Indigenous Networks at the Margins of Development

Feminización y pedagogías feministas. Museos interactivos, ferias de ciencia y comunidades de software libre en el sur global

TANIA PÉREZ - BUSTOS

Perspectivas antropológicas sobre la Amazonia contemporánea

MARGARITA CHAVES Y CARLOS DEL CAIRO,

COMPILADORES

INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

OTHER TITLES

This work is based on research and advocacy with the people of two multiethnic indigenous resguardos located at the outskirts of the Colombian towns of Leticia and Puerto Nariño. Through an analysis of the relationship between development institutions and indigenous people, the book examines the dynamics of social praxis in contexts where development is debated, enforced, and subverted, and it does so in a dialogue with the critical perspective of post-development, and the critiques woven by indigenous people on the basis of their experiences, world-views, and embodied perceptions of well-being. In spite of being the postulate of development “the improvement of the people’s quality of life,” indigenous people express the feeling that their life quality has become worse as development projects proceed, and they see themselves as both physically and spiritually ill. While they become increasingly involved in the development apparatus, they strive to resist the implicit beliefs of development as well as its practical workings. In a situation of crisis, which pervades, as a virus, the human, social, and cosmic bodies, indigenous people endeavor to cure the pathogenic energy of development through the strengthening of cultural meanings and the weaving of intercultural alliances. For the supra-ethnic ensemble known as People of the Center, this twofold process is articulated through the ritual consumption of coca and tobacco. This work asks why this philosophical and ritual system is able to resonate in an indigenous multicultural context, and how it generates schemas for political agency that intertwine in a powerful way healing, dissent, and the consolidation of intercultural networks.

Indigenous Networks at the Margins of Development GIOVANNA MICARELLI

GIOVANNA MICARELLI Associate professor of anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, and researcher at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, directed by Prof. Boaventura de Sousa Santos. She has worked in the Amazon since 1995, with the Conibo Shipibo of the Ucayali region in Perú, the Tikuna of the Amacayacu river, and the indigenous peoples belonging to the supra-ethnic ensemble People of the Center at the periphery of the Colombian town of Leticia. Beside her research on indigenous critical engagements with development and modernity, she has worked on social-environmental understandings in the construction and defense of the territory, and on native modes of knowing – indigenous epistemologies - particularly embodied knowledge. Envisioning ethnographic methods as a horizontal exchange with indigenous intellectuals and communities, she has been engaged in different indigenous processes of cultural reaffirmation and self-determination.

INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

GIOVANNA MICARELLI

Facultad de Ciencias Sociales

Reservados todos los derechos © Pontificia Universidad Javeriana © Giovanna Micarelli Primera edición: mayo del 2015 Bogotá, D.C. isbn: 978-958-716-819-8 Número de ejemplares: 100 Impreso y hecho en Colombia Printed and made in Colombia Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Carrera 7, N.º 37-25, oficina 1301 Edificio Lutaima Teléfono: 320 8320 ext. 4752 www.javeriana.edu.co/editorial Bogotá, D. C.

Corrección de estilo Nicolás Barbosa Matthew Battle Diseño de cubierta Claudia Patricia Rodríguez Diagramación y montaje de cubierta Marcela Godoy

Impresión Javegraf

MIEMBRO DE LA

RED DE EDITORIALES UNIVERSITARIAS DE AUSJAL ASOCIACIÓN DE UNIVERSIDADES CONFIADAS A LA COMPAÑIA DE JESÚS EN AMÉRICA LATINA

www.ausjal.org

Micarelli, Giovanna Indigenous Networks at the Margins of Development / Giovanna Micarelli. -- 1a ed. -- Bogotá : Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2014. -- (Colección diario de campo) 236 p. : ilustraciones, fotos, mapas y tablas ; 24 cm. Incluye referencias bibliográficas. ISBN : 978-958-716-819-8 1. ANTROPOLOGÍA CULTURAL - COLOMBIA. 2. INDÍGENAS DE COLOMBIA. 3. RELACIONES SOCIALES - COLOMBIA. 5. GEOGRAFÍA HUMANA - COLOMBIA. I. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. CDD 306 ed. 21 Catalogación en la publicación - Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Biblioteca Alfonso Borrero Cabal, S.J. opg.

Abril 09 / 2015

Prohibida la reproducción total o parcial de este material, sin autorización por escrito de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Notes on Transcription

Acknowledgements

Introduction

L iving in the K ilómetros : C onceiving T heory as P raxis O ut of the H ouse : A nthropological K nowledge and the E thics of F ieldwork W eaving a T ext Entwined Landscapes: Sensory Itineraries and the Topography of Power

R outes , M aps , T erritories “C arretera A rriba …C arretera A bajo :” C omunidades and M alocas Situating Development

C oca and T obacco : “O ur P rinciple of O rganization ” D evelopment as I llness , I ndigenous A ntibodies T he P ractice of C ulture C onclusions

15 16 23 27

35 37 50 65 71 78 82 94

Comparative Interstice: On the Verge of Development

Policies, Politics, and Orders of Worth

103

R acionales and N aturalitos : T he C onstruction a L esser S ubject “ ¿A dónde está la plata ?”: M oney and the V alue of S ocial R elations T he C risis

105 123 131

Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances

A M uinane W ay to C onduct a P roject N ative C lassifications S ide P aths : L earning H ow to L earn H ow D oes the S peech C ure ? P oetic P erformances P erformances for S urvival : C uring the B ody , and the W orld

139 140 144 150 155 162 the

S ociety ,

Organization: Histories and Territories

A P lace to S it R outes and R oots : T he P erformance of I dentity O Abïmo Erokaï, ‘Look at Your Body’: An Indigenous Project T erritories : T he A ncestral F ootprints C onclusions Four Pillars and a Dance Floor

S ituating D evelopment T he P oetics of D issent R itual and P olitics I nterethnic N etworks and P lace -M aking A D ance F loor References

169 173 173 178 184 192 207 209 210 211 212 214 216 219

List of Illustrations

Maps Map 1: The Peruvian-Colombian-Brazilian border with main locations

where research was conducted.

Map 2: Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km 6-11

Map 3: Routes between the Putumayo and the Amazon Basin

Photographs Photo 1: A contemporary maloca

Photo 2: Indigenous community “Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Murui,” also known as Kilómetro 11

Photo 3: Introduced housing in the indigenous community

“Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Murui”, Kilómetro 11.

Photo 4: Carefully collecting coca leaves: “each leaf is a word”.

Photo 5: An example of indigenous connections. A bowl full of mambe

sits on a Yap “stone money” donated by a Micronesian indigenous delegation during a visit in the year 2000. Kilómetro 11 community

Photo 6: Extracting the poison of bitter manioc. Kilómetro 11 community 137

Photo 7: They showed her a huge chagra (swidden plot) with plenty of manioc, plantain, coca, peanut plants. “Había de todo,” “it was plenty of everything.”

177

Photo 8: Building a maloca. Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto,

Km. 6-11. 2005

193

Photo 9: A shaman, a ritual chanter, and a young woman of the Uitoto

ethnic group reflecting on the maps in the Kilómetro 11’s maloca. 1999

202

Photo 10: Jimoma dance ritual. Joko Ailloko Rïerue Nabïrï maloca, Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto, Km. 6-11. 2010.

208

Photo 11: Workshop of Social Photography, TAFOS. Indigenous

community Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, 2000.

218

Figures Figure 1. The front page of the Development Plan presented to the Municipality of Leticia by the indigenous association of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6 y 11.

Tables Table 1. Clans and ethnic groups of the Kilómetro 11 Community, Comunidad Indígena Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Muirui.

Table 2. Malocas in the Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto Kilómetro 6-11.

Table 3. Terms by which the Muina distinguish themselves from the Murui

(from Gasché, 1972, p. 209).

Notes on Transcription The following conventions have been adopted for transcribing oral texts. • • • •

•

Bold has been used to indicate an emphasis in the utterance. Three dots indicate a pause in an individual utterance. Three dots in square brackets indicate a cut in the transcription. Text included in square brackets is my reconstruction of implicit information. For example: “Then we passed it [the project], we pass it this way and it came out 30 [million pesos].” Text included in parenthesis indicates the interference of the transmitting voice in the transmitted voice.

For example: ‘[the official told us] “[…] you cannot have an engineer because you don’t have (I don’t know what) from the chamber of commerce”.’ Because of the specificity of the action of consuming mambe, which cannot be properly translated as “eating” or “chewing” coca, I follow Echeverri’s suggestion (Candre and Echeverri, 1996; Echeverri, 1997), and use “to mambe” as an English verb. To mambe indicates the action of putting coca inside the cheeks, and slowly absorbing it through the mouth. Foreign words commonly used in the text, such as maloca, resguardo, mambe, ambil, will not be in italicized after the first occurrence.

Pronunciation ï, i = high central vowel ll, y = voiced palatal fricative

Acknowledgements This work would have not been possible without the help of many people and institutions. I acknowledge the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Graduate College and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Nelle M. Signor Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Illinois Program of Research in the Humanities (IPRH), which provided funds that allowed me to study at the University of Illinois, do research in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, and write my dissertation. Post-doctoral funding was provided by the Spencer Foundation for Research in Education. I thank my mentors at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in particular Janet Keller, Kris Lehman, Bill Kelleher, and Norman Whitten, my thesis advisor, for guiding and nurturing my interests over the years. Neil L. Whitehead (University of Wisconsin-Madison) was an invaluable addition to my doctoral committee. His intellectual breadth and enthusiasm have inspired me tremendously and will never be forgotten. In Colombia my thanks go to Juan Álvaro Echeverri, Carlos Zárate and Germán Vallejo, and Hugo Camacho (ICBF), Fabiola Herrera, and Fernando Mosquera (Red de Solidaridad Social) who made me appreciate how individual actors who operate in the institutional arena can make a difference. I thank Nelson Ortiz for the hours spent discussing the working of development and indigenous alternatives in this region. I also thank the friends of the Reserva Cerca Viva for relieving the burden of ethnographic research and for their hospitality, and Marcela Lucía Rojas for allowing me to use some of the photographs she took in the Resguardo while visiting in 2010.

I feel privileged for having had the opportunity to know and work with Amazonian indigenous people. I thank the people from the Resguardo TikunaCocama-Yagua of Puerto Nariño, from the indigenous community San Martín de Amacayacu, and from the Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6-11, as well as the many indigenous individuals I met during the years who shared with me their wisdom, and trusted me enough to involve me in their struggles. I am particularly grateful to the people of the indigenous community Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï Muina-Murui, the “place of the sweet science,” for their kindness, patience, and friendship. My respect and gratitude go to Juan Flórez Reátegui, Juan Flórez Valle, Alfonso García, Nicanor Morales, Walter Morales, Lucinda Vásquez, Jesús Vásquez, Cristóbal Gómez, Chirui, Panerito, Jhonny (sic), César, Aurelia and Rosalia, among others. My special thanks go to my friend Celimo Nejedeka Jifichíu for his patience and generosity. My dearest gratitude goes to my family, who has encouraged, inspired, and helped me through all these years in countless ways. My deepest thanks go to my parents, Nicoletta Badoni and Maurizio Micarelli, for encouraging me to find my way in the forest of knowledge as well as in real forests bestowing on me their unconditional love, trust, and support. My brother Vincenzo offered his skills as a photographer while visiting us in the Amazon. The Workshop of Social Photography we developed in the indigenous community Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï Muina-Murui would have not been possible without his help and enthusiasm. Hernán Gómez —Chona— has been a tireless travel companion, and this work has been deeply enriched with his creativity, reflections, and fine understanding of the Amazonian world. He also created two maps included in this books. Dulcis in fundo, Aikuna and Nicoletta, our daughters, to whom I dedicate this book.

14 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Introduction Full of merit, yet poetically / Humans dwell on this earth. (F. Hölderlin)

One evening, a few weeks before leaving the field, I was at home waiting for my friend and consultant Nemesio.1 We had planned to work hard to complete the project on Muinane health promotion and prevention that he wanted to submit to the Municipality’s Health Office for funding. I had just finished making cahuana, a manioc starch beverage mixed, in this particular case, with pineapple juice. Refreshing and sweet, cahuana is the woman’s counterpart to cool tobacco and sweet coca, and the beverage is considered to be the woman’s contribution to a successful coca and tobacco talk. Finally Nemesio arrived. He did not walk in freely as he always did, but stood at the door: “Hi, I’m going to a talk session with some doctors, lawyers from Bogotá. I need our notes. We’ll have to work another day.” I grudgingly handed him a bunch of hand-written papers containing the work of the last few months on indigenous notions of health. “I need all of them.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Your green booklets.” “You mean my field notes? What do you need them for?” “I cannot explain now. I’m in a hurry. Please, get a move on.” As most anthropologists, I tend to be quite protective with my notes, and I was especially unprepared to expose them to the perils of the tropical night and to the unheard commentary of the “doctors” from Bogotá. 1. Name has been changed.

The disappointment over a night of work gone to nothing, combined with Nemesio’s rush, superseded my usual trust in him. So, in spite of his insistence, I refused to give him my booklets. The day after, he showed up in his usual cheerful mood. He looked tired but radiant, like after winning a soccer match. He sat down in the hammock, and, without me asking, he started narrating the talk he had had the night before. “I really don't understand how white people can talk about one thing and the other. We talked about law, and the Maya Calendar, and ethnoeducation... The Speech flies around, it gets all tangled up. The Speech That Cures is the one you define out of the chispero.2 Can you imagine what it means to suck the energy of all those lawyers? What a job! I got dizzy. I almost fainted. I had to go and take a shower and wash out all that filth. They were talking about this and that and I was adjusting all what they were saying. Squeeze all the juice out of the talk and make it into a fruit. The heart is sweet and the peel is neither sweet nor bitter. It must be strong. This is a defense. This is why I asked you for the notes. It was because I was going to ask the Grandfather of Tobacco to bless them with the Speech of Life. He revealed to me all the corrections we have to make to the papers. But those you did not give to me have not received the influence of the Speech. So I’m sorry but they will stay with the errors!” And he smiled.

Living in the Kilómetros : Conceiving Theory as Praxis This book is based on research carried out in the Colombian Trapecio Amazónico during a two-year period, from 1998 to 2000. Several years have passed since then, and of course, many things have changed. I was back in “the field” from 2004 to 2007 and for the whole year 2009, and while living in Bogotá I was able to maintain close contact with many of the individuals who helped me gain some understanding of the issues discussed here. During these years, the map, social as well as physical, has been constantly changing: malocas have fallen, moved, and rebuilt, new leaders have emerged, 2. The noun chispa means ‘spark’ in Spanish, but in Colombian Spanish slang chispero indicates an animated argument in which contrasting opinions are expressed.

16 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

alliances have shifted, politics have been readjusted. Yet these movements keep revealing the particular disposition with which people deal with identity and change. Paraphrasing Clifford (1997, p. 3), roots do not necessarily “always precede routes”; rather, people’s routes seem to strengthen cultural meanings and senses of dwelling in this particular scenario. The point of departure of my research was how indigenous people who live in multiethnic communities at the periphery of an Amazonian town3 cope with development. While I looked at concrete interactions between indigenous people and development officials, a series of contradictions came into view. On one hand, indigenous people’s strong criticism of the development enterprise seemed to be at odds with their efforts to partake in development projects. On the other, people’s perception of abjection diverged from the stated development goal of improving people’s quality of life. As I tried to empirically unravel these issues, I realized that their complexity could not be accounted for through a dominance/resistance approach. Gradually, I also realized that development is envisioned as a pathogen, and therefore, that the possibility for indigenous people to participate in development is dependent on a process of “curing,” both in the sense of healing and of making suitable for human consumption (as in curing the meat of wild pray). This process is dependent on the rearticulation of interethnic values and identities. Accordingly, I followed Escobar’s (1995) suggestion and looked at development as both a regime of practices and representation, and “an arena of cultural contestation and identity construction” (p. 15). For the Gente de Centro4 —a linguistically diverse, but culturally relatively uniform ensemble of ethnic groups located in the North West Amazon5— this twofold process is articulated through a language philosophy centered on speech performances and the ritual consumption of coca and tobacco. The Speech of

3. The town of Leticia, in the Colombian Department of Amazonas. Los Kilómetros refers to multiethnic, predominantly indigenous communities located at the border of the indigenous Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto, Km. 6-11, named after the number of kilometers that separate them from the town of Leticia, on the Leticia-Tarapacá road. 4. Literally People of Center, for the time being I adopt here the translation People of the Center that has become common among scholars working in the region. 5. People of the Center includes approximately 7,500 individuals of Uitoto, Bora, Miraña, Muinane, Andoke, Nonuya and Ocaina patrilineal clans in the Caquetá, Putumayo and Amazonas regions of Colombia and in the northern Amazonas region of Peru (see Echeverri, 1997; Londoño, 2001)

Introduction • 17

Coca and Tobacco,6 also known as Speech of Life, is mobilized as a powerful symbol of both healing and dissent, of cultural continuity and interethnicity. This philosophical and ritual system translates a body of knowledge related to the management of life and defense against illness into concrete daily tasks. It is based on the idea that life depends on people’s personal responsibility to take care of life through processes that, at the same time, transform, organize, and reproduce diversity. According to Echeverri (1997), the body of knowledge expressed by the Speech of Coca and Tobacco’s language philosophy was instrumental in the creation of the Gente de Centro’s supra-ethnic “moral community,” after the genocide and diaspora that followed the rubber boom, at the beginning of last century. He also noticed [the] general tension between the desire to maintain a ‘closed’ system of cultural reproduction —one which is based on secret knowledge and ethnic difference— and an ‘open’ system which allows for the incorporation of new elements from other groups and the construction of a supraethnic discourse. Such a closed system is based on an endogamic ideal of maintenance of identity. An open system, on the other hand, is based on an exogamic ideal of exchange and reciprocity. (pp. 101-102)

Following this argument, my suggestion here is that the reconfiguration of the indigenous society as a moral community is always suspended on the edges of its own immorality, which implies a constant process of negation of cultural concepts and values to enable the creation of new concepts and values (Fabian, 2001). I take this tension, revealed in the dynamics of interethnic re-organization, as a central aspect of indigenous historicity. The concept of supra-ethnic “moral community” positively disengages the equation of culture, ethnicity, and language affiliation, but to avoid the reproduction of a much criticized view of culture that stresses integration and conformity, we must understand this concept as not defined once for all, but as fundamentally contingent and performative. This moral community is dependent on the continuing selection of existing structures and meanings, and their 6. In Spanish this would be “Palabra de coca y tabacco,” literally “Word of Coca and Tobacco.” However, to avoid the ambiguities that the literal translation could present in English, and to focus on its performative aspect, I decided to translate this concept as “Speech of Coca and Tobacco.” In some cases, though, I maintain the translation “Word,” when indigenous discourse stresses the sacred origin of the Speech of Coca and Tobacco.

18 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

strategic reconfiguration to respond to the situation at hand. I see this as the result of a process of articulation: “the construction of one set of relations out of another [which] often involves delinking or disarticulating connections in order to link or rearticulate others” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 54). My approach engages the recent discussion of Amazonian society as adhering to a “virtue-centered” moral system (Overing and Passes, 2000). Rather than concerned with conformity to rules and obligations, as in a “rights-centered” view of morality, this system is “primary centered upon the quality of ‘the good life’ which is engendered through the artful practices and skills of those who personally and intimately interact in everyday life” (Overing and Passes, 2000, p. 4). The relevance of this distinction for my approach is that it conjoins thinking and sensual life in the understanding of native Amazonians’ view of sociality. Moreover, the moral ideal of peaceful coexistence, which Santos-Granero (2002) calls “the struggle for conviviality,” can only be understood by going beyond locality and the domestic domain, and by adopting an interethnic perspective that highlight relations of exchange, alliance, affinity, predation, and transethnic changes (Santos-Granero 2000, 2002). In other words, we should look at social action in Amazonia as unraveling at the junctures between what Amazonian scholars have called “the political economy of control,” “the symbolic economy of alterity,” and “the moral economy of intimacy” (Overing-Kaplan 1981; Rivière, 1973; Turner, 1979; Viveiros de Castro, 1996; Santos-Granero, 1991, 2000). Said in other words, the construction of sociality is also dependent on the strategic appropriation of non-indigenous practices and discourses. So, the central question I address in this book is how social and cultural networks are interwoven in and through the dialectics between the ‘inside’ world of shared substances (lo de adentro) and the ‘outside’ world of radical alterity (lo de afuera), projecting the struggle for conviviality across the indigenous/non-indigenous divide. A central aspect of this process is the creation of historical schemes in memory. The re-membering of interethnic traditions, based on ideals of cooperation and alliance between groups, is paralleled by voluntary acts of forgetting of less peaceful practices, such as warfare, slavery, witchcraft, and cannibalism. Remembering and forgetting constitute two sides of the same process (Fabian, 2001) in which the implicit and seemingly forgotten coexist with what is brought to mind and publicly stated. This process is profoundly historical, in the sense that it engages indigenous visions of history and their

Introduction • 19

capacity to imagine alternative futures. I take indigenous historicity —the “cultural proclivities that lead to certain kind of historical consciousness within which [indigenous] histories are meaningful” (Whitehead, 2003a, p. xi)— as a central element of indigenous sociality, and look at culture as “an historical product so that even the denial of a given history results from cultural processes that are shaped through that denial” (Whitehead, 2003a, p. xii). In this regard, indigenous conceptions of development as a pathogen —that must be cured and controlled— should not be seen as a symptom of abjection, but rather a way in which indigenous people regain control over history and agency in a situation of crisis, which pervades, as a virus, the human, social, and cosmic bodies. My argument draws inspiration from Michael Taussig’s (1987) study of terror and healing, in which he shows how images of the wild Uitotos were colonially generated to authorize the Casa Arana’s regime of terror. The same terrifying images became magically empowering, as they were symbolically overturned in shamanic healing rituals. However, Taussig does not tell us how the ‘Wild Indians’ “mobilized terror in order to subvert it” (p. xiii) through the healing ritual of coca. This issue urges me to acknowledge healing as a key process in indigenous perspectives of culture, history, and identity, one that puts emphasis on embodiment and personal agency. I agree with White (2002, p. 1) that “identities come from turbulence”; they are “triggered by disjunctions in interactions, social and environmental. For example, awakening each morning is a disjunction from sleep which re-triggers an identity into action.” White (2002) also stresses that “beginning as it does from disjunctions, identity is the expression in social context of the same urge for secure footing that also leads to habits of posture in physical settings” (p. 3). This suggests that processes of identification can be seen as developing at the suture of individual bodies, and changing natural, social and political environments. In this regard, my view of the body coincides with that of critical medical anthropology, as “unquestioningly real and existentially given, even though its very giveness is always historically and culturally produced. Although bodies are, to a certain extent, ‘made up’, there are limits to their made-upness” (Scheper-Hughes, 1994, p. 230). Human bodies represent the intersection of the personal, social, and political bodies, and fissures in this intersection, such as the perception of impending illness, are what make the subversive body possible. Along this line, Hall (1996, p. 12) asks why “there is no theorized account of how or why bodies should not always-for-ever turn up, in

20 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

place, at the right time.” He also reminds us that this “is exactly the point from which the classical Marxist theory of ideology started to unravel.” Besides critical medical anthropology, this point was taken by Marxist cognitive anthropology, in particular by a brief but incisive article by Maurice Bloch (1985) on the relationship between ideology and cognition. In his article, Bloch maintains a difference between those knowledge processes that legitimize domination by creating an alternative view of the cosmos —which he calls “ideology”— and those that organize the experience constructed through day-to-day interactions, which he calls “cognition.” With this distinction he is suggesting that cognition is at least partly able to elude overarching ideological structures, and eventually subverting them. Following this suggestion, I try to locate the source of dissent in the contradictions that unravel between ideology and cognition. I adopt an unorthodox take of ‘dissent’ that is closer to its etymology: ‘dis-sensus’, that is, to feel or sense differently. So, dissent constitutes a political praxis that is rooted in the way in which people perceive and feel the world; it arises from sensual perception, from people’s experiences of themselves and of relations of contact and domination that refuse to conform to the images induced by disciplinary power. What’s more, dissensus is engendered from clashing conceptions of well-being and the ways by which well-being is pursued. By seeing the body not as the docile instrument of power, but as the site of resilience, I agree with the critique addressed to Michel Foucault’s idea of “docile body,” that stresses in particular how this concept “leads to an overestimation of the efficacy of disciplinary power and to an impoverished understanding of the individual which cannot account for experiences that fall outside the realm of the ‘docile body’” (Mc Nay, 1994, p. 104). In the final period of his writing, Foucault moved away from the power that is exercised on, and that forms subjects to the power through which individuals form themselves (Nehamas, 1998, p. 179). His idea of the “care of the self” is fundamental to my understanding of indigenous resilience as based upon embodied notions of well-being. Foucault also saw the techniques for the care of the self as instruments of morality, and connected them explicitly to medical thought and practice. According to Nehamas (1998, p. 178) the care of the self is “not a process of discovering who one truly is but of inventing and improvising who one can be.” This process —that for the People of the Center is articulated and pursued through the Speech of Coca and Tobacco— is historically situated, and it implies the ability to rearrange and manipulate the given. It is essentially a process by which one pursues the desired kind of health.

Introduction • 21

To counter a static view of culture I rely on the key concepts of praxis, performance, and poetics. These concepts provide a useful vantage point from which we can explore the art of living through which indigenous philosophers make the articulation of a mode of life the central theme of the daily care of the self. I see praxis as “action plus reflection” (Freire, 1970), and agree with Escobar (1992a, p. 30) that “reflection on daily life has to be located at the intersection of micro-processes of meaning production, on the one hand, and macro-processes of domination, on the other.” So, I understand praxis as a fundamentally dialectical process of construction and articulation of meanings that extends beyond locality, and that engages “a multitude of actors working together to give form to experiences, ideas, feelings, projects” (Fabian, 1990, p. 13). I see performances as more temporally and spatially bounded events aimed at accomplishing an effect, and shaped by the joint action of ethics and aesthetics. From an epistemological point of view, the focus on performance is relevant because it shuns the hierarchical distinction between the observer and the observed, contributing the construction of networks of knowledge and practice that are conducive to counter-hegemonic agency (Fabian, 1991). In this way, it is possible to conceive of theory as praxis, a “nomad science” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) committed to following the shifting itineraries of everyday life. Finally, the notion of poetics suggests seeing norms as immanent in the concrete process of creation: it is “a doing that while it does, invents the ways of doing” (Pareyson, 1954). Concretely engaged with materials and techniques, poetics aims at realization, but, at the same time, it is tentative and processual. This notion puts emphasis on creative agency that unravels in history, as it is concerned not “with the formal properties of signs, symbols, and rituals —semiotics— but how those signs are used performatively through time” (Whitehead, 2002, p. 2). Praxis, performance, and poetics engage not only what is present but also the traces of memory, feeling, imagination, and desire that are submerged in everyday life. The mobilization of implicit knowledge, meaning, and feeling involves an experimentation with, and direct practice of, alternative frameworks of sense, also engendering a reflection about the human condition, in so doing warding off abjection and the attribution of abjection made by the dominant culture.

