Riding a Wave:

Embodied Skills and Colonial History

on the Amazon Floodplain

Mark Harris
University of St Andrews, UK

abstract This article considers the taskscape of fisherpeople who live on the
Amazon floodplain. It builds on discussions of skills which are limited by their focus
on a small number of activities, weak contextualisation in relations of power and
history and homogenisation of practice. I argue that skills should be differentiated
and historicised and understood as composite and improvised abilities made up of
various capacities. The way in which skills are reinvented by each generation depends
on the particular circumstances they confront. This improvisational ability has its
genesis in the way Amerindians and poor colonists adapted to the colonial economy.
The present of these floodplain dwellers can be compared to a wave that carries
forward the history of past actions and embodies their potential.

keywords Skills, embodiment, history, taskscape, practice, Brazil

T
he practical aspects of social life have been shown to be significant in
kinship, gender, religion, the economy and politics. Comparatively
less attention has been devoted to the actual skills, body techniques
and habitual practices themselves; how they are learned and performed and
their individual histories.1 What can be gained by focusing on the practi-
cal itself? By analysing my ethnographic material from a location where a
range of practical skills is at a premium for survival in terms of this focus
on practice, I want to highlight the complex corporeality and historicity
of practice. My ethnographic context is the riverine communities who live
on the floodplain of the Amazon River, where the land is subject to annual
inundation. Without coordinating labour and activities with the seasonal
variations of river height and natural resource availability, there would be a
chaotic melange of conflicting demands. Following Ingold (2000:197), the

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198 mar k har r i s

varied practical aspects of work and their temporality can be referred to by

the neologism taskscape.
Ingold develops the notion of taskscape to indicate the way in which
activities come together to form particular patterns. These patterns are the
effect of the relationship between different tasks and give a rhythm to social
life. The taskscape is thus composed from a multitude of activities; and will
change depending on the work that people do. At the same time Ingold
distinguishes taskscape from landscape. The landscape is the accumulated
imprint of the taskscape on environment; it is the ‘taskscape made visible’
(2000:204) and is also varied in quality. The taskscape is a useful term here
because it is flexible, able to accommodate diverse activities and is sensitive
to historical shaping. But in the current example, the taskscape does not leave
its superficial marks on the landscape because they are literally removed by
the flood each year. Either new soils are deposited or chunks of land are re-
moved by the flow of water (Sternberg 1998). The landscape cannot embody
the sedimented activity of those who live from it, since there is little or no
continuity from one season to the next. There is on the Amazon floodplain
quite a different relationship between landscape and taskscape.
One characteristic of this relation is an orientation to the present (Harris
1999; Lima & Alencar 2001). The appearance of land following the lowering
of the water heralds a new beginning each year. Writing about the upper
Amazon, Lima and Alencar refer to life continually restarting, and ‘to be a
floodplain dweller means to live in the present’ (2001:44). This is coupled
with high social mobility amongst ribeirinhos (river dwellers), either in search
of a better life or temporary adjustments such as rebuilding a house in a more
suitable location. The way of life and the environmental characteristics privi-
lege the here and now. I would like to suggest that traces of past actions,
instead of being inscribed on the landscape, remain in this whirling force of
present activity. In turn this produces the improvisational and resilient quali-
ties which many researchers have noted for Amazonian riverine dwellers
(caboclos, or ribeirinhos; e.g. Smith et al. 1995; Moran 1974).2 This taskscape
can be compared to a wave embodying the past.
This present orientation sits alongside another characteristic in the regi-
onal literature on Brazilian Amazonian ribeirinhos and it is one that I want
to challenge. This relates to the origins of the skills and practical knowledge
used by ribeirinhos. Parker, a prominent scholar of the region, writes:

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most importantly... caboclos were the inheritors of a rich realm of knowledge

about the physical environments of Amazonia (especially the várzea [floodplain])
that was wholly Indian in origin. Caboclo subsistence strategies, technologies,
resource perceptions, and resource management techniques are ample evidence of
this inheritance. For almost 200 years, caboclo culture in Amazonia has remained
remarkably faithful to the general features of early caboclo society [formed in late
18th century] (Parker 1987:255).

Parker’s characterisation of ribeirinho life is not unusual (e.g. Moran 1974;

Wagley 1976). I disagree with this characteristic, however. Not because it is
necessarily factually wrong, but because of its implication that knowledge
is a thing that can be inherited and isolated from practice and context, and
because of its identification of knowledge with a cultural or ethnic heritage.
This article offers an alternative account of the relationship between history
and practical knowledge in the Amazon basin. Here I articulate how skills in
this Amazon context are not unproblematic hand-downs of previous gene-
rations learnt in a domestic environment, but are the practical, sometimes
hybrid, expressions of struggle to constitute oneself in time.
My understanding of skill is of the adjusting of movements between
person, technology and material (Ingold 2000:289–93). A skill resides in
the act itself (as opposed to being an instrument in a toolbox), and emerges
in the coordination of bodily movements. My discussion builds on analyses
of skill which have tended (1) to have a weak contextualisation of practical
knowledge in relations of power and a historical process (e.g. Ingold 2000);3
(2) to homogenise and essentialise the local character of skills (e.g. Bourdieu
1990); and (3) to deal with one skill rather than a range of skills (e.g. Pálsson
1994). My argument is that it is possible to maintain a notion of skill as a
form of intelligent action while still recognising that different skills employ
various technologies, have different histories and are used in different envi-
ronments. We may move continuously from one place to another, but the
kinds of relations we have, the type of environment we inhabit and the tools
we use produce a shift in the quality of our experience. This shift is less a
displacement and more a reorganisation of perception and skill. Here I am
working from Chaitlin and Lave’s argument that ‘there is no such thing as
learning sui generis, but only changing participation in the culturally design-
ed settings of everyday life’ (1996:6). Recognising these shifts connects the
differentiation of skills to age and gender differences. This makes way for a
temporal dimension to the understanding of skills, and their situation within
wider economic processes and technological development.

