Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-sjtt6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-20T11:26:49.207Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ecologically Noble Amerindians?: Cattle Ranching and Cash Cropping among Shuar and Colonists in Ecuador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Thomas K. Rudel ,
Diane Bates  and
Rafael Machinguiashi
Thomas K. Rudel
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
Diane Bates
Affiliation:
Sam Houston State University
Rafael Machinguiashi
Affiliation:
Federación de Centros Shuar
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Observers have argued that as indigenous peoples become more acculturated and their reserves more populous, they begin to exploit tropical rain forests much as colonists and other outsiders do. The history of changes in land use between 1950 and 1980 among the Shuar, an indigenous group in the Ecuadorian Amazon, would appear to support this convergence thesis. The Shuar began to clear land, plant pastures, and acquire cattle, much like their mestizo competitors for land. Using survey and remote-sensing data for a later period, from 1987 to 1997, we demonstrate that convergence has given way to divergence in land-use trends among the two groups. While mestizo smallholders throughout the region continue to rely on cattle ranching, Shuar smallholders close to roads have begun to reforest their lands and cultivate former garden crops like coffee and cacao as cash crops. These recent trends in Shuar land use suggest that even when Amerindians become more acculturated, they still maintain more biologically diverse landscapes than their mestizo neighbors.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , 2002 , pp. 144 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a grant from the Geography and Regional Science Program of the National Science Foundation (SBR-96–18371). We would like to thank Walter Palacios and Luis Cáceres of the Fundación Jatun Sacha for administrative support during the field research. We also would like to thank the Federación de Centros Shuar for permission to do the research. Delores Quesada provided invaluable assistance in interviewing colonists. Caroline Phillipuk and John Hansen analyzed the remote-sensing images for us. David Hughes, George Morren, and Rodrigo Sierra made valuable comments on earlier drafts.

References

BEHRENS, CLIFFORD, BAKSH, M., and MOTHES, M. 1994 “A Regional Analysis of Bari Land-Use Intensification and Its Impact on Landscape Heterogeneity.” Landscape Ecology 22, no. 3: 279–315.Google Scholar
BORGTOFT, HENRIK, SKOV, F., FJELDSA, J., SCHELLERUP, I., and OLLGAARD, B. 1999 La gente y la biodiversidad: Dos estudios en comunidades de las estribaciones de los Andes en Ecuador. Quito: Abya-Yala.Google Scholar
CHUMPI, MARCELINO 1999 Explotación petrolera y minera en los territorios Shuar: Problemas y posibles planteamientos. Quito: Abya-Yala.Google Scholar
COOK, THOMAS D., and CAMPBELL, D. T. 1979 Quasi-Experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings. Boston, Mass.: Houghton-Mifflin.Google Scholar
DESCOLA, PHILIPPE 1994 In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
DESCOLA, PHILIPPE 1996 The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
EBERHART, NICHOLAS 1998 Transformaciones agrarias en el frente de colonización de la región amazónica. Quito: Abya-Yala.Google Scholar
FEDERACION DE CENTROS SHUAR 1976 Solución original a un problema actual. Sucua: Mundo Shuar.Google Scholar
FORSTER, NANCY 1989 “Minifundistas in Tungurahua, Ecuador: Survival on the Agricultural Ladder.” In THIESENHUSEN 1989, 92–126.Google Scholar
GODOY, RICARDO, BROKAW, N., and WILKIE, D. 1995 “The Effect of Income on the Extraction of Non-Timber Forest Products: Model, Hypothesis, and Preliminary Findings from the Sumu Indians of Nicaragua.” Human Ecology 23, no. 1: 29–52.Google Scholar
GRINDLE, MERILEE 1986 State and Countryside: Development Policy and Agrarian Politics in Latin America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
HARNER, MICHAEL J. 1973 The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfall. New York: Anchor.Google Scholar
HENRICH, JOSEPH 1997 “Market Incorporation, Agricultural Change, and Sustainability among the Machiguenga Indians of the Peruvian Amazon.” Human Ecology 25, no. 2: 319–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HUMPHRIES, SALLY 1993 “The Intensification of Traditional Agriculture among Yucatec Maya Farmers: Facing up to the Dilemma of Livelihood Sustainability.” Human Ecology 21, no. 1: 87–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
