Political Organization and Competition for

Resources in Nambiquara Society

David Price
Cornell University

INTRODUCTION

The Nambiquara are American Indians who live in western Brazil, up

against the Bolivian border. Their homeland comprises nearly 20,000
square miles--an area about the size of Vermont and New Hampshire. At
the beginning of this century, there may have been 5- or 6,000 Nambi-
quara living in small villages scattered throughout this territory. Today, the
Nambiquara population is reduced to about 700.
The Nambiquara were known to explorers in the eighteenth century,
but they only began coming into permanent contact with members of
Western society around 1910, when a 1,000-mile-long telegraph line was
built through their region. The exploration and construction was carried
out under the command of Colonel C~ndido Mariano da Silva Rondon,
whose feat of building a telegraph line through a previously uncharted
wilderness made him a Brazilian national hero. But shortly after the project
was finished, wireless telegraphy was invented. The telegraph line was
used for only a few years and then abandoned. This gave the Nambiquara
a respite, and up through the 1950s they were left alone, except for the
incursions of rubber tappers and missionaries.
In 1960, a road was built through the Nambiquara region, parallel to
the old telegraph line, and this precipitated a wave of land speculation. But

Please addresscorrespondence to David Price, 254 Carpenter Hall, Cornell University,

Ithaca, NY 14853-2201.
Population and Environment:A Journal of InterdisciplinaryStudies
Volume 18, Number 4, March 1997
9 1997 Human SciencesPress,Inc. 415
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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

initially, there were relatively few settlers. The road was unpaved and very
difficult to travel. Human habitations were few and far between. In the dry
season the road became an endless washboard that would rattle the fillings
out of your teeth. In the rains, it became a quagmire where even four-
wheel-drive vehicles bogged down. Finally, in the early 1980s, the road
was paved--with massive help from the World Bank--and a flood of Bra-
zilian settlers invaded the region.
Since the Nambiquara were spread out over a very large area, they
came into contact with Western society one village at a time. By 1938,
when they were visited by the French anthropologist, Claude L~vi-Strauss
(1948), some groups were already very familiar with axes, shotguns, and
influenza. But other villages, far from the telegraph line, were little af-
fected. I did my own fieldwork in the years 1967 through 1970, and made
return visits in subsequent years. As late as 1977, I visited a village that had
never before been entered by a representative of Western society; and yet
another village came into contact in 1980.
For a people such as the Nambiquara, contact with Western society is
disastrous. Hoards of technologically sophisticated foreigners appropriate
the native people's resources, deprive them of their independence, and
bring them a plague of communicable diseases. The Nambiquara were
lucky to be spared the full consequences of contact until quite recently,
and I was lucky, as an anthropologist, to get there when much of their
traditional social organization was still functioning.
In this paper I discuss the political organization of Nambiquara society
as it was when the Nambiquara were still an independent people. I want to
share some of my observations about decision making, leadership, and the
nature of groups. This is a purely anthropological endeavor, which is
aimed at gaining insight into the human condition. I have spent time trying
to help the Nambiquara find ways to survive in the twentieth century and
acting as their advocate (Price, 1989). But now I want to return to the
reasons why I went to visit them in the first place. I will try to show the
kind of things that can be learned from studying such a society.
Traditionally, the Nambiquara wore no clothes at all, and slept on the
bare ground. Since most Amazonian peoples sleep in hammocks, this gave
the Nambiquara a reputation as one of the most primitive peoples in South
America. Modern anthropologists do not like the word "primitive" because
of its judgmental overtones. But whatever One calls a society like that of
the Nambiquara, it is very different from our own societymand, presuma-
bly, very much like that of our ancestors. For thousands of years, before the
rise of what we call "civilization," people lived in small groups like those
found in Nambiquara villages; and by examining Nambiquara political in-
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DAVID PRICE

stitutions, we may gain some insight into the range of human political pos-
sibilities.
In talking about the Nambiquara, I will use the present tense to de-
scribe them as they were before the bulldozers of Western civilization be-
gan pushing them aside, although much has now changed. Even during my
earliest fieldwork, many Nambiquara wore clothes and used aluminum
kettles. This made them look, to a casual observer, quite acculturated; but
their attitudes and beliefs were still very traditional.