22 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Out of the House: Anthropological Knowledge and the Ethics of Fieldwork [...] the extraordinarily tenacious vision of a world divided into the more and less ‘developed’ has been, and in many ways continues to be, constitutive of the anthropological domain of study. Critiques of development, however necessary they may be, and however effectively they may be articulated, will not be sufficient to solve the Jekyll-and-Hide-like conflict between development and anthropology [...] On the contrary, so intimately intertwined is the idea of development (and its lack) with the idea of anthropology itself, that to be critical of the concept of development requires, at the same time, a critical reevaluation of the constitution of the discipline of anthropology itself. Anthropology cannot throw the evil twin out of the house, because the twin remains a part of itself, if only in a repressed and ill-acknowledged way. (J. Ferguson, The A nti-Politics M achine, p. 170.)

At the onset of my fieldwork in Amazonia I was struck with the realization that anthropologists are seldom welcome in indigenous communities. The main accusation addressed to anthropologists, and to scientists in general, is that they steal knowledge. Even if anthropologists usually exchange knowledge for some kind of compensation, these exchanges are perceived as saqueo (a pillage), a comparison that evokes past structures of exploitation. The equation of domination and investigation conveys a sense of powerlessness, and a common feeling expressed by consultants is the anxiety about how knowledge —a person’s most intimate possession— will be used for. As a Uitoto-Murui consultant once explained, “a psychological trauma makes us jealous with our knowledge.” The growing criticism that indigenous people address to the whole anthropological enterprise and the emergence of indigenous ethnographers, urged me to rethink the practice of anthropology, starting from a radical transformation of the ways in which knowledge is seen to be constructed in “the field”. Insisting to locate theory in academia, too often anthropology self-critique ended up in self-contentment, finally endorsing power asymmetries over the recognition of the plural sources of anthropological knowledge, and falling short to reconsider the nature of our knowledge and the utility of our discipline to our ‘subjects’ and the public at large. To this must be

Introduction • 23

added the tendency of anthropological narrative to systematize —and hence obscure— the fluidity of social relations. I believe, with Taussig (1987), that a montage of multiple foci is more apt to render the entanglement of conflicting worlds of meaning and the sense of the creative disorder that characterize the peripheries of development. But in order to destabilize my focus and perspective, I realized I needed to escape the anthropologist pigeon-hole. Then, my approach combined apprenticeship and engagement in a broad range of processes shaped by the people with whom I worked, which in turn led my research project to unexpected paths. An effect of adjusting myself to different perspectives was to multiply both knowledge-exchange occasions, and their register, which also provided me with an ‘emergency exit’ when a relation became too overwhelming. Apprenticeship, for example, could become exceedingly demanding for both the apprentice and the teacher, for reasons I will describe in Chapter 4. The role of asesora (literally consultant, but more with a connotation of “allied educated person”) was also very thorny, as I had to be careful not to be caught in the power conflicts between malocas and their shaman masters. These relationships were luckily counterbalanced by a freer and more familiar one, that of vecinos, neighbors, even with the specific expectations attributed to it.

Collaborative Action-Research At the beginning of our research, my husband Hernán Gómez and I made our equipment available to the comuneros (scooter, camera, tape recorder, laptop, printer, books and tools), and we offered our time and skills for helping with different projects they had generated. These included: • A research project conducted by four Uitoto indigenous leaders about their community’s daily life with relation to interculturality (“Historias de la vida cotidiana en la comunidad indígena Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina Murui, Km. 11, con relación a la interculturalidad”), which eventually won a grant by the Ministry of Culture. • A research project by a Muinane health promoter. The project focused on the People of the Center’s conceptions of health promotion and prevention, and it was aimed at integrating institutional and indigenous programs in indigenous communities of the Amazonas Department. After I left, the project received financial support by the Municipality’s Health Office.

24 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

•

The Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto, Km. 6 y 11. Territorial planning is a requirement set by the Colombian law for all territorial entities, included indigenous resguardos. In their plans, indigenous peoples are trying to establish their view and forms of management of the territory to respond to the challenges of modern society. In the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6-11, this task is made more difficult by the multiethnic texture of its population. My task, as consultant of the reservation’s organization ACITU in the process of territorial planning, was to help coordinate the activities in five different communities, including the workshops of social cartography that took place with the support of NGOs Gaia and Fundaminga. Commercial relation with Fair Trade. An experimental buying order was carried out with three artisans’ organizations of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6-11, and the Resguardo Tikuna-Cocama-Yagua of Puerto Nariño.

In addition to these projects, other two activities responded to the need of imagining relations with indigenous communities conducive to collective praxis. They were aimed at creating a di-version from the heavy psychological load resulting from the development enterprise. In 1996, Hernán Gómez and I presented the theater piece “Los Mendigos” (written by Juan Monsalve from the Popol Vuh of the Maya Quiché) in the Tikuna community San Martín de Amacayacu. Following the presentation, people asked us to spend some time in the community to train them in theater techniques. The workshop was based on the study of body actions used in daily activities such as fishing, weaving or making pottery. These actions were then used in the montage of oral histories collected by Tikuna youngsters. The group of theater anthropology they created, named Me’tare, after a mythical warrior and shaman, has been involved since 1996 in the cultural scene of the Amazonas Department. One of its accomplishments has been to attract indigenous youngsters to the valorization of their language, body, narrative, and cultural tradition (see Micarelli and Gómez, 2002). In 2000, with the help of Italian photographer Vincenzo Micarelli and artist Hernán Gómez, a Workshop of Social Photography (TAFOS) was developed in the multiethnic community Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Murui, Km. 11. We provided cameras and film together with a basic training in photography to community members of all

Introduction • 25

ages, who used these newly acquired skills for investigating and representing their community. The pictures circulated in the community and were eventually exposed in the Universidad Nacional. The knowledge produced by these activities came about in a collective dialogue which involved a process of co-theorization. One result of such collaborative endeavor is that it provoked more questions than those that it was trying to answer, requiring the rediscovery and orchestration of individual and collective knowledge and skills, which in turn, fostered processes of cultural reaffirmation and self-determination. Moreover, some of these collaborations were eventually funded by institutions,7 giving economic yield besides the added value of improved self-esteem for indigenous researchers.

Ethnography of Institutions In order to understand the politics of development at a regional level, I studied the files of governmental organizations and NGOs, and interviewed development officials and consultants working in projects targeted at indigenous communities. Institutions I contacted included the Government of Amazonas, Red de Solidaridad Social, ICBF (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar), Ministerio del Medio Ambiente, Parque Nacional Natural Amacayacu, Ministerio de Cultura, Asuntos Indígenas, INCORA (Instituto Colombiano de Reforma Agraria), Corpoamazonia, Artesanías de Colombia, Universidad Nacional, Banco de la República, Resguardo Tikuna Uitoto Km. 6 y 11, Resguardo Tikuna Cocama y Yagua de Puerto Nariño, Comunidad Yagua-Río Tucuchira, Fundación GAIA, Fundación Hylea, Fundaminga (COAMA), Fundación Yulukairu, Reserva Cerca Viva. Moreover, I participated in meetings held by governmental and/or non-governmental organizations, including Indigenous territorial planning (1998-1999), Ethnoeducation (1999), and the Closed meeting of traditional healers organized by the Secretaría de Salud Departamental (1999). To better 7. Three projects were financed thanks to these collaborations. The research project Historias de la vida cotidiana... (Investigators: Juan Florez Valle, Juan Florez Reátegui, Nicanor Morales Pérez, Walter Morales Vásquez) that I describe in chapter 4 got a grant by the Fondo Mixto para la Promoción de la Cultura y las Artes, Ministerio de Cultura. The Municipal Health Office funded the Muinane research project on Health Promotion mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The main researcher, a Muinane man, was able to send for his father from the Caquetá and to work thoroughly with him on Muinane health conceptions and the formation of traditional health promoters.. A project for the commercialization of crafts of three artisans’ associations of the region was funded by Botteghe della Solidarietá, an Italian Fair Trade shop.

26 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

understand the implementation of Development in indigenous communities I also participated as consultant in a project designed by the indigenous reservation council of Puerto Nariño.

Apprenticeship Apprenticeship in a wide range of crafts, both in indigenous and non-indigenous settings, with and without a primary instructor, helped me access the specificity of cultural and idiosyncratic ways of doing (for the use of apprenticeship in research setting see Coy, 1989; Hutchins, 1995; Keller and Keller, 1996; Singleton, 1998, among others). This also required me to participate in the mambeadero (the place were people ritually consume coca) sessions at night, often until dawn (see Chapter 4). Apprenticeship furthers the understanding of the place of the body in producing, storing, and retrieving knowledge. This process can employ speech, such as directions, proverbs, songs, working metaphors, and so forth, uttered in the context of practical activity, or it can employ bodily images, oriented movements, and kinesthetically represented ideas. The processes that this ethnographic choice implies bear analogies to a walkabout, a journey that results in a cognitive transformation, internalized “by the translation of the narrative into a sequence of kinesthetic experiences and performances” (Shore 1996, p. 315).

Weaving a Text Hay que tenderse al máximo, ser voyant como quería Rimbaud. El novelista hedónico no es más que un voyeur One must stretch to the maximum, and be voyant as Rimbaud wished. The hedonic narrator is nothing but a voyeur (Julio C ortázar)

The need to account for the emergent nature of performance and the plural interpretability of meaning challenges not only the research process but also the way in which research is presented. The indigenous model of knowledge as a basket (see Chapter 2) assisted me in working up the plan of the dissertation. In order to account for the intricacy of the issues I set out to examine, I chose not to organize each chapter around distinct themes, or ‘hard’ topics, but around relations. This attempt is based on the idea that context

Introduction • 27

and actors are not given, but are mutually constituted in interaction. For example, the interaction between a bureaucrat and an indigenous leader shifts according to its location —an air-conditioned governmental office, a bar, or the maloca— the time of the day, or the sharing of coca and tobacco. This may be quite a trivial point but, nonetheless, it is rarely taken into account by ethnographies of development. Accordingly, I identify several ‘threads’, follow them along the chapters, and show the ways in which they intertwine with each other to co-produce different sets of interaction. Among these themes are the interplay of politics and poetics in the fields of representation, location, and identification, meaning making, indigenous conceptions and cures of development, and the relation between knowledge and practice. These threads can also be seen as itineraries. They encompass vision, rhythm, acquired skills and improvisations. Chapter 1, “Entwined Territories: Sensory Itineraries and the Topography of Power”, focuses on the interconnection of local and global processes in the town and periphery of Leticia. I situate this set of connections in the regional, historical, and ethnohistorical context before describing the locality and the local organization of power. For example, I show how rituals create and connect alternative localities, and how these network often subvert the “spatial incarceration” provoked by colonial and neo-colonial processes (Whitehead, 1992b). Stressing movement as well as territory, I also examine the ways in which people in diaspora cultivate a sense of dwelling (Feld and Basso, 1996). I briefly discuss the history of multiculturalism in the Resguardo’s communities, I look at the maloca as a contested symbol of unity, and I address the notion of community as a development cliché that in many ways stands against attempts to reaffirm indigenous identity, also analyzing how the interplay of different forms of social aggregation is negotiated. In Chapter 2, “Situating Development”, I argue for the need to complicate the dichotomy between ‘developers’ and ‘those to be developed’ and look at individual strategies for dealing with development. I explore indigenous rationales for strengthening interethnic forms of organization in response to development, in particular the importance given to coca and tobacco as symbols of unity and resilience. Suggesting that ideologies of progress, such as the development ideology, disjoint memory from historical agency, I introduce indigenous perspectives on culture and history that put emphasis on intentionality, embodiment, and personal responsibility.

28 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

In the “Comparative Interstice”, I narrate an event that happened on the verge of development, in the Ucayali Region of Peru, where I conducted research before moving to Colombia. It tells how, at development interfaces, identity is caught in the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, which oftentimes deploy terror as well as imagery. Chapter 3, “Policies, Politics, and Orders of Worth”, takes as its point of departure the claim made by the People of Center that “Development makes us sick.” By adopting what Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg calls a conjectural or evidential paradigm (1980a), I work through a variety of small clues to tackle the causes, symptoms, and course of a pathology as the People of the Center experience and describe it. I look into the development’s ideological milieu through the analysis of specific context of plan design and implementation. I describe how mechanisms of development, such as bureaucracy, institutional rhetoric, and technical training create a cosmology which predetermines the needs of people and the ways to satisfy them by disseminating modes of thinking and doing that are naturalized and incorporated in everyday life. I examine how racialized notions of culture contribute to create a spatial-temporal framework that limits the possibility of acting. This framework explains, justifies, and eventually reproduces inequality by constructing the “underdeveloped subject” as lacking something: rationality, skill, or assets. I show the effects of this powerful apparatus on social relations, and contrast it to native conceptions about language and power. This discussion provides an entry to the notion of crisis, as it is articulated by indigenous leaders. Chapter 4, “Weaving the Basket of Knowledge: Poetic Performances”, concentrates on indigenous conceptions of health and illness, asking how they are linked to notions of knowledge, speech, and agency. This connection is made clear by the indigenous speech genre and philosophical-ritual system known as Speech of Coca and Tobacco, or Speech of Life, whose basic principle is “think well, speak well, work well; and turn this into abundance for all.” Inherent in the Speech of Coca and Tobacco is a notion of culture as daily practice aimed at maintaining and promoting a healthy life in the cosmos. Every night, indigenous leaders meet in the maloca, the big communal house, where they prepare and ritually consume mambe and ambil, powdered coca leaves and tobacco paste. After discussing and analyzing daily events, they heal the world with the Speech of Coca and Tobacco. Basing my discussion on my participation to these events and my collaboration with an indigenous health promoter, I adopt a performative approach to the

Introduction • 29

Speech of Coca and Tobacco. By engaging ideas of embodiment, this analysis seeks to illuminate the extent of indigenous critiques of development, the range of its effects on indigenous ways of life, and the reasons for its failure to improve the people’s quality of life. Chapter 5, “Organization: Histories and Territories”, is about two indigenous projects for which I worked. They constitute a critical response to development programs in indigenous territories, and show how a bureaucratic form —the project— is transformed and appropriated by indigenous leaders on the basis of cultural values. One is a research project designed and conducted by four Uitoto indigenous leaders. It was aimed at understanding the dynamics of interethnic relations within the history of territorial appropriation and cultural transformation that followed the rubber boom diaspora. The other project is the Resguardo’s Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial, a requisite of the Colombian law in the process of State decentralization. This project reveals how the political and cultural negotiations for the appropriation and definition of a multiethnic territory are managed on the basis of a pan-amazonian model of, and for, political action. This is called, alternatively, “law of origin,” “ancestral management,” or “ancestors’ footsteps.” In the Conclusions, I link the discussion of indigenous interethnic networks, embodied knowledge, and cultural praxis, to what Walden Bello (2001) calls the “globalization from below,” and Arturo Escobar (1995) describes as the capacity to “imagining a post-development era.” * For the People of the Center, knowledge must be paid back with knowledge or a powerful equivalent of it, such as coca and tobacco. For example, when a man wants to acquire knowledge from an elder, a song or a healing spell, he will prepare mambe and ambil and give them to the elder as an offering. Knowledge that is not acquired through a reciprocal exchange of power “no sirve”; it is not only useless but intrinsically dangerous. The giver may lose his/her power, the receiver his/her mental and physical health, and the parental groups of both individuals involved, as well as the society and the cosmos, are doomed to be affected by the negative consequences of an improper transference of knowledge. At the beginning of my fieldwork, my family and I went to live by the Kilómetro 11 indigenous community, at about 7 miles from the town of

30 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Leticia. Twice a day I took the colectivo, a battered Volkswagen bus that connects the rural communities to town, to do research in institutions in Leticia. My first acquaintance with the people of the Kilómetro 11 was on that bus, during the half an hour ride that took to get to town. Stories, gossip, and jokes animated the trips, stretching or shrinking geographic distance. People talked about a variety of things: all the turnaround to get to sell fariña8 at a decent price; the commentaries on the story of a leader who fled to Brazil with the money that the U.S. military base was paying to the community for renting a plot inside the Resguardo to install a radar; the on-going epic of a jaguar, a tigre mariposo, who appeared here and there on the road, ate dogs and chickens and terrified people, not a tigre común, but a brujo, a sorcerer seeking revenge. Hunting and fishing stories, cheating, magic, and condensed wisdom shaped the interaction on the bus. Sometimes everybody stayed quiet, the only sound being that of romantic ballads or Brazilian hiphop, and the hoarse roar of the engine. In that initial period I rarely went to the maloca. During weekdays I was doing research in the offices of Leticia, and I knew I was not allowed to participate, during the night, in the circle of men in the mambeadero. That space, as well as coca, are proscribed to women. My place had to be on the women’s side of the maloca. However, no women participated in the night meeting in the maloca. I thought that there was no point in sitting alone in the dark without being able to hear what was said on the opposite side. But after the news that new gringos had arrived spread in the neighborhood, we started receiving visits from men and women of the community, either at dawn or at night. Day by day, and night by night, we became woven into a net of mutual exchange and bonds of knowledge and everyday activities, and little by little we were drawn closer to the People of the Center’s world and their labored process for autonomy. One of the main concerns troubling the leaders was that they felt unprepared to cope with development. They were trying to devise solutions to this problem and were looking for possible allies. Our collaboration began by assisting them in writing letters to bureaucratic institutions in Leticia, and sometimes by delivering them. Initially, I had planned to do part of my fieldwork in Leticia and part in a “more traditional” Tikuna community located on a tributary of the Amazon river, 70 miles from the town. I had not considered doing research in 8. The coarse flour of manioc (Manihot esculenta).

Introduction • 31

the Kilómetro 11 community because it was multiethnic, it was too close to town, and it had a terrible reputation. Eventually, these same reasons made me change my mind. One night, bored for the painstaking work with bureaucratic institutions, I decided to pay a visit to the maloca with my partner Hernán Gómez, who was regularly attending the mambeadero sessions. Surprisingly enough, I was invited to sit in the mambeadero, and I was offered mambe, which I accepted. While trying not to choke, my mouth full of the fine powder of toasted coca leaves, I pondered the implications of that act. Perhaps they did not see me as a woman. Perhaps that was the strategy they used to involve ‘doctors’ in their struggle. Maybe they were asking me for something, developing bonds of knowledge that sooner or later I had to reciprocate.

32 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

COLOMBIA

Rio

ECUADOR

Caq ueta

Pu tu ma yo

Pto. Nariño RIO AMAZONAS

Leticia

Rio

Uc ay a

Rio Marañ on

BRAZIL

Pucallpa

PERU

Map 1: The Peruvian-Colombian-Brazilian border with main locations where research was conducted. Map by Hernán Gómez.

INTRODUcTION • 33

Chapter 1 Entwined Landscapes: Sensory Itineraries and the Topography of Power Quien quiere dominar no vive en la realidad de quien no quiere hacerse dominar. The one who wants to dominate does not live in the reality of the one who does not want to be dominated. (Uitoto Muina leader) In the field of knowledge [â&#x20AC;Ś] two types of science, State science and â&#x20AC;&#x153;nomadâ&#x20AC;? science, coexist, the former always trying to appropriate the contents of the latter. State science proceeds by territorializing, creating boundaries and hierarchies, producing certainties and theorems, identities. Nomad (or popular) knowledge has a very different form of operation, opposed to that of the State and the economy, with its division of the social space into rulers and governed, intellectual a manual labor. Nomad science stays closer to the everyday, seeking not to extract constants but to follow life and matter in itineraries that shift according to changing variables. While State science reproduces the world according to a fixed point of view, nomad science follows events and solves problems by means of real life operations, not by summoning the power of a conceptual apparatus or a pre-established form of intervention. (E scobar , 1992 a , p. 44, on D eleuze and G uattari, 1987)

The purpose of this chapter is to present the fieldwork setting as the intersection of multiple spaces, ranging from the local to the global. In approaching

this multilayered landscape, I do not see State institutions, the town, the resguardos, the comunidad indígena, or the maloca as delimited research units but as the ongoing product of their interconnections, which are drawn by the joint action of representations, practices, and politics. If to account for these relationships means necessarily to unveil the clash of different points of view, I privilege a view “from below,” one that stays closer to the everyday and that follows people’s real life itineraries. The lived-in places that people create and navigate are tangible, utterly material; however, they also transcend the constraints of time and space to stretch over the realms of memory, imagination, and desire. Clearly, to ask how space becomes territory, that is, a space made meaningful by and for, human agency, one has to assume the fact that space comes already mapped. This mapping is what positions people differently, bounds them to pre-designed places, and controls people’s perspective and movement. This inscription of hegemonic power into the physical space is also reinforced by theories and methods too often revealed “as a way of creating scientific objects and not the start point for unraveling other experiential worlds” (Whitehead, 2009, p. 20). A real counter-hegemonic epistemology, so, must recognize the ways in which people elude the boundaries imposed by the categories of ethnological explanation, and it must embrace fluidity and instability as part of its own intellectual project. My aim is precisely to unveil these other experiential worlds through a consideration of emerging solidarities that defy the categories of culture, ethnicity, and nationality, as well as the univocal attribution to delimited localities. The concept of locus may be a useful, albeit tentative, tool to start approaching these emerging experiences. Among the meanings of locus, the Webster dictionary lists “a center of activity and concentration.” In the late Renaissance, this classic concept of the mnemotechné —the art of memory— was adopted by Giordano Bruno in his studies on memory, and by Giulio Camillo’s Teatro della Memoria (Yates, 1966). These scholars suggest that loci are shaped through the creative composition of place-experience, stage, body action, memory, plot, imagery, and invention. In such a sense, loci help us represent the rooting and routes of identity as constitutive of each other. In the following sections, I shall lay out some of the basic elements and processes that intervene in this composition.

36 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Routes, Maps, Territories Nation-building and Indigenous People The articulation between development, the naturalization of nation-state, and the domestication of savagery, is the pivotal point of the colonial and national incorporation of indigenous people inhabiting the Amazonian “frontier”. This is especially so in Leticia, the Southern Colombian outpost of progress and meeting point of three nation-states. The consolidation of national borders in the Amazonia has been a concern of the Colombian nation-states since it gained independence at the beginning of nineteenth century. In such historical process, “movement and the control of movement [are] important substances for the construction and the reproduction of the sovereignty of (territorial) nation-states” (Stepputat, 2000, p. 128). An analysis of the “legislation aimed at protecting the Indians” between 1800 and 1900 (Domínguez and Gómez, 1994, p. 111), reveals that such protection was contingent upon the “Indians” serving the aims of nation-state's constitution. The ‘heathen indigenous tribes living in the ‘empty land’ (baldíos) played a strategic double role in such a process. First, as the negative image of an ideal ‘civilized social life’ they were instrumental to the nation-state's conceptual and ideological self-definition. Second, once the “savage tribes” were “reduced to social life” and settled into villages as legitimate —although second-class— citizens, they would physically benchmark the nation-state colonizing advance, and they stood as the living proof of its civilizing achievements. This implied to seize the movement of people in that blurred frontier territory seen as empty land. To achieve this goal the law established the quantity of land given to each of the “heathen indigenous tribes wishing to abandon a wandering life and to be reduced to formal parishes” (Domínguez and Gómez, 1994, p. 112). At the same time, in 1824, the state would provide priests, vestments and adornments for the village church, and in 1826 it would foster commercial relations with both national and foreigner traders, showing an instance of what Taussig (1987) calls “conquest through trading”. In 1860, the legislation fixed the expenses for reducing the savage tribes living in the empty lands, and for funding new settlement in the frontier zones. In 1869 the law on “civilización de indígenas” granted twenty-five hectares of tierra baldía (unoccupied land) to the indigenous families wishing to abandon their “nomadic life” and settle in parishes. It also granted them houses, clothes, domestic animals, tools, and Christian missionaries. The law provided that

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 37

38 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT N

AM O AZ

Map by Hernán Gómez.

PERU

Road to Tarapaca

COLOMBIA

na 1

Cre 8

BRAZIL

Manaïde Izuru

Tabatinga

Km. 6

Km. 7

Leticia

Km. 11

Kaziya-Nairai-Multietnico

Tac a

rcac

Map 2: Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km 6 y 11.

1. Uitoto 2. Macuna 3. Uitoto (Manaïde Izuru) 4. Uitoto (Kilómetro 11) 5. Uitoto 6. Uitoto (Kilómetro 7) 7. Tikuna (Kilómetro 6) Malocas, abandoned 8. Yucuna, abandoned in 2005 9. Uitoto, burned down in 2000 (Kaziya Nairai) 10. Uitoto, abadoned in 2003 (Nuevo Milenio)

Kaziya Naïraï – Multiétnico Kilómetro 11 ‘Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï – Muina Murui’ Manaïde Izuru Kilómetro 7 ‘Ciudad Jitoma’ Kilómetro 6 ‘San Jose’, Nuevo Milenio Malocas, standing

• Indigenous Communities:

a Yaw a Cr eek

RIV

1 Miles

the “wild tribes” that assaulted the villages or disturbed commerce and transit must be captured, settled in a fixed locality, and instructed in Christian religion, agriculture, and “the practical things of civilized life” (Domínguez and Gómez, 1994, p. 115). At the same time, the indigenous groups “reduced to social life” in the new villages were to be exempt from personal, civil or ecclesiastic contributions for twenty years in 1833, and from military service in 1848; through these exceptions, the law constructed and reinforced the idea of indigenous people as being citizens but of a different class. At the beginning of 20th Century, the Peruvian rubber company “Casa Arana Hermanos” established its supremacy in the Caquetá and Putumayo interfluves of Colombian Amazonia. This intrusion constituted a threat to Colombian sovereignty and economic interests, and called the attention of sectors of the intellectual and political class of the interior. Rafael Uribe Uribe, caudillo of the Liberal Party, warned about the “urgent problem of populating the national soil” (in Useche Losada, 1993 p. 82) and he proposed as a solution to strategically deploy indigenous and mestizo population who lived in frontier areas. In an early formulation of the sustainable development’s premise of “learning from the locals,” Uribe Uribe saw the Indians and the mestizos as the only ones capable of desbravar, literally “tame,” those virgin lands (Useche Losada, 1993; Domínguez and Gómez, 1994). First, though, they had to be harnessed to the colonizing process. This was to be accomplished through the articulation of military force and agricultural colonies run by missionaries.

