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Bittersweet
The Moral Economy of Taste and
Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

Amy Leia McLachlan

ABSTRACT For Uitoto communities Amy Leia McLachlan

is a PhD student in
DOI: 10.2752/174589311X12961584845765

in the borderlands of the Colombian anthropology at the

Amazon, ordinary sociality depends University of Chicago.
on the effective rendering of sweet Her interests include
semiotic theory,
social relations from a universe of botanical economies,
bitterly antisocial possibilities. Human personhood, gender,
personhood and kinship must be migration, and the
politics of the sensory.
continually materialized through the amclachlan@uchicago.edu
transformation of bitter substances and
sensations into sweet ones, and the
incorporation of sweetness as a sensible
quality of moral personhood. In a context
where the sensorium is frequently
transposed into a moral register, taste
qualities both index and transmit the moral
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qualities of persons, and the bittersweet

potentialities of kinship relations are
mediated through botanical instruments of
moral transformation. This paper explores
the qualities of dulzura (sweetness) and
amargura (bitterness) as key terms of
value in the moral economy of Uitoto
156
 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

horticulturalists experts in the management

of bitter manioc (manihot escualenta) and bitter
feelings alike.

KEYWORDS: Amazonia, personhood, gender, kinship, taste,

history, manioc, moral economy

The source of strength, for the woman,

is in the cassava bread,
is in the chili pot,
is in the juice of sweet manioc,
is in the pineapple,
is in the forest grape.
That is the true strength.
With that, [men] resolve to work,
they clear the bushes,
they chop down the trees.
That is the source of strength.1

+ For Uitoto horticulturalists living in the borderlands of

the Colombian Amazon, ordinary sociality depends on
the effective rendering of sweet social relations from a
universe of bitterly antisocial possibilities. Here, the production of
ordinary life is inextricably bound to the production of a sensory
order2 within which reciprocity, memory, and ultimately kinship are
made. In a context where the sensorium is frequently transposed
into a moral register, taste qualities both index and transmit the moral
qualities of persons, and the bittersweet potentialities of kinship
relations are mediated through transformations of gustatory qualities.
Based on twelve months research3 in newly formed diasporan
Uitoto4 communities on the Colombo-Peruvian-Brazilian border,
this article follows recent work on the historical transformation of
sensory experience and an anthropological tradition of attention to
the social and moral valence of sensible qualities. Tracking one set
of contrasting values, those of dulzura (sweetness) and amargura
(bitterness), through everyday discursive and material practices,
my aim is to correlate a topography of taste qualities with a moral
economy of kinship and estrangement. Rather than assuming the
persistence of this opposition through the complex history of social
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and economic transformations that led to the establishment of

diasporan Uitoto settlements in the extreme South of the Colombian
Amazon, I follow Farquhars insistence on the complexity of the
activity that makes a life process real, that makes theoreticians of the
senses (2002: 7).5 In her words, bodies are far from inert or passive
slaves to the intentions of minds; they are inhabited by language
and history and ever-responsive to specific built environments. They
157

also make and are made by the local forces and temporal rhythms
 Amy Leia McLachlan

belonging to particular lifeways (2002: 7). While the lifeways I am

here describing are responses to very different local forces and
rhythms than those informing Farquhars account of the efficacy of
flavors in Chinese embodied practices, her notion of the body as
a flavourful temporal formation (2002: 29, 75) provides a useful
image of the body as a historically, culturally and socially located
aggregate of sensible qualities and sensory experience.
My strategy here is to coordinate my informants accounts of their
experiences of sweet and bitter qualities (both gustatory and
affective) with local productive practices that focus on the mitigation
of bitterness and its transformation into sweetness. Chief among
these is the labor-intensive work of cultivating and rendering edible
manihot esculenta, the bitter manioc that is the basic substance
of daily commensality and ritually produced consubstantiality in
Uitoto households. I argue that everyday productive and discursive
practices focused on what Sutton terms the gustemological (2010)
can be read as a form of engagement with a history of displacement
and violent incorporation into a regional cash economy built on the
extraction of labor, botanical commodities, and obligation.
In contrast to descent models of social organization, Amazonian
ethnography has since the 1970s emphasized the made quality of
bodies and corporeal groups (Seeger 1980) in Amazonian practice;
the achievement of social life as a product of continual vigilance
against antisocial threats (Overing and Passes 2000; Londoo Sulkin
2004); and the potency of food substances in both moral projects
(Seeger, da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro 1979; McCallum 1996;
Londoo Sulkin 2003). More recently, Vilaa has argued that while
Americanists have consistently drawn our attention to the centrality
of the body in defining and differentiating persons and social
groups, as well as to the intense use of the body surface perforated,
painted, tattooed, and decorated in the circulation of values
(2005: 446), the precarity of those definitions and differentiations has
received relatively little attention. Overing and Passes (2000) describe
Amazonian quotidianity as an achievement that must be continually
reiterated, and Vilaa extends this observation to the intersubjective
and embodied locations of actors. Not only are Amazonian bodies
produced through the actions of those who simultaneously produce
themselves as kin; they must be continually reproduced as such. As
Vilaa remarks, although making kinship is a way of ensuring forms,
if we consider that kin are made out of others, there always exists a
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latent possibility of alteration (2005: 458).

