of policing the region and its borders by regulating only the valuable verbals, areas the Guarani avoided. As indigenous settlements were small and moved often, not leaving much in their wake, they were of litde interest to the corporation.18 Given the size of the region and the fact that each verbal was visited only every third year, these bands could also avoid unnecessary contact

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with collectors. Yerbateros feared Indians in the abstract, and were brutal when they encountered Guarani in the flesh. Outside the bounds of civilized behavior in their own communities, mensu would replicate the violence of their bosses. They raped women, stole crops, and pillaged Chiripa houses. Fortunately, yerbateros rarely ventured off their paths or out of their verbals. They rarely came across Chiripa houses and when they did find one, usually it was vacant. The Chiripa did their best to see that it was so. The organization of Industrial Paraguayan headquarters in Igatimi stimulated the commercial economy of the region, and the population grew rapidly. Along the Paraguay River, Lima, Concepcion, San Estanislao and Rosario grew up as market towns and labor recruitment centers. It was to these places that laborers returned from the verbals to spend any cash they had. By 1904, San Estanislao was a booming community full of general stores, and it was the site of wild sprees each year in November, when workers received their advances. While the local economy prospered, Industrial asserted itself in other aspects of local society. The town was incorporated in 1904 with a mayor, police chief, and justice of the peace, posts that were controlled by Industrial. In 1917, the direction of Industrial Paraguaya in Igatimi was taken over by a new patron, "Don" Pedro Cardozo. He, and later his son, dominated Igatimi for thirty years. As chief administrator of the local economic council, Cardozo acted as both merchant and paymaster. He monitored the flow of yerba from the forest and oversaw the wooden warehouse in which it awaited shipment. He managed more than the bulking of Industrial's yerba and its shipment down the Jejui; he also controlled merchandise sales and payments to middle-level patrones and workers. Cardozo kept account books that detailed each worker's production and debt. Payments of scrip were issued to patrones, who passed them to gatherers who earned a profit. Paraguayan pesos reales were almost unknown in the region, and scrip supplanted Paraguayan currency as the dominant medium of exchange. Their economic control allowed the Cardozos to dominate most other local affairs. Each in turn acted as justice of the peace and appointed the mayor and police chief. As members of the governing Liberal Party, the Cardozos worked primarily with and for the benefit of business associates and political allies. Formally speaking, the profits of the Cardozos were based on the quantity of yerba produced. Beyond this, a variety of opportunities were available for dispensing favors to themselves and others, and for extracting profits from debtors, vendors, and purchasers of goods. The Cardozos quickly accumulated substantial quantities of land and cattle. With local officials in their pocket and the local police in their pay, they allowed litde recourse for dissenters. The raw political power of Industrial is still remembered in Igatimi in the case of one police chief, Jose Concep-

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cion LaRue. LaRue tried to stop Industrial from smuggling yerba from Igatimi through Ypehu to Brazil by denouncing the practice in Asuncion. When word of his misdeed arrived in Igatimi, he was stripped of his office and chased out of town. LaRue was finally hunted down on government land south of the Jejui and shot by a new police chief, with assistance from soldiers sent by the company. Industrial Paraguaya remained a thoroughly Paraguayan corporation through the first decade of the twentieth century. However, the direct link between the state and Industrial was subsequendy severed by American and European investment in the southern cone. In 1912, the infamous Percival Farquhar, an American, purchased Industrial Paraguaya. Farquhar and a group of daring European investors mounted an audacious program to create an international railroad system to link Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Paraguay. The plan called for purchasing transport lines and natural resources that could be exploited profitably by using the company-owned railroads. Farquhar's plan quickly foundered on two things: a wave of Argentine and Brazilian nationalism, and British defense of its rail interests (Hanson 1937). In August of 1914, the English bank, Speyer and Brothers, solicited government intervention in the steadily worsening affairs of Industrial Paraguaya. The corporation remained under English ownership until it and the Paraguayan Central Railroad were bought by an Argentine consortium in 1938.19 The management remained British until 1950. Even though corporate ownership shifted from Asuncion to London and Argentina, the social organization of production in Mbaracayu remained largely unchanged. New board of directors members had little effect on relations between patrones and mensu in the verbals. Industrial could depend on waves of workers to seek a pitiful life in the verbals and on its administrators in the isolated bulking centers to ship the leaf to Porteno markets. Just as importandy, into the 1940s, the political structure of rural areas continued to support the industries that provided the lifeblood of the region's commercial economy. In Mbaracayu, the corporation could depend on the allegiance of local mayors and sheriffs of Igatimi. Their favors had been kindly returned and they now had profitable forest investments to protect. It should be noted that although Industrial Paraguaya dominated production and trade in the Mbaracayu region, it was not alone in the yerba market. Despite the large holdings of Industrial, other entrepreneurs found land in Mbaracayu on which to setde. When it sold land to Industrial, the government retained tide to areas along rivers, national borders, and the sites of established or planned communities. The vast majority of this land remained undeveloped and available for squatters (or buyers). Several of these landowners controlled smaller, but sizable, verbals. They

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were not independent from Industrial Paraguaya, however. They sent their crops through the corporation's administrators to Industrial mills in the south. In 1956, Industrial Paraguaya was purchasing yerba from over five hundred producers of less than one hundred tons each. Although Industrial milled and marketed 80 percent of the national production, half that was purchased from smaller producers (Raine 1956, 364). One of the smaller yerba producers in Mbaracayu was the Iturbe family. Marciano Iturbe came to Igatimi during the early years of the century and settled in the forest along the Jejui River, eventually filing ownership claims against the absentee titleholder. He was a big man with a square face, and he wore the broad-brimmed hat of rural Paraguay. Iturbe, who made his living harvesting yerba and timber, was joined by his three sons as they reached maturity. Rather than compete with Industrial Paraguaya, Iturbe marketed his produce through Cardozo, developing a firm relation with the administrator. Their sons remember the two men being like brothers. Iturbe accumulated the wealth, stature, and girth befitting a patron. He was a committed Liberal and served as the delegate to the regional government in San Pedro. During the height of the yerba economy in the first half of this century, the Guarani of Mbaracayu lived in settlements dispersed throughout the headwaters of the Jejui River. These small groups were often comprised of only two or three nuclear family households. Along the smallest streams in the upper reaches of the Jejui, these houses were isolated from the major mestizo settlements of Igatimi and Curuguaty, as well as the river transportation routes that linked the region to the larger world. At the turn of the century, according to the earliest information in contemporary Chiripa memory, the progenitors of the people of Itanarami lived in various small settlements: Yvyra Pyta, Takuatindy, Yruku'y, Kaigue, Takuaraty, and Mboi Jagua (see Fig. 5). The former two were located on government land (tierrasfiscales), which was later purchased by Marciano Iturbe; the land of the latter two was owned by Industrial Paraguaya. Although they hid their communities from mestizos, these Chiripa, like other Guarani, did not isolate themselves from the yerba economy. It was an important source of cash. Men sought work and brought goods back to their isolated communities. Guarani households were dependent on the machetes, pots, and salt that merchants could provide. Industrial Paraguaya employed few Guarani, however. Mestizos were considered better workers and made up the vast majority of the mensus in the verbals. Indigenous laborers had the reputation of being ^independable as workers: absconding without paying their debts, only working when they were hungry, and, when their stomachs were full, wandering off into the wilderness. In fact, there was some truth to these charges. Unlike mestizo yerba-

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Figure 5. Historic Settlements near Itanarami teros, the Guarani maintained families and gardens in the region. As the Guarani had access to subsistence production, there was less opportunity to create a debt-bondage relationship with workers. Mestizos that escaped the capataz found themselves lost in the deskrto of the forest. In contrast, the indigenous yerbatero who ran from his employer was welcome at the hearths of many kin throughout Mbaracayu and in Brazil. The old patrones in Igatimi remember that they could not chance a loan to a worker who could so easily fade into the forest. Instead of working in larger verbals, Guarani maintained gardens, hunted and fished, and performed intermittent and short-term work in independent verbals, such as Iturbe's. The lesser patrones exploited Guarani, but labor relations differed from the conventional debt bondage. Ties between indigenous workers and smaller patrones usually were multifaceted. Iturbe and his sons acquired the reputation among both mestizos and the Chiripa around Igatimi as "Indians5 patrones"—they could maintain the relationship necessary to turn a profit from indigenous labor. These relationships, discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 6, were established over extended periods and often involved considerable trust and even kinship between Guarani and the mestizo patron. In some cases, Guarani work crews were assembled under indigenous capataces, who were somewhat more lenient than mestizo bosses. Credit was stricdy limited in these groups.

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Although extractive corporations retained considerable power into the 1960s, serious problems had begun to surface a decade earlier. Cultivated yerba in Argentina and Paraguay was creating new production zones not controlled by Industrial. National production was increasing when exports could not, due to Argentine import restrictions. The extractive economy looked for new commodities as yerba began to lose its hegemony among forest resources. Logging in Mbaracayu had begun in the late 1930s, and hardwood grew increasingly valuable into the 1950s. The Jejui River became a thoroughfare for logs moving to markets in Asuncion and Buenos Aires. Logging camps, called obrajes, sprang up in many of the yerbals and patrones now hired lumbermen instead of mensu. In addition, patrones began to produce orange extract in response to a dramatic market improvement in the 1950s. As the yerba market declined and accessible logs were felled, the economy diversified, looking for profit where it could find it. Orange extract and skins, in turn, created short-term booms that drove the regional economy. At a time when profits were falling, politics was becoming increasingly complicated for foreign latifundistas such as Industrial Paraguaya. In 1933, the nation threw itself into another disastrous war, this time against Bolivia. Although it won a cosdy victory over desolate Chaco lands, the war mobilized an army of veterans who demanded responsiveness from the government they defended. In 1936, these "Febreristas" overthrew the Liberal Party government, which had been installed by the yerba elite in 1904, and ushered in a decade of violence and political confusion. Postwar legislation called for the dismanding of latifundios and enacted labor reforms that protected workers. This was a direct threat to the authoritarian structures of rural Paraguay. The reforms were extended in 1940 when a new constitution replaced the laissez-faire statutes that had been in place since 1870 (Lewis 1980, 24). As large landowners, the Argentines lobbied hard against land-reform legislation and in 1944, showing their power, succeeded in convincing a new government headed by Higinio Morinigo to deflect the law from helping peasants and laborers. This conflict came to a head in 1945, when civil violence replaced palace intrigue and the entire country polarized into party factions. The competing elites were the target of much of the violence, and stores, cattle, and warehouses, such as those belonging to Industrial, were prime targets. Paraguay's two parties, the Liberals and Colorados, alternately held power and used their advantages to pillage the opposition. In the end, the Colorado Party controlled the reins of government and donned the mantle of the martyred Solano Lopez and his beloved General Caballero. By the time that the Colorado dragoons had meted out their revenge, almost a third of the population had fled the country as political or economic refugees (Lewis 1980, 38).

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The 1945-1947 war brought new leaders to Igatimi and the Mbaracayu region. Many patrones had been killed. Others, like the Iturbes and Cardozos, abandoned their possessions and fled to Brazil. The Colorado army slaughtered their cattle, and their lands were taken by the state. In addition to the political dangers, patrones and yerbateros were forced to leave Igatimi for Brazil because of economic reasons. Industrial's bulking system had been largely desroyed and the nation's economy had retreated into subsistence production. Those who desired to work for cash or manufactured goods needed to find employment in Brazil, irrespective of their politics. Industrial Matte Larangeira was happy to hire the destitute work force and benefit from the demise of its only international competitor. Although the violence of the civil war did not involve them direcdy and forest Guarani were generally accepted as being nonpolitical, they were affected by commercial flight to Brazil.20 Between 1945 and 1948, many Mbaracayu Guarani chose to travel to Brazil, where the forest extractive industries remained strong. Even in flight from the Colorado victors, Marciano Iturbe remained important to the Chiripa of Yruky'y and Yvyra P y t l As the yerba economy shifted to Brazil, Iturbe went to work for La Matte, taking Chiripa yerbateros with him. The group included several unmarried men and one entire family. All had worked with Iturbe in yerbals; several of the young men were his Active "kin." In retrospect, these individuals emphasize that they went freely, without debts to or pressure from Iturbe. In Brazil, Chiripa settled in or near indigenous communities, sometimes with distant relatives, where they gardened and collected yerba for Iturbe. Life varied little from what these Chiripa had experienced around Igatimi. For those who worked in yerbals, the period spent in Brazil was less a qualitative change in life-style than a continuation of the status quo they had lived under in Paraguay.21 Some of these men stayed several years before returning to the Mbaracayu region. New Elites The rise of Alfredo Stroessner's military dictatorship in 1955 sounded the death knell for the weakened Industrial Paraguaya, at a national level, even as Stroessner reinforced the authoritarian structures it had created. Beset by peasants with empty stomachs and followers with empty pockets, Stroessner placated both with land grants from foreign corporations. He cloaked the move in nationalist rhetoric. The government also shifted alliances from Argentina, a favored economic partner for decades, to Brazil. Large landholders from Buenos Aires found themselves disadvantaged as both foreigners and Argentines. In an era when cultivated yerba near the abandoned Jesuit missions was flooding the national and international

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market, Industrial Paraguayan two million hectares of forest became difficult to defend from peasants and an antagonistic government. Stroessner used land-reform legislation to force Industrial Paraguaya to sell to a new generation of investors.22 Stroessner's loyal military elite acted as intermediaries, purchasing at undervalued prices and marketing to Brazilian and American ranchers or agro-industrialists at profits of up to ioo percent. While Stroessner usurped the power of the latifundistas at the national level, he used his military to reinvigorate its authoritarian structures in Mbaracayu. Stroessner's rule is characterized in Guarani as mbarete^ raw power over people. The gun and whip of the military comandante replaced that of the capataz, and the beneficiaries were now party loyalists, who became the local elite in Igatimi and Curuguaty. Rather than using violence to produce yerba, this new regime used brutality to maintain political control. Notable Liberal Party members who criticized the regime were beaten, their houses vandalized, and their spouses threatened. Campesinos who chose not to make an appearance at the annual Colorado Party celebration were considered suspect, and if they spoke out against the party they were branded as subversives, jailed, and tortured. They were lucky to escape with their lives. Repression in rural Paraguay has remained a brutal modus operandi since Stroessner came to power. Any attempt to organize outside of the Colorado Party, in peasant unions or as Christian communities under the aegis of the Catholic Church, has been treated as armed Communist insurrection, with the full weight of the army unleashed against its members. Landless peasants have been shot in the darkness of the countryside and intellectuals dropped from airplanes. As in most authoritarian systems, few people stepped out of line. In Mbaracayu, the strictures of the system were both clear and familiar, having dominated the mestizo population since the rise of the yerba economy. Most Liberals, their resources and standard of living reduced by their losses, returned quiedy from Brazil and devoted themselves to their farms and businesses. Even their hopes of returning to power were tolerated, provided that they were not made public. The less-conspicuous Liberals moved quiedy into the Colorado fold. There were few "card-carrying55 Colorado Party members before the revolution and, after the fact, there was a rush to declare one5s self with the victor. Loyalty had always been purchased and affiliations naturally went to the party in power. Government land sales in the 1950s and 1960s created new pressures on Chiripa communities. Parcels of land moved quiedy into the hands of government bureaucrats and Brazilian investors. New roads and property lines cut the dense forest. The unswerving linderos over the undulating hills gave evidence that some alien cartographer's reality was being imposed on the forest. The determined progression of new roads from unseen points to

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unknown destinations made it clear that new forces drove development. This wave of extraction focused on logging. This logging differed from previous extraction, in fact, from previous timber harvesting, in that heavy equipment could effortlessly create roads into headwater areas and interfluvial highlands. Cutting previously had been limited to within a few kilometers of major rivers, as oxen carried the timbers to the waterway for transport. Bulldozers could quickly clear a roadway for lumbering trucks into the most landlocked regions. In some areas of Mbaracayii, the changes had a drastic affect on the Chiripa. For example, on the southern edge of Mbaracayii, the Chiripa settlement of Fortuna found itself stripped of its land and forest. These Chiripa were quickly forced into commercial agriculture and itinerant labor. Communities like Itanarami, in the heart of Mbaracayu, suffered less, because the Brazilians and Paraguayans who acquired land near Igatimi were interested in extracting valuable hardwoods. They did not have the capital to convert their forests to farms and ranches nor the interest in doing so. Investors expelled Chiripa residents to prevent future claims of ownership by occupation, but they permitted them to hunt and extract commodities from the remaining forest. The Chiripa settled onto parcels of government land on the periphery of latifundios. The process of relocation forced the dispersed groups to consolidate into larger communities. The previous groups of three to five houses found themselves in the company of dozens of families. Instead of kilometers, meters now separated household clearings. Itanarami formed in the early 1960s, when the residents of Yvyra Pyta, Takuaraty and Yruky'y came together onto a plot of government land along the Jejui River, at its confluence with a stream called Itanarami. The community site was originally occupied by two households, and it grew as relatives of the wives joined them. Although the three groups provided the bulk of the new community residents, they were joined by others who sought close access to Igatimi and the work that the mestizo patrones could provide. Chiripa continued to work in extractive industries, exploiting the forests that remained in public hands and those of absentee neighbors. As the hegemony of yerba was broken, a variety of commodities began to be sold in the market in Igatimi, including timber, orange extract, furs, skins, and, eventually, fence posts. Chiripa involvement in these industries continued to be mediated by patrones, usually the same individuals and families who had worked with them in the yerbals. The Iturbe family continued to contract Chiripa from Itanarami to work in forest extractive production, but following the tradition of passing patronage relations across generations, Marciano Iturbe's sons and grandsons now assumed the role of patron. Chiripa who now live in Itanarami were involved in those decades in the production of lumber, orange extract, and skins. For lumbering, em-