Coca, Cocaine, and Coca-Cola When I landed in Leticia after a ten-day river trip on an overcrowded rusty scow, my first impression was that of a quiet and prosperous mercantile town. After living at its periphery for almost six years, I have quite a different opinion now, and the town itself has considerably changed, not for the better. What did not change is the town’s collective reverie of unruly possibilities. In Leticia’s founding mythology there is a story that synthesizes this mind-set. It happened during the cocaine boom, when an immigrant entrepreneur and owner of a small soda plant managed to counterfeit the Coca-Cola recipe. He bottled the tawny liquid in the original Coca-Cola recycled glasses, which he sold to both the narcos and the U.S. soldiers of the U.S. military base. Unfortunately for him, a U.S. journalist who was visiting the base still had too fresh a memory of the real taste to be fooled by the imitation. She noticed that the Coke bottle tops did not bear the

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 39

original trademark but bore instead the name of an unknown local brand. Back in her country, she published an article where she talked about the Coca-Cola fake in a forgotten frontier town of cocaine dealers, and the news eventually called the attention of The Coca-Cola Company. With the ruthless magnanimity of capitalism that harnesses competitors by turning them into partners, The Coca-Cola Company incorporated the counterfeiter Leticia plant, which consequently became the smallest Coca-Cola factory in the world. Leticia’s tourist boom was tightly linked to the cocaine boom; tourism was initially promoted by Mike Tsalikis, a Greek-American entrepreneur, wildlife exporter, DEA informant and narcotrafficker. Nowadays, when luxury hotels and villas are in need of some repairs, and narco-traffic follows less visible routes, the town still bears the signs of illegality: an oligarchy which thrives on the monopoly of political and commercial power, with structures of subservience, bribery, and nepotism embedded in the everyday life. But the story of the Coca-Cola fake is emblematic in another way too, since in response to both corporate modernity and cocaine narcotraffic, the coca plant has been mobilized as a potent interethnic symbol, able to cure, with its “sweetness” and “coolness” what the People of the Center call the “illnesses of the white men’s road.” At the conjuncture and disjuncture of local, national, and transnational arenas, Leticia shows instances of both a cosmopolitan and a frontier town. In the cosmopolis differences have equal status, they coexist side by side, even if they never mix. The frontier town, instead, is a space of mixture and disorder, where asymmetries are constantly and painfully negotiated. While the frontier can be seen as a battlefield between clashing positions and identities, it is also an undetermined space where such positions and identities are transformed, dissimulated, and mimicked. Intermixing results not only from the implementation of State policies and the use of violence, but from carnival-like promiscuity and accidental encounters as well. In seeing the town as lying at the intersection of a cosmopolitan and a frontier space, I am concerned with how ideas of order and disorder are layered and contrasted. Yet, a world out of order has its own advantages, and social actors are not necessarily concerned with bringing it back to order. As Hannerz (1992, p. 168) says: “it is arguable that there is some virtue here in being just incoherent enough.”

40 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Radiant Space/Itinerant Space: Frontier and Forest The making of the town is dependent on the way in which the relationship between the town and the forest, as real and imagined spaces, is articulated. In Leticia, the forest that scantly surrounds the town and that gives way at a quick pace to timber industry and cattle-ranching, is mostly seen as subject to the will and control of the colonizing man. As an obstacle to progress, the forest must be suppressed; as an infinite source of wealth, it is there to be exploited. These representations exist side by side to a different one, which assimilates the forest to magic, and that ambiguously sees the forest as both a space of damnation, and of purification and cleansing. All these images construct the forest as an uncultured and liminal space, although dangerously powerful, that becomes one and the same with the Indians that inhabit it. As Michael Taussig (1987) points out, “going to the Indians for their healing power and killing them for their wilderness are not so far apart.” Then, the symbolic and material construction of the town rests on the control of the forest/frontier pair through the superimposition of a series of emblematic landmarks, inscribed on Leticia’s topography by state institutions, the church, and the military forces. Parades, processions, national anthems, and the daily raising of the flag mark the urban time and space at a regular and regulating pace, setting the horizon of a space-time that radiates from the center to the periphery. They can be seen as instances of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) calls chronotopes: [...] points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse. Time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people [...] Chronotopes thus stand as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members’ images of themselves. (p. 7)

Chronotopes are also visible in the festive, extra-ordinary time. Similarly to state parades and church processions, official festivals are expressions of a radiant space (Leroi-Gourhan, 1965), as they are aimed at reestablishing the centrality of the town. In Leticia’s official festivals, popular culture and patriotism merge to assert the domestication of wilderness with the persuasive force of symbols. The Pirarucú de Oro, the Confraternidad Amazónica, as well as the Carnival and Festa do Boi in the twin Brazilian town of Tabatinga, represent savagery as a wild woman recast into a reina,

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 41

a beauty queen. The ‘monumental’1 representation of wilderness as a sexual object, at the same time tame and seductive, reflects the machista ideology of the frontier men. And as the forest is described in female body terms, the landscape is also given the attributes of a nurturing and fecund mother (Porteous, 1990). Ecological ideologies, as well, often entail a sensuous symbiosis between the forest and the human body. The reification of nature usually involved in these views ends up obscuring the histories and experiences of indigenous people, reproducing dominant categories about such people. So, mainstream environmentalism either becomes a modern articulation of the idea of the “empty land,” or it fosters the commodification of natural resources through foreign notions of efficiency and governance. These forms of radiant space that create boundaries and hierarchies coexist with other forms of agency in and with space, which following Leroi-Gourhan (1965) I call “itinerant spaces”: spaces that embody the “hunter dynamics”. The suggestion here is that radiant and itinerant spaces reflect and allow different modes of knowing, which operate respectively in ways similar to state science and nomad science described by Deleuze and Guattari in the opening quote. In the specific arena of indigenous engagements with development, two areas of human agency can be seen as an expression of these itinerant dynamics: shamanism, and diligencias (literally ‘procedure’, diligencia means dealing with bureaucracy and lobbying in state institutions and NGOs). I see these activities as eluding the boundaries imposed by official topography, and creating spaces of resistance and empowerment. In bringing together shamanism and diligencias, I draw on the suggestion made by anthropologists working in the global economic periphery (Taussig, 1987; Geschiere, 1997; Whitehead, 2002; Vidal and Whitehead 2004), according to which the reconfiguration of shamanic power is a mean for gaining control over the practice of state dominance.

Crossing Boundaries: Shamanism and the Fissures of Bureaucracy An ecosystem based on the constant and cyclic motion of the boundaries between water and land, with the water level shifting about forty-five feet between wet and dry seasons, provides an ironic commentary on the efforts for controlling and containing the movement of people in Amazonia. When the river swells, the whole region looks like a brown-green archipelago. Water progressively floods the port shops, the market place, and the new 1. In the sense of means for memory.

42 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

squatters’ barrios. Fragile stilted footbridges are laid out in a fragmented pattern over a network of streets and alleys now turned into canals. Pushed by the rising water level, riverine settlers move to the roof of their homes and eventually move out; they go to stay with relatives or simply get adjusted in their thatched canoes. This is a time of mobility. Even though whirlpools, uprooted tree trunks, and floating grasses (grammalote) make river navigation very dangerous, the open network of waterways and flooded varaderos (manmade paths) boosts traveling between backwoods areas and the main streams. During this time of the year, huge luxury cruise yachts moor off the coast. People rush to the riverbank to admire them, while neat crowds of white dressed foreign tourists materialize in the muddy streets of the port. The waves caused by these glaring giants and by their darker military lookalike have almost mythical dimensions; as they capsize canoes, they also inspire river dwellers’ storytelling. Once the water recedes, it uncovers islands, beaches, and the fetid muddy banks of the port overlooked by spiraling flocks of vultures. A natural terrace over the river hosts an unauthorized market of vendors from river villages nearby. Amidst indigenous and caboclo2 folks, there are the Israelitas,3 more of them each year, with their meager crops of onions, cucumbers, and cilantro, and the Cruzados, members of another religious sect from Brazil, distinguished by the wooden cross they wear over their light-colored nylon tunics. An old caboclo squats behind few recycled bottles of cane alcohol tatuzinho corked with bundles of bark strips: “The name of this vegetal remedy is Doctor Hugo. He cures all classes of illness: blood infections… nerves… kidneys… parasites… cancer… saladera (bad luck caused by sorcery).” The remedy must be taken every day, at dawn and at dusk, followed by a cold bath, the old healer says. To enhance the remedy’s power, one has to bury the bottle for four days under the gutter of the house. The old caboclo was a young boy when he migrated from highland Peru to the Amazon, where he learned from a vegetalista, a shaman who masters the esoteric power of plants.4

2. Brazilian riverine person of mixed heritage. 3. Members of this messianic sect initially migrated to the promised land of the “three frontiers” from coastal Peru. More recently, adepts came from southern Colombia too, the Cauca Valley in particular. 4. The vegetalista differs from the hierbatero/a because his/her ability to cure is based on a spiritual power.

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 43

Popular healing is a pervasive theme in this landscape, intersecting the town‘s official map, and offering an alternative, and inherently heterodox, construction of reality. Healing connects in complex tangles of power the white paisa5 who sells sahumerios in the market place, the indigenous cleaning lady who buys them, and the governor in whose office, twice a week, the indigenous woman burns the aromatic substances to avert evil. Healers are numerous both in and around Leticia and in the neighboring Brazilian town of Tabatinga. In the different regional dialects, and depending on their specialization and source of power, they are known as curanderos, vegetalistas, hierbateros, yagéceros, ayahuasqueros, brujos or chamanes. Healers who use yagé or ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis Sp. with plant additives) may hold various sessions per week depending on the needs of their patients. Such healing sessions stir the movement of people from different class and ethnicity, including tourists, back and forth across the three sides of the Colombian-Peruvian-Brazilian frontier. Healers not only affect the temporary transit of people from one country to the other; they themselves bridge, in one way or another, the borders of ethnic and national affiliation. Examples of this are an Ingano “master” of a Uitoto maloca; a Peruvian mestizo practicing in Brazil; a Bora who learned with the Secoya of the Ecuadorian-Colombian border and practices in a Tikuna community; a Cocama elder who sings in Quechua.6 The elders of the Yagua settlement of Río Tucuchira,7 thirty miles north from Leticia, remember when they used to exchange curare (arrow poison) for shamanic knowledge with the Conibo of the Upper Ucayali Andean foothills, some hundred miles upriver. Such information was confirmed to me by the Shipibo-Conibo living in the outskirts of the Peruvian town of Pucallpa, and by those who periodically travel to Leticia to sell their crafts, whose designs were revealed

5. Someone from the Colombian region of Antioquia. 6. Although I could recognize a few words in Quechua that belong to the vocabulary of Ayahuasca shamanism, I am not able to confirm to what extent such the songs' language corresponded to Quechua and its varieties. Yet, the question of authenticity is not that revelant here. 7. At that time they were living between the source of Río Yagua and Río Algodón. During the cocaine boom, in 1970’s, they migrated to the Río Atacuari, where they were employed by the cocaine business to open clandestine airstrips in the jungle. The Yagua settlement of Río Tucuchira was created by a Greek-American boss of cocaine narco-traffic, Mike Tsalikis, who was also the owner of the two best hotels in Leticia. The settlement was created as a tourist entertainment. Tsalikis decided to move the whole Yagua community because they had a reputation for being mansos, tame, with respect to the fiercer Tikuna.

44 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

in Ayahuasca shamanic vision. The attribution of the source of shamanic knowledge and power alternatively to people from upriver or downriver can be seen as an instance of the symbiotic and complementary exchange between sidereal and chthonic powers, a conception that permeates Amazonian shamanism and is reflected in shamanic imagery (Luna and Amaringo, 1991; Whitten, 1987). More generally, it puts emphasis on the role of shamanism to mediate different realities, one reason why shamanism acquires increasing relevance against the uncertainty of modernity (see Taussig, 1987; Geschiere, 1997; Whitehead, 2002; Vidal and Whitehead, 2004). Recent studies that stress the ability of witchcraft to engage with and make sense of modernity have challenged the prevailing anthropological discourse that saw witchcraft as a conservative force. Peter Gow (1991), for example, suggests that the arena of shamanism serves to channel the transformation from Indian to mixed blood Amazonian identity. Michael Taussig (1987, p. 368) looks at the ways in which conquest and colonization are included in shamanic imagery, and argues that the “bits and pieces” that remain of indigenous knowledge systems “are not testimony to the tenacity of tradition [...] Instead they are mythic images reflecting and condensing the experiential appropriation of the history of conquest, as that history is seen to form analogies and structural correspondences with the hopes and tribulation of the present.” Shamanic performance is also seen to connect the personal and bodily experience of suffering to wider social, cultural and ecological realms; as Michael Brown (1988, p. 117) argues, during shamanic healing rituals illness is vanquished “from the physical body only by shifting the locus of uncertainty to the body politic.” Peter Geschiere (1997 [1995]), in his work on witchcraft and politics in post-colonial Cameroon, offers an interesting view on the historicity of witchcraft’s discourses and practices in the face of modernity. To Geschiere, these notions and images “express a determined effort for signifying politico-economic changes or ever gaining control over them”(p. 3). He also draws attention to the affects of broader configurations for understanding the specificities of local witchcraft. He argues that the reasons for the proliferation of witchcraft in post-colonial nation-states are linked to the authoritarian and bureaucratic system, which “made no room for the articulation of interest from below, at least not through formal channels [and] concealed the foundations of power and the reasons for its decisions from the eyes of the population” (p. 37). Occult forces become an articulation of the sense of powerlessness against a quibbling, inaccessible, and often corrupted bureaucracy.

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 45

In his work on Patamuna dark shamans (kanaimà), Whitehead (2002) argued that assault sorcery is a way to transform, through mimetic possession, the violence of development. The dismemberment and consumption of Patamuna bodies by kanaimá dark shamans juxtapose those bodies to the bodypolitic. The context that these violent practices create alludes “not merely to the contingent inequalities of political or economic power but also to the negating force of those dark and hidden potentialities that threaten the humanity of Patamuna life— its sociality, its ecology, and its prophetic vision” (p. 132). Vidal and Whitehead (2004) also demonstrate how occult power has been incorporated in national and regional political processes, and how this mode of participation in political processes is integral to the cosmological understanding of Amazonian people in a colonial and post-colonial world. Before leaving for a diligencia, indigenous leaders prepare coca and tobacco, “with a thought” (con un pensamiento), that is, intention translated into a spell. Ir de diligencias is often compared to ir de cacería, to go hunting, and the forest is assimilated to bureaucratic institutions. Coca, and especially tobacco, help the hunter to deal with the uncertainties of the hunt, enhance his perception, concentration and endurance, protect him from the humor of the prey and the anger of its spiritual owner, el dueño de los animales, and cool down the heat of an alien substance to make it suitable for human consumption. These activities are shamanic, in the sense that they involve predation and healing, and are accomplished through powerful thought in action. A powerful hunter, the People of the Center say, does not need to move from his bank: the prey will promptly come to his feet (see Candre and Echeverri, 1996). In the forest of institutions, the prey is project money “owned” by powerful bureaucratic officers and politicians. It is fundamental, thus, to tie alliances with these powerful dueños. So, as the leaders learn how to operate effectively in the bureaucratic system, they also subvert it. First, they reverse the ideal nature of bureaucracy as an impersonal system. Second, they subvert its ideal rationality through the deployment of occult power. The quote by the Muina leader that opened this chapter seems very appropriate here: “the one who wants to dominate does not live in the reality of the one who does not want to be dominated.”

Tobacco Worlds At the beginning of 1900, the regime of genocide, slavery, and deportation set up by rubber exploitation provoked waves of forced displacement and migration among indigenous groups of the Caquetá and Putumayo regions

46 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

that dramatically changed the ethnic map of Northwest Amazonia. During the 1950s, people of diverse ethnic affiliation started migrating to what is now the Resguardo Indígena Tikuna Uitoto Kilómetro 6-11. Since then, they have been struggling to build communities in the face of a multicultural and multilingual population and a growing dependence on the town. One of the most challenging tasks that the inhabitants of the Resguardo are facing is how to articulate the complex canvas of ethnic differences to the processes of cultural affirmation and self-determination. Traditional healers of the Amazonas Department who gathered in Leticia in 1999 identified three different cultural spheres existing in the region on the basis of the ritual use of licked, snuff, and smoked tobacco respectively. The licked tobacco, known as ambil, is a concoction of tobacco leaves often mixed with vegetable salt and other additives. The ritual use of ambil together with coca (mambe) is shared by Uitoto Muina-Murui, Muinane, Bora, Miraña, Ocaina, Andoke, Nonuya and Resígaro groups,8 defining a supra-ethnic complex self-named as Gente de Centro (see note 4, Introduction). In spite of linguistic diversity,9 these groups share a substantial mythological corpus, cultural principles related to the genre known as the Speech of Coca and Tobacco, and ritual expressions, predominantly dance rituals organized in a complex sequence (carreras de baile) and enacted with the purpose of “curing the world.” The recognized ancestral territory of the People of the Center is located in the Caquetá and Putumayo interfluve along the Caraparaná, Igaraparaná, and Cahuinarí rivers and tributaries. Except for the Resígaro, these ethnic groups are all represented in the Tikuna-Uitoto Resguardo. The use of snuff tobacco together with mambe10 defines another supraethnic formation, which traditionally occupies the area between the Apaporis and Mirití rivers. It includes Yucuna, Letuama, Tanimuca, Matapí,11

8. The Arawak speaker Resígaro were believed to be extinct by the first half of the last century during the Rubber Boom, but in the 2007 censusabout 30 individuals were reported to be living in Peruvian Loreto (see also Gasché, 1982). 9. The Uitoto language, divided in the four dialects, bue, mika, minika and nipode, belongs to the Uitoto linguistic family, and is related to the Ocaina and the Nonuya. Bora, Miraña, and Muinane form a separate linguistic family. Andoke language is isolated. Resígaro (also Resiguero and Resigero)) is ascribed to the Arawak family (Gasché, 1972, p. 197). 10. The mambe used by this supra—ethnic group differs from that of the Gente de Centro for being aromatized with incense. 11. These are exogamous groups. The Yucuna is an Arawak language, while Tanimuca and Letuama are probably Tukano languages. The Matapí speak Yucuna.

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 47

Makuna, Barasano, and Cabiyarí, who also share myths and rites. A yucuna maloca was built in the Tikuna-Uitoto resguardo and it hosts dance rituals to which the People of the Center are also invited. Among these rituals are the Chontaduro dance and other rituals related to the Yuruparí ritual complex. The third cultural complex brings together the Tikuna, Cocama, and Yagua ethnic groups, identified by the common use of smoked tobacco in healing rituals. The traditional territory of these ethnic groups runs along the northern shore of the Amazon River and tributaries, with an alternating mobility between the riverine and terra firme areas. Nowadays, these groups maintain close interethnic relations, but the extent to which they also share a supra-ethnic identity or forms of political articulation is not clear. These groups are all represented in the Tikuna-Uitoto resguardo, particularly the Tikuna, who inhabit the first founded and most populated community. It must also be added that the Resguardo is located in the ancestral Tikuna territory. This complex ethnic canvas —or people’s “biodiversity,” as the leaders define it with a term borrowed from the development vocabulary— is not the only challenge the people of the resguardo are facing. The capital of the Amazonas Department, Leticia, is the local center from whence the development’s administrative apparatus and ideology are propagated. The resguardo is constantly exposed to the frenzied pressure of national bureaucracy and ideas of progress. The resguardo’s proximity to Leticia is also responsible for the increasing proletarianization of the indigenous people living in the area, both men and women who depend on menial informal jobs in town. This proximity, though, has a positive turn. It is common that indigenous leaders from remote areas of the Amazonas Department travel to Leticia to attend to the formalities of development projects. While they spend the day dealing with red tape, lobbying in State offices, lining up on the bank, or meeting with NGO personnel, in the evening they cultivate different kinds of relations; this is when they visit their relatives, take part to a mambe session in a maloca or occasionally participate in a dance ritual. These visits play an important role in maintaining social networks and flow of information between the people of the resguardo and their ancestral territories. Ancestral territories are not only seen as the source (the “cradle”) of traditional knowledge and legitimacy; they are also the base of operation of strong indigenous organizations with recognized political trajectory. So, these visits also serve to connect the resguardo to wider indigenous articulations in the national and international arenas.

48 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Photo 1: A contemporary maloca. Photo: Giovanna Micarelli.

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power â&#x20AC;˘ 49

“Carretera Arriba… Carretera Abajo:” Comunidades and Malocas At the outskirts of Leticia, along the only road that stretches out from the town, a sign marks the distance to Tarapacá, on the Putumayo River: 288 kilometers. Actually, in the year 2000, the road ended abruptly at Kilometer 13, with a few more miles of bumpy unpaved road. The carretera has been the terrain of corrupt local politicians since its construction started in the late 1980s. Every new administration embarked on the paving of few hundred meters of road with cheap asphalt and thinned cement that crumble under the sun and the heavy rain. To work in the construction, men from the indigenous communities along the road were employed. They were rarely paid, their salaries lining the pockets of many along a ladder of corruption that starts in Bogotá and ends with the head of the construction site or the indigenous foreman. In the best case, as an updated form of endeude, paychecks were turned into food coupons to be spent at an expensive supermarket in town. The populating process of what is now known as the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6-11 was triggered by two main migratory patterns which resulted from the interlocking of state-level expansion and rubber exploitation. A substantial portion of the resguardo’s population belongs to the People of the Center supra-ethnic complex, which includes Andoke, Uitoto Muina-Murui, Muinane, Bora, Nonuya, Ocaina, and Miraña people. From the beginning of the 20th Century to the 1932-33 Colombian-Peruvian conflict, the territory that these groups inhabited —the region delimited by the Putumayo, Caquetá, Caraparaná, Igaraparaná and Cahuinarí rivers— was devastated by the regime of terror set up by the rubber company Casa Arana Hermanos. The Casa Arana, a Peruvian-British consortium, later known as Peruvian Amazon Co., established control over this disputed border zone by taking possession of the indigenous population who lived in the region, forcing them to work in the rubber extraction (Casement, 1911; Hardenburg, 1912; Pineda Camacho, 1985; Taussig, 1987; Domínguez and Gómez, 1990, 1994). At the onset of the Colombian-Peruvian conflict, the rubber station foremen (capataces) of the Casa Arana fled to the Peruvian Amazon, carrying with them their indigenous slaves. The transfer of enslaved indigenous families continued until the 1940s, when the Peruvian rubber traders were finally forced out of the Colombian Amazon. Those who became the first inhabitants of the resguardo, and who were children at that time, still remember the long journey through forest trails carrying heavy loads for their patrones (see Map 3).

50 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Others were carried in cages on the steam launches of both the Casa Arana and the Peruvian militaries. A group of native families settled at the mouth of the Ampiyacu River, a northern affluent of the Amazon River, where they worked for the rubbermasters until the 1970s, when the SINAMOS finally expelled them from the area. The combination of state-level expansion, rubber slavery, and the subsequent diaspora effected on indigenous populations resulted in a variation of what Whitehead and Ferguson (1992) called the “tribal zone,” a sphere of interaction between the state and indigenous people in which multilingual and multicultural regional networks are reduced to territorially discrete and homogeneous “tribes.” In this specific case, the pattern that became established in the region was that of multiethnic, non-integrated units. Members of different ethnic groups, clans, and lineage ended up living “mezclados,” intermixed, at first under the control of a patrón, and then in the newly established communities (Gasché, 1982). During the 1950s, a few families migrated from Peru to Colombia and settled at the outskirts of the town of Leticia. Adapting the traditional residential pattern to a new setting (Whiffen, 1915, p. 42; Gasché, 1972, 1982; Guyot, 1972), they relocated in the proximities of a backwoods stream: the Quebrada Tacana. Soon, other relatives joined from the Ampiyacu and from the Caquetá and the Putumayo regions. In the 1950s, a millenarian movement initiated by a Tikuna shaman resulted in the relocation of Tikuna families from Brazil. Other settlers were attracted by the possibility of finding wage labor in town. More recently, movement was also stirred by the cocaine bonanza that characterized the region from the 1970s to early 1990s, and by the armed conflict between FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the paramilitary, and the Colombian Army. In response to the provision of centralised state health, education, and housing services, by 1970 indigenous communities began to form along the planned road between Leticia and Tarapacá. The first maloca was built in what is now the resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto in the 1950s, on the shore of the Tacana creek. But as the five communities of the resguardo began to form, malocas were located within or close to the villages and their construction was carried out mostly with state funds. In 2000, eight malocas existed in the relatively small territory of the resguardo (7,500 hectares); six of them were located in the communities’ perimeter (see Table 2).

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 51

“I ask: Is This a Community?” Así como se teje un canasto sacando la fibra sutil así se construye un pueblo, como abejitas que van buscando y transformando lo tóxico en miel, de poquito a poquito. Like you weave a basket tearing up fine strips of fiber, in the same way you build a people, as tiny bees seeking and transforming toxicity into honey, little by little. (Muina intellectual)

At Kilometer 11 of the Leticia-Tarapacá road, the indigenous community “Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï,12 Muina-Murui, also known as Kilómetro 11, is spread around the soccer and the basketball fields, and along a shallow stream of polluted water that intersects the settlement. A range of failed development projects is mapped on the community’s terrain: the health post, the cattle ranching project, the chicken runs, the tanks for fish farming, the food processing plant, the experimental garden plot, the lavatories, the aqueduct. But projects do not simply fail; sometimes they trigger a chain reaction of more problems. The creation of the comunidades indígenas has been a prerequisite for the implantation of development among indigenous groups in Amazonia. This imposed social form is itself a reflection of the ideals of progress embedded in the development ideology and practice. State institutions and development agencies stress the importance of the community as the locus of development. Similarly, the discourse of empowerment hinges on the notion of community and community participation. This contrasts in many ways with the reality of indigenous communities and with indigenous attempts to reinforce cultural identity. “Is this a community?” asks a leader of the Kilómetro 11. “This is a romanticism” he goes on. “I prefer realism. I’d rather say that this is a citadel. Institutions talk about collectivity, but they forget about familiarity and individuality. Here, if we solve familiar problems we go ahead. Each individual has his or her specificity.” In trying to envision a solution to the problems generated by the community’s internal diversity, the leaders oscillate between two alternative philosophies. One aims at restoring the spatial and hierarchical distinction of 12. "This clean space of the sweet science" in Uitoto Muina.

52 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

clans and lineages as constitutive elements of a network of social relations mapped on the territory. This position is summed up by the motto “a cada uno lo suyo, cada quien en su lugar, y cada quien cumpla con lo que le compete” (to each his own, each one in his place, and each one complies with what is of his competence). The other philosophy is synthesized by the concept of “confusionismo” articulated by a community leader. When I started working with the Km. 11 community, I implied that “confusionismo” derived from the Spanish word ‘confusión’, and it denoted the disorderly intermix of social and ethnic identities caused by an alien, imposed order. After a few months, the leader who coined the term provided me with a radically different explanation. In his own etymological interpretation, confusionismo, he explained, came from ‘con’, together, and ‘fusión’, fusion: “everything works because it is articulated, in diversity there is harmony, everything is governed with this principle.” He also suggested a relation to Confucianism. As I shall discuss in the next chapter, the concept of confusionismo reflects an ideology of interethnicity and interculturality that is articulated through the cultural meanings of coca and tobacco. These two perspectives coexist in the community, with the community being an empty shell within the comuneros’ social organization, and not an organization unit. In spite of the fact that the community’s function is “to bind indigenous people to the national legal and bureaucratic apparatus” (Gasché, 1982, p. 12), the community’s formal structure of organization, the cabildo, is absorbed into native social structures, such as clans, lineages, and the council of elders.13

13. Gasché (1982, p. 11-12) noticed that: “a) la asamblea general regularmente reúne solo una parte de la comunidad nativa, mientras que la otra parte se mantiene indiferente a lo que se está tratando en este marco institucional; b) que el presidente, por consecuencia, no puede pretender ser el vocero de toda la comunidad ni, menos aún, ejercer cualquier autoridad sobre el conjunto de su pueblo y; c) que la colaboración entre comuneros nunca compromete a la totalidad de los miembro de la comunidad, sino que, por el contrario, la colaboración se practica en el marco más reducido de dos o tres familias de una misma comunidad, a las cuales se puede sumar, ocasionalmente, familias residentes en otras comunidades entonces cabe preguntarse, ¿cuáles son los criterios que determinan estas agrupaciones que funcionan en la práctica como unidades organizativas reales, mientras que la unidad global propuesta por la ley —la comunidad nativa— tiene un carácter meramente formal mediante el cual vincula al pueblo nativo al aparato legal y burocrático nacional?”

