Reciprocity as principled argument: The ethics of human-nature interactions for the Letuama

Abstract

Every culture has a system of beliefs that guides their interaction with nature. The literature suggests that indigenous communities rely heavily on the pursuance of an ideal of natural justice, which leads them to have a balanced relationship with nature. In this paper we seek to deepen the understanding of indigenous people's concept of natural justice and morality systems guiding their interaction with nature. An exploratory case study was conducted in which we gathered qualitative data through in-depth interviews and participant observation in a Letuama village from the Colombian Amazon. We conducted a grounded analysis of the data in search for subjective moral norms guiding environmental behavior. The six basic principles that emerged recurrently were: Economy, Reciprocity, Antagonism, Cleverness, Parallelism, and Tradition, with Reciprocity being common across all other categories. We found enough evidence to suggest that among the Letuama, Reciprocity is a culturally rooted moral principle acquired through the socialization process that strongly drives their human-nature as well as their social relationships. Some implications for future research and current theories are discussed.

Full text

36 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004
© Society for Human Ecology
Abstract
Every culture has a system of beliefs that guides their
interaction with nature. The literature suggests that indige-
nous communities rely heavily on the pursuance of an ideal
of natural justice, which leads them to have a balanced rela-
tionship with nature. In this paper we seek to deepen the
understanding of indigenous people’s concept of natural jus-
tice and morality systems guiding their interaction with
nature. An exploratory case study was conducted in which
we gathered qualitative data through in-depth interviews and
participant observation in a Letuama village from the
Colombian Amazon. We conducted a grounded analysis of
the data in search for subjective moral norms guiding envi-
ronmental behavior. The six basic principles that emerged
recurrently were: Economy, Reciprocity, Antagonism,
Cleverness, Parallelism, and Tradition, with Reciprocity
being common across all other categories. We found enough
evidence to suggest that among the Letuama, Reciprocity is a
culturally rooted moral principle acquired through the
socialization process that strongly drives their human-nature
as well as their social relationships. Some implications for
future research and current theories are discussed.
Keywords: morality towards nature, indigenous commu-
nities, Amazon region, Colombia, Letuama people, natural
justice, justice conceptions, reciprocity, ethics
Introduction
The human relationship with nature is guided, at a psy-
chological level, by our conceptions about what nature is, and
how we view ourselves in respect to it. Among the most
influential mental representations of the natural world are
moral beliefs about the correctness and incorrectness of our
actions toward it. Moreover, we define moral beliefs not only
in terms of humans’ judgments about their actions toward
nature but also in terms of judgments about the way nature
acts and reacts to them.
An ideal of “natural justice” or “fairness toward (and
from) the natural world,” although critical for the first human
groups that inhabited the earth, is not a prevailing value any-
more in most contemporary western cultures. This is proba-
bly due to the fact that people in developed nations see them-
selves as separate from nature due to urbanization and indus-
trialization and to the fact that most western cultures empha-
size the cultural value of dominance over nature (Kluckhohn
1953; Altman and Chemers 1984). We recognize that all
societies have contact with the natural world in one way or
another (e.g., exposure to weather, water, air, living species)
but conceptually,if not practically, western societies seem to
have virtually abandoned it because their well being does not
appear to depend directly on those resources. Indigenous
groups, in turn, are more dependent on the natural world than
most western groups because they derive their main needs
such as shelter, food, and spiritual well being directly from
plant and animal resources.
This idea leads us to hypothesize that, in cultures with a
close contact with nature, the pursuance of justice with
respect to the natural world still plays a vital role in defining
individual and collective beliefs about, and behaviors toward,
nature. If this were true, then, we would anticipate that in
such contexts these kinds of justice beliefs might be powerful
forces in determining the community’s social actions and its
individuals’ behaviors.
A brief review of the concept of natural justice takes us
to the context of law, where it is defined as the basic under-
lying principle upon which the world punishes criminal
behavior within communities, societies and the environment
(Rodger 1985). Furthermore, natural justice is presented as a
concept of essential justice. That is, it describes the baseline
for determining normality and abnormality in the social con-
text according to the natural occurrence of behaviors, and to
responses to those behaviors (for a discussion of this see
Fabunmi 1974). In these definitions, the concept of “natural”
means “inherent” and is applied to describe the baseline of a
justice system founded in our ethical understanding of human
actions. Although these definitions may seem quite distant
Research in Human Ecology
Reciprocity as Principled Argument:
The Ethics of Human-Nature Interactions for the Letuama
Sergio Cristancho1and Joanne Vining2
Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences
University of Illinois
Urbana, IL 61801
USA

Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004 37
from our reference to “natural justice” as the justice frame-
work within which human-nature interactions occur, they
provide us with a background of the concept and shows us the
potential breadth of the concept.
Moral beliefs about the natural environment are devel-
oped, in a phylogenetic or evolutionary sense, as an adaptive
response to the characteristics and demands of the different
environments humans have inhabited. The resulting “ecolog-
ical” moral beliefs are then passed from one generation to
another through the socialization process. Hence, both the
moral principles and the mechanisms of cultural transmission
of those norms are the result of complex processes of human-
nature and social interactions that vary geographically, his-
torically and culturally. In a human’s individual development
(or ontogenetically), ecological morality appears and devel-
ops along with the social morality that children acquire.
We will explore first whether the concept of natural jus-
tice has been suggested by other studies conducted among
indigenous communities in Latin America and other regions
of the world. Then, we will explore whether the pursuance of
a natural justice ideal is a cultural value/goal among the
Letuama people from the Colombian Amazon, and on what
principles their ecological morality is based.
The Meaning of Nature
In western culture the concept of nature describes sev-
eral things. Ellen (1996) argues that nature first means a
“thing,” that is, the non-human aspects of the world. Second,
it means an “other,” or in other words, all that exists “out
there.” Third, nature refers to an “essence” that can be either
human (e.g., the nature of humans is very complex) or situa-
tional (e.g., the nature of those acts is based on altruism). In
other cultures these definitions may vary (MacCormack and
Strathern 1980). However, as a starting point we will take
nature as the two former definitions and, consequently, the
concept of natural justice should be derived from these defi-
nitions of nature.
Nature and Justice
Researchers have linked these two constructs through a
variety of angles. The most common concept that links both
constructs is environmental justice. This concept addresses
the question of the equality or inequality of the distribution of
environmental resources and threats among different social
groups. However, when we think about natural justice in a
psychological context, this concept remains inadequate to
address how nature and justice are linked in an individual’s
mind. Opotow and Clayton used the concept of green justice
to describe individual beliefs of fairness toward the natural
world. They argue that green justice consists of “justice
beliefs that shape our behavior toward the natural features of
the environment such as forests, wetlands, animal species,
and such widely-shared common resources as water and
air”(1994, 1). A person’s justice beliefs are intrinsically
related to her morality (Kohlberg 1981). Therefore, they are
expected to shape both her attitudes and her behaviors toward
nature.
