Some anthropologists study political ecology, others are interested in the psychodynamics of societies, but few had combined the two. That is, until UCLA anthropology professor Allen Johnson headed to the Peruvian Amazon more than 20 years ago to document how the primitive Matsigenka Indians lived, worked and interacted with their rain-forest environment.
What he first discovered was a society where no one worked for wages, and cash was barely recognized. With primitive technology, small groups of interdependent family members lived off the land, staying in one area only as long as natural resources remained. It worked very well. "They meet all of their basic needs from nature while doing little damage to the environment," says Johnson. In identifying patterns of behavior, Johnson relied on a time-allocation method he pioneered, called "spot checks." The technique, which has since become popular among anthropologists, involves randomly dropping in on people and recording their activities at that moment. Once thousands of these observations have been made, the researcher can then develop a detailed map of the activities people perform at different times of the day or at various times of the year, and how behavior differs by gender, age or other variables.
But while researching the Matsigenkas, Johnson, who is currently writing a book on the society, began to feel his political-ecological characterizations were failing to tell the whole story. Just as fascinating as how the Matsigenkas made their living, he found, was how they experienced life, how they mentally processed the world they inhabited.
Johnson began to document not only how much time the Matsigenkas spent producing food or how long it took to weave the cotton to make their clothes, but also how the Matsigenkas' folktales and dreams offered insight into the tribe's concerns and fears. It was an extension, rather than an about-face, of his research techniques. "My concept of needs has expanded," he says. "I used to think of them in terms of comfort, health, nutrition, defense. I've added to that people's need for connection, along with their hidden motives and conflicts. What I'm trying to do is link the necessities of life and the kind of discipline a person needs to live alone with the characteristic anxieties and how they are managed."
For clues, Johnson explored how the Matsigenka children are raised to possess the unique tools needed to be adaptive in that society. In general, Johnson explains, so-cieties that face frequent warfare seek to produce males who will excel as warriors. But in the Amazon society, with a diffuse population and little threat of war, the emphasis is instead on controlling aggression. Indeed, Matsigenka folklore is replete with the unpleasant consequences of anger.
"I'm interested in meaning, and you can't determine that just by watching what people do," says Johnson. "You have to ask them and look at their texts." Since the population was illiterate, that meant learning about the Matsigenka folktales and dreams, looking at overall themes.
The stories invariably describe people whose strong desires lead to frustration followed by anger, ultimately resulting in disaster — someone gets killed or is turned into a demon or a monkey. "When you see such a pattern, you have to ask why people are choosing to listen to these stories," he says. "They must be mapping something about their interior lives.
"They live with relatively low stress and have a wonderful family life with lots of laughter, singing, hugging," says Johnson. But by expanding his research focus, Johnson has also tapped into the darker side of life in the Peruvian Amazon, the terror with which primitive peoples confront a world full of evil spirits. As Johnson notes, "That's something that could be shown only through this psychoanalytic approach, in which I'm getting beyond the surface."
— D. G. |