GAINING A LIVELIHOOD

The Nambiquara region (Figure 1) is a mixture of savanna and forest--

in the east, it is mainly savanna, with patches of forest, and in the west it is

I
!
I

1
i , , , , I
25 miles

FIGURE 1. The Nambiquara region. The shaded area on the inset map
shows the location of the region. On the main map, shaded areas are
forest and white areas are savanna.
418

POPULATIONAND ENVIRONMENT

mainly forest, with patches of savanna. The Nambiquara like to live in the
open, but they make their gardens in the forest. Consequently, their villages
are usually located at the interface between forest and savanna. Villages
must be near a stream or a good spring, and they must also be located in a
place where the soil is composed of fine sand. The Nambiquara may sleep
on the ground, but they do not like to sleep on rocks.
The typical Nambiquara village is composed of about thirty individ-
uals, living in two or three large thatched houses. The people who live in
these houses are related to each other as kinsmen, but they also constitute
an economic and political unit. They gain their livelihood through a com-
bination of gardening and hunting.
Gardening involves what is known as "shifting cultivation," a practice
that is ideally suited to the tropical forest. As is now widely understood,
there is very little topsoil in most rain forests. At any given time, most of the
nutrients that sustain the forest are tied up in its own biomass, and there is
only a very thin layer of rotting leaves on the forest floor, covering infertile
sand or red clay. This is why so may tropical trees have widely spreading,
shallow rootsq--and why they fall over so easily. (When asked why they
like to build their villages in the savanna, the Nambiquara usually say they
want to avoid the danger of falling trees.)
Each year the Nambiquara clear a patch of forest for new gardens. In
the middle of the rainy season, which lasts from October to March, the
men chop down trees to make a clearing. They let the trees dry where
they have fallen, and toward the end of the following dry season, they
burn them. This releases the nutrients that were tied up in their tissue,
and the layer of ash fertilizes crops that are then planted between the
larger trunks, which generally do not burn up. The Nambiquara plant
corn and manioc as dietary staples, as well as beans, peppers, tobacco,
cotton, yams, and sweet potatoes. By the end of the following rainy sea-
son, seed crops can be harvested, and root crops are ready to be eaten,
although they are left in the ground until needed. Fast-growing brush
soon takes over, and the garden spot is abandoned, permitting the forest
to heal itself.
After a few years all the good gardening places within easy walking
distance of the village become used up. When this happens, people begin
to think about moving elsewhere. Available evidence suggests that in the
past this happened about once every ten or twelve years, or once in the
tenure of each leader. In the twenty years that I have been paying attention
to the Nambiquara, all villages have moved at least once, and some have
moved two or three times.
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DAVID PRICE