The notion of a natural justice system emerges from reli-
gious and philosophical beliefs about how we see ourselves
with respect to nature. Kluckhohn’s (1953) analysis provides
one of the most noted descriptions of the philosophical prin-
ciples that govern our relationship with nature. He claimed
that humans think of themselves as being 1) subjugated to
nature, 2) an inherent part of nature, or 3) separate from
nature. Each of these views shapes a particular natural jus-
tice belief and thus a distinct moral stance toward nature.
Some cultures emphasize their submissiveness to nature and
would tend to adopt a morality of divinity. Others emphasize
their harmonious relationship with nature and would tend to
adopt a morality of caring. Still others emphasize their con-
trol over nature and would tend to adopt a morality of justice
(Miller 1997; Shweder et al. 1997).
In the context of ecological anthropology (e.g.,
Rappaport 1979; Moran 1990; Biersack 1999), indigenous
communities have traditionally been described as seeing
themselves as an inherent part of nature (see also Escobar
1999). Therefore, we would expect that they tend to adopt a
morality of caring, which implies that they act toward nature
on the basis of duty.
At this point it is important to make clear that one of our
purposes here is to evaluate moral tendencies as they are
“subjectivized” in individuals who belong to an indigenous
culture. Rappaport (1979) argues that our image of nature is
culturally constructed so that there may be a discrepancy
between the cultural image of nature and the actual organiza-
tion of nature. Ingold (1996) uses the same distinction, refer-
ring to it as the two versions of nature: the really natural
nature and the culturally perceived nature. Even though this
distinction might be useful for making sense of the incoher-
ence humans sometimes have between beliefs and behaviors
toward nature, it seems to be strongly shaped by the Cartesian
notion of separation between subject and matter that has been
seriously criticized by post-structuralist and post-modern
philosophers. For the purpose of this paper, when discussing
about nature and natural justice we will use the second of
Ingold’s conceptualizations; culturally perceived nature.
Ecological Worldviews of Amazon Indigenous People
Several studies that attempt to relate cosmological
beliefs to indigenous peoples’ relationship with nature have
been conducted with the Oriental-Tukano and Arawak
descendant groups in the Colombian Amazon (e.g., Reichel-
Cristancho and Vining

38 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004
Dolmatoff 1982; Hugh-Jones 1979; Von Hildebrand 1987;
Reichel 1987; Van der Hammen 1996). These studies have
focused mainly on the impacts of ethnoastronomic beliefs on
human ecological and social behaviors. With these studies
we are able to better understand the symbolism that these
groups attach to stars, constellations, animals, plants, and
forest sites that somehow model their actual behaviors.
However, there seems to be a gap in the explanation of how
ethnoastronomic beliefs are turned into such behaviors,
which is a psychological question. We suggest that cosmo-
logical values are turned into moral principles and that these
moral principles are then turned into ecological and social
behavioral patterns that the indigenous people must follow in
order to thrive.
Morality principles consistent with the search for an
ideal of natural justice, although not mentioned explicitly, are
suggested by most ethnographies conducted among contem-
porary native groups from the Colombian Amazon. These
include those developed among the Letuama (Palma 1984);
the Uitoto (Candre and Echeverri 1996); the Barasana and
Desana (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1996, 1997); the Tanimuka or
Ufaina (Von Hildebrand 1987); and the Yukuna-Matapi
(Reichel 1987; Van der Hammen 1996). For groups such as
the Makuna from the Apaporis region, for example,
humankind is seen as a “particular form of life participating
in a wider community of living beings regulated by a single
and totalizing set of rules of conduct” (Århem 1996, 185).
The idea of reciprocity, which we define as the mutual depen-
dence and commitment between humans and nature, has been
traditionally seen as one of the most central rules of conduct
that guide indigenous peoples’ interactions with the environ-
ment. If this were true, then, the idea of reciprocity would
appear constantly in the specific norms that guide their
behaviors towards nature and in their expectations in regard
to how nature would affect them. At the most basic level,
humans give something to nature in order to receive some-
thing they need from it. This conception of humans exchang-
ing goods with the natural world to keep equilibrium seems
to be shared by many indigenous groups but we lack the
knowledge as to how indigenous people cognitively represent
the processes that lie behind reciprocity.
Another question is how these norms are acquired.
Rappaport (1979) argues that participation in rituals entails
obligation and that it is through these obligations that moral
standards (such as the idea of reciprocity) emerge in human
beings. Consistent with Rappaport, Georgas (1993) argues
that the concept of justice may be more likely to be shaped by
local cues than by abstract cognitive categorizations or con-
cepts. For example, he argues that perceptions of justice and
fairness among indigenous peoples in Greece are shaped by
the community whereas “laws and the judicial system are
sometimes perceived as hostile inventions of the central gov-
ernment”(1993, 68). It is likely then that local communities
pay more attention to local rituals and to their most immedi-
ate leaders’ behaviors and prescriptions than to a set of exter-
nal rules for shaping their moral beliefs.
A previous study on the psychological representations of
nature and human-nature interactions in a Letuama commu-
nity from Northwest Amazonia (Cristancho 2001) used a
grounded approach to identify the most relevant themes in
their interactions with nature. The themes were cosmology,
nature’s essence, ecological calendar, organization of nature,
natural justice, and nature care taking. From the six themes
identified, natural justice was suggested as perhaps the most
significant one as it permeated all the other themes. We want
to pursue that finding due to its apparent cultural centrality to
the Letuama.
In sum, we believe that the search for natural justice
should be approached as a psychological process that
involves essential cognitions and moral beliefs. Our assump-
tions include that this process takes place in the individual’s
as well as in the community’s shared system of beliefs.
Moreover, the process is dynamic in the sense that it may
change over time due to normal variances across individuals
and as a result of cultural transformation. We also believe
that culture affects individuals’ representations and those
individual representations, in turn, affect culture in a process
of permanent and mutual reconstruction. Our next purposes
are to examine whether the search for natural justice as a pre-
vailing cultural value/goal exists in the contemporary
Letuama culture, to examine the moral principles that guide
their behavior toward nature, and to determine the actors and
dynamics associated to such moral principles.
Method
In the framework of a qualitative cultural psychological
methodology (Ratner 1997) we used participant observation
and in-depth interviews to collect information regarding nat-
ural justice. Although the presence of outsiders will always
have both desirable and undesirable impacts in any commu-
nity, we took measures to minimize it. These included ask-
ing the community members to define the type of participa-
tion expected from the researcher who conducted the inter-
views, ensuring that he adhered to community norms and
lifestyle, ensuring his responsiveness to requests made by the
community (e.g., to help procure medicines, physical check-
ups by a physician, workshops on health policy, and facilitat-
ing local projects). By arrangement with the headman, who
was concerned that modern devices could alter their tradi-
tional cultural practices or thought, we also endeavored not to
leave western devices behind.
Cristancho and Vining

Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004 39
The Letuama culture comprises about 200 members of
two indigenous communities located in the upper Mirití-
Paraná River basin, Northwestern Amazon in Colombia. We
selected this group because it is one of the less acculturated
native groups in the zone. They also willingly accepted the
first author’s presence during the fieldwork period due to
their familiarity with his health services work in their com-
munity from 1996 to 1999. Letuama traditions reflect to a
great extent the richness of their cultural past, something that
is unusual to find in other neighboring communities that have
been transformed considerably through their contact with
western colonizers. The distance and the geographical barri-
ers that make travel into the community quite difficult have
played a major role in keeping much of their culture intact.
