Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

located the district offices and the only hospital and police station in the South
Rupununi. A secondary school was opened in this village in 1999, but although the
provision of secondary education in the area is welcomed the headmaster has
complained about a chronic shortage of appropriately trained staff. Karaudanawa to
the west is situated on the upper reaches of the Rupununi river, and Achiwuib lies still
further west, its reservation boundary abutting the Brazilian border. Several smaller
settlements are administered by these villages, and villagers of both Achiwuib and
Karaudanawa have established separate farming settlements to the south of the
villages, close to the forest-savannah boundary, as the farming areas are at
considerable distances from the villages themselves.
Wapishana settlement in Guyana thus encompasses almost the entire forest-
savannah boundary in the South Rupununi, and the range of habitat types found
within this. Analysis of changes in the forest-savannah boundary over the period
1952-1983 shows it to have remained stable over time, despite increases in
population and permanence of settlements and hence apparent agricultural
intensification. In fact, in one uncultivated area north of Shea the forest appears to
be advancing into the savannah (Eden 1986). Preliminary research findings based on
a study of genetic variation of bird species across savannah-forest ecotones in
Cameroon suggest that such transitional habitats may be of great importance in
generating biodiversity over evolutionary time-scales, via the promotion of
intraspecific genetic diversity and hence speciation events (Smith et al. 1997).
Should these findings be confirmed, and should they also apply to such habitats in
South America, this would have great implications for the conservation importance of
the area occupied by the Wapishana in Guyana. As a major part of an ecotone of the
world’s largest intact area of tropical forest, it would represent an area whose
biodiversity is of global importance. Human use of and effects upon this habitat is
thus a subject of key interest to those concerned with global conservation, and
comprises the subject matter of the next chapter.
3.2.4 Maruranau as an example of a modern Wapishana village
The major site of field research in this study was Maruranau village, which was
founded in 1922 after converts of Fr. Cary-Elwes resident in the village of
Sawaramanirnao decided to relocate to a previously uninhabited site on the banks of
Marora wa'o creek, owing to a shortage of water at the former location. Work started
on the church in 1922, and Cary-Elwes reported the village to have relocated
following its completion by the time of his visit in 1923 (Bridges 1985: 146, 158,