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Letting Go
My interest in practical knowledge grew out of my initiation as a parti-
cipant into the field of skilled practitioners amongst ribeirinhos in the state
of Pará, Northern Brazil. The best way of talking about this initiation is to
recount two anecdotes from my fieldwork.
The event took place in 1992, a few days into my first fieldwork in Parú,
an area of the floodplain in the Lower Amazon (its residents call themselves
Parúaros, which expresses a geographic association).4 It was about midday
and the sun pounded ferociously. It was so hot that I decided to go down to
the river to bathe. Reaching the embankment, I saw the agitations of a group
of about five boys in the water. They saw me approaching and immediately
rushed towards me. They spoke with such excitement I had no idea what
they said. One grabbed my hand and asked if I could swim. I said I could
and was led to the water. ‘What about stingrays?’ I asked. And they showed
me how to avoid standing on a stingray. You either had to punch a stick in
front of you, as you walked in the water, or shuffle your feet along the bed
of the river. In any case, one added, the bed here was too hard for stingrays
to settle down on. One boy asked if I wanted to join in the game they had
been playing. It was a game of tag, where you had to swim under the water
and avoid being caught by the ‘it’.
I was happy to play. Lost in these new sensations, someone immediately
touched me. I became the pursuer. The half-submerged bodies disappeared
into the muddy water. I realised why the game was so attractive. Once under
water you could not see a thing. The silt load was so dense. Even the sun
could not penetrate. Successful evasion and pursuit came down to a fish-like
agility and speed. I dived in, aiming for where I thought a body had gone,
but found nothing but the force of the water against my hand. I stood up
and looked for more bodies. The river current pulled against my legs, as if
to trip me up. I dived again, trying to be as graceful as the young boys were.
I discovered that they would pretend to go one way, but once under water
would reverse or change their direction. An outsider adult like me had
little chance. After many tries I managed to touch someone by jumping on
them from a short distance. Splashing, glistening water, screaming, goading
dominated above the water. Silence, darkness, voluptuous bodiliness, deft
swimming characterised the world below the surface. The boys seemed in
collusion with the river.
We played for a while more. They enjoyed teasing me in this game of cat
and mouse. It was their game and I was an intruder who had to learn the hard

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way. I did learn something of diving and negotiating the strong current and
how to avoid contact. It was deliciously transformative. I forgot the outside
and lived in the water, following the dolphin-like bodies. Occasionally, I al-
lowed my body to be swept away with the flow of the river. Letting go.
I use this story to show that the kind of lived knowledge learnt by partici-
pating is a way of learning how to attend to the world in the way others do;
how to notice the qualities of the environment that have local relevance. This
episode was a kind of enskilment (Pálsson 1994) or an apprenticeship into a
taskscape (Coy 1989; Dilley 1999; Lave & Wenger 1991). What I learned in
those early days came to be added to and strengthened by talking, observing
and more diving and swimming. I had experienced the river not as an object
over there away from the houses but as an active and a living element in the
constitution of ribeirinho lives.
The second account takes place a year and a half later in the same place
and at the end of my doctoral fieldwork in January 1994. A heavy rain had
fallen as it was getting dark, forcing us to retreat to our hammocks to keep
warm. The child of the couple, in whose house I was staying, had gone to
sleep and we, the three adults, chatted. The conversation turned towards what
Ailton and Ermiria considered I had learnt and the tastes I had acquired. We
went through a catalogue of events and actions, such as paddling a canoe,
swimming, using a machete, and cleaning fish. I had considered myself fairly
competent in most of these activities. Yet they remained unconvinced that I
could perform them as well as a ten-year-old boy. Ailton went on to say that
I had learnt a lot in Parú and had got accustomed to life on the floodplain. I
asked why a boy could paddle better than I could. His reply was quick and
simple. It was the jeito in which I did something, the way of performing a task
and each skill had its own jeito. This is their inteligência (literally intelligence
or knowledge), learnt from their parents.
Jeito has multiple meanings in Brazilian Portuguese. It can mean a physical
dexterity or an aptitude for something. It is also used in the sense of taking a
short cut to get something done, a fix (o jeitinho), subverting a bureaucratic
procedure (Barbosa 1995). In the conversation, it indicates that I did not
have the ‘know how’ for something. From Ailton’s perspective, I had never
learnt how to do these actions in the context of living in Parú and therefore
could not do them. What is more, I had not learnt them in the way that they
do them. Knowledge of this kind is acquired in a personalised process of
working and living with other relatives and neighbours and is constitutive
of an attachment to a place. One does not just learn to fish, for example, but

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one learns to fish using a particular technique in a definite place amongst

specific kinds of people.
This second scene offers a reflection upon certain skills enacted in the
environment of the Amazon floodplain. It suggests understandings of a
person’s capacity to work, tools and technology, social relationships and the
natural environment. Critically, these understandings, I was being told, are
expressed in the way they do things and that this can only be appreciated
by participating in their daily existence. It follows that what I was able to
write in my notebooks was only part of my ethnographic understanding.
There was much more to know than what they could tell me. Most relevant
for the development of my argument is the fact that each skill is specific to
itself has its own context of learning and knowing.
I use these experiences not to discuss my performative adequacy (Holy
1987:34) but instead to signal the importance of my awareness of local skills
and meanings through my methodological stress on participation. I was
never able to escape the physical effort of living on the floodplain, for example
getting water from the river and providing food to eat. These experiences
drew my attention to the significance of learning skills as an adult outsider;
here I turned to think of the many immigrants who were not academic and
sympathetic visitors but Portuguese soldiers and peasants who had come
between 200 and 300 years ago and wanted to settle down. Did they also
swim and dive in the river with Indian boys in their first encounters? Did they
teach Indians to use a machete? I was confronted by the difficulty of lumping
skills together. By letting go and immersing myself in this work, I started to
make ethnographic sense of the diversity and historicity of skills.