Moreover, Letuama people live in the midst of the Amazon
rainforest, potentially providing us with an idea of how close-
ness to nature leads a culture to develop mental representa-
tions of human-nature interactions that have been crucial for
both their daily life and their long-term successful environ-
mental adaptation.
Setting
About 200 Letuama are settled in two small independent
villages known as Oiyacá and Paromena. The former, where
this study was conducted, has a population of 115 people set-
tled beside the upper portion of the Oiyacá stream between
the Mirití-Paraná and the Apaporis rivers in a very remote vil-
lage. This territory belongs to the Mirití-Paraná Indigenous
Preserve (see Figure 1) constituted legally in the 1980s. Its
territorial extension is 6,500,000 hectares1 (GAIA 1993).
Cristancho and Vining
Figure 1. Location of the Letuama community of Oiyacá.*
*See where the two arrows converge. Shaded areas indicate indigenous reservations in the zone.
Original map title: Lower Caquetá, Mirití-Paraná and Lower Apaporis Region — Indigenous organizations’ territorial domains. Used with permission from the Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, Sede Leticia — Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones, Imani (Vieco, Franky and Echeverri 2000).

40 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004
The preserve is located within the political boundaries of the
“Departamento del Amazonas” in Colombia. The total
indigenous territory in Colombia is 25,447,348 hectares
(22.28% of the Colombian territory). In the Amazon it is
18,724,540 hectares (46,380,685 acres). The Mirití-Paraná
indigenous preserve accounts for 25.54% of the national
indigenous territory.
On a broad scale, the Mirití-Paraná Indigenous Preserve
comprises mainly ambrophylic low tropical forest vegetation
developed under slightly undulatory moderately dissected
surfaces (Puerto Rastrojo 1998 cited in Forero 2003). Many
small streams have contributed to these dissected surfaces
that make the forest surrounding the Letuama village quite
hilly. The Letuama’s immediate landscape can be divided
into residential open areas, forest pathways, chagras (com-
munity gardens), streams and stream banks, and dense rain-
forest. Each of these landscapes contains different vegetation
and wildlife. Fruit trees and shrubs generally surround the
open areas. Forest pathways and dense forests contain exu-
berant vegetation that ranges from the smallest plant species
to huge palms and old-growth forest. Community gardens
are typically planted with manioc (Manihot esculenta),
pineapple (Ananas comosus), tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum),
coca (Erythroxylym coca var. Ipadu), chili peppers
(Capsicum sp.), caimo (Pouteria caimito), yam (Dioscorea
trifida) and plantains (Musa sapientum). Wildlife species
include jaguar (Pantera onça), tapir (Tapirus terrestris), pec-
cary (Tayassu sp.), paca (Agouti paca), deer (Mazama sp.),
parrot (Amazona sp.), and a variety of ophidians and mon-
keys. Fish are scarce in streams due to pronounced variations
in water levels from flooding patterns throughout the year.
Only small fish can be found, mostly sardines (Triportheus
sp.) and picalones (Pimelodus clarias). The climate consists
of hyperhumid forest (average of 99% humidity) with warm
temperatures (average of 26 degrees C), except for the friaje
or cold wave that lasts about a week between June and July.
The Letuama divide the year into 13 seasons, six of which
fall into the rainy season called ‘puea, which takes place
roughly from April to July. The remaining seven seasons fall
into the dry season called ‘ijia which takes place roughly
from August to March.
Neighboring ethnic groups include the Tanimuka,
Yukuna, Matapí, Makuna,and Barasano. The Letuama peo-
ple’s name in their native language is Wejeñememajâ,which
means “people from the navel of the world.” The Letuama
people consider themselves descendants from the boa.
In all Letuama villages there are traditional community
houses or malokas. Letuama malokas are round wooden
houses with conical roofs and triangular apexes. They are
located in the rainforest highlands close to a stream and inter-
connected with trails. A maloka location is established to
facilitate fetching water and catching the limited amount of
fish that the streams of the region supply. The maloka hous-
ing system favors community living and therefore collectivist
cultural features. As is the case with other indigenous groups
from the Amazon, the spatial distribution of the Letuama
maloka (Letuama 2000) and a layer-by-layer analysis of its
structure (Cristancho 2001) resembles their cosmology.
Other peripheral housing alternatives include familial wood-
en units.
The Letuama village of Oiyacá possesses a headman,
who is the political and spiritual leader in his community. He
performs simultaneously the roles of headman, sage and
shaman (traditional healer). The headman succession usual-
ly falls to his eldest son. However, destination, temperament,
social support, and social legitimization of the new headman
play roles in validating the eldest son’s election. Because of
the small size of the community, most people have kin ties
with the headman. Not surprisingly, the headman’s main
apprentices are his closest relatives. Apprentices are chosen
by their kinship with the headman and among those, the ones
to be most intensively trained are those designated by his
visions and from the consultations he holds with various spir-
itual figures.
Letuama social structure is mainly divided on the basis
of gender, and is decidedly masculine, patrilineal, and virilo-
cal. The pattern of marriage is based on a brother-sister
exchange with their “cousins,” the Tanimuka. Even in a con-
temporary village, marriage occasionally occurs through the
betrothal of young girls (sometimes infants) to older men.
The Letuama practice monogamy. Their social structure and
functional relationships can be defined as rather complex and
they resemble cosmological and ecological dynamics.
In Letuama culture, childhood ends when adulthood
begins (Palma 1984). There is not an adolescence stage, or a
transition between childhood and adulthood. Insofar as the
Letuama boy shows consistent ability to understand and
abide adult conversations in the maloka,he will deserve his
status as an adult. Likewise, when the Letuama girl gets her
first menstruation, she will be initiated as an adult woman
through a ritual specifically performed for that purpose.
From then on, a Letuama man can marry the girl whom he
chose or betrothed years ago and may start having children
with her. In other words, both fertility and maturity define
adulthood.
The Letuama culture nearly disappeared in the time of
war with the Tanimuka, when one of the few remaining
Letuama survivors was cared for and socialized into a
Tanimuka community at the age of ten. (Later in life this
individual found and gathered other Letuama survivors and
pulled his culture back together again.) As a result, the two
groups share important cultural icons and practices such as
Cristancho and Vining

Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004 41
Cristancho and Vining
pants verbally consented to participate in the study.
Additional data came from informal interviews of 20 other
members of the community and from ethnographic notes of
naturalistic observational phases of the study. Information
from these two sources is not quoted directly in the results
but contributed considerably to their interpretation.
