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The mak, the Makuna and the Guiana system: Transformations of social
structure in northern lowland South America
Kaj Arhema
a
University of Uppsala, Sweden

Online publication date: 20 July 2010

To cite this Article Arhem, Kaj(1989) 'The mak, the Makuna and the Guiana system: Transformations of social structure

in northern lowland South America', Ethnos, 54: 1, 5 22

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00141844.1989.9981377
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.1989.9981377

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The Mak, the Makuna and

the Guiana System:
Transformations of Social Structure in Northern
Lowland South America
by Kaj Arhem

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University of Uppsala, Sweden

// is argued that the Makuna society in the Colombian Vaups is an intermediate form
between two contrasting but related types of social organization, represented by the
Carib societies of the Guiana region and the Tukano groups of the Northwest Amazon.
The paper suggests that current changes in Makuna society may, in part, be understood
in terms of the underlying structure of exchange, encoded in the asymmetric alliance
system common to all these Amerindian societies of northern lowland South America.

In the early 1970's I spent two years doing anthropological fieldwork

among the Tukano-speaking Makuna Indians of the central Vaups territory in the Colombian Amazon.1 In 1985, almost 15 years later, I returned
to Vaups for a few weeks. Though I was not able to visit the actual
community where I had previously workedit is still rather inaccessibleI
had the opportunity to talk to various people who had had intermittent
contacts with the Makuna since the time of my fieldwork. The account they
gave me of the changes taking place among the Makuna seemed to me to
bear on the more general problem of structural variation among the Indian
societies of northern Lowland South America; a problem which I have
addressed in previous works (Arhem 1981a, 1987), and which recently has
been subject to more extensive treatment by others, notably Riviere (1984)
and Hornborg (1986).
In this paper I would like to present some further comparative reflections
on this theme. Though inspired by my revisit to Vaups, they are grounded
in my earlier fieldwork in the region and my reading of published ethnographic works on northern Lowland South America in general.2 Specifically, I
shall attempt to relate the fundamental pattern of social organization of the
Eastern Tukano-speaking groups of the Northwest Amazon to that of the

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Kaj Arhem

Amerindian societies in the Guiana region (what I shall here refer to as the
Tukano and Guiana systems respectively).3 In this comparative scheme the
Makuna and the enigmatic Makforest-dwelling, non-Tukano speaking
Indians living interspersed among the dominant Tukano groups in the
Northwest Amazonwill be singled out as cases of particular interest. I
shall try to show that the changes currently taking place among the
Makuna may, in part, be understood in the comparative context and
analytical perspective outlined in this paper.
Before embarking on this comparative venture, a note of caution is in
place. This paper is essentially a reconsideration of material published
elsewhere. My ambition is analytical rather than descriptive, and my
treatment of ethnographic data hence schematic. The reader who feels he
needs more substantial documentation of the issues raised and discussed in
the paper is therefore advised to go to the sources (listed in References).
Perhaps I should also state at the outset that the analytical perspective
employed in the paper is purportedly structuralist. I am consequently more
interested in discovering the structural regularities underlying the empirical .
diversity of social forms than explaining this diversity in terms of the
generative processes and determinant factors which produce it. This does
not mean that I am uninterested in causal or generative explanations; on
the contrary, I have devoted a recent paper (Arhem 1987) to a detailed
study of individual marriage strategies in order to arrive at a generative
model of the Makuna marriage system. But here my aimand the analytical procedure I must followis different: to shed light on certain aspects of
social change among the Makuna by relating them to the pattern of sociostructural variation in northern Lowland South America in general. What
is needed is an analytical procedure which permits me to handle the
problem of structural variation in space (the empirical diversity of social
form) and time (the process of social change) within a single explanatory
framework. Structural analysis offers such a framework.4
Varieties of Social Structure: The Guiana and Tukano Systems
Riviere's recent book Individual and Society in Guiana (1984) provides a
convenient point of departure for my comparative survey. Riviere here
presents and comprehensively discusses the recent ethnography of the
indigenous societies of the Guiana region with respect to what he takes to be
their fundamental and invariant feature, namely their social structure. This
structure Riviere defines in terms of a combinatory set of features shared by
all Guiana societies: cognatic descent, a preference for settlement endogamy, a tendency to uxorilocal residence, and a prescriptive, two-line rela-

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The Mak, the Makuna and the Guiana System

tionship terminology encoding an ideal of direct marriage exchange (symmetric alliance).5

