Olgalinares symposium

CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF

OLGA F .

LINARES

1936-2014 ACADEMIC SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF DR. OLGA F. LINARES EARL S. TUPPER RESEARCH AND CONFERENCE CENTER, SMITHSONIAN TROPICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE PANAMA CITY, PANAMA | FEBRUARY 18, 2016

AGENDA 9AM | INTRODUCTORY WORDS BY STRI DIRECTOR DR. MATTHEW C. LARSEN 9:05 | WELCOME WORDS BY DOLORES PIPERNO 9:30 | ROBERT M BAUM | Dartmouth College

Prophets, Prayer, and Production 9:50 | MARINA TEMUDO | University of Lisbon

Mangroves, Mangrove People and Mangrove Rice 10:10 | DISCUSSION SESSION 10:30 | COFFE BREAK 11:00 | JOANNA DAVIDSON | Boston University

The Lives of Others: Enacting Connectivity through Jola Stories 11:20 | RAMON SARRÓ | University of Oxford

The Baga House: a Conversation 11:40 | DISCUSSION SESSION 12PM | LUNCH BREAK (Not provided by STRI)

2:00 | FRANCISCO HERRERA | CEASPA Olga F. Linares: Her Contribution to Panamanian Anthropology

2:20 | JAMES HOWE | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Olga F. Linares as teacher, mentor, and promoter of ethnography

2:40 | RICHARD COOKE | STRI Two seminal archaeology papers by Olga F. Linares and their impact on methodology and inference 3:00 | DISCUSSION SESSION 3:20 | COFFEE BREAK

3:50 | JOSÉ IRIARTE | University of Exeter

A multi-proxy approach to study past human impact on the Lower Amazon, Santarem

4:10 | RUTH DICKAU | HD Analytical Solutions Research Radiations: Building upon Olga F. Linares’s Legacy in the Study of Pre-Columbian Western Panama

4:30 | ANTHONY J. RANERE | Temple University Grand Ideas, Collaborative Research and the Influence of Olga F. Linares’s Adaptive Radiations Project on Archaeology in Panama and Beyond 4:50 | DISCUSSION SESSION 5:10 | CLOSING REMARKS BY DR. WILLIAM WCISLO 5:20 -7:00 COCKTAIL AT COROTÚ PLAZA

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Prophets, Prayer, and Production 9:30 am

ROBERT M. BAUM

Dartmouth College

In a ground-breaking book, POWER, PRAYER, AND PRODUCTION, Olga Linares explored the relationship between Diola religious practice and Diola agricultural practice in the Casamance region of southern Senegal. She describes the close integration of ritual practice, labor organization and rice farming in areas that still practice the traditional religion and analyzes the impact of conversion to Islam and the spread of peanut cultivation among other Diola groups, which produces a dramatic shift in labor organization and gender relations. My paper will explore those linkages, but concentrate on a woman prophet named Alinesitoue Diatta, who challenged French colonial agricultural practices in 1942, especially the spread of peanut production, as well as the impact of Christian and Muslim efforts to convert the Diola. Specifically, I will focus on the ways in which the spread of peanut farming challenged a family mode of production, leaving all rice farming to women and freeing the men to focus on cash crops. This threatened both a family structure centered around shared labor in rice cultivation and a liturgical calendar focused on the fertility of rice paddies. To Alinesitoue these practices undermined the status of women, eroded the place of traditional religion, and led to a growing dependence on colonial markets. She also worked against the introduction of new forms of Asiatic rice (oryza sativa), which the French hoped would replace the lower yielding, but hardier African rices (oryza glaberimma). In a way, her work illustrated some of the insights that developed in critiques of the Green Revolution that argued for the importance of seed diversity by insisting that the traditional rice be used in ritual, but that the new rice could be used for ordinary consumption. She claimed that only the African varieties had been provided to the Diola, by the supreme being and were spiritually situated in relation to the land.

CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF OLGA F. LINARES

| FEBRUARY 18, 2016

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Mangroves, Mangrove People and Mangrove Rice 9:50 am

MARINA TEMUDO

University of Lisbon

Mangrove societies and their work-intensive and highly innovative rice production system have been the focus of studies since the first European travelers arrived in the region now called Casamance. It was precisely in this possible cradle of African rice domestication and of hand-ploughing in the mangroves that Olga Linares did an extraordinary long-term study of the social and agricultural transformations induced by the conversion to Islam and by the adoption of peanuts as a cash crop. In my presentation I will focus on two other well-known mangrove swamp rice producers – the Balanta of Guinea-Bissau and the Baga of the Republic of Guinea – to show how different patterns of social organization of the domestic group and of agricultural production resulted in quite diverging local knowledges, processes of variety selection and adoption, and skills of technical innovation in the management of the rice fields.