Perceptual Monitoring
These floodplain people’s lives are captured by the sense of flux, that is
the constant adaptation to the rhythm imposed by the momentous river.
Elsewhere (Harris 1998) I have argued that the seasonal variations on the
floodplain should be seen as part of the creative movement of daily life.
In this sense, annual environmental changes, such as the rising and falling
of the river (in the Lower Amazon about 8 metres between high and low
water), fish migrations and plant growth and decay, do not determine social
life. Instead, seasonality is constituted by the movements of people and the
rhythmic structure of their activities, which resonate with and respond to
periodic changes in the floodplain environment.

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This argument can be developed by looking at the perception of seasonal

changes. Each house stationed on the banks of the Lower Amazon has its
own port, consisting of a number of planks of wood supported by cross bars
and legs. It is a small affair, something which is easy to take down and put
up without too much trouble; the legs go to chest height and the whole
length may be no more than seven metres. In some cases a large tree trunk
is used as a port (easily found floating downriver). The port goes from land
over the mud at the edge of the water into the river itself. Some are flimsy,
others robust, but each house needs one to carry out essential tasks. Women
wash clothes and pots on it, children clean fish on it, canoes are tied to it,
everybody washes on it and incoming boats go up to it to drop people off
and load them on. One has to learn to walk on the log so it does not roll or
to step on the planks so they are not levered up.
The port needs to be rebuilt about once a week, in accordance with the
rise and fall of the river, and is therefore at a varying distance from the house.
Nobody can have a port that is not properly functional, providing a dry
passage from river to land and back again. There is an ongoing attention of
changes in the river level with the adjustment of the port and people’s lives.
Even when people are not working on or at the port they remain connected
to the river, registering its movement and any associated animal, fish and
plant changes. Perception of the river does not occur on an on/off basis but
is continual and part of every action, even if not apprehended in awareness.
Floodplain dwellers learn to become responsive to those subtle clues in the
environment.
Similarly, for ribeirinhos, the river is more than an object of the world. It
expresses not just place but change. The river is a period of movement be-
tween one place and another and one time and another. It ploughs on
downstream and rises and falls, it extends and endures. In the example of
moving the house port, the river is not an object in the mind of the perceiv-
ing person but a subject in a continuous exchange between the body and
the environment. The actions of rebuilding a house port are the result of the
attention to river level changes, involving a bodily and collective re-adjust-
ment of life. The river is a subject in the sense that a person sees with it, or, if
you like, ‘according to it’ (Ingold 2000:265). It does not dictate or determine
change, rather it is constitutive of the creative movement of social life.
Ribeirinhos register changes in the river which are then replicated in so-
cial and economic flows. The passing of time is experienced as the passing
of definite activities. Each season, or part of a season, is known by the way

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people engage with specific environmental events; most obviously what fish
is migrating past the village, and what fruit is available. People say, for in-
stance, that June is the ‘time of the jaraqui’ because great shoals of the fish
appear in the river at this time. The passing of different seasonal afford-
ances is a kind of ‘practical grammar’ (Meløe 1990:70) developed from skil-
led perception.
Although I have discussed the perception of seasonal changes I am also
referring to a multitude of environmental features in the taskscape, from the
river to the lake, from fish to animals, from plants to trees. And even then we
should recognise, as locals do, how each category should be broken down,
that, for example each species of fish has different behaviours. Thus the skills
and techniques used to catch a particular fish differ. An example will come
in a following section. It is important not to reduce specific aspects of the
world to the same seamless background of perpetual perception. We could
say that jeito is a learned form of perception. It is what the perceptual sys-
tem has become attuned to pick up from the continuous monitoring of en-
vironmental data. Jeito is not just a perceptual skill but a way of knowing
the world.
Parúaros refer to their form of knowing the world as nossa inteligência,
which can be translated as ‘our knowledge’, translating inteligência as it used
to be understood in English. I shall gloss the phrase as ‘embodied practices
not easily conveyed in words or written in notebooks’. It was used countless
times in answer to my questions about why ribeirinhos do this and that in
such a way. There was no adequate or precise verbal explanation, at least
from an ethnographer’s point of view, as to why, for example, one person
goes fishing in that place on that day, or why people say ‘cousins join fami-
lies together’ in answer to my question about cohesion in the community.

