The Tsimane
The Tsimane are an Amazonian forager-horticulturalist group inhabiting a vast area of lowland forests and savannas east of the Andes in the Beni department of Bolivia. Roughly 6,000 Tsimane live in about sixty villages settled along the banks of the Maniqui River, while an additional 1,000 live in the Pilon Lajas region and in interior villages between San Borja and San Ignacio de Mojos.
The Tsimane economy is based on small-scale cultivation of plantains, rice, corn, and sweet manioc, as well as fishing, hunting, and gathering wild forest products. Each adult, or husband-wife pair maintains their own horticultural fields, although farm labor is often shared among members of households, which generally consist of one to four nuclear families. Households are also the units of food distribution, although it is not uncommon for portions of fish and game to be distributed to other nearby unrelated households. While the distribution of raw foods is limited relative to that encountered among many foragers, requests of cooked foodstuffs are not uncommon, and are rarely denied. The Tsimane employ both solitary and group fishing activities, especially during the dry season months from May to October. They use hooks (purchased in San Borja or from upstream merchants), bow and arrow, poisonous vines, and occasionally nets, if available. The Tsimane hunt mainly with the use of rifles or shotguns, sometimes with the use of tracking dogs, and with machetes. However, the use of bow and arrow is not uncommon, especially when ammunition is not available.
The average number of individuals living in a Tsimane village along the Maniqui River is 93, with about half of all villages containing fewer than 50 people (PRODESIB, 1997). Villages vary in the extent to which family clusters are dispersed or clustered, although in general, direct interactions with most group members on a daily basis are fairly common. High levels of visiting and sharing among members of different households are usually associated with beer consumption. Huge vats of fermented manioc, corn, or plantains always attract visitors from other household clusters and even other villages.
Although the Tsimane were exposed to Jesuit missionaries in the late 17th century, they were never successfully settled in missions. New mission posts in several different villages only began in the 1950s, with an increasing influence of missionaries and other outsiders on the Tsimane lifeway (Chicch´on, 1992). The greatest influence of the twenty year-old New Tribes Mission was to create a system of bilingual schools with trained Tsimane' teachers and an elected village chief in each of the villages downstream from the Catholic mission, F´atima. Indeed, three of the four villages with over 200 individuals contain either a Catholic Redemptorist or Evangelical New Tribes mission.
(from Gurven, 2004. Economic Games Among the Amazonian Tsimane: Exploring the Roles of Market Access, Costs of Giving, and Cooperation on Pro-Social Game Behavior. Experimental Economics, 7:5-24.)
full image (172 KB); map design: Eric Schniter