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ployers preferred to hire mestizos to fell trees and use Chiripa as jangaderos^ who guided the log rafts from areas south of Igatimi to the Paraguay River. Workers were paid cash when they arrived at their destination and were expected to return upriver on foot. Similarly, patrones hired indigenous residents to collect the leaf in exchange for cash per kilo harvested. Chiripa often sold skins, especially otter and jaguar pelts, which became valuable in the 1960s as hunting depleted animal populations near mestizo setdements. In the 1970s, the expanding ranches of Brazil's border regions demanded fence posts, the wood for which could be found cheaply in the forests of eastern Paraguay. Chiripa could also find buyers for other products, but these sales were contracted through less structured relationships. For example, mestizos in the region had always recognized the abilities of the Chiripa to produce medicines from the forest. In addition, settiers without guns or snares were glad to trade corn or other garden produce for meat from the forest. While the economy diversified, the relative profits of forest extractive industries continued to decline through the 1960s and 1970s. As noted, the yerba market began its decline in the late 1940s. The logging industry flourished during the 1950s, but by the early 1960s, the valuable hardwoods that were easily accessible by river had been removed, and logging declined as easy profits were reduced. Even the market for furs was destroyed by prohibitions in the 1970s on exporting this item. Orange extract also suffered from a depressed market in the late 1960s, and most production had stopped by 1975. As in previous cycles, international demand created markets for new forest products. As the forest extractive economies declined, Chiripa became increasingly important to the few patrones who remained. Mestizo workers abandoned forest wage labor for commercial production of tobacco and cotton in newly opened areas. Most Chiripa, and those of Itanarami in particular, do not engage in commercial agriculture—they farm and hunt for subsistence and use the faltering extractive economy as a source of cash. Today, Industrial Paraguaya remains a powerful—if phantom—force in rural Paraguay. The mythology of the verbals and obrajes is told by the old mestizo men who suffered in them. Sitting on doorsteps in the sun, they recount the pain of fifty-kilo bundles carried under the sun's full heat and brag of the silver buckles, spurs and bombillas (yerba drinking straws) they purchased during the golden years of the trade. The brutality of Industrial Paraguaya becomes immortalized in the stories they tell. In their own way, these memories of the old mensu legitimize the contemporary authoritarian structure of rural Paraguay. As caudillos and merchants acquire new sources of power in their isolated colonies, peasants draw their understanding of political relations from the precedent offered

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by the capataz and patron. The lines of power are clear and, although unfair, are the only means of governance these frontier areas have ever known. It is with a deep understanding of this reality that Roa Bastos described the desperate yerbatero struggling against the omnipotence of Industrial Paraguaya as metaphor for the Paraguayan nation's struggle for freedom. The corporation remains powerful in other Paraguayan arenas. The company is notoriously secretive, but a recent report suggests that it still holds 1.5 million hectares in Paraguay (Parquet 1985, 70). Today, Industrial Paraguaya is owned by a consortium of Paraguayan, British, American, and Argentine corporations, including Lloyds Bank of London and Westinghouse Corporation. With the fall from power of Stroessner, balances in Paraguay are once again shifting. The peasants and titleholders of Mbaracayu now tell stories of how La Industrial is returning to reclaim its titles and land. Chiripa in Contemporary Mbaracayu The descendants of the Monteses remain in the forests of Mbaracayu. The contemporary Guarani are a clear, if small, portion of the regional population. Guarani communities have grown in size, today rivaling the settlements encountered by the conquistadors. Where previously the Guarani were hidden in the trackless forest, their present communities are more often well marked and usually accessed by logging roads or cart tracks that link them direcdy to mestizo setdements. Over 2,700 Chiripa have setded in fourteen communities in the Jejui River basin, scattered from the lower regions near the plains of the Paraguay River to the headwaters in the highlands east of Igatimi. Small groups of families, called tapyi^ which had scattered in response to the frontier pressure, have regrouped, often into setdements of over a hundred residents. Most have solicited recognition of their land rights, and many have been granted tide to small forest areas.23 Itanarami, located near the site of the early encomienda community of Mbaracayu, has twenty-eight families comprising approximately 140 individuals. The community lies within an hour's walk of Igatimi, along a rough path cut by generations of ox carts trundling goods from forest to town. Despite these links, Itanarami has retained access to extensive forests. The community stands at the north edge of the Jejui floodplain, which is valuable for hunting during the dry season; to the west is one of the region's last large parcels of unbroken timber. The village of Mboi Jagua is a second important setdement for Chiripa in Mbaracayu. Mboi Jagua was formed as residents of smaller communities coalesced along the northern bank of the Mboi Jagua stream. A major

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portion of the families of Mboi Jagua have close relatives in Itanarami; in fact, many members have lived in both communities. The community also includes factions making up other kinship groups, most which have migrated from Brazil. Since 1971, German Protestants have managed a mission with a school and health center at Mboi Jagua. Although some families attend Protestant services, the indigenous religious leader {tamoi) of Mboi Jagua remains influential. In fact, he is considered among the most powerful in the region and is one of two tamoi in the area who are capable of performing name-giving ceremonies. The community of Fortuna has also become a principle Chiripa setdement in Mbaracayu. It is located on the Curuguatyy River, just a short walk from the present community of Curuguaty. With over seventy-five families, Fortuna is among the largest of the Chiripa communities. It was established at its present site over fifty years ago and has undergone considerable growth, despite the fact that it is situated in an area of dense mestizo setdement. There are many kin ties between Itanarami and Fortuna, and the Fortuna religious leader is said to be the most knowledgeable and experienced Chiripa tamoi. Because land for gardens is increasingly scarce and unproductive, some residents are moving to other Chiripa communities, including Itanarami. Y'apo is located thirty kilometers north of Itanarami on the banks of the Arroyo Bolakua. It has grown to thirty-five families, predominandy members of an extended family group with close ties to Mboi Jagua and, through them, to Itanarami. Santa Carolina, with a hundred families located near the mouth of the Jejui, is the final Chiripa setdement in Mbaracayu. Although the distance between Itanarami and Santa Carolina is over fifty miles, they are linked by the Jejui River. Chiripa often traveled between the two when yerba and lumber were transported by water. Today, roads carry goods in different directions and communication is sporadic, but an important bond remains in the kin members who have married and moved between the two villages. Other Chiripa communities lie in the southeast and west sectors of the Jejui floodplain, but they are not within the social networks of Itanarami. Three communities, Arroyo Mokoi, Aguae, and Carupera-mi, with a total of over a hundred families, lie near the watershed of the Jejui and Parana rivers. Their ties link them with Chiripa communities to the south and east. Santa Isabel, with sixty-four families, lies on a tributary of the Curuguatyy. Santa Isabel recendy expanded in land and population, as a group of families relocated from Fortuna, where they had only weak ties. The social network of Santa Isabel extends to settlements to the west and south. An additional 10 percent of the Chiripa population of Mbaracayu is

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dispersed outside indigenous communities (Instituto Nacional del Indigena [INDI] 1982). These families are often overlooked, as they appear to assimilate into mestizo society, but most maintain close connections with Chiripa communities and eventually return to build houses and plant gardens among their compatriots. The contemporary Chiripa population of Mbaracayu has not only survived, it is growing. The rate of fecundity is almost seven children per woman, slightiy higher than the average for the rural population of Paraguay (INDI 1982, 62). Fifty-nine percent of the Chiripa population is under twenty years of age. Rates of infant mortality remain high, however. Until 1976, over 25 percent of the Chiripa died before reaching five years of age. Since that time, assistance efforts have reduced this rate to closer to 20 percent, but this is still twice the Paraguayan national average for non-Indian peoples (INDI 1982,14). Tuberculosis, measles, and influenza continue to be prime killers of Chiripa. Despite four centuries of contact with the larger society, the Chiripa of Mbaracayu maintain their distinct ethnic identity and social organization. Even as the national society has been organized into an authoritarian and hierarchical system in the forests, Chiripa continue to manage their distinct communities along egalitarian and kin lines. Just as in the eighteenth century, this Chiripa population is defined by residence in indigenous communities. In a society in which language and biology provide little opportunity to distinguish between the indigenous and peasant populations, the principle ethnic marker is community affiliation. This division is not superficial, however. Group membership implies cultural attributes that differentiate the populations. First, although peasants are nominally Catholic, Guarani have generally rejected Christian doctrine. Indigenous leaders remain the central focus of religious experience; the exploits of the twin creators recounted by old Guarani men are almost identical to those recorded by Nimuendaju ([1914] 1978) at the turn of the century. The description and pictures of religious ceremonies in this famous manuscript could have been taken from Mbaracayu today. Mission activity has continued almost unabated since the seventeenth century but has had surprisingly little effect on indigenous religion. Of the five communities discussed here, two have had recent Protestant missions. But when the Baptist missionary recendy departed after fifteen years of residence in Mboi Jagua, few people had been baptized, and the power of even these conversions has dwindled as the indigenous tamoi asserts his presence. Itanarami, more typical of Chiripa response to missionary work, has actively rejected the presence of a Christian missionary in its midst. Economics also distinguishes the Chiripa from the dominant society. This is not to suggest that they isolate themselves from the commercial

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economy. Chiripa distinguish themselves in their use of the forests for both subsistence and commercial activities; many continue to gather forest goods to sell. In Itanarami, almost a third of men's labor is devoted to gathering products from the forest to sell in commodity markets; the majority of household income comes from these sources. As market demand changes, the collectors shift their focus, most recendy benefiting from a demand for mborevi ka% used by merchants to adulterate yerba mate. Unlike the peasants, who farm tobacco or cotton for profit, Chiripa eschew cash cropping. Less than 5 percent of Mbaracayu Guarani engage in commercial agriculture (INDI1982, 521). Periodically, the more entrepreneurial families of Itanarami plant cotton or tobacco to sell. But the vagaries of production and the disadvantages inherent in credit and marketing networks invariably drive even the most committed entrepreneur to return to extraction. After four centuries of using forest resources as a refuge from the larger society, the Chiripa are finding that their forests are being threatened. The Chiripa communities of Mbaracayu stand at the edge of one of South America's last great subtropical forests. As the timber is assaulted, so are the production systems that distinguish the Guarani from the national society. Where previously they were subject to mestizo immigration along major waterways, today, their situations are conditioned more by development frontiers promoted by roads into the region. From the south and west, the burgeoning Paraguayan population relocates onto the forests that were once controlled by Industrial Paraguaya. Brazilian setders move into the forests from the east and north. Each Chiripa community has been affected to varying degrees by recent change. Residents of Mbof Jagua were moved in 1971 when a local rancher purchased their land and cleared the forest. The community resettled onto a parcel of national government—owned, forested land with access to a large region to the east for hunting and gathering. Fortuna has been circumscribed by the homes and fields of peasants, and, as residents are forced off adjacent areas, the colony's own forests and fertile lands are being overexploited. Nearby Mennonites have bisected Fortuna with a road; residents now face a procession of logging trucks, grain haulers, and horse-drawn surreys. Tapo was formed in 1967 when residents were displaced by local ranchers from their community of Takuaraty along the river named Arroyo Guazu, near the abandoned site of Nandurocai. Interested and sympathetic indigenistas have promoted agencies and programs to ameliorate the negative effects of this recent development. In 1958, the Departamento de Asuntos Indigenas (DAI) was established within the Paraguayan defense ministry to coordinate relations between the government and the indigenous population, bringing together and sedentizing the seminomadic and often hostile Chaco groups. Fifteen

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years later, the government reorganized the agency as the Institute National del Indigena. This agency was designed, at best, to reduce conflict between the two ethnic groups and, more often, to assimilate the indigenous population into the national society. As the forests have diminished, the Chiripa have secured some land for their communities. In the early 1970s, private and religious organizations fought to assure indigenous peoples' rights. With international financial support, programs began measuring land and attempting to tide some of it to the Guarani. By 1993, 90 percent of the Chiripa lived on land reserved for their communities, much of it tided directly to the particular Guarani community. The five communities covered in this book each received land grants from the federal government before the latest wave of development. These grants were intended to provide each group with approximately 1,500 hectares in the region of their present settlements. Itanarami received 1,561 hectares; Mboi Jagua was awarded 1,545, Fortuna was granted 1,668 hectares (Asociacion Indigena del Paraguay and Mision de Amistad, 1977). Several communities lost land even after it had been measured. Santa Carolina received only seven hundred hectares, an additional eight hundred hectares was cleared by ranchers and minifundistas. IPapo, with 456 hectares, lost two thirds of its land to greedy military officials. For smaller communities, 1,500 hectares was a considerable parcel. When combined with the usufruct rights they still held to the surrounding forest, they had sufficient land to continue hunting for meat and for commercial gathering of forest products to sell. Larger communities, most notably Fortuna, discovered that the land grants did no more than provide house sites for their rapidly expanding population. Forests are destroyed on reserves and the population has been forced to seek wage labor outside. Conclusion Despite the pressures and opportunities created by extractive industries in Mbaracayii and four centuries of involvement in the yerba trade, the Chiripa have maintained their independent communities and distinct ethnic identity. Even as Mbaracayii fell under the rule of Industrial Paraguaya and its brutal authoritarian systems, the Chiripa kept their distance from the powerful patrones and caudillos. The survival of the Chiripa in part is due to the fact that the larger system penetrating the forests of the Chiripa was organized around extractive commodities. It differed from other capitalist systems in several important characteristics. First, the state and the elite had only tenuous control over the specific materials needed for commercial production and did not attempt to dominate the foresfs other resources. Additionally, the industry's intensification did not destroy the natural environment. In this

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Verba, Society, and the State in Mbaracayu 73 type of forest extractive production, increasing production means more extensive^, rather than more intensive. Consequently, despite an integrated commercial production system, an abundance of resources have remained available. To create a coercive wage system, the elite needed to bring in workers from impoverished areas outside the immediate region and force them into dependence and debt bondage. The constraints created in this process provided the basis for the authoritarian and stratified relations of the rural mestizo society. This commercial economy created an environment where the indigenous Chiripa became linked to the larger authoritarian society without being dominated by or assimilated into it. The first colonists attempted to exploit the Guarani through feudal systems; their descendants used low wages and mercantile networks. Chiripa who survived the first deadly onslaughts became involved in commercial production but were not integrated into the mass of mestizo laborers. As long as the forest remained intact, the Guarani retained a level of control over their involvement. The following chapters show that the Chiripa did more than avoid the larger system—they prevented its coercive relations from permeating their culture and society. As will be discussed, the Chiripa not only remained peripheral to the larger economy, they maintained more egalitarian relations than did mestizo society. This was accomplished through religious leadership, kin-based residence groups, and an economy that stressed stability and diversity.

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3. Kinship, Households, and Community

At first sight, Itanarami appears similar to any of the small mestizo hamlets that dot Paraguay's forest frontier. Its most visible aspect is a small, sloping field with a worn, wooden school house. There are none of the impressive multifamily dwellings or the striking circularity of famous indigenous villages found elsewhere in lowland South America. Individual families build small thatched huts from poles and local marsh grasses. Most residences are set in isolated forest clearings along a tangle of footpaths, some several kilometers from the town center. The resemblance extends to life-style. Isolation caused the first Spaniards to adopt the Guarani language and cuisine, and to have children by Guarani women. Guarani continues to be the language of Paraguayan mestizos, and the physical process of mestizaje has given the general population a distinct resemblance to the local Guarani. Given the superficial similarities of Chiripa and mestizos, indigenistas and government bureaucrats have often suggested that the Chiripa are acculturated and are being assimilated into Paraguayan society (Metraux 1948, 71; Susnik 1961, 174; Cadogan 1959a, 66). Despite these beliefs, Itanarami 5s indigenous character remains strong. The communities of Mbaracayu reject a national identity, considering themselves to be Ka'aguygua or "People of the Forest.55 They avoid the hierarchy of mestizo society, maintaining more egalitarian social relations and interpersonal relations that are noncoercive. Finally, despite years of missionization, Chiripa reject Christianity in favor of their own cosmology and religion. This study regards kinship as fundamental to the distinction between the Chiripa and the mestizos. Descent and affiliation structure Chiripa society. Membership in a kin group—through blood and/or marriage—is the only means to acquire rights to residence, exchange networks, and leadership. Wolf (1982) distinguished this "kin-ordered55 society from those organized through feudal or capitalist relations, in which violence and coercion characterize relations. This does not argue that the Chiripa retain

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exotic marriage systems that set them apart from mestizo society. Function, not form, is what is important. Chiripa society has retained its kin organization despite contact with feudal and capitalist frontier organizations, but this does not suggest that the indigenous system has remained unchanged. Indeed, Chiripa society has undergone profound changes. For example, although contemporary Chiripa nuclear families maintain independent residences, the lineage group generally has been considered to be the traditional Guarani household (Schaden 1962; Wagley and Galvao 1946). The authors of the first reports from the seventeenth century (Techo [1705] 1897) observed rectangular and circular thatch buildings housing Guarani kin groups of up to two hundred persons. As noted, Paraguayans discovered a large Guarani household in Nandurocai in 1844. As late as 1943, the Pai-tavytera in Brazil still constructed these tafui or oga djekutu for extended families (Watson 1952).

