Piaroa

Anagoria, "Piaroa Indian at work, Venezuela," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaroa_people#/media/File:Piaroa_Indianer.JPG

With a population of around 14,000, the egalitarian Huottüją or De'aruhua people live in and around the tropical forests around Venezuela's Orinoco River. They were formerly shifting cultivators but now mostly live in permanent villages. They're often known to outsiders as the "Piaroa," a name of unknown and perhaps Latin origin.

As of 2013, threats to their society included mining and Colombia's FARC guerillas.

Members of the Huottüją/De'aruhua run the Huottüją Foundation which invites global support for protecting their culture and ecosystem:

"Now you too can help us become better known, before the bulldozers arrive and wipe out one of the last safe-harbors of biodiversity, indigeneity and nature; or before they can exterminate our 3,000 years of self-governance and autonomy which are being adapted now, presently, to serve our ends before they are upended."

The block quotes in this article mainly come from the Peaceful Societies's page: [2].

Culture

"The Piaroa place a very high value on personal autonomy, informal social life, and tranquil interpersonal relationships. They constantly proclaim the right of the individual to choose how to do things, and they would not comment negatively on decisions of others regarding their work, food choices, sexual habits, or residence. Decisions as to where a married couple should live are made based on their perceptions of what is right and best. The work of the day is loosely organized according to individual choices and moods—no one feels compelled to do things. Social values that promote individuals, such as personal industry, talent, ambition, and courage are discouraged."

"The Piaroa view competition as leading to cannibalism. They feel that competition over resources and over the power to transform the resources of the earth into human goods is the primary force producing human violence. They believe their political process should reject competition and the ownership and control of resources. In fact, however, their political leaders do compete for position, especially by making strategic marriage alliances."

Gender Relations

"The Piaroa believe that the ideal meal is composed of meat and manioc bread, the product of a man’s hunting and a woman’s garden. Their ideal for both men and women is tranquility and control—a mastery of the emotions. They are quite strongly egalitarian and supportive of individual autonomy."

Communal leaders are invariably male, but ethnographer Joanna Overing insists there's no "male dominance."

Religion

"The Piaroa believe in a violently creative mythic past when their gods achieved material and technological prosperity only through competition, violence, greed, arrogance, and lust, traits that, they believe, poisoned peaceful relations within and between communities. Their present society fosters its creativity by controlling that mythic period and by focusing on individuals who live peacefully together—the antidote to those past excesses of wanton wildness. Their communities, in fact, are almost completely peaceful, but they still face the threatened violence of their mythic past. In order to control that violence, the shaman chants every night and blows his words into water and honey which, consumed the next morning by adults and children, will keep them safe for another day. The Piaroa shamans also consume several psychoactive drugs for several purposes, including an anti-depressant that helps keep the people peaceful."

The Piaroa, a highly egalitarian society living along tributaries of the Orinoco which ethnographer Joanna Overing herself describes as anarchists. They place enormous value on individual freedom and autonomy, and are quite self-conscious about the importance of ensuring that no one is ever at another person’s orders, or the need to ensure no one gains such control over economic resources that they can use it to constrain others’ freedom. Yet they also insist that Piaroa culture itself was the creation of an evil god, a two-headed cannibalistic buffoon. The Piaroa have developed a moral philosophy which defines the human condition as caught between a “world of the senses,” of wild, pre-social desires, and a “world of thought.” Growing up involves learning to control and channel in the former through thoughtful consideration for others, and the cultivation of a sense of humor; but this is made infinitely more difficult by the fact that all forms of technical knowledge, however necessary for life are, due to their origins, laced with elements of destructive madness. Similarly, while the Piaroa are famous for their peaceableness—murder is unheard of, the assumption being that anyone who killed another human being would be instantly consumed by pollution and die horribly—they inhabit a cosmos of endless invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and have to be avenged by the magical massacre of whole (distant, unknown) communities.

Economy

The Piaroa used to subsist on shifting cultivation, fishing, hunting, gathering and trading craft products, but in recent decades their economy has grown more complex. They now live in more stable settlements where they accept modernizing trends, grow crops in permanent gardens, raise livestock, earn money through wage labor, buy modern consumer goods, and get educations so they can become nurses, teachers, or other professionals. Some Piaroa who live near enough to the Amazonas State capital, Puerto Ayacucho, take produce and goods into the city to sell on market days...

The produce of the forest is shared by all the members of the multi-family houses in which they live, but the products from gardens are owned individually by the people who grow them. Individuals are free to choose how much they wish to be part of any collective activity—there is no coercion in their society, which has no authority over people. While the concept of a collective will is foreign to them, the Piaroa highly value social skills and the ability to live together in a community. The Huarime festivals held in Piaroa communities emphasize the importance of sharing in their society.

Environment

"A news story in 2012 reported how one Piaroa community is trying to prevent forest fragmentation, minimize soil erosion, preserve river banks, support the use of indigenous crops, and help retain traditional land use practices."

Crime

"The Piaroa maintain their peacefulness by the use of healing therapy rather than by imposing authority systems, civil laws or criminal laws. Their ideology completely forbids any physical coercion or violence. They feel they have abolished the use of coercion by eliminating the ownership of material resources and the control over other people’s labor... Joanna Overing, an anthropologist who has written extensively about the Piaroa, wrote in 1986 (p.88) that, “Piaroaland is a place almost totally free of all forms of physical violence, where children, teenagers, and adults alike never express their anger through physical means.”

As noted above, murder is "unheard of."

Neighboring Societies

"Their prohibition against killing includes not only people within their own territories but also outsiders. The Piaroa have had a mostly peaceful history of relations with their neighboring societies."