Skills and Attachment to Place

This knowledge is, as Ailton told me, emplaced. It is intimately derived
from a person’s social and natural environment. But does this mean people
are stuck in a place with their knowledge of that place or their skills are not
transferable?
Ribeirinhos in the Óbidos region complain constantly that their lives are
harsh; nevertheless many say they would not substitute their way of life for
the supposed luxuries of urban dwelling, at least not permanently. They suf-
fer greatly in the flood time and fall ill more quickly. Life takes getting used
to (acostumado), they say. This habituation is born of being there, working

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hard and living with kin. It gives way to an attachment which is located in
the life-world rather than its transcendence, as is the case when identity
becomes abstracted to be associated with culture and politics.
The term acostumado implies that it is possible to fall out of a field of skilled
practitioners, such as when a person migrates to a town and becomes in-
volved in other relationships and activities, and that there are natives who
do not get used to life on the floodplain, and did not like it. I did meet one
such man who was the son of an Italian migrant and used to live in Parú.
He told me he was born in Parú and had lived there for 50 years, planting
jute and fishing. He had developed rheumatism from working in the water,
and it had become too difficult to work so hard anymore, he decided to sell
up and move to town, where his wife earned most household income from
working as a seamstress.
A good illustration of the relationship between people, work and place is the
earning of nicknames (apelidos). Individuals may have one or more nicknames
by which they are commonly known to their kin, peers and neighbours. The
nicknames refer to an important event in the life of a person, or one of their
key characteristics. Often the nickname derives from some work situation
where something funny happened. A word becomes used widely if it catches
on. It recalls the event each time it is used, and is a part of an individual’s
life history, an ongoing living portrait of a person. Generally only kin and
friends should use the nickname. Outsiders should not address the person
with the nickname as it would indicate a lack of respect.
Not all people have nicknames; there is a clear gender bias towards men,
since few women have nicknames. The brief life history I shall now present
is a case of one woman who did have a nickname, and will reveal the link
between person, skill and place. Dona Sofia, as I called her, was stout, with a
long neck and a face when not smiling or talking which looked very serious.
She was born in 1933 in a village on the right hand side of the Amazon River
about 50 km upriver from Óbidos. Her parents had died from malaria when
she was two years old and she was adopted by her immediate neighbours.
Then her adopted father died, after which her adopted mother moved to
another community just opposite the city of Óbidos. There dona Sofia, at the
age of seven, started work cutting jute, waist deep in water with a machete.
She went to school until she was twelve, when her mother moved to another
village, not far from Parú, to live with an uncle. Typical of many couples,
dona Sofia met her husband (a brother of Antonio, who we will meet below)
at a saint’s festival in Parú. She moved there, since her husband was given

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some land by his father. They cultivated jute together, and her husband was
known as one of the best pirarucu fishermen in the region. It was about this
time that dona Sofia fell ill and as a result she had to go to the larger towns in
order to seek treatment. She recovered slowly and put on a lot of weight. One
day she was cutting the jute in water up to her chest and some people came
to talk to her. They suddenly thought she looked like a river turtle (tracajá)
with her large body, long neck and stern face (when river turtles swim they
extend their heads fully at a 45 degree angle). Her family and neighbours
started calling her dona Tracajá in an affectionate way and it stuck. And so
her personal identity was joined with the hard work of jute preparation and
her new physical characteristics.
The work with jute had started to give her rheumatism, so she no longer
wanted to spend long periods in water and developed other skills. She con-
tinued to fish (helping her husband) and plant food crops, but turned her
energies to midwifery. She resisted the formal training, she said, and taught
herself by attending childbirths. She had 12 children and felt a strong desire
to help other women. She says she learnt how to be a midwife using her own
jeito. Linked to her childbirth skills, she is also known as a benzedora, a tradi-
tional healer, who massages, and says prayers over, parts of the body which
hurt. Her powers are ones she has become aware she has through her care of
women at childbirth. In one of our conversations she echoed what another
woman had told me. She said, ‘the world does not change, but people do’.
Perhaps this was a reflection on her life, that she had learnt many skills and
had seen a number of places. She had moved from each place carrying with
her previous knowledge but each time readapting it to a new context. What
changes is the way she configured herself, and was configured, in each situa-
tion. The term acostumado is the local concept which expresses this personal
transformation as one connects to a new place each time. The world does
not change, as such, but the way in which a person is placed in it.
The gendered nature of this attachment is an important dimension here.
Studies of women in the Amazon region reveal that the changing peasant
economy demands greater flexibility from women than it does from men
(Alencar 1995). Traditionally, the ribeirinho economy is diverse, but with the
current greater emphasis on fishing and cattle (McGrath et al. 1993), mostly
men’s work, women are being pushed out of rural income opportunities (Al-
vares 1995). There are other forms of work to be adopted, such as opening
a shop, doing basketwork and so on. In some cases, women are finding it
harder to earn money and stay in the rural areas. Despite the reluctance to

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move to a town, some women and their children are seeking work there, at
least in the lower and middle Amazon. Generational differences regarding
women’s work are also important. Dona Sofia was a working adult during
a boom time in the riverine economy. Jute provided much income and its
provision fitted in well with other seasonal activities. Thus a diversity of skills
was demanded and there was a balance between men and women’s work.
With the loss of jute from the 1980s this relatively strong peasant economy
was reduced in scope. Adult women nowadays on the floodplain are much
more dependent on men for money, if they are not earning money from their
own labour and crops. And this puts them in a fragile position.5
My outline of dona Sofia’s life history also reveals how an attachment to
place develops from personal transformations. A place does not pre-exist
but is revealed in the movement of individuals in the pathways of their life.
For dona Sofia and other floodplain dwellers, skills and practical knowledge
are synonymous with control of one’s personal life. Enskilment is a process
in which each generation plays its part in setting up the situations and
opportunities in which successors can, through a mixture of imitation and
improvisation, develop their own embodied skills. Thus this kind of know-
ledge is not so much passed on as continually regenerated within contexts
of novices’ interactions with the manifold components of their human and
social environments. Moreover, it is originally reproduced by each person
in their own course of development.
‘To become skilled at something like catching fish’, according to Pálsson,
‘is to progress from nausea to well being, to feel at home in one’s body and
the company of others’ (1994:920). In other words, enskilment, as used by
Pálsson is both grounded in contexts of practice and a shift from a state of
being uncomfortable and not being skilled to being at ease and skilful. This
change makes a difference to one’s participation in a field of relations. But
there is a tension in the concept of enskilment between the skill itself (‘get-
ting one’s sea legs’ in Pálsson’s example) and the person (e.g. dona Sofia); a
division that the concept tries to overcome, at least in Ingold’s work. If we
focus on a skill it is possible to talk about a change in ability from one point
in time to another. If we focus on the person we attend to the multiplicity of
their skills and changes in life course. Person and skill are inseparable though
because of the never-ending cycle of the need to learn new skills and relo-
cate oneself in new conditions. The emphasis on changing skills as a person
grows older reveals a flexibility that the concept of enskilment lacks. It is
possible to fall out of practice; or be good enough to catch fish, for example,