In a parallel vein, anthropological attention to the body has in past
decades focused on the importance of sensation to both social life
and subjectivity (what Howes calls sensory relations (2003) and on
the historical and cultural variability of regimes of embodiment. Within
this orientation, the gustatory has appeared in a number of ap-
proaches, and to a number of different ends. Structuralist approaches
158

have focused on the rendered qualities of foods (Levi-Strauss 1969;

 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

Douglas 1971), while more sensualist approaches have called

for close attention to the flavor of social life and artistic production
(Stoller 1989; Adapon 2008). A number of critical perspectives have
approached questions of political economy, gender inequality, and
the reproduction of disadvantage through attention to taste qualities
(Mintz 1985; Cowan 1990; Serematakis 1994; Weismantel 2005),
while others focus on the management of taste qualities as forms of
engagement with historical transformations (Weiss 1996; Farquhar
2002).6
While Amazonianists preoccupation with bodies has had relativ-
ely little intersection with other anthropological problematizations of
the corporeal (Vilaa 2005), this article will draw on both discussions
to explore the place of taste qualities in the production of persons
and kin relations within the sensory landscape of an Amazonian
borderland.
In the context of diasporan Uitoto households, taste qualities
circulate in economies of social value and moral valence. Drawing
on Munns adoption of the Peircean qualisign, this analysis takes
the contrasting qualia of dulzura (sweetness) and amargura
(bitterness) as vehicles of value transformation in the making and
unmaking of persons and kinship relations. These contrasting values
depend on their sensible qualities for their social significance, at the
same that the sensory experiences of dulce and amargo tastes in this
context derive moral and social valence from their entanglement with
discourses of other dulce and amargo subjective states, including
affect, memory, and intention.
Locating sense-making in the sensory, the concept of a qualisign
provides a necessary tool for understanding the semiotic and social
processes by which sensory orders emerge, and takes us a step
beyond the Marxian point that they do, historically, and within asym-
metrical social relations and systems of value. The concept of a
qualisign as first articulated by Peirce allows us to attend simult-
aneously to particular sensible qualia and to their circulation as signs.
In his original formulation, we find a theory of semiosis that refuses
to differentiate between sensing and sense-making subjects. A
qualisign is both a phenomenologically available sensible property
and a socially mediated naming of that quality (a rheme).7 Thus, a
rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but sweetness by any
other name may not apply to roses.
The concept of a qualisign allows us to take seriously the social
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efficacy of sensible material qualities without presuming either

their givenness or meaningfulness to any sensing subject, or their
essential consistency across linguistic or historical contexts. As an
analytic tool, it directs our attention to the semiotic and the sensory
as dialectically entangled and mutually transforming. It also allows us
to take seriously both the sensual lifeworlds and discursive practices
of our informants without imagining either to be prior or privileged in
159

the making of social relations or subjective experience.

 Amy Leia McLachlan

In her adoption of the concept of a qualisign, Munn developed

the phenomenological implications of Peirces original formulation
to account for the efficacy of qualia in the making and maintenance
of social relations. Focused simultaneously on the sensitivity of the
body to the qualities of social media and on the sensible qualities
of the body as a social medium, The Fame of Gawa offers a model
for ethnographic attention to distinct sensory orders and regimes
of value. Modifying the Peircean definition, Munn uses qualisign
to refer to certain embodied qualities that are components of a
given intersubjective spacetime . . . whose positive or negative
value they signify (2007 [1986]: 17). Munn contends that in the
Gawan context, certain media in particular, the body and other
important elements . . . exhibit qualisigns of the positive or negative
value generated by acts, notably by acts of food transmission . . .
and consumption (17) and that in focusing on the intersubjective
aspect of the process, we may also see this form of bodily being
as a particular construction of the actors self and the defining
self-other relation of which it is a part. From this perspective, the
intersection of the problem of value signification and that of the
constitution of the subject becomes apparent (17). Here, I follow
her in considering the role of sensible qualities (as signs in a system
of values and also as phenomenological experiences) in expanding
and contracting intersubjective networks and re/producing social
relations that include other persons, nonhuman entities, and in
particular, cultivars. Embodied qualities, transmitted and transmuted
through the production, exchange, and consumption of cultivars are
of central semiotic importance in Uitoto communities, and among
these, dulzura and amargura figure prominently.
As a taste quality, dulzura characterizes such diverse phenomena
as ripe fruits, nontoxic varieties of manioc and detoxified bitter manioc,
well-made tobacco paste (which tastes about how you would expect
a sticky reduction of tobacco resin and vegetable salts derived from
burnt palm fibers to taste), panela (a dense reduction of sugar cane
juice), cold black water streams, and industrial sugar products.
In contrast, amargura inheres in a wide variety of substances,
including unprocessed toxic manioc, poisonous substances of all
kinds, and numerous medicinal plants (whose efficacy is attributed
in many cases to their bitter toxicity to pathogenic agents). As
Weismantel notes of the Zumbaguan Quichua vocabulary regarding
taste qualities, terms which translate easily into sweet and bitter
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retain particular rhematizations (encompass foods and experiences)

which would confuse English categorizations. What is more, for
Zumbaguan Quichua-speakers, sensations of sweetness, saltiness
and hotness are subtly related to issues of gender, of the social
and productive roles of women and men (2005: 87). In diasporan
Uitoto communities, dulzura and amargura are also intersubjective
qualities, drawing lines between things of a less edible nature, and
160