The Guiana Amerindians are predominantly Carib-speaking slash-andburn cultivators supplementing their diet with hunting, fishing and gathering. Settlements are small and impermanent, ranging in size between 15-50
individuals. Though fluid in composition, settlements generally consist of a
group of closely related kin and affines. Since unilineal descent groups are
absent, settlements take the form of a bilateral kindred. According to
Riviere, all Guiana societies share an idealized notion of the settlement as
an endogamous and undifferentiated kindred group. The preference for
settlement endogamy thus ideally becomes coterminous with kindred endogamy; kinship becomes equated with co-residence.
This ideal notion of the settlement as a self-contained and self-reproducing body of kinsfolk is however, Riviere tells us, a fiction. In actual fact,
settlements are rarely entirely endogamous. For demographic and political
reasons a considerable degree of intermarriage and movement take place
between adjacent settlements, producing loosely bounded and relatively
autonomous local groupings of settlements. Yet, the fiction of the endogamous and undifferentiated settlement is maintained by a system of "prescriptive endogamy", by which marriages are treated as if they conformed
to the ideal. In other words, the facts are made to conform to the fiction by
redrawing social boundaries and reclassifying affines as kin (ibid:72).
The general picture that emerges of Guiana society is one of an extremely
atomistic and unformalized society. There are no social groups that survive
the life time of any single individual. Riviere writes: "It is this failure to
combine individual sets of dyadic relationships into any higher and more
enduring form of organization that gives the Guiana societies their peculiar
stamp in the Lowland South American context" (ibid:97). "Society is no
more than the aggregate of individually negotiated relationships" (ibid:98).
He contends that the Guiana system represents Lowland South American
social structure in its simplest, logically most elementary form (ibid:102).
This picture of Guiana social structure contrasts almost on every score
with the pattern of social organization characterizing the Tukano Indians of
the Northwest Amazon. 6 The Tukano comprise some 10,000 individuals
(estimates vary; cf. Jackson 1983, and C. Hugh-Jones 1979) distributed,
among roughly 15 language groups belonging to the Eastern Tukano
language family. Subsisting mainly on slash-and-burn cultivation, fishing
and hunting, they live along rivers and streams in the tropical forest in the
eastern Vaups territory of Colombia and adjacent territory in Brazil.
The traditional Tukano settlement is the multi-family long-house (maloca). Though an increasingly large portion of the population today inhabit

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Kaj Arhem

nucleated villages of single-family housesas a result of more than a

century of contact with missionaries and tradersthere are parts of the
Vaups territory where Indians still live, or lived until recently, in longhouses, and where the traditional Tukano pattern of social organization
continues largely intact.7
This typically Tukano social structure is characterized by patrilineal
descent, descent and language group exogamy, virilocal residence, and
symmetric marriage alliance encoded in a two-line relationship terminology. Each language group ideally constitutes a territorially bounded and
exogamous descent group, identified with a distinct language and inhabiting a specific river system or section along a river.8 In this way, descent
group (lineal) exogamy ideally becomes coterminous with both linguistic
and territorial exogamy.9 The language group is internally sub-divided into
a hierarchically ordered set of ribs (lower-order descent groups) classified in
terms of mythical birth order as elder and younger "brothers".10
The lowest-order descent unit is the local descent group (sib-segment)
inhabiting a single longhouse. Typically consisting of a group of closely
.related and virilocally residing male agnates and their families, the longhouse is a root model of the Tukano descent system. Each longhouse, today
comprising some 3-6 families, replicates the ancestral society of a set of
brothers born by the same mythical father and originating from the same
mythical birth place, the "waking-up house" of each Tukano language
group." Descent, then, in the Northwest Amazonian context involves the
stipulated patrilineal descent from a mythical ancestor and the patrilineal
inheritance of a distinct language (as well as shared control over ritual
property, including a set of personal names recycled in alternate generations within the descent group).12 The rule of virilocal residence, finally, is
consistent with this strong emphasis on the unity and solidarity of male
agnates and the rule of descent group exogamy. It is ideologically expressed
in a preference for (ritualized) "bride capture" whereby wives, who in
terms of Tukano ideology are "strangers" and "outsiders", are abducted
from distant groups of affinables (i.e. the members of which are classified as
marriageable; cf. Riviere 1984).
An Intermediary Type: The "Wild" Mak
In important respects, then, the Tukano societies are the very opposite of
the cognatic, endogamous and uxorilocal societies of the Guiana region.
Only the structure of the relationship terminology and the symmetric
alliance system it codifies is common to the two systems. Nevertheless, the
Guiana system appears curiously familiar to the ethnographer of the North-

