Akawaio - Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The Akawaio are slash-and-burn cultivators, and they hunt, fish, and gather as well. The staple is cassava bread made from bitter manioc, accompanying a meat or fish stew seasoned with chili peppers. They make a great variety of drinks of low alcoholic content. Crops include bananas, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, yams, taro, cotton, gourds, and calabashes. They hunt deer, peccaries, tapir, agoutis, pacas ( Cuniculus paca ) and birds, traditionally using bows and arrows and blowpipes, but today shotguns. Fish in the upper Mazaruni are small and scarce. They are obtained with hook and line, fish poison, and dams with basket traps. A cash economy began in 1946 with the sale of balata (a latex from Manilkara bidentata), surplus garden produce, and timber products. Gold and diamond mining, often full time, steadily developed from the 1960s. There is an increasing dependence on imports and a loss of self-sufficiency. Alcoholism, family alienation and break-up, prostitution, neglect of the elderly, shortages of food, and impoverished village life are negative aspects of free-lance mining.

Industrial Arts. Men make houses, boats, hunting and fishing equipment, cords, ropes, baskets, storage racks, wooden stools, and simple furniture. Women spin cotton, weave hammocks and baby slings, bead aprons, and make clay bowls and pots.

Trade. A traditional network of exchange relationships links the Akawaio with their neighbors and, via these, to more distant Amerindian groups. Notably, they obtain Yecuana cassava graters, blowpipes, and quivers; brewing pots from the Patomona; and curare from the Piaroa. They traveled to the coast to work and barter for metal tools, utensils, cloth, beads, guns, salt, and a great variety of exotic goods, which they also traded in the traditional network.

Division of Labor. A married couple is expected to be able to perform all necessary daily tasks and manufacture most equipment necessary to sustain themselves and their family. Work is strongly sex orientated and complementary, with some overlap and mutual assistance. Men cut and burn new gardens; women plant, tend, and harvest. Men hunt, fish, and engage in long-distance trade; women fetch firewood and water, care for the home and young children, and prepare and serve food and drink. Men are basket- and woodworkers; women work cotton and are potters. Men go mining and women engage in domestic work. Educated Akawaio of either sex take government employment as teachers and health workers.

Land Tenure. Members of a village and its surrounding settlements have a collective right to use of the land and resources of the neighborhood. Others use them only in collaboration or by paying. Vacant areas between villages, used for long-distance hunting and gathering, ensure that conflicting claims are rare. There is acute awareness of the need for a legal title to communal lands, but the government of Guyana intends to construct a hydroelectric dam that would render the upper Mazaruni uninhabitable. Coastal miners have increasingly worked in the area since 1959, but Akawaio believe that the resources of their ancestral land should be exploited only by Akawaio.