Mark Seifert

Feeding the Mouth of the Bull: Provisioning Native Caribbean Foragers Within the New Economy of Bocas Del Toro, Panama Mark Seifert

Aimed at economic anthropologists and scholars of tropical human ecology, this monograph details the food provisioning system of the maritime Guaymi of the Bocas del Toro Archipelago in the rural Caribbean of Panama and attempts to situate the Guaymi within a larger theoretical context related to non-domesticated provisioning and suggests how anthropologists should think about people who engage in foraging activity, but not exclusively. The maritime Guaymi have for decades been identified as subsistence farmers but have also hunted and fished the forests and seas to gain essential and substantial items of sustenance. This diachronic study details multiple facets of the Guaymi food production system and proposes that micro-economic provisioning clusters exist and serve as adaptive mechanisms. The discovery and examination of the maritime Guaymi food production system informs on a larger theoretical construct concerning the concept of ¿part-time foragers¿. Using the Guaymi as an ethnographic example, a ¿foraging continuum¿ is identified and assessed and perspectives on how anthropology can begin to evaluate this sustenance group is proposed.