THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

3. The surprise which some anthropologists as well as human ecologists
experience on realising that land is used for other than basic
subsistence is exemplifled in a section of Cowell's The Tribe that Hides
from Man, where he describes himself and three colleagues in a sma!l
plane searching for signs of the Kreen-Akrore Indian tribe in Brazil
from a small plane over the Amazon jungle:
Gradually we began to make out a faint crease in the
jungle, Then, with agonising slowness, i t grew into a wall of
trees. There was a sudden flash of emerald. In the dark green
of the jungle, this light green shone almost like neon.
"Fantastic!" Claudio shouted. "An astonishing thing,"
The ' plane veered round, and we pi 1 ed on top of each other,
staring out of the window.
"Never, never has there been anything 1 i ke this. The
anthropologists will run to see it."
We were looking down on a smooth, ordered pat tern of geometric
gardening. There were circles and ellipses, bisected and sub-
divided, Even the Parque's relative!^ sophisticated Indians,
using steel axes and steel machetes, leave ragged holes in the
jungle when they cut plantations. It is too much trouble to
move the trees from where they fall; they scatter their crops
between the stumps, and so their plantations look disorganised
and shabby,
What we were looking at now was - for Amazonia - indeed
fantastic, as Claudio had said. We flew backwards and
forwards, staring at the sight below. The outer rings
consisted of single rows of banana trees, in beautiful curves
and circles. The crosses and double avenues were straight
lines of maize, looking like paths over lawns of grass, It
was as i f we had st umb 1 ed on a Versa i 1 1 es.
"It can't be grass," said Claudio. "They must be
potatoes.'
But what purpose could the patterns serve? And why had
they bothered to remove the fallen trunks and cut the stumps?
With stone axes it would have been a Homeric task (1974: 121-
2),
4, There has been little discussion of the meaning implied in the much-
used terms 'garden' and 'gardening' in the anthropo!ogical 1 i tera ture,
A key difference between 'gardens' and other forms of horticulture
viewed cross-culturally would appear to be an aesthetic sense which is
applied to gardening work in excess of the utilitarian, subsistence
needs of the people concerned. Malinowski (1922: 58-59, 61) suggests
that the "praise and renown" a gardener will earn from the size and
quality of his harvest can explain such non-uti!itarian behaviour, It
seems to me, however, that while social status might be significant in
certain arenas, the aesthetic urge could in many cases be taken as
sufficient explanation in itself.
5. There was quite a c:ontrast between the vegetable patch Tamara and I
tried to ?!ant with neat, ordered rows, and the higgledy-piggledy
lushness of the Yakha house fields. Our crops were systematica!ly
decimated by a bewildering array of crop pests within weeks! People we