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 53

Table 1. Clans and ethnic groups of the Kilómetro 11 Community,

Comunidad Indígena Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Muirui. Table by the author, 2000. Uitoto Muina Murui clans (-), and other ethnic groups

Tot.

- Gïdonï

- Fayagenï

- Sïkuenï

- Yorihaï

- Naïmenï

- Ereyaï

- Aïmene

Bora

Ocaina

Muinane

Tikuna

Yagua

Yukuna

Cocama

Mestizos

Total

183

The Four Pillars of the Cosmos: The Maloca as a Contested Symbol A focal point in this landscape is the maloca. This space is catalyst of processes of cultural reaffirmation that are able to call the attention of local, national, and international audiences. In the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto, malocas have become a symbol of and for cultural resilience. Called “center of tradition,” “center of intercultural communication,” or just “the central center,” the maloca provides a physical space for the utterance of the Speech of Coca and Tobacco on which processes of cultural reaffirmation are based. The maloca is first and foremost a locus memoriæ, as cultural knowledge is inscribed in its architecture through bodily and cosmological correspondences. Also, the

54 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

maloca plays a pivotal role in bridging the relations with the territory and the outside world. In a meeting, people identified the four pillars of the maloca as corresponding to jurisdiction, education, health, and resource management, together constituting ‘Our Own Government’ (Gobierno Propio). It is important to note, however, that most of the malocas existing in the resguardo have been sponsored by the Amazonas government under the rubric of “tourism and cultural activities”. But as we shall see shortly, this fact, although debated, is harnessed to the process of cultural resilience.

Table 2. Malocas in the Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto Kilómetro 6-11.

Table by the author, 2000. 1

Residential maloca Maloca built with institutional funds

Shaman rules

Maloca belongs to the People of the Center supra-ethnic group

Ritual use of coca and tobacco performed daily in the mambeadero

Maloca legitimized by a woman’s status Dance rituals are held in the maloca

* *

(*)

The malocas of the resguardo still standing in the year 2000, in the temporal order in which they were established, are described as follows: 1. The shaman is a Muinane-Uitoto elder, who inherited the maloca from his father, a knowledgeable Muinane man and one of the first who migrated to this territory. His name is Jitoma, meaning ‘sun’ in Uitoto language. 2. The name of the maloca is Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï (‘this clean space [both mambeadero and dance court] of the sweet science’) and it came to rename the Kilómetro 11 community. The shaman’s traditional name is Naïmekï Jitoma (‘sweet sun’ in Uitoto language), and he belongs to the Uitoto Muina ethnic group.

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 55

3. Manaïde Izuru (‘cold channel’ in Uitoto language). The shaman is the son of a mestizo colonist and a Uitoto Murui woman. He was affiliated to the Kilómetro 11 maloca, but following a dispute in 1991 he decided to found a new community. He built a Murui style ‘male’ maloca, characterized by a strong, violent talk. He named the community Moniya Amena, which is the tree of abundance of Uitoto creation myth, a name that showed to be too ‘hot’ and dangerous for the community to prosper. As a consequence of this, a few years after the community was founded, families began to move out. Eventually, in 1999, the leader rebuilt the maloca in a new site and changed the name of the community for a more propitious one. 4. A Yucuna family from the Mirití River inhabits this maloca.14 The old shaman and head of the family abjured to his third male child, a young man in his early twenties who underwent the formal apprenticeship for becoming a ‘powerful knowledgeable one.’ 5. The maloca belongs to a Uitoto Muina woman from La Chorrera, who belongs to an owner of maloca 15 lineage, and his partner, an Ayahuasca healer belonging to the Ingano ethnic group. The maloca was built following the instruction given to the woman by her ancestors, manifested to her in a Yagé vision (see chapter 5). 6. Organización de Mujeres. Women of various ethnic groups belonging to the cultural horizon of coca and ambil are associated to this maloca. Its leader is a woman who claims lineage rank from her father’s side. However, the maloca construction was sponsored by a Murui elder. 7. The community that built this maloca formed through a process of fissioning of the Km. 11, and the Moniya Amena community. Previously known as Multiétnico, following a conflict with a faction of the community that resides in Leticia, the leaders decided to build a maloca and rename the community Kaziya Naïraï (‘awakening new people’ in Uitoto language). Two shamans ruled the monumental maloca of this community (still under construction as year 2000): they belong respectively to the Uitoto Muina and the Miraña ethnic groups.

14. The main structural difference between the Yucuna and the Muina-Murui maloca is that the former has a round plant, while the latter is based on an octagonal plant. 15. I translate as ‘owner of maloca’ the spanish terms ‘maloquero’ and ‘cacique’ that is how indigenous people of the Uitoto Muina and Murui ethnic group refers to the iyaima, the chief.

56 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

8. Centro Cultural Tikuna. The Tikuna rectangular maloca was under construction in the year 2000. In the year 2000 five of six malocas that belong to the People of the Center cultural complex were not residential units but are used for cultural and community activities. Among these activities, are the ritualized preparation and consumption of mambe and ambil, dance rituals, preparation of food, either for ritual or community purposes, craft production, community meetings, negotiation of disputes and trials, meetings with bureaucratic officials, activities related to bilingual and bicultural education, workshops, and the celebration of the Christian mass. The site in the maloca where mambe and ambil are prepared and consumed, the mambeadero, is marked out, and its access is generally limited to men. However, among all the activities mentioned above, only the dance rituals seem to require a maloca to be performed. Dance rituals are inextricably joined to the maloca. Each maloca is associated with one or more carrera de baile (a ceremonial career) that charts its life, is inscribed in its specific architectural style, and legitimizes the knowledge and power of the cacique. Before the diaspora, each maloca was inhabited by a patrilineal-virilo16 cal exogamous group and by an unrelated group of people called ‘orphans’, jaïenikï in Uitoto language. These were individuals captured in the tribal wars and kept as servants of the iyaïma, the chief, who could dispose of them, for example trading them for prestige goods such as axes or shotguns.17 The reason they were called ‘orphans’ was because of the death of their political and religious leader who was addressed as mooma, ‘father’. The term jaïenikï also denotes an ordinary person, someone who does not belong to a rank lineage (Gasché, 1982). Also, it seems to indicate a man who chose to live in his wife’s maloca under the protection of his father-in-law, and in so doing it represents 16. My data suggest that a system of double descent is at work. Information comes from my principal consultant, who is the second child of a Muinane-Bora marriage. In the Muinane kinship system, the odd children (first, third, fifth, etc...) inherit from the father’s lineage, while the even children (second, fourth, sixth, etc...) inherit from the mother’s lineage. For being the second child, my consultant inherited the rank of his mother, who belongs to a Bora ‘owner of maloca’ lineage. He also inherited the qualities that lay with the second child, in particular the management of the Speech. However, following the death of his older brother, he had subsumed the rank and qualities of the first child from his father. Since his father belongs to a Muinane ‘owner of maloca’ lineage, he is authorized to continue the dance ritual careers of both his mother and his father. This authority, though, is dependent on his acquired knowledge. 17. Whiffen (1915) mentioned that only the boys and girls younger than approximately the age of seven were kept as captives, while the other were sacrificed in cannibalistic rituals.

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 57

an exception to the rule of patrilocality (Pineda Camacho, 1985, p. 61).18 Whiffen (1915, p. 67) noted that “in the possible instance of a chief having a daughter but no sons to succeed him, the daughter may marry a man of the same household, who would probably be an adopted son.” At present, three malocas in the resguardo are legitimized by the woman’s status (3, 5, and 6). Competition for authority is a competition of knowledge/power that involves the cacique, the council, and the orphans. All the malocas of the resguardo, except two, were built as community projects in the framework of cultural reaffirmation, and received institutional funding. Nevertheless, six of eight malocas were under the control of individuals with recognized shamanic powers. These individuals came to be considered as “masters of maloca” in spite of the fact that not all of them belong to a master of maloca’s lineage. “El maloquero es la maloca” (the master of maloca is the maloca), the elders say. Rather than an absolutistic claim, this statement refers to the expected protective role of the maloquero. From his seat of power, at the center of the maloca, the leader’s energy is seen to radiate to his people and the surrounding space with a positive or negative power. Thomas Whiffen (1915, p. 63), who visited the region in 1908-1909, saw the chief and the medicine man as competing authorities of the maloca, although he noted that “the chief’s Speech carries a great amount of weight” (p. 65). The picture that emerges from more recent anthropological literature (Pineda Camacho, 1985; Landaburu and Pineda Camacho, 1984), and confirmed by my own data, contrasts with Whiffen’s observations. I do not see a division of authority between the chief and what Whiffen calls the medicine man. The chief is both a political and religious leader; he is a spiritual guide and a specialist in cultural and ritual knowledge, including healing. In a historical narrative collected by Pineda Camacho (1985, p. 61), the supreme Nonuya chief Fudurru (el capitán de capitanes) had the power to dominate people with his own word. His power was so renowned that people from other malocas 18. The orphan is also someone who is able to achieve the status of leader not for belonging to a high rank lineage, but through physical and spiritual hardship, aimed at materializing the ideal state of generalized well-being and conviviality. The ‘orphan’ personifies the Orphan-Grandsonof-the-Center, a key character of creation myths who is described as “holder of knowledge,” being endowed with the potentiality to materialize the life of abundance. By feigning his true capacities, he is able to fool the evil agents that threaten creation, and to attain a “node of power.” This reflects the general use of dissimulation in native philosophy, which takes the principle that power is shown by deeds, and not by words, to the extreme of shunning overt praise of individual accomplishments.

58 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

turned to him to ask him to “baptize” their children and to choose “the path” they would follow in life. The knowledge that iyaïma (master of maloca) obtains through an arduous preparation is validated by practice, that is, his power to materialize the Speech of Life. He is in charge of the well-being of the residential group, its territory, and the cosmos in general. Ideally, the maloquero does not move from his bank of concentration, where he sits in a wakeful state, constantly watching for danger, “cleaning the paths,” maintaining a spiritual defense “like a shield” over the maloca, and healing with the power of his ‘thought’ and ‘speech’, embodied in tobacco and coca. Ideally, he barely speaks. He has various attendants and workers, who are ready to assist him with different tasks related to the organization of communal chores, who give voice to his thoughts, and who are in charge of collecting his coca and tobacco leaves. After a cacique dies, the council meet and evaluates who can become leader. They consider, “study,” those who hold the “insigna” of power, and the knowledge for becoming a chief (Pineda Camacho, 1985, p. 127). Pineda Camacho (p. 128) relates the story of the supreme Muinane chief Makapaamine, who did not have the rank of a capitán, but because of his knowledge was able to “capitanizing himself” (“se ‘capitanizó’”). When a candidate is chosen, the council will test his knowledge; if he fails, the council will choose another candidate and submit him to testing. The chief does not have absolute power, and ultimately has to comply with the decisions made by the council; people stress the possibility that the successor may even belong to the category of the orphans. To illustrate this view, they tell the story of a bird who was chosen for its beauty to be instructed in traditional knowledge. Another bird, who was ugly and stinky, was kept under an overturned clay vessel. When the beautiful bird was tested to see what it had learned, it did not answer. Instead, the ugly bird, from the darkness and quietness of the vessel, had listened to everything that was spoken in the mambeadero, and gave the right answers. This provides an instance of the complementation of rank and egalitarian dynamics, and of the dialectics between the authority of the leader, that of the council, and the jaieniki. The council is located in the mambeadero, where, following Whiffen (1915, p. 65-66) “a matter of war, some question of hunting, or the wrongdoing of a fellow-tribesman that has to be discussed and judged” were debated, as they are nowadays. Whiffen argued that each maloca had its own chief, and that “there is no chief or central organization to bind these households in the tribe.” In contrast to this observation, oral history reports cases

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 59

of supreme chiefs, such as the mentioned Nonuya chief Fudurru and the Muinane chief Makapaamine (Pineda Camacho, 1985, pp. 61, 73-74). My consultants stress the fact that a nested organization of the councils of different malocas was in place before the rubber boom. Each council was composed of individuals who represented specific area of knowledge, and different maloca’s councils were also specialized within the larger organization. In the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto, specialization is still attached to each maloca. For example, the Km. 11 council appointed the Inga-Uitoto maloca (n. 5) for health and medicine, the Km. 7 maloca (n. 1) for tourism, the Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï maloca (n. 2) for coordination, the Manaïde Izuru maloca for education, and the yucuna maloca (n. 4) for cultural development. Information that seems to confirm the specialization and complementarity between malocas is provided by the etymology of the term, that comes from the Tupi ‘mar-óca’, war-house (Guyot, 1973, p.143; Stradelli, 1890). The organization of malocas included units specialized in war, that consultants call ‘cannibal malocas.’ Pineda Camacho (1985) suggests that for both the Nonuya and the Uitoto, these maloca “played a fundamental function in maintaining the ‘official’ relations of power.” Undesirable individuals of a maloca could be given away to another maloca; they could go from one residential unit to another, and eventually be sacrificed, or they could be handed in directly to the cannibal maloca. For the Uitoto, the differentiation between male and female maloca is also associated with different functions (see Table 3). This differentiation is marked in the maloca’s architectural structure; the male maloca is taller and narrower, and the female maloca is wider and lower, “like a squatting woman.” In relation to the anthropomorphism of the male and female maloca, a comparative example comes from the Makuna of the Pirá-Paraná. According to Kaj Århem, the Makuna “conceptualize society in terms of two complementary models: the descent (agnatic) model and the alliance model; one centering on patrilineal descent, birth-order hierarchy, and descent-group exogamy, the other on prescriptive symmetric alliance, competitive equality, and local endogamy” (2001, p. 123). Århem suggests that the descent model was hegemonic in nature, while the alliance model had “a more elusive, implicit presence in PiráParaná social organization, manifest notably in the settlement pattern and local politics” (p. 123). While the descent house is epitomized by the secrecy of the Yuruparí ritual of male initiation, the consanguineal house is characterized by the food-giving ritual. In the process of historical transformation “the descent model as a dominant vision of society is receding into the background while

60 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

the consanguineal model is coming to the fore, supplying a new basis for collective identity in the emerging, village-based society (2001, p.124). For the People of the Center, the maloca’s character depends on the intention of its founder. Jürg Gasché (1972) argues that the male maloca (Murui) is limited to the Caraparaná River, while the female maloca (Muina) is found along the Igaraparaná and Caquetá Rivers as well as among the other peoples belonging to the People of the Center supraethnic formation (Ocaina, Bora, Miraña, Muinane, Andoke, Nonuya, and Resiguero). Table 3. Terms by which the Muina distinguish themselves from the Murui

(from Gasché, 1972, p. 209).19 House

Tobacco

Speech

Creator

Murui

Male Ïiko

Strong Rïiredïko

Strong Rïirede

Mixed with ashes bírïe

Violent Juzíña úai

Juziñamui

Muinanï

Female Rïngóko

House of subsistence Monífue íko

Sweet Naímérede

Mixed with salt lléra

Consoling Buináima úai

Buináima

Notice that Gasché, as other anthropologists, tends to use the term Muinanï and Muina indifferently. While the homonym may give rise to confusion between the Uitoto speaker group Muina, and the Muinane (or Muinanï) speaker group, it reflects the relational intra- and inter-ethnic self-definition of Amazonian societies, the People of the Center in particular. Murui and Muina/Muinane/Muinanï inhabit two complementary positions, which may be represented as upper and lower, sidereal space and aquatic infra-world. These positions are associated with opposed qualities of the divinity, personified by Juziñamui and Buinaima (the indigenous thinkers also associate these figures respectively with the Old and New Testament).20 This complementarity

19. Note the different Uitoto spelling: ï = i (high central vowel) ll = y (sound alveolar). 20. “Because of the extension of the actual use of this name, adopted by both Catholic and Protestant missionaries to refer to the Christian God, it ended up assuming the different facets of the Father-Moo. In the more strict tradition, Júziñamui would be the avocation of the force (cosmic energy) in the role of avenger, who punishes with violence. It follows that this character, or rather its role, is symbolized by the bloody crepuscular sun: violent sun, cannibal, head cutter” (Urbina, 1992, p. 80-81, my translation).

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 61

is translated to various domains of human life, such as the differentiation between male and female malocas, the maloca’s internal space, divided into masculine and feminine spheres of activity, the male (high pitch) and female (low pitch) manguaré drums, coca and tobacco (see picture 2 and 3). Instead of creating solidarity, the maloca as a symbol embodies a clash between the interests of different groups of the resguardo. Two interwoven arguments are constantly called into question when discussing the legitimacy of maloqueros. One concerns the rank of the maloquero’s lineage, but we have seen in the case of the “orphan,” it is possible to get round this problem. More importantly, legitimacy is attained through knowledge of myth and rites, reflected in the leader’s spiritual power, materialized through his sweet, cool, healing Speech and eventually shown in dance rituals. His knowledge is also manifested in his behavior that, in turn, is mirrored in the state of health of his people. The other issue that makes the maloca a contested symbol is related to the expectations risen by the departamental goverment about the development of tourism in the region, which involved the adaptation of the maloca as a tourist site. In becoming the catalyst of cultural reaffirmation, the maloca attracts development projects now focused on “cultural sustainability.” The people of the maloca say that since the Speech spoken in the mambeadero is sweet, as the coca is sweet, it attracts all kinds of things, good or bad (they also use the metaphor of a magnet). Projects have to be submitted for authorization to the cacique and the council of elders, who, with their families, are the first to benefit from the projects. This has caused resentment both within the communities and between malocas. In some cases, envy takes shape in a dramatic way, such as shamanic attacks (see Chapter 5). Usually, though, these emotions are resolved through diplomatic means, and eventually, conflicting emotions achieve their ultimate resolution in the dance rituals.

Vecinos: Translocal Neighbors Different forms of social aggregation coexist in the resguardo, ranging from lineage and clan, to ethnic, supra-ethnic, and regional identity, to nationality, and panindigenous ecumenism. This fluid membership ascription is not tied to one locality. Instead, microlocal, macrolocal and translocal frames of reference intercross in complex ways. Translocality is both the result of territorial displacement and the subsequent redefinition of indigenous society as a society of ‘orphans.’ It also stems from notions of universality predicated on the principles of coca and

62 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

tobacco. Travel is of course a main element in defining translocal social forms. Most families of the resguardo maintain a flexible mobility that involves temporal migrations to the Ampiyacu River in Peru, or the Caquetá and Putumayo Rivers, in Colombia. In addition to visiting their families, people travel to flee troubles in the community or with the law. Some individuals from the Ampiyacu are unable to settle in because they lack immigration documents. Since they cannot commit themselves to the community, members of the resguardo often subject them to discrimination. This discrimination is often articulated through ideas of nationality. Individuals, the leaders in particular, also travel to Bogotá and to foreign cities. These voyages are empowering, not only for the aura of prestige attached to traveling, but also for the network of alliances they establish with the blancos (mostly members of NGOs) during these trips. These networks ‘land’ locally (aterrizan), when travelers and members of national and international organizations pay their visit to the maloca, bring news or project money from abroad. “With the manguaré we summon our allies. They come. They are attracted by this spiritual force. It is like a magnet” people of the maloca say. This is a plan for producing locality through translocal relations. These translocal neighborhoods are far more relaxed compared to the highly committed relations proper of the maloca. They constitute a space of experimentation, where ideas and projects are tested, and alliances are cultivated with a margin of freedom. The translocal neighborhood is not only lived as alternative to the two opposed arenas of the maloca and the offices of bureaucratic institutions in town; it reflects cosmological perspectives that see in the articulation of distinct elements the source of vital energy and a way to materialize knowledge. To alternate practice between these contrasting arenas is empowering in a complex way, which includes psychological, political and cosmological aspects.

Chapter 1. Entwined landscapes: Sensory itineraries and the topography of power • 63

R. Cam pulla

Calderon Tro ch ad el die z

INDIOS HUITOTOS

Lago Seguno

ARA R. IG A AN PAR

Colina

Q. Esperanza

Nueva Granada

Recreo

Calderón

ya balo R. Sa

rum qua mA rtiu ivo lD

poto R.Tara Va rad ero

Tambo

R.E re

CABRER A

d ea Lin

acu boy am R. T

TARAPOTO

UNION

VARADE RO

I.Pucacura

SIRA POZO

oé Q.N

u lyac opa Q.C

yacu Q.Yana

Nueva L.Nongones L.Nongones

Nicahuela

El Encanto

ARICA

Sa Pedro

Puma

O L.Trompetas

R.T ac ha -C ura ray

INDIOS

Bellavista

Tro ch aa Pro ntig yec ua to nu evo Q.Mamp aya

MURAN-Cocha

JEBEROS

Union

Q.Paz taza R.Suray

Negro-urcu L.Pincha-cocha

I.Cantaria

ro Varade

Mazan an az R:M

R.S ab ala ya cu

za dra u ara yac Q.S Sara L Miraña zo Bra

Sta Teresa Tinicuro

Rio Am biya cu

Cocha llanau lYucayacu

Cocha Pozo Sandra

PAYAGUAS

Gracias a Dios

R.S uc us ari

Polo S.Juan

L.Payaguas

Q.Escalara

Victoria

a um uiric R.H

COTOS Y OREJONES

Sta Cecilia Jerusalen del Napo

Destacamento I.Mapo

a ta nien Cos Ta__ Morura de sa Tere

I.Maniti

R I O

R.A pa yac u

A M A Z O N A S L.Yanayacu Orosa

I.Tinicuro a onir Q.M

Sereria Nanay

INDIOS YAGUAS

INDIOS BORJEÑOS Y MAYORUMAS

Orali Oran I.Oran

Pebas

I.Ampiyacu I.Xivajita

Tipisca

Parana

Bocina I.Periquito

INDIOS MAYORUNAS

IQUITOS

Map 3: Routes between the Putumayo and the Amazon Basin. Elaborated from Ministerio

de Relaciones Exteriores del Ecuador: Arreglo de Límites entre las Repúblicas del Ecuador y Colombia, Quito, 1920.

64 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 2 Situating Development No one asked what is the difference between the indigenous thought and Western thought. Thought is how humans are related to the land and its resources, how they get by and live. For example, housing goes along with thought. Thought is the axis. When it starts cracking, it starts failing. Western thought, as we analyzed it in the mambeadero, is the advance of technology: is development. It leapt up high but now it has to land. We must begin to break down such a structured scheme. Destruction! Ruin! Failure! Making people believe that money is the most important thing for living! Creating needs! This is an invitation to collaborate on how to weave a new basket. (M ir aña-B or a leader , C ongress on Territorial O rdering, L eticia , 2000)

Leticia, Capital of the Amazonas Department, February 28, 1998. It´s a rainyseason afternoon and the administrative elite of the Amazonas Department is expected to gather in the main hall of the local branch of the Universidad Nacional. Authorities are arriving with calculated delay. Some of them have sent delegates. On one side of the hall, a group of indigenous leaders of various ethnic affiliation is waiting. They are sharing mambe, the powdered leaves of the coca plant, and ambil, tobacco paste, “to think well, speak well, and work well, and to turn this into abundance for all.” A leader of the resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto1 1. Recently, scholarly and indigenous definitions have converged on the spelling that I am adopting here. Accordingly, I use Uitoto instead of ‘Huitoto’ or ‘Witoto’.

Photo 2: The indigenous community “Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, Muina-Murui,” also known as Kilómetro 11. Photograph taken by its inhabitants during the Workshop of Social Photography, TAFOS, 2000.

66 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Kilómetro 6-11, walks up to the stand: “To present this indigenous plan we shall stand up and sing the National Anthem…” With what has been perceived as a radical turn from previous administrations, the new government of the Amazonas Department sought to involve indigenous participation in the formulation of the Development Plan 1998-2000. In order to gain political recognition, the five multiethnic communities of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto got organized in AZCAITA, the Asociación Zonal de Cabildos y Autoridades Indígenas de Tierra Alta (Zone Association of Cabildos and Indigenous Authorities of the Upper Land). The plan that today is to be presented to the authorities is an attempt to publicize the version of development that the people of the resguardo hold. Compañeros, good afternoon. Good afternoon, Señor Major of Leticia, Governor of the Amazonas Department, Commander in chief of the Jungle Battalion No. 50, Commander of the National Police, District Attorney, Representative of the Legal Status Office, mister Ombudsman, Corpoamazonia, Instituto Sinchi, Universidad Nacional, Monsignor, Court Officers, among others compañeros y compañeras... Through a work of knowledge and zone development for the unified integration of traditional ancestral criteria, seeking the identity and autonomy of our biodiversity, planning the development of our children and descendants so that they could preserve the customs and traditional cultures belonging to our forms of life, how we are and how we think, with this indigenous development plan we want to participate in the Municipal and Departmental plans for their development...

The meeting at the Universidad Nacional is animated by another motive, just as compelling. A few weeks earlier, the military entered the resguardo, destroyed hundreds of coca plants, and jailed those who dared to protest. This momentous event became a symbolic benchmark in the process of cultural and political self-determination of the people of the resguardo, who described it as a rising of awareness: “¡Nos conscientizamos!” Following the military incursion, the indigenous authorities invited the representatives of the army and the national police to the symbolically charged space of the maloca2 2. In 1998, the maloca located in the Kilómetro 11 community, and more precisely the maloca council, assumed the role of coordinating the process of organization of the resguardo.

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 67

—communal great house and seat of the shaman. They were seeking an opportunity to publicly inform state authorities about the sacred nature of the coca plant and its fundamental place in their life and culture, and, appealing to the colombian political constitution, claim their right to cultivate coca in their own territory. But on that occasion the guests neither showed up nor sent delegates. “Coca, the Word, and Tobacco, the Thought, are the fixed starting points for the social development of the indigenous communities that keep them and consume them,” says a Uitoto Muina leader. “With the knowledge that this medical plant is giving to us we shall overcome another addiction, and shall not become corrupted when managing programs and projects: plan well, think well, and sit down to work.”3 In the years between 1996 and 2000, the resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto overturned its reputation for illegality and cocaine-base addiction by initiating a process of interethnic re-organization that hinged on the positioning of coca and its natural companion, tobacco, as shared symbols of resistance and cultural resilience. Coca and tobacco provided the basis for building a political agenda capable of articulating the “unified integration of traditional ancestral criteria,” and respect for ethnic and cultural plurality, a program in tune with Colombia’s political constitution of 1991. At the same time, the emphasis on the cultural value and sacredness of the coca plant enabled indigenous leaders to catapult the indigenous struggle for self-determination to the national and international arenas, and to bear directly on geopolitical issues such as the U.S. championed war on drugs. Coca came to signify the daily threat against indigenous sovereignty in their own territories, and the subtler and more symbolically charged encroachment on their cultural forms and way of life. Such threat must be understood in relation to the ideologically constructed effort of developing the region, one that is at the same time linked to the definition of the Nation-State as much as to patterns of governance of the global order. Since the publication of Said’s path-breaking book Orientalism (1979), studies on colonialism laid the basis for understanding the discourse and practice of development as another form of colonization of reality (Bhabha, 1990; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991; Ferguson, 1994; Mitchell, 1988; Mohanty, 1991; among others) which served what Escobar (1995) called the making of the Third World and of Third World subjects. Representations 3. For a discussion of the People of the Center’s concept of ‘work’ see Griffiths (2001) and Micarelli (forthcoming).