Instruments
Several in-depth interviews were conducted with each
participant during summer 2000. We established a basic
interview protocol that included questions regarding the
human-nature relationship and then probed for depth (see
Cristancho 2001 for a complete list of questions). We
designed questions to address moral beliefs, attributions, sub-
jective norms, and decision-making in regard to natural
behaviors. Questions were based on similar types of studies
in the literature and on the first author’s previous experience
with the Letuama. We also developed original questions to
test concepts about relationships with nature. We tried to
place the questions in a logical order in which there were no
significant order effects. We also kept the questions relative-
ly broad so we could stimulate a discussion and probe for fur-
ther information. Questions included the following:
• Who or what takes control over nature overall?
• When do you think it is right to inflict harm to nature
and why?
• What are the most important rules governing your
relationship with nature?
• How does the community control that the basic rules
in this regard are applied?
• What are the punishments?
• In your community who decides what to plant, when
to gather or harvest, or when to go fishing and hunt-
ing?
• How do you personally decide that you are going to
perform an action such as harvesting, fishing or gath-
ering?
Procedure
The first author conducted the interviews mostly in
Spanish. Sometimes translations to and from Tanimuka-
Retuarâ were necessary in which case these were provided by
one of the headman’s sons. The participants chose to be
interviewed in the maloka because, according to their tradi-
tion, this is the place where all the sacred aspects of Letuama
culture are to be spoken. Inside the maloka were several
shaman’s artifacts that the Letuama see as protective against
evil sent by nature spirit owners, witchcraft from other sor-
cerers, or cariba’s (white or western people) diseases or bad
intentions. Therefore, it is a safe place to speak about sacred
things. For the Letuama, the sacred refers to knowledge or
the Yurupari ritual. Also their languages are quite similar to
the extent that the language spoken by the Letuama people is
called Tanimuka/Letuama or Tanimuka-Retuará‚ (ASCII 9;
Code: TNC). This language belongs to the Oriental-Tukano
Family, Arawak linguistic group, and Chibcha conglomerate.
Although native speakers argue that there are slight lin-
guistic variations between Letuama and Tanimuka, the basic
language structure and vocabulary is shared. Besides regular
vowels used in English and Spanish, the Tanimuka-Retuarâ
has five nasal vowels and several guttural sounds. Moreover,
it has a very rich vocabulary and its syntax structure fol-
lows a subject-object-verb model (Strom 1992). Nearly
40% of the population also speaks Spanish, mostly middle-
aged adults. Most elders and young children speak only
Tanimuka-Retuarâ.
In spite of the similarities between Letuama and
Tanimuka, members of both groups argue that they are dif-
ferent from each other in the origins of their people, in some
of the deities they worship, and perhaps more importantly, in
the nature of their traditional thought. We respect their view
and although some conclusions may be generalizable to both
groups, we only intend to make statements about the
Letuama.
Participants
We selected interview participants via an agreement with
the headman of the community (the headman is the one who
determines who is allowed to speak and about what).
Because speaking about certain aspects of nature is taboo in
the Letuama culture, only the four people with the most
important traditional roles were allowed to formally respond
to the interviews. These were the three oldest sons of the
headman, who are his closest apprentices, and one of his
nephews who holds the role of traditional chanter. As we
anticipated, women, young men, and children were not
allowed to participate in the in-depth interviews by strict
order of the headman. This is because they are considered to
have neither the wisdom nor the maturity to speak properly
about the sacredness of nature (see definition of sacred for
the Letuama in the Procedure section). Even if women and
children had been available as research participants, they
would have preferred a female researcher to interview them
and none was present at the time. As a consequence, we
acknowledge that the views herein presented reflect mostly
masculine ideas and that the implications of gender on the
morality and ethics of the human-nature interactions for the
Letuama remain outside the scope of this study. However,
other members of the Letuama culture were observed during
the naturalistic observational phases of the study and thus
their behavior is represented even though it is not verbal.
Upon receiving the headman’s authorization, partici-

42 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004
objects that were initially handed down to them by their
deities with specific and very strict spiritual regulations
regarding their use, as well as the people and the circum-
stances under which such knowledge or objects should be
shared. Sacred knowledge and objects are to be managed
only by people who have the specific training to do so.
Mismanagement of the sacred may bring illness and even
death to the individual who mismanages it and to his family
or community.
The headman was always present in the maloka when
the conversations occurred, arguing that his presence would
ensure that accurate information was provided to the inter-
viewer. Besides the interviews, extensive field notes were
taken as part of the participant observation regarding native
systems of meaning and nature representation discussed dur-
ing informal conversations. All of the information was first
transcribed, then translated into English and analyzed.
During data collection for this study, the first author
lived with the Letuama for six weeks. He participated in
many of their daily activities, conducted informal conversa-
tional interviews, and had an opportunity to observe the
workings of Letuama society. He also had the opportunity to
observe Letuama Society during the three years he was a
health care worker in the area. Because he was welcome in
the maloka,he was privy to sacred discussions there.
Data Analysis
Following a grounded approach (Charmaz 2000), we
opted for what Kim, Park, and Park (2000) call a psycholog-
ical analysis of indigenous concepts (instead of an indigenous
analysis of psychological concepts, which corresponds more
to a hypothetic-analytic approach). Not having any pre-
established categories, we searched for the principles,
dynamics and imagined actors related to natural justice that
emerged recurrently from the dataset.
We analyzed the transcribed data in order to find the
most salient and recurring units of meaning. Our analysis
consisted of categorizing the text according to the main
themes that appeared consistently through the raw data
(Ratner 1997). In order to improve reliability and validity of
the categorization both authors reviewed the raw data.
Content categories were then agreed upon and the text data
were coded accordingly. The units of analysis were para-
graphs of nearly unitary meaning as we parsed them.
The quotations presented below are illustrative samples
chosen from the text of the interviews with the four individ-
uals. In some cases we present more than one quotation in
order to show some slight variations from participant to par-
ticipant within one theme, and to better illustrate the point
made with complementary information from two participants
or from two parts of one participant’s interview.
We assessed the extent to which the four interview par-
ticipants agreed on each theme. The agreement was always
at least 75% (or three of four) unless otherwise indicated.
Results
Because the word “nature” was used in the wording of
the questions posed in the interviews and in participants’
answers, we begin by presenting our Letuama participants’
definition of nature. We then will present Letuama notions
about whom or what is ultimately in control of nature. This
will enable us to better understand the system of attributions
they use to explain the occurrence of different natural events,
and their relationships with human thoughts, behaviors and
health. Then we will examine the Letuama’s description of
the natural justice system in order to understand their ideas
and beliefs about the interconnectedness between the differ-
ent elements in the system. Furthermore, we will draw on the
morality principles derived from these ideas of natural jus-
tice. Finally, we will outline a model of individual and social
decision-making with respect to nature related behaviors that
results from their justice conceptions.
Concept of Nature
We begin by establishing the Letuama participants’ con-
cept of nature:
For us, nature is all what we live together with. It is all
what we see surrounding us. It is the jungle, the ani-
mals, the rivers. It is a whole.
Nature is all what surrounds us. We live out of what we
take from it. It protects us all and allow us to be
here...Ok. ...It covers it all. We are born from nature.
Nature is for example the jungle in general. Whatever is
surrounding this place; surrounding us.