While gardening supplies most of the vegetable products eaten by the

Nambiquara, hunting supplies their meat. Every two or three days men
leave the village to hunt. Sometimes they hunt singly, or in pairs; when
hunting gregarious animals, such as wild boar, they hunt in larger groups.
They hunt in both the savanna and the jungle. Their bows are five to six
feet long, with a pull of fifty pounds or more, and there are different kinds
of arrows for large animals, small animals, birds, and fish. These arrows are
made so as to balance perfectly on the archer's left hand when the bow is
fully pulled, and the feathers are attached so that the arrow will spin in
flight (Aytai, 1965). When hunting is particularly successful and there is
more meat than can be eaten right away, the Nambiquara preserve it by
smoking it on a rack over a fire.
The Nambiquara must hunt in order to have meat because they have
no domesticated animals. They make pets of all sorts of creatures, from
birds to armadillos--bringing them home when young, and raising them
in captivity so that they grow up completely tame. But there are no spe-
cies in the region that lend themselves to large-scale domestication. Con-
sequently, the Nambiquara are a "hunting and gardening" society. Early
visitors to the Nambiquara described them as intermediate between "no-
madic hunters and gatherers" and "settled agriculturalists" (Carnier,
1909). But the simple fact is that they just like to have a balanced diet,
and given the resources in their environment and the technology at their
disposal, the easiest way to have both carbohydrates and protein is to
both garden and hunt.
In general, women are responsible for gardening, and men for hunt-
ing. Men chop down the trees to make the gardens, and both men and
women work at planting them. But women do most of the harvesting and
food preparation. This is particularly arduous in the case of manioc. The
tubers must be peeled and grated; then the poisonous juice is squeezed out
and the resulting dough is left to dry for two or three days; after this it is
made into manioc bread by crumbling it into a shallow depression under
the cooking fire and rebuilding the fire on top of it.
Men not only spend time in hunting, but also in making and repairing
their bows and arrows. The Nambiquara are not adamant about the sexual
division of labor; men sometimes cook, and women sometimes fish or hunt
for small animals. But the basic division of labor makes a man and a
woman into an economic unit, with each doing complementary tasks. The
association of women with plants and of men with animals is pervasive
and deep rooted; it informs the symbolism of songs, the shape of rituals,
and the meaning of myths.
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POPULATIONAND ENVIRONMENT

VILLAGE COHESION

Once the food has been produced, it is supposed to be shared. Shar-

ing is such a basic value that there is no word for "generous"; there is only
a word for "stingy." A refusal to share food is almost the only violation of
basic values that will make a parent get really angry with a child. The
people of each house make one or more gardens, and if they find that
someone has been pilfering produce from their garden, they are unhappy.
But once the food has been brought back to the village, it is shared with
anyone who is hungry. Similarly, when game is brought back to the village,
it is supposed to be shared with everyone. Even visitors from other villages
who happen to be present are included in the sharing. When there is very
little meat, people sometimes try to keep it for themselves, but if someone
asks, they cannot be denied. I remember a time when meat was scarce in
the village of Camarar~, where I happened to be staying. A friend who
dropped by my camp to pass the time of day complained bitterly about a
little fish which he had managed to catch in the stream and had almost
managed to eat. Unfortunately, just as he was cooking it, his brother-in-law
came to see him, and all he got for himself was a tiny piece.
But in general, people are supposed to share, and to cooperate in
other ways. The importance of cooperation is shown in a game that Theo-
dore Roosevelt (1926) called "headball." (Roosevelt visited the Nambi-
quara in 1914 on his way to explore a previously unknown river that now
bears his name.) The game is played with a large ball that used to be made
from native latex, although nowadays a soccer ball is commonly used. At
dusk the men of the village gather in an open space between the houses
and form a circle. They toss a ball into the air and try to keep it aloft for as
long as possible, by butting it only with their heads. Sometimes they go to
enormous lengths to keep it from hitting the ground, throwing themselves
down and rescuing the ball when it is only inches away from the sand.
I have found that some Americans are unwilling to believe that there is
any people, anywhere, who are not by nature competitive. But whether
people are cooperative or competitive seems to depend on their values,
not their genes, and Nambiquara character is reflected in the game of
"headball," just as American character is reflected in the game of football.
The difference in attitude was brought home to me by a woman I once met
at a party. Her parents had been missionaries among the Nambiquara in
the 1930s. She had been born and raised in the United States, but her
mother and father had talked about the Indians from time to time, and
when she found that I had lived with the Nambiquara, she had one press-
ing question that she wanted me to answer: What are the rules of headball?
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DAVID PRICE