68 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

came to be seen as social facts, disseminated through a myriad of forms of control and consent outside the realm of institutional politics (Foucault, 1980; Freire, 1970; Rabinow, 1986), and significantly shaping the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon. Some scholars have argued for the need to locate the analysis of Development in concrete contexts of practice. Along this line is the work undertaken at the department of Social Anthropology of Stockholm University, whose research program Development as Ideology and Folk Model is “to investigate the diverse manifestations of development thinking in different environments” (1987, p. 1; see also Ethnos, 1984; Dahl and Rabo, 1992). Here too development is seen as a discourse of power that fosters symbolic communities. But as Pigg (1992) has shown in her study of development in Nepal, social categories are not simply imposed, they circulate in a community in complex ways, are interpreted and transformed, and influence local processes of identity formation. With very few exceptions (Whitten, 1985; Dahl and Rabo, 1992) though, the attempts to turn the ethnographic lens on the practices and meanings people deploy to interpret, resist and/or participate in development have been limited to development practitioners and how they negotiate with the funding institutions during the implementation of specific projects (see Arce and Long, 2000; Crewe and Harrison, 1998); the voices of the so-called development “beneficiaries” on the other side of development are still left unheard and unexamined. This book is partly intended to correct that lack through a consideration of the ways in which native Amazonians criticize, appropriate, resist or subvert the development enterprise and its ideological apparatus, taking into account the creative as well as the constraining elements involved in the development encounter. My argument is that the strategies people construct for dealing with development, which are often contradictory and provisory, are nevertheless quite far from being a replica of the dominant concept of reality, nor are just an expression of resistance to such dominant reality. I follow here the suggestion that hegemony is a differentiated relation (Ferguson, 1994; Herzfeld, 1992; Asad, 1991), where interests and desires compete and collide in complex ways; if people internalize dominant representations and come to see themselves as underdeveloped, they also debate the nature and telos of development on the basis of both cultural models, and practical understandings of their conditions of life. Also, the critique of such tropes of anthropological discourse as the modern-traditional dichotomy and its implicit “denial of coevalness” for

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 69

non-Western cultures (Fabian, 1983; Thomas, 1989), urges anthropology to address the emergence of indigenous modernities and of new languages through which identities are expressed (Asad, 1991; Turner, 1989, 1991). The first lesson that can be learned from an ethnographic perspective “from below” is that the categories of “developers” and “those to be developed” are not unproblematic. Even if they do shape social interactions, they do not reflect fixed or clear-cut categories; rather, they are relational positions that shift according to the context of the interaction and the perspectives of the subjects involved. For instance, an indigenous leader may get in the position of the “developer” with respect to community members, and the local bureaucrat to the category of “those to be developed” with respect to an official from Bogotá or a foreign consultant. And as the quotes above suggest, indigenous leaders may see themselves as “developers” of State institutions and programs. So, these categories constitute a contested semantic space in itself. Another issue to be addressed empirically is how bureaucracy and the rhetoric of the development discourse are incorporated in local system of power-knowledge. As a closed set of requirements deployed in project formats, procedures, timetables, and reports, and expressed in an exclusive linguistic genre, bureaucracy has real oppressive effects on the life of project beneficiaries. Similarly, the rhetoric of the development discourse —condensed in such tropes as “culture,” “community,” and “participation”— shapes the thinking and acting of the beneficiaries, the experts, and the bureaucrats. Both rhetoric and bureaucracy work to fit human agency into a world that is already mapped and classified. Nevertheless, for their exclusive and almost ritualized formalism, rhetoric and bureaucracy lend themselves to multiple reinterpretations, which serve the reconfiguration of power in indigenous society in unexpected ways, for instance reinforcing cultural forms of shamanic power. As indigenous people move back and forth from gaining access to the bureaucratic apparatus to claiming rights of self-determination, they find their own ways of getting and exerting power —such as taking advantage of the temporary bonanza offered by development in terms of cash, goods and relations— which reveal not a convergence with dominant modernity, but cultural trajectories that may result in reaffirming native forms of leadership and notions of wealth, as it has been pointed out (Hugh-Jones, 1992; Whitehead, 2002). In addition, new forms of envisioning identity and organization are prompted by the development encounter. As we shall see, these complex interactions not only harness native forms of power and control, but they

70 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

also have the unplanned outcome of changing development’s planned goals, breaking up its hegemonic interpretative grid, and generating contexts for subverting the idea of development as the right solution to the problem of poverty and marginalization.

Coca and Tobacco: “Our Principle of Organization” After the flood, nothing was left, because everything had been swept away by the water; only a man called Buínaima [owner of the primordial water] existed. As he was alone, he was trying to reestablish the humanity that had disappeared from the world, because he knew that before the deluge good people had lived on the earth and they had disappeared with the scourge sent by Júziñamui. Buínaima was staying up all night invoking Júziñamui, but his intelligence would not go beyond, and the effort was making him sleepy. So he sought the way to overcome sleep, and he started investigating how to open up his intelligence. Buínaima started toasting the leaves of different plants, such as the maraca (Theobroma bicolor H.B.), cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.), ñame (Dioscorea alata L.), nettle or pringamosa (Urera baccifera L.), manioc (Manihot spp.), and other wild plants. After he had toasted the leaves, he pounded them, and then he sieved them, and then he got to mambe the powder. With that he could dominate sleep a little, but that was not worth it; his intelligence would not open up, and he could not find what he was looking for when he made his invocations. As he saw that that was not worth it, he went at the river shore to search for the coca-of-the-boa, and with that he could see a little more. Knowledge was coming and he kept making his invocations and enduring sleep. The spirit conversed with him through sleep but it would not reveal what Buínaima was looking for. Then he had a baby girl, and he called her Buinaiño, that means the Mother of Humanity. She was the coca. Now we are going to see how the plant appeared. The girl was growing. One day she went with her mother to the garden. When she arrived she sat on a log, she shook and combed her hair letting some lice nits fall. That is how she seeded the coca, because she knew that the coca was what her father needed.

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 71

That is how the coca was born. The child was the owner of the coca, that is why we take care of the coca as if it was our daughter; if we mistreat the plant, we fall ill. The day after she went back and she noticed that a seedling had grown. She got very happy because she saw that what the world needed to fight evil and keep the world healthy and the people honest was growing. But her father and her mother did not know why she was happy. That was a secret that she could not reveal until she saw that evil was vanquished. When in the afternoon she went back home very happy, she asked her father: —Dad, weave me a basket because I need to carry things. And the father answered: —All right daughter, I will weave a basket for you so that you can help your mother to carry manioc. As he finished the basket he gave it to the girl who got very happy, and the day after she went with her mother to the garden, and she found that the coca plant had grown three leaves. She picked them up and put them in the basket. In the afternoon she went back home with the coca in the basket and she said to her father: —Dad: you have to take the biggest pot and toast the thing that I’ve brought you. I have seen that you eat coca that is not good to eat, because those leaves only the animals eat. From now on, you will mambe good coca, and you will learn many things, because this is a gift of God to rescue humanity. Buínaima became very happy to hear those words. He put the pot on the fire and when it was very hot he asked the girl. —Where is the coca? And the girl answered: —It is below the mortar [pestle] with which you work, in the basket that you wove for me. He sought the coca but he only found three unknown leaves, and he said:

72 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

—Here there are only three leaves, for such a big pot? It would be better to use a small pot rather that such a big one. And the girl said: —Do not distrust and toast in the name of Júziñamui, naming all the people that existed in the world, like this: the coca that Bora ate, come here! The coca that Ocaina ate, come here! The coca that Gidone ate, come here! …4 So he kept naming all the cocas. In this way Búinaima begun to toast, and when he toasted well, the pot was full. This was the first miracle of coca, which with three leaves filled up a pot… (Related by José Octavio García; in Urbina, 1992, pp. 57-58, my translation.)

This myth, which was narrated by one of the leaders of the resguardo, conveys some key elements for understanding the place of coca in the resguardo’s politics. We learn that after the cataclysm had swept away the human kind, the coca became the power sought by Buinaima —his knowledge and “intelligence”— needed to rescue people from vanishing. Coca also has a moral connotation, since it helps Buinaima to seek for “good people.” It is generated by a father through his daughter, and it is a gift from a daughter to his father, binding generations and consanguineal groups through reciprocal and affectionate relations. The story says that the coca leaves (the teaching, but also the offspring) are collected in the basket (knowledge and intelligence, but also the womb) woven by a father for his daughter, so that she can work and help her mother in daily duties. It refers to the Yetárafue, the Speech of Discipline spoken in the mambeadero, a speech aimed at forming proper affects and dispositions, which materialize in abundance of food and people. Also, coca is a gift from the Creator to his children, acquiring a sacred and universal quality. At the same time, the intention with which it is prepared recognizes difference and plurality. This is a programmatic statement for uniting different people while respecting cultural differences.

Bora and Ocaina are ethnic groups; Gidoni is a Uitoto clan.

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 73

Finally, the coca makes people happy, an idea that highlights the role of coca in achieving well-being and conviviality.5 The following statements, expressed by indigenous leaders-thinkers of different ethnic affiliation in public meetings, mirror the elements above. We are not distinguishing between one and the other, because we unite this strength through the coca. We are not saying to the Bora, the Muinane, the Andoke that their coca is useless. We have different languages but the use is the same, and it comes directly from the Creator. By contrast, you the whitemen, you do [create divisions], because when the Bible arrived thousands of sects were born, and this is confusing humanity nowadays, because each one pulls to his side and no one believes in anyone else. We the Uitoto, we have the organization of the mambe. In each ethnic group, such as Bora, Ocainaâ&#x20AC;Ś it was born in a different way but it has the same history. This is not for everyone, though. This is used only to counsel, to teach, to do a cultural activity. In this space [the mambeadero], To see, illness, to see theft, to see everything. To analyze humanity. Not for revenge. We that mambe, we respect mambe. Since I mambe I respect everyone. Mambe is to unite. Coca and tobacco are the two strengths we have. This is the most important thing to be indigenous. Tobacco is masculine, is strength and power. Coca is feminine, is intelligence and wisdom. Our traditional culture is based on coca and tobacco. Coca is the Speech, Tobacco is the Thought. This is the base of the organization of indigenous communities. When we meet, we make mambe, we make ambil, with this we talk, we give advice to the children in the mambeadero, the sacred place. We give advice to the youngsters, so that they learn they have to respect the elders. We give advice to the adults when they do not comply with the rules and the directions received in the sacred place [...] I like the culture side. As indigenous person I will never forget it. Wherever I will go, I will keep being the same person.

5. It is regrettable that laughter and humor have been addressed only marginally by anthropologists working in Amazonian (for exceptions see E. Basso, 1987, 1995). Colombian anthropologist Roberto Pineda Camacho (1985, p. 62) suggests the importance of laugh for the Nonuya, who claim that happiness immunizes against, and neutralizes illness.

74 â&#x20AC;˘ INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

The Speech of Counsel that was given by the grandfathers stems from a principle of organization that are the coca and the tobacco. From there, counsel, and the order and discipline of everything were born. The word “life,” the word “Development” are in the coca and tobacco. If I use it well, it is good. If I use it wrong, it is bad. There, all the spells (conjuros)are deposited; all that our father has given to us is deposited there. We that mambe here, we cannot be angry, because this force makes our son get ill. When we do not comply, our son, our sister, our mother wake up ill. We have to carry this Speech well, because from there our knowledge stems, our strength, our Development stem. The Speech that we are mambeing here, sometimes the wild animals hear it. They say “this señor that is mambeing he’s organizing but he’s not thinking of himself, he doesn’t take care of his son, so we will take him away.” So, he wakes up ill. This is the consequence of not taking care of himself. This is not a game. For us this is something very sacred. Education is provided from the maloca, the mambeadero. It is intimately tied to health, natural resources, economy, and biodiversity. From coca depends the happiness of all the people.

Coca and Tobacco are symbols in the sense argued by Sperber (1974); they don’t encode meaning as words do, but evoke complex sets of conceptual representations that rest on implicit knowledge. Such representations, though, are made explicit through a series of icons that not only serve to articulate the processes of interethnic organization in a multiethnic context, but also to anchor the leaders’ legitimacy. The front page of the 1998 TikunaUitoto Development Plan (figure 1) is an example of this. It was extensively discussed by the council of elders of the resguardo. It shows: The circle, a world, inside the Tikuna-Uitoto plan. Here is the tree. Do you know why we put it up front? The root of the tree is in the mambeadero that symbolize the elders... the chief. Without copying from other front pages that always put the maloca up front [the communal house]. We are going to change this strategy. The tree, with its trunk that are all its people that give strength to the trunk that comes out as a head, the cabildo, with its children, its autonomy, its association AZCAITA [...] At the right hand there is the basket, where all the knowledge, all the science is kept; that is our context. And a little plant of tobacco and a little plant of Coca, which is the speech.

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 75

To explain all this we could stay up a whole night and the following morning too. This is just to sum it up. (Murui leader) The circle is the universe. But where did we form? In the universe, which is the womb of our mother that also contains water and air. It also contains the tree, which stands between the earth and the air. I am opening up more philosophically, this goes deeper. Simply said, this is the globe where the human being is born, which is the matrix of our mother, and from where the root grows. Because we ask ‘where were we born?’ Here in the seat of our mother. (Muinane leader)

These explanations entangle complex ideological rationales. Symbols are mobilized with the double aim of incorporating development in the indigenous cosmology, and, at the same time, to construct the indigenous development plan as a cosmology. But whose cosmology? Different orientations are simultaneously at work. One puts emphasis on shared symbols that may serve to unify the different ethnic groups of the resguardo. The Ceiba tree, for example, can be seen as Wone, the Tikuna mythical tree from which the Amazon River and its tributaries originated, and as Moniya Amena (in Uitoto language), the Tree of Abundance’ of the People of the Center’s cosmology. At the same time, the icons that compose the development plan’s front page can be read as blazons of the three leaders who in 1998 were owner of maloca. Indeed, Moniya Amena was the name of one of the maloqueros’ community; the sun, Jitoma in Uitoto language, referred to another cacique and his maloca. And the maloca’s front space holding the roots of the tree to the Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï maloca.6 This symbolical apparatus is instrumental to the redefinition of leadership and interethnic organization in a changed scenario, and its polysemy provides room for negotiation between the different groups involved. At a deeper level, the conceptual representations evoked by coca and tobacco link the rearticulation of diversity to processes of energy exchange and transformation that are needed to maintain a healthy life, as we shall see next.

6. Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï means ‘this clean space of the sweet science’ in Uitoto language. Ibïrï (‘this clean space’) may be used to indicate both the open space in front of the maloca where the guests of a dance ritual congregate before entering the house, and the mambeadero.

76 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Figure 1. The front page of the Development Plan presented to the Municipality of Leticia by the indigenous association of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto Km. 6 y 11 (note that the spelling of ethnonyms has changed). It shows a giant Ceiba tree as axis mundi traversing the maloca. A chiefly headdress connects the tree to the sun and firmament. Two plants of coca and tobacco are represented on the left, and a woven basket on the right. K-6 stands for Kilรณmetro 6, and K-11 for Kilรณmetro 11, both multiethnic but respectively predominantly Tikuna and Uitoto settlements.

Chapter 2. Situating Development โ ข 77

Development as Illness, Indigenous Antibodies In indigenous Amazonia, failure of development projects constitutes more the rule than the exception. On a social level, these projects have exacerbated ethnic divisions and worsened the struggles for power among clans and lineages. On an economic level, they have fostered dependence on institutional aid. In spite of being the postulate of the development enterprise, “the improvement of the people’s quality of life,” indigenous people express the feeling that their quality of life has become worse, and they see themselves as both physically and spiritually ill. The ways in which the people of the resguardo interpret development entangle political, bodily, moral, and cosmological rationales. Articulating a view of development as pathogenic, these explanations lay emphasis on a clash between different notions of wellbeing and of the practices needed to achieve it. The polluting nature of the world of the White men, is captured by traditional etiology as a category of illness: the illnesses of the White men’s trail (“enfermedades del camino del Blanco”). Such category includes corruption, prostitution, alcoholism, malaria, and sexually transmitted diseases, and it is defined more generally as moral and bodily degeneration and loss of control. El camino del Blanco exceeds the humanizing vision able to keep the world in a healthy state. As a Murui leader of the Kilómetro 11 community says: “when our grandfathers were seated in the mambeadero, they could see the world in their knees and they were curing it. Now the world has become too vast. The elders cannot see it, so they cannot cure it anymore.” Still, the symptoms of development, which attack the human, the social, and the cosmic body, must be kept under control. Even though the promotion and maintenance of health is the task of every adult human being, the leaders are on the forefront. Anticipating here an issue I shall develop in the next chapters, the leaders function as the link connecting the internal world of shared substances (lo de adentro) and the external world of radical alterity (lo de afuera). They must learn how to operate in a manner that is reasonably effective in that specific arena, where local, national, and global politics intersect and collide, and they are also responsible for designing strategies to gain political recognition in the development arena —a recognition that should yield to their self-administration. What’s more, they must be able to “cool” and transform “hot” exogenous energies, and to channel them into the creation of conviviality and generalized well-being.

78 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

When I started collaborating with indigenous communities, I was puzzled about the leaders’ ambiguous behavior, which was made even more confusing by the emphasis on the need to be consistent made by indigenous leaders-thinkers. In fact, inconsistency between one’s thought-intention, speech and deeds is considered to be a source of illness. Once I became more familiar with indigenous understandings, I started realizing that ambiguity is not just a symptom of general confusion, nor the residue of a shattered order, nor a case of contradictory consciousness. Rather, it is strategic for operating in arenas that range from institutional politics to interlineage conflicts. In such slippery contexts, ambiguity gives individuals a margin of freedom in which to operate, for instance, facilitating the search for new alliances with both indigenous communities and the local political class. More significantly, ambiguity evokes native forms of knowledge/practice that link shamanism and politics, and that hinge on the role of the leader as healer. Besides the political advantages of being ambiguous enough, we can see ambiguity as an emergent quality of thought that is involved in curing in a twofold way. First, the possibility of interpreting meaning in a non-univocal way is needed to turn pathogens into elements apt to life; curing is not pursued by antagonism, but through a metabolic process of embodiment, transformation, and disposal (Merleau-Ponty’s definition of the healthy person as the one who uses the contradictions in life in a creative way seems very appropriate here; 1962). Second, the leaders’ ambiguous behavior is not only a memento of their liminality, and hence a source of power, but it also keeps people alert about their own personal conduct and responsibilities (which, in turn, is a way through which collectivities control their leadership). As an old healer says: “el chamán es un show-man.” These views highlight the role of performance, mimesis and improvisation in healing, as well as the achieved character of tranquility, conviviality, and generalized good health that constitutes ideal community life. To see development as an arena of difficult interactions of which sense must be made engages one of anthropology’s fundamental questions: the production of meaning. The focus here is on how clashing perceptions of agency and well-being coexist and how the incongruity between them is understood and worked out. Asking how people struggle for meaning in contradictory situations prompts a series of related issues, including the power and the limits of culture in making sense of novel experiences; the interrelation of personal and public meanings; the production of ideological frames as a mean

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 79

through which meaning is authorized; and the place of practice and embodiment in sense-making. In order to account for these issues, it is necessary to see knowledge as consisting of processes of different nature: some historically produced and non-individual, and others emerging from experiences that are only partially constructed by culture. The tension existing between these different kinds of knowledge, that following Bloch (1986) I tentatively call ideology and cognition, suggests that culture cannot be conceived of as a coherent, shared, and all-encompassing system. It also complicates the attribution of beliefs to people on the basis of a literal interpretation of what they say, relieving knowledge from the linguistic black box in which concepts correspond to words, and language maps all thinking activity, and suggesting that some kind of knowledge —such as that underlying complex practical tasks, or creativity— may need to be non-linguistic (Bloch, 1995, p. 8). The relationship between different forms of knowledge and their relation to practice has been a main concern of American anthropology from Boas on. Recently, the question of cultural givens and individual creativity has greatly benefited from cognitive approaches to the study of practice and material production (Gatewood, 1982; Lave and Wenger, 1991; D’Andrade and Strauss, 1992; Chaiklin and Lave, 1993; Lehman, 1994; Renfrew and Zubrow, 1994; Keller and Keller, 1996). Two fundamental ideas emerge throughout these studies. The first is that structure and performance are mutually constitutive, a crucial idea for exploring the construction of meaning through practice facing the changes fostered by development. The second one is that “conceptual thought includes visually and kinesthetically represented ideas” (Keller and Keller, 1996, p. 15). That means that the body has, and is, knowledge. The People of the Center describe knowledge and thinking through the imagery of a woven basket, which encompasses the action of interweaving different strands, the form of the woven container, and the things contained in it. The basket also stands for the human body shaped through affinity and kinship. As summarized by Candre and Echeverri (1996, pp. 49-51): The woven basket is a powerful metaphor. The basket, Kinerai says, is a person. A tradition of rituals is also called a basket, and the master of those rituals is called ‘the basket holder.’ When a person completes a training (as healer or master of rituals), it is said that he/she ‘closed his/ her basket.’ The places where ancient people lived are also referred to as baskets, and if a person wants to live in those places he/she has to know the Word of that basket.[...]

80 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Baskets are made with threads of vines. The thread (igai) stands for ‘thought.’ The thread is what holds us to the Mother, the umbilical cord, the thread of life. When a sorcerer or a powerful person travel with his/her thought it is said that he/she is traveling ‘in the thread of dream.’ [...] Basketry symbolizes exogamy and marriage alliances. These alliances are going to hold new life – children.7

The imagery of the basket illustrates a perspective found in many Amazonian cosmologies (Santos-Granero, 2009; Overing, 1981), according to which alterity —weaved into the fabric of society like different fibers are interwoven to make a basket— is constitutive of one’s self-identity, and thus indispensable to human life. It also relates knowledge and thinking to practices aimed at securing life: the life of the person, the exogamic group, a certain tradition, and the territory. These transformative knowledge and capacities are what make the good life possible, maintaining a constant exchange of vital energy, and restoring the healthy fabric of abundant life on a permanent basis. The People of the Center make the relationship between knowledge and well-being explicit: knowledge is evaluated on the basis of underlying intention and tangible contribution to generalized well-being, and as such, it is a defense against illness. Conversely, any action, speech utterance, or thought that doesn’t adhere to the principle of health delegitimizes knowledge.8 The promotion of health and the prevention of illness are tasks disciplined by the Speech of Coca and Tobacco, a language philosophy found throughout Northwest Amazonia. Also called Speech of Life, this philosophy is based on the idea that life and health are not given, but permanently achieved. It conceives of speech as endowed with illocutionary force, which “actualizes itself in a tangible form, as food, game, offspring” (Candre and Echeverri, 1996, p. 32). The relevance of this language philosophy is that it responds to the fractionalization, uncertainty, and cultural loss brought about by modernity by stressing a notion of culture as a daily practice aimed 7. Kinerai is the name in Uitoto language of Hipólito Candre, an Ocaina elder. He narrated the Word of Tobacco and Coca in Uitoto, the language of both his mother and his wife, to Colombian anthropologist Juan Álvaro Echeverri, who also translated it. 8. Indeed, the People of the Center claim that malevolent beings do have power but not proper knowledge (sí tienen un saber, para hacer daño por ejemplo, pero no tienen sabiduría, ni conocimiento).

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 81

at the reproduction of life and well-being. Moreover, it responds to cultural mixing by promoting an ideal of cultural interrelationship, which involves the non-indigenous as well as the indigenous world. This complex significance —a notion of culture in process opposed to some abstract notions of authenticity, not only tolerant of, but made possible by the proper intermixing of difference— acquires a further shade in the global geopolitical arena, generating schemas for political agency that intertwine in powerful ways healing, dissent, and the envisioning of new forms of organization.

The Practice of Culture In an incisive article, Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) suggested that anthropologists should start working against the notion of culture since it enforces asymmetries between cultures and flattens out differences between individual actors. Recently, cognitive anthropologists have proposed the notions of cultural models (Shore, 1996), and cultural meanings (Strauss and Quinn, 1997) to rethink culture and to try to rescue it as a useful analytical tool. The processes described so far reveal both the power and limitations inherent in the notion of culture. If culture lies at the core of indigenous people’s claims of autonomy and self-determination, and cultural meanings clearly mediate their views and experience of reality, it is also utterly clear that culture does not correspond to limited or stable groups. And while the notion of culture becomes crucial for negotiating political inclusion, it also serves to reinforce a framework of subordination and exclusion. The participation of indigenous people in modernity is predicated upon clashing concepts of culture. The catch-all notion used by state and NGOs officials, scientists, tourists, travelers, politicians, the clergy, new-agers, film-makers and businessmen, tends to represent indigenous people as a uniform and bounded whole. As such, culture denotes an authentic essence that negates internal heterogeneity as much as change. Rooted in the opposition between tradition and modernity, such tropes as “culture,” “custom,” and “tradition” become attributes of indigenous and black minorities that serve to differentiate them from mestizo and white people, and to construct them as underdeveloped. This emphasis on culture, which came to characterize the so-called sustainable development, reflects a strategy of control and subordination that is not alternative to hegemonic globalization. In this regard, Echeverri (2008) notes how

82 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

[…] in the dialectics between autonomy and domination (exerted for instance through a dependence from commodities that are essential to social reproduction) the ties of domination contribute to intensify autonomous forms of life and culture, and manage to make them subsidiary to the demands of domination […]. ‘Culture’ becomes a key notion in adapting to the demands of domination and at the same time becomes more and more abstract and separated from emerging needs and from the demands of social relationship. (p. 11, my translation)

But as Rabasa (1993, p. 69) rightly suggests, identity inscribes itself in “a tension resulting from the institutional forms imposed by the dominant culture and the need to convey a sense of the self or a meaning of history that is alien to the colonial order.” It is in such tension that culture takes up meanings that are not encompassed by the dominant lexicon, but that come to express a critical response to it. The question is how native Amazonians understand and perform culture, what rationales, symbols and practices they deploy to forge cultural relatedness across ethnic and linguistic borders, also exploring the counter-hegemonic potential of these indigenous perspectives. In recent years, the concept of ethnogenesis has been used to explore the emergence of culture in relation to the dynamics between indigenous resistance and domination (Hill, 1996; Whitten, 1976, 1988, 1996). According to Hill, ethnogenesis “is not merely a label for the historical emergence of culturally distinct peoples but a concept encompassing peoples’ simultaneously cultural and political struggles to create enduring identities in general contexts of radical change and discontinuity” (p. 1). However, in the multiethnic context of the Tikuna-Uitoto resguardo, the terms on which people pursue and demand recognition are not grounded on identity, but on the cultural values given to the proper articulation of diversity —their “biodiversity,” as they name it with a term borrowed from the sustainable development lexicon— making the creation of “enduring identities” a problematic issue in itself. A better lens to account for the constantly destabilized dynamics between interpretations of dominance and the need for self re-definition is provided by social movement theory. According to Touraine (1995, p. 240) “a social movement is at once a social conflict and a cultural project […] The goal of a social movement is always the realization of cultural values as well as victory over a social adversary.” The significance of this definition for this particular context is that it acknowledges the place of cultural values in

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 83

people’s struggles without making them correspond to stable identities, or to fixed frameworks of meaning or tradition. It recognizes that such values are performed against domination in dialectic and strategic ways, which may lead to the emergence of “project identities, aiming at the transformation of society as a whole” (Castells, 1997, p. 357). This is, of course, a process riddled with difficulties. As a Muinane leader described it: “the problem is that tradition does not let tradition work,” the first “tradition” referring to the set of cultural meanings more or less shared by the ethnic or sub-ethnic group, such as clan or lineage; and the second “tradition” to a higher set of cultural meanings that put the articulation of diversity at the core. The tension between these two sets of meaning cannot be reduced to the opposition between a radical sense of identity and the need to achieve political inclusion. Rather, it should be understood through a consideration of native ontologies and theories of sociality, also exploring the significance they acquire in broad contexts of cultural and political transformations.