The first reports of smaller households among the Guarani of Mbaracayu came in the eighteenth century (Dobrizhoffer [1784] 1822, SS). Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers all described Chiripa households as nuclear family groups (Ambrosetti 1894; Muller 1935, 154). Today, no Chiripa remember constructing lineage houses; the Chiripa now use the term tapui to denote a small settlement of nuclear families in separate houses. The record suggests that the Chiripa have adopted nuclear family residences at least in part because of the pressures and opportunities of the frontier. The fate of the group at Nandurocai lends credence to Rehnfeldfs supposition that large Guarani households were forced to disperse into nuclear groups by disease, bandeirantes, and encomenderos (1983, 35). It is also probable that wage labor and commercial involvement promoted the independence of nuclear family residences. These changes, however, render the people of Itanarami no less indigenous and no less Chiripa. In fact, as they have moved into the cash economy and dispersed into nuclear families, the Chiripa have maintained their ethnic autonomy by repudiating the authoritarian relationships of the frontier. More than simply surviving, the Chiripa have successfully adapted their systems of kinship to the new pressures. As nuclear families became more dispersed, these lines of indigenous cohesion continued to function, perhaps even taking on new purposes, as Chiripa society has confronted the larger system. Two aspects of indigenous social organization allowed the Chiripa to adapt their kin-based system to a contemporary context. First, nuclear families have independent access to the land and labor needed in production. They are not subject to indigenous hierarchies or susceptible to

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domination by non-Indian elites. As this economic autonomy still has the possibility of dispersing Chiripa households into the larger society, the viability of indigenous organization is only understandable with reference to a second factor, indigenous leadership. Chiripa leaders stress religious powers and kin connections to organize nuclear groups. These relations transcend households5 economic independence and are not degraded by members' involvement in commercial production. This chapter discusses the importance of extended kin networks in organizing Chiripa setdement, reciprocity, resources, and leadership. The stress is on the economic autonomy of nuclear families. Chapter 4 discusses how religious leadership uses noncoercive means to organize these independent households as cohesive communities. Kin-ordered Society Although kinship is the basis for Chiripa social organization, the society is not characterized by highly structured corporate kin groups, such as clans or moieties. Bilateral descent and exogamous, but nonprescriptive, marriage rules create extensive and flexible networks that link nuclear families into larger groups. Chiripa descent, like that of other Guarani societies, shows "no emphasis on either the father or the mother's side" (Wagley and Galvao 1946, 3). Extended families comprise all descendants of a progenitor, with the strength of ties diminishing as the common relative becomes increasingly distant. Both members of a couple claim membership in several cognatic groups, so nuclear families are usually affiliated equally with four or more kin groups. Consequendy, kin ties create a simple network in which nuclear families can be relatively mobile in the face of changing conditions and through which communities can reorganize as membership changes. After Guarani religion, kinship terms and relations are the most studied aspect of Guarani life. This work was initiated by anthropologists in Brazil in the 1940s. Drumond (1943) produced an analysis of Guarani kin terms, using linguistic data collected by Montoya ([1647] 1876). Later, Virginia Watson (1944) and James Watson (1952) supplemented library research with data collected among the Cayua-guarani near Ypehu along the Paraguayan border. Wagley and Galvao (1946) noted that minor variations in kinship systems in Tupi and Brazilian Guarani groups are best understood in terms of slight linguistic, rather than structural, differences. This holds true for Chiripa kinship terminology and for terms collected among the Paitavytera (Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg 1976). Chiripa kinship terminology corresponds to that labeled "Tupian" by

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Wagley and Galvao (1946), which is closely related to Dakota systems. All relatives of one's own generation are categorized in terms of one's own siblings. Males and females distinguish older from younger siblings of the same sex, and have a single term to define opposite-sex siblings. Parents' same-sex siblings are referred to by terms that derive from that of the parent. Parents' cross-sex siblings are more clearly distinguished. For example, sy (mother), becomes sfy (mother's sister), as contrasted with jaiche (father's sister). In one's children's generation, progeny of one's same-sex sibling are terminologically included with one's own. Although the Chiripa are inconsistent in applying more obscure terms, Wagley and Galvao (1946) and Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg (1976) suggested that children of one's cross-sex sibling would be categorically included with one's nieces and nephews. Grandchildren are included in a single category, without distinction as to the speaker's gender. Metraux (1948, 87) suggested that the preferred Guarani marriage practice previously was of a man to his sister's daughter. Watson (1944, 36) found support for this contention in Guarani kinship terminology. Watson pointed out that labels used by men distinguish a sister's male and female children (riy and atipe), whereas a woman makes no such gender distinction for her brother's children (both are called pe). Moreover, although a man's terms for a sister's son is closely related to a brother's or his own son (ray), his sister's daughter is accorded a term with a very different root from that of daughter (rajy). Watson's argument finds some support in Tupian marriage rules reported by sixteenth-century chroniclers. In these, a newly married man was expected to reside and work with his wife's father. However, this economic obligation was excepted in cases where a man married his sister's daughter. A marriage to a sister's daughter creates a reciprocal relationship of two groups, and each individual marriage is part of an ongoing series of matrimonial exchanges. Because the debt is compensated by marriage in alternate generations, it need not be exacted from the new husband in labor. Although kinship terminology clearly creates a distinction that would be useful in marriage of a woman's brother and her daughter, this research, as well as ethnographic studies by Watson (1944), Schaden (1962), and Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg (1976), finds litde evidence of the practice.1 All Chiripa agree on terminology for close relatives, but the various terms for parents' siblings, their progeny, and more distant kin are not generally used today. In fact, the terms documented among Guarani in Brazil are only remembered by older Chiripa, and they often disagree on meanings. Despite the importance to earlier kin-reckoning systems, these terms are of litde value in structuring contemporary relations.

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Bilateral descent organizes individuals as a series of overlapping cognatic groups (Fox 1967, 146). As Chiripa men and women recognize equally their male and female children, each individual is a member of the extended families of each parent and all grandparents.2 The extent of these relations is logically infinite. The reality of an individual's kin relations is limited by social memory and the extent to which an individual activates his or her membership in a specific descent group. Few Chiripa can trace relations back more than two generations, beginning with their parents. This creates de facto limits over the collateral kin recognized by an individual. Therefore, instead of being objectively defined, the limits of kin relations are socially constructed and subject to manipulation. A person can claim membership rights in numerous kin groups serially or even concurrendy and, conversely, the larger group can either respect or disregard these claims. In regards to affiliation of descent groups, it should be noted that Chiripa today do not recognize strict marriage prescriptions, but they do proscribe marriage with close kin, specifically, the progeny of parents' siblings. Parents generally hope that their children will select hardworking people from Chiripa families living nearby. Young men and women in Itanarami find many possible marriage partners in the neighboring communities of Fortuna, Mboi Jagua, and Tapo. Couples meet in a variety of ways, often as young men travel to relatives in search of work or when women accompany their families to religious gatherings in other communities. The institutionalization of marriage is not an act or ceremony but a process that begins tentatively and progresses slowly. Adolescents establish temporary liaisons soon after puberty but do not maintain stable relationships until their early twenties.3 The seriousness of a couple's intent to be married is best judged by its household (or lack thereof). It is said that an unmarried woman should not waste effort on a man who does not have a garden and, similarly, that a bachelor who plants a big garden is on the lookout for a hardworking wife. Most marriages achieve their long-term stability based on the couple's support and care of children. In short, kin relations do not create closed corporate groups among the Chiripa. Membership in a kin group affects, but does not determine, setdement patterns, marriage, or, as will be discussed later, leadership affiliations. Instead, a flexible structure is created by which individuals and nuclear families maintain a series of alliances in a variety of descent groups and manipulate these memberships in response to changing factions and opportunities. The norms and structure of kin relations assume importance to the Chiripa in the allocation of rights and responsibilities. The organizing function of kinship is most evident in social interaction, where

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individuals and groups act on the structure of the system to organize people and resources to specific purposes. Tekoa: Settlement Patterns In Itanarami and other Chiripa communities of Mbaracayu, one of the primary purposes of defining kin relations is to determine usufruct rights of the forest. Kin links provide membership in tekoa,4 the small groups that have been the traditional settlement unit in the forest. Descent and affiliation provide families with rights to live, farm, and hunt in the forest near a tekoa. Conversely, unrelated individuals can be excluded from the social life of the group. Although kinship determines rights to settle with a group, it does not define the group with which an individual or family will actually reside. The composition of a tekoa is defined as nuclear families assert their rights to live with one of the several kin groups in which they can claim membership. Claims to residence change in response to a variety of factors. This structure of extensive kin networks permits the group with usufruct rights to remain unchanged as members shift residences among tekoa. It is important to distinguish between Chiripa communities recognized by the national society and the kin-based tekoa of which they are constituted. 5 Today, tekoa groups form semi-isolated social and residential units within the larger indigenous communities. The community includes all residents, but the various tekoa are distinct kin groups, factions, and geographical units, which vary in size, status, and power. A group's power within the community is largely determined by its ability to mobilize nuclear families through kin lines. The groups with the longest and most stable settlements in a region have the most extensive kin ties. For example, in Itanarami, it is generally conceded that the true members of the community are the descendants of three families that lived in the region in the early years of the twentieth century. These progenitors provided rights of settlement in the forests along the headwaters of the Itanarami stream to their descendants and affines. Tekoa such as Yvyra Pyta, Takuatindy, and Yruku'y, were extremely small, with three to five households during the middle decades of the century. In 1981, fifteen of the twenty-six households of Itanarami traced direct lines of descent from residents of these early tekoa. Thirteen of these households claim descent from two sisters, Kunarykatu (Bii) and Kunambei (Aix), who both lived in Yruku'y until the 1950s.6 Two other siblings of this nuclear family, a sister called Kunane'epony and a brother named Avatu'i, settled with their spouses' families in Fortuna. The link among these four and their progeny has grown into a firm bond between the kin groups of the two communities, with visitors

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Figure 6. Kin Group A often making the twelve-hour trek and joining together every year for name-giving ceremonies. The other two tekoa are represented today in the descendants of two sets of siblings: Ignacio Gonzalez (Ai2) and Pixa'i (Cii), and in the progeny of brothers Avambaraka (Bi 2 ) and Avaguyra (Ci 2 ). The close and complex relations of these small residence groups are clear in that Ignacio Gonzalez and Avambaraka married the sisters Kunarykatu and Kunambei. As is clear in kinship and setdement patterns in Itanarami (Figs. 6, 7, and 8), the contemporary tekoa are both patrilocal or matrilocal. They are structured by relations among brothers, sisters, or parents. Although four of the seven males in the second generation of one extended family in Itanarami (Fig. 7) setded near the wives' families for a short period, they have returned to their natal descent group. Two of the remaining men have chosen to remain with their wives' kin groups. (The seventh lost contact with the family long ago.) Although a quick look at setdement patterns suggests no tendency in the locality of residence, there is a definite pattern to the process of sibling groupings. Just as Goody (1958) oudined a life cycle of the domestic group, the various Chiripa tekoa can be better understood as stages in an extended cycle. Groups of same-sex siblings—first, sisters and later, brothers—provide the core around which setdement groups organize and reorganize. Chiripa suggest that a newly married man should join the household of his wife's parents, at least temporarily.7 A young wife is supposed to remain in her home and assist her mother in the house and garden, while her new husband joins the household and helps his father-in-law.

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O-A

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Figure 8. Kin Group C

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Despite both the local ideal and the findings of Wagley and Galvao (1946), young men rarely move into the households of their wives. Couples establish themselves near the woman's parents, but most young couples build their own houses and establish independent gardens. A newly married man is expected to assist his father-in-law in the arduous tasks of garden clearing and house building, but this assistance is often reciprocated in the young man's garden or house building. Moreover, if they are near both sets of parents, the young couple give them equal assistance and, in return, expect reciprocal treatment. As multiple daughters marry, this process transforms the settlement group from a single household to a cluster of nuclear groups, organized around the wives' relationships with one another and their parents. These women form a group for cooperative work, social activity, and often, as will be shown, support of their father's religious activity. The bonds that hold this matrifocal group together are ephemeral. The ties that centered on this natal home lose power as the organizing force of their parents declines. The elder couple's death, or the search for better land, forest, or work, can cause the young couple to seek out another tekoa in which they have relatives and rights of residence. At this time, it is not uncommon for nuclear groups to shift from the wife's natal group to that of the husband. Groups of brothers replace groups of sisters as the core of tekoa. Men's cooperation focuses on hunting and wage labor, as they organize kin-centered work groups. The development of nuclear families creates a new locus of energy within households. As a family's children reach maturity, it develops the capacity to undertake cooperative work groups and social activity. Young men and their father hunt and work together, while sisters join their mother in gardening and household chores. The independence of this group allows for increased autonomy. Parents' siblings are no longer necessary for companionship, gardening, and hunting. Independence promotes mobility, and families often move among the kin groups in which they can claim membership, causing rapid variation in a tekoa's social composition. The end of this stage is defined as members marry out of the nuclear group. Young men go off to join their wives' families and young women bring men to join the group. Because each nuclear family has two groups of close kin with whom they can reside, and a variety of more tenuous residence rights in other tekoa, it is important to distinguish between descent groups that provide rights to residence and the tekoa—the actual social groups. Lines of descent are only the raw material from which groups eventually form. Individuals can elect to assert or ignore their membership in a tekoa. The choice to reside in a tekoa is based on a variety of factors, including disputes among factions or the attraction of an influential relative or leader. For example, when an elder religious leader died in Itanarami in

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1982, many households moved to neighboring communities.8 As a new leader gained power and influence, many of these families and others were attracted back to Itanarami. Production factors can also be important; families moved to the community for the unrestricted access it provided to high forests for hunting and agriculture. Such shifts can be permanent but are also quite common. Some families relocated temporarily to other communities near daily wage labor; others who came to Itanarami quickly found its mosquito-filled air intolerable and escaped to other locations. Only two of the six adult children of Ignacio Gonzalez (Ai2) and Kunambei (Aii) remained in Itanarami during the entire twenty-four months of this research. Of the five who were temporarily resident outside the community, three moved among the spouses5 tekoa, one spent time with his daughter, and the last worked on the farm of a mestizo patron. In Itanarami, individuals and families sometimes assert claims to tekoa membership through cognates and descendants that have married into descent groups. The extent to which these claims are recognized varies in relation to the closeness of the kin and the reputation of the newcomer among the tekoagua (members of the tekoa). For example, in 1982 a family came to Itanarami from Mboi Jagua. Although the man could assert no kin ties in the group, his wife had the same parents as the spouse of Kunatakuayvory (A26) and shared one parent with the spouse of Ava'apyka (A23) (see Figure 6). Given these kin ties and the family's reputation for being "true" Chiripa, called Guaranfete, they were immediately integrated into the group. Not all affines are accepted.9 The means to limit setdement are subtie, informal, and extremely effective. The most obvious method of keeping a family from joining a tekoa is a searing ostracism that excludes them from social activity, reciprocity, and religion. A family may actually reside among other families of a tekoa but their claim to membership will be ignored. This is best understood through an example. In 1982, three families appeared in Itanarami and expressed their intentions to take up residence. The group consisted of an older couple, their children, and families of their two married daughters. The group had been forced out of the father's natal tekoa, now in Colonia Guarani, where factional animosity led the families' three sons to kill a man. The group arrived with little food and no means of support. Their claim to group membership was based on that of the wife, Julia Vera, to descent from Kunarykatu. This relationship had not previously been relevant, as Vera and her descendants had lived a considerable distance from Itanarami. Despite these assertions of membership, Itanarami's residents refused to integrate the families into the tekoa. These new families were said to have been influenced by the mestizos and Pai-tavytera, leaving them violent and ignorant of Chiripa life. Rather than resorting to explicit public rejection, however, Itanarami's residents simply refused to

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integrate the newcomers into social networks. They were not provided with food to sustain themselves and were not invited to social or religious gatherings. In an explicit, but private, negation of their claim, Avatataendy (B31) refused to recognize their cognatic relationship. As none of the other descendants of Kunarykatu, such as Avamaino (B22), claimed them as kin, they remained physically within the region but excluded from the group. They abandoned Itanarami after several months. Reciprocity Kin relations serve to organize networks of responsibility and reciprocity among individuals and nuclear families. Sharing relations of parents and children extend logically to larger kin groups, including both cognates and affines. In many instances, this sharing is for convenience; at other times, it provides a safety net that protects families from the vagaries of disease, weather, and changing fortunes. Reciprocity often involves sharing work, usually tasks that are arduous or boring. This convention lacks the formality of minga, relations seen elsewhere in Latin America and generally involves a group of close friends and kin who find it pleasant and advantageous to work as pairs or threesomes. Same-sex siblings and "in-laws'5 will commonly work together, as will friends and neighbors. For the men, shared labor often involves field clearing, rail splitting, or lengthy hunting or fishing trips. Women usually share the chores of digging manioc and processing its flour. Group work parties often include cognatic kin. As in settlement, these kin lines do not determine work parties but create opportunities for individuals to choose work partners. For example, the affines and cognates of Ignacio Gonzalez include eight adult men in the second generation and five in the third, a total pool of thirteen from which a work party can be formed. However, two sisters of the third generation (A314 and A315) are married to two brothers (E22 and E23). These young men prefer to work with their older brother and their sister's spouse. Consequendy, the second-generation male descendants of Ignacio Gonzalez generally share work among themselves and with their sisters' spouses, who have few kin in Itanarami. In addition to cooperating in work, close relatives share goods among themselves to provide for all families. The yearly food cycle is characterized by periods of scarcity and abundance; as the production of each family varies over time, sharing among kin can increase the security of all households. For example, hunting tapir produces large amounts of meat that are impossible to preserve. As most Chiripa hunting is an individual endeavor, there is no group to partition the kill. Meat is either scarce or overabundant for any one family. Hunters find it advantageous to share the meat