She said her parents had mentioned the game several times, and to the end
of their lives they remained puzzled because they could not figur e out how
it was played, or what one had to do in order to win . . . . The problem, of
course, is that the game is cooperative, not competitive. The object is to
keep the ball in the air; everyone in the group participates, to the utmost of
his ability, and as long as the ball does not hit the ground, the whole group
wins.
In line with the general emphasis on cooperation, important decisions
are made by consensus, which is arrived at informally, over a considerable
period of time. Overt political authority in a Nambiquara village rests with
the adult men, and all the men must be reasonably satisfied before action
is taken. In the evening, after people have eaten, they continue to sit by
their cooking fires for a while, relaxing, before they go to sleep. At this
time, any man who has something on his mind will give a speech, sitting
on his heels and looking into the dark. The speaker tells how he feels about
a particular issue, and the function of the speech is as much therapeutic as
it is political. Venting his emotions has a cathartic effect on the speaker, but
the speech also lets everyone know where the speaker stands (or, as it
were, sits). A man speaking in this way can be heard all over the village,
and other people go about their business, occasionally exchanging com-
ments among themselves, but never answering him directly. Women at-
tempt to influence their husbands privately, and they sometimes make brief
comments publicly, but they do not give formal speeches.
Over the course of time, the villagers decide on a course of action that
is mutually satisfactory. Consensus is a very slow way of making decisions,
and the larger the group, the slower it becomes. But Nambiquara villages
are small, and no one is in a hurry. It is possible to spend years deciding
where the village will move to, or who will marry whom and where they
will live. And consensus is an extremely egalitarian way of making deci-
sions, for everyone's opinion is important.
Now, having given the impression that the Nambiquara village is re-
markably cohesive, I must tell you that in fact, it is very fragile. The fact
that people are supposed to share, to cooperate, and to join in a consensus
does not mean that they always do so. When a hunter returns with a very
small animal, he may try to hide it and eat it by himself---as I have sug-
gested. And in other ways, people sometimes give less than one hundred
percent. For instance, a man who became known as Lazy Joe used to de-
velop a mysterious illness whenever it was time to make gardens.
When a man is consistently at odds with everyone else in the village,
the solution is very simple. He and his family pack their baskets and go
somewhere else to live. They may join some other village where they have
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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

relatives, or establish a homestead of their own. But the way the village
maintains its solidarity is by sloughing off members who are not willing to
participate in that solidarity. Apart from changes in membership that result
from birth and death, village composition changes at an average rate of
about 2% per year.

GROUP DEFINITION

The village is the only social group that the Nambiquara recognize.
They have no term with which to refer to smaller groups, such as the "fam-
ily," and they have no concept of a larger group, such as the "tribe." Even
the village group cannot be referred to abstractly, but only in relation to a
leader or an ancestor. That is, the group of villagers may be called some-
thing like "Mr. Strong's followers," or "Mr. Foot's grandchildren."
Villages are an average of about eighteen miles apart (although in the
past they must have been closer), Their location is a function of the avail-
ability of resources--water, good soil, abundant game--and what sepa-
rates them is not political boundaries, but inhospitable regions, such as
high, arid savannas or swampy regions in the jungle.
The people of each village refer to the people of surrounding commu-
nities according to notable characteristics of the areas in which they live.
Thus, there are people called "jungle people," "savanna people," "alligator
people," "fishermen," etc. But these names are not used for communities of
definite and circumscribed composition. Rather, they are used for "for-
eigners," "strangers," or "others" who live in particular directions. For ex-
ample, the people who live on the Rio Leme are called 'y6"dvnsd by their
neighbors on the Rio Trinta e Dois, whom they call kwaljs~dnd~s6. Both
the 'yd'd~ns6 and the kwalls~dndds6, as well as other people to their
north, are called hah~ind~sd by the folk who live on the Rio Galera. ,And
all of the people who live in the Guapor~ Valley are, in turn, known as
w~n~i'risd to the people who live in the Campo District. (See Figure 2.)
All these names are labels for categories of strangers. They are generic
terms for other people who are not well known. They are not names that
people use for groups to which they, themselves, belong. Since a name's
range of application depends on who uses it, the extent of the population
named is defined by the namers, not the people named.
Before contact with Western society, the Nambiquara did not see
themselves as belonging to named geopolitical groups of any kind. I began
my fieldwork among the Nambiquara by trying to make a census, going
from village to village counting the Indians and asking them what groups
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DAVID PRICE