Embodying History, Performing Culture: Hot, and Cooling Down Societies Indigenous views of history and the self shun the polarity between tradition and modernity; instead, indigenous people demand recognition as “Indios contemporáneos”. Green (2000, p. 78), writing about Southern Tanzania, suggests that people experience tradition and modernity as “context-dependent, not incompatible. [They are] articulated in terms of living ‘here and now’ [...], participating in [modern] practices and ‘traditional’ obligations, as situations demand, in a world that is ever changing.” According to Latour (1993), the notion of modernity depends upon a dichotomization of nature and culture that “fails to acknowledge the complex [...] mixing of nature-culture and human-non human”. This he attributes to the “‘purification’ principle of conventional science, which hides from view and sanitizes certain critical activities and processes that are variously composed of humans, cultural, material, and nonhuman elements” (in Arce and Long, 2000, p. 7). I agree with Latour that much of Western science has defined itself through a conflictive opposition to nature, a recognition that urges us to understand the ‘human’ as “an historically and culturally contingent category” (Whitehead, 2009, p. 1). However, Latour takes no notice of the fact that every system of conventionalized knowledge —science— addresses in arbitrary ways the distinction between nature and culture, and between human and non-human. This way of totalizing Western science exposes

84 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Latour’s argument to the dangers of reviving the noble savage myth. If from the perspective of native Amazonians animals have human attributes, they speak, they belong to clans, and they even hold rituals (see Descola, 1992), in contrast to Latour’s view, indigenous people are adamant in stressing their difference with respect to animals. Such difference, though, is not given but fabricated on a permanent basis; humanity and sociality are projects in the making and by no means finished products (Viveiros de Castro, 1979). Likewise, “nature is not something that exists out there, but it is the product of a transformation process” (Echeverry, n.d.). The opposition is rather between cultures as embodying particular perspectives and dispositions. This is expressed by a Uitoto-Muina man as follows: The indigenous person brings the maloca, the garden, the forest into relation. This is his/her link. Within it all the medicine is contained. One must investigates where a person lives, where he/she works, the paths he/she walks. What happens in your side is that you take a portion of this and call it “health,” from here to there you call it “culture”. For the indigenous person culture is all this. You are fraccionistas, like the lottery. Instead, we call this ‘a whole’. That is why we have not succeed neither in education, nor in health, because we are fractionated.

A fraccionista epistemology, such as that inherent in Western science, is rooted in, and draws legitimacy from, culturally specific understandings of time and history The linear view of history that lies at the foundation of the ideology of progress and of its natural successor, development, reflects itself on the ways in which human experience is understood in relation to time; particularly, as linear history encases people’s historical responsibility in a teleological framework of progressive but discontinuous points in time, it actually limits the capacity to affect history. In contrast, indigenous views of history assume the interdependence of past and future, and put emphasis on people’s faculty to affect such relation. The People of the Center see presenttime humans as the shadow of both ancestors and future generations; in this shadow line, becoming and origin meet and interpenetrate. Cast on the human body, past and future only show as rough images, and it is through people’s actions that they acquire a clearer form. So, the human body that lives in the present is not just the mirrored image of history, but it reflects back into history, a view that highlights people’s historical responsibility. And to cure the body is the first step to cure history as well.

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 85

Photo 3: Introduced housing in the indigenous community “Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, MuinaMurui”, Kilómetro 11. Photograph taken by community members during the Workshop of Social Photography, TAFOS, 2000.

86 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

I venture here to propose an alternative interpretation of Lévi-Strauss’ (1977) notorious distinction between hot and cold societies: societies that engage with historical change, and societies that minimize the effects of history by freezing them in myth. My suggestion is that the critique that has been addressed to this distinction was itself too deeply rooted in AngloSaxon and northern European ideologies of progress with their culturally specific notions of space, time, and the body. From such a perspective, heat has positive connotations: it stands for the power of engine-operated machines, which fuel progress and growth. Conversely, coldness is negatively defined as lethargy, inactivity, and frigidity. But once we submit the hot and cold distinction to a reversal of perspective —one that is at the same time geographic and cognitive— and try to theorize “coldness” through the senses rather than the intellect, we may come to realize that coldness is not such a bad thing in the Tropics. The significance of cooling down as a process indispensable to life is revealed in the following account of the Tobacco Word on Cooling Down (Candre and Echeverri, 1996, pp. 169-179), an instance of the Speech of Life uttered by Ocaina elder Kinerai (Hipólito Candre), collected and translated by Colombian anthropologist Juan Álvaro Echeverri: Well then, now, the Mother’s word on cooling down, the Father’s word on cooling down. At the moment when —truly— the juice of sweet manioc becomes cool, the paste of tobacco becomes cool, the powder of coca becomes cool, then the child becomes cool. At the moment when the firmament becomes cool, when this earth becomes cool, at that moment, now, all the people become cool, the orphans become cool. Well then, they were hot; when they were hot they spoke restlessly,

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 87

and that word was heard from afar. At that moment, how many upsetting words there were! there were words of fire, there were words of animal anger. They still are in confusion, they still are not calm. for this reason they must be corrected. In a little while —so one says— I will form it, I will blow it so that the child may drink. The child drinks to sleep well. A calm breath is released— how it bursts forth! The firmament becomes cool, this earth becomes cool. At the same time, lovingly, the breath unravels, the breath relieves. At the same time, how lovingly it relieves! The breath of life, the breath which cools down,

88 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

the breath which sweetens. How thoroughly it relieves! At that moment the people are healed. At that moment the Father becomes cool, the people become cool. Everything: the heart of tobacco

becomes cool,

the heart of coca

becomes cool,

the heart of sweet manioc

becomes sweet,

the heart of bitter manioc

becomes cool,

the heart of peanut

becomes cool,

A genuine healing spell is released by the Father and the Mother. Right away everything becomes cool. The heart of pineapple

becomes sweet,

in that manner the heart of the forest grape

becomes sweet

the heart of the sapote

becomes sweet â&#x20AC;&#x201C;

like water

Chapter 2. Situating Development â&#x20AC;˘ 89

Right away, how it heals! What was not cool before now is cool; the gourd becomes cool, the earthenware pot becomes cool, the clay griddle becomes cool. Everything becomes

thoroughly cool.

At that moment this earth is like moist clay, thus, it becomes cool. How lovingly people become calm! How drowsy they become! The heart is relieved, the heart of the Father

is relieved,

the heart of the Mother is relieved. In this way it becomes cool, everything

becomes cool.

From the man’s heart

a fresh

breath

burst forth,

a dewy

breath

burst forth,

the true

breath of

the people’s

birth bursts forth

90 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Right away, how cool

it becomes!

Fully

it dawns,

fully

the good Word

is uttered,

fully, the good Word

becomes sweet.

We are the true People; that is why, in order to heal ourselves, there is a word of healing. What is well blown

becomes cool;

the Father’s countenance

becomes cool,

the Mother’s countenance

becomes cool,

a cool breath

bursts forth.

At that moment, how the forest

is relieved!

The breath

at the Bottom of this World

is thoroughly relieved.

Breath of the Father,

breath of the Mother,

seat of the Mother,

seat of the Father,

Buinaima of life,

one says,

name of the Father,

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 91

name of the Mother,

Mother of the people. The breath

of the Mother of the people

bursts forth.

At that moment, how

the true “house”

is conjured!

At that moment – so to speak – how,

inside the vessel,

this “house” will be is conjured!

Resolutely

it settles down,

resolutely

it will be healed.

In this manner, soon the people will be born – now the Father already pronounced, the Mother already pronounced. In this manner the breath

becomes visible.

In this manner the good Word

becomes visible.

Well then, resolutely, the Father’s purpose releases

the breath

of life.

So it is.

92 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

The sensory concepts of “cool,” “hot,” “sweet,” and salty are the coordinates of the People of the Center’s embodied cosmology. Vegetable salt is an ingredient of ambil, and is also used as curing remedy. ReichelDomatoff (1996) and Echeverri (2000) have shown that salt, and in particular the extraction of salt through a sophisticated process of “burning down the vegetable matter, filtering the ashes to separate the mineral and boiling down the brine to dry the salts” (Echeverri, 2000, p. 41) is constructed as a complex metaphor that indexes “a conceptual field that has to do with procreation, insemination and impregnation” (Reichel-Domatoff, 1996, p. 190). These embodied coordinates mark the fields of knowledge and speech, but also expand to all human experience. They correspond to both the intrinsic quality of given domains, and to the energy released and transformed by human practice. From a People of the Center’s perspective, exogenous substances resulting from a predatory undertaking —such as wild preys, metal tools, or money— are said to be hot. Spheres of human activity such as cannibalism and warfare, everything related to sexual reproduction, and mythical knowledge, are also deemed to be hot. Their energy is dangerous, but necessary to life, and in order to be incorporated in the body and in society it must be first cooled down and purified. Nonetheless, heat, more as a process than as a state, is indispensable to the production and transformation of vital substances. This idea is expressed in Muinane thought through reference to the origin of such transformative processes. For instance, one of the Mother’s names is Cool Flame of the Center. She was consecrated by the Grandfather of Tobacco through a process that involved incinerating and extracting the essence of all the fruits that had been polluted by malevolent agents after creation, simmering it in a pot to purify it, and then cooling it down. The pure aroma of cool plants that burst forth from the pot came to constitute the Mother-Cool Flame of the Center’s intimate self. In another myth, the Mother purifies the rage that filled the Creator when he saw that his work had been damaged, by putting rage into chili pepper. In Uitoto thought, the Mother is called Fire Kindler and Flame of Life. Candre and Echeverri (1996, p. 209) mention the “custom of kindling fires in their gardens to ‘warm up’ the plants so that they will grow well.” In a similar way the woman’s hearth makes the children grow well. As the Mother’s hearth warms the children, the Father’s speech cools them down. The “good speech” is compared to a cool breeze. It cools the atmosphere, so that the children can sleep well, but

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 93

it also cools down the heat of rage, fight, and social conflict, so that all the children, in other words, all society, can sleep well. These views reveal that in native Amazonians’ embodied cosmology hot and cold/cool do not constitute a dichotomy and they are in no way exclusive. As complementary forces, they depend more on a question of balance than on fixed dualism. Also, they contain in embryonic state their reverse, and it is upon such potential that transformation is operated. This transformative capacity —essentially the capacity to turn noxious energies into a source of life— is what makes the true people. These views cannot be comprehended apart from native notions of alterity as constitutive of the self and society. If for native Amazonians “the self is only possible through the incorporation of the other” (Santos-Granero, 2009, p. 478), such incorporation is not meant to completely erase alterity, but to rework it into the fabric of society, like different fibers are interwoven to make a basket. This unrelenting task is not only self-shaping; it is also indispensable to appease the energy of what has been predatorily obtained from the outside, feeding it to the exchange networks that guarantee the reproduction of life.

Conclusions I have tried to make at least two points in this chapter. The first is that the study of development must engage an analysis of emerging local forms of organization, not only because they support the demands for recognition in the development arena, but also because it is through these social forms that responses to development are articulated and expressed. The second point is that the emergence of indigenous interethnic organizations cannot be understood apart from the performance of culture, that is, the ways in which people harness cultural values and meanings to their struggles to imagine new possibilities for historical agency. The discussion presented here is intended as an introduction to the perspectives that might assist native Amazonians in understanding and engaging with development. Rather than simply resisting economic development, it is suggested that indigenous people try to incorporate development into their conceptions and practices, a process rooted in the idea that life depends on the capacity to capture and transform potentially toxic exogenous substances, but whose outcome is at all times uncertain.

94 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Photo 4: Carefully collecting coca leaves: “each leaf is a word”. Photo: Vincenzo Micarelli.

Chapter 2. Situating Development • 95

Photo 5: An example of indigenous connections. A bowl full of mambe sits on a Yap “stone money” donated by a Micronesian indigenous delegation during a visit in the year 2000. Kilómetro 11 community. Photo: Vincenzo Micarelli.

96 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Comparative Interstice: On the Verge of Development When I began my doctoral research in the Peruvian Amazonia, the topic I was mostly interested in was the relationship between craftsmanship and identity. Working with Shipibo-Conibo and mestizo population in the Ucayali region of Peru, I took the practice-based analysis of art production and performance as a point of entry to explore the representation and construction of identity in the complex dynamics of interethnic relations that characterize that region. Seeing the relationship between identity and representation as a process of mutual constitution, both ideological and cognitive, my aim was to understand how craftsmanship —as a skill and as a creative process manifested in a material object— embodied cultural and ethnic identity, and how it was used to represent or construct identity in a multiethnic scenario. Following preliminary fieldwork, I had planned to do research in the town of Pucallpa with mestizos and indigenous artists and members of indigenous artisans’ organizations, then move to a Shipibo village to learn the particular Shipibo-Conibo art style under the guidance of an indigenous master. Pucallpa and its surroundings were the perfect place for doing this kind of research. From Pucallpa, Shipibo-Conibo art —among the finest of the entire Amazon— is exported to souvenir markets and ethnic art galleries all over the world. What’s more, ethnography and ethnohistory of ShipiboConibo art stressed the existence of a close bond between a person’s identity and patterns of design. Every person receives at birth an invisible pattern, which comes to reflect that person’s state of health changing through time. In the Ayahuasca vision, the shaman can see the patterns smudged by the

effects of illness, and he tidies them up through singing. In a circular translation from the visual to the musical, and back to the visual, the intangible designs the shaman sees and sings are made tangible by women craft masters who translate them into the patterns they paint on ceramics and textiles. Such a rich conception of the relationship between imagery, creativity, the self, and healing permeates life in Pucallpa, and the same mechanism of synesthetic translation is still at work even in changing settings. The marvelous visionary world that indigenous and mestizos shamans summon at least twice a week from their shacks at the periphery of town during Ayahuasca healing sessions, keeps being brought from invisible to visible on the local art scene. Sometimes this is done with a documentary reason in mind —as for the artist Pablo Amaringo, an ex-shaman who has been reproducing down to the detail hundreds of Ayahuasca visions he had years before while still practicing shamanism. Some other times the intention is to recreate the visionary experience using the imagery and symbolism of Ayahuasca to induce an alternate perception of reality, as in the painting of local artist Lizarzaburu and in the religious street performances known as Pastorada. When one year after my preliminary research I went back to Pucallpa to do my doctoral fieldwork, hundreds of landless indigenous people were moving to the periphery of town displaced by the escalation of violence on the river, and most of them were depending on women’s crafts to survive. Craft production was quickly giving way to mass production, with a considerable as well as predictable loss of quality. The Maroti Shobo —one of the first indigenous artisans cooperative in the whole Amazonia, if not in the continent— and the indigenous radio station Kinaya Joni were shutting down. Pablo Amaringo’s Usko Ayar School of Amazonian Painting was also in troubled water. In the lapse of few months, no more “organization” but “economic development” had become the main theme of people’s private and public discourse. It looked like everybody was in desperate need for something, especially for cash money. As I was looking for a master potter, I decided to visit an indigenous association that interestingly brought together shamans, potters, and midwives. The year before, I had participated in the founding of the association, when indigenous leaders and their families from the whole Ucayali region had joined for a three-day meeting in a village upriver. The association was lodged in a nice two-store house financed by the Swedish Government. In the patio I was received by the president, a stout

98 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

woman in western cloth, while other Shipibo women were preparing a minga —a communal work paid with food and drink. This, I was told, was the closing act of the association, but a new, better association was going to be created. The president’s boastful bureaucratic discourse overwhelmed the soft whispering of the women who were peeling and grating manioc for the masato, but the squirts of the manioc pulp, the rhythmic slams of the machetes, and the grumbling counterpoint of the metal graters seemed to add an ironical commentary to the president’s rhetoric. She finally assigned me to a master-potter who happened to be her aunt; the control she exerted over the terms of my relationship with my Shipibo teacher made me feel uncomfortable. The next day, we began to work by setting off to a nearby village to get some of the materials we needed. My teacher was very concerned with why a gringa would like to learn the Shipibo style, making the example of other gringas who learned the Shipibo-Conibo art and back in their country made a lot of money out of that. I tried to reassure her that was not my case, but when I was asked to pay an exceeding amount of money for the materials, I started to realize that her assumptions were getting in the way of our relationship. My disappointment grew as I saw that the clay vessels we were making were falling apart before we could even finish them. So I quit and kept my search for a teacher. One night, my husband and I were attending a Pastorada celebration a few miles from town, in San José de Yarinacocha, a village inhabited by mestizos of diverse ethnic background. One of the guests —tipsy with masato as everyone else in the house— was blatantly making fun of everything and everybody. His jokes showed a wild sense of humor and a sharp critical thought. People seemed in awe of him. His name was Ini Mano, “Mud’s Smell.” He proudly identified himself as the only Indian there, and after some more drinks as the only one left. The day after, Ini Mano and his wife came to visit us at our house. They introduced themselves as Wilfredo and Romelia Ramírez. Their extended family, the only which self-identified themselves as indigenous in San José, was situated at the border of the village, reproducing at a small scale a common pattern of double marginalization. The Shipibo settlement was divided from the village by a creek, known as the Clay Creek, Maputai in Shipibo language. They shared the periphery, not the same periphery though, with the base of Medicins Sans Frontieres and with a jungle lodge managed by a North American couple.

Comparative Interstice: On The Verge Of Development • 99

The Ramírez used to disparage the villagers’ self-definition as mestizos, saying that their neighbors were all indios just like them: Huariapano, Piro, and Shipibo-Conibo, among others. As they had abandoned previous residence patterns to come to live in the peripheral village of San José, they also erased their ethnic difference by adopting the common and less marked identity of ‘mixed blood.’ Soon, we went to live at the Caño Maputai where I became apprentice of Romelia in the Shipibo-Conibo art of creating designs. Romelia had also a Shipibo name: Peshé Uesna, meaning ‘She Who Unravels.’ She was a graceful woman and an excellent textile painter who sustained the whole family of eight with her art work. She sold her crafts in the streets of Pucallpa and as an extra source of income her family performed Shipibo dances at the lodge or at local events. She, as some of her children, had fair hair and skin, making her struggle to affirm Shipibo-Conibo identity even more challenging; the fact that she could easily pass as a gringa bore witness to her genuine motivations for reaffirming her indigenous identity. We worked under the tin roof her house consisted of. With amazing confidence and speed, she outlined on the cloth complex geometric designs, which I filled in with vegetal dye using a nib ingeniously made from an old umbrella’s rib. These Shipibo designs are called Quene, which root ‘que-’ is linked to ‘respiration,’ ‘song,’ and ‘rhythm.’ The following step was then to draw thin lines to border the design’s bold outline. These are called quetante, ‘the song of the drawing.’ The empty space between the designs was finally filled up with modular scribbles very similar to electronic circuits.1 Peshé Uesna used to complain that these were not the powerful shamanic designs which could make a person die, fall in love, or get lost in the forest. It was almost impossible to still find women who could practice such powerful art. However, she drew a synesthetic motive in and through her creative activity by chanting to the designs and soaking the painted clothes with an herb which fragrance impregnated them for months.2

1. 2.

For an interesting interpretation of these recurrent motives in shamanic art see Narby (1998). The same herb, of the Compositae family, is called dirímao in Uitoto, and it “is one of six outstanding plants in Uitoto cosmology. These are plants that carry female powers, they are ‘names of the Mother’—‘sweet and cool’ plants” (Candre and Echeverri, 1996, p. 195). A little bit of water with dirímao leaves is conjured and given to drink to the child to cure fever and restlessness. It is also used for bathing.

100 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Unfortunately, after few months we had to leave the Caño Maputai and the Peruvian Amazon. Someone who bore resentment toward my husband since he was teaching theater at the Usko-Ayar School, had reported him to the police as a Sendero Luminoso sympathizer. Fujimori’s determination to eradicate the guerrilla was becoming more and more indiscriminate, and we felt unsafe. So we made the decision to move to the Colombian frontier town of Leticia, several traveling days down-river along the Ucayali, the Marañon, and the Amazon Rivers. Ini Mano and Peshé Uesna dreamt to participate with their program of Shipibo dances in the festivals held each year in Leticia: the Confraternidad Amazónica and Pirarucú de Oro. So, once in Leticia, we send them our contacts. Months later we got a letter from our American friend of the Yarinacocha Jungle Lodge. Something terrible had happened. Ini Mano and Peshé Uesna had been murdered by band of hooded men —encapuchados— who broke into their hut in the middle of the night, tortured and slaughtered them in front of their terrified children. Ini Mano’s old parents were severely injured while trying to stop the murderers. They claimed that the encapuchados were all men from San José, who had murdered the Shipibo couple because they were held responsible for inexplicable deaths in the villages. Witchcraft epitomized the oxymoron of a prompt explanation given to the unexplainable. In trying to find a reason for their death, I sense that Ini Mano and Peshé Uesna embodied the antithesis of what drove the people of San José to negate their indigenous identity and integrate into national society as mestizos. The hiding under a hood obeys too much to a notorious racist stereotype not to suggest that this was a racist performance of violence. The modes of violence and torture extensively inflicted by white people on the Indians since their first encounter were to be reversed by these aspirants non-Indians, in an act of purge against themselves, and their own blood that had turned poisonous.

Comparative Interstice: On The Verge Of Development • 101

Chapter 3 Policies, Politics, and Orders of Worth ...the ‘development’ apparatus […] is not a machine for eliminating poverty that is incidentally involved with state bureaucracy; it is a machine for reinforcing and expanding the exercise of bureaucratic state power, which incidentally takes ‘poverty’ as its points of entry— launching an intervention that may have no effect on the poverty but does in fact have other concrete effects. Such a result may be no part of the planners’ intentions —indeed, it almost never is— but resultant systems have an intelligibility of their own. (J. Ferguson, The A nti -Politics M achine , p. 255.)

“Development makes us sick”, claim the People of the Center. I assume this statement to be more than a cliché “blaming the others”; as we shall see, indigenous people assume some responsibilities for the failure of development in their communities. But should we take it as a metaphor, or as a literal description of the effects of development, understood and experienced from an indigenous perspective? Choosing to explore this latter path, I rely on what Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg calls the conjectural or evidential paradigm (1980a, 1989): a mode of knowledge “characterized by the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that could not be experienced directly” (1989, p. 103). The advantage of this paradigm is to bridge intuition and theoretical analysis, shunning as well the epistemological divide between the ethnographer and the indigenous thinker-healer, who, even though with different goals, are both engaged in a minute investigation of seemingly trivial signs found in the phenomenological world.

To begin to tackle the causes, symptoms, and course of a pathology as it is experienced by indigenous people, I first look into the ideological milieu of development, revealed in the discourses and practices that are deployed in specific development projects. My point is that mechanisms of development such as bureaucracy, institutional rhetoric, and technical expertise, naturalize modes of thinking and doing that are incorporated in everyday life, and acquire the force of a cosmological order. This resulting spatial-temporal framework explains, justifies, and eventually reproduces inequality, constructing the “underdeveloped” subject as lacking something: rationality, skills, or assets. Having nothing, except for needs, the subject is reshaped into what Ivan Illich calls “homo miserabilis” (1999). These representations confine “those to be developed” to a disempowered state, a sort of metaphorical hospital in which the experts attempt to cure their chronic disease of underdevelopment. Ambiguously, even when this is understood as originating in colonial and neo-colonial power structures, it is acted upon as if it were an idiosyncratic disease caused by the very nature of ‘those to be developed.’ These representations hinge on normalizing notions of culture and identity, which are revealed as ways of creating objects to ease the exercise of forms of control and intervention. This discussion provides an entry to the notion of “crisis” as it is described and analyzed by indigenous leaders. In their narratives, the crisis evokes a looming sense of collapse in which physical, psychological, social, and cosmic symptoms juxtapose. It is a “space of death,” in the sense argued by Taussig (1987, p. 4) of “a threshold that allows for illumination as well as extinction.” But following Stewart (1996, p. 3), I wish to stress “the possibilities of narrative to fashion a gap in the order of things —a gap in which there is ‘room for maneuver’” So, the crisis can be seen, in a more positive light, as a condition that allows to circumvent the constraints imposed by a dominant order. Clues for understanding how the leaders harness the potentially disruptive situation of being in crisis in ways that eventually empower them can be found in the fuzzy zone where history and cosmology entwine. Here resolution is never definitive; instead, irresolution is a strategy that reveals indigenous peoples’ historicity, and that becomes a locus of historical and political agency.

104 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Racionales and Naturalitos : The Construction of a Lesser Subject The thatched canoe of the indigenous organization Morwapü rolls upstream on the winding river, stirring the still reflection of the forest in the water. As the sun sets, scattered lights begin to appear on the river’s muddy banks; they are comunidades indígenas, blessed by propitious names such New Paradise, Progress, New Hope… A couple of months had passed since I had started working as a consultant for a development project to take place in the village of Z, on the Loretoyacu river, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to visit the community. The Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Cocama-Yagua of Puerto Nariño1 had contracted the NGO I was temporarily working for to carry out a project for the creation of the resguardo’s crafts and eco-tourist center, part of a process that had started years before, when the INCORA2 was able to reclaim private lands located in the resguardo. One of these properties, located in the village of Z,3 was a wrecked jungle lodge that had belonged to a local woman politician, doña Zoraya. During the cocaine boom, in the 1980s, it was a preferred venue of Colombian, Peruvian, and Brazilian narco-traffickers, whose parrandas — wild parties— still resonated in the epic accounts of river dwellers. As part of the Territorial Organization Plan (POT) of the resguardo, in 1997, the property was acquired and assigned to a river community to relocate form flooded land. The cadres of the resguardo also determined the future use of the jungle lodge. The project was included in the Plan of Life of the resguardo, a planning tool for implementing a self-determined and self-managed model of development in indigenous territories. Crafts and eco-tourism seemed a viable strategy to couple cultural reaffirmation and production, and it was in line with the Amazonas Department’s established development policy. The indigenous Plan de Vida, consisting in 4 projects and 5 sub-projects, was eventually chosen as a model plan at a national level and substantially funded by the Fondo DRI (Rural Inversion Fund, ascribed to the Ministry of Agriculture). The first phase of the Plan de Vida consisted in a series of talleres de concertación that took place in the town of Puerto Nariño. Adopting a methodology foreign to indigenous groups, these “agreement workshops” involved

1. These groups do not belong to the People of the Center supra-ethnic complex. 2. Instituto Colombiano de Reforma Agraria. 3. Name has been changed.