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rather than reach a qualitatively different state of being. These messy, deficient
and imperfect compromises of daily life are as much a part of being skilful as
enskilment proper. By focussing on this flexibility, we shall see how different
skills entail different experiences of learning and have their own histories.

Kinds of Attention and the Diversity of Skills

In Parú, there are many fishing techniques, which are a function of the
local importance of fishing, the range of environments (river, lake, stream)
and their seasonal variation (e.g. flooded forest), as well as the diversity of
fish species (there are over a thousand in the Amazon compared to over a
hundred in Europe). Traditionally, the most locally prestigious form of fishing
on the floodplain has been the capture of pirarucu, or river cod, which is a
large scaled fish (sometimes weighing over 100 kg). Its favourite habitat is
the relatively still water underneath floating grass on the side of lakes and
rivers during the dry season (roughly August to March). It needs to surface
to breathe every few minutes and this provides an opportunity for the fish-
erman to strike. At this moment a harpoon, with a metal tip, is thrown into
the water. It is not hard to imagine the fisherman selecting a spot, the hours
waiting under the tropical sun for the fish to come up for air and then the
possibility of missing. But also consider the complete attention the water’s
surface holds for the solitary fisherman as he watches for bubbles, or ripples
indicating movement below. He will also use his sense of smell to detect the
presence of the fish, and his hearing to attend to happenings behind him. This
form of fishing is generally regarded as the most difficult and most skilled.
It is said to take years of experience to know where to go and how to throw
the harpoon correctly. Men are judged according to their heaviest catch and
number of successful trips. Compare this, as do elderly and experienced fish-
ermen, to net fishing typically done by the younger generation, whose only
skill, so the elders say, involves choosing a serendipitous place to lay out the
net; ‘you just wait and hope for fish to fall into the net’, they mock.
This generational difference is also one of skill. Those fishermen who learnt
to fish before relatively cheap nylon monofilament nets were introduced in
the 1950s (dona Sofia’s generation), were practised in using less predatorial
methods, such as hand lines, cotton hand-cast nets, rods, trot lines, bows
and arrows, traps and harpoons. The senior generation did not adopt the
newer and potentially more effective techniques associated with net fishing
(e.g. drag-net or purse seine). They told me they could not get used to fish-
ing with nets in the open river or lake, it was too different, and it devalued

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Riding a Wave 209

their skills as fishermen. The younger fishermen only occasionally use the
older techniques. The fish exporting factory rewards volume of catch not
individual skill. The local market still gives good money for pirarucu meat.
But the tension between money and respect is ever present. There are two
points here that relate to the overall argument. First is the way the impor-
tance of certain kinds of skills changes with seniority, older people want to
be respected, and remembered, for a particular ability. Secondly, it reveals
the changing economic contexts which each generation faces. Fishing skills
are not just passed down from senior to the junior kin but have to find a
relevance to current economic demands and decisions. My argument is that
ribeirinhos are especially skilful at adapting in this way.
There is a larger point here about the challenges to a floodplain peasant
economy. During most of the 20th century market demands have been rela-
tively weak; jute was the main cash crop exported to make bags and backing
for carpets. Since the 1980s the floodplain peasantries have been threatened
by large-scale commercial fisheries and the expansion of cattle ranching
which is taking up (indirectly and directly) land used for food crops. I shall
illustrate how it affects skill-based knowledge with the case of Antonio, mar-
ried to Nazaré. He is one of seven children, five of whom remained on their
parents’ parcel of land, which was divided equally among them before their
father died. In the 1950s and 1960s, Antonio told me, in the run-up to the
flood season (March to May) he and Nazaré worked planting jute, which is
labour intensive. In the low-water period (September to December), when
he was not planting jute, he was fishing, mostly for pirarucu and other large
fish he could harpoon. Throughout the year, he and Nazaré also grew a few
subsistence crops. Over time, sales of fish and jute proved to be profitable, and
they were able to buy a small, motorised boat that allowed him to transport
and store more fish. The price of jute then declined, and he shifted all his
efforts to commercial fishing, any profits being used to buy cattle as a form
of savings. Antonio and his wife have not been able to do all of this on their
own. They have thirteen children, all of whom have remained living near
their parents, partly because they have a relatively secure economic base
(and do not have to pool the money they earn). Without their children’s
contribution the couple would not have been able to maintain these econo-
mic activities. Antonio takes great pride in the fact that he has never sold
his labour to a patron in the city or a cattle rancher. Antonio’s brothers
were not so successful. In particular, they could not shift to larger scale net
fishing when jute declined, in the way that Antonio did. They had not built

