ABSTRACT
My first research amongst the Amuesha, an Arawakan-speaking people of the Peruvian tropical forest, sought to reach an understanding of their economic organisation and the complex ways in which their traditional subsistence patterns were interwoven with market-orientated productive activities. At that time I carried out fieldwork with my colleagues, Frederica Barclay and Rosario Basurto, from March to November 1977. The analysis of the process of incorporation of the Amuesha people into national economic networks necessarily led me to the field of history. In my Licentiate thesis (1980) my aim was to reconstruct the history of the Amuesha from their first contacts with the Spanish up to the beginning of the present century. As I believed that a historical account based on non-Amuesha documentary sources would misrepresent Amuesha history, I attempted to incorporate the Amuesha's own reflections of their past. This led me into the fascinating and intricate domain of Amuesha mythology, I soon discovered the difficulties of extricating what we call the 'historical' from the 'mythical', but in compensation I became aware of a completely new area of Amuesha life which I had previously disregarded. Since then it has been my goal to explore this area of Amuesha thought, which increasingly seemed to me to be inextricable from their social action.