As is evidenced in the quotations above, the Letuama see
nature both as part of them (we are born from nature) and as
separate from them (it is all that surrounds us). This dialec-
tical reasoning style (Peng and Nisbett 2000) shows us that in
the Letuama culture, as perhaps opposed to the western cul-
ture, ambiguity is accepted as a possibility of truth. The fact
remains that in spite of this difference, there seemed to be a
basic agreement with our operational definitions of nature.
Who Controls Nature?
The general perception among the Letuama is that there
is one Supreme Being who takes control over nature. This is
Yuruparí, who is considered the “master of masters of nature”
(Reichel-Dolmatoff 1996, 1997; Palma 1984; Von Hildebrand
1987) and he is the link between the earth ñama’tuka and the
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Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004 43
Cristancho and Vining
spiritual worlds governed by the four powerful ancestors
imari’makana. Below Yuruparí, in this hierarchical structure
are the masters of nature and the headman. The overall
importance of Yuruparí as the overall controller of nature is
exemplified in the following quotes:
For us it is the same as it is for the white people. There
is a supreme being that controls everything: The one we
call Yuruparí, that is, the ritual. Everything started from
him, everything! Everything that happens is because of
him.
It is just one... The world’s Master.... The Yuruparí. He
remained here in order to prevent us from the most seri-
ous things that exist.
Yuruparí controls nature through the subordinate masters
and through the headman, the latter being considered as the
mediator, or “secretary,” between Yuruparí, the masters of
nature, and humans. Since communication with Yuruparí
only occurs during the ritual period, the headman keeps com-
munications more regularly with those masters who are avail-
able on a daily basis.
There are two beings that take control over nature. One
of them is the ritual [Yuruparí]. He is the one who con-
trols the entire natural world, all the Masters of the
bush, the environment, all... all. Second, as his secre-
tary, it comes the headman, who is the headman, the one
who knows how to manage nature. He will appear as
though he were speaking [to Yuruparí] and understand-
ing all what he thought. Likewise, he will understand
what Yuruparí said through the signals [he sends to
him]. They have a direct relationship between them-
selves. Those two [Yuruparí and the headman] control
everything, the entire environment, the women, the
plants, the soil, the animals, and the beings from the
water, all... Those who are sorcerers have the power to
do so, not just one but all of them and the Yuruparí also,
it is just those two.
One of them is the headman, who has a direct relation-
ship with the Masters over there. The headman, that is
the sorcerer, is the one who is related with the Masters.
They are the ones that keep nature. One of them is
the...[headman], but the other one is the Master of
nature [Yuruparí]. He has direct relationships with both
[the headman and the Masters]. That is the key that
keeps indigenous people alive.
Thus, previous literature, plus our formal and informal
interviews and observations, have revealed that the Letuama
believe that Yuruparí controls what happens in the natural
world through his relationships with the masters of nature
and the headman. Moreover, it is his justice system that gov-
erns all human-nature interactions as Yuruparí is thought of
as the most important and immediate moral-principles-
enforcement agent. The headman is the person mediating
between the “master of masters of nature” and the people in
the community. Hence, he has two main responsibilities.
First, he must ensure that his community obeys Yuruparí’s
norms. Second, he must take the community’s petitions to
Yuruparí. Masters of nature, in turn, are hierarchically infe-
rior to Yuruparí but in a slightly superior spiritual level to the
headman. Like the headman, they have their own communi-
ty and serve as mediators between their people (animals,
plants, and other natural elements), and Yuruparí.
Letuama’s Theory About Human-Nature Interactions,
Natural Justice, and Reciprocity
When a Letuama person needs something from nature,
he (we use masculine pronouns here because we are referring
to male individuals who invariably interact with the head-
man) must ask the headman or a trained person to serve as
mediators in his communication with the masters of nature.
By doing so he will obtain permission for taking whatever he
needs. The best way to do that is for the person and the head-
man to mambe (chew coca), snuff tobacco, and burn breo
(natural black tar). Mambeing for the Letuama also means
“thinking” in a spiritual sense and “figuring out” best ways to
approach issues that demand great attention. Breo is extract-
ed from the exudation of certain tree species in the jungle.
The artisan melts the breo in order to handle it as a sort of
glue in the construction of the blowguns, the heron’s leg bone
used to snuff tobacco, and other material objects. During
most ritual ceremonies the headman burns the breo and then
blows its smoke on physically or spiritually ill people. There
may be slight practical variations for women as they are not
allowed to mambe coca, snuff tobacco or burn breo.
However, their conceptualization of this process seems to be
the same as that of men. Here the Letuama explain the rea-
soning behind their natural justice ideal in their own words:
...[People] must cast spells, and say the reasons [why
they need something from nature] through their thought
in order to ask nature for permission. For example, in a
maloka, nature is managed with all the cultural aspects.
Hence, you must give your coca and tobacco to one
[Master], and then to another and another. Through
that, you ask them for the things you want to negotiate,
like products, you know? So, it depends on the headman
what you offer because he is the one who knows what
can be given, and how much. For instance, if you take
cumare [vegetable fiber used to make thread from the
Astrocaryum aculeatum palm], you ask the Master and
he will tell you the limit of what he thought was enough

44 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004
for you. So, he may tell you “you can only take four
[palms].” Therefore, you must only take those four. For
example, canangucho [Mauritia Flexuosa] also has its
Master, so you prevent through mambe and ask the
Master “one, two, three, four.” He says “no, you can
only knock down one palm.” Thus, you must only knock
down one palm. If you don’t obey after you do the pre-
vention and if, for example, he tells you to take only one
and you take more than five, this will create a problem.
People do that mistake because they believe those are
regular plants. They think it is like a game as youth is.
Since they are young, they don’t believe in our own tra-
ditions. What is true and what is not? Nor do they
believe what the old men say. That’s why that kind of
things happen.
Well, we manage nature in the following way. As I
already started to tell you, all kind of nature has its
Masters. Therefore, in order to have a crop, a chagra,
you must take some breo and accommodate the world,
and ask for a place, a small part of land where you can
live, and not just to fool around. By doing so you get the
permission [to grow your crops]. Then you have to walk
and burn the place, one starts clearing, looking where
the cananguchales [forested area where there are many
canangucho palms] may be located, all that. Then you
can [do it] because you got the permission to do so. You
can use whatever you need. It is through casting spells
and [burning] breo that you do that.
...Listen, if one is going to clear-cut a piece of jungle for
a chagra [community garden] one doesn’t just do it
because one wants to destroy the jungle. One must
assume a limit in one’s thought and say “until here it
will be useful, but from this part on it won’t be useful.”
Then, one casts a spell to nature in order for one not to
harm it and ask the Master through coca and tobacco...
We give him the most we can... This is like a business in
which we ought to pay something. White people have
their currency and say “Take this and I can use that
piece of land.” It is the same but we pay with coca and
tobacco.
