Rain Forest Exchanges: Industry and Community on an Amazonian Frontier (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry)

In Rain Forest Exchanges, William Fisher contends that efforts to encourage conservation and sustainable practices among indigenous Amazonian groups remain problematic unless the dynamics of each group's social and economic organization are recognized. He looks specifically at the Xikrin Kayapo of Brazil and the ways in which their subsistence practices, notions of barter or sale, and social status systems have been shaped by decades of life on a boom-bust frontier and increasing reliance on outside trade goods.