INEC (INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ESTADISTICA Y CENSOS) 1996 Cifrando y descifrando a Morona-Santiago. Cuenca, Ecuador: INEC.Google Scholar
KARSTEN, RAFAEL 1935 The Head Hunters of Western Amazonas: The Life and Culture of the Jibaro Indians of Eastern Ecuador and Peru. Societas Scientarium Fennico Commentaciones Humanarium Litterarum, no. 6. Helsinki: Societas Scientarium Fennico.Google Scholar
MACDONALD, THEODORE 1981 “Indigenous Response to an Expanding Frontier: Jungle Quichua Economic Conversion to Cattle Ranching.” In Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, edited by Whitten, Norman E., 356–83. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
MACDONALD, THEODORE 1984 De cazadores a ganaderos. Quito: Abya-Yala.Google Scholar
NETTING, ROBERT M. 1993 Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
NIETSCHMAN, BERNARD 1973 Between Land and Water: The Subsistence Ecology of the Miskito Indians. New York: Seminar.Google Scholar
PICARD, LOUISE 1996 “Les transformations de l'economie et de l'identité culturelle Shuar a la suite de l'expansion de l'elevage.” M.A. thesis, Université Laval, Quebec.Google Scholar
PREFECTO, IVETTE, and VANDERMEER, JOHN 1995 Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Truth about Rain Forest Destruction. San Francisco: Food First.Google Scholar
PUTSCHE, LAURA 2000 “A Reassessment of Resource Depletion, Market Dependency, and Culture Change on a Shipibo Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon.” Human Ecology 28, no. 1: 131–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
REDFORD, KENT H. 1991 “The Ecologically Noble Savage.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 15, no. 1: 46–48.Google Scholar
REDFORD, KENT H., and STEARMAN, ALLYN M. 1993 “Forest-Dwelling Native Amazonians and the Conservation of Biodiversity: Interests in Common or in Collision?” Conservation Biology 7, no. 2: 248–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ROPER, J. MONTGOMERY 2000 “Whose Territory Is It? Resource Contestation and Organizational Chaos in Bolivia's Multiethnic Indigenous Territory.” Paper presented to the Latin American Studies Association, 16–18 Mar., Miami, Florida.Google Scholar
RUDEL, THOMAS K. 1983 “Roads, Speculators, and Colonization in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Human Ecology 11, no. 4: 385–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
RUDEL, THOMAS K. 2000 “Organizing for Sustainable Development: Conservation Organizations and the Struggle to Protect Tropical Rain Forests in Esmeraldas, Ecuador.” Ambio 25: 78–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
RUDEL, THOMAS K., HOROWITZ, WITH BRUCE 1993 Tropical Deforestation: Small Farmers and Land Clearing in the Ecuadorian Amazon. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
SEYMOUR-SMITH, CHARLOTTE 1988 Shiwiar: Identidad étnica y cambio en el Rio Corrientes. Quito: Abya-Yala.Google Scholar
SIERRA, RODRIGO, RODRIGUEZ, F., and LOSOS, E. 1999 “Forest-Resource Use Change during Early Market Integration in Tropical Rain Forests: The Huaorani of Upper Amazonia.” Ecological Economics 30: 107–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
STAVER, CHARLES, SIMEONE, R., and STOCKS, A. 1994 “Land-Resource Management and Forest Conservation in Central Amazonian Peru: Regional, Community, and Farm-Level Approaches among Native Peoples.” Mountain Research and Development 14, no. 2: 147–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
THIESENHUSEN, WILLIAM 1989 “Introduction: Searching for Agrarian Reform in Latin America.” In THIESENHUSEN, ED., 1989, 1–33.Google Scholar
THIESENHUSEN, WILLIAM, ed. 1989 Searching for Agrarian Reform in Latin America. Boston, Mass.: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
TURNER, TERENCE 1995 “An Indigenous People's Struggle for Socially Equitable and Ecologically Sustainable Production: The Kayapo Revolt against Extractivism.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1, no. 1: 98–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
WHITTEN, NORMAN 1976 Sacha Runa: Ethnicity and Adaption of Ecuadorian Jungle Quichua. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
ZAVALLOS, JOSE V. 1989 “Agrarian Reform and Structural Change: Ecuador since 1964.” In THIESENHUSEN, ED., 1989, pp. 42–69.Google Scholar