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The Lives of Others: Enacting Connectivity through Jola Stories 11:00 am

JOANNA DAVIDSON

Boston University

Olga Linares’s penultimate published paper on Jola rice cultivators in southern Senegal introduced readers to several Jola farmers whom she had come to know so well after decades of research there. In an effort to demonstrate the social and economic dimensions of drought in this region, Linares charted the life trajectories of these “real persons with life-threatening subsistence problems” (Linares 2005: 232). In some ways, this approach was a departure from much of Linares’s previous work, which – although it consistently placed “farmers at the center of the agricultural agenda” – tended to prioritize social organizational analyses over “individual vision, initiative, and purpose” (Linares 20015: 232, 237).

My paper for this symposium picks up this thread from one of Linares’s concluding contributions on Jola society. Based on ethnographic research among Jola farmers just across the border from Linares’s beloved Senegalese villages, I offer several new stories about Jola individuals as they continue to struggle with their subsistence problems. Inspired

by Linares’s sustained commitment to understand the plight of rural Africans, I suggest how and why intimate portrayals of particular people help advance general explanations about – and perhaps even policies and programs concerned with – the world in which they live.

CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF OLGA F. LINARES

| FEBRUARY 18, 2016

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The Baga House: a Conversation 11:20 am

RAMON SARRÓ

University of Oxford

Among many other things, Olga Linares taught us that if we wanted to understand how Jola society worked we needed to look at the organization of the household and at the structure of the house itself, back doors and all. My ethnographic work on the Baga, a people living almost 500 kms southwards from the Jola but sharing a cosmology and rice farming system with them, was in its beginning based on a very detailed comparison, indeed a conversation, with Olga’s work. When I arrived in the field in 1993, not knowing anything at all about the Baga (a people then largely understudied) I used to read Olga’s justpublished book (together with Bob Baum’s thesis) aloud and ask my Baga interlocutors to comment on what I was saying. Through this comparative exercise I would learn the similarities as well as the most significant differences between the two groups, their religion, their farming techniques, and their social structure. In this presentation I want to review the conversation Baga farmers held with Olga in 1993 through the medium of an anthropology student. In particular, I will focus on the structure of the Baga house and household, a topic that greatly interested me and for whose full understanding Olga’s methodology and ideas were crucial.

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Olga Linares: Her Contribution to Panamanian Anthropology 2:00 pm

FRANCISCO HERRERA

CEASPA

I got to know Olga when I was one of Reina Torres de Araúz’s students at the University of Panama. At that time Olga had just finished her PhD at Harvard (1964). Olga introduced me to STRI by inviting me to the weekly seminars at the conference room in the old Ancón office. Right at the beginning of her career Olga was still under the shadow of diffusionist archaeology that focused on material culture. But she changed course on meeting up with a group of young researchers who were promoting the inter-disciplinary “New Archaeology” whose goal was the resolution of specific research questions from the perspective of the “Anthropology of the Past”. While still Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Olga won an NSF grant for undertaking a ground-breaking research project in Chiriquí, the province of her birth. Its goal was to deduce how a single native population, the remote ancestors of the Ngäbe, adapted its life-ways to the radically different biomes of the Caribbean and Pacific slopes of the western isthmus while experiencing contrasting social and economic trajectories.

The biological concept that directed this research was “Adaptive Radiation”.

On returning to Panama, Olga assumed the presidency of the Anthropology Association of Panama where she promptly made an impression on regional archaeology by publishing important articles in Spanish in Panamanian journals and meeting proceedings. But her intellectual focus turned once more to the tropical region where her first independent archaeology research project in the wetlands of Senegal introduced her to the feasibility of applying the approaches and methodologies advocated by the New Archaeology. This change of direction at Olga’s age in her life deprived me of a more continuous professional and personal relationship. Nevertheless, one of her last articles was related to compare the cattle culture among the Ngöbe and its inexistence among the Guna, presented as a collaboration with me, as well as my few contributions to this article, which was presented at the Americanist Conference held in Sweden.

CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF OLGA F. LINARES

| FEBRUARY 18, 2016

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Olga Linares as teacher, mentor, and promoter of ethnography 2:20 pm

JAMES HOWE

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the few short years that Olga Linares spent at the University of Pennsylvania, she stood out as a charismatic teacher of, among other things, South American ethnography. Inspired by the Harvard Central Brazil Project of David Maybury-Lewis, in the early 1970s Olga encouraged several students to carry out joint ethnography projects among the Guna of Panama, communicating with each other and exchanging insights and results while in the field, as indeed happened with Joel Sherzer and the author of this paper. Since then, Sherzer and the author, while following different research trajectories, have continued to influence each other. Among the dozens of anthropologists who have worked with the Guna, the two stand out for working intensively in the Guna language, for collaborating extensively with indigenous colleagues and each other, and for persisting in programs of research and publication spanning almost a half-century---thus fulfilling in no small part Olga’s original hopes and plans.

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Two seminal archaeology papers by Olga Linares and their impact on methodology and inference 2:40 pm

RICHARD COOKE

STRI

Olga’s first experience of field archaeology was in Chiriquí, the Panamanian province of her birth. While a Harvard PhD student she joined an “expedition” led by Bob McGimsey, the discoverer of Cerro Mangote, at that time the only pre-pottery site in tropical America.