weaving sensory experiences into affective and moral ones. As

 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

Munn noted of Gawan modulations of qualia, value transformations

involve transformations of subjective states (2007 [1986]: 16). In
Uitoto accounts, thoughts and emotions can be dulce and life-giving
or amargo and destructive, and characterize those who bear them
as such. As a process of mutual making between persons, kinship
must be continually materialized through the transformation of bitter
substances and sensations into sweet ones, and the incorporation
of sweetness as a sensible quality of moral personhood.
Uitoto persons are made through the cultivation, rendering
and exchange of key plant species, including coca, tobacco, and
manioc, that produce not only the material of their bodies, but the
subject perspective that the body determines. As a number of
ethnographers have emphasized in past decades, the Amazonian
body and its constituents are best regarded as aggregates of social
relations, as material accretions of habit and memory, and as records
of anticipated circulations. More recently, analytic emphasis has
shifted toward the unstable nature of these bodies; the endless
recombinant potential of the matter from which they are formed, and
of the perspectives entailed by those forms (Vilaa 2005; Lagrou
2007). In this sense, the Uitoto body is a perspective in a world
of human and nonhuman subjectivities that must be continually
reiterated.8
Uitoto exegeses and practices of person-making support
McCallums assertion that in Amazonia personhood is . . . processual
and relational (Conklin and Morgan 1996) [and] Amazon persons are
not so much dividual as accumulative and encompassing. They
blend into others or cut off sharply from them, but do not transact
with parts of themselves in the constitution of a more global social
sphere (2001: 91). This perspective is consistent with quotidian
person-making practices in Uitoto households in the tri-border area,
as well as with a performative approach to gender and subjectivity
which emphasizes the precarious, reiterative and accretional
character of any persons social identity and embodied social
positions (Butler 1993). What often strikes us as an ontological oddity,
what Viveiros de Castro has termed Amerindian perspectivism
(1998), can also shed light on a quality of human bodies in other
social and cultural contexts; namely, their substantial, sensual and
affective entanglement in economies of care and exposure, memory
and abandon, hazard and intimacy, making and unmaking, and the
deictic or inter-referential quality of subjectivities in any context.
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Amazonian ethnography often attends to the entanglement of

human and animal bodies, but the bodies and substantial qualities
of plants are, arguably, of equal importance in the making of human
subjectivities and the modeling of social relations. In a collection of
philosophical discourses translated and edited by Echeverri, the
elder Hipolito Candre (Kinerai) provides a Uitoto account of the
beginning of human life and sociality alongside key cultivars. In the
161

first of these texts, Kinerai describes the origin of our life in the
 Amy Leia McLachlan

condition of pregnancy. The Mother, when first pregnant, is made

ill by the substances of conception (the breath of tobacco). The
Father Buinaima enacts a curing spell that renders her discomfort
into a healing capacity:

With that spell

he conjures a little juice of sweet manioc
with that spell he conjures it.
Now, with that, he makes the mother drink.
Right there the mother was tormented
with the breath of fire
that was in her heart.
She was burning herself
with the breath of fire.
Again, the heart of the Mother
of Sweet Manioc is relieved.
After that, the mothers name
is Mother of Relief.
After that, furthermore,
the mothers name is Mother of Sweetness.
The mother now settles down.
This is the healing spell for the mother,
the spell that Father Buinaima employed.
From then on
the mother stands up well. (Candre 1996: 46)

Producing the substances of alliance and consubstantiality, the

Mother then heals Buinaima, rendering his breath and thoughts
sweet:

At once,
the breath released
by the mothers heart,
there
took the form of the plant of sweet manioc.
The mothers spirit,
furthermore, took the form of the plant of peanut.
The Mother of Relief
in this way
took form
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So it is.
From then on
once again
in Father Buinaimas heart
there is breath of fire.
At once,
the mother herself
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cures Father Buinaima

 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

with this spell,

she cures the breath of tobacco and coca
of Father Buinaima.
At once,
blown with that breath,
the Fathers heart
becomes sweet,
becomes cool.
From then on
the Fathers heart
becomes sweet,
becomes cool.
From then on
the Fathers name is
Cool Tobacco,
Sweet Coca.
In this way it concludes. (Candre 1996: 445)

The Mother and Father of the human world effectively make one
another through the transformation of illness and agitation into
sweetness and abundance in the form of plant foods. These reciprocal
transformations then bring about the abundance of gardens and
hunting. Breath takes form as people, plants, and animals, and as
the abundance of a well-healed social world. Plants and people alike
multiply through the reciprocal action of the Father Buinaima and the
Mother of Sweet Manioc, of Relief, and of Sweetness.

And then
if one dreams of many plants of sweet manioc growing,
many women and girls will be born.
And if one dreams of coca plants
many boys will be born,
the same [if one dreams of] tobacco plants.
(Candre 1996: 61)

In Uitoto philosophical exegesis, as in quotidian practice and the

moral discourses surrounding it, work and reciprocity maintain a
moral economy of human and plant transformations within which
feminine agency and being are substantially intertwined with that
of manioc. Abundant manioc is transformed into the substance of
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womens relationality, just as the substances of womens bodies are

materialized as the plant life from which new relations are formed.

The same for the girl,

for your breasts to be full of milk
you will fetch water,
you will grate sweet manioc,
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you will boil down the juice of bitter manioc.