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among close kin and, if sufficient, among more distant relatives, assuming that they will receive the same treatment in the future. In six households surveyed at the end of the harvest season in 1982, a third of the sixty-two gifts involved meat and fish. Although relationships of reciprocity and responsibility extend beyond kinship lines, they are much reduced. After close kin, there are clear, but limited, expectations that a family will share with religious leaders, close neighbors, and special friends. These networks are especially important for families during times of crisis, such as illness or when they are without gardens. A survey showed that, after fish and meat, the goods most usually exchanged were manioc and sweet potatoes. These tubers are the staple of the Guarani diet and most important to a family's survival. Of the six families surveyed concerning their networks of reciprocity, two families who were in extreme need were involved in over two thirds of the exchanges. The first family had recently moved and was without a garden. The second household included a single woman and her seven young children, a group that could not maintain a garden of sufficient size to satisfy their needs. Although exchange relations link families for mutual assistance, they do not inhibit families' residential flexibility. In fact, these exchange relations permit households to shift among kin groups. Families that move into a community can rely on their kin network until they are able to establish themselves. For example, when the family of Jose arrived in Itanarami, they planted a new garden and harvested from relatives' gardens until their own matured. In contrast, when the tekoa of Itanarami withheld support from the ostracized group mentioned previously, the newcomers were forced to transport manioc from their own distant gardens and seek wage labor to purchase daily necessities. Reciprocity among kin, therefore, is critical to families' freedom to move among residential groups; it actually improves Chiripa mobility. Community Resources Membership in a Guarani kin group confers on individuals access to resources surrounding the tekoa, rights that supersede those of other Chiripa groups or mestizo settlers. Rather than define a specific area with objective borders over which the group has total control, indigenous tenure recognizes the group's right to particular resources for specific purposes. As a unit, the extended families of each Chiripa community claim unrestricted access to a region of the forest sufficient for their purposes. The regions generally include water for drinking and fishing, fertile slopes for farming, and suitable canopied, or high, forest for hunting—enough to satisfy the economic needs of the community. In Itanarami, the tekoa recognizes a primordial right to the forests and soils of the headwaters of the

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Itanarami stream. This attitude differs from Paraguayan national concepts of ownership in several key respects. First, rather than recognize unqualified right to all aspects of the environment, communities claim rights to specific resources within complex environments. Thus, the people assume rights to use the soils for gardens and forest for hunting but not necessarily use of the canopy overhead or minerals underfoot. Moreover, community rights to resources change in response to the changing needs of the community. Rather than simply assume permanent access to a delimited area of the forest, Chiripa communities claim rights to sufficient forest resources for sustained production and natural growth. As the fertility of their present soil and forests decline, Chiripa tekoa believe in their rights to move into new forest areas. Likewise, as community sites are abandoned, the tekoa relinquish control of resources in those areas. Differences between indigenous and national concepts of tenure became clear in the 1970s, when the right of most Chiripa communities to control land was legally recognized by the government. As mentioned, approximately 1,500 hectares were set aside for some communities in the Mbaracayii region, conferring on each the status of Colonia National Indigena under the Paraguayan "Estatuto de las Comunidades Indigenas (No. 904/ 81)." Although an important tool for the protection of Chiripa resources, Paraguayan law fails to recognize the difference in the way that Chiripa look at rights of use versus Paraguayan rights of ownership. Rather than acknowledge Chiripa rights to specific resources necessary for present and future needs, national law defines a discrete parcel of land over which the community has complete and permanent control. Rather than assure diverse resources sufficient for gardening, hunting, and gathering, the law guarantees twenty hectares per family that are assumed to be used for cotton production. Kin Leaders In Chiripa kin groups, lines of descent and affiliation provide the relations from which leadership develops. The hierarchy of kin relations in descent groups of senior and junior, within and between generations, is a natural structure for the development of leaders. As individuals become more senior in their kin groups, they assume increasingly influential positions among their siblings, children, and affines. Although descent groups provide the raw material for the development of power bases, kin position does not prescribe which elders in an extended family assume the positions of greatest power. Leadership is not achieved by all elderly people, but neither is the number restricted; most large kin groups have several elderly leaders. There is a structural tendency for positions of influence to be assumed by the elder male of a descent group.

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However, because the role is often not formalized or limited to a single individual, the person of greatest influence in a family is often difficult to identify and varies over time. This leadership role in kin groups is one that individuals assume over their descendants and cognates, not an office in a bureaucratic hierarchy. This position remains informal and poorly defined, in part because it wields litde power over the group or its resources. Kin leaders exercise influence acquired not through force, but through respect based on wisdom (marandu) and religious understanding. In contrast to a position of power founded on control over juniors5 rights in land, women, or children, influence derives from a leader's showing an understanding of teko mamngatu, a moral aspect of social behavior that emphasizes respect for and understanding of others. (Translations here are my own.) Elder leaders have no authority to punish juniors. The older residents exercise their influence over family members through consultation that is by definition nonconfrontational. Thus, it involves expressing desires rather than demands and reaches its most direct form in proffered advice. The words of one of the earliest chronicles of the closely related Tupiguaranf are still true today about kin groups in Chiripa communities. In 1557, Hans Staden wrote, "I have seen no particular authority among them, except that by custom the young defer to the elders. They obey the orders of the chief of the hut; this they do of their own free will" ([1557] 1928,151). Influential elders of a kin group provide counsel concerning public and private disputes, often involving family matters. In one case in Itanarami, Avatataendy became violent during a fight with his spouse. In the heat of the argument, he grabbed a thin plank and, brandishing it, chased the woman from the house and down the path. The violence and open animosity of the exchange broke the accepted Chiripa norms of social conduct among individuals and, especially, spouses. However, although the exchange was observed by several people and heard by many more, it was generally ignored. Rather than direct admonishment or punishment, the matter was taken up quiedy in a semiprivate situation several nights later by the elder brother of the father of Avatataendy, his ruvy^ Avamaino. The old man stared into the fire and referred to the violence that is common among Paraguayan couples. Without any reference to the previous incident, he noted that this domestic violence destroyed the tranquility (pyaguapy) of mestizo communities. The message was clear and the incident was not repeated. In addition to this type of secular influence, elder leaders provide religious direction for their families. This ability increases with age, as older residents accumulate experience in communicating with the supernatural. Knowledge is seen or heard while asleep, ikerupi. For example, it was not uncommon to enter a community after an absence of weeks or months and be met by children proclaiming my arrival with excitement but not

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surprise: "He's arrived!" rather than "He's come back!" After the first greetings, their elders would explain that my coming had been dreamed and word had spread through the community. I had been expected. Access to supernatural knowledge can be facilitated through meditative chants. The intonations, called porae (literally meaning "to sing") are short and often melodious collections of syllables with no explicit meaning. Each individual receives his or her own porae, often in sleep, through personal inspiration that is neither solicited from nor taught by religious specialists. The chanting is used by individuals in search of guidance; kin leaders are individuals who are capable of divinely inspired visions and understandings. It is insight from porae that permits an older member to give counsel to his or her family. Most men and women have received one or more porae. New chants, called "porae pyau" come at times of personal or social crisis. The porae are intoned in private or with the accompaniment of family members on bamboo logs (takuara) or mbaraka. One older man in Itanarami, having lost his third wife to tuberculosis, could be heard late into the night chanting alone in his house. "Ndovyarnerna, oporaepyau" the neighbors said, "He's not happy anymore, he sings anew." After a period of intense porae, which can often last several days, the intonation becomes part of that individual's tools for accessing the supernatural. Subsequendy, it can be used in a highly specific context, such as to assure a safe journey, a successful hunting trip, or as Nimuendaju ([1914] 1978, 95) reported, to assure a safe river crossing. Although kin leaders hold no clearly defined office, Chiripa who consistendy porae become known as poraea^ "one who sings." As is discussed in the following section, this increased recognition leads to widening influence as a community leader. Because kin leadership is exercised through advice, it is open to acceptance or rejection by younger family members. An elder's wishes are not presented as mandates or ultimatums; therefore, members of the group have the right and the power to disregard them. This type of insubordination, however, represents a disavowal of the influential position of the leaders. By rejecting the counsel of the group's most influential members, an individual declares him- or herself as a dissenter from the group. In effect, the structure does not assure that all members will remain with the kin group, but it does assure that those who do will remain in relative harmony. Ogua: Domestic Groups Kinship structures social relations in Itanarami, but the nuclear family is the fundamental unit of social organization. Cognatic descent groups organize setriement, exchange, religion, and politics, but nuclear family households are the primary units of residence, production, and consump-

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Kinship, Households, and Community tion. The ability to adapt this organization has made Chiripa society resilient to the disruptive influences of the frontier and wage labor systems. Individuals and family groups have been able to move into and out of wage labor without disturbing the social and economic base of the community. As semi-autonomous households, families have been able to avoid coercion by either indigenous or mestizo elite. It is within nuclear families that labor is delegated to the everyday tasks that create the houses in which people live and the food they eat. They are the repositories from which the larger group draws labor for either kinbased work or community religious activities. But the social and economic demands of kin and community are limited and can be satisfied without sacrificing nuclear families5 independence. Should they wish to avoid these demands, nuclear units can abandon the group without sacrificing their economic base and without destroying the larger social unit. This section discusses the autonomy of Chiripa nuclear families, focusing on the independence of household production and consumption. Chiripa domestic groups usually consist of a man and woman and their children. As is clear in Itanarami (Figs. 6,7, and 8), other individuals, such as grandchildren and elderly parents, are incorporated into the units as direct extensions of the nuclear family. Households comprising two or more couples are usually transitional, as is seen with recendy married daughters or new arrivals to the community. In censuses conducted in Itanarami, Mboi Jagua, and Tapo during the course of this research, it was determined that almost 85 percent of the households were maintained by a couple. The remaining were composed of a single adult individual (predominandy an older man or woman) and children. Almost a quarter of the households included an older relative, usually a parent. Houses are constructed in clearings, preferably screened from neighbors by forest. In Itanarami, most are located within easy walking distance of kin or neighbors but are not direcdy associated with them (see Fig. 3). Houses are simple structures, rarely more than a thatch roof suspended by six poles and partially enclosed by bamboo slats, palm trunks, or hewn boards. Although the size varies in relation to the composition and energy of the family, most houses average about three meters by five meters. The family fire is usually located near the center, with the family working, warming themselves, and resting around its perimeter. Each house is surrounded by a clearing that provides work space, room for domestic animals or small gardens, and an open area of protection against danger from the forest. Household Production As self-supporting domestic groups, households maintain individual garden plots, domesticated animals, and traps; and send workers out to

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gather commodities and produce from the forest. Furthermore, they retain access to the land and labor resources necessary for their own survival. Production activities, such as agriculture, hunting, fishing, and wage labor, are performed by the nuclear family members for the benefit of the household. A domestic group has sole responsibility for planting and tending its garden and exclusive claim to its produce; in fact, domestic groups are in part defined by the planting of an independent garden. Likewise, the game brought in by the hunter is first consumed by members of his domestic group, only later being distributed to other nuclear families. The particular opportunities, needs, and desires of the household members determine whether they devote themselves to agriculture, wage labor, hunting, or leisure. Some households maintain extensive gardens, ranging up to several hectares, and perform little wage labor. Other families forgo garden work for wage labor or hunting. The decision to hunt tapir or plant corn, however, is made by the domestic group for its own purposes. Extended kin groups engage in only limited communal production, usually nonsubsistence activities such as clearing paths or repairing the house of the religious leader. As noted, relatives and friends often work together for the benefit of participants' individual households. Public opinion resists efforts to enlist the group for communal production. Two cases illustrate this reticence. The first was when a community leader attempted to convince the community to plant a cotton plot for the benefit of the local school teacher; the second was a leader trying to get the group to make a garden to subsidize an indigenous hospital. In both cases, the work would have direcdy benefited the community by subsidizing desired services. The plots were cleared with much grumbling, but community leaders could not rally men to plant them. Without publicly denouncing the projects, workers simply failed to return to the work. After several attempts to exhort men to prepare the fields, the projects were abandoned. In other societies, individual family units have only limited access to the land and labor needed in production, tying domestic groups to the larger social group. This is equally true for hierarchical systems and egalitarian societies. Family labor in the latter can be committed to communal projects. As is clear in the following section, Chiripa households have direct and unencumbered access to both the land resources and family labor that they need to provide for themselves. Land Resources The economic autonomy of Chiripa nuclear families has been promoted by unlimited access to fertile forest. Even during the height of the yerba economy, an abundance of forest resources existed in Mbaracayii. Residents of Itanarami continue to use a broad forest range. A group claims

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general access to a fertile region of the forest, but within this region, neither the leaders nor the community at large dictates which areas are to be used. Land tenure in Chiripa communities pertains only to individual families' control over specific improvements in forest resources, clearings, crops, and buildings. As members of kin groups, residents have the right to plant fields within the area of the forest identified with the community. However, instead of holding rights over specific plots of land, they have rights to the improvements made within the community's boundaries. Ownership exists only as long as a family is producing from a plot. Rights over these improvements are most evident when plots are abandoned or transferred. For example, forest plots are highly productive for several years, after which they are abandoned as kokuere.10 The farmer's right to plant, hunt, and gather in this kokuere diminishes as the forest overtakes the plot, until both the claim and the plot have disappeared. In respect to transfers, the nuclear family gives up some, but not all, of their rights to the resources when it becomes apparent that they do not intend to continue to plant in an area. First, however, they have the right to give or sell the improvements and produce to a friend or relative. Second, if a family abandons the community for a short period, as many do to visit distant relatives or work sites, they retain the right to continue to harvest and replant the plot on return. Several cases illustrate this process. In one, a young married man had cleared a hectare of new land for a garden near his house. Soon after, he found himself short of cash and in need of medicine from a pharmacy for a sick child. Confident that he would be capable of clearing more land before planting was necessary, he sold the clearing for cash to a recendy arrived and unrelated neighbor. The new owner acquired total right to the clearing and use of plot in the future. The young man went on to clear a new plot elsewhere. In a second example, a recent widower decided to move his fields and home to a new location. He began to clear a plot in a fallows near an abandoned house forty-five minutes' walk away. He was ambivalent about the move, however, wanting to leave the place where his wife died but hesitant to move so distant from his close kin. He worked slowly and, after many weeks of talking about moving, had only cleared a plot of a hundred square meters. He took no action to move his residence to the vicinity of his new plot. Unbeknownst to the widower, new residents to the community moved into the deserted house. Without requesting permission, possibly without knowing his intention, the new residents began to clear the same area. When he discovered them, the ambivalent gardener complained that his field had been usurped by the newcomers. His protest received little support. General sentiment was that he had done litde to improve the field,

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beyond express intentions of planting there. The new family was allowed to plant as much of the field as they needed. Similar to land use for agriculture, other forest resources cannot be exclusively "owned" by individuals. Forest trapping is the primary means of hunting and, like farming, involves only a temporary claim to land area. An individual is expected to avoid placing his traps near another man's trap line. The more extensive resources of subsistence, including fruits and game, have no proprietary claims made against them and are available to anyone willing to collect them. Similarly, the forest resources needed for extractive industries, such as yerba and certain varieties of wood, are not considered to be owned by any person or group: they exist for the benefit of those people who manufacture something from them. It is important to note that natural resources such as land and forest are the most important, but not the only, material resources necessary for production. Others are acquired and maintained by the nuclear family as well. Tools necessary for subsistence production are purchased and maintained by individual families; seeds are produced in the household gardens. They are often shared among kin and friends. For example, a man who needs seed or an extra machete for a day can expect that his close kin will provide these for him. Tools, but not ownership, will change hands. 11 Labor Resources

The diverse tasks of Chiripa workers can usefully be grouped as either "productive labor" or "reproductive labor," the former relating to activities such as agriculture, hunting, fishing, animal care, wage labor, and commercial gathering; the latter denoting labor in child care, cooking, and household construction and maintenance (Minge-Klevana 1980, 279). Productive labor assures the survival of the domestic unit on a daily basis; reproductive labor assures its continuation over generations. Over half (56.4 percent) of Itanarami families' time is spent in these two activities; the remaining time (44.6 percent) is spent in resting, socializing, and attending to personal needs.12 Twenty-seven percent of a family's total labor is devoted to reproductive work. In addition to the activities mentioned above, this includes sewing and cleaning the household and house yard. Eighteen percent of family members' waking hours is spent in productive labor, of which almost a third is devoted to gardening. Slighdy less is allocated to hunting and fishing. Chiripa spend twice the amount of time in fishing as they do in both trapping and hunting. Only a small portion of productive labor time is devoted to gathering.13 Finally, market production accounts for almost 40 percent of a family's productive labor. This includes a variety of extractive activities, as well as

