Dr Laura Rival

Amazon Research

My work has engaged Amazonianist anthropology in a number of ways, most particularly around issues of kinship and landscape histories. I have written on the gendering of affinity, consanguinity and residence, and on ‘the uterine logic of the house.’

I have shown that the principle of ‘shared substance’ dissolves dichotomies such as individual and society, or biological inheritance and social constructedness. Finally, I have looked at native theorizations of personhood underpinning practices as diverse as agroforestry, hunting and warfare.

I have opposed the simplistic evolutionary models so often found in anthropology and archaeology, in particular the thesis of ‘agricultural devolution,’ and have defended a non-linear vision of pre-Columbian history, in which prey-predator cultural dialectics inform wider political economic concerns with the centralisation of power and the role of agricultural intensification. In Amazonia, the ‘art of not being governed’ exercises a continuous check upon the ‘art of governing.’ In the concluding chapter of Trekking through History, I argue that the Huaorani hold two contrastive models of nature and distinguish two natural processes, ‘predation’ and ‘natural abundance,’ one which they make their own, the other which they project onto their enemy. My work on the Huaorani has been used both in discussions of Amazonian landscape and crop domestication and in archaeological reconstructions of pre-Columbian plant and people migration routes. I have cast this work within the mould of hunting-and-gathering societies, at times rhetorically, but always with great effect, as the reasons for excluding lowland South America from cross-cultural comparisons of foraging societies are dubious, to say the least (see my regional introduction to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers 1999).

My interest in Amerindian conceptualizations of nature and society has increasingly led me to engage theoretically with ‘ethnobiology,’ a field which examines the - often symbiotic - relationships between humans and their surrounding plants, animals and ecosystems. Ethnobiology, as recently defined by Ellen (2006), stands at an important intellectual junction between biology, culture and sociality. Initially rooted in ethnobotany, the subject matter and methodologies of ethnobiological research now address core issues regarding cultural knowledge, language, cognition and human subsistence, and how these interact through long-term processes of co-evolution. In lowland South America, ethnobiological research has shown that plant domestication involves whole forest landscapes. The 2008 Current Anthropology article on the natural and cultural history of manioc is a good example of the kind of integrative social/ natural science I have practiced in recent years. It also illustrates how ethnobiology helps researchers to rethink nature and culture as analytic categories in anthropological theory, away from the comfort zone created by Franz Boas (for whom nature was that to which the laws of biology applied, while culture became that which biology could not explain) and George Murdoch (who famously said that the laws of culture are independent of the laws of biology). My contribution to ethnobiology includes work on historical and contemporary landscape and crop domestication in the Amazon basin, as well as a sustained attempt to address the ecological significance of material culture and artefacts used in hunting and horticulture.

This has led me to deepen my reflection on indigenous modes of classification. Native Amazonians do not map the continuities and discontinuities between mankind and environment according to the naturalist logic of western common sense and science. They thus invite us to think about the world without distinguishing nature from culture a priori, and, on the basis of such a possibility, to consider whether there is a need for a radical reconfiguration of the natural and social sciences. To start imagining what such a reconfiguration might look like, we need to lay the theoretical foundations for a deeper anthropological reflection on the values of ‘minority’ knowledge systems. The global ecological challenges the world faces in the 21st century will not be solved by ‘top-down’ solutions or uni-directional ‘harvesting’ of knowledge. Instead, genuine exchange of knowledge needs to be fostered between those who retain an understanding of the ecological and cultural specificity of their environments and researchers seeking to understand the web of relations between ecology, culture and history. I am thus now engaged in fostering a new kind of collaborative anthropological research, whose holistic approach to learning and education will not only strengthen indigenous pedagogical experiments, communicative practices, and dialogical forms of understandings, but also create opportunities for native Amazonians to fight poverty and exclusion. By researching with collaborators, students and colleagues the forms of transformative agency deployed by indigenous peoples in Amazonia, I hope to demonstrate both their capacity for actively engaging in the construction of meaning and their passion for learning about other worlds of knowledge, as well as for sharing their world of meanings with others.