Ethnoeconomics and Native Amazonian Livelihood: culture and economy among the Nɨpóde-Uitoto of the Middle Caquetá Basin in Colombia

This thesis explores the cultural logic shaping native livelihoods in one part of Northwest Amazonia using an ethnographic study of the Nɨpóde-Uitoto people who live in the land corridor along the middle

reaches of the Caquetá river in lowland Colombia. The study applies a culturalist perspective which seeks to understand the Native Amazonian economy from their own point of view. Ethnographic material on Uitoto subsistence, ritual and commercial activities are presented to demonstrate that Uitoto mental representations of the cosmos direct their material processes of livelihood.

The thesis shows that swidden cultivation forms the core of the indigenous economy, and that the Nɨpóde-Uitoto embrace their gardening livelihood as a moral and religious way of life. By examining

a series of formal oral texts about horticulture and garden crops, the discussion reveals that the Uitoto hold a dualistic cosmology in which life is seen as an ceaseless struggle in which garden work seeks to maintain cordial relations with parental divinities and related garden plant spirits who sustain and protect humanity from negative forces in the cosmos. In the same way, regular labour effort in narcotics processing, and the production of garden surpluses for ceremonial exchange, are geared towards strengthening the support of divinities and ancestors who guarantee continued social reproduction.

Uitoto models of livelihood feature a pervasive reciprocal logic of mutual nurture, care and helping between humans, and between humans and spiritual beings. Alongside the key cultural logic of reciprocity, Uitoto theories of work and well-being focus on cyclical bodily processes. The primacy of a bodily idiom reveals cultural models of a “corporeal economy” and a “healing economy”, which may find correlates in Amerindian models of livelihood and social reproduction throughout the ethnographic region. Examination of native perspectives on commerce shows that the Uitoto construct a dualistic model of their mixed livelihood which they use to organise their work strategies in the short and long-term. As well as a secure source of food, native people value subsistence gardening as a specific practice which expresses their Amerindian personhood: for the Uitoto, livelihood practice is an essential part of ethnic identity.