FIGURE 2. Terms used for categories of outsiders in the Guapor~ Valley.

they belonged to. Some of the more acculturated Indians gave me answers,
but I found that many people just could not understand what I wanted to
know. And earlier visitors to the region, I found, had suffered the same
problem. Many of the terms recorded as group names by the early ex-
plorers turn out to be spurious. Maps show tribes called "people," "ene-
mies," and various kin terms. Apparently Brazilian visitors said (in Por-
tuguese), "What tribe does that man over there belong to?" and received
the answer (in Nambiquara), "My brother." Thus there came to be sup-
posed tribes named "My brother," "My father," and "My younger sibling."
Missionaries had similar problems. In the 1940s, the people on the Rio
Camararezinho became known to the members of the South America Mis-
sion as Iritua. When I talked with Indians who lived in the area, they could
not recognize the term. Finally it dawned on me that it must be a poor
transcription of l~rit~w~. The missionaries must have pestered the Indians
with requests for the name of their tribe until they responded, "Jirit6w~,"
"You may name it yourself."

LEADERSHIP

Each village has a recognized leader, but he is a man of such low

profile that there is little that would indicate, to an outsider observer, who
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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

he is. The leader does not have any authority to command his followers.
And he may or may not be able to settle disputes. He is a primus inter
pares, a "first among equals," who can, at best, attempt to persuade.
The word for "leader" is hfk~dnt'~, which means "the capable one."
This word is used, more generally, to refer to an older brother. (Since the
Nambiquara have no numbers, and cannot count, the essence of being
older is not a difference in age, but a difference in competence.) The leader
is supposed to be big and strong, and a hard worker; he is also supposed to
be wise, and to take the lead in initiating new ventures. Among children,
these are all characteristics that one expects of an older brother. Except in
rare instances, an older brother is bigger, and unless he is lazy, he can
work harder; he is also likely to be wiser, and to take the lead in doing
things. The Nambiquara continue to expect these qualities of an older
brother who has grown up to be a leader--which often happens--or at
least they expect a leader to act in a manner that would be appropriate for
an older brother.
A leader must be both a good hunter and a good gardener. I once kept
track of hunting activities in the village of Camarar6 for a period of 77
days, and found that the leader, Elijah, participated in twenty out of thirty
hunting expeditions. He killed five deer, two greater anteaters, three arma-
dillos, two monkeys, and one fox. All the other men combined (there were
fourteen of them) only managed to kill four deer, two monkeys, three pec-
cary, one tapir, one large turtle, and one iguana. During the same period,
Elijah was one of the first men to begin clearing the forest for new gardens.
A leader is expected to be generous with the game he kills and the
vegetables he grows. Children are taught to share food, and older children
are expected to be better at sharing than younger children. Thus, the ex-
pectation that a leader will be more generous than anyone else is in keep-
ing with his role as an older brother. Paradoxically, this means that the
hardest worker is the poorest man in the village. At one point I found Elijah
going naked when everyone else in Camarar6 was wearing clothes. In the
days when the Nambiquara wore nothing but feathers and beads, it was
common for the village leader to lack even these.
The expectation that a leader will be wise is in accordance with the
most basic values of Nambiquara culture. The Nambiquara have very few
material possessions, but a vast knowledge of the natural world. They
laugh at all the junk Westerners need to survi~,e in their region: hammocks,
mosquito nets, shotguns, matches, and insect repellents. In contrast, they
can live comfortably with little more than a bow and a pointed stick. They
are proud of the poverty of their material culture, and the richness of their
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immaterial culture. So it is not surprising that they want a leader to be