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The Mak, the Makuna and the Guiana System

west Amazon, for it is strikingly similar to the way the Tukano groups
describe the non-Tukano speaking Mak, inhabiting the interfluvial forests
of the Northwest Amazon. In other words, the Guiana system sounds very
much as a Tukano characterization of the Mak society.
The term Mak is generic and (probably) of Geral origin (the TupiBrazilian lingua franca introduced to the Amazon centuries ago by missionaries, traders and settlers). 13 It has multiple referents. In its most precise
senseand as used in the recent ethnographic literature on Northwest
Amazoniait refers to three linguistic groups of Indians: the Cacua (or
Bar Mak), the Jupda (Ubde or Hupdii), and the Yohop (Yhup) (Jackson 1983:149).I4 They all rely predominantly on hunting-and-gathering and
characteristically enter into various kinds of "symbiotic" relationships with
Tukano groups in which they play a subordinate role. These can be
relatively temporary relationships involving occasional exchanges of meat,
labour, or various forest products for cultivated foods and "white" trade
items. Or they can involve long-term servant-master relationships between
Mak families and a specific Tukano settlement (ibid:1489).
As used by local traders or settlers, or by the Tukano when communicating with "whites", the term Mak has a derogatory connotation. For the
former it loosely designates "wild" Indiansthose least contacted, least
clothed, who are said to have no houses, to practice no cultivation and to
lead a nomadic existence in the forest. For the latter, the term (and its
various Tukano counterparts) generally alludes to the relationship of super
and sub-ordination between the two groups (ibid: 149).
Due to their elusive existence in the forest away from the rivers, the Mak
are ethnographically relatively little known. It is not clear whether they
constitute remnants of an original population of hunters-and-gatherers of
the interfluvial forest, or have devolved from previously more complex
riverine and horticultural societies. The difficulties in accounting for the
complex ethnic situation in the Northwest Amazon is further enhanced by
the fact that various Mak groups are reported to have been assimilated
into particular Tukano groups, thus adopting the status of low-ranking
Tukano sibs (cf. Goldman 1963, Koch-Grnberg 1906, Silverwood-Cope
1972, cited in Jackson 1983:149).
Until recently, the little we knew about the Mak in Northwest Amazon
derived from the Tukano (and a few fragmentary reports by missionaries
and travellers). The Tukano describe the Mak society very much in
contrastive terms to their own: they say that the Mak lack longhouses and
have no proper clans, that they (the Mak) marry within the language
group, and that kin and affines live together in the same settlements. Mak
men are even said to "marry their sisters" (which is probably another way

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Kaj Arhem

of saying that kin and affines are not "properly" separated in terms of the
Tukano ideal of local, lineal and linguistic exogamy) Qackson 1983:150).
The incestuous character of Mak society is reiterated, in a different
cultural register, in the Tukano assertion that the Mak are "cannibals";
not only do they disregard Tukano food restrictionseating snakes, sloths,
rats, and vulturesbut they are also said to hunt and eat human beings
"simply for food" (ibid:151-2). And they are described as "naked", as
wearing no clothing or body adornment, to lack knowledge about myth and
ritual, to have no songs and dances (ibid: 153).
All in all, to the Tukano the Mak are not fully "people". They are subhuman, animal-like, and therefore treated as inferiors. Certain Tukano
groups refer to the Mak as "Jaguar children" (Giacone 1949:88, cited in
Jackson 1983:151). Consequently, the Mak are not considered potential
marriage partners. All the features that define the Tukano concept of
human society and which distinguish human beings from the beasts of the
forestdescent and language group exogamy, marriage rules and eating
restrictions, knowledge of myth and ritual, dances and songs, and the
wearing of body adornmentsare said to be lacking among the Mak. The
Mak are all that the Tukano are not and ought not to be. They provide the
Tukano with a prototypical image of the monstrous, the bestial and the subhuman.
Obviously this characterization of the Mak is exaggerated and mostly
false. The recent work by Peter Silyerwood-Cope (1972) and Howard Reid
(1979) shows that the Mak presently (and perhaps always did) subsist on
rudimentary horticulture as well as hunting, fishing and gathering of wild
forest produce.15 They lack the elaborate fishing technology of the Tukano,
do not build or use canoes, and depend on agriculture to a far less degree
than the Tukano. But they share with the Tukano the same basic cosmology, and have a system of religious beliefs, myths and ritual practices which
is closely related to that of the Tukano. According to both ethnographers
they also have patrilineal, exogamous descent groups, a two-line relationship terminology, and an explicit preference for direct exchange marriage.
At the level of social organization there are, however, some significant
differences between the Mak and the typical Tukano pattern. Mak
settlements, consisting of clusters of single-family houses or shelters, tend to
be small, impermanent and fluid in composition. Various adjacent settlements are grouped into localities of closely related and interacting settlements (which Jackson calls "circumscribed regions"). The settlements
studied by Reid (1978:2) ranged from 13 to 40 individuals. Though families
frequently alter their residence and move between adjacent settlements, the
structure of the settlement remains basically the same: a group of closely

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The Mak, the Makuna and the Guiana System