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Kinship, Households, and Community Table 1. Gender Division cf Labor

Agriculture Hunting,fishingand gathering Wage labor Domestic labor Food preparation

Men (%)

Women (%)

60.6 95.0 97.2 28.6 17.7

39.4 5.0 2.8 71.4 82.3

field labor. Yerba or citrus leaf collection and fence-post production account for over half of the labor in the commercial sector. These activities take place in the forests and in nearby land controlled by the Chiripa. Field work, which occupies the remaining work time, usually means clearing new fields, planting pasture, or harvesting cotton for nearby mestizo farmers. Although these averages are fairly indicative of a Chiripa community's activities, they mask considerable variations among individual families. Some Itanarmai families devoted themselves to one activity and engaged little in others. For example, one family devoted 58.2 percent of its productive labor to agriculture, maintaining a large garden, and spent only 41.7 percent of its time in other productive activities (approximately 23 percent in hunting and fishing and 18 percent in wage labor). Another family allocated 65 percent of its productive time to hunting and fishing and engaged in much less agriculture and wage work. It is notable that in 1983, when these data were collected, none of the Chiripa surveyed raised commercial crops, preferring the security of wage labor to the vagaries of the national commodity markets. Family production is organized by gender. This sexual division of labor is fairly clear in social norms and expectations but is not inflexible. Men and women often assist their mates in tasks that are typically linked to the other's sex role. Nevertheless, several generalizations can be made. First, women perform roughly two thirds of the families' reproductive labor. Cooking, sewing, and caring for children account for almost seven hours of an average woman's day. Men devote an average of only two hours daily to domestic chores and spend more of this time on activities such as repairing the house and clearing its perimeter.14 As is true of many South American Indian groups, there is a clear division of work in agriculture. Men perform over 60 percent of the labor and women perform approximately 40 percent (see Table 1). Men perform virtually all of the heavy forest clearing and are responsible for cleaning

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old fields before firing them. Fields are most often hoed by men, whereas women do most of the harvesting. The planting process is performed by either or both the husband and wife, with the help of sons and daughters. Outside of agriculture, men perform the vast majority of the productive labor—95 percent of the hunting and 97.2 percent of the wage labor. Women perform more of the family's gathering activities. Of the individuals monitored in this research, women engaged in work for direct exchange in only three cases and these were under exceptional circumstances. In one case, an unmarried women briefly harvested cotton with her family. In two others, unmarried women washed clothes for peasant families. Gathering is practiced by both men and women and usually takes place in the midst of another activity, such as when berries are eaten along a path on the way to the garden. Both men and women are included in trips made specifically to gather fruit or plants for medicines for home consumption. Gudeman (1978, 17) noted that the division of labor within the family can be accurately conceptualized in terms of age as well as gender. Chiripa family members are responsible for different tasks at different stages in their life cycle. A child is introduced to labor at a young age, and responsibilities increase in diversity and intensity as the individual grows. Toddlers entertain their younger siblings. By the time boys and girls walk, they are expected to haul wood on their back or a child on their hip. In old age, heavier chores such as woodcutting are relinquished to children and affines. Studies such as those done by Barlett (1977) and Schumann (1985) have suggested that family size and members' ages are important factors in determining productive strategies in areas of land abundance. This research supports that contention. As children become producers, the household economy shifts to take advantage of the new resources. Sons (and to a much lesser extent, daughters) usually become involved in wage labor. Men between thirteen and twenty-one perform twice as much wage labor and half as much hunting and fishing as do men in their forties. Unlike peasants of Mexico and Costa Rica, Chiripa households do not abandon subsistence production as they shift into new economic spheres. The cash supplements, but does not supplant, subsistence production. The greater number of workers increases the total time and the proportion of labor that the family allocates to productive activities outside the home. In part, continued subsistence production is a result of young workers' independence from the family group. These young workers retain control over their earnings, which are usually allocated for goods other than those for subsistence. The domestic economy of the Chiripa differs markedly from that of the region's non-Guarani. Mestizos consider themselves to be kokueceros,

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people who work in the fields. Those that aspire to greater things hope to lift themselves out of the campo with a few good harvests, turning their land over to catde and building a house in town. Mestizo farmers devote themselves to cotton production, maintaining subsistence plots alongside their commercial crops. They occupy lots of twenty to fifty hectares and practice intensive agriculture in fixed fields. As the soil deteriorates, it is planted in pasture for beef catde or the family milk cow. Mestizo families often use wage laborers to cultivate and harvest commercial crops. Men do all the farming, except during the harvest, when all but the most infirm are pulled into the fields to pick cotton. For mestizo families, hunting and fishing are primarily recreational activities confined to Sundays. Rather than trap or hunt at night, mestizo men prefer to trail larger game on foot with a gun, generally a decrepit Brazilian shotgun with hand-loaded cartridges. Wage labor is not common. Because mestizo farmers have cash crops, family labor is concentrated on the households' fields during the peak working periods. There are few potential wage employees available. Thus, the mestizo farmers of the region depend on the Chiripa as day laborers. Household Income and Expenditures The diverse productive strategies of the Chiripa provide households with income. Crops come from the garden, meat from the forest, and cash from the patron or merchant. Gardens average almost half a hectare and provide a predictable supply of carbohydrates in manioc, corn, and beans. Hunting, fishing, and trapping provide protein; the family that passes a day without fish or meat feels deprived. Finally, cash provides access to processed foods and manufactured clothes and tools. As in production, Chiripa households are the primary unit of consumption. At the most obvious level, food that is produced or purchased by the family is prepared and consumed by that household. There is one "pot," and the wife, husband, and children have equal access to it. This does not suggest that families do not maintain extensive systems of sharing, but rather that sharing is among economically self-supporting households. As noted, gifts from gardens are one of the most common mechanisms of redistributing abundances of produce, game, and fish among households, assuring each family of at least some quantity of goods on a regular basis. The economic independence of a household is most pronounced in the case of goods purchased with wages. Cash work provides the most individualized labor returns of any of the productive activities. Even in cases where men join together to perform wage labor in groups, they divide the payments per man-days worked. Individuals who work together to cut yerba are paid a single sum by their patron, but each minero has claim to

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a defined portion of the total amount. This cash becomes one of the goods of the nuclear family and is disbursed to satisfy the needs of the members. Although all households engaged in work for cash, they differed in the amount and type of purchases. Between the families with the greatest and least income, expenditures differed by a factor of almost ten, from 5,220 Gs to 48,835 Gs. Over one eight-month period, from the middle of the harvest to the middle of the hunger season, seventeen households in Itanarami were visited biweekly. Adult men and women were interviewed. All income and expenditures were noted and a running balance of household debt or credit was maintained, including the employer or merchant each transaction involved. Chiripa families averaged approximately 18,700 Gs (U.S. $122) during the research period, or 2,400 Gs (U.S. $17) income per month. Extractive production, in the form of commercial gathering, was a principal source of income, providing almost two thirds (63 percent) of the households' cash. This included the sale of yerba (27 percent), citrus leaves (5.6 percent), skins and pelts (16.8 percent), and fence posts (13 percent). Paid field work produced 23.5% of the families' incomes. Beyond these primary sources, cash was derived from a variety of lesser activities, including the sale of pigs, chicken, and burros (6.3 percent); banana or manioc marketing (2.4 percent); domestic labor for mestizos (1.3 percent); and curing mestizo patients (.6 percent). Wage-labor income is invariably defined in terms of cash to individual workers. A given amount of labor or a product is defined as having a specific value in Guarani currency. This sum is then credited to the producer, usually a portion on commencement of a contract and the remainder upon its termination. Often goods are purchased from the Chiripa by a merchant, who in turn sells commodities to the producer. When goods are provided instead of currency, the price of each item is subtracted from the total credit and any remaining is provided in cash. Beyond the adelantado that each may receive at the start of a work contract, few Chiripa are in debt to their patrones or the merchants who purchase their production. Workers are rarely considered dependable enough to carry a running debt, a characteristic that patrones suggest differentiates Chiripa from mestizo workers. Chiripa that fail to repay an adelantado, or who incur a burdensome debt, will often attempt to avoid the debt by selling to, or working for, a new patron. Individuals devoted themselves to several productive activities in turn, shifting among extractive production, fishing, and gardening as the needs of the family dictated. Commercial gathering requires that the worker labor for several weeks to produce a quantity sufficient to transport and sell. As few workers devoted more than half of their time to wage labor, lumpsum payments were followed by weeks or even months of little income.

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Chiripa households allocated their limited cash to a variety of purposes, primarily to purchasing consumables in the nearby market town of Igatimi. Food, clothes, production inputs, and soap were the principle reasons for cash outlays (see Table 2). Forty-four percent of household income was allocated to food purchases, of which a third were carbohydrates. Annual household purchases averaged 7.5 kilos of pasta, 6 kilos of rice, 8 kilos of flour, and 6 kilos of hardtack. Thus, on average, households consumed over two kilos of dried carbohydrates per month. Pasta and rice were usually cooked with meat to give them oil and flavoring, flour was fried into hard pancakes, and hardtack was treated as a luxury. Meat was the second most important food expenditure, totaling 12 percent of the average family budget, or 1,500 Gs. This averaged ten kilos of meat for each family over a period of eight months. Meat was usually purchased from a local merchant or rancher, but campesinos often slaughtered a pig or cow and marketed the less desirable cuts to Chiripa, selling them door to door to whoever had a little money. After meat purchases, oils were the important expenditures. Canned Brazilian vegetable oils and pig fat accounted for 8 percent of household budgets. The average family purchased almost nine liters of oil annually. Although this quantity was low, oils are considered basic to the Chiripa diet. When game is scarce, or if a man prefers not to hunt, purchased fats are the only means of acquiring oils that make dry manioc and flour pancakes palatable. Salt is a small but very important expenditure (3.2 percent). The average family consumes six kilos of salt annually. Like oils, Chiripa consider salt a necessity that the body craves, and a shortage of sixty Gs to purchase salt can drive a man into the wage-labor market. Even the households that restrict food purchases to an absolute minimum depend on the market for small quantities of salt. Only 2.8 percent of a total household budget was expended on luxury foods—primarily sugar, tomato paste, onions, canned meat, processed yerba, and candy. After food, cloth and clothing were the most important purchases that Chiripa consumers made, constituting 27 percent of the average household budget. A shirt and pants or soccer shorts are worn by most men; women wear thin dresses or a blouse and skirt. A new shirt is reserved for special occasions, and the old one is used for work, becoming increasingly tattered until it is more a presence than an article of clothing. Shoes are unnecessary in good weather and useless in mud; thus, they are only worn by the most fashion conscious on special occasions. Families spend 18 percent of their cash on ready-to-wear clothes, usually cheap polyester clothes imported from Brazil or Taiwan. Handmade clothes are common, sewn from the yard goods available in the general store; cloth makes up 8 percent of the household budget. Soap, like salt, is one of the few commodities that all families consider

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%

Cost (in Guamnis)

Food Meat Pasta Rice Oil Lard Flour Salt Bread Sugar Beans Manioc Milk

41 12 4 4 4 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1

111,315 33,090 11,840 11,930 11,110 7,980 8,050 8,690 4,540 6,460 2,425 2,970 2,230

Clothing Clothes, ready made Cloth Thread

27 18 8 1

75,055 49,075 22,365 3,615

Production Merchandise Munitions Tools Batteries Seed Provisions Animals

18 6 3 2 1 1 1 6

33,700 15,965 8,125 4,625 1,520 2,430 1,395 17,625

Luxury goods Tobacco Cafia

4 1 1

9,705 3,685 1,930

Luxury foods

3

7,605

Soap

3

9,210

Medicine

2

6,795

Fees

1

1,650

Misc.

2

4,290

TOTAL

100*

272,660

* Total actually comes to 101% due to rounding of numbers.

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necessary. Large bars of crude lye soap are used for daily bathing and washing clothes. Only the adolescent, with a pocket full of cash and an eye on someone special, will spring for one of the small, perfumed cocoabutter soap bars. Production inputs account for a significant portion (18 percent) of the average household budget. Machetes, foice (a heavy Brazilian scythe), and axes are used in subsistence agriculture; ammunition, lead, and primers are purchased for hunting; and gunny sacks are needed to market commodities. Animals make up over a third of production inputs. Slightly over half the families in the study group purchased young live animals for raising during the eight months of monitoring. These were primarily chickens, ducks, and pigs. Medicine made up a small portion of household expenditures. Indigenous medicines are effective against most ailments such as parasitosis or headaches, but Chiripa use commercial medicines against more persistent problems. The local mestizo medical specialist is a poorly trained pharmacist who sells a variety of Brazilian medicines from his home. Pain relievers and antibiotics are dispensed in packets of one or two, making them accessible (if not effective) to the consumer with even a small amount of cash. Major medical problems, such as tuberculosis or leishmaniasis, are treated by roving doctors supported by international agencies. Luxury goods such as tobacco, tape recorders, and alcohol, which so often are used to characterize indigenous consumption, made up only a small portion (4 percent) of the total expenditures. The largest single category of purchases was cheap black tobacco, which most people use (for chewing) when it is available. Lesser expenditures were for liquor (cana), grooming supplies, kerosene, and matches. Few household expenditures were for accumulated goods. Food and clothing, almost three quarters of household expenditures, are used up quickly. Within several days of major food purchases, household stores have been depleted or distributed to friends and relatives. Even individuals who choose to restrict sharing find it difficult to defend foods against cockroaches and weevils. The cheap clothing for sale in these rural areas does not last long. Rain, physical labor, and daily washing quickly remove the substance from new shirts, dresses, and pants. Tools, machetes, axes, and foice are used hard and worn down, becoming reduced quickly to thin shadows of their original appearance. Conclusion Although extended kin groups define individuals5 memberships and positions in larger social groups, nuclear families remain the basic social unit

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in terms of residence, production, and consumption. A man, a woman, and their children form a distinct group in which to pool resources and from which to allocate labor to the enterprise of providing for themselves. Although the larger, extended family is important for exchange, it does not exercise control over members' access to productive resources and rarely organizes communal production. Each of the constituent nuclear families is integrated into the social and cultural life of the community, but as a self-sufficient economic unit. The bilateral nature of descent and the economic self-sufficiency of nuclear groups provide families with considerable independence. Nuclear families can claim membership, residence rights, and access to resources in as many as four different kin groups. Multiple kin ties and the corresponding access to resources in several tekoa provide nuclear families with the freedom to shift groups. This flexibility is important for two reasons. First, it provides for the community a dependable economic base that is not dependent on members' communal production. The greater or lesser market involvement of the individual members has little effect on the economic viability of the group. Second, access of each nuclear family to an independent economic base inhibits the development or insertion of coercive, stratified social relations. The following chapter discusses the contribution of religious leadership in integrating these independent families into larger social groups.