McGimsey’s main interest was material culture. Stratigraphy was an after-thought. Great was Olga’s chagrin when her colleagues were not impressed that her excavations in the mangroves disgorged vertebrate remains obviously more informative than “mammal, prob. deer”. Olga made sure that her NSF project in western Panama treated animal bones and stratigraphy in ways rarely used by archaeologists in the humid tropics: water-sieving, areal excavations and flotation. Zooarchaeologists did the identifications; Olga interpreted the faunas in a culturalecological context influenced by conversations with biologists at STRI where she became Staff Scientist in 1972. Her garden-hunting paper (Human Ecology 4: 331-349) argued that the residents of pre-Spanish hamlets in humid forests did not make treks to the deep forest like many contemporary tropical forest peoples. Rather they harvested r-selected mammals that foraged at forest-edges and came to traps (agouti [Dasyprocta], pacas [Cuniculus] and armadillo [Dasypus]). These taxa were not the ones most often depicted on the pre-Colombian pottery of Chiriquí and the savannas of the Central Provinces. Olga’s explanation for this dichotomy is the title of her 1976 paper: “Animals that were bad to eat were good to compete with…”. To be frank, it wasn’t as clear-cut as Olga thought: white-tailed deer are the most frequently depicted mammal in Gran Coclé art, and the commonest mammal in regional rubbish dumps. The major contribution of Olga’s monography Ecology and the Arts in Ancient Panama was to stress the importance of animal behaviour in a millenary symbolic system that treated animals and humans as partners in a complex metaphoric environment.

CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF OLGA F. LINARES

| FEBRUARY 18, 2016

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A multi-proxy approach to study past human impact on the Lower Amazon, Santarem 3:50 pm

JOSÉ IRIARTE

University of Exeter

This presentation introduces the ‘Pre-Columbian Amazon-Scale Transformations’ project that investigate the nature and scale of past human impact across the Amazon integrating archaeology, archaeobotany, palaeoecology, soil science, botany and remote sensing.

Here, I illustrate this multi-proxy methodology by presenting initial results from the unique region around Santarém city at the confluence of the Tapajós and the Amazon rivers. Home to the Tapajós chiefdom (10001600AD), this region exhibits some of the highest densities of ADE sites in Amazonia located in diverse settings including both floodplain and terra firme locales. These preliminary results are compared with other regions of Amazonia and their implications for the current debate on the nature and scale of past human impact in Amazonia are briefly discussed.

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Research Radiations: Building upon Olga Linares’s Legacy in the Study of Pre-Columbian Western Panama 4:10 pm

RUTH DICKAU

HD Analytical Solutions

Olga Linares’s pioneering research on the pre-Columbian history of western Panama created the foundation for a radiation of scholarship over the past several decades. Theoretical and methodological advances in archaeological science have opened up new avenues of investigation, providing significant insights into the lives of the ancient inhabitants.

Recent research has extended the known occupation of the region to at least 8700 BC, and demonstrated that the inhabitants began cultivating crops very early in their history, long before the adoption of ceramic technology. The recovery of artifacts associated with ritual practices suggests that the social organization of these pre-ceramic horticulturalists included religious specialists. These discoveries and others further resolve our understanding of ancient settlement patterns, subsistence economy, and social organization in the region, issues central to Linares’s work.

CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF OLGA F. LINARES

| FEBRUARY 18, 2016 11

Grand Ideas, Collaborative Research and the Influence of Olga Linares’s Adaptive Radiations Project on Archaeology in Panama and Beyond 4:30 pm

ANTHONY J. RANERE

Temple University

Olga Linares’s vision for identifying and explaining the different cultural trajectories in western Panama led her to examine cultural connectedness across the three environmental zones of Pacific coastal Chiriquí, Highland Chiriquí and Caribbean coastal Bocas del Toro. She put together a research team that included ethnographers, paleoethnobotanists, palynologists, zooarchaeologists and several graduate archaeology students. She also expanded the scope of the Adaptive Radiations project by supporting my initial forays into exploring the pre-ceramic archaeological record in Western Panama. The example of the Linares Adaptive Radiations project in Western Panama was very much on our minds as Richard Cooke and I mounted our own regional scale archaeological project in Central Panama. While Linares’s focus was on the most recent ceramic aged cultural complexes in Western Panama, our Proyecto Santa Maria (PSM) focused on the earlier pre-ceramic record. Like the Western Panama Project, the PSM involved a number of collaborators including an ethnographer, geologists, palynologists, paleoethnobotanists, zooarchaeologists and a number of graduate archaeology students. In this presentation I examine the influence of the Adaptive Radiation project in Western Panama and the influence of the Proyecto Santa Maria project in Central Panama over the last several decades of continued archaeological research in both regions. I conclude by considering the contributions both project have made to our greatly expanded knowledge about the history of human occupations in the tropical forests of the Americas.

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For more information: kingb@si.edu