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210 mar k har r i s

up the same level of resources as Antonio and Nazaré, nor had they access
to the same kin-based pool of labour. The brothers and their families have
had to rely on a greater diversity of strategies. They have also occasionally
had to sell their labour, unlike Antonio, and depend on the money their sons
and daughters earn from market sales and from wage labour, pooling the
household’s resources. The example of Antonio and his brothers shows that
some people have been able to adapt to the economic transformations of
the last thirty or so years, and some have not. Their relative success depends
on not just the skills to do so but also the resources. Antonio and Nazaré
were, and still are, in a good position to adapt, but it comes at a cost. They
are able to negotiate new demands because of the success of their previous
enterprise and their ability to shift skills and resources (including past profits)
from one activity to another. But they and their children are also losing the
diversity of skills traditionally needed to survive on the floodplain. This is not
the case with Antonio’s brothers and their sons. They rely on many kinds of
skills and strategies, including wage labour to planting crops, keeping a few
cattle, and fishing using many techniques. Antonio and Nazaré, and others
like them, will continue to do well until the demand for fish diminishes or
the price gets too low. The loss of a diverse skill base might make it difficult
for them to reorganise their productive efforts. Whereas the brothers, and
others in their position, may be able to respond more successfully because
their range of skills and their knowledge of the amazing floodplain environ-
ment remain intact.

Histories of Skills and Techniques

How floodplain peasants have coped with economic changes in the last
forty years pushes us into the other dimension of this paper. Having already
considered the place of skills we need to understand the temporality of the
taskscape. One way of doing this would be to portray the transmission of
knowledge from one generation to another as a form of making history (e.g.
Toren 1993); here I continue to dismantle practical knowledge by turning
to its historical formation. This is to say that the skills have histories and
contexts which form the way in which they come to be part of daily life.
Much of the knowledge described in the previous sections would be
considered by Parker, whom I quoted earlier, as essentially ‘Amerindian’
in character. Parker’s view on this heritage essentially reflects those of the
majority of scholars of ribeirinhos (see Moran 1974; Wagley 1976). According
to this view, there is a simple continuity of ‘inherited’ technical skills and

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Riding a Wave 211

knowledge of the environment from the time of conquest to the present day.
This is so, cultural ecologists argue, because the ribeirinho body of knowl-
edge is so well adapted to the exigencies of nature and to their social world
(Moran 1974). Why change a good thing? Outsiders learn local knowledge,
‘quickly embrac[ing] caboclo culture and economy’ (Parker 1987:257). The
problems with this line of thinking are manifold: how do we really know
what is Amerindian and what is not? Can we assume continuity just because
they live in the same environment? Is knowledge inherited unchanged like
property is passed down? Do outsiders or children simply absorb local skills
and practical knowledge?
While Parker’s effort to historicise ecological knowledge was innovative
and should be applauded (Parker 1985), the problem is that his account
provides precious few details about the content of this history and how it
may have shaped particular forms of practical knowledge. Providing a de-
tailed and comprehensive history of practical knowledge among ribeirinhos
is clearly beyond the scope of this paper, but I do want to sketch out some
ideas. To this end, I want to pursue Ailton’s insight that each skill embodies
a way of knowing.
Since European conquest there have been a variety of political, cultural
and economic influences in the region. It is not good enough to say that these
agencies were European or Amerindian because it distorts the internal dif-
ferences in each category and masks the different ways they came together
and were reinvented in quite specific contexts. This is critically relevant to
the current discussion because of the diversity of technologies and techniques
employed by ribeirinhos.
The Amerindians, from whom the ribeirinhos descend, were relocated
and rounded up into missions from late 17th century onwards and forced
to participate in an export of forest and river products to Europe. These
‘indentured’ labourers were central to the successful workings of the col-
ony. Their knowledge of how to navigate the rivers, of what products were
available where, and of how collect and catch these products gave them
essential role in the export economy, a position their mixed blood offspring
eventually also gained (see Buarque de Holanda 1994 for São Paulo). In the
mid-18th century, in an attempt to increase production, the Portuguese ad-
ministration nationalised the economy (Maxwell 1968) and secularised the
mission villages, which involved expelling the Jesuits, and, on paper at least,
giving more local power to Indians (MacLachlan 1973). Furthermore, they
encouraged colonists to marry Indian women by offering financial incentives

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212 mar k har r i s

and, by law, forbade any prejudice against Indians and mestiços (MacLach-
lan 1972). It is frequently said that in the Brazilian Amazon, up to the end
of the 18th century, the key problem of the colonial administration was the
control of Indian labour, because the crown wanted Indians to work more
(Hecht & Cockburn 1989). What this claim masks is the fact that labour is
not simply the mechanical application of effort in a task. It involves familia-
rity with a material, a technology, and a geography. Without learning how
to labour in the colonial environment, the Indians and colonists would have
been next to useless. While the colonists and the administrators controlled
the labour of Indians, there were also relations of dependence that ran the
other way. Without local knowledge there was no economy.
A Jesuit, João Daniel, who was expelled in 1757 from the Amazon by the
Portuguese after living more than 16 years in the region, has written one of
the most magnificent ethnographic records of mid-18th century life in the
region (from his prison in Lisbon in the 1760s). Having extolled the great
talent and skill of Indians in fishing and hunting Daniel writes:
where their skills are enhanced greatly is in the missions and the houses of whites;
there they learn all the crafts that are taught them, with such facility, dexterity and
perfection, like the best master craftsmen (Daniel 2003a:341).