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4. Leadership and Religion

Guarani religious leaders have acquired almost mythical status in both the oral history of the Guarani and the ethnography of anthropologists. Nimuendaju ([1914] 1978) first recorded Guarani stories of famous religious men who led pilgrimages from Mbaracayu to the Atlantic coast in the early nineteenth century. These powerful shamans convinced their congregants to confront dangerous rivers, indigenous enemies, and Brazilian soldiers in search of the "land without evil" in the east. In doing so, they entered ethnographic annals as fearless souls who exhorted their hapless followers to confront insurmountable obstacles to reach an unattainable Utopia. As Metraux (1948), Schaden (1962), and Bartolome (1977) returned to Nimuendaju's work, their writings have helped the Guarani come to be known as fanatic fatalists who join their charismatic religious leaders to await the end of the earth. Although the characterization may be overdrawn, the attentions of oral history and ethnography to religious leaders are well placed. Called tamoi, these religious leaders are central to the organization of Chiripa society and have been critical to the survival of the Chiripa as an ethnic group in the contemporary context. Tamoi integrate economically independent nuclear families into larger villages and, in turn, into the regional Chiripa population. Unlike the authoritarian class relations that characterize the regional mestizo society, however, tamoi manipulate bilateral kin ties and exert religious power in a noncoercive manner. Contemporary religious leaders and nineteenth-century charismatic ones have proved remarkably effective at organizing Guarani society in the context of the developing commercial economy. Rather than being fatalists, they have responded to the pressures of outside development by strengthening Guarani social relations and reinforcing ethnic identity. Over the last century, most Chiripa communities have had secondary, political leaders called capati, sargento, cacique, and presidente. Unlike tamoi, these bureaucratic officials are modeled on frontier military officers or elected civilian leaders. They preside formally over community meetings

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and represent the group in relations with the Paraguayan state. Rather than assert independence from the national society, these leaders identify with the larger system. The two types of leaders hold very different power bases. Religious leaders derive their position from kin ties and communication with Guarani deities. Political leaders assume their authority from the national society. This chapter explores the cosmology and relations that religious leaders manipulate to integrate independent households as communities. It is suggested that religious leadership allows the Chiripa to maintain a distinct society and ethnic identity in the context of, but not in domination by, the frontier political system. In contrast, bureaucratic political offices retain only a peripheral position in community affairs. Although the limited role of these offices in indigenous society will be introduced here, their greater functions in interethnic relations will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Tamoi: Religious Leaders Tamoi are especially wise religious leaders whose influence extends beyond their immediate descent group to more distant relatives such as siblings, cousins, and their progeny. Powerful tamoi even win the respect and affiliation of distant relatives who retain little memory of actual kin relations. The true relations between a tamoi and his followers vary from sibling to distant or even fictive kin. Nevertheless, the importance of kinship is clear in that tamoi, or nanderamoi, literally translates as "grandfather" or "our grandfather." A tamoi, reciprocally, calls members of his group remiariro ("grandchildren"). Tamoi occupy roles, not offices, in Chiripa communities. The rights and responsibilities of the position are acquired by specific individuals and are not passed to successors upon death. Like kin group leaders, this role is self-assumed but legitimized by community members who respect that individual's access to the deities and counsel. Likewise, tamoi can relinquish their leadership roles by not exercising their powers. In essence, the difference within a kin group between a poraea and a tamoi is the power of the latter to extend influence over several groups. The position of a tamoi is neither hereditary nor formally appointed. Consequendy, the position exists only to the extent that members affiliate with a particular leader to constitute a cohesive social group. The power of religious leadership derives from the tamoi's ability to mediate between a group and the supernatural. As noted in the previous chapter, all kin elders exhibit marandii, knowledge of the supernatural. This gives them a privileged position to understand teko marangatu, the proper mode of being Chiripa. Marandu is acquired through chanting, and the most powerful poraea often assumes the position of tamoi. 1

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A tamoi exercises his influence by counsel, example, and religious ritual. He does not retain control over the productive resources of the nuclear families and therefore does not coerce the fealty of members. Leadership is exercised in being tenondem^ literally, "to be out in front." The tamoi is physically out in front of the community during religious gatherings and, figuratively speaking, presents his behavior as an example for the entire community. Just as an elder kinsman will obliquely counsel his juniors on the dangers of violence and anger, the tamoi is expected to act out the ideals of serenity and composure in front of his congregants. The process by which power is acquired was evident in Itanarami in 1981, when the tamoi, Avariju, was relatively new and sought to assert himself as the community's most influential member. Avariju, a small man of about fifty years, was filled with seemingly boundless energy. His sharp wit, quick laugh, and repertory of stories made him an asset around any hearth. He had been born in Mboi Jagua and had come to Itanarami to join his wife. Before asserting himself as a tamoi, he had been known for his fortitude in the face of the larger society. He had once confronted a general during an official visit and could carry himself with dignity past the prostitutes and truck drivers of Igatimf. Avariju was not given much respect for his religious powers when he asserted himself as a leader, but he developed his reputation with hard work, asserting kin relations and developing religious knowledge to attain the principal leadership of the tekoa of Itanarami. Until 1976, religious leadership in Itanarami was in the hands of an elderly man named Manucho Rojas (Ei 2 ). Rojas was one of the three most powerful tamoi within a radius of two days' walk. His mother, Ka'irague, had also been a respected poraea, but her son's influence resulted more from his age and numerous progeny in the community. Five years after his death, he was still remembered for his wise advice and calm demeanor. Rojas's death left a leadership vacuum in Itanarami because other poraea lacked his religious power. When Avariju began to porae in 1978, many community members expressed reservations about his youth and lack of religious experience and secular wisdom. Despite the fact that both his father and paternal grandfather had been influential poraea, his initial religious activities were largely ignored by his friends and neighbors and accompanied only by his wife and children. As noted earlier, individuals receive religious power in porae while asleep. Visions or songs appear to all sleeping people, but some people experience them more intensely, often speaking of traveling in their sleep to other worlds in the sky or under the earth. The method of access to these experiences is neither solicited from, nor taught by, religious specialists. Upon waking, some individuals who undergo these visions feel compelled to share their newfound understanding and power with the larger community. When porae are repeated in religious gatherings, the

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individual begins to develop a reputation as a tamoi. A porae is often multisyllabic, but it rarely is constituted of words and sentences. However, when explicated in religious settings, Chiripa use Guaraniete, a ritual or archaic form of Guarani with sound shifts, word roots that are not drawn from Spanish, and nouns (often animal names) that differ from those in conventional use. Thus, kyha (hammock) becomes kya, and akutipay (Cunkulus paca) (a paca) becomes jaisha in Guaraniete. After beginning with a single porae to share with the community, Avariju joined established tamoi in neighboring communities, developing his power and reputation from the association. To promote his divine inspiration, he adopted a life-style conducive to supernatural inspiration. He ate only foods "of the forest," primarily kanguijy (a fermented corn beverage like chicha) and honey, but avoided game. He also used sleep to explore the supernatural through dreams. Night after night, for months on end, Avariju alternated sleep with chanting until dawn. He would sing until his voice was only a guttural hum, then retreat to his hammock with a piece of manioc. After what seemed like only minutes, he would rouse himself, and his wife and daughters, to continue. His voice, carrying his visions, drifted from his house into the forest. People began to see him in a new light. As his repertoire enlarged, so did his stature and influence in the community. A poraea must be also able to translate private inspiration into counsel and direction for neighbors and relatives. Leadership is set in part by example because knowledge of the supernatural provides clear guidelines for personal comportment. All humans are to be treated with dignity and respect. Living a serene (pirtfy) life and helping others to do so becomes a responsibility of the tamoi. Those who seek supernatural understanding and organize their behavior around this understanding are rewarded with stature and respect. By diligendy leading religious ceremonies, Avariju was able to develop his reputation as a knowledgeable and religiously powerful individual, steadily increasing his level of influence within other kin groups. He periodically fermented corn for major celebrations and, in 1981, organized the first naming ceremony in the community in five years. Because the ceremony demands the cooperation of several tamoi, he requested assistance from religious leaders of Mboi Jagua and Fortuna. His position was secured when these tamoi later solicited his assistance in return. Kin ties were critical to the leadership claim of Avariju. First, his wife (A26) was of the largest descent group in the community. Moreover, his sister had married into a second important kin group, descendants of Bi2. As such, Avariju could claim close kin ties with thirteen families of the community. In addition, the tamoi slowly, but successfully, acquired the respect of the other kin groups of Itanarami. Eventually, Avariju's home became the primary religious gathering place

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in Itanarami. He built a small altar, a tataendfy^ with a cross and a wick facing the eastern horizon (the Chiripa believe that the deities approach from this direction). Rojas's son gave Avariju the elder tamoi's religious goods, and the community cooperated in enlarging Avariju's house to accommodate the crowds that gathered at night. The community cleared a dancing area in front of this oguazu (large house) and fixed a hollowed tree trunk for fermenting corn on braces in its center. More than simply a religious center, Avariju's house became a central focus of social activity, evinced in the networks of footpaths that went to the various tekoa of the community. By 1982, Avariju had been accepted as a leading voice in Itanarami, capable of providing knowledgeable counsel to individuals in private and direction to the larger community through religious ritual and community meetings. The decision to accept or reject the leadership of a tamoi is made by individual families. In one case, a group of three families arrived from Brazil at the house of Avamaino. Two of the three adult men were descendants of collateral kin of Kunarykatu and used her surname, Martinez. They had come from Brazilian Chiripa communities, where they had worked as day laborers. The weakening Brazilian economy destroyed the labor market and forced them to search for land for agriculture. They were welcomed by Avamaino and Avatataendy, who provided them with shelter until they could build houses, and with food until their crops matured. Despite these families' recognized kin claim to membership, difficulties arose concerning their integration into the community. The newcomers rejected community social life. Their gardens quickly provided economic security, and they refused to attend religious gatherings on account of being Christian. The issue was forced to a head by Avariju, who called all community members to nighdy religious gatherings. The long, dark paths were forbidding at night and seemed especially difficult after a full day's activities in the field and forest. The demands exacted on the community strained even the most devoted followers. After a few feeble visits, the three families abandoned any efforts at appearing cooperative, abandoned their houses and fields, and returned to Brazil. By rejecting the leadership of Avariju, these kin were rejecting the ties that integrated them into the community. Thereafter, they could not remain. Although this is not the place for a detailed analysis of Chiripa religion, several points concerning Guarani mythology and ritual are important to explain its relation to the maintenance of Chiripa social organization and ethnic identity. Chiripa Cosmology Long winter nights and warm fires promote the sharing of dreams, gossip, and stories. One of the favorite topics in these conversations is the exploits

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of Mokoivea ("the two of them55), two young brothers named Nanderyke5y ("our older brother55) and Tyvyry5! ("his younger brother55), during the creation of the earth. The origin of most aspects of the mundane environment are explained in a series of vignettes in which the two brothers are separated from their parents and forced to prove their cunning in a series of dangerous exploits. The Chiripa explain that Nanderuguazu ("our great father55) created the world. His wife, Nandesy ("our mother55), bore two sons, Nanderyke5y and Tyvyryl Although Nanderuguazu is an omniscient and omnipotent deity, the brothers are more accurately described as culture heroes. They are of the supernatural world, existed in primordial history, and shaped the mundane world of the forest. On the other hand, the Chiripa closely identify with the characters and exploits of the Mokoivea. The brothers moved through the same forests as the Chiripa and exhibited a wiliness and determination that wins the appreciation and pride of the listeners. Although of another realm, they are also of this one, represented by the daily passage of the sun and moon and, in fact, are often called by these celestial bodies5 names, Nanderyke5y as Kuaray and Tyvyry5! as Jasy. The adventures of the brothers are considered to have been instrumental in the creation of abundant important and useful forest elements. Origin myths from the Chiripa communities studied in this book record the exploits of the brothers as they created varieties of birds, honey, sugarcane, coati, mosquitoes, deer, and fish poison. They are also used to explain the origins of adultery, menstruation, phases of the moon, and fire. The exploits of twins similar to these brothers are common knowledge over a broad range of lowland South America. Bierhordst (1988) recorded the prevalence of the myths in Guarani and other Tupian societies throughout eastern Paraguay and southern Brazil, east to the mouth of the Amazon and north to the Caribbean. The tale has been told unchanged since it was first recorded by Thevet in 1575. In recent times, the tale was first carefully recorded by Curt Nimuendaju ([1914] 1978) when he spent time eighty years ago among a group of Guarani migrating out of the Mbaracayu region. Details of plot and dialect are almost identical in the transcriptions of Bartolome (1977); Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg (1976); and myself. The constancy of the twin myth across time and space contrasts sharply with the diverse perspectives of the Guarani cosmological world related by the Chiripa. Rather than being a single, integrated whole, the Chiripa ideological realm is characterized as a bricolage of places and personages, with multiple layers of names and conflicting demographies that deserve, but have yet to receive, careful investigation. The following text integrates diverse descriptions by contemporary informants and information gathered previously by Nimuendaju; Cadogan (1959a, 1959b); Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg; and Bartolome.

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The parents and brothers are part of the pantheon of the most important beings in the Chiripa supernatural. Nanderuguazu remains the omnipotent god with the power to destroy the world that he created. Nanderuguazu controls thunder (fapuguazu) and demons (Anay), as well as the mundane—fire, water, and darkness—that will ultimately destroy the earth (Nimuendaju [1914] 1978, 78). Nandesy is his feminine counterpart, watching the world from a distance but not intervening. The brothers are more closely related to this world; their most obvious representations are as the sun and the moon. In addition to this group, Tupa, the third son of Nandesy, appears in some later versions of this myth. 2 Tupa is the god of the tempest and does the bidding of Nandesy. The geography of the sacred world is dominated by the yvymaraey^ the "land without evil." This idealized world is located beyond pamry, the Adantic Ocean, in the east. In yvymaraey there is no death or disease, the forests are filled with food, and crops produce abundantiy, with no human care. Some Chiripa envision the yvymaraey with all the indigenous Chiripa food plants (Cadogan 1959a, 78); others see it with two-story houses, kitchen gardens, and picket fences of Paraguayan communities. At death, souls leave this world, traveling a path (fapuguazumpe) that is difficult to find and dangerous to pass, to arrive at their eternal resting place in the east, either in or near the yvymaraey. Yvymaraey is also accessible, we will see, by living Guarani who travel east in search of salvation. The sky overhead is itself associated with the brothers Kuaray and Jasy. Although the lunar bodies are not the deities themselves, their presence and trajectories across the sky are physical manifestations of the existence of the deity. The sky is most important as the threshold through which one would pass to reach the yvymaraey. The western regions of the supernatural world (katud) are inhabited by the deity Tupa. This area exists as darkness beyond the western horizon, into which obscurity the sun passes each evening. Tupa sits on a throne made of ygary trees (Cedrela fisilis)^ constructed in the form of a tataendy'y. Under the direction of Nandesy, Tupa flies through the air on his throne, with lightning emanating from his tembeta lip plug. It is believed that Nanderuguazu created this world, destroyed it several times, and will cause the final destruction sometime in the future. Although the accounts vary greatiy, there are reports that the earth was destroyed three different times: variously by fire, by water, by falling darkness or by Nanderuguazu's jaguar. The world was recreated after each cataclysm. In one version, this happened when seeds trapped in the claws of an armadillo sprouted and grew into the ygary tree, from which the falling leaves created the diversity of plants and animals seen today. However, Nanderuguazu will cause the final catastrophic end to the earth some day. In the final days, he will remove the crossed beams on which the

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earth is suspended, beginning in the west and moving east, allowing the earth to fall into eternal darkness (Nimuendaju [1914] 1978, 88). Guarani cosmology creates the need for religious specialists to act as intermediaries between the mundane and supernatural worlds. Despite the fact that all individuals have the power to porae, some develop much greater powers to communicate with the realm of Nanderuguazu. These people become critical to the group's attempts to understand the complex supernatural sphere, as well as their attempts to manipulate it. Only the poraea can intercede for the community, to save it from hardship or the cataclysmic end of this world. Ceremonies Nembo'e: Religious Ceremony The role of the tamoi is acted out in a public ceremony called nembo'e, a term that translates directly as "to be made to speak." The concept includes aspects of teaching, learning, praying, and studying (Montoya [1647] 1876, 122).3 Nembo'e has a variety of functions, but two are important for the tamoi. The ceremony allows him to reaffirm the corporate nature of the group and provides him with an arena over which to exercise influence. Nembo'e is the basic religious activity of the Chiripa and is performed for a variety of different ritual events. Naming ceremonies, monthly kanguijy drinking, and nighdy gatherings during times of distress are accompanied by nembo'e. It is also performed spontaneously to express the tamoi's personal emotion or anxiety about the state of the larger community (porae pyau). Nembo'e takes place in the evening in the home of the poraea. As in Itanarami, this house is usually centrally located in the community and often has been extended to accommodate the crowds that gather. Consequendy, it comes to be called the oguazu, the large house. The poraea's house opens toward the rising sun in the east, the direction that all properly placed Chiripa houses face. In Itanarami, Avarijii's house is closed against the western sky by bamboo screens. His hammock and the family fire are toward one end. The low-hanging roof of the eastern wall shelters the altar, the focus of religious activities. The altar consists of two posts standing chest high, set in the ground a meter apart. A lengthy wick of beeswax and caraguata fiber (Bromleia balansae) adheres to one, illuminating the region during the dancing. The two posts are topped by wooden objects, often crosses or birds carved by Avariju. In addition, a three-pronged brace affixed to one post (commonly representing a bird) supports a basin carved from ygary, which holds water during name-giving ceremonies. A line made from caraguata

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fiber stretches between these posts, holding a variety of ornaments, bird skins and beaks, carved animals (especially fish), guns, and religious paraphernalia. Crosses, strings, and mbaraka on the altar are decorated (ojejyguaka) with small clusters of short, bright feathers, often the red and yellow breast feathers of the tukajii (Perogollus castanotis austmlis). The eastern face of Avarijii's house opens onto the dancing ground, the nernbo'edpe^ beat firm and clean by people's feet. In the middle of it, the community places on two stout braces a hollowed-out log for fermenting corn. This massive yvymna'e, three meters in length, provides a visual focus for the dancing ground. In the middle of the nembo'eape, next to the yvyrana'e, the community often constructs a simple temporary altar (yvyramomo) for specific ceremonies. It faces east, but rather than standing at chest height, it is raised three or four meters into the air by thin cedar saplings. Two instruments, the mbaraka and the takuara, are used in the nembo'e, the former by men and the latter exclusively by women. Mbaraka are constructed from small gourds (Lagenaria cucurbita) that are filled with hard seeds (ygua'u) and fitted with a short handle of bamboo. They are usually decorated with small feather poty ("flowers") made from yellow and red toucan feathers wrapped at the base and attached with cotton cord to the handle or the top of the gourd. The takuara are simple undecorated bamboo posts, about a meter in length and seven to fifteen centimeters in diameter. Tamped on the hard ground of the nembo'eape, they produce a resounding tone that can be heard for kilometers through the forest. During nembo'e, the shaking of mbaraka and pounding of the takuara envelop the area with sound. The instruments themselves are not treated as sacred, but the resonant bass and sharp staccato remove the action from the mundane world, creating the context for the powers of the supernatural. In preparation for nembo'e, Avarijii dons a cotton headband (akdgud), crosses his shoulders with cotton cords (jasa'd) to form a bandolier, and wraps his wrists with twine made of human hair (tukambi or poapykud). Like the mbaraka, these adornments are decorated with poty, and to his jasa'a Ararijii attaches other small carvings, often fish, a bird, or a small cross. While his mbaraka is in his right hand, it is not uncommon for Avarijii to clutch feathers, often the longer green tail feathers of a parrot (Amazona aestiva xanthopteris) or macaw (Am caninde), in his left. Female poraea tend to wear jasa'a that are also threaded with seeds of the Kapi'iguazii plant. Rather than head- or wristbands, women use the red dye of urukii seeds (Bixa orellana) to color their cheeks. Chiripa tamof are often assisted by a secondary religious specialist, called an yvymijd ("owner of the short stick"). Usually an elderly man with his own religious knowledge, the yvyraija brings water, honey, or food to the tamof as he rests, and accompanies the poraea with mbaraka and in-

