process of integration of indigenous societies into the market economy through three

stages: (1) luxuries became necessities, and the influence of trading relationships disrupts

native social organization, (2) government and outsiders pushed the indigenous to

market, and (3) indigenous people made a conscious choice to became part of market

economies.

 The AshAninka

 The Ashininka are an Arawakan-speaking people inhabiting the Upper Ucayali

tributary valleys (Tambo, Perene, Pichis, Apurimac and Ene), the interfluvial Gran

Pajonal area and the Upper Ucayali seasonal flooding lands in the Selva Central region in

the Peruvian Amazon. According to the last national census (INEI 1993), the Ashininka

population was 51,093 people among 359 communities located in the tropical rain forest

in the departments of Junin, Pasco, Cuzco and Ucayali.

 Within the Ashininka, six ethnic groups are identified according to their

geographic distribution and some linguistic and cultural differences. The target

communities of this research belong to the Campa-Ashininka group, the most numerous,

with some 40,518 (INEI 1993) in the Lower Apurimac, Ene, Tambo, Lower Perene and

Satipo valleys (Yafiez 1998).

 The Ashininka traditional domestic unit consists of residential units of four or five

nuclear families linked by kinship and affinity relations. These residential units have a

leader and share a common territory or nampitsi. In the 1960s, these residential units

were grouped into indigenous communities, within larger territories that comprise various

nampitsi. Several factors caused the concentration of the dispersed population into

grouped communities: colonist pressure over indigenous territories, the need to ensure

land tenure rights, school influences, and the activities of churches and governmental