The Bará, or Fish People, of the Northwest Amazon form part of an
unusual network of intermarrying local communities scattered along the
rivers of this region. Each community belongs to one of sixteen
different groups that speak sixteen different languages, and marriages
must take place between people not only from different communities but
with different primary languages. In a network of this sort, which
defies the usual label of 'tribe', social identity assumes a distinct
and unusual configuration. In this book, Jean Jackson's incisive
discussions of Bará marriage, kinship, spatial organization, and other
features of the social and geographic landscape show how Tukanoans (as
participants in the network are collectively known) conceptualize and
tie together their universe of widely scattered communities, and how an
individual's identity emerges in terms of relations with others. As
theoretically challenging as it is unique, the Tukanoan system bears on
a wide range of issues of current anthropological concern, such as how
to analyze open-ended regional systems in small-scale societies, ideal
versus actual patterns of behaviour, identity as both structure and
action, and indigenous use of multiple, even conflicting, models of
social structure. Professor Jackson's thoughtful discussions also extend
to broader social scientific issues concerning the relation of language
to culture, the presence or absence of individualism in pre-state
societies, the nature of ethnic boundaries, the interplay between
observation of behaviour and its interpretation (on the part of both
native and anthropologist), and the achievement of flexibility and
self-interested goals while applying seemingly rigid social structural
principles.