 Amy Leia McLachlan

Dont be lazy,
because you will disgrace us;
you wont say naughty things.
One teaches. (Candre 1996: 79)

In contemporary practice, a Uitoto womans chagra,9 like the

bodies of her kinspeople, is a record of her relations and capacities.
Like those of the gardeners body, transformations in the chagras
composition, fertility, and resilience are indicators of the condition
of a womans relations to her kin and co-residents, as well as to the
beings who are the plants of the garden. As Weiss says of Haya
food practices, eating and feeding, growing fat and wasting away,
being sated and going hungry may all be taken-for-granted aspects
of everyday life. But they are also activities that have consequences
for the way in which that everydayness is put together . . . . They
represent cultural values and simultaneously create the cultural order
through which such value is made (1996: 129). In diasporan Uitoto
communities, the propagation and rendering of key plant foods and
their associated sensory states are inextricable from the making
of persons and relationsDulzura is important to womens fertility,
and the conception and healthy growth of babies depend on the
ingestion of sweet foods and the maintenance of sweet relations.
After a friendly visit one morning, for instance, Rosa sent her guest
Liliana home with a kilo bag of sugar for her baby, who was not yet
weaned, but who would presumably receive the benefits of dulzura
through her mothers body, and through the care she received in
relation to Rosa. Similarly, among Uitoto communities of the Caquet
River (Colombia), Griffiths (1998) describes womens concern with
providing as many sweet foods as possible (especially sugar and
panela) to their young children.
Relations of alliance are equally founded on the circulation of
dulzura. Echeverri comments on Candres text that Uitoto relations
of alliance are agreed between males and sealed with gifts of tobacco
and coca, but this alliance will not be fulfilled until it is sealed with the
girls own fluid transmuted into the juice of sweet manioc (1996:
144). In the Uitoto diaspora, the problem of alliance extends beyond
exogamy to include relations with state, municipal, and NGO actors,
and these must also be sweetened if they are to be fruitful. On a
hot afternoon in the height of pineapple season, Mariela heaped
juicy, perfumed pineapple onto an enamel plate and passed it to her
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adolescent daughter. A sweating and cranky agent of a municipal

development agency was inspecting the familys fish pond in order to
determine whether they would continue to receive municipal funding.
Pushing her daughter toward the stranger, Mariela instructed her,
Dale pia Endulcelo! (Give him pineapple Sweeten him!).
While the efficacy of dulzura lies in the extension of social relations
and material entanglements, amargura both marks and causes the
164

contraction and atrophy of those relations. Bitter foods (including

 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

bitter tasting medicines, and particularly bitter fish and herbs) are
described as lethal to early pregnancy, and bitter pills such as
aspirin are attributed abortive and contraceptive efficacy. Bitter
emotions were often attributed the same effects in disrupting repro-
duction. A number of women recounted suffering miscarriages due
to bitter affective states, including the grief caused by a loved ones
death or departure, or anger aroused during a domestic dispute.
Blanca described how upon discovering that her husband had been
maintaining another woman during most of her pregnancy, she was
convulsed with a bitter rage that led her to abort twins: Fue la
rabia que me amarg por pura rabia avort. (It was the rage that
made me bitter out of pure rage I miscarried.) While sweetness
is vital to the extension and expansion of kin relations through labor,
exchange, and the making of new persons, bitterness is not only
an aftertaste of failed reciprocity, but also an agent in the undoing of
relationality.
Amargura is also, however, a primary condition in the production
of quotidian materiality. Bitter manioc is the basis of the foods at
the centers of daily and ritual commensality, including thick breads
(cassave), toasted granules (farinha), steamed stuffed palm leaves
(far), dark chili sauce (tucup a reduction of hot chilis, ants, and
the poisonous excretions of fermented manioc pulp), and sweet
starchy drinks (caguana). This base material of everyday life is also
a lethal poison. If not properly rendered, the starchy roots of yuca
brava (manihot esculenta) turn treacherously on their cultivators.
Instead of filling contented bellies to satiated fullness, they bloat
them suddenly and painfully, causing illness and inverting the flow
of food exchanges and growth. The soothingly cool fibers of the
roots that Doa Rosalda liked to hold against her burning cheeks
while she expertly stripped them of their rough peels are saturated
with cyanogenic glucosides. This toxin must be removed through
a complex, multiday process of grating or soaking, mashing and
sieving, which occupies women in heavy work that they nonetheless
describe as sweet. The majority of Uitoto resguardo womens lives
are spent in the propagation, care, and rendering of these bitter roots
into sweet consubstantial sociality.
As illustrated in the nightmarish warnings women gave me as they
taught me each step in the process, improperly converted manioc
poisons the bodies of the entire commensal network. A terrifying
story was occasionally wielded by older people to tease me or to
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correct my flagging technique in processing the heavy, wet fibers

of grated manioc roots. In this tale, a young wife was in charge
of preparing the feast for a dance to which all of her husbands
malocas10 relations had been called. She made an enormous vat of
caguana, and a pile of cassave as tall as herself, laboring for days
and days so that guests would leave with full bellies and full baskets.
As the guests arrived and began to drink the improperly prepared
165