11

related kin and affines. In other words, settlements seem to be organized

around a core of coresiding affines, or sets of agnates related by marriage.
Marriages occur most frequently within or between adjacent settlements in
the locality (circumscribed region). There is thus a tendency to local
(regional) endogamy. Men of distant local groups are feared as women
hunters and sorcerers (Jackson 1983:150). Indeed, even lineal exogamy
seems not to be strictly adhered to. Frequent marriages within the descent
group are reported (Jackson 1983, C. Hugh-Jones 1979:58).
From this review of fact and fictions about the Mak we can draw two
immediate conclusions: First, the Mak actually share features of both the
Guiana and the Tukano systems of social organization. With the former
they share the tendency towards local endogamy and the emphasis of the
alliance bond in the formation of settlements and local groups; with the
latter the categorical division into patrilineal descent groups, and with both,
the prescriptive symmetric relationship system.
Secondly, there is a notable discrepancy between the Mak social reality
and the Tukano view of this reality. This discrepancy is significant. To the
Tukano, the Mak represent a negatively evaluated counterpoint model of
social reality. It constitutes a normative model in the negative sense that it
provides an image of inhuman society, what happens when the rules
governing proper, human behaviour are ignored. In this way, the Tukano
image of the Mak defines the boundaries of the Tukano social world and
thereby serves to affirm the Tukano identity (cf. Jackson 1983:162).
The Makuna Anomaly
This brings us to the Makuna, the Tukano-speaking group which I studied
between 1971-74. In the same way that the Mak evidently mediate
between the Guiana and Tukano systems, the Makuna can be said to
mediate between the Maku and the prototypical Tukano pattern of social
organization. Inhabiting the Pir-Paran area in the watershed between the
Vaups and Apaporis Rivers in the Colombian Amazon, they share with
other riverine Tukano groups the typical Tukano features of patrilineal
descent, descent group exogamy, virilocal residence and the two-line relationship terminology. The Makuna are thus divided into shallow patrilineal
sibs, hierarchically ordered into exogamous phratric groups. They inhabit
longhouses scattered along rivers and streams, each longhouse forming a
local descent group (sib-segment). Like other Tukano groups the Makuna
subsist on slash-and-burn cultivation, fishing and hunting, the staple being
bitter manioc.
But in two crucial respects the Makuna differ conspicuously from the

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Kaj Arhem

prototypical Tukano pattern. Firstly, they do not practice language group

exogamy. The Makuna language group is in fact composed of two intermarrying sets of sibs (phratric segments), each conforming to the Tukano model
of a hierarchically ordered set of sibs, related as elder and younger "brothers".16 Secondly, the descent system is not spatially articulated in the
typical Tukano manner, where sets of patrilineally related longhouses tend
to form exogamous and descent-ordered local and territorial groups.
Among the Makuna, in contrast, adjacent longhouses tend to be linked
through multiple marriages, forming alliance-ordered localities and territorial groups of intermarrying sib-segments. In other words, while the longhouse is strictly exogamous, local clusters of adjacent longhouses tend to be
highly endogamous.
These two features of the Makuna marriage system have a further
important consequence at the level of social organization. Since most
marriages take place between close affines (allies) within the local group of
adjacent longhouses, marriages rarely take the form of bride capture or
direct exchange. Local marriages are rather modelled on the principle of
generalized reciprocity: allied men are engaged in the unconditional giving
and receiving of women as wivesa form of marriage which I have termed
"gift marriage" (Arhem 1981a, 1981b, 1987). In this type of marriage,
where the productive labour of a kinswoman given away is not immediately
reciprocated by a wife received, postmarital residence is often temporarily
(occasionally permanently) uxorilocal, in stark contrast to the Tukano ideal
of virilocality.
Yet, the Makuna subscribe to the Tukano ideals of language group
exogamy and virilocal residence in the sense that they maintain that these
ideals should properly apply also to themselves. In other words, the Makuna accept the Tukano model of the social world where the exogamous
descent group is identical with a territorial and linguistic unit and where
men ideally marry women from far away and belonging to different language groups. But they also admit that they deviate from this normative
ideal. They recognize that they are different, that their social behaviour is
an anomaly in terms of the ideal Tukano pattern. And this conscious
recognition of their own anomaly, I suggest, helps us to understand their
particular relationship with the Maku.
The two featuresthe (statistical) tendencies towards linguistic and local
endogamythat set the Makuna off from most other Tukano groups in fact
bring them close to the Mak. As was noted above it is precisely the
tendency to marry people speaking the same language and to live together
with one's affines which the Tukano single out as typical for the Mak. Is it
too farfetched, then, to suggest that it is in fact this objective similarity

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The Mak, the Makuna and the Guiana System