In fact so well did the Indian population learn a trade that an object could be
put in front of a sculptor of wood, for example, and they would reproduce it
so faithfully it was impossible to tell whether it was the original or the copy.
As a result, Daniel claims, whites in Belém at the time did not seek other
white craftsmen but rather Indian ones.6 These statements are clearly part of
a general discourse, as Taussig (1993) has shown, which does not grant real
creativity to non-whites, all they can do is imitate others, but it does indicate
a sense of the Indian innovation of imposed European skills and techniques;
their ‘readiness’ to take on board new knowledge. I am not dismissing instan-
ces, or generalised cases, where Indians refused to adopt new forms of labour
and were physically punished or simply seen as lazy. I am instead building
up a picture of the way in which various skills and forms of knowledge in
the 18th century were circumscribed by the colonial context.
In the second half of the 18th century, the Portuguese took a much more
active interest in the Amazon in order to raise taxes and modernise the
bureaucracy (Maxwell 1974). They tried to achieve this by granting Indians
a share in the total value of their production in common. The products,
such as cotton, sugar, molasses, rum, cocoa, manioc flour, salted fish and

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Riding a Wave 213

meat, clove, oils of various kinds, medicines, were sent on to Lisbon. Some
of these goods (e.g. sugar and rum) involved European technology, while
others (e.g. sheep and cattle) were introduced from Europe and Africa. But
most products had a local or indeed mixed origin. Some were forest pro-
ducts collected on seasonal expeditions, or processed in the village (e.g. nuts,
turtle oils). Others products were grown in or near the villages in gardens or
orchards (manioc and cocoa) or were caught using a mixture of European
and Amerindian technology (fish caught with nets and bows and arrows).
Settlers and Indians were in other words not only producing mixed offspring;
they were also working and living together and inevitably learning from
each other to produce hybrid forms of skills. In this hybrid economy, based
on varied and mixed skills and knowledge, it was from the very beginning
difficult to distinguish what was European and what was Amerindian. As
new techniques were imposed on all in order to increase production, such as
net fishing (Daniel 2003b:291–305), older ones became an important part of
the new economy, such as pirarucu and turtle fishing. There was a mixture
of techniques and skills, where all practical knowledge was reinvented by
its inclusion in this new world. It could not be separated from its new role.
What was Amerindian and what was European became so entwined it was
impossible to distinguish them. All these skills were from elsewhere in time
and place, and were thus redeployed and resignified.
Adding to this diversity was the fact that each village had a specific econ-
omic profile (a list was submitted every year to the royal treasury); even the
same village would radically differ in what it produced year on year, sometimes
a lot of manioc flour and then very little. There was little consistency.7 This
variability had to do with local factors such as labour availability, degree of
conflicts, corruption of local officials and so on. Each region was subject to
different kinds of demands, local and external. In this way it is impossible
to speak of a distinct cultural economy in any homogenous sense. Nor did
this plethora of skills and changing activities constitute an easily bounded
way of life. Rather, this diverse economy was formed on top of metropolitan
demands and the destruction of Amerindian societies; local negotiations;
rich colonists trying to improve themselves; poor settlers attempting to find
a niche for a new life; and acculturated Indians and mestiços trying to find
out who they were. There were too many interests at play, which never came
together for it to be understood as a culture.
Despite the complexity of this historical context, each skill nevertheless
has it own history composed from the specific uses to which it has been

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214 mar k har r i s

put. These individual histories grow out of the instruments and methods
of production as well as the knowledge and knack required to wield them.
The tools and practical knowledge associated with these skills, however, in
many cases only materialised as a result of a transatlantic fusion. Each skill
then is individually embroiled in colonial history. Without the successful
and constant reinvention of available techniques and forms of knowledge,
ribeirinhos would not have been able to survive historically.
The history of the ribeirinhos outlined here shares many characteristics
with the Caribbean peasantries described by Sidney Mintz. They both have
short social histories in their new locations; they are organised around an
export economy; and they are reconstituted through skills learnt elsewhere.
For Mintz (1989:139) practical knowledge in the Caribbean colonial economy
was neither invented on the spot nor did it grow out of a bounded cultural
heritage. As Mintz writes, discussing how slaves brought the old and the
new together:

tastes in food are acquired; tools are fashioned and employed according to socially
learned and standardised practices; choice, taste and preference became organised
around specifiable ranges of acceptable variation (Ibid.)

There was in other words constant improvisation and resilience in the

Caribbean economy, and these were directed by the conditions set by the
wider context as well as by a changing history of local preferences. I make
the same point for the Amazon basin where there was a reconstitution of
displaced traditions. While we know quite a lot about the larger perspective
of the transatlantic world, we know little about the on-the-ground realities
of how this intermingling took the shape it did.
An example from the Amazon which exemplifies the applicability of Mintz’s
perspective is the following. Veríssimo’s Fishing in Amazonia 1970[1895] offers
a detailed portrait of the region’s riverine and maritime fisheries. Veríssimo
describes a particular way of fishing on the Tapajós river in the Lower Ama-
zon, which is a clear water river relatively poor in fish. It involves diving in
the water and digging a hole in the bed of the river about a metre deep and
about half a metre wide. Bait is placed at the bottom. A stick on the shore
secures the line with the hook and bait in the hole (Veríssimo 1970:85).
This technique, Veríssimo says, is entirely primitive and indigenous. I argue,
however, that it makes more sense to see it as a mestiço or hybrid skill. The
metal hook is of European origin as is the idea of attaching it to a line and
rod. It is possible the hook is a substitute for traps which were very common