From the standpoint of negotiation with the masters of
nature and surviving within the demands of the forest, coca
(tã‘ãpika), tobacco (mi’rõã), and breo (mãeã) are probably
the three most important natural products. These products
are thought of as currency for negotiating with the masters of
nature for any kind of environmental need. The plants from
which these products are extracted are the “tools” that the
Letuama inherited from their ancestors for surviving in the
forest. Through offering coca, tobacco and breo Letuama are
indirectly offering the most valuable goods to the masters,
who in turn, by being pleased, are expected to respond posi-
tively to their request. The attribution of reciprocal human
features is not limited to the masters of nature: plants, ani-
mals, streams, and other natural features are also treated in a
similar reciprocal manner but at a lower hierarchical level as
it is illustrated here:
What exists out there in the environment are [not just
plants and animals but] people. They are another
group... those who live there in the environment [in the
jungle]. That’s why I told you, they are the Masters of
sacred sites. However, one of them may be a starving or
a crazy person because they are like people. If you go on
a trip they may kill you because they see you as a tiger,
as a threatening being and they can kill you: “he means
nothing to us” [they can say]. So you may kill him [in
order to protect yourself] and his thought goes there
[points the jungle] and they [the Masters] ask him “what
happened?” he says “I was killed.” They ask “why?” he
says “because I killed his dogs.” So they are likely to say
“ahh! it was you who sought your fate, so there is not a
problem [you deserved it].” Similarly, when the snake is
starving, it may start pulling out soil looking for a prey.
When it finds a dog or a hen... pumm! It kills it. The
snake comes to his home and they ask him ‘what hap-
pened?’He says “I was killed because I was fooling with
their dogs,” [so they tell him] “ahhh! you deserved it.”
So it is. For example, if you happen to be anywhere and
you see a tiger coming to you, he will just look at you but
he couldn’t do anything to you and he disappeared. But
if you see it and you shot it, then you are in trouble
because immediately he gets there [his maloka] and they
ask him “what happened to you?” He says, “I was
killed.” They ask him “why?” he says “just because I
was around and he looked at me, I looked at him without
doing anything, and then he killed me.” Now the
Masters get ready to recover him [the tiger’s life]. They
come through a storm or thunders, well, there are many
ways to get rid of them. But, when they see that a young
man is about to die, they just take him and kill him as
revenge. It is like if I kill your brother, then you must kill
me.
We think likewise. If any of them harms us, the sor-
cerer has to heal [prevent illnesses through casting
spells] the entire world and all the Masters of sacred
sites. Through casting spells he makes them appear as
though they really were in this world. Those animals
become tamed [when you are hunting] so that when you
find one of them you may just kill it easily, without any
problem. The same happens to them [to humans].
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Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004 45
Cristancho and Vining
Letuama people also receive instruction from the mas-
ters of nature about the quantity of natural goods they are
allowed to trade. This instruction is given through what the
Letuama refer to as emotions, defined as a set of signals in
the person’s body. Upon receiving the approval and thus the
signals, Letuama people may fearlessly extract whatever nat-
ural product they asked for.
To break the natural laws means to take something with-
out its master’s permission, or to offend Yuruparí by not fol-
lowing his strict norms. One can also break a natural law by
challenging the authority of the headman by taking (hunting,
gathering, using) something without his permission.
Punishments for breaking natural laws are physical
and/or psychological. Depending on how serious the offense
was, a punishment could be applied to either the person, to
his/her family, or to the entire community. Physical punish-
ments consist of sending ailments, or even worse, causing the
death of either the offender or one of his significant others.
Psychological punishments include introducing feelings of
permanent sadness, anger, or insanity in the person who
directly offends nature or in a significant other such as the
spouse, children, or other relatives.
In summary, we have seen that the Letuama employ a
reciprocal system of justice in which they must give some-
thing valuable for every thing of value they take from nature.
This justice system is enforced through strong norms that
are taught from an early age and that are enforced through
sanctions. A strong sense of morality emerges from the
Letuama’s own descriptions of what is right and wrong and
how they thrive or suffer as a result of their actions.
Normative Systems
The Letuama’s pursuance of natural justice is mainly
guided by general rules or principles.
Everything has rules. There are laws that are gen-
eralized to nature as a whole regarding nature man-
agement. They exist in order to prevent nature from
being excessively harmed in activities such as hunt-
ing, fishing, over harvesting the fruits of plants and
palms. This is the way in which it is ruled every-
thing in order to give a proper management to it, in
order to take care of ourselves because we live from
it, so it must have some rules. These rules are for-
malized and legalized among us.
Participant observation and interview results supported
the initial assertion that the headman teaches these norms to
children through a socialization process. Hence, even though
Yuruparí and the masters of nature established the norms
originally, it is the headman who rules and promotes them
within the community.
...It is through the headman, though, that those
rules are established.
Drawing upon the data, we summarized six basic moral
principles that guide Letuama’s human-nature interactions.
These principles are also used by the Letuama to judge the
morality of the behavior of nature toward humans.
Moral Principle 1: Economy. “I will use what I need
from you and won’t accumulate any surplus. Whatever I use
from you has to be paid for in advance by me or by my com-
munity.”
Through their thought the old men say that they will
pay what they need to take. They do it through
breo... It was like two dealers doing business: “he is
buying me this.” The Master just throws it and says
“take it!” and that is how it suddenly appears here.
“Because you paid, you will suffer no harm...” One
must pay what the Masters want one to pay. With
this [he points at the coca] we pay, this is what we
give them, with these [coca and tobacco] we buy. If
one gives him that, he will give one what one asked
for. We must do it always...
Moral Principle 2: Reciprocity. “If you give me some-
thing good or bad, I’ll give you back something good or bad.”
Not only does nature provide people with something in
exchange when receiving something, but also it specifically
provides people with something of the same essence (positive
or negative) as what it receives.
Those who want can become Tapir. They live in a
house like this one [a maloka]. If you keep killing
them they may realize that you are killing them and
hurting them so they take you and of course [they
revenge what you did to them]!
Moral Principle 3: Antagonism. “You are both my ally
and my enemy at the same time.” Letuama concepts of both
natural justice and human relationships with nature may be
defined as rather antagonistic. This seems to be true also for
other indigenous communities in the Amazon such as the
Uitoto (i.e., Echeverri 2000). The relationship is antagonis-
tic insofar as nature is conceived of as not only positive and
protective but also as negative and threatening.
Nature is our ally...it protects us because we are born
from it.
Nature may be really dangerous...Nature can kill us
when we don’t follow the rules.

46 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004
Moral Principle 4: Cleverness. “If I am clever enough, I
will be able to strategically get from you what I want without
you being able to find out. Likewise you can fool me.” Under
special circumstances the norms can be “fooled” for one’s
own benefit, which indeed requires tremendous cleverness
from the human who does it. This principle applies only to
restricted circumstances, times, natural objects pursued, and
the person’s level of traditional training. Likewise, nature is
thought of being clever enough to be able to fool humans. In
response to the question, “Somebody here told me that the
wolf was also a very sacred animal, is that true?” one partic-
ipant answered:
Yes, it is a very hazardous animal even though it is
not as sacred as the boa and the tiger. If it happens
to harm you in any way, you are allowed to kill it.