13

between the Makuna and the Mak forms of social organization which in
part is responsible for the curious similarity between the names by which
the two groups are known? Both names, it is true, are given them and
mainly used by others, indians and non-indians. The Makuna and the
Mak themselves use sib names as auto-denominators, and in the case of
the Makuna there exists no generic name for the entire language group.
However, the terms Makuna and Mak have been used in the region for at
least two centuries and are, in fact, the terms used by Spanish-speaking
Indians themselves when communicating with non-Indian "outsiders". 17
Consequently, it is these names that have entered into the ethnographic
literature of the region. According to Martius (1867:547), the term "Macun" means "black Mac". I do not know the etymology or original
meaning of any of the terms, and Martius gives us no clue, but I offer the
tentative hypothesis that the terminological contiguity implied by the two
names in fact stands for the objective similarity in terms of social organization between the two groups.
Less speculative, and perhaps more important, is the evidence that
suggests that the Makuna recognize their closeness to the Mak. While the
Tukano in general, as we have seen, consider the Mak as marginal and
sub-human, the Makuna explicitly reject this derogatory view of the Mak.
They maintain that the Mak are people like themselves. Mak sibs are
equated with low-ranking sibs within the Makuna language group, not to
stress their sub-ordinate position but to emphazise their place within their
own social universe, alongside low-ranking sibs of other, Tukano, language
groups with whom the Makuna interact and intermarry. Indeed, during my
fieldwork I was told of various cases of Makuna men having (or having
had) Mak wives. All in all, it is as if the Makuna were aware of the
objective similarities between the two groups, and that this awareness in a
sense had brought them subjectively closer to one another.

Transformations of Social Structure: Further Reflections on a

Familiar Theme
The significance of the Mak and the Makuna in the context of a comparative analysis of Lowland South American social structure is that they allow
us to see the Guiana and the Tukano systems as variations on a theme,
transformations of a single, underlying structure of exchange encoded in the
prescriptive, two-line relationship terminology. In this perspective, the
Mak and the Makuna form intermediary varieties of social organization
linking the societies of the Guiana region to those of the Northwest Amazon

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Kaj Arhem

in a transformational set defined by the structure of direct exchange (symmetric alliance) common to them all.
In its general outline, this line of reasoning seems to be implied in the
writings of various authors (cf. for example, Riviere 1973, 1984; Overing
Kaplan 1975; Dreifus 1977; Ramos and Albert 1977). Recently the perspective has been substantially developed by Hornborg (1986) in his ambitious
survey of Lowland South American social structure. In a couple of previous
works (Arhem 1981a, 1987) I have myself argued that the Guiana and
Tukano patterns of social organization can be seen as different organizational "realizations" of logical possibilities inherent in the symmetric alliance structure. According to this argument, the two systems socially employ, or organizationally develop, different logical possibilitiesout of a
limited range of such possibilitiesoffered by the structure of exchange
common to both. The Guiana societies have chosen, as it were, to stress the
alliance bond and the unity of co-residential affines, resulting in a cognatic,
endogamous and uxorilocal system, while the Tukano have chosen to
emphasize unilineal affiliation and the unity of co-residential agnates,
resulting in a patrilineal, exogamous and virilocal system.
In short, the different societies of northern Lowland South America
represent so many varieties of the same underlying social structure. As I
have expressed it elsewhere (Arhem 1981a), they represent the set of logical
transformations defined by this structure laid out in space, projectedas it
wereonto the ethnographic map of northern Lowland South America. In
the same work I further suggested that the different organizational possibilities defined by the structure could also be (and in various cases probably
have been) realized in the same society over time; i.e. as temporal varieties
in an ongoing process of social transformation. Hornborg (1986) has adduced evidence for this type of historical trajectories of social structure from
other parts of Lowland South America. There is, in other words, inscribed
in the symmetric alliance structure a dynamic, temporarily or only apparently "frozen" in each moment of time, but potentially activated in trajectories of change defined by the limits and possibilities of the structure itself:
Here I would like to follow this line of reasoning a bit further and suggest
that the different logical possibilities offered by the symmetric exchange
structure may be realized, not only in different societies, or in the same
society over time, but in the same society at the same time as parallel or
alternative social models, consciously elaborated and operative in particular
social contexts.18 In other words, I am saying that some (if not all) of the
societies examined here are aware of the alternative possibilities offered by
their basic structure, and that they actively employ these alternative models
in the reproduction of their own society.

