Autonomous partners: asymmetry and masculinity in Amazonian river trade

Abstract

Trade on the Iriri River, in the eastern Brazilian Amazonia, is structured around a credit-barter system between clients and bosses known as aviamento in Portuguese. Nowadays, bosses are river traders born in the riversides who offer goods on credit to riverside dwellers, who later pay these debts with fish and products they collect from the forest. While the system, found in the Amazon basin since colonial times, is perhaps most known for fostering debt-peonage during the Rubber Boom (1870-1912), it can also create relations of mutual dependency that promote the autonomy of trade partners within an asymmetrical exchange. When that is the case, this trade is central to how clients and bosses define themselves as hard-working, reliable, and transparent, personifying qualities they deem essential to masculine honour. In such partnerships (and more dramatically when they break down), the asymmetry of the relation can be challenged through a notion of male equivalence in which men must defend their honour and adhere to a code of conduct that ultimately excludes women and children from trade.