caguana, their bellies swelled and they writhed in cramped agony,

running from the maloca vomiting and horrified.
 Amy Leia McLachlan

Bitter manioc is made sweet by the expert labor of adult women,

a capacity that is indexical of their status as well-made and knowing
women. This economically important productive activity cannot be
understood, however, as simply the production of calories for the
household, or as the objectification of female labor power in service
of the patrilineal kin network (pace Rivire 1987). Rather, it should
be understood as the historically and culturally patterned production
and transformation of values. As Sahlins articulated, production is
. . . is something more and other than a practical logic of material
effectiveness (1976: 169), it is a functional moment of a cultural
structure (170).
Weiss makes a similar argument regarding the production, con-
sumption, and transformation of food in Haya communities. Attend-
ing to the management of the qualities embodied in food and those
who share it, Weiss demonstrates that the economic basis of Haya
households is simultaneously the production of culturally particular
values through key actions. In the Haya context, food becomes
an objectification of value in a process that is generated through
culturally specific forms of action (1996: 128). Tracing the sense of
the meanings and values that are entailed in an experience of food
in a particular local cultural order, Weiss focuses on certain critical
actions, actions that generate the objective, tangible, givenness of
the world, while simultaneously situating the agents of subjective
experience . . . These critical actions have a determinate form that
orients agents to actions which are grounded in (but also productive
of) a structured field of personal and physical relationships (1996:
148).11
In contemporary discourses and everyday practices of the
Uitoto diaspora, the ability to transform states of amargura into
dulzura appears as a central dimension of womens agency (cf.
Nieto Moreno 2006). In contrast to approaches which understand
agency as the exercise of will which can only be constrained by
structures of signification, agency is here taken as the capacity to
act in the world which is afforded by shared, overlapping, and even
conflicting structures of signification. The transformation of raw
manioc roots into the staple foods of ordinary and ritual sociality
involves a fundamental value transformation which marks Uitoto
womens labor as a moral undertaking proper to human sociality (in
contrast to the amoral socialities of nonhuman beings; cf. Londoo
Sulkin 2005) and as the manifestation of the distinctive capacities
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congealed in womens bodies.

Like the Sohoan women whom Cowan describes as producing
themselves as properly feminine persons by producing and ex-
changing sweet foods (1990: 184), diasporan Uitoto women con-
tinually reproduce the substantial and sensual bases of their morally
situated personhood. Whereas Cowan characterizes this process as
a reinscription of disadvantage through the sensible signs of gender
166

difference, I am reticent to follow her in conceiving of the semiotic

 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

production of gendered difference as the imprisonment of subjects

(which presumes both an original state of freedom from signification
and that equality is only possible in a state of non-differentiation).
Rather, I take seriously my informants claims that they experience
masculine and feminine forms of agency as mutually constituting,
equally indispensable, and substantially incommensurate. In this
context, where gender is a key idiom through which relations of
interdependence, mutuality, and dialectical exchange (between parts
of the person, persons, and social entities) are enunciated, womens
work in the production of staple foods should be understood not
as the production of a material or domestic substrate upon which
a broader political order is built, but as the material reiteration of a
moral project the consolidation of human sociality which depends
on the collaboration of masculine and feminine capacities for, and
modes of action.
Manioc sustains life and makes kinship. With its corky texture and
pungent flavor of ferment, properly converted manioc is a source of
consubstantial relations and reciprocal memory, affect and care from
which personhood, sociality, and kinship are materialized. These
exchanges include, significantly, persons beyond the resguardo
households where manioc foods are produced. Many resguardo
women supply their childrens city households with manioc foods on
a weekly basis, while others exchange garden foods for cash with
more distant kin living in the city. A significant number of women
living in the resguardo make weekly trips to the indigenous market
on the Colombian side of the triple border to sell manioc products
to kin and strangers. As rendered manioc foods circulate within
and between resguardo households, and between resguardo
households and urban spaces of exchange, sweetness is circulated
from chagra to house to city and back. In the process, kin ties are
renegotiated or reinforced.
In the market place, manioc undergoes further significant trans-
formations, from the substance of kinship and moral personhood
into cash, and almost immediately back into the material foundations
of proper personhood for vendors children. Cash is converted into
school uniforms and supplies, but most of all, into sweet-smelling
soaps and shampoos, packaged cookies, soft cakes of dark panela,
and kilos of white crystallized sugar. Most other commodities are
either out of reach, or are considered laughable wastes of money (or
both). Market vendors from the resguardo frequently comment on
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the stinginess of city people and the miserable quality of the things
they eat half-rotten fish sold by treacherous third-hand vendors,
beat-up plantains priced at five times their value, 5,000 pesos for
a single green pineapple! En el monte, vendors would comment,
somos ricos; tenemos comida y agua fresco, aire limpio. En la
ciudad, nadie te ofrece ni un vaso de agua. (In the bush, we are
rich; we have food and fresh water, and clean air. In the city, no one
167

offers you even a glass of water.)