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Consider, for example, the case of the Piaroa. Their social organization
closely follows the stereotypical Guiana pattern with cognatic and ideally
endogamous settlements and no permanent groups of any kind beyond the
personal kindred. Yet we are told by their ethnographer (Overing Kaplan
1975, 1981) that the Piaroa have a notion of patrifileal clans and moieties
which is operative in cosmogonic myths and eschatological beliefs. These
clans and moieties are associated with the mythical birth place of the Piaroa
as a people, and the mortuary homeland to which all Piaroa are believed to
return after death. Clans and moieties among the Piaroa exist, as it were,
only before birth and after death in a sort of spiritual, super-human
"society" where the members of each clan are supposed to live together in a
single settlement, separated from all other clans, from affines, animals and
all other beings separated from self (Overing Kaplan 1981:162). This
"society of spirits" is absolutely static, timeless and sterile. Human society
only emerged, according to Piaroa myths, when clans and moieties intermingled and intermarried, and their social and spatial distinctiveness became blurred and ultimately abolished (ibid. 1975:205).
The Piaroa concept of clans and moieties are thus exclusively cosmological categories. They play no organizational role in Piaroa social behaviour.
Indeed, the society of spirits is the very opposite to the society of human
beings; instead of spatially demarcated clans and moieties, we find in reality
endogamous, cognatic settlements of co-resident kin and affines. While the
integration and intermingling of kin and affines are associated with human
life and social reproduction, differentiation and separation into clans and
moieties are associated with death and infertility.
The notion of the mortuary homeland among the Piaroa, then, plays a
role similar to the image of the Mak among the Tukano. To the Tukano,
the Makjust like the Piaroa notion of their mortuary homelandarticulate the boundaries of the social universe. By providing negative social
models, contrasted to actual social reality, both imagesone associated
with the super-human domain of spirits and the afterlife, the other with the
sub-human margins of the inhabited worldserve to affirm the normative
order of the societies which produce them.
The theoretical point of interest here is that both the Piaroa notion of the
mortuary homeland and the Tukano view of the Mak in fact can be seen as
alternative representations, in two different social contexts, of the same
underlying social structure. They are conscious elaborations, at the level of
ideology, of logical possibilites encoded in the relationship system of the two
societies. It is as if the Piaroa and the Tukano were aware of the transformational set of logical possibilities defined by their symmetric alliance structure. By choosing one possibility as the normative model, each society has

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Kaj Arhem

relegated its logical complement to the realm of ideology and turned it into
a highly negatively charged counterpoint model, a model of non-human
societyindeed, of anti-society. In this way, the counterpoint models serve
to demonstratemuch like myths in structuralist thinkingthe practical
impossibility of alternative social models and the necessity of the existing
normative order. By presenting the other organizational possibilities offered
by the symmetric alliance structure as inhuman, the Piaroa and the Tukano
negate them and thereby justify the present social order.
In this light the Makuna anomaly takes on added significance. Among
the Makuna the patrilineal descent ideology and the rule of exogamy are
still categorically effective. The Tukano system is recognized as the normative ideal. Yet, the Guiana system is vaguely present in the actual working
of the Makuna marriage system. Consistent with the pronounced dichotomy between categorical ideal and social practice, which sets the Makuna
apart from other Tukano groups and brings them closer to the Mak, they
do not share the derogatory view of the Mak held by other Tukano groups.
In other words, the consciously articulated relationship between normative
social order and its negatively charged counterpoint model, which we
discovered among the Guianese Piaroa and the Tukano in general, is
conspicuously lacking among the Makuna. And, in view of the intermediary
position occupied by the Makuna in the socio-structural space bounded by
the Guiana system at one extreme and the Tukano system at the other, this
is only to be expected. In the absence of a negative counterpoint model,
there is among the Makuna no ideological barrier to change along the
trajectories of social transformation offered by the symmetric alliance system itself.
Theoretical Implications and Empirical Relevance
Stretching this line of reasoning to its limit, one could say that the Tukano
image of the Mak is there to inhibit the Tukano system from changing into
a Guianese one, just as the mortuary homeland of the Piaroa prevents them,
as it were, from "becoming Tukano". The counterpoint images are ideologically elaborated precisely because there exists a potentiality for this type
of reversible transformations to take place, for the trajectory of logical
possibilities to materialize into social reality. And since the potentiality for
change exists, inscribed as it is in the very structure of exchange, the
ideological barrier to change implied by the counterpoint image is also
liable to disappear when the circumstances so demand, as has happened in
the case of the Makuna.
These somewhat speculative reflections have a concrete bearing on the

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The Mak, the Makuna and the Guiana System

