The Growth of Family Trees: Understanding Huaorani Perceptions of the Forest

Abstract

This article discusses how a group of Amazonian people, the Huaorani, relate their perceptions of vegetal growth to their understanding of social relations. They recognize two different processes of growth and maturation. These are used to classify plant species and categorize social principles, as well as to understand why their society goes through cycles of peace and expansion followed by times of warfare anid demographlic collapse. The article establishes ethnographically that social properties are derived from, and are directly shaped by, the experience of life processes. It thus challeniges the dualistic view of the relationship between nature and society which takes 'nature' as a source of symbolic representations for describing social life.

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