Savage values: Conservation and personhood in southern Suriname

The idea of indigenous peoples of Amazonia living in harmony with their environment may be a cliché, with origins in romantic portrayals of native Americans such as those of Hudson, Rousseau or Chateaubriand, but recent studies in anthropology and ecology have confirmed that indigenous Amazonian ways of life are materially ‘sustainable’, given the right circumstances (Shepard et al. 2012), although they are not necessarily maintained on the basis of ideologies of sustainability. Nor are they based on ideas of harmony or equilibrium; indeed, students of Amerindian thought have found it characterized on the contrary by a tendency towards ‘perpetual disequilibrium’ (Lévi-Strauss 1991: 316). Change, but also social reproduction, may be regarded as being due to the fact that the elements of the whole are in disequilibrium, even when their immediate relationships towards each other appear stable. In this chapter I shall try to explore the implications of these features of native Amazonian society and ecology for ideas about human-wildlife conflict. I shall begin with some reflections about the distinction between nature and culture heavily implicit in the ‘human- wildlife’ relationship. I shall then consider what it means to be ‘human’ and to be ‘animal’ in native Amazonian societies. This will bring me to the specific case of the Trio, who have become involved first with Christianity and then with conservation organizations. I shall argue that the notion of human-wildlife conflict is implicit in the conservation agenda, but depends on a worldview that derives from Christianity. Yet the Trio’s engagement with conservation and the human-wildlife conflict paradigm is based on their own agenda, not one prescribed by outsiders.