But, be careful. If you kill him you must not remain
there looking at him after you shot him because he
will know who killed him. You just should shoot him
and run away without even touching it after it dies.
Likewise, if you blow a dart from your cerbatana
[blowgun] and it kills the animal, he may answer
back if he gets to see who killed him. This happens
because the animal that is shot goes to his maloka
[each group of animals gathers in a maloka and
become people inside there] and carefully takes out
the dart in order to identify whose dart hurt or
killed him. If you haven’t done prevention of that,
he may kill you later on. If after killing him you
stay there looking at him, he will use the same
arrow to kill you! That’s the case of the wolf. You
can fool with it by hiding yourself.
Moral Principle 5: Parallelism. “I treat you as I treat my
fellow humans and can expect from you that you treat me as
you treat your fellow humans.” The same moral system that
governs human-nature interactions is the one that governs
social interactions with other people in Letuama culture.
For example, if I kill a tapir today and tomorrow
again, the day after tomorrow again and so on, in a
daily manner [that would not be fair]. This is very
delicate and sacred. Sometimes you can kill them;
sometimes you cannot because those animals are
sacred as well. They are like human beings.
Moral Principle 6: Respect for Tradition. “I treat you as
my ancestors treated you. You treat me as you treated them.”
This last principle of natural justice has a conservative tone.
Letuama people should behave toward nature as their ances-
tors did. Any modification to traditional practices, if needed,
should nevertheless be consulted with the ancestors before
being implemented. However, they should not be far away
from or contradict the actions taken by their ancestors to sim-
ilar circumstances in the past.
First, it is mandatory to respect our tradition in all
senses. We must have good relationships with the
other indigenous people, learn how to do it, know
how much wood can we get, or if we can’t get it,
know if something has a Master, etc. If we do the
things just according to our volition, we may affect
negatively indigenous people. We may destroy it
[the resource] and therefore be mistaken. Hence,
we must have a good relationship with the Masters
since the very beginning in order to understand
what we are allowed to do, when, and how. This
will lead them to respect nature and help take care
of indigenous people.
Here we have seen six moral principles that guide
Letuama interactions with nature, notably similar to their
rules for dealing with each other, set up the rules for reci-
procity in dealings with nature, and reach back to ancestors
for wisdom and guidance.
Discussion
Our purposes with this paper were to examine whether
the concept of natural justice has been described for indige-
nous communities in Latin America and other regions of the
world, and, more specifically, whether the pursuance of a nat-
ural justice ideal is a cultural value/goal among the Letuama
people from the Colombian Amazon, as well as the moral
principles that guide Letuama behavior toward nature.
In an attempt to answer our first question, our results and
literature review suggest that the Letuama, as well as other
indigenous communities from the Amazon (e.g., Århem
1996; Palma 1984; Reichel 1987; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1996,
1997; Von Hildebrand 1987; Candre and Echeverri 1996; Van
der Hammen 1996) do pursue an ideal of natural justice. As
a system, natural justice encompasses a set of expected con-
tingencies, dynamics, actors, and beliefs. As a value/goal
natural justice constitutes both an ideal of human behavior
toward nature that ought to be pursued and a precious legacy
of their past. The value/goal of natural justice seems to be
culturally encoded into moral norms that are transmitted from
one generation to another through the socialization process.
Natural justice guarantees health and well-being for the indi-
vidual and an ecologically sustainable future for the region
they inhabit.
Now, let us answer our second research question regard-
ing the moral principles guiding the human relationship with
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Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004 47
nature. The subjective norms guiding human-nature interac-
tions among the Letuama seem to be based on the reciprocal
reinforcement of six basic moral principles: economy, reci-
procity, antagonism, cleverness, parallelism, and respect for
tradition. These principles have in common a commitment to
reciprocal obligations, actions, and relationships between
humans and nature. The Letuama make a commitment to
giving to nature things that compensate for what they have
received or wish to receive from it. This mutual exchange
defines what we mean by the principle of “reciprocity.”
Thus, “reciprocity” seems to be a principle that is present
across all other moral principles that we found. Moreover,
maintaining a reciprocal relationship with nature is essential
for pursuing the other moral principles of economy, antago-
nism, cleverness, parallelism, and respect for tradition in the
sense that all these principles involve mutual agency and
commitments from both human’s and nature’s perspective.
These findings are consistent with Århem’s idea of reci-
procity among the neighboring Makuna from Northwest
Amazonia that he illustrates as follows:
Men supply the Spirit Owners of the animals with
“spirit foods” (coca, snuff, and burning bees wax).
In return, the spirits allocate game animals and fish
to human beings. (1996, 192)
In the Letuama the reciprocity principle is not only lim-
ited to the hunter-prey relationship between humans and ani-
mals but also extends to other levels of the human-animal and
of the human-plant relationship as well. Furthering Århem’s
arguments we could say that the reciprocity principle in-
volves five different sets of interactions: between humans and
spirits, between spirits and animals, between humans and ani-
mals, between spirits and plants, and between humans and
plants. The particular conception and expression of reciproc-
ity in each of these interactions is to be further explored.
To a great extent, the community’s ability to keep a har-
monious relationship with nature depends on the headman’s
ability to cure through casting spells (bejoke’raka), foods,
plants, animals and natural objects that are necessary for their
adaptation to the environment and, ultimately, for their sur-
vival. This assumption implies that Letuama have elaborate
ways of thinking about natural events as well as a different
logic of causality with which they explain natural events.
Moreover, the notion of bejoke’raka implies having strong
ideas about the potential of human agency for preventing nat-
ural disasters, epidemics, and spiritual perils. This markedly
contrasts with the significance they give to Yuruparí as the
overall controller of nature because it adds individual respon-
sibilities and thus dispositional attributions surrounding
human-nature behaviors. And so it is interesting to note that
the Letuama’s attributional style seems not to be predomi-
nantly situational, as it would be expected for a collectivist
culture (Choi, Nisbett and Norenzayan 1999).
With respect to theories of environmental values,
Letuama value of natural justice presents a balance between
negative and positive connotations attributed to the human-
nature interaction. This balance goes far beyond the typical
romanticized versions of indigenous people as achieving har-
monious relationships with nature by being completely sub-
jugated to it. For example, as Kellert’s (1993) typology of
environmental values tends to emphasize the positive dimen-
sions (naturalistic, ecologistic-scientific, aesthetic, symbolic,
humanistic, moralistic), it avoids dealing with more complex
and dialectical values such as antagonism and reciprocity,
which are acknowledged by the Letuama as essential. This is
typical in dialectical reasoning styles (Peng and Nisbett
2000) in the sense that both nature’s and human’s demands
can be seen as both oppositional and complementary.
