The material life of the Warao

The theoretical theme of my thesis is on material culture. Given that I am working at a museum, and the project announcement was a call for "new theory on material culture", this is a thread I have actively been perusing since I started out this project. I really did not have a great interest in the field of material culture. I thought is sounded a bit daft, and thought that the combination of "material", and "culture" at the same time gave us a picture of how wrong it is possible to think about culture. I am here of course talking about the "Great Divide", Cartesian dualism and so on. 

But when I started digging into this field, I found a great deal of very innovating and inspiring theory. Reading guys like Miller, Tilley, Rawlings, started to inspire me in reflecting on materiality in a different way. Of course Ingold is also someone I have been reading a lot of. 

Anyway, what I find interesting and challenging when it comes to the Warao and their material culture, is their engagement in industrialized goods in combination with their day to day activity. 

The Warao I have lived with are fishers and gardeners. People paddle out to their gardens and fishing spots, travel into the woods to gather fruits and other edible stuff. All in all it is what you would expect indians to do, and the materiality of canoes, bowes, arrows, shotguns, palm thatched roofs, houses built on stilts and so on, are all in place. In addition to this I found a range of industrialized consumer goods in the village, like stereos, TV´s and radios, while the media show was run by small generators people had acquired in the city. People where having parties where they where dancing salsa, watching the last "Lord of the Ring" movie, and listening to the news. 

And it is grasping the meaning of these changing consumer pattern that I am trying to get at. What is the consequence of engaging with this type of materiality in this place? How to you avoid traps of boxing this materiality on the one side of "traditional" and the other "modern"?