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Riding a Wave 215

(nowadays plastic bottles are used). But then why go to the effort to dig such
a deep hole underwater (and what with?), when the trap is already a kind of
hole? It is also possible the hook is a substitute for something else we do not
know about. It is most probable that this technique was developed around
the hook and drew in other techniques such as hole digging and the ability
to dive and thus is quintessentially an improvised skill. There is no inherent
link between environment, technology and knowledge. There is nothing
about the interaction of these elements that could be determined either by
a cultural expression or by a colonial economy alone.
This brief historical foray has pointed to the importance of a detailed in-
sight into the complex interplay between the embodied and historical nature
of practice. Without understanding how skills and technologies came to be
part of the everyday world and how their imposition was shaped by local as
well as Portuguese geo-political interests in the 18th century, my argument
would not have been able to take seriously the proposition that practical
knowledge is heterogeneous and ethnically disinterested (though of course
it can become interested). Attention has been drawn to the importance of
defining quite precisely what skill is being considered, as opposed to grouping
all practice together and assuming there is a coherent unity (as Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus seems to suggest 1990).

Conclusion
I have argued that the knowledge practices of ribeirinho taskscape do
not derive from a distinct Amerindian or European legacy. Instead I have
shown how skills are the composite improvisation of various capacities and
resources, and not self-contained abilities passed down from generation to
generation.
I have drawn a connection between my own experiences on the floodplain
and the diverse repertoire of skills that people and families acquire over a
lifetime negotiated a changing taskscape. This taskscape was then placed
within a longer historical duration to show how the techniques and knowledge
from elsewhere and other times have been adapted to the changing context
of the Brazilian Amazon. This phenomenological and historical perspective
allowed an appreciation of the experience of performing a particular technique
in the creation of an object’s meaning within a particular history. An object
is characterised by what it can be used for at a particular time. A machete
is for instance an axe when chopping wood, a knife when cutting meat, a
screwdriver when turning a screw and so on; its identity depends on the use

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216 mar k har r i s

to which it is put and the skill of its employer. The fact that it is an object of
European provenance is irrelevant from this point of view. This article has
demonstrated the importance of paying attention to the historical reconsti-
tution of skills and techniques generated by human experience.
This reconstitution is the basis for the historical openness of practical
knowledge and its infinite originality in the act of doing or making. This
inventiveness takes on a special historical character in the Brazilian Amazon
where seasonally attuned perceptual skills are vital for survival and where
there has been a hybridisation of technologies and ways of knowing. There is
then a curious mix between the present of the action itself and the past which
shapes perception, the materials available and the range of skills and so on.
We can imagine this as surfing on the crest of a wave. Past actions are carried
forward, and have an immanence, in the tremendous and whirling force of the
present. The conjuncture of the historical and the contemporary converges
on the know-how of ribeirinhos and their technique of adjusting existing skills
and resources, depending on needs and interests. These innovations arise out
of the necessity to maintain a diverse economy in the changing conditions of
the market. The resulting taskscape is a carefully crafted struggle on behalf
of the ribeirinhos to endure in their environment.
For the reasons discussed here, attention to the practical reveals the spe-
cial character of skills. Given the nature of this ever dissolving and renewing
environment, skills are not made visible on the landscape rather inscribed
on the taskscape. The paths by which a skill has been formed is a kind of
inscription, written into present activity. Traces of past actions or gestures
are incorporated (actively or passively) into skills as they are imitated and
recomposed. Perhaps it is in this way we could say that ribeirinhos are the
inheritors of Portuguese or Amerindian pasts. They have not inherited their
perceptions, techniques or strategies, but the disintegrated traces, as embodied
echoes, whose continuity is in practice.
Acknowledgments
Fieldwork has been carried out in the state of Pará, Brazil, in 1992–1994, 2001,
2003–2004 and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the British
Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Board.
I thank, for their encouragement, constructive criticism and editorial patience, Don
Kulick, Dominic Boyer, Robert Gibb, the editors of Ethnos and two reviewers.

Notes
1. Other scholars have devoted critical attention to what they variously refer to as
the practical. One problem is that the term has lost the focus Mauss gave ‘body
technique’ (1979). Different understandings are given to: habitus (Bourdieu 1990),

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Riding a Wave 217

techne (Marglin 1990), a lived-in folk model (Bloch 1993), common sense and
local knowledge (Geertz 1983), implicit meaning (Douglas 1999), implicit social
knowledge (Taussig 1987), social practice (Descola 1996), embodied practices
and the senses (Stoller 1994), and direct perception (Ingold 2000) and the pre-
objective (Csordas 1990:6, 1994:7–12; Lambek & Strathern 1998:15).
2. Lima (1999) has argued that academics should discontinue the use of the word
caboclo, because its local connotations are so pejorative, which include backward-
ness, stupidity and laziness. I am inclined to agree, and use instead ribeirinho
(river dweller). However, I have come across situations where the term is used
positively by those who would be called caboclo by outsiders (Harris 1999; see
also Nugent 1993).
3. An example of a study that does not is Edelman (1993).
4. This passage is version of a piece that appears in Harris (2000).
5. The ngos working in the region clearly recognise this situation and respond to
this global development concern with many programmes to strengthen women’s
position, such as interest-free loans, improving access to education in rural areas,
better health care facilities, making sure fences are properly built to prevent cattle
ruining gardens (thereby making agriculture possible).
6. Daniel was so concerned with Amerindian skills that he even proposed to ban fish-
ing using poison because it involved so little skill and no effort (2003b:291).
7. This claim is based on my research of reports submitted to the state governor
in the second half of the 18th century which are housed in the Public Archive
of the State of Pará, Belém, Brazil.

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