214 ARTS AND CRAFTS OF GUIANA INDIANS [PTH, ANN. 38 
300). “The felling of the timber to clear a field is essentially man’s 
work, and it often occurs that the owner will be assisted by his neigh- 
bors and friends, their labor being requited in the way of drink at the 
party given on completion of the work. Such an association, to- 
gether with its subsequent festivities, is known as a kai-appa (War- 
rau), or mansirimanni, from the Arawak massaramanni. So also, 
on the lower Amazons, all the heavy work, such as felling and burn- 
ing the timber, planting, and weeding, is done in the plantation of 
each family by a congregation of neighbors, which they call a 
‘pucherum ’—a similar custom to the ‘bee’ in the backwoods settle- 
ments of North America. ... When the invitation is issued the 
family prepares a great quantity of fermented drink” (HWB, 221). 
It must be borne in mind that in the clearing of the forest the 
Indian will usually save from destruction any economic palms or 
edible fruit trees. Dance says that kushi ants will not have their 
nests near a cunaparu (Phyllanthus sp.) plant, the milky juice of 
which is acrid and insufferably irritant, and it is for this reason that 
many fields contain two or three of these plants (Da, 213). The com- 
mon practice of burning the savannas has nothing of an agricultural 
interest. The clearing of the field usually takes place at the commence- 
ment of the dry season. Hilhouse makes the following remarks con- 
cerning the labor entailed in the acquisition of a year’s food supply by 
two people: “ One Indian (Akawa1) will clear and, with his wife, plant 
2 or 3 acres in as many weeks, and 7 or 8 acres will supply them with 
a year’s food, so that 10 or 12 weeks in the year is absolutely all that 
is required for actual labor, and the rest of the time remains for 
pleasure, hunting, and fishing” (HiC, 235). This excerpt is note- 
worthy in the mention therein made of the planting being done by 
a man—an unusual occurrence, the planting, like the weeding, being 
woman’s work. So also, for similar reasons, the illustration of a 
man (sec. 343) grating cassava in Rochefort’s work is very curious 
(RO, 105). 
229. But local conditions, as on the banks of the larger streams, 
the Amazon and the Orinoco, may be such that there is no necessity 
for clearing any forest, suitable agricultural land being already avail- 
able. Thus, some do not take the trouble to clear a piece of forest 
for this purpose [of a plantation], but make use of the sloping, 
bare, earthy banks of the Solimoens which remain uncovered by 
water during eight or nine months of the year, and consequently 
long enough to give time for the ripening of the crops of man- 
dioca, beans, ete. (HWB, 282). The Otomac pursued the same tactics 
on the lakes when drying up with the fall of the Orinoco (G, 1, 177; 
11, 231). 
230. On the other hand, certain tribes, nomadic in their habits, 
never troubled about agriculture in any form. On the Orinoco the 