 Amy Leia McLachlan

The no one in this type of critique is less empty as a referent than

it may seem in its innocent construction. The circulation of food gifts
among kin is complicated when part of a household moves into
the city, as often happens when children reach seventh grade and
wish to continue studying, a couple separates and the difficulty of
maintaining a forest household without a partners complementary
labor leads people to seek cash employment outside the resguardo,
or the draw of urban economies and horizons justify leaving ones
garden and house to be overgrown.
The potential failure of food gifts was not limited to apocryphal
tales or stomach aches. The inability of city kin to provide even
a glass of water is a source of tension and bitter feelings among
those who remained in the resguardo.12 Those who move to the
city to take on wage labor find themselves in positions of debt and
insufficiency more frequently than they encounter the wealth that
such jobs seem to promise. Unable to earn living wages, they often
struggle to maintain their smaller households, much less to maintain
reciprocal relations with kin who continue to cultivate and hunt in the
resguardo.
At the same time that resguardo dwellers disparaged the limited
or negative reciprocity of the urban cash economy, however,
many resguardo women told me that they had enjoyed periods of
disentanglement from their kin by taking jobs in the city. One grey
morning in the indigenous market, a frustrated and resolute Marta
told me that she was fed up with living in the bush, living hard with
no comforts and with her ungrateful and angry husband. She told
me that she had left to live in a little house in the city, quietly, earning
her enough to support herself, and eating rice (an inexpensive
commodity imported from nearby Israelite colonists or industrial
Brazilian producers). Over the next two years, she moved back and
forth between the city and the resguardo several times, eventually
moving to the city permanently to live alone with the nephews she
had adopted from her brothers family in the resguardo. The decision
to separate was materialized when her husband also gave up their
house to work upriver cutting timber for cash.
On a searingly hot afternoon several months after Marta had
left their community for good, Rosa commented on Martas and
Mauricios separation by describing her own choice to flee. As we
slashed at stinging invasive vines and serrated-edged pineapple
spikes in her vast chagra, she recounted the times she and her
Senses & Society

husband had fought so badly that she had taken off for the city,
shedding her garden and the burden of kin relations that it condensed.
She lived off her own work, making chicken and rice tamales to sell
on the street, and taking in sewing. Te cuento, as viva contenta,
tranquila. Trabajaba bien, ganaba mi plata, tena mi casa y mis hijos.
Y no tena nadie para molestarme. (I tell you, I lived contented this
way, peaceful. I worked hard, earned my money, had my house and
168

my children. And I didnt have anyone to bother me.) Life in the

 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

city appeared in these descriptions as an island of disconnection in

comparison to the richly integrated sensory and social world of their
chagras, as both relief and deficiency.
Indeed, entanglements with life in the resguardo were not always
pleasurable and sweet. There, especially, relations between
non-kin women are often negotiated through the idiom of taste.
Provoked by rumors that her husband, Juan Jos, had been visiting
a neighbors daughter during nocturnal hunting trips, Rosa had been
feuding with the girls mother, Lucia. Yet given the delicate balance of
emotions in her house, she had avoided complaining to her husband
and had reacted to his friends teasing innuendo by clenching her
jaw and swallowing her pride. When Lucia and her husband, Paco,
held a minga (work party) to clear a new chagra, Rosa insisted that
she had too much work in her own chagra to spend the whole day
in their service. When an exhausted Juan Jos returned late in the
afternoon, carrying a plate of rice, fish and cassave Rosas portion
from the minga she took a resentful bite and announced: Hm! Ni
tiene sal! y mira que el arroz est sucio, (Hm! It doesnt even have
salt! And look, the rice is dirty!) setting the plate aside in anger and
disgust. While in this instance, Rosa took up qualia outside the bitter/
sweet range that I have focused on (in this case accusing its maker
of inattention to basic processes of preparation and shameless-
ness in distributing bland and dirty food at an important moment of
exchange), her angry criticism demonstrates the pointed salience of
food and its qualia as social media, and the potency of commensality
(or its refusal) in tightening or slackening social relations. The plate of
food sat uneaten until the next morning when it was sent flying to the
chickens, seemingly along with Rosas anger from the day before.
Her capacity seemingly to slough off antisocial emotions was
remarkable to me not only because of her adeptness in this regard,
but because of its unremarkableness in this context. The tiny com-
munity in which her house and garden were enmeshed was formed
on the eve of the year 2000 in response to a devastating conflict
between members of the next nearest settlement that ended in the
burning of a half-dozen houses and a nearly completed maloca,
and the attempted shooting of several community elders (see Tobn
Ocampo 2005 for a detailed account). The two factions now live
on opposite banks of a narrow and winding river from which they
all draw drinking water, fish, and caimans, and in which they all
wash clothing and bathe. When asked about the houses that had
Senses & Society

been burned, their owners recounted in chilling and minute detail

the events of the showdown that left them betrayed and homeless.
Marta told me, trataron de matar mi marido, queran matarme, mis
hijos estaban gritando y corramos por el monte para escaparnos
(They tried to kill my husband, they wanted to kill me, my children
were screaming as we ran through the forest trying to escape)
then paused, . . . pero ya lo olvid. (. . . but now Ive forgotten it.)
169

