Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
magazines, caxiri, arrows, women, and so forth. These commodities play for stakes
that are non-material and cannot easily be quantified; the conversion of their symbolic
value into monetary units creates conflicts and tensions, especially between local
merchants and the Indigenous Peoples.
Bang-Bang's inhabitants are shocked that the natives seem content with producing
what is strictly necessary for their own consumption. They constantly evoke images
of Indian indolence and incapacity to work hard. As the owner of a local store told
me in March 1990:
The Kayabi don't want to become my partners.... They'd raise the cattle and
I'd sell the meat, we could all become millionaires! But they say there's a lot
of game on their land, that hunting and fishing is enough. I know they're just
too lazy to do anything else besides sleeping in hammocks and messing around
with their women all day.
Systematic exploitation characterizes the relationship between most merchants
and Indigenous Peoples in Bang-Bang. Goods (such as sugar, coffee, soap, fishing
equipment, clothing items) are always overpriced. No matter how much merchandise
the Juruna, Kayabi and Suyá bring into the stores to be exchanged, a 30 percent
monthly inflation rate during the 1980s plus interest sent debts skyrocketing. Here
is Ipó Kayabi:
I had to give almost half the banana I planted this year to pay my debts at
Tonhão's. That is, to pay for 3 kilos of salt, 2 kilos of sugar, a pair of boots,
10 medium-size fishing hooks, and 4 large batteries for my flashlight which I
bought 4 months ago, I had to give him 240 dozen bananas. He had originally
asked for 30 dozens, but he said the inflation was very high so I had to pay him
more. [May 1983]
The way in which mathematics is generally understood leads to the equivalence
between mathematics and exact calculations - that is, basically they seem to amount
to the same thing. In this respect, mathematics became an important structuring
resource for the rise of the industrial civilization. As several scholars have pointed
out, the modern Western form of capitalism is dependent on science, especially on
mathematics.
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This is, however, a dialectical process, since “the development of
these sciences and of the technology resting upon them now receives important
stimulus from these capitalistic interests in its practical economic applications”
(Weber 1983:28). Modern mathematics has therefore developed a strong tie to the
capitalistic enterprise, which positions the discipline as the promoter of a certain
model of power through knowledge (D'Ambrosio 1990:24).
In central Brazil, the capitalist need for a calculable legal system has equated
calculation with “rational” thinking, and the progress of such “rationality,” based
on the pursuit of forever renewed profit, has shaped mathematical concepts
(D'Ambrosio 1990:28, Lave 1988:125, Weber 1983:28). Thus the social, economic,
and political meanings of school-taught mathematics determine that to buy, borrow,
