• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2061 0

180; natural origins of mounds, 182–85). Their discussion has been dismissed as “improbably interpreted” (Myers et al. 1992:87). Roughly similar conclusions appear in Langstroth 1996.

Snow’s critiques: Interviews, Snow.

Pristine myth: Denevan 1992a, 1996b.

Wilderness Act: P.L. 88–577, 3 Sept. 1964 (“untrammeled,” section 2c); Callicott 1998:349–50 (act embodies “the conventional understanding of wilderness”).

Obligation to restore natural state: Cronon 1995a:36.

Fish weirs: Erickson 2000a.

Future options for Beni: Interviews, Erickson, Balée, CIDDEBENI. By leasing their land to loggers and miners, the Kayapó in the southeast Amazon basin demonstrated how Indians can disappoint environmentalists (Epstein 1993; the article is reproduced and discussed in Slater 1995:121–24). Some environmentalists propose tucking the eastern Beni into a nearby UNESCO biopre-serve, one of the 350 such preserves the agency sponsors worldwide.

Devil tree: Interviews and email, Balée. I found no published work on this specific form of obligate mutualism, but see, generally, Huxley and Cutler eds. 1991.

Ibibate and pottery: Interviews, Balée, Erickson; Erickson and Balée 2005; Balée 2000; Erickson 1995; Langstroth 1996.

Holmberg’s view of Sirionó: Holmberg 1969:17 (“brand,” “culturally backward”), 37 (“sleepless night”), 38–39 (clothing), 110 (lack of musical instruments), 116 (“universe,” “uncrystallized”), 121 (count to three), 261 (“quintessence,” “raw state”). After Holmberg’s death, Lauriston Sharp introduced Nomads as a study of “lowly but instructive” “survivors” who “retained a variety of man’s earliest culture.” The book, he said, “discovered, described, and thus introduced into history a new and in many respects extraordinary Paleolithic experience” (Sharp 1969: xii–xiii). Nomads was a widely used undergraduate text for decades (Erickson, pers. comm.).

Holmberg’s work and career: Interviews, Henry Dobyns; Doughty 1987; Stearman 1987 (account of his blind walk, Chap. 4).

Lack of study of Beni and Langstroth: Interviews, Erickson, Langstroth; Langstroth 1996.

Sirionó epidemics: The chronology is uncertain. Holmberg (1969:12) describes smallpox and influenza epidemics that forced the “decimated” Sirionó into mission life in 1927. Citing other sources, Swedish anthropologist Stig Rydén, who visited the Sirionó briefly ten years after Holmberg, reports epidemics in 1920 and 1925, which he interprets as episodes in a single big flu epidemic (Rydén 1941:25). But such heavy casualties are less likely from a single source.

Sirionó population: Holmberg 1969:12 (fewer than 150 during his fieldwork). Rydén (1941:21) estimated 6,000–10,000 in the late 1920s, presumably a pre-epidemic count. Today there are 600–2,000 (Balée 1999; Townsend 1996:22). Stearman (1986:8) estimated 3,000–6,000.

Stearman returns, bottleneck, abuse by army and ranchers, Holmberg’s failure to grasp: Stearman 1984; Stearman 1987; author’s interviews, Balée, Erickson, Langstroth. Holmberg (1969:8–9) noted the incidence of clubfoot and ear marks, but made little of it.

Migration of Sirionó: Interviews, Balée; Barry 1977; Priest 1980; Pärssinen 2003. A Spanish account from 1636 suggests that they had arrived only a few decades before (Métraux 1942:97), but this is not widely accepted.

First Beni research and Denevan thesis: Nordenskiöld 1979a; Denevan 1966.

Bauré culture and Erickson’s perspective: Interviews, Erickson; Erickson 1995, 2000b, 2005; Anon. 1743.

Las Casas ethnography: Casas 1992a; Wagner 1967:287–89 (publication history).

“lyve in that goulden”: Arber ed. 1885:71 (letter, Martire, P., to Charles V, 30 Sept. 1516).

“Indian wisdom”: “[W]e cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom” (Thoreau 1906 [vol. 5]:131).

Crying Indian campaign: Krech 1999:14–16.

Indians without