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 105

the leadership cadres first, and then the representatives of the twenty-one communities of the resguardo. The organizers —a multidisciplinary team that included non-indigenous consultants and indigenous leaders—stressed that the different projects had to be integrated into a whole, long-term plan. They also stressed that people’s participation in each phase of the process was to be achieved through participatory-action research and dialogue of knowledge key methodologies. It was during one of the talleres de concertación that I was approached by a group of men and women from a river community. One of them, pushed by his companions and holding on his cap, introduced himself as don Pedro, curaca of Z. The people had heard that a project was going to be carried out in their community and they wanted to know what it was about. Surprised, I asked if they had not participated in the design of the project, or agreed on it with the resguardo’s cadres. They answered that that was the first time they heard of ‘the project.’ In the following weeks, I expressed my concerns to the project coordinator and the other members of the team. Clearly, the project was being imposed on the community, reproducing in practice the asymmetries of conventional development that we all criticized, and putting its viability at risk. Several reasons made the fact that the comuneros had not been consulted in advance particularly unfortunate. First, it was stated in the project that they had to provide free labor as ‘counterpart’ for the realization of project’s activities. Moreover, to run a tourist center in the community would have brought significant changes to the village life, and these changes had to be evaluated by the people before embarking in the project. My suggestion was that we stop, got to know better the village, its inhabitants, and their own plans and aspirations with regard to the tourist center. If we could not start the project all over again, we could at least find ways to make it more viable. Some members of the team agreed, at least theoretically, with my concerns. Though, it was said, there was no way we could make changes to the project. Once a project got on the “assembly line” and the first disbursement had been paid, reports must be produced at a steady pace so that they can be followed by more disbursements and more reports. Once that this timereleased mechanism had been activated, any delay would have put the funding at stake, and that was a risk that the team was not willing to run. This first practical lesson on the working of development revealed how development practice is controlled by bureaucratic mechanisms, such

106 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

as timetable and reports. But it also cast a shadow on my methodology. In order to understand the complex interactions involved in the development arena, my plan was to look at it from different perspectives, which included participating in a development project. But at that point it was clear that I could not limit my role to that of a “participant observer.” My participation had to be rearranged between a kind of schizophrenic polarity: to silence my convictions, therefore not quite participate; or to voice my heterodoxy within the team, abandoning the low profile more suitable for observation. Was there a way to solve such dilemma? As the canoe silently glided on the water and thumped the balsa dock, this internal questioning got suspended. My colleagues and I climbed the slippery ladder to the top of the bank to meet the community members, who, called by the sound of the canoe’s outboard motor, had gathered to greet us. They were surprised: funcionarios usually traveled in more powerful boats, not by night, and with children! As we introduced each other and shook hands with a dozen of people, we started to grasp the complex web of multiethnic kinship relations the community was made of.4 Clanking an empty gas tank, the curaca called a meeting in the communal hall and the room was soon crowded. It was particularly impressive to see the wide participation of women of all ages. Later on, I realized that only a few of them had some command of the Spanish language. But that did not seem to matter. In fact, there was something spectacular in the presentation by the project coordinator; he translated an ideological system —development— into an aesthetic performance.5 The gesture, the benevolent voice tone, the rhetorical and almost hypnotic reiteration of formulas and pauses, stripped the situation of any political and potentially conflictive meaning, turning it into a pre-packaged dream: “Compañeros, this project is for you, for your well-being, to improve your life conditions. You are the patrons and we your employees. You are those who make decisions. We will beautify the community.” Someone pointed out that there were neither water wells nor containers for rainwater in the village. A guest from a Tikuna community in which an ethno-tourism program was being implemented asked: “What if the community doesn’t want a centro artesanal?” The director answered: “Up 4. The core of the community is the offspring of a Brazilian mestizo and a Tikuna woman. The twelve children of the couple have intermarried with individuals of diverse ethnic background, such as Tikuna, Yagua, Cubeo, as well as mestizos. 5. For this issue see Stirrat (2000).

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 107

to where things have been set out this is a centro artesanal.” Then the director went on to divide the participants into four groups: infrastructure, crafts, community history, and tourist attractions, which would nicely fit into the chapters of the final report. Bureaucracy and institutional rhetoric both hinge on an ideal of efficacy and rationality, which is imposed on experience through forms of discipline and control such as procedures, formats, and rhetoric formulas. Bureaucracy and rhetoric work in an effective and complementary way to naturalize ideology and make it into a cosmology. This order is not accomplished by engaging a dialogue with elements of reality —these schemas in fact deny the possibility of dialogue and negotiation. Rather, it is substituted to real-life experiences through alternative notions of time, space, being, and causality that shape people’s feelings of themselves and the world: bureaucracy by negating feeling altogether, and rhetoric by establishing a central authority over which feelings are allowed. I see them as representing a particular form of cognitive egocentrism. According to Piaget, an egocentric thinker “sees the world from a single point of view —his own— but without knowledge of the existence of [other] viewpoints or perspectives and […] without awareness that he is the prisoner of his own” (Flavell, 1963, p. 10). In this case, however, it is the oxymoron of an “impersonal egocentrism” which better represents the institutional side of the development encounter. As Warren points out (2002, p. 389), bureaucracy “escapes accountability for its actions in a way that leaves its model of intervention intact no matter what its result.” Development’s rhetoric and the bureaucratic apparatus alienate the development’s set goals from everyday practices and needs, so reinforcing a sense of dependency. This situation is made worse by intricate bureaucratic jargon and procedures that are opaque to the non-initiated, no matter his/her level of education and/or concrete knowledge of the problem.6 To complicate this process even more is the fact that each institution follows a different formal standard for the presentation of project proposals, hence clearly negating the declared rationality of bureaucracy. The “clients” of development, who are struggling to learn how to deal appropriately with norms and procedures, walk on a tightrope between the Scylla of impersonal rules, and the Charybdis of idiosyncratic, arbitrary readings given to these rules by the people in charge. 6. See for example the “Ficha B-Pin,” an exceedingly complicated form that anyone applying for state funding needs to fill out.

108 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

In practice, the presumed rationality and impersonality of bureaucracy is subject to the manipulation of individuals in an exercise of personal power. These contradictions define the development encounter as a space of confusion, vulnerability, and inertia from the perspective of its “beneficiaries.” However, this is also a space of possibility; amidst the ambiguity between “decontaminated” modes of classifications and explanations (Stewart, 1996), and the personal charisma of bureaucrats and politicians, cunning and improvisation can be deployed to bend bureaucracy to one’s own interests, cracking its hegemony. The following speeches provide an example of this. They were uttered in one of the malocas of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto during a meeting with governmental officials of the Amazonas Department Office of Planning, Bora woman leader: “Look Doctor: it turned out that when we entered the resguardo really we didn’t know that the Government was giving some money to the communities to sustain themselves. Well then, we had a great necessity that was the crossing of the Tacana River in the time of the year when you go around with the water up to here [indicating her waist]. Well then, one day I set a trap for a government employee. He told me this: “look, I will come to visit the community.” And I: “come, come, we will be waiting for you.” It turned out that he thought that we were going to wait for him right here [the Km.11 community], but we cleared off to our lots and the water was reaching all over here [the waist]. You know, the Tacana has 500 meters of aguajal [flooded forest]. Well then, since the mister wants to talk to us, well, he has to go where we live. So he ended up with the water to his waist. Now then, when I went to submit him the request [for project funding] he told me “it is very costly to come to town, isn’t it?” See? So I told him “Yes sir, this is how we live, let’s now see what you can do for us. We have no canoe, we have no raft, we have no nothing; we have to cross with the danger that a temblón [Electrophorutias electripulucus; electric eel] kills us, or a caiman, or I don’t know what.” So he told me like this: “look, all right I’m going to get you... Do the damn project”, which we didn’t know how… “Do the project to make a bridge.” All right. So then, there in [the office of Govermental] Planning there was a consultant and he told me “Doña, the Government…” (Yes, sure, this is how it went! Right now nobody can fool me there!) Well then, he told me “Look doña, the Government is not giving for ‘building of bridge,’ it is only

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 109

improving that which already exists. If there is an old bridge it is giving money to fix it but not for ‘building new bridge.’ What you have to do is to put it ‘on credit,’ put it ‘on credit’ and when [the money] arrives you execute it as you wish. If there isn’t enough money for a bridge, at least for half a little bridge, at least for a stretch”. Then we passed it [the project], we pass it this way and it came out 30 [million pesos]. Then what? You must know. Then we tried to contract an engineer. “No, that you cannot have an engineer because you don’t have (I don’t know what) from the Chamber of Commerce. We are going to bring (a paunchy big one), he can do that.” All right, the community met and [made the decision] “the engineer is going to be so-and-so.” The guy built half a stretch, and then they passed him the rest [of the money], with the second [installment], when he wanted to run I went behind him. All right, “you are not going to give away one more peso of that money…” I cannot supervise the great ones. Anyway, he left with the money. This happened in 1997. This is no good.”7 7. “Doctor mira. Resulta que cuando nosotros ingresamos al resguardo, en realidad nosotros no sabíamos que el gobierno daba a las comunidades algo de plata para subsistir. Entonce’ nosotros teníamos una necesidad grande que es el guado del Río Tacana en esta época el año, que uno iba con el agua hasta aquí. Entonce’ un día yo le hice una jugada a un funcionario ¿no? Entonce’ me dijo así vea ‘yo me voy a visitar a la comunidad multiétnica’, entonce’ yo pues ‘vaya, vaya que le vamos a esperar’. Y resulta que él pensó que le íbamos a esperar aquí y nosotros nos largamos todos a nuestras parcelas y el agua estaba por aquí, el Río Tacana pues tiene 500 metros de aguajal. ‘Tonce’ pues el señor quería hablar con nosotros, pues que vaya a donde estamos. Entonce’ resultó con el agua hasta la cintura. Y cuando yo le hice a hacer la solicitud él me dijo mire ‘que es muy costoso venir acá’ ¿Ve? ‘tonce yo le dije ‘sí señor, así estamos acá, a ver qué pueden ustedes hacer por nosotros’. Entonce’ ‘no tenemos ni canoa, no tenemos ni plancha, no tenemos nada; nos toca cruzar con peligro que un temblón nos mate, o un caimán, o no sé que.’ Entonce’ él me dijo así, vea, ‘bueno yo le voy a conseguir... Haga el bendito proyecto’ que no sabíamos ‘haga el proyecto para hacer un puente’. Bueno. Resulta que había un asesor allí donde ustedes en planeación y me dijo ‘Doña el gobierno...’ ¡cómo que no, en realidad es…. ahoritica nadie ya no me engaña allá!… Entonces me dijo ‘vea, doña, el gobierno no está dando para construcción de puente, no está dando plata, él esta mejorando solamente lo ya existente, si hay un puente viejo él te da la plata para que usted lo arregle, pero no está dando para construcción de puente nuevo. Pero lo que usted va a hacer es colóquela como fía, como fía, y cuando llegue usted lo ejecute como lo quiere. Si no hay plata para hacer un puente como para un medio puentecito, como para un tramo.’ Y entones se pasó, se pasó así y salió 30 ¿Y que? Ustede’ deben saber. Llegó que recetamos otro ingeniero, ‘no que ustedes no pueden tener ingeniero porque ustedes no tienen no sé que cosa de Cámara de comercio. Vamos a traer un barrigudo asi de grandotote y que el sí puede hacerlo’, y bueno se reunió la comunidad y va a ser fulano de tal... El viejo hizo un medio

110 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Uitoto Muina Leader: “If a community passes a project, the same community has to execute it, with institutional supervision. This could have never been done. When we presented the project, the idea was that we were going to execute it, but they didn’t allow us to make an estimate. Our estimate was of no use, only the one done by UMATA [Municipal Unit of Technical Assistance, created by DRI]. A morenito [a brown pig] 3.800.000 pesos8, and the same one that I estimated in Bucaramanga cost 1.700.000. They pocketed the ‘reasonable sum’ of 2,000,000 pesos. Do you see why they don’t let us do the quote and to submit it? We have seen no cent to manage the project. Everything was done by UMATA.”9 Miraña leader: “We have a problem with the different forms of presenting projects, if it is at a Departmental or Municipal level. For example ‘basic sanitation’ has a mode for presenting projects. ‘Basic sanitation’ [sic; probably contrasting Departmental and Municipal standards] has another mode. It is not the same. That is a source of confusion.” Uitoto Murui leader: “It is the communities’ blame, since we let them get away with all these kinds of things.” Miraña leader: “Everything turns around a politicking at a national level. No parliamentarian, no senator will ever give some millions of pesos to such-and-such resguardo if they didn’t support him. Within all this politicking there will also be some politician who looks at the needs of the people, but the majority of them don’t. And there is where the money is, from there the money comes.”10 tramito y ya le pasaron el resto y ya con la segunda le dieron, cuando se quiso volar yo fui detrás de él, bueno ‘usted no me da un peso de allí más de esta plata…’ Yo no puedo estar fiscalizando los grandes, de toda’ manera se voló con la plata. Eso fue en 1997. Eso no sirve”. 8. Approximately $1,700.00 in 1999. 9. “Si una comunidad pasa un proyecto, debe ejecutarlo la misma comunidad con la supervisión de la institución. Esto nunca se ha podido conseguir. Cuando se presentó el proyecto la idea es que nosotros mismos lo íbamos a ejecutar, pero no nos permitieron hacer cotizaciones. Nuestras cotizaciones no valían sino la cotización que hacía UMATA. Un morenito 3.800.000 pesos y el mismo que yo coticé en Bucaramanga de la misma clase del mismo tamaño valía 1.700.000. Se embotellaron la módica suma de 2.000.000 de pesos. ¿Ve por qué no permite que uno mismo haga las cotizaciones y las presente? Nosotros no vimos ni un centavo para manejar el proyecto. Todo fue hecho por UMATA”. 10. “Todo gira en torno a una politiquería a nivel nacional…Ningún parlamentario, ningún senador va a dar tantos millones de pesos a tal resguardo si no lo apoyó. Dentro de toda esta politiquería habrá unos políticos que miran las necesidades del pueblo. Pero la gran mayoría no. Y allá esta la plata, de allá que viene la plata…”

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 111

Uitoto Murui leader: “This is manipulation of political influence. Sometimes the community doesn’t even know what the Gobernador is doing.”11 Uitoto Murui leader: “When we got 40 millions of pesos to open up our road, we made the request to the parliamentarian who was getting us the money. And when the [financial] resources arrived, lots of architects and engineers appeared, that ‘bueno, I am going to open your road.’ ‘No, sir, no, and no. If you want to be our architect we are going to pay you.’”

As I noted before, the void of meaning created by imposed institutional forms may unexpectedly host a process of resignification and thus engender agency. These talks stand as a crisp example of Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) definition of “good sense,” in contrast to the established “common sense” of development discourse and practice. Behind these utterances is the daily struggle of indigenous men and women to make sense of bureaucracy and of the whole development apparatus, the state, and modernity. This problem-solving process interrupts “the hierarchy of system over accident” (Stewart, 1996, p. 205) and leads people to set traps to the funcionarios, to investigate the prices of pigs, to evaluate applications for hiring an architect, and to negotiate alliances marked off by the exchange or refusal of information and political contacts. People’s view of bureaucracy, rhetoric, and technical expertise as instruments for reinforcing a system of inequality is aptly captured by indigenous people through the self-designation of naturalitos (literally “little natural ones”), in contrast to los racionales (the rational ones): white, urbanized, educated persons.12 But interestingly, as we shall see shortly, this questioning also involves a self-reflection on indigenous people’s personal responsibilities, and it prompts mystical interpretations of bureaucracy and the bureaucrats.

11. “Esto es el manejo de influencia política, a veces la comunidad ni sabe lo que está haciendo el gobernador.” 12. The distinction between whites and mestizos is not clear-cut, and mestizos can belong to both categories. This distinction is rather made on the basis of daily occupation and expertise.

112 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

The Monopoly of Knowledge: Expertise and Need for Training Artesanía no sé hacer. Solo paneros, tipití, hamacas, tinajas... I don’t know how to make art-crafts. Only baskets, manioc strainers, hammocks, clay vessels... (Tikuna woman artisan)

In Tikuna language there is no word for ‘artisan;’ every person must learn the practical skills proper of his or her own gender. These skills are made visible on the body, which in turn reveals a person’s aptitudes and dispositions. The signs of continuing practice, such as the callosities on a woman’s leg from twisting Chambira (Astrocaryum aculeatum), are so valued that in the past they guided the choice of a spouse. Only a few crafts have their specialist, such as the pucuna (blowpipe), and curare, both “occult crafts,” or the ritual whistle and howling spinning top made by shamans. In recent years, craftsmanship and ecotourism have emerged as privileged fields for preserving a “traditional” and “authentic” indigenous culture, at the same time turning such culture productive from the perspective of market economy. From 1995 to 1998, 85% of the projects received by the Amazonas Office of Departmental Planning, targeted at indigenous communities, focused on craftsmanship and/or ecotourism. These data reflect the emphasis given to craft development at a national level by the Colombian Ministry of Economic Development and its affiliated office: Artesanías de Colombia. The overwhelming majority of these projects were focused on the training of indigenous artisans. With an ambiguous move with respect to the increased recognition of indigenous “cultural heritage,” the aim of these projects is to use industrial design to rationalize production and standardize the quality of products. This reflects a prevailing assumption of development, that is the categorization of the “underdeveloped” as being so because technologically deficient, where the technical embodies an idea of “value free neutrality” (Crewe and Harrison, 1998, p. 31). In one of Artesanías de Colombia’s programmatic statements, the institution’s “mission, vision, and goals” are defined as follows: Mission: to lead the processes that contribute to the sustainable human development of the artisan sector, strengthening and qualifying production and commercialization so that the sector could increasingly participate in the

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 113

national economy. It works […] to accomplish the wellbeing of both artisans, and the agents who support their development. Vision: to establish politics, to lead and coordinate development plans and programs and to arrange with public and private entities the investment of physical, human, and financial resources, so that they translate to a better level of life and wellbeing for the people who both constitute, and work for, the craft sector. Goals: To dignify craftsmanship and elevate the social, cultural, professional, and economic level not only of artisans, but of all the people who work for the sector. To increase the participation of the artisans in the productive sector, in terms of employment and generation of wealth. To rescue, preserve and develop craftsmanship as part of the cultural heritage. To promote the preservation of the natural environment and to raise public consciousness on the rational management of the natural resources […]. To give training in the format of informal education for skill specialization, and execute programs of integral training. […] One of the fundamental tasks of Artesanías de Colombia is design in all the conceptual aspects and conditions of its realization exercise, in view, particularly, of the issue of identity […]. (Benavides, 1996, pp. 3-4)

In another publication, the entity’s mission is “to elevate the artisans’ quality of life,” and “to guarantee environmental sustainability and the preservation of the live cultural patrimony” (Cartilla: Administrando mi trabajo artesanal). Computer is used to create designs of butter dishes and candle holders “so that designers and artisans can interact and accelerate the processes of creation” (Benavides, 1996, p. 12). Interaction is needed because while “artisans learn by doing” (Benavides, 1996, p. 15), the ‘experts’ are capable of synthesis and can articulate technical and theoretical knowledge in the creation of the design. According to these publications, the rationale for training is “to qualify the artisans to improve technique, to adopt new technologies and to implement an administrative management in the workshop” (Benavides, 1996, p. 9). A closer reading, though, suggests that the focal point is not the artisan. In the opening quote it says that: “one of the main sources of economic development is the development of new products, the improvement of the existing ones, and the change of the production

114 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

processes” (Schumpeter, 1994, n.p., quoted by Benavides, 1996, p. 11). More than the development of the artisan as producer, these policies foster the development of products and productive processes. One author argues that: “the creation of production networks based on specialization is needed in order to reduce transaction costs in a family economy such as that of craft production. To accomplish this, production should be organized in […] community enterprises” (Benavides, 1996, p. 9). After basically suggesting to alienate the productive process from the artisan, the author reassures the reader of the priority given to social sustainability: “With regard to development, social sustainability is possibly the most important issue; this guarantees permanence in time and allows the community to manage its own projects in places where base groups [agrupaciones de base] hold particular importance” (Benavides, 1996, p. 13). The question is if the lack of recognition of the artisan’s individual creativity, and of the cultural environment in which practice is embedded, can really bring a better quality of life. This evokes Manfred Max-Neef’s now classic analysis of development as hinging on the distinction between a humanizing and an alienating dimension of the social environment. In the first, humans are able to accomplish a sense of identity and integration, while in the second they can only transfer to others their individual identity. In the first, humans directly perceive the consequences of what they do and decide. In the second, they resign to letting that others act and make decisions in their place. In the first, is made possible the development of persons; in the second only the development of objects. (1982, p. 153)

The ambiguity of the cultural politics envisioned by Artesanías de Colombia is made clear in their aesthetics, which oscillates between capitalizing on the “primitive magic-religious content” of the objects, and satisfying people’s fashion desires through the design of new products, “producing a dynamic of change.” (Artesanías de Colombia’s expert, personal communication, 1997). Rather than the expression of cultural and individual creativity, the artisans’ productivity lies completely under the control of the market. In contrast to an extensive effort toward decentralization, craft development policies in the Amazonas Department follows the policies set at the national level by the Ministry of Economic Development and Artesanías de Colombia. The Secretaría de Turismo y Frontera is in charge of the sector, and policies are explicitly designed with tourism in mind. Interestingly,

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 115

there is no concern about “authentic art,” whatever that is. Policies are directed not at reaffirming indigenous ethnic art but at promoting a regional art that can endorse the construction of a regional identity and that is appealing to the tourists. The lack of interest for craftsmanship as an expression of ethnic and gender identity is extended to the point of discouraging autonomous indigenous artisan organizations in the production and marketing of crafts. The view put forward in craft development policies, of community as an unproblematic collective entity that can be reorganized from above, is matched by the lack of support for real political entities, artisans’ organizations in this case. An example of this is the Indigenous NGO Eware, created under the auspices of the ICBF indigenous program directed by anthropologist Hugo Camacho as part of an integrated program for revitalizing Tikuna language and strengthening political organization in their communities. Eware was one of the few indigenous artisan organizations in the Trapecio Amazónico, and the shop it was able to keep for two years in the town of Leticia was the only alternative commercial venue for indigenous arts and crafts in the region In 1997, an agreement between Artesanías de Colombia, Gobernación del Amazonas, Corpoamazonia, and Corpes Amazonia, set funds for designing the Operative Artisanal Plan for the Amazonas Department. The artisans presented their guidelines, which included a boost credit, a much-needed training in bookkeeping, various actions aimed at strengthening the commercialization process, as well as reforestation and research. However, these guidelines were not taken into account, on the reasons that the indigenous organization “lacked credibility.” The 58.5% of the budget corresponded to travel allowances and per diem of the experts of Artesanías de Colombia coming from Bogotá, in contrast to Eware proposal to hire local master artisans as instructors. The training focused on new techniques, but mostly on design. The planned actions for promoting the use of technology and tools were strongly gendered, disallowing women’s participation to the plan. The plan disregarded traditional women’s crafts, in contrast to men’s Palosangre woodcarving (Brosimum rubescens), a recently introduced and ecologically unsustainable craft. Moreover, the plan did not address important issues of ethnic inequality in the ethnic art market, controlled by non-indigenous intermediaries. Last, but not least, Eware’s request to be given a locale in town was not taken into consideration. A sum destined to the artisans for building their own selling space in the center of Leticia was diverted by bureaucracy

116 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

and never handed over. Beside the zealous distribution of many cartillas13 (introductory manual; a distinctive mode employed by the development apparatus to produce and compile knowledge), the program brought no significant results. While Eware and the Convenio disagreed on many fundamental issues, they nevertheless both agreed on a predominant aspect of the philosophy of craft development: serial production. Some artisans were trained at working with raw materials, others at using the wheel, others at finishing the products. The attempts to implement serial production —that as far as I know have all failed— do not take into account a fundamental aspect of craftsmanship: that the production process is as significant as the object produced. Some of the cultural meanings involved in practice are revealed in the following Speech by an Ocaina elder (Candre and Echeverri, 1996, p. 185).14 Well then, now, the father disciplines himself to take care of the child. To thus disciplines himself, then —truly— he sits by the child, he watches over the child. So that the child is soothed by his work he weaves a manioc sieve, so that the child is soothed by his work, he weaves a manioc strainer, he weaves a basket, he weaves a little basket. In this way he watches over the child. By his side, the mother Twists cumare fibers. Thus, they watch over him so that he will fare well later on.

13. Formacíon Integral del Artesano: “Administrando mi trabajo artesanal”, “Calculando costos”, “Produciendo”, “Promoviendo y Vendiendo”, “Llevando cuentas,” by Artesanías de Colombia (ministerio de desarrollo económico) and SENA (Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje). “Abriendo camino al liderazgo artesanal” (1999), by Artesanías de Colombia and Corporación para el Desarrollo de las Microempresas. 14. This process affects artisans worldwide. For example, in Rome, artisans have been displaced from their traditional locations that, historically, had the names of the trades that were produced there. Toponymy still bears this lost organization of space. Craftsmanship is marginalized because its principles resist the ones of consumerism: it embodies personal qualities to the object and to the productive process; it’s anonymous; it fixes broken things, saving them from disuse.

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 117

To acknowledge the way in which cultural meanings come to be incorporated in and through practice is crucial not only to the understanding of craftsmanship, but also to the critique of those categories of ethnological explanations such as ‘culture’ and ‘identity.’ This goes along with the realization among anthropologists working in Amazonia that native theories tend to understand personhood and identity as highly unstable, not given but in the making. This process, which involves the exchange and incorporation of exogenous vital substances, progressive shapes the body’s active inclinations and thought/affects (Descola and Palsson, 1996; Fausto, 2007; Londonho, 2004; Santos Granero, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). At odds with these native understandings is the normative view of cultures as bounded and self-contained wholes that development inherited from anthropology, as we shall see next.