Uitoto womens skilled forgetting of memories and emotions they

 Amy Leia McLachlan

described as bitter often appeared as the affective equivalent of

leaching manioc, a deliberate rendering of the socially poisonous
and debilitating into sweetened continuities in relations.
Indeed, the very existence of these communities is an effect of the
collective capacity to recover a genre of connection from a situation
of bitter dispersal and violent indenture. In 1910, at the height of the
global rubber boom, Roger Casement observed the conditions of
the Uitoto indentured to Peruvian rubber traders at La Chorrera the
parents and grandparents of todays gardeners and market vendors.
Recounting the payment of a chief for his submission of 63.5
kg of latex resin, Casement says that he might be given a gun, a
hammock and a pair of pantaloons . . . The guns being the worst
trash of the kind I have yet seen anywhere, and could not have
found purchasers, at any price, in Africa. After receiving payment,
the tappers were then forced to carry the rendered latex fourteen
miles down by the dreadful road to Puerto Peruano on such
food as they can bring with them, or that [the plantation master]
can or will supply. What he gives comes from the plantations round
the house that they themselves have been forced to make without
getting one cent of payment. Thus, the handful of cassava . . . and a
lump of sugar-cane is equally the product of their own unrewarded
labour unrewarded save by stripes (1997).
The rubber tappers handful of cassave and lump of sugar cane
today cut the hunger of resguardo women waiting in the pre-dawn
obscurity for the weekly bus to market. They also provide the ground
of sociality between former neighbors forced into shared spaces
by the increasing necessity of cash. Seated under 4:00 a.m. stars
next to their heaped cargo of pineapples, cassave, and canangucho
paste, two vendors whose husbands have come to blows over
insults fueled by cane alcohol and debt make the wait bearable by
exchanging over-sweetened coffee and cassava bearable, but not
quite pleasant. On one particularly raw morning, Maria offered Lina
a cup of hot sweetened coffee. After one tentative sip, Lina handed
the cup back to Maria with a weary glance Falta dulce (Its not
sweet enough). Indirectly voicing her discomfort with the necessary
proximity to her neighbors in a moment of strained relations between
their households, Lina was also directly criticizing Marias lack of
effort in producing sweet relations. Her request for more sugar was
as much a statement about gustatory preference and bodily pleasure
as a public critique of her and Marias husbands for engaging in open
Senses & Society

conflicts. As the comment was overheard by her larger audience,

composed of a cross-section of two embattled settlements, it also
indexed the failure of both communities effectively to distill their
poisonous history into a more ideal conviviality. Lina passed her the
sugar tin and a spoon without comment, and turned back to the task
of packing manioc starch into saleable kilo bags.
As Weiss comments regarding Haya food practices and values,
170

the very nature of food its potential for making and extending
 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

aspects of personal identity and collective relationships, for properly

feeding some and being fed to others is actively engaged in . . .
changing orders of signification and politics. Food . . . may serve
as a critical condensation of history (Weiss 1996: 129). As it does
in a Haya context, the ability to control food in this local context
is not only engaged in an ongoing global process of historical
transformation, but the critical actions [of feeding and being fed]
are, for the agents of these actions, forms of engagement itself
(Weiss 1996: 149). With similar attention to the role of food and
taste in historical process, Farquhar provides a subtle account of
the bitterness of history in Chinese everyday experience and nar-
ration. The trajectory, from free market to free market via state
repression and hunger (2002: 93) appears in Chinese literature and
daily practice as alternating moments of bitterness and sweetness
that oriented political discourses in various moments of reform.
But where Chinese history in Farquhars sensory account required
people to swallow bitterness, Uitoto history over the past century
has required an expanded capacity to convert the bitterness of
history into new forms of everyday sweetness. Like the Chinese food
practices that Farquhar describes as working on history through the
intimacies of bodies (2002: 29, 77) the transformation of the flavorful
qualities of Uitoto quotidianity works to recoup genres of relationality,
and to reiterate the forms of connection, memory, and moral value
that maintain kin relations against displacement, erasure, and a
voracious political economy.
Bitter memories of the rubber trade, of the powder keg economy
of the 1980s coca trade, and of the ongoing trade in devalued Uitoto
life and labor upon which regional botanical economies continue to
thrive, are grated, pummeled and leached in large part through the
transformative capacities of Uitoto women in the making of ordinary
life and new, flexible forms of kinship. While my informants did not
make statements as explicit as these, other Uitoto speakers are
quoted as figuring the processes of subject formation as leaching and
sieving the psycho-substantial elements that compose the person
to remove all that is poisonous, antisocial, rancorous, and bitter,
leaving behind only that which is cool and sweet. As Oscar Romn,
a Uitoto elder from the Caquet River put it: Evil, the negative, pain,
illness are transformed into what is good and positive . . . The latter
is the purest form, the most crystallineprefigured as starch, what is
strained that is, human life (quoted in Candre 1996: 273).
Senses & Society

This transformative capacity was exemplified in a story Rosas

husband told me one evening as we lay in our hammocks, smoking
cigarettes and waiting for the mosquitoes to abate. We had been
talking about a young man in a nearby community who had recently
been killed by a neighbor reeling with jealousy and cachaa (cane
alcohol). Juan Jos was no stranger to either spirit. A ten-year
veteran of the Peruvian prison system, he had been sappeado
171

(betrayed) by the customs officer for whom he worked trafficking

 Amy Leia McLachlan

cocaine in the late 1980s. After a pause filled with the twilight roar
of frogs and insects, I asked him if he was afraid to die. Emilea,
he announced, exhaling protective smoke across his sinewy legs,
death isnt painful. Its sweet, like falling asleep.13 I had frequently
heard mournful stories from other neighbors about dying during
malarial fevers and leaving their bodies to wander the inhuman
forest, but I was surprised both by Juan Joss characterization
of death as pleasant, and by what came next. One time I was
mambeing [consuming toasted coca powder] and I took some pills
for my hernia before I lay down in my hammock to rest for a minute.
I lay there and I felt so heavy and so sweet. I could here Rosa
cooking; I could hear the world and everything around, but as if from
a distance, and all I wanted to do was sleep.14 Rosa interrupted from
her hammock, I was there cooking, she pointed to the smoldering
hearth, and I saw his body stiffening. I tried to wake him up, or move
him, but he was completely rigid. So I took a kilo of sugar and mixed
it in water, and forced it into his mouth, trrran, then another kilo,
trrran, into his mouth, then another, trrran three kilos of sugar! And
then slowly, slowly he woke up.15 She drew on her cigarette and
looked me proudly in the eye. I was dead, Juan Jos said, and
it was so sweet.16 Rosas expert and stubborn sweetening powers
the same ones that had kept her tied to Juan Jos and to the life
of her resguardo garden in spite of his alcoholism, imprisonment,
and infrequent but terrible violence insisted that he remain where
he was, in the midst of a world of mutual obligations. Indeed, in a
shifting landscape of social precarity and economic vulnerability, the
disconnection of death may seem sweet; but where that landscape
is cultivated by a Uitoto expert in the rendering of moral sociality,
ordinary life can be even sweeter.