Our findings support the transactional/dialectic approach
to human-nature interactions research proposed by Werner,
Brown, and Altman (2002) in which both humans and natural
world are seen as receiving and demanding outcomes from
each other. To illustrate, we found that the Letuama are con-
cerned about diminishing game and fish in their territory,
although they expected it to happen. Population pressure from
their own and other neighboring communities in the region
have depleted game for more than 30 years. Fish have always
been scarce due to the high variability in the water levels of the
Oiyacá stream. Also, the large amount of litterfall and bio-
mass that drop to the stream from the forest makes it almost
impossible for fish to swim upstream to their region. The most
immediate solution that the Letuama are undertaking is mov-
ing to Popeyacá, their ancestral territory, which is located
some 10 hours further walk from their present location. In this
new site both game and fish are expected to be more plentiful.
This mobilization is part of a larger cycle of land rotation they
have traditionally practiced in order to preserve the natural
resources in the long run.
In the short term, however, the Letuama practice food
taboos dictated by the headman according to gender, age,
social hierarchy, health status, and ecological season. They
also smoke fish and other types of meat in order to make
them last longer and avoid unnecessary extra hunting. These
practices help alleviate human pressures on the ecosystem but
they will not solve problems associated with population pres-
sure, so migration to other areas is necessary. Food taboos
and related traditional conservation practices are good exam-
ples of how cultural features result from environmental
demands. Likewise, these cultural outcomes affect the envi-
ronment (e.g., more sustainable game, new cultivation sites)
thus creating a dynamic process of mutual transformation. At
this point these solutions are not working well because the
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48 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004
30-year cycle of land use is reaching its end. Thus, migration
is the best solution for them.
How do the moral principles and the pursuance of natur-
al justice influence people’s actual behavior toward nature?
In Figure 2 we draw on a general social psychology model to
help explain the relationship between the concept/value of
natural justice, ecological morality principles, attitudes, and
behaviors toward nature. Each culture emphasizes certain
values or principles based on their historic tradition and their
environmental adaptation needs. From those principles, a
notion of justice (in this case a notion of natural justice) is
constructed. This notion of justice includes the beings, roles,
competences, processes, and punishments related to that par-
ticular conception of justice. Therefore, beliefs and judg-
ments about the fairness or unfairness of humans’ behaviors
toward nature and about nature’s behavior toward humans are
dictated by this conception of justice. That is, ecological
morality is defined and based upon the conception of natural
justice. Moral beliefs in an individual drive the transforma-
tion of general cultural principles into attitudes, the latter
being responsible for ultimately increasing or decreasing the
likelihood of occurrence of certain human-nature and human-
human behaviors.
The Letuama idea of a natural justice kept under the sur-
veillance of very powerful spiritual and human individuals
leads us to believe that they assume a natural state of things
that, upon disruption, leads toward concatenate consequences
for the sources of disruption. This notion is very similar to
the concept of essential justice used by lawyers, which
implies “good conscience” and “equity” (Fabunmi 1974). An
important question is whether the concept of natural justice,
as understood by Letuama people, once existed but lost rele-
vance in western cultures due to the ever more distant rela-
tionship people have with nature.
Although we believe that the reliability of the data we
collected in this study is high due to the specialized knowl-
edge of the individuals interviewed, the fact remains that
much of it came from only four individuals. Those individu-
als were all adult men of elite status, highly central to the cul-
ture of the community, which is why the interviewer was
directed to them. We triangulated much of the data with in-
formal interviews and unobtrusive observation and thus have
good confidence in our results. However, future research
might examine cultural consensus including the natural jus-
tice concepts held by other members of the community
including women and children. Studying the latter might also
reveal the manner in which traditional ecological knowledge
is passed from one generation to another. In addition to mat-
ters of gender, the study of the influence of other factors such
as class and knowledge expertise may shed light on the rea-
sons for subordination in the Letuama’s hierarchical society.
Another question is whether the results here could be
generalized to other societies in similar or different ecosys-
tems. In part, we believe that generalization should be
engaged cautiously since our findings are based on a some-
what limited season of fieldwork and a small number of
research participants. Nonetheless, our participants gave us
extensive depth of information and the first author’s experi-
ence with the community gave him some insight into the
workings of the community and its relationship with the nat-
ural world. The Letuama are a hierarchical and collectivist
society and it is interesting to speculate whether non-hierar-
chical societies might be even more likely to negotiate with
the natural world and perhaps to see themselves as even more
part of the natural order than hierarchical societies. We are
less able to speculate as to the relationship between the type
of biome and interaction between humans and nature.
Certainly the geographers of the late 18th and early 19th cen-
turies believed they were able to identify personality styles
associated with geographic domains (e.g., indolent tropics
and energetic temperate zones) but the question is known to
be a great deal more complicated. We hope that through stud-
Cristancho and Vining
CULTURAL IDEOLOGY
(Set of all traditional beliefs about nature inherited from ancestors)
VALUES / PRINCIPLES
(Deep beliefs and norms about nature and the human relationship
with nature, e.g., reciprocity, antagonism, respect for tradition, etc.)
NOTION OF JUSTICE
(General understanding of the dynamics between natural and
social actors and their expected actions)
MORALITY
(What is the “should” and “should not” in the
human behavior towards nature?)
ATTITUDES
(What do I think about and expect from natural objects/constructs?
How do I feel about them? How would I behave towards them?)
BEHAVIORS
(Observable human behaviors toward nature)
Figure 2. General social psychology model as applied to the relationship
between cultural values/principles and natural behaviors.
➪➪➪➪➪

Human Ecology Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004 49
ies such as the one we have reported here that we can con-
tribute to the answer to this question.
In conclusion, the Letuama’s search for natural justice is
mediated by a rich and complex moral system guided by
dialectical principles that involve negotiation between
humans and nature through culturally defined pathways.
These moral principles were: economy, reciprocity, antago-
nism, cleverness, parallelism,and respect for the tradition.
Reciprocity was found to be common to the six principles
identified. Therefore, we suggest that Letuama’s morality
toward nature tends to be ultimately based on the principle of
reciprocity. This finding is contrary to our initial expectation
that because the Letuama constitute a collectivist culture, its
members would have assumed a morality of caring toward
nature. A notion of reciprocity is more closely related to a
morality of justice. Or, it may be more accurate to say that
the principle of morality is attuned to equity, which is a par-
ticular kind of distributive justice. We do not believe we are
prepared to say which of these is the case in the Letuama soci-
ety. The relationship between cultural syndromes and moral-
ity systems in the context of indigenous communities as well
as in more developed societies bears further examination.
Endnotes
1. E-mail: cristanc@uiuc.edu
2. E-mail: jvining@uiuc.edu
Acknowledgements
Funding for this research came from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) through a Center for Latin American Studies
Summer Grant to the first author in 2000. Complementary funding for the
fieldwork and writing portions came in the form of two Summer Research
Grants from the Human Dimensions of Environmental Systems (HDES)
Program at UIUC in 2000 and 2001. The fieldwork portion took place
while the first author was a Fulbright Scholar under the Amazon Basin
Program for Colombia. We would like to thank the Human-Nature Re-
search Laboratory and the HDES faculty and scholars for their invaluable
feedback and support throughout. Above all, we are particularly indebted
with the Letuama people for their hospitality and willingness to share their
sacred knowledge with us. Finally, we want to acknowledge that this paper
was greatly improved by the thoughtful and specific comments of three
anonymous reviewers.
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