17

process of change currently taking place among the Makuna. The fragmentary information available on the situation of the present-day Makuna
strongly suggest that their society is in the process of transforming into a
more Guiana-like system along the lines sketched above. Settlements are
changing from the traditional Tukano multi-family longhouse based on a
local descent group, to larger, nucleated villages of single-family houses
related by ties of agnatic kinship as well as close affinity. In other words, the
new villages are structured, not on the pattern of the old, exogamous
longhouses, but on the highly endogamous local groups of intermarrying
longhouses which I discerned among the Makuna 15 years ago (Arhem
1981a). From "the inside", these villages are differentiated into kin and
affines both in terms of relationship terminology and unilineal descent
categories (just like the Mak settlement), but from "the outside" each has
the appearance of a kindred group similar to the prototypical Guiana (and
Mak) settlement.
This process of village formation is apparently not (yet) taking place on
the same scale among the other Tukano groups in the Pira-Paran area.
The traditional settlement pattern centred on the longhouse still lives on
(1985) among the immediate neighbours of the Makunathe Barasana, the
Taiwano, the Tatuyu and the Bar. And the only non-Makuna village I
know of in the area is structured around a local (Barasana) descent group;
in fact, its inhabitants constitute the dispersed members of a previous
longhouse.19 In other words, an explanation of the changing settlement
pattern among the Makuna cannot be phrased solely in terms of factors
external to the Makuna society since these are shared by the neighbouring
groups. An explanation must rather be sought in the dialectic between
external pressures and a dynamic internal to the Makuna society itself.
In the case of the Makuna we can trace this dialectic back at least to the
turn of the century when a series of consequential historical events laid the
foundation for the particular Makuna social system as we know it today.
Intense inter-group hostilities and raiding as a result of the booming rubber
trade at the time caused considerable population movements in this part of
the Northwest Amazon. It seems that, among the Tukano groups of the
Pir-Paran area, the Makuna were particularly affected due to their
location at the southern margin of the area (near the white rubber camps
along the Apaporis River). Several Makuna sibs were displaced and scattered. The neighbouring territories were occupied either by phratrically
related sibs, with whom one competed for marriageable women, or affinally
related groups, with whom one exchanged women on a more or less
peaceful basis. The displaced Makuna sibs chose to settle among the latter,
thus exploiting alliance bonds rather than (putative) descent bonds (cf.

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18

Kaj Arhem

Arhem 1981a). New social and territorial groupings thus emerged which
differed considerably from the idealized, descent-based structure. However,
the Makuna social system apparently easily accommodated the changes. It
contained in itself the seeds of change. It was as if the external pressures set
the Makuna social system in motion along a trajectory of change already
present in the system as a latent potentiality. In this light, the current
changesactivated by the recent cocain boom and the intensified missionary activities in the arearepresent but another step along the same
trajectory. It crystallizes and solidifies a trend present in Makuna society
for decades, and certainly visible at the time of my fieldwork in the early
1970s.
With the imminent disappearance of the longhousethe very root model
of the Tukano descent structurethere is little left of the typically Tukano
features of the Makuna social system. Perhaps we are beginning to discern
among the Makuna the outlines of a "post-Tukano" society where the
longhouse and, ultimately, the notion of descent are relegated, as among the
Piaroa, to the realm of mythic thought and eschatological beliefs?20
It may be appropriate thus to end a rather speculative paper: with an
imaginary scenery of a possible future Makuna reality. Certainly the paper
has raisedand left unansweredother, grander, questions, such as why
the same structure of exchange appears in different cultural forms among
the various groups of northern Lowland South America, and why, and
under what circumstances, one form transforms into another. If I have not
attempted to answer these questions here it is partly because I don't have
the data required to do so, but also because they seem to me to belong to a
quite different line of enquity, and hence to deserve separate treatment.
They demand answers phrased in terms of a different explanatory framework than that presented here; explanations phrased in terms of cause-andeffects, and generative models based on the detailed analysis of ecological
variation and historical processes.21
What I have attempted in this paper is rather to develop an analytical
perspective which allows us to handle the problems of social change and
socio-structural variation within a single explanatory framework. In this
vein I have tried to show that the Guiana and Tukano systems are related
as logical variants of a single structure (or transformational set), and that
the different logical possibilities implied by this transformational set are
ideologically recognized and evaluated by (some of) the societies examined.
Finally, I have argued that the structural change currently taking place
among the Makuna can be seen as a temporal translation of this transformational set, a translation into social process of the set of logical possibilities contained in the structure of symmetric exchange shared by the various

The Mak, the Makuna and the Guiana System

19

societies of northern Lowland South America. If I have succeeded in

convincing the reader that the theoretical study of social structure is
relevant for the empirical understanding of social change, then my aim is
achieved. In a limited but significant sense I think we are justified in saying
that the historical destiny of the Tukano is inscribed in their social structure.