Culture, Identity, and Other Unsustainable Categories Culture isn’t something that can be gotten right. (K. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the R oad. p. 211)

The murder of Peshé Uesna and Ini Mano related in the Comparative Interstice bears a tragic testimony to how the regimes of representation propagated by modernity force themselves on the ways in which identities are controlled and disciplined. Normalizing moral judgments go far beyond supporting development’s economic or technologic goals; they seep deeply into the daily living. The ways in which people talk, move, inhabit, learn, desire, dress, produce, exchange, consume, accumulate, dispose of waste, get ill, get cured, are born or die, are all affected. At the same time they are ranked. This is apparently at odds with the widespread discourse of sustainability, which hinges on a general recognition of difference and of the need to foster the participation of local cultures in development. Culture, theoretically at least, is not considered anymore to be an obstacle to development, and a consideration of culture has become a widespread routine in the planning of development. With wide reaching roots —the Barbados Declarations (1971, 1977, 1993), the 1981s San José Declaration and its first definition of etnodesarrollo, the ILO Convention 169 (1989), the 1992s World Conference in Rio, among others— this change of paradigm brought together the vindications of indigenous movements and the arguments of anthropologists working in the field, increasingly reaching the centers of production

118 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

of development theories and programs. “The reality, though, has changed less than the rhetoric” notice Chambers and Richards in the preface to the volume The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous knowledge Systems (Warren, Slikkerveer, and Brokensha, 1995); “the awareness, attitudes and behavior of many development practitioners have changed less than the language they have learnt to use. Many have acquired the easy skill of using words like ‘participation’ and even ‘empowerment’ but without changing the way they see poor people or the way they feel development should be understood. The language has become bottom-up but the inclination remains top-down” (Chambers and Richards, 1995, p. xiii; italics mine). In the same period, the early 1980s, when development practitioners were calling for the need of engaging culture in development, critical scholarship started leading a sustained attack to this notion which unveiled its hegemonic nature. Anthropologists criticized the apolitical and ahistorical character of the notion of culture, and emphasize how it obscured the internal distributions of knowledge and power. Raymond Williams’ influential historical analysis of the English usage of the word ‘culture’ (1982) shows that its meaning —together with that of other words such as ‘progress,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘class,’ ‘art,’ and ‘industry’— underwent a radical transformation staring from the Industrial Revolution. The emphasis on culture was initially a romantic reaction to the industrialization process. From “tending of natural growth” it gradually came to denote “a habit of the mind,” “a state of intellectual development,” and eventually “a whole way of life.” Reflecting the romantic ideal of the “embodied spirit of a People,” culture started to emerge as abstract and absolute notion (1983, p. xviii), and eventually supported the constitution of an evolutionary scheme that justified colonialism. This scheme still persists, in a milder but not less insidious version, in the developers’ characterization of “pre-modern societies [as] requiring assistance” (Crewe and Harrison, 1998, p. 29). Similarly, Adam Kuper, recalling his experience in apartheid South Africa, tells how he grew skeptical of culture theory when he realized that culture embodied racial differences, and that respect for cultural differences was actually used as a justification for apartheid. His analysis of the modern concept of culture demonstrates its penchant toward essentialism, and disregard for specific identities: “culture shifts from something to be described, interpreted, even perhaps explained, and is treated instead as a source of explanation in itself” (1999, p. xi).

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 119

In the historical process of consolidation of nation-states, culture also came to mark the distinction between a national identity —culture in the sense of “civilization”— and the groups living at the boundaries, who have culture in the sense of “a way of life.” With regard to development, then, it is not surprising that the alleged recognition of cultural difference goes hand in hand with the construction of pre-packaged, normalized identities, a practice that not only frames the experience and meaning of the underdeveloped, but that also acquires a discriminatory tinge as to the meanings given to inclusion and exclusion. The following outline summarizes the views of culture held by development practitioners I interviewed in Colombian institutions and in two Italian NGOs. I do not mean to imply that all development practitioners conform to these views; I know that some of them don’t. Rather, my suggestion is that these conceptions reflect and reinforce a received wisdom that is particularly hard to break, both because it has institutional endorsement, and because it is deeply grounded in development’s system of values. It is important to add that these views traverse political affiliation from left to right. 1. Moralizing: culture is equated with superstition. If people want to develop they must come to the realization that their cultural assumptions and practices are wrong. To develop implies a process of redemption. 2. Nostalgic: culture evokes the feeling of a lost and idealized world in which humans lived more authentic lives. This view involves an aesthetical representation of culture, seen mostly through collectible artifacts. Culture, idealized, is abstracted from the present, and separated from history. 3. Traditionalist: culture is seen as an overarching set of rigid rules and beliefs, which are a barrier to development. This perspective “embodies the fairly simple view that social structure drives practice” (Crewe and Harrison, 1998, p. 132). There is no space for individual choice, nor for heterodoxy. Opposing tradition and modernity, this view disallows the possibility for indigenous people to actively participate in the contemporary world and to take control of their own processes of transformation. 4. Selective/opportunistic: culture is seen as a body of valuable practical information that can be marketed, compiled, and incorporated in the development encyclopedia. But for this to happen, cultural

120 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

knowledge has to go through a process of discovery and selection, under the managerial authority of development experts. These notions naturalize the subaltern position of the underdeveloped, maintain the status quo, and when needed, they also serve to justify the failure of development projects. These notions’ most adverse effect is to bind indigenous people to a static time and space from which there is no possibility to act. “We want to be contemporary Indians; we want to operate airplanes and computers” —a Tikuna bilingual teacher once told me— “The White men want to see us painted and feathered. But if we go to Leticia without clothes, they make fun of us, they may even put us in jail,” a vivid example of how foreign notions of culture can really imprison people. We should follow Kuper’s suggestion and “avoid the hyper-referential word altogether, and […] talk more precisely of knowledge, or belief, or art, or technology, or tradition, or even of ideology (though similar problems are raised by that multivalent concept)” (1999, p. x). The goal should be “… a particulate theory of culture; that is, a theory about the ‘pieces’ of culture, their composition and relations to other things” (D’Andrade, 1995, p. 247). Similar problems concern the notion of identity. I have noted above how the category ‘indigenous communities’ obscures internal differentiation —such as ethnic and intra-ethnic clans and lineages affiliation— together with the historical processes of slavery, forced displacement, and relocation that gave rise to these communities. What is more, the failure to acknowledge the multiple and shifting identities that are packed together in the ‘indigenous’ category leads to disregard indigenous own explanations and practices of identity, for instance the complexity of their present endeavors for negotiating interethnic identity politics in the region. The process of “reindianization” —as it was described by a Uitoto Muina leader— that is taking place in the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto is illustrative of these issues. Reindianization was prompted by increased governmental policies targeted to the indigenous population following the 1991’s Political Constitution. Reindianizados are people who have reclaimed an indigenous identity for some opportunistic reasons. They have gone through a process of denial of their indigenous background, incorporated mestizo prejudice against the Indios, and drastically cut their ties with the extended kinship group. The reindianizados are often educated individuals who hold whitecollar jobs in town, and upward class mobility is one motivation for this

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 121

process (and bitterly criticized by community members). By claiming an indigenous identity they could gain access to development funds funneled to indigenous communities, such as obtain plots of land in the resguardo. But once they received the land, they illegally rented it or sold it to third parties. A different process of identity reconfiguration brings together colonos and indigenous people in their dissent against dominant state practices and representations. In the development discourse, the lack of technical knowledge and training defines both colonos and indigenous people, but with a difference: indigenous people’s lack of technical knowledge is explained by their ‘tradition,’ something that, it is assumed, colonos lack. So, while it excludes indigenous people from modernity this discourse elevates them to the status of “guardians of the environment,” blaming in turn the colonos for the ecological degradation of the Amazon. These representations transfer the responsibility for deforestation, and encroachment on indigenous territories away from its real causes, and it polarizes the interests of these groups of people, who otherwise share a struggle for land and recognition. The common experience of exclusion, however, is able to undo these misrepresentations and to advance the possibility of broad intercultural alliances. The following speech was uttered by a colono in an indigenous maloca, during a meeting for setting the bases of the indigenous development plan of the reservation. I have been the president of the Pechuna Acción Cumunal for 5 years and we are saturated with so many programs, with so many workshops and seminars, and nothing has never been accomplished. We are sick with so many babosadas [‘drooling’]; and that are coming people from the exterior [‘abroad’] and people from the interior [Andean Colombia] to teach us how to manage the natural environment. People from Europe come, from, what’s its name, o.s.p. I don’t know what a world hell of world health, to tell us that we are destroying humanity. Ask who destroyed humanity in the year 1945 when they threw the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? They are destroying the environment. Now, since they don’t have anything to do they don’t let us make a chagrita [‘little garden plot’] because we are going to destroy the “lung of the world.” When is the colono going to eat lumber? The colono has to eat food!15

15. “Tengo 5 años de ser presidente acción comunal del Pechuna, y estamos saturados de tantos programas, de tantos talleres y seminarios y nunca se ha logrado nada. Estamos resaturados ya

122 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Similar critiques are voiced by indigenous people. First of all, they notice that the attribute of “guardians of the environment” goes along with the systematic dismissal of local environmental meanings and practices, and often results in state institutions limiting indigenous people’s access to natural resources. At the same time, they criticize state institutions for failing to acknowledge their increased dependency on market economy, again, the projection of an essentialized view of culture and locality that detaches them from historical processes and power structures.

“¿Adónde está la plata?”: Money and the Value of Social Relations16 The identification of development with money and Western goods is a topic discussed by anthropologists working in the global economic periphery (Taussig, 1980; Pigg, 1992). In Amazonia, as well, the budgeting, disbursement, and expenditure of money, controlled by a powerful but unruly technical and bureaucratic apparatus, has become the mark of development for its “beneficiaries.” This is surely revealing of development’s “unintended consequences”, aptly characterized by Ferguson (1994) as the expansion of bureaucratic state power. Besides, such interpretations constitute the pivotal point of different regimes of value, and they offer a window on the processes through which modernity is understood and appropriated by people living at its margins. Sahlins (1999, p. xvi) made the point that engagement with world capitalist domination was not enough to undo indigenous cultures. He showed how foreign money is assimilated “in the logics of the familiar” through processes of ‘indigenization of modernity’ and inserted in existing exchange obligations. Similarly, Perry and Bloch (1989, p. 19) emphasized that money does not give rise to a particular cosmology, but that “an existing world view

de tantas babosadas, que viene gente del exterior, viene gente del interior a enseñarnos a manejar el medio ambiente. Viene gente de Europa de la como es que se llama o.s.p. no sé qué vaina, mundial de la salud mundial de no sé qué vaina a decirnos que nosotros estamos acabando con la humanidad. Pregunte quién acabó con la humanidad, del año 45 cuando tiraron la primera bomba atómica en Hiroshima y Nagasaki. Esos son los que están acabando con el medio ambiente. Ahora, como no tienen nada que hacer, que no nos dejan hacer una chagrita porque vamos a acabar con el pulmón del mundo. ¿Cuándo el colono va a comer madera? El colono tiene que comer comida.” 16. I have further developed this issue in a recent essay, forthcoming in the volume Images of Public Wealth or the Anatomy of Well-being in Native Tropical America, edited by Fernando Santos-Granero. (Micarelli, forthcoming).

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 123

gives rise to particular ways of representing money.” Writing about the Tukanoan people, Hugh-Jones (1992, p. 58) showed that indigenous demands for foreign goods are not merely a response to external pressures: “To possess [manufactured goods] is to share in the world from which they derive, and to appropriate some of the transformational power that is used to make them.” Perry and Bloch (p. 19) emphasized that money does not give rise to a particular cosmology, but that “an existing world view gives rise to particular ways of representing money.” However, these appropriations are not unproblematic. The People of the Center, for example, consider money to be “hot”, and potentially pathogenic. To take indigenous peoples’ own understandings seriously, then, is not just asking how they incorporate modern money creatively into their social practices, but also how they deal with these dangerous substance and what may be the place of such endeavors in their cosmological views. My suggestion here is that money is the linchpin where the external world of radical alterity (lo de afuera) and internal world of shared substances (lo de adentro) swing into each other. I see the participation of indigenous people to the frontier economy as the outcome of a process of “circulation” (Ginzburg, 1980b) that involves the mutual translation between native and Western social practices and meanings. In other words, I do not see it as the simple incorporation of imposed dominant structures, nor just as resistance to such structures. For instance, establishing alliances and relations of habilitación with indigenous leaders was a common practice for recruiting indigenous labor (Domínguez and Gómez, 1990; Gow, 1991; Pineda Camacho, 1985; Santos Granero and Barclay, 2002). In this regard, Whitehead (1992) has shown how new systems of ethnic rank formed in regard to the distribution of Western manufactures. New alignments emerged through processes of preferential trading and military alliances that were actively sustained by the colonial state. This gradually led to a process of “tribalization,” in which the widespread networks of ethnic alliances were interrupted, and ethnic groups equated to language groups. We cannot miss, however, the role of indigenous leaders in this process; they were seduced by the possibility of acquiring trade-goods, and the control of trade-goods was fundamental to establish indigenous leadership, giving leaders control over wide networks of people (Helms, 1987; Henley and Mattéi-Muller, 1978; Hugh-Jones, 1992; Myers, 1981; Oberem, 1974; Scazzocchio, 1978). This importance sometimes took an ambiguous turn, as

124 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

exemplified by the story of the Muinane chief Makapaamine, published by Roberto Pineda Camacho (1985) under the name “the legitimacy of power.” To sum up this extraordinarily rich story, Makapaamine and his group had established trade relations with Portuguese traders, and exchanged food, furs, balata (Manikaria sp.) and juansoco (Couma macrocarpa, another kind of rubber) for manufactured goods. The capitanes of other groups located upriver realized that commerce had arrived from Brazil, and went to ask Makapaamine information about the Whites, whom they knew only through mythology. While the traders traveled back and forth from Brazil, their administrators settled with indigenous people. At first, the relations between them were good, but when the Whites started raiding villages, and abusing indigenous women, Makapaamine, without listening to the council of the captains, decided to force the Whites out. He then started to maraud the Whites’ boats, killing the traders, and hiding trade goods such as metal axes in a cave, where only his people could access them. This gave rise to a political crisis between the leaders of the region. The other capitanes blamed Makapaamine for interrupting the commerce with the Whites, and decided to kill him. This was not an easy task, since Makapaamine had shamanic powers contained in a “quartz of power.” He “was an ‘analyst,’ a ‘scientist,’ a ‘diviner;’ he would not sleep in the hammock, he would not need to sleep, he would live with ‘drug,’ licking wild ambil (ambil de monte). He was drunk in the world, sheltered in the world. That’s why [the captains] could not put him to sleep [to take his quartz]” (Pineda Camacho, 1985, p. 126). The ambiguity of trade as a source of both power/knowledge, and interand intra-ethnic rivalry, provides reason for understanding indigenous interpretations of money in connection with the triad of affinity, predation, and exchange so crucial in many Amazonian cosmologies (Viveiros de Castro, 1992; Fausto, 2001; Vidal and Whitehead, 2004; Santos-Granero, 2007). Trade is seen to lie at the basis of social reproduction, but it is also inextricably linked to slavery and dependency. Metal tools were traded for slaves, ‘orphans’ or subalterns, and the fear associated with trade is still expressed in the ritual “chants of the axe” (Guyot, 1979; Echeverri, 1997). In a myth of integration through trade reported by Guyot (1979) the masters of trades are powerful spirits that mark the road of commerce along the Caquetá River, moving upstream, like the first Brazilian traders, from East to West. So, the analysis of money and its seductions should be located in a broad field of indigenous perceptions of power and political control, as much as within

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 125

colonial modes of encroachment that hinge on the distribution of Western manufactured goods: a field of maneuvers where leaders must prove their capacity to negotiate with dangerous others. The following conversation between two Uitoto Murui indigenous leaders provides an example of this: —We are sleeping on top of the money. The government gave us participation, and this is an opportunity. But what does that mean? It means that it is a joke. Where is participation? […] Over there they do not take into account our dialogue here in the council [the mambeing place]. Documents are not real as we feel them. We have a very serious necessity. A positive force is nothing. It needs to join a negative force to produce something. We are unnecessarily wasting energy and we are going crazy. We are fools, useless, unable to construct anything because each tends to know more and deny the other. We are fools for trying to pacify the other criterio. Since we have no majority they keep stepping on us, these good-for-nothing.17 —The national government says “we are going to make a Development Plan.” What an absurdity. It is only thinking of moving officials, earning daily allowances, earning money […]. Let us start talking, y listo, pay us for being seated and not work. The director of such and such university has learned things, but out of pure theory, he has not lived them in practice, out of pure fantasies, fantasies that are of no use to us. But if we show them the true reality they do not believe us. The institution Corpoamazonia conducts a preliminary investigation on the conservation of the environment. What is the use of studying if I do not go to study in the forest? What am I doing here wasting notebooks? We are those who live and conserve nature.18 17. - Estamos durmiendo encima de la plata. El gobierno nos dio una gran participación, y esta es una oportunidad. ¿Qué quiere decir? Que esto es una burla. Dónde está la participación entonces. Yo no puedo organizar un plan de desarrollo con una o dos personas de diferentes entidades y ya listo. Allá desconocen nuestro diálogo aquí en la mesa. Los papeles no son reales como nosotros lo sentimos. Nosotros estamos viviendo una necesidad muy grave. Una fuerza positiva no es nada. Tiene que estar unida con la negativa para que produzca algo. Estamos gastando energía innecesariamente, y cada vez nos estamos volviendo locos. Somos unos locos. Inservibles, incapaces de construir nada, porque cada cual tira a saber más y desconocer el otro. Porque nosotros somos unos grandes bobos de querer unificar, apaciguar el otro criterio. Como no tenemos mayoría, no siguen pisoteando estos malechados. 18. - El gobierno nacional dice vamos a hacer un plan de desarrollo, cosa tan absurda que está pensando solamente por mover funcionarios, ganar viáticos, ganar plata, como no hay otra alternativa. Vamos a ponernos a hablar, y listo que nos paguen sentados no más sin trabajar. Un director no sé de qué universidad ha aprendido cosa, pero de pura teoría porque ni siquiera lo ha vivido en práctica. De pura fantasía, fantasía de la vida que a nosotros no nos sirven.

126 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

—How do we care for nature if we hinder cultural strengthening? Later on they will feel the blow, when we will need good air to breathe, if those who have more money are those who have more power. Who are we? We care for it so that in ten years someone else will come and cut everything down? Sinchi [a Government institution for biological research in the Amazon] is investigating us while we are those who should teach them, and the money should go to the indigenous communities.19 —For us the scientific part is secondary, since we already are within science, within reality. Why do we need more institutions? We have money left even if we do not claim it, because over there the institutions are taking it away. Produce more and more institutions and more projects and more and more, what an absurdity! When they want to conserve nature don’t they know that we are part of nature? If we do not take consciousness as nature we are lost. Since they do not suffer, they do not feel pain…they need to have an arm broken to say “it is true, that hurts.” Since they have air conditioning…from inside there I regulate and do whatever I want. But those who are out here look in what situation we are! Many indigenous people have abandoned their culture to follow the others and now they are living in the street, addicted, alcoholic, thieves, degenerated, living like madmen for consuming too much drug. In our form of life we have never thought something so absurd […]. For these reasons we do not have anything to say about any development plan. If these gentlemen do not come here there is no use.20 Pero si nosotros le mostramos la verdadera realidad no nos creen. La institución de Corpoamazonia hace previo estudio sobre la conservación del medio ambiente. Que hago yo estudiando si no me voy al monte yo a estudiar. Que hago yo sentado gastando cuadernos. Si nosotros somos los que vivimos y conservamos la naturaleza. 19. - Cómo vamos a cuidar la naturaleza si estamos bloqueando el fortalecimiento cultural. Más tarde sentirán el golpe cuando tendremos la necesidad de respirar buen aire. Si quienes tienen más billete es quien tiene más poder. Y nosotros, ¿qué somos? Cuidamos poquito para que venga otro adentro de diez años y lo tumbe todo. Sinchi, investigándonos a nosotros cuando nosotros debemos de enseñarlos a ellos y la plata debería de venir para las comunidades indígenas. 20. - Para nosotros la parte científica es cosa secundaria, adonde que nosotros ya estamos en la ciencia, en la realidad. ¿Para qué más instituciones acá? Hasta nos sobra plata porque ni siquiera lo reclamamos porque allá las instituciones se lo están llevando. Produzca y más instituciones y más proyectos y más, que cosa tan absurda. Y no saben cuándo van a conservar la naturaleza, ¿que nosotros somos parte de la naturaleza? Y si nosotros no vamos a concientizarnos como naturaleza estamos completamente perdidos... Como no sufren, no sienten el dolor, pero hay que quebrarle un brazo pa’ que sienten el dolor y diga verdad si duele. Como tienen aire acondicionado... de allá adentro yo reglamento y hago lo que se me venga en gana. Pero los que están allá afuera mire como se encuentran. Muchos pueblos indígenas han abandonado su cultural para apegarnos a los

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 127

—Money is the heart of the White man, and because of this it is difficult for us to manage it. But that is not true, because indigenous people from their ancestral part have managed their money, their resources, and their economy. What is going on here is a minimal transfer of intelligence, but from there, from the mambeadero all criteria have to start.21 — [...] We have another plan: to receive the funds. I made an estimate of all the economic projects, and infrastructure works that have been invested in the Km.11 community from 1995 to 1998: 135.000.000 pesos were invested by the national government [$ 65.000, when the minimum salary was $ 115 per month]. The multiple sport court, the health post, the fish farming project, the manioc processor by UMATA, transferencias, the dressmaking project… We have the paved road, we have 24 hours of electric power. The Government gave us the privilege… we have the forestry reserve... Let us put them to work. Corpoamazonia has millions of pesos that come from the European Government to preserve the forest. What is going on? Since we do not need that money, we are so millionaires, they can eat that money, since we do not need it. But if we needed it, long time ago we indigenous people had thought them out. Let us put to produce what the Government is giving us, we can count on this resource, and that resource, and that resource […].22 otros cuando ahora están hasta viciosos por la calle, alcohólicos, ladrones, degenerados, hasta locos por tanto consumir droga. Y que es lo que están construyendo entonces, están dañando la sociedad. Nosotros en nuestras formas de vivir nunca hemos pensado una cosa tan absurdas. En qué estamos parados nosotros. Será que estamos en la tierra o estamos en otro planeta. Y si estamos en la tierra miremos qué tenemos y qué vamos a cuidar. O sino no hablemos nada listo y se acabó y vivamos como podamos vivir cada uno. Para eso no tenemos de hablar de ningún plan de desarrollo, para qué. Mientras que no estén estos señores es letra muerta. Se tiene que organizar otra mesa con más seriedad. No estoy de acuerdo para seguir este plan de desarrollo mientras no vengan estos señores responsables. 21. La plata es el corazón del hombre blanco, y como es el corazón del hombre blanco es difícil para nosotros manejarla pero mentiras, porque los indígenas desde sus partes ancestrales han venido manejando su propia plata, sus propios recursos, su propia economía, lo que pasa es un mínimo traspaso de inteligencia pero desde allí, del mambeadero debe empezar, todo criterio. 22. Tenemos otro plan. ¿Cual? Recibir los beneficios… Estuve sacando una contabilidad de todos los proyectos económicos y obras de infraestructuras que se invirtieron en la comunidad del Km. 11 por un periodo del 95 al 98. 135.000.000 de pesos se invirtieron en el Km. 11 por parte del gobierno nacional. Polideportivo, puesto de salud, construcción de piscicultura, por parte de UMATA procesadora de fariña, transferencia, programa de modistería…. Tenemos una carretera pavimentada, tenemos servicio de energía las 24 horas. Entonces el Gobierno nos dio el privilegio... tenemos reserva forestal. Pongámoslos a funcionar. Corpoamazonia tiene millones de pesos que vienen del Gobierno europeo para cuidar el monte. ¿Qué pasa? Como nosotros no necesitamos esta plata, somos tan millonarios, pues que se lo coman ellos, porque

128 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

—This requires that we sit and think, not to the political problem but how to show them a better ideology for building a healthy country. The Government is taking advantage of everybody, the Departmental Governors, as the projects are not being executed, or just a little. Money is being diverted. Through us a lot of money is arriving. But if we do not sit down to concientizar, if we do not put in practice… In the field of health, we do have traditional doctors. We can train youngsters in the field of traditional medicine. Money can come to our own hands. We can be the administrators of this. But if we do not get to think that we are going to develop in the two cultural fields… because there are two cultures. What could be the unifying alternative of the two cultural criteria? If we work with both, you can be sure, we will go ahead.23 —Turning the leaf, there is a position that we say, perhaps we are in this sense of poverty because we deny our richness, we deny ourselves, we do not value our forest, we do not value our flora and fauna, we are ashamed to speak our dialect, or to go on a canoe. Then the first thing is to re-cognize what is our own, to really start searching a departmental Development plan. We the indigenous people, talking at a Departmental level, we are very paternalistic. All that surrounds us, our richness, we do not know how to administer it, we do not have knowledge of administration. This is a basic thing of what it means to unify criteria, and stop being paternalistic, and to know ourselves, what we have.24

a nosotros no nos hace falta. Pero si nos hiciera falta a nosotros, pues hace tiempo los hubiéramos pensado nosotros los indígenas, vea. Vamos a poner a producir lo que el Gobierno nos está dando, vamos este recurso, contamos con el otro, contamos con el otros [...] 23. Pero eso se requiere de sentarnos a pensar no en el problema político, sino en cómo mostrarle una mejor ideología de construir un país sano. [...] El gobierno está aprovechando a todo el mundo. A los gobernadores departamentales que no se están haciendo las ejecuciones de las obras y si se están haciendo es muy poca. Los dineros están siendo desviados. Por medio de nosotros están llegando muchos dineros. Pero si nosotros no nos sentamos a concientizar, a poner en práctica. En la parte de salud. Tenemos nosotros médicos tradicionales. Podemos capacitar jóvenes en este campo de la medicina tradicional. El dinero puede venir a nuestras propias manos. Podemos nosotros ser administradores de esto. Pero si nosotros no llegamos a pensar de que si nos vamos a desarrollar en los dos campos culturales, porque son dos culturas [...] Cuál puede ser la alternativa unificadora de dos criterios culturales. Si trabajamos con ambos les aseguro que salimos adelante. 24. Volteando la hoja, hay una posición que nosotros decimos, tal vez estamos en este sentimiento de pobreza porque nosotros desconocemos nuestra riqueza, y nosotros mismos nos desconocemos, porque nosotros no valorizamos nuestro monte, nosotros no valorizamos nuestra flora y fauna, nosotros nos da vergüenza hoy hablar nuestro dialecto, nos da vergüenza andar en una canoa. Entonces lo primero es reconocer lo nuestro para empezar buscar de verdad un plan de desarrollo departamental. Nosotros los pueblos indígenas, hablando a nivel departamental, somos muy paternalistas. Todo lo que nos rodea, nuestra riqueza pero no la sabemos administrar.

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 129

To begin to unpack this conversation, the leaders see themselves and their communities as a channel through which “money is arriving.” But money has brought no prosperity to the community. Why? On the one hand, because people don´t put money into practice, they are “sleeping on top of money;” on the other, because the productive interaction between contrasting “forces,” “cultures,” or “criteria” is lacking. To put these ideas together may yield a better sense of the “principle of origin” evoked by the leaders. It suggests the view, much discussed in Amazonian anthropology, that the source and the driving purpose of life hinge