Acculturation as a Theory of Value: The Circulation of Goods Among the Korubo

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the Regime de Circulação de Bens (Regime for the Circulation of Goods), a document created by Funai in 2011 to standardize the transactions of the Korubo of the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, with non‐Indigenous people. I argue that this Regime projects the commodity‐form onto the Korubo through equivalence tables, differential pricing, and a prohibition on debt, all presupposing autonomous and mutually foreign transactors. This mercantile ontology revives the premises of acculturation, now obsolete in anthropology yet still operative in contemporary indigenist policy directed at Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples. The Korubo, however, conceive of the Regime as a “project” that enacts the logic of asymmetrical relations between predation and sharing. The article shows how the Brazilian state seeks to institute a regime of commerce among people who have historically related to non‐Indigenous society through warfare.