In the Company of Humans

Abstract

This chapter seeks to make a preliminary assessment of the political effects of cattle-raising among an Amerindian population in Northern Amazonia. At first sight, the results of cattle-raising can be detected mainly in hired labour – an unusual practice among an ethnographically famously egalitarian Guianese society. It could easily be said this is a predictable result of a market economy. Here, however, I suggest that this is mainly due to the fact that the commodity in question is an animal. In this vein, the process of hierarchisation in social relationships is modelled by inter-species relationships.