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tonations during the nembo'e. 4 Like the tamoi, the yvyraija wears jasa'a and akagua, and carries a mbaraka, but in place of feathers, he carries a short, carved staff or, more commonly, a small bow and several arrows. Nembo'e usually begins at dusk. In Itanarami, Avariju begins to porae as darkness falls and the household is filled by the orange-red glow of the hearth's coals. Sitting in his hammock, Avariju sings, slowly rising and falling in pitch, in contrast to the sharp staccato of his mbaraka. His wife and daughters soon pick up the chant, accompanying him with their voices and the takuara. After long minutes of chanting, the tamoi utters a low, mournful call and shakes his mbaraka continuously, signaling closure and a short rest. Soon they begin again. In the twilight, the community gathers. With children and bundles in hand, men and women hurry through the forest toward the sounds of the takuara and mbaraka. Women settle themselves toward the back and ends of the house, filling the night air with their chanting voices and the slow cadence of their takuampu (the sound are their bamboo poles). Men join the nembo'e in a line in front of the women, facing east toward the altar and into the darkness. A wick is lit and affixed to the tataendy'y. The momentum of the porae grows and Avariju leaves his hammock to join the standing men, moving back and forth between them and the altar and periodically facing the altar to stare into space. The energy of the group builds as the sound grows. Men move back and forth with a short, shuffling step, and women, now standing in a line behind the men, keep rhythm by moving several steps from side to side. When the noise and energy seem to fill the house to overflowing, the tamoi leads the group outside onto the dance ground. The two lines of men and women fall in behind him, continuing to mark time with steps, voices, mbaraka and takuara. They dance counterclockwise around the kanguijy vat, returning to position in front of the tataendy'y. After periods of intense chanting, the tamoi imparts his divinely inspired vision to the group. This message often direcdy reflects sources of anxiety felt by the tamoi, problems faced by the community, or collective enterprises undertaken by the group. Before a visit to another community, the poraea will often express concern for safety during the trip. At other times, the vision is designed to educate the community in the proper manner of behavior, offer advice and direction, or give a stern lecture or verbal castigation. Visions of Avariju often concerned friction between community members or the ruinous habits of mestizo society. Tamoi determine the length and frequency of nembo'e. Usually, the group will gather for several hours. Avariju chants for periods of twenty to thirty minutes, then returns to his hammock and rests, closing his eyes to receive new visions. During the interim, the group disbands to rest, unless other, less experienced tamoi continue the porae. A troubled tamoi may porae like this every night for months, but the size of the gatherings

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decreases as he saps the energy of his supporters. In the end, the tamoi will be accompanied only by his most loyal family members and friends. The entire community gathers for important and infrequent ceremonies and celebrations. In Itanarami, the nembo'e culminates each month with the drinking of kanguijy during the full moon. Relatives from neighboring communities join the festivities. Women chew the corn and place it in the wooden yvyrana'e with water. It is then covered with banana leaves and allowed to ferment for three or four days. Other sugar sources are often substituted; honey creates a weak mead, fruit such as guavirami (Campomenasia observa) produces a weak punch, cane sugar renders a more potent brew. On nights of the kanguijyape^ a long and intense nembo'e is followed by drinking and celebration. As the nembo'e finishes, Avariju calls for a calabash of kanguijy. After intense porae over the liquid, he draws from it a small object (Cadogan 1959a, 84, observed poraea who produce a flower), to the amazement of all the youngsters who have gathered close. He then takes a drink and passes the liquid on to the yvyraija. Soon, all the young women in the group are dishing out kanguijy and distributing it to the crowd. Drinking kanguijy changes the tone of the evening, and although it contains litde alcohol, the focus shifts from nembo'e led by the religious leader to more worldly forms of celebration. The poraea retires to his hammock and the group becomes raucous. All join in singing and dancing nonreligious music, and young people openly flirt with one another. Kotyvu and Guau During the drinking of kanguijy, community members begin two forms of secular singing and dancing. The first, kotyvu^ includes people of all ages but is most popular among young people. Men and women form lines of four to twelve people, with arms thrown over one another's shoulders. With great enthusiasm, the line moves forward and back, in a complex three-step rhythm, swaying in time to short, staccato songs. The end of each passage is punctuated by a hard, resonating stamp, which propels the line back in the opposite direction. After each line, it is common for the group to repeat the steps, following the rhythm with melodious breathing, to form a continuous flow that is broken only when all are out of breath. As several kotyvu groups begin to dance around the nembo'eape, with different rhythms and lyrics, the scene becomes happily chaotic. Some groups become rambunctious; children lose step and tumble into the dust with peals of laughter, like a Chiripa version of the school yard game, Crack the Whip. The most enthusiastic participants in the kotyvu are often young unmarried participants. It provides an arena where men and

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women from neighboring communities can socialize. After shyly eyeing each other throughout the nembo'e, they can finally join together and be openly flirtatious. The lyrics of the kotyvu have the brevity and complexity of haiku. Their subde, multiple meanings draw on complex imagery that deserves a deeper analysis than can be carried out here. Cadogan (1959a, 86) recorded this kotyvii ("In the afternoon, the bird sings55): Ka'aru aru, ntfeguyra Ka'aru aru, nfeguyra Ka'aru aru, ne^eguyra In a kotyvu that can refer either to decoration for the nembo5e or for a potential mate, one kotyvu asks, "Why do you decorate yourself, my sister?55 Mamrepa rejeguakd, xirindy Mamrepa rejeguakd, xirindy Mamrepa rejeguakd, xirindy The second form of secular dancing that follows the drinking of kanguijy is guau. 5 Unlike kotyvu, the guau is performed within the oguazu, rather than on the dancing ground outside. The group, usually older adults, is led by the yvyraija with a small bow, his guyrai^ in hand. Participants take hands to form a circle of six to ten people. A gourd of kanguijy is placed in the center of the group for their refreshment during breaks between songs. The guau is done with solemnity, not with rambunctious enthusiasm. As the group begins to sing, participants pull together, bringing hands together in the center at chest height, then stepping back and bending at the waist, throwing arms out to the side. As the circle moves in and out, the participants shift in a clockwise direction. After finishing a stanza, they return counterclockwise. Like the kotyvu, the meanings of the guau are rooted in Guarani metaphor. However, where the kotyvu is usually one or two lines, guau extend to five or six, carrying more complex ideas. For example: Oveveguyrd, The bird flies, oveveguyrd, the bird flies, oveveguyrd, the bird flies, ndavyavema. Fm no longer happy. Kotyvu and guau continue into the night; the young people providing the momentum to keep the party going even after the energy of older

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compatriots and weary anthropologists has flagged. Eventually, when the kanguijy is gone, and before the first light of dawn, families bundle their sleeping children on their backs and head through the forest for home. Nimongarai: Naming Ceremony If the monthly nembo'e reaches its peak with the drinking of kanguijy, the annual religious cycle culminates with the nimongarai^ the Chiripa's most important religious ceremony. The ritual has several purposes—first, to baptize new members of the group; second, to discover their names; and third, to celebrate the year's new crops. In this, the religious leader reaches his most intense communication with the deities and "sees" the names of the newborns. These names, called tera ka'aguy (tera meaning name and ka'aguy meaning "of the forest") are closely related to the Indians' concept of the Chiripa soul, ayvu: without a forest name, an individual's identity is unknown in the Chiripa world. Thus, Avariju's role in divining the forest soul is critical to integrating the individual into Itanarami and providing him or her with a distinct identity as Chiripa. The Chiripa soul comprises dual characters, the human (ayvii) and the animal {asyigua). The first of these, the ayvu, inhabits an infant's body soon after birth. It has supernatural origins, either from the west (tuparenda), the zenith, or from the east (fapuguazudpy). It is up to Avarijii, in the nimongarai, to make contact with the soul that has arrived into the community's midst and discover its name. The second aspect of the soul is of nature, not confined by human cultural norms. It brings to the individual an animal character—that of a butterfly, monkey, or puma, for example—and a permanent and personal connection with the forest. The asyigua creates the individual's temperament. An infant who receives the asyigua of a butterfly is expected to grow up to be tranquil and happy; that of a monkey brings discontent and mischievousness and the asyigua of a puma, outright danger (Nimuendaju [1914] 1978, 55). More than simply being influenced by this aspect of the soul, the individual becomes the animal in human form. The two elements of the soul separate at death and the ayvukue (the remains of the ayvu) makes its way along the y'apuguazurape toward the yvymaraey. As described by Nimuendaju, the child's ayvukue passes easily into yvymaraey, but adults, who have had greater contact with their animal natures, find the path more difficult and dangerous. First they must pass under the hammock of the sleeping Amy, then confront a sleeping owl whose call brings their dead relative's ayvukue to meet them. Most ayvukue fail to reach paradise and must be content to remain as "Lost Ones" (Tavykue) just short of their final destination.6 The asyigua presents more problems at death. The animal soul trans-

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forms to an earthbound spirit, anguery, and, unless it finds a tranquil resting place, creates havoc for the living. In cases of untimely or violent deaths, this anguery remains near the site of the death and attacks the living. The forests at night present grave dangers for those caught at dusk with distances still to travel and without fire. The tera ka'agiiy recognizes a Chiripa identity in a child. As Nimuendaju ([1914] 1978, 52) suggested, "The Guarani do not 'call5 it this or that, it 'is5 this or that.55 Specifically, it defines a bond between the child and the religious realm. For example, the name Tupakarai literally translates as "Tupa man.55 The forest name identifies the direction from which the soul arrived on earth; in this case, in the far west from which Tupa arrives. Most individuals also have Christian names and surnames that are used when conversing with non-Chiripa ("Cristianos55). For non-Chiripa, surnames are provided from fathers to their children, and given names are read from the chart of saints5 days on the wall of a merchant's store in a nearby town. This latter method of naming is generally regarded by the Chiripa as absurd. The tamoi discovers forest names for each child after intense and prolonged nembo5e. The ceremony demands weeks of preparation: the dancing ground must be cleaned, the altar repaired, and kanguijy prepared. Chiripa expeditions bring a variety of forest goods— honey to feed the poraea, beeswax for wicks, uruku for women, and feathers for new poty. Most importantiy, a poraea and members of his household and community exert themselves in increasingly long nights of nembo5e. It seems that no sooner has the community finished drinking the kanguijy from one kanguijyape than the tamoi is preparing a new batch. The tamoi prepares himself by limiting his activities and foods. He first excludes deer meat and any purchased food from his diet, then all meat. In the final days, the tamoi refuses manioc and vegetables, restricting himself to kanguijy, honey, small amounts of sweet potato, and minnows (piky). Even yerba is limited to small amounts of terere (cold yerba mate) in the morning hours. In the days preceding the nimongarai in Itanarami, nembo5e extends from dusk to dawn, its size and intensity increasing as friends and relatives arrive from Mboi Jagua and Fortuna. They bring some food and after that is gone, depend on the largesse of their hosts. The area in and outside the house becomes a happy jumble of blankets and children as families setde in for the days5 events. Each of the powerful tamoi within walking distance of the community is invited. Not all poraea are capable of carrying out the nimongarai, only three tamoi in Mbaracayu have the knowledge: Tangara in Mboi Jagua, Avamboka from Fortuna, and Avariju. They string their hammocks under the oguazu, with their wives and daughters on the floor beneath. No tamoi can perform the nimongarai alone, even if he were sufficiendy marandii (wise). Marshaling the energy to communicate

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with the supernatural at this level demands continuous nembo'e, an impossible feat for older men on a limited diet. The nimongarai is more than an initiation ceremony; it reaffirms human relations with crops and animals of the forest on which the community depends. Cadogan referred to this aspect of the ceremony as the "tetnbfu agfuyje" the "fruit ripening." (In fact, the harvest of the first corn between November and January is the impetus to carry out the nimongarai.) Young corn stalks are cut and placed with sweet potato, sugarcane, squash, and other garden crops between the yvyrana'e in the dancing ground. Guns and traps are piled there as well. Carved fish and birds are tied to the temporary altar overhead. On the final day of the nimongarai, when the weather is clear and a full vat of kanguijy has been prepared, Avariju carries his exhortations to new heights. The final participants arrive and the crowd spills out of the oguazu and fills the areas beside and behind the house. Each principle tamoi sings in turn, and the lines of supporters spill beyond the thatch roof into the plaza outside. The porae reaches a peak of power and intensity; sound fills the air to overflowing and the ground shakes with takuarapu and stamping feet. After several weeks of fervent activity, in the middle of the night, the tamoi gather to baptize each of the small children. Parents present themselves and their infants to the hammock of the most powerful tamoi. The carved baptismal font, with water and several thin strips of ygary, is brought from the tataend/y, and a wick is lit to illuminate the scene. Each child in turn is held forth by its parents or "godparents" (syanjja or tuvanga) and, as the tamoi remains in his hammock and continues his supplications, water is wiped onto the forehead and stomach of the newborn. The similarities between this ceremony and the Catholic baptism are clear. However, it is noteworthy that this isolated act is not the point of name giving. The realization of the nimongarai, which follows, bears litde resemblance to Catholic ceremony. The naming is done in the hours before the first light of day. As the tamoi continue their chanting, and men and women continue their support with mbaraka and takuara, the entire community assembles, facing east between the oguazu and the vat of kanguijy. Parents take their children in arms. Accompanied by the other tamoi and the yvyraija, Avariju approaches the line. Each person is given a lit beeswax wick by the yvyraija. Then Avariju, shaking his mbaraka, singing, and holding his hands over and around the head and body of the individual, sees his or her tera ka'aguy. This process includes not only the newborns, but all people of Itanarami. Adults receive their names again. In cases of extreme sickness, a new name is divined for the patient as a means of providing an identity that is free from illness. When the last names are given, the chanting of

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the tamoi reaches a final crescendo and stops. The dawn is welcomed with kanguijy. The nimongarai symbolically reaffirms the connection between each of the community members, as well as his or her relation with the Chiripa spiritual world. In seeing the names, Avariju becomes a principle mediator between each person and the Chiripa deity, as well as being basic to the community's definition of itself as Chiripa. Apocalypse: Guarani Migrations In addition to the specific initiation functions of the poraea, there exists a more general task: the poraea's relations with Nanderuguazii are a means to forestall the world's final destruction or, if the apocalypse arrives, to lead his people into paradise in the east. The poraea will learn of the impending final destruction in his dream communication with Nanderuguazii. By intense nembo'e, the poraea and his followers can be lifted en masse over the waters of Parary or through a hole in the sky directly overhead into the yvymaraey. The tamof's role in bringing his group together in the face of this cataclysm has been fundamental in protecting Guarani society from the pressures of contact with the larger society. To avoid the end of the world, famous tamoi have led a series of religious migrations from the Mbaracayii area toward the Brazilian coast. It is suggested here that these movements were classic examples of situations where tamoi adapted their indigenous powers to strengthen Guarani social relations and ethnic identity in the face of the expanding national society and international economy. The Guarani belief in the earth's final destruction has given the impetus to a series of religious pilgrimages toward the yvymaraey. Inspired by visions and dreams, some religious leaders have gathered followers and gone in search of the land where they could escape annihilation. As this land without evil was to the east, where the sun rises, their path led them across Brazil. Arriving at Parary, knowledgeable and powerful religious leaders led fervent nembo'e to attain a state of communal teko marangatu and be lifted as a group over the water to yvymaraey. These religious prophets were given great exposure by Nimuendajii ([1914] 1978), who encountered Paraguayan Guarani south of Sao Paulo in 1912. His classic study has been the basis of most subsequent analyses of Guarani religion, such as those by Schaden (1962), Bartolome (1977), and Vara (1984). Nimuendaju's record suggested that Guarani migrations were initiated during the nineteenth century among the ethnic groups in Mbaracayu, including the Guarani south of the Iguatemi River and west of the Parana. Linguistic data collected by Nimuendajii confirms that, if