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NOTES
1. My fieldwork was carried out in the Pir-Paran area of the Colombian Vaups territory
between 1971 and 1974. Published results, relevant to the theme of this paper, are listed in
the references below. I would like to acknowledge the constructive comments on an earlier
draft of this paper by T. Gerholm, D. Heinen, A. Hornborg, and P. Riviere.
2. See list of references.
3. I use the term Tukano here to refer to the totality of the Eastern Tukano-speaking groups.
These groups share a similar culture and pattern of social organization (sec below).
4. Let it also be said that my concern with the formal properties of the social systems
examined here is partly due to a lack of the precise data required for constructing
generative models of structural variation and change. Yet I think that a comparative,
structural analysis such as the one attempted here needs no justification. After all,
structural and causal explanations are complementary and equally necessary in the
development of anthropological theory.
5. The summary account of the Guiana system which follows is based entirely on Riviere
(1984). An insightful review of the book is offered by Hornborg (1987). Since the paper was
written, another useful review of the Guiana societies has appeared in printthe collection
of papers edited by Butt Colson and Heinen (1983-84).
6. In the description of the Tukano system I rely on my own field work as well as the writings
of, principally, Goldman (1963), C. Hugh-Jones (1979), S. Hugh-Jones (1979), Jackson
(1983) and Reichel-Dolmatoff (1968). Let it be stressed again that I use the term Tukano
here to refer to the totality of Eastern Tukano-speaking groups and not to the specific
exogamous group, known by the same term, which constitutes one of the 15 or so language
groups making up this totality.
7. The Pir-Panan area where I carried out fieldwork is such an area. However, along the
Vaups River, and particularly near the large settlement of Mit, the regional capital,
indigenous life has changed dramatically and the traditional Tukano pattern of social
organization is largely shattered. Here settlements invariably take the form of nucleated
villages of varying social composition, determined by missionary and administrative
dictates rather than endogenous developments.
8. I have borrowed the term language group from Jackson (1983). C. Hugh-Jones (1979) uses
the concept of Exogamous Group for the same unit of Tukano social structure.
9. It should perhaps be pointed out that the Cubeo (and the Makuna, which will become
apparent in the course of the paper) deviate from this ideal pattern. The Cubeo constitute a
language group divided into three exogamous phratries which intermarry among themselves (Goldman 1963).
10. The hierarchical structure of the exogamous group is furthermore articulated in terms of an
idealized set of "specialist roles" so that sibs are arranged in order of seniority, from the
first-born to the last-born, in a series of five "specialist roles": chiefs, chanters, warriors,

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20

Kaj Arhem

shamans, and servants. To each of these categories corresponds a set of personal names
recycled among its members in alternating generations.
11. The notion of "people waking-up house" (masa yuhiri wi in both Barasana and Makuna
languages) denotes the mythical birth place of an exogamous descent group as well as the
ancestral home to which the souls of its members return after death.
12. Cf. C. Hugh-Jones (1979:31) and note 10 above.
13. Alternatively it has been suggested that the term Mak might be of Arrawakan origin
(Ortiz 1986).
14. The information on the Mak presented here derives essentially from Jackson (1976, 1983).
Jackson's accounts of the Mak are largely based on material published by others, and
exhaustive bibliographies on Mak ethnography are given in her works.
15. At the time of writing I did not have access to these works, but they are both summarized
in Jackson (1976, 1983), and I have had the opportunity to discuss some of the issues raised
here personally with Howard Reid.
16. As noted above (note 9), this also applies to the Tukano Cubeo. However, the Cubeo have
all the other typical Tukano features of social organization, and differ sharply from the
Makuna in their strong emphasis on territorial exogamy.
17. The term Mucunas appears as a name of a group of Indians living on the Apaporis River
(most probably the present-day Makuna) in the late 18th century. At the same time the
Mak of the Vaups Region are mentioned for the first time in the chronicles of Sampaio
(1775) and Ferreira (1878); cf. S. Hugh-Jones 1981:31, 43).
18. In the context of general theoretical anthropology this idea of multiple or alternative,
coexisting models is, of course, not new at all; cf. for example, Leach (1954) and Salzman
(1978). An example immediately relevant to the present ethnographical context is Overing
Kaplan's (1973) examination of alternative models of marriage exchange among the
Piaroa.
19. As mentioned earlier, in other parts of Vaups, nucleated villages predominate. Their
composition is highly variable and tends to be predicated on missionary influences and the
migrant labour pattern evolving in the most acculturated parts of Vaups. It has, for
example, been a pronounced policy on the part of the Catholic mission to mix various
language groups together in missionary settlements. Nevertheless, nucleated settlements in
Vaups tend in general to follow the Tukano pattern of agnatic/patrilateral rather than
uterine of affinal extensions (Chernela 1985, but cf. Jackson (1983:69).
20. It may be relevant in this context to point out that in Mak mythology the founding fathers
of the Mak sibs inhabit huge ancestral longhouses to which the souls of the living
generations of people return after death (just as among the Tukano and the Piaroa) (Reid
1978:10). Among the living Mak, though, there are no longhouses. The world of the dead
constitute an inversion of the world of the living.
21. In a subsequent paper I hope to come back to these questions. At the present moment
(1988) I am carrying out renewed field research among the Makuna, focussing precisely on
the theme of cultural change.

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