Hierarchical society: The Yukuna story¹

This article is a reworked and extended version of a paper presented at a workshop on new theory in social anthropology at the University of Oslo, June 1989. My fieldwork among the Yukuna Indians of Colombia was financed by a research fellowship from NAVF (Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities), and was carried out in cooperation with Carla Matallana Laverde.

The theory on hierarchy and value developed by Louis Dumont and his students is here tried out on the society and culture of the Yukuna Indians of Colombian Amazonas. It is shown that this society can easily by analyzed to fit the Dumontian model of a hierarchical order, but the notion that such an order can be anchored to an “ultimate value” is criticized. Rather than stressing the “pre‐modern” aspects of hierarchies, it is argued that the cognitive functions implied are expressive of how the construction of all ideology may rely on the less than strictly logical aspects of human thinking. It is suggested that the dichotomy of the “modern” and “pre‐modern” may itself be an ideological construction.

Notes

This article is a reworked and extended version of a paper presented at a workshop on new theory in social anthropology at the University of Oslo, June 1989. My fieldwork among the Yukuna Indians of Colombia was financed by a research fellowship from NAVF (Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities), and was carried out in cooperation with Carla Matallana Laverde.