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not direct ancestors, these emigrant groups were closely related to the contemporary Chiripa. When Nimuendaju encountered the remnants of these migrations along the Atlantic coast, the Guarani told him of arduous trips of over a thousand kilometers that often took decades. One group, the Tanygua, migrated from Mbaracayu in the 1830s. In 1912, the remaining Tanygua recalled how their parents and grandparents had abandoned crops and left their homes with whatever they could carry. Following river routes in an era before roads, they traveled north along the Parana to the Ivahy River, then followed the Ivahy east and south toward the Atlantic. Their original leader, Nanderykynf, a feared and powerful man, died shortly after the start of the migration and was replaced by a second tamoi, Nanderui. Brazilian reception was hostile, and they were forced to take arms against the militia. The power of their best warrior, Aravusu, and the wiles of one of their compatriots conversant in Portuguese, Capitao Guasu, won them a parcel of land of almost fifty square kilometers, near the ocean and south of Sao Paulo (Nimuendaju [1914] 1978, 31-33). Two hundred people completed the amazing trek. Inevitably, epidemics and intermarriage took their toll. One hundred and fifty survived to 1877, fifty-seven remained in 1885, and Nimuendaju found only nine Tanygua when he visited in 1912. These few remaining people held steadfast to their original purpose. Even as Brazilians settled and developed their land, they refused to abandon their site near the ocean for reservation land inland. Other groups of Guarani, Oguauiva and Apapokiiva, followed the Tanygua later in the nineteenth century. They were met by missionaries, wealthy benefactors, and government authorities who attempted to convince them to settle onto reservations. The populations that took this offer were decimated by disease. Only a small number finally arrived at the ocean, where they established camp and proceeded in their religious mission. Religious organizing and migrations continue. Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg (1976, 234) reported that groups of Guarani in eastern Paraguay were making preparations to ascend to yvymaraey as recently as 1971. Paraguayan, Brazilian, and Uruguayan anthropologists continue to note small Guarani pilgrimages to the coast. There is considerable evidence that the religious migrations recorded by Nimuendaju were caused by social conflict in Mbaracayu. Abandoning homes and crops signals a desperate attempt to escape an untenable situation. Early pressure may have come from other Indians. When the migrating Guarani made contact with the Baron de Antonina in 1840, they reported that they had been expelled by enemy indigenous groups. It is also likely that these migrations were a response to the pressures exerted by

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mestizo setders. Throughout the nineteenth century, serious tensions existed between the Guarani and yerbateros in Mbaracayu, often culminating with violent attacks against indigenous communities. The combined pressures of indigenous and mestizo enemies created conditions that forced the Guarani to seek a less conflictive life elsewhere.7 More recendy, Melia, Griinberg, and Griinberg (1976, 234-235) reported that between 1946 and 1948, the Brazilian government's activities to divide and sell Guarani lands between the Iguatemi River and the Paraguayan border led to a religious mobilization by Chiripa who not only sought to prepare for the final destruction of this earth but attempted to escape this world for paradise. Violent expulsions from their land led the Pai-tavytera to organize for religious redemption as late as 1971 and 1973. Guarani tamoi have adapted themselves to the changing political and economic environment of Mbaracayu. Despite increased pressure from mestizo development, these tamoi did not decline in power, but retained, and perhaps increased their influence in indigenous communities. Even as small setdements were disbanding into nuclear families and households were dispersing in the forest, Guarani tamoi became the structural centers of religious mobilization and migration. In persons such as Nanderykyni and Nanderui, they became symbols of power and revitalization when confronting the larger system. The leadership role of tamoi such as Avariju and Nanderykyni is necessitated by Chiripa cosmology and expressed in the public ceremony of nembo'e. Chiripa belief in yvymaraey and the cataclysmic ending of the world create the need for a religious intermediary between the mundane and supernatural realms. The tamoi is charged with organizing his followers to prepare for ascension into the "land without evil." They are dependent on his leadership and knowledge in escaping both the hardships of this world and its fiery ending. Nembo'e is the primary arena for the tamoi to exercise his leadership. As a mediator between the worldly and supernatural realms and between each individual and the deities, and as a diviner of the end of the earth, he establishes himself as leader of his people. The attendance at the nembo'e evinces the extent of influence of a tamoi in a community. Large groups are garnered by those tamoi who command respect for the importance of their visions. Lesser tamoi may only exert influence over a few close kin. These activities and ideas reinforce bonds between families and reaffirm the group's Chiripa identity. First, the religious leader emphasizes the unity of the group. By physically mediating relations between the community and the supernatural, he reinforces his role as the central point around which the dispersed families congregate. In being called grandfather, he assumes the role of progenitor of all members, symbolizing the real and Active kin relations that join them as a community.

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Second, divining their forest names from the supernatural realm, the tamoi reinforces each person's identity as unique from the larger society. By using a language and body of knowledge that is unintelligible to mestizos and most other indigenous groups, the tamoi emphasizes that this supernatural world is uniquely Chiripa. Bureaucratic Leadership In addition to religious leaders, most Chiripa communities have had a political officer for several decades. First they were called sargentos and were appointed by the local military as a police force in the Chiripa community. More recentiy, as they have been selected by the national Indian agency or elected as representatives to the national council of indigenous peoples, they have been variously called dirigentes^ caciques, or presidentes. Even in hamlets of five or six households, these leaders preside over a small staff, modeled on Paraguayan bureaucracy, that includes a secretary, a constable, and often several soldiers. Despite their ubiquitousness, these councils have never been central to the organization of Chiripa tekoa. This section discusses these community leaders and contrasts their roles in indigenous social organization with those of religious leaders. Chapter 6 will argue that they are of greater importance in mediating interethnic relations with the larger society. Rather than envision Itanarami as a collection of fluid tekoa, the bureaucratic council attempts to administer the community as a formal corporate group. Its identity as a colonia nacional is defined as an unchanging entity that relates to a carefully delineated parcel of land. The residents are inscribed as the body of members in a role that is held by the Instituto Nacional del Indigena (INDI). Individuals have membership in only a single group; their claims to residence rights in Mbof Jagua, Y'apo, and Fortuna are unrecognized. The community's boundaries have been duly mapped by teams of surveyors. Finally, the bureaucratic organization of community councils is hierarchical, revolving around a single individual. The cacique acquires resources from a caudillo or development agency and is subject to that outside power. Where the tamoi exercises his position in the nembo'e, the public forum of the cacique is the community meeting. These meetings are organized to make decisions concerning relations between the community and the larger society. For example, a meeting will be called to receive the doctor who provides subsidized medical care or to organize support to send the cacique to Asuncion to process requests for land guarantees. Although the cacique calls the meeting and introduces the subject, decisions are by consensus. Discussion is free flowing and all members, both men and women, may state opinions and offer suggestions. Bureaucratic leaders have greater

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knowledge of the national society and direct access to sources of material assistance. Being the conduit for assistance and favors from the defense department gives bureaucratic leaders the resources to dispense within the local community. However, these favors provide little community power in the long term. Rather than depend on the power of caudillismo^ bureaucratic leadership needs to appeal to indigenous relations and leadership for support. The tenuous position of bureaucratic leaders was made clear in Itanarami when Avariju decided that the cacique, Antonio, was not acting in the community's interests and needed to be removed. Antonio had attended school to the fifth grade, had considerable experience outside the community, and had modeled his personal life after Paraguayan campesinos. Instead of exchanging goods with his kin and neighbors, he sold them. Although he was very adept in mestizo society, his kin ties in the Itanarami community were not strong. 8 Avarijii's campaign to unseat the cacique was indirect, avoiding confrontation. He simply suggested to his associates and relatives that Antonio was acting in his own behalf; specifically, that he was selling wood from the community's forests and pocketing the money. The complaints of the tamof struck a responsive chord in the community and the cacique was forced to deal with them. The resolution of the conflict shows the complex intermingling of indigenous and bureaucratic attitudes toward leadership. Antonio, who had been raised in a Paraguayan community, first asked the tamof to divine his name in the upcoming nimongarai. This asserted his identity as a Chiripa and emphasized his position in the community. This act was applauded as a show of good faith, but it only temporarily reduced tensions. As criticisms continued, the cacique called a meeting to reaffirm his leadership. He demanded that his position in office be ratified by a voice vote. Public opinion was against the cacique and he had been advised of this through private conversations. Nevertheless, the community members avoided an open conflict by expressing unanimous support of Antonio. Having made this face-saving gesture, he renounced the office and left the meeting. The nephew of Avariju was made the new cacique. Religious and bureaucratic political leadership demand fundamentally different talents. Whereas the tamof must be thoroughly knowledgeable of Chiripa life and relations with the supernatural, the cacique must understand the mestizo life-style, language, and goals. The difference is clear in the opposing concepts of marandu and letrado. Letrado literally means "literate," but connotes a sly self-interest, the capacity to understand the unspoken motives of others and smoothly move for one's own advantage. Caciques need to be letrado to match the self-interested individuals of mestizo society. Tamof and caciques have fundamentally different power bases and thus,

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fundamentally different roles within community life. While tamoi focus their efforts on the formation and maintenance of the Chiripa community, caciques dominate the community's relations with external society and the Indian community. The cacique still has little power to act on his own behalf. The position of political leaders is fundamentally conflicted. On one side, the individuals are closely tied to Chiripa communities through kin relations; on the other, they are representatives of and responsible to mestizo patrons and caudillos. In one classic case, a famous tamoi who asserted himself as both a capataz and dirigente lost credibility through his associations with mestizos. Indians who knew him in the yerbals remember that "he sold his people" and Cadogan (1959a) wrote that his later attempts to move his community were construed as a capitulation to the government. Despite the appointment of political officers to manage relations between Guarani and the larger society, the noncoercive leadership of religious tamoi remains the central focus of Chiripa communities. Appointed political leaders rarely assume a position as caudillos over their communities. Conclusions The development of a regional society based on extractive industries has not destroyed the distinct social organization and ethnic identity of Chiripa communities. Two reasons stand out as explanations. First, Chiripa society has retained a distinct structure despite the pressures created by members' involvement in the commercial economy. As wage labor produces individual returns, it increases an individual's independence from the group and creates new bonds of dependence on the regional society. Kin groups and religious leaders have remained effective to a great extent because they do not depend on the communal production and economic cooperation of community members. Chiripa nuclear families can engage in independent commercial production without affecting the community structure. The flexibility of Chiripa social groups is important to their viability in the commercial context. Chiripa society is not dependent on highly structured or prescriptive social institutions. Kin relations create extensive, noncorporate networks that provide membership and rights to many Chiripa. These can be used to form cohesive groups from a diverse pool of relatives. At any time, only a portion of any group activates membership rights and accepts the correlating responsibilities. Thus, the group is able to retain its structure as members disengage from the group or return to the community in response to pressures and opportunities of wage work.

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Second, Chiripa social relations have retained their noncapitalist nature. The kin relations that serve as the basis for leadership and communities have not been appropriated to the purposes of capitalist production. To a large extent, this results from the structure of power relations within Chiripa society. Relations between Chiripa families and leaders are flexible and noncoercive. Religious leaders have little power over families or the resources on which families depend. Moreover, families have considerable mobility between leaders and kin groups. Thus, commercial attempts to draw Chiripa into the coercive wage-labor market found little leverage in existing Chiripa leadership and kin relations. Finally, power brokers in the regional commercial system have created Indian intermediaries as a means of imposing nonkin-based relations on communities. However, these sargentos and caciques have had limited power over Chiripa individuals and families. In fact, it is clear that bureaucratic offices carry little independent power within communities. Political leaders must depend on kin relations and religious leadership to fulfill their mandates. The next chapter will explore the structural integration of Chiripa production into the larger economy; Chapter 6 will analyze the importance and power of bureaucratic leaders as ethnic brokers.

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5. Chiripa Agroforestry

Like the placement of their houses in the forest, the work of people in Itanarami strikes the uninitiated as poorly organized. Avamaino might begin clearing a garden one morning, only to abandon the work before noon to gather yerba in the forest. It wouldn't be uncommon to see him set traps in the afternoon and go fishing at dusk. Chiripa move between gardening, hunting, fishing, and commercial extraction, often performing several kinds of work in the same week or even the same day. Like Chiripa social relations, however, their productive activities are carefully organized; agriculture, hunting and fishing, and commercial gathering are integrated into a system of commercial agroforestry. Avamaino allocates his work to exploit a variety of ecological niches; the soils, canopy, understory, and even the lagoons provide part of his family's needs. Rather than being chaotic, his activities are tailored to assure a dependable subsistence without degrading the forest habitat. The diversity of Chiripa agroforestry defends them against the vagaries of rainfall, hunting, and commodity markets. More than simply filling his family's pot, the system allows Avamaino to earn cash without foregoing subsistence production. Mestizo neighbors consider the Chiripa undisciplined; in fact, this diversity promotes their independence from the larger society. Indigenous agroforestry has three primary components. First, and in a sense primarily, Avamaino engages in subsistence agriculture. His family, like every other stable household in Itanarami, maintains a garden plot, called a chagm in Spanish or a kokue in Guaranf. Gardening demands more family labor than any of the other economic activities and provides the manioc, corn, and other staples on which the Chiripa diet is based. Families who depend only on hunting or commercial gathering are considered irresponsible and tenuous, like a broker who invests in only one volatile stock. Second, hunting and fishing provide protein between harvests. When food is scarce, men often devote more time to obtaining game and fish than to either gardening or wage work. Although Chiripa men kill large

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game with a bow or gun, most hunt small animals with handmade traps. Fishing in oxbow lakes along the Jejui River not only provides the men with a dependable catch; it is a favorite sport that offers the opportunity for camaraderie and entertainment in the bargain. The third component of Chiripa agroforestry is commercial extraction, which complements subsistence activities. Chiripa collect commodities from the forest, including yerba, furs and skins, wood for fence posts, and citrus oil (esencia). Lesser quantities of cash are obtained by selling produce and domestic animals. In addition, some income is earned from clearing fields for mestizo farmers. This cash allows the Chiripa to buy goods such as salt throughout the year, as well as to supplement the seasonal production of farming, fishing, and hunting. Most indigenous forest societies (Johnson 1983) integrate a variety of productive activities into a single annual system. The Chiripa case is especially interesting, however, in that commercial gathering is an important aspect of their economy. Commercial agroforestry has attracted considerable attention (Peters, Gentry, and Mendelsohn, 1989; Denevan and Padoch 1987; Fearnside 1989) as a sustainable activity for economic development of lowland forests. In addition to protecting the forests, agroforestry empowers producers in relations with larger systems (Padoch, Chota Inuma, de Jong, and Unruh 1985; Schwartzman 1986; Clay 1988). Thus, by integrating commercial activities with horticulture, hunting, and fishing, the Chiripa have been able to enter the regional commercial society without being dominated by it. Visitors to Itanarami are quick to judge the Chiripa to be simple horticulturalists. Gardens are visible and an impressive evidence of their work. This perspective suggests, however, that other productive activities are aberrant; hunting is seen as an artifact of a more primitive past, and wage labor as pulling the Chiripa relentiessly into the future. The text in this chapter argues that these diverse activities form a single, sustained system. Schaden (1962,45-62) and Chase-Sardi (1972,179-180) pointed out that wage labor and debt bondage can limit Guarani subsistence production. Cadogan (1959a, 69) described two Chiripa families tied like medieval serfs to their mestizo masters. Although wage labor undoubtedly limits subsistence production for some Chiripa, commercial gathering by the residents of Itanarami has not driven them from their fields. Most perform wage labor for mestizo patrones without incurring debts, and for centuries they have done so without relinquishing their subsistence production. Analyses of the expansion of capitalism, such as that done by Wolf (1982), have suggested that capitalist production links with and appropriates the resources of subsistence production and, in the process, integrates and assimilates small-scale societies into larger systems. Just as an analysis of the articulation between production systems provides a model for un-

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Chiripa Agroforcstry

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derstanding domination between ethnic groups in regional systems, this perspective highlights important factors in the economic and ethnic autonomy of the Chiripa. In arenas where capitalist production does not constrain subsistence production, the social relations that depend on subsistence production are unaffected by commercial systems. To understand Chiripa society as a distinct entity within the larger society, one must first explain how Chiripa subsistence production has retained independence from expanding capitalist production activities. In this chapter I will describe the various productive activities and define the integration of these individual systems, focusing on the independence of resource demands of commercial production and subsistence activities. Production resources are divided into two general types, physical (soils, flora, and fauna) and labor. With regard to the former, the various production activities depend on distinct ecological niches—agriculture, hunting and fishing, and commercial production exploit different forest resources. With respect to labor allocation, workers shift between a variety of production spheres. Because each nuclear family constitutes an independent labor pool, there are very few workers, who must perform a diversity of activities. Chiripa agroforestry is notable in that the periodicity of the various production systems assures that commercial gathering does not impede hunting and gardening. Few conflicts between resource demands in the various systems mean little opportunity for constraints and hierarchies between production systems. The ramifications of this technical coordination will be explored in the next chapter, which discusses Chiripa independence in social relations with the larger system. Agriculture Chiripa agriculture is based on a long-fallow swidden system common throughout Latin America's lowland forests (see, e.g., Ruddle 1974; Johnson 1983). Families clear small plots in the forest, plant seeds, and harvest the crops. As weeds take hold and the soil degrades, gardeners cut new fields from virgin forest. Family gardens average just over half a hectare,1 ranging from three hundred square meters to several hectares. Single clearings usually are planted with the complete range of a family's crops— manioc, corn, beans, squash, and sweet potatoes (see Figure 9). The system has remained largely unchanged since Cabeza de Vaca ([1555] 1891) observed it in the sixteenth century. Its success is attested to in that rather than transforming indigenous agriculture, colonists adopted the swidden system of the indigenous peoples. Few crops have been introduced and these, such as sugar and oranges, integrate well in indigenous plantations. There is little commercial agriculture in most Chiripa com-

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