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

162). Extensive changes in the overall settlement pattern appear to have occurred
since that time.
Figure 3.4. Village map of Maruranau
Present-day residents recall when settlements were mostly dispersed along the
forest-savannah boundary, and archaeobotanical evidence of this is still visible in the
form of fruit trees planted at these sites. The present-day settlement pattern in
Maruranau is fairly typical, consisting of a number of small hamlets fairly widely
dispersed around the village centre, on the savannah several miles from the edge of
the forest. Hamlets mostly correspond to various developmental stages of the basic
unit of residence among Amerindians of the Guiana shield described by Riviere (1984:
15-41). As such, they range from single households occupied by a recently married
couple, or at the other end of the scale, by an old widow or widower, to clusters of
several closely related households representing three (in some cases four)
generations of an extended family.
The traditional pattern of cross-cousin marriage is explicitly recalled by few
people, but remains encoded in kinship terminology. This is also apparent in the
manner in which kinship referents are often used in English: Wapishana speakers will
regularly confound and use interchangeably the terms 'uncle' and 'father-in-law',
'aunt' and 'mother-in-law', 'brother-in-law' or 'sister-in-law' and 'cousin'. Cross-cousin
marriages are nowadays very rare, as people tend to marry more in accordance with
Christian than Wapishana custom, and were strongly discouraged in the earliest days