Kin-Ordered Mode of Production Labour and resources are acquired primarily on the basis of reciprocity between people who are related by descent and marriage.

Kin-Ordered Mode of Production

• Labour and resources are acquired primarily on the basis of reciprocity between people who are related by descent and marriage.

Relations of Production

• Deployed on the basis of kinship relations.

Modes of Exchange

• Patterns according to which the distribution of good and services take place.

• The different modes of exchange are reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange.

• Each mode of exchange is characteristic of a different mode of production.

• Kin-Ordered Mode = Reciprocity

• Tributary Mode = Redistribution

• Capitalist Mode = Market exchange

Reciprocity

• Form of exchange that dominates the distribution of goods among members of a kin-ordered society.

• Reciprocity is the exchange of goods and services of equal value, involving an obligation both to give and to receive.

Generalized Reciprocity

• An exchange where people don’t expect immediate return and don’t specify the value of the return.

There is a direct link between a society’s subsistence strategy and its social and political organization.

Kin-Ordered Mode of Production

• Social stratification is usually egalitarian.

Kayapo

• Amazonian indigenous group of about 4,000 people, living in autonomous villages.

• Tropical forest horticulturalists.

Politically Significant Regional Divisions

• (a) 2 Northern communities, part of the Tchikin sub-group.

• (b) “The people of Para.” In Kayapo Indigenous Area – East of the Xingu river (Gorotire, Kikretum). These villages have received little support from the state or private agencies, and have allowed extractivism from loggers and miners in their areas.

• (c) “The people of Xingu.” Located West of the Xingu river (Kapot-Roykore). Received support from the National Park of Xingu, and Sting’s Rain Forest Foundation.

Extended Family

• A family pattern made up of three generations living together: parents, married children, and grandchildren.

Authority

• Defined through action, particularly success in bringing back goods from alien sources and in mobilizing collective action.

• Traditional political tension between consecutive social generations.

• Tension counterbalanced by the closeness of alternate generations – grandparents and grandchildren, uncles and nephews, aunts and nieces.

Main Authority

• Exercised by a male chief, whose authority is derived from formal office as ritual leader of the community as a whole.

History of inter-ethnic relations

• Before 1950s: Penetration of Western groups’ territory by ranchers and speculators.

• 1960s and 70s: Attempts by settlers and ranchers to move onto Kayapo land.

• 1970: Government diverted the course of a highway to cut out the Kayapo portion of the National Park of the Xingu, and sold it to ranchers = these were repelled violently by the Kayapo

History of inter-ethnic relations

• Late 1970s and early 1980s: Logging companies and gold miners began to appear, offering small fees for concessions. They didn’t represent a threat of permanent settlement or occupation of land like ranchers did, so…

• 1979: Chief Pombo of Kikretum granted the 1st logging concession.

• 1981: Gorotire followed suit. • Gold rush at the time was also encouraged by

the Brazilian government as a mechanism to diffuse social tensions among landless peansants

Late 1970s + early 1980s

• Kayapo leaders in what is now the Kayapo Indigenous Area entered into contracts with logging and mining companies to operate on Kayapo lands, in return for a percentage of the proceeds.

• The young chiefs who began giving concessions were the most inter-cultural of the Kayapo, successful in mediating inter-ethnic relations thanks to their command of Portuguese and of Brazilian ways

Main social consequences of negotiations

a) Young leaders enriched themselves at the communities’ expense.

b) However, these young chiefs were able to establish themselves on an equal footing with the Brazilian regional elite for the first time in history.

c) Internal tensions grew, nonetheless, as opinion about logging and mining became divided, and the legitimacy of new young leaders was questioned.

d) Villages live in poverty and suffer the effects of environmental degradation:– Destruction of forest hunting and gathering

resources by logging.– Pollution of rivers with mercury, poisoning

water and fish. – Flooding, bringing malarial mosquitoes.

e) Kayapo’s image as “primitive” ecologists eventually came into question in the 1990s.

Sting

• Between Sept. 1994 and Jan. 1995 the people of Gorotire revolted and expelled miners and loggers from their territory.

• Kayapo chiefs terminated all concessions on their land.

Assertion of communal control over Kayapo leaders

• Facilitated by a fundamental dynamic of indigenous Kayapo politics: the compensatory alliance between alternate generations, in this case senior traditional chiefs on the one hand, and young men in their twenties, on the other.

Present

• New inter-communal associations to develop alternative, environmentally sustainable sources of income.

Resistance

• Power to refuse being forced against one’s will to conform to someone else’s wishes.

Hegemony

• Persuasion of subordinate peoples to accept the ideology of the dominant group

Ideology

• Worldview that tends to justify the social arrangements under which people live.

Domination

• Coercive rule

Exam

• Next Thursday, October 13.

• In-class, (1:20 hs)

• No reading materials or notes allowed.

• Bring your own pencil and eraser.

What?

• Schultz and Lavenda– Chapter 1: The Anthropological Perspective– Chapter 2, Culture and the Human Condition– Chapter 4: Anthropology in History and the

Explanation of Cultural Diversity– Chapter 9: Social Organization and Power– Chapter 10: Making a Living– Chapter 14, Dimensions of Inequality in the

Contemporary World, pps. 327-329– Chapter 15: A Global World

• Lecture notes

• Tzvetan Todorov’s Columbus and the Indians [in reading kit]

• Terence Turner’s The Kayapo Resistance [in reading kit]

• Films: Cannibal Tours and Life and Debt

Format

• Multiple-choice

• One short essay question