Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
I know you want me to use the minus sign here instead of the plus sign, but
I don't understand why. Does giving away always mean minus for you guys?
[Wenhoron Suyá, March 1982]
The first problem we dealt with was:
I caught 10 fish last night and gave 3 of them to my brother. How many fish
do I have now?
When capitalists decide which operation to use, the fact of having given the fish
away determines, according to our utilitarian and “rational” thinking, that we will be
subtracting 3 from 10; the supposedly correct and logical answer is 7. The answer at
which Tarinu Juruna arrived, however, was different: “I ended up with 13 fish,” he
wrote, and explained his reasoning:
I ended up with 13 fish since, whenever I give my brother anything, he pays
me twice as much back. Therefore, 3 + 3 = 6 [what his brother would pay him
back]; 10 + 6 = 16; and 16 - 3 = 13 [the total amount of fish minus the 3 that
were originally given away].
Robtökti Suyá also came up with “13” as an answer to the same arithmetical dilemma
that he had calculated in a slightly different way:
I gave 3 fish to my brother, so that is 10 + 3 = 13.
When I argued that having given the fish away meant that he would have less fish
than before, Robtokti replied:
When the Suyá give something to somebody, it doesn't mean we are going to
have less of it. When I give my brother fish, he always pays me back. So if I
have 10, and give him 3, he will give me more fish when he goes fishing. So
that is 10 + 3, and not 10 - 3.
The explanations provided by the Juruna, Kayabi, and Suyá to such divergent
solutions gradually made it clear that it was not a question of “cognitive incapacity,”
the explanation commonly evoked by some mathematics teachers and government
officials on Indigenous lands, but rather that principles of reciprocity were structuring
the arithmetical reasoning.
“Giving” fish to one's kin does not mean being deprived of such goods, since the
recipient is necessarily obliged to reciprocate. The specified ways through which
the gifts will be returned, however, depend on previous debts, kinship relations,
personal emotions, and other symbolic, interpersonal, and economic associations
between the giver and the recipient. Such associations provide structuring resources
for the arithmetical strategies that are performed, and the proportional articulation
of such resources account for the variety of responses to a single “problem.” Let us
look at how similar structuring resources were differently articulated by two Juruna
teenagers when solving the same dilemma (cited in Ferreira 1994b, 1997):
