The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

It is not unusual for ethnographers working with indigenous Amazonian societies to discover that almost everything around them has an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars, liana groves and animals. As ethnographers also note, such ownership always carries a double meaning of domination and care. To be without an owner is to be exposed, unprotected.59 In what anthropologists refer to as totemic systems, of the kind we discussed for Australia and North America, the responsibility of care takes on a particularly extreme form. Each human clan is said to ‘own’ a certain species of animal – thus making them the ‘Bear clan’, ‘Elk clan’, ‘Eagle clan’ and so forth – but what this means is precisely that members of that clan cannot hunt, kill, harm or otherwise consume animals of that species. In fact, they are expected to take part in rituals that promote its existence and make it flourish.