wise--to know many things, and to make good decisions.
Most important, a Nambiquara leader cannot be bossy. He leads by
example, not by command. If he wants people to work in the gardens, he
says, "1 think I'll go work in my garden today," and other men pick up their
axes and join him, so that they will not be thought lazy. If he said, "All
right, I want everybody to work in the gardens today," people would say, in
essence, "Just who do you think you are?" Being a leader is a hard job that
is undertaken for the good of the community, If a man is ambitious--if he
wants to be a leader to gratify his ego--no one will follow him.
In simple terms, the relationship between a Nambiquara leader and
his followers depends on influence, rather than on authority. Influence is
the ability to persuade, while authority is the culturally constituted right to
wield power. The Nambiquara leader has no authority; people do not fol-
low him because they accept his right to tell them what to do. They follow
him because he is generous, and because he makes wise decisions. In
other words, they follow him because they think it is in their own best
interests to do so. If they decide he is stupid or stingy or bossy, they may
leave the village and go elsewhere. I know of two or three cases where
men who were very anxious to become village leaders wound up living all
by themselves.
Since people only stay with a particular leader because they think it
advantageous to do so, the leader's competence defines the village group.
In principle, without the leader, the group would come apart. In fact this
does not always happen, for as a leader begins to age, and loses the ability
to be the best hunter and the hardest worker in the village, some other
man, perhaps his son, begins to take his place. But when a leader dies
suddenly, with no obvious successor, the village really may disintegrate.

INTERPRETATION

The characteristics that most distinguish Nambiquara political life are

individualism and equality.
Every society strikes a balance between the best interests of its individ-
uals and the best interests of the groups to which they belong. But the point
of balance varies; some societies favor the individual at the expense of the
group, while others favor the group at the expense of the individual. Soci-
eties such as that of the Nambiquara, where there is great personal free-
dom and groups are fragile--dependent on revocable decisions of their
426

POPULATIONAND ENVIRONMENT

members--are "individualistic." In contrast, societies in which the actions

of individuals are constrained by their membership in preexisting groups
might be called "corporate." In individualistic societies, groups exist only
because their members want them to; in corporate societies, individuals
take their identities from the groups into which they are born.
The Nambiquara are also extremely egalitarian. This is to say that
every person has an equal measure of authority--in contrast to authori-
tarian societies, where some people have an acknowledged right to com-
mand and others have the duty to obey. Among the Nambiquara, every
man--and to a large extent, every woman--gets to participate in the mak-
ing of important decisions. This egalitarian distribution of power goes to-
gether with--and is really implied by--individualism. Where every indi-
vidual can choose whether to stay in a group or leave it, power must be
evenly distributed.
Why is Nambiquara society individualistic and egalitarian? At least
three different reasons might be proposed. First, it might be claimed that
the Nambiquara represent a rather primitive stage of human evolution, in
which the institutions of complex society have not yet developed. This is
unacceptable because it is judgmental--it assumes that our own form of
society is manifestly superior to that of the Nambiquara--which is debata-
ble-and, moreover, it fails to specify the conditions under which the sup-
posedly more advanced form of society will develop, and the absence of
which have kept it from developing among the Nambiquara.
Second, we might propose--as did the French anthropologist, Pierre
Clastres (1974)--that the members of egalitarian societies understand au-
thoritarian rule, but reject it. "The history of peoples without history,"
Clastres wrote, "is the history of their struggle against the state." In other
words, the members of egalitarian societies have retained their freedom
through the ages by maintaining eternal vigilance against the rise of author-
itarian leaders. This formulation must also be rejected, even though it de-
rives from a much more appealing prejudice--the author's attachment to
the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
I prefer an explanation that sees Nambiquara social organization not
as merely primitive, nor as a social ideal, but as a successful adaptation to
what the Nambiquara environment has to offer.
Observers who have been impressed by the relative poverty of Nambi-
quara material culture failed to notice that, from the Nambiquara point of
view, resources were really quite abundant. The population density was
very low, and a rather simple technology was quite sufficient to provide the
Nambiquara with an ample livelihood. I had the good fortune to live in the
Sarar~ Valley before Brazilians with shotguns and rifles began competing
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with the Indians on a serious basis, and the men were able to kill so much
game with bows and arrows that on some occasions the meat spoiled be-
fore they could eat it all.
The low density of Nambiquara population can be understood in the
light of historical evidence. It seems clear that much of the region they now
inhabit belonged to a neighboring people, the Pareci, at the beginning of
the 1700s. The Pareci were numerous, peaceful, and hard-working; and
they lived in large villages in the open savanna, which could easily be
raided by men on horseback. They were repeatedly raided by slaving expe-
ditions from S~o Paulo, and by the end of the eighteenth century they had
virtually been wiped out. Then, during the nineteenth century, slaving
stopped and the frontier stabilized. At this time, the Nambiquara spread
south and east, into vacant lands that had formerly belonged to the Pareci.
A glance at the map shows how they interposed themselves between the sur-
viving Pareci and other groups that spoke the same language (see Figure 3).
Given the low density of the Nambiquara population and the fact that
the Nambiquara were moving into land that was virtually unoccupied, the
resources they needed to sustain their way of life were very plentiful. These
resources were scattered, but more than sufficient for a small population.
Under these circumstances, an individualistic, egalitarian society, with
small groups going off in all directions, was highly adaptive. Such groups