Acknowledgments
Many thanks to David Howes, David Sutton, Carlos Londoo Sulkin,
Diana Rosas, and Christopher Sheklian, as well as the anonymous
reviewer at The Senses and Society, for their generous comments
on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to Frances Slaney
and participants of the Explorations in Sensory Anthropology
Symposium at CASCA 2010, where this paper was first presented,
for their invaluable feedback. This research was made possible
by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council, the
Tinker Foundation, and the Center for Latin American Studies at the
Senses & Society

University of Chicago. Finally, thanks to my hosts and adoptive kin in

the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km 6-11 and Leticia, Colombia.

Notes
1. From Candre Text 5: On the Source of Strength (1996: 149).
2. See David Howes (2005) on the sensorium.
3. This research was conducted over twelve months between
172

2006 and 2009 in urban Uitoto households on the triple border

 The Moral Economy of Taste and Intimacy in an Amazonian Society

between Colombia, Brazil, and Peru, and in households within

the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km 6-11, which is located on the
periphery of the Colombian municipality.
4. While members of these communities are of varied descent,
they represent themselves collectively as Uitoto. Many residents
speak or spoke Uitoto, but Spanish is the language of everyday
communication in most households.
5. Marxs original formulation provides a firm foundation for this
conception of sensory experience as historicized, socialized,
and responsive to even perhaps critical of the larger nexus
of human relations in which a sensory regime emerges: The eye
has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social,
human object an object made by man for man. The senses
have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.
They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but
the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man,
and vice versa (Marx 1988 [1844]).
6. See Sutton (2010) for an excellent discussion of gustemological
approaches in anthropology.
7. I draw particularly on Peirces insistence on the dual nature of the
qualisign as the conjunction of a sign of and a sign for a quality: a
quality which is a Sign [that] cannot actually act as a sign until it is
embodied (1940: 101), and further, since a quality is whatever it
is positively in itself, a quality can only denote an object by virtue
of some common ingredient or similarity . . . Since a quality is a
mere logical possibility, it can only be interpreted as a sign of
essence, that is, as a Rheme (1940: 294).
8. Whereas many have emphasized the mutual transmutation
of human and animal bodies and perspectives, McCallum
describes the perpetual materialization of positions among the
Cashinahua, taking gender rather than species as the central axis
of differentiation (2001). While Vilaa, following Viveiros de Castro
and others, asserts that the human/non-human opposition [. . .
in Amazonia] ends up encompassing all others [and] therefore
comprises the key idiom for expressing difference in general
(2005: 451), in a Uitoto context, it is clear that differentiated
capacities attributed to two genders are fundamental to
ontology. In Uitoto cosmogenestic accounts, the world was
made and continues to be remade by the co-articulation of
gendered agencies, and in contemporary practice, persons
Senses & Society

are formed through the materialization of those capacities

over the course of their life times. That materialization also
involves, crucially, the differentiation of human from nonhuman
subjectivities and the transformation of nonhuman into human
substances and subjects. As nonhuman subjects are attributed
gender, and as gendered agents exist in specific (non)human
forms, the question of identifying a fundamental Amazonian set
173

of oppositions seems misguided.

 Amy Leia McLachlan

9. A large swidden garden including tuber, palm, plantain, fruit,

and herbal plantings.
10. A longhouse, traditionally occupied by the head of a patriline,
several brothers, and their in-marrying wives.
11. In an Amazonian context, McCallum (2001) makes a similar
argument regarding the production of gendered subjectivity and
sociality through the circulation of key substances and qualities
embodied therein.
12. It is also a live material concern. In a city where the municipal
water supply (donated waste water from a privately owned
electric plant) contains such high levels of bacteria and toxins
that it is not potable, and where ever more frequent drought
increasingly leaves residents without even rainwater, the only
reliable source of drinking water has become the Coca-Cola
plant which sells water by the liter.
13. Emilea, la muerte no duele. Es dulce, como el sueo.
14. Una vez estaba mambeando y tom unas pastillas para
mi hernia antes de descansarme en la hamaka. Me qued
acostado, y me senta pesado y dulce. Oa la Rosa, en la cocina,
oa el mundo y todo alrededor de mi, pero como si fuera a una
distancia. No quera ms que dormir.
15. Estaba yo ah, y mir que se estaba envenenado, con el
cuerpo rgido. Trat de despertarle, de moverlo, pero estaba
completamente rgido. Entonces, tom un kilo de azucar y lo
mezcl en agua, y lo hech en su boca, trrran, despues otro
kilo, trrran, por la boca, y otro, trrran tres kilos de azucar! Y
bueno, al rato se despert.
16. Estaba muerto, y era tan dulce.

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