Moving to produce: Nukak mobility and settlement patterns in Amazonia

Abstract

This paper presents original information on the mobility and settlement patterns of the Nukak, who live between the Guaviare and Inirida rivers in the Colombian Amazon. The objective of this paper is to provide a better understanding of how egalitarian societies produce spatial arrangements in order to organize their settlements and to exploit the tropical rain forest resources. Traditional Nukak subsistence is based on hunting and the gathering of plants and animal products such as honey, turtle eggs and palm grubs; fishing and small‐scale horitculture are also practised. High residential mobility is practised in both the rainy and the dry season; it is estimated that bands make between seventy and eighty residential moves per year. Residential camps comprise two to five domestic units and usually cover under 130 m2. The Nukak case shows that forager mobility in tropical rain forests is not exclusively the consequence of avoiding over‐exploitation of an easily depleted environment. On the contrary, mobility is partly a complex way of concentrating forest resources in patches: the Nukak ‘move to produce’. Sanitation, abandonment due to a death, social/ritual activities, and inter‐band marriage also play a role. Therefore we must seek historical and socio‐ideological reasons as well as environmental ones for the high mobility and low population density of tropical hunter‐gatherers.