FIGURE 3. The Nambiquara in relation to speakers of the Pareci language.

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POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT

could not be expected to respond rapidly nor present a united front in the
face of a threat, but with virtually no competition for resources, there were
few challenges to be met.
What about the corollary? If a lack of competition for resources results
in individualistic, egalitarian political organization, is it also true that in-
tense competition for resources results in corporate, authoritarian political
organization? I think it may. Large, tightly-knit groups can use strength of
numbers to defend their own resources or appropriate those of other
groups, while guaranteeing a share to all their members. Larger groups
require more elaborate corporate organization, and rapid mobilization re-
quires authoritarian leadership.
Thus, as a general rule, we would expect individualistic, egalitarian
forms of organization where population is sparse and resources are plenti-
ful; and corporate, authoritarian forms of organization where population is
dense and resources are scarce. Generalizing to the modern world, one
might suggest that what we call freedom and democracy depend, ulti-
mately, on the amount of resources available per capita. It is noteworthy
that American society, in which these values are so deeply cherished, has a
history that is strikingly parallel to that of the Nambiquara. For more than a
century, and at precisely the same time, both societies were expanding into
sparsely occupied territory.
Frederick Jackson Turner ([189311938) attributed the rise of individual-
ism and democracy in the United States to the influence of the frontier,
with its promise of free land and a better life for everyone, somewhere just
a bit further west. William Graham Sumner (1913) made it clear that the
importance of the frontier was not in its wide open spaces, but its abun-
dance of resources. He pointed out that it was easy for Americans to aban-
don class distinctions and commit themselves to the doctrine that all men
should have an equal opportunity in life when there was a whole continent
out there, underpopulated and waiting for the plow. He suggested that
even the rise of democracy in Europe was abetted by the New World,
which provided both a supply of excess resources and a sink for excess
population.
While there are profound differences between the political organiza-
tion of the Nambiquara and that of a modern nation such as the United
States, it seems clear that the fundamental character of political institutions
is, in both cases, shaped by abundance. Little government is needed to
maintain public order when most people are relatively prosperous, for
prosperous people do not challenge the status quo. They are willing to
accept strong leadership when it is necessary for their defense, but they
dislike any government that interferes with their personal freedom. In fact,
they are willing to tolerate governments that are really quite ineffectual.
 429

DAVID PRICE

Of course, periods when relatively egalitarian institutions prevail can

exist only fleetingly. Institutions predicated on freedom and equality re-
quire a sparse population with a surfeit of resources. But the abundance of
resources that favors such institutions also promotes population growth,
and greater population density favors institutions that maintain more rig-
orous social control. Democracy is a consequence of abundant resources,
and without abundant resources, democracy cannot long endure.

NOTE

This paper was presented as a Resident Associate Lecture at the

Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, on December 14, 1989. It is
drawn, in large part, from four earlier publications (Price, 1981, 1983,
1985, and 1987). I have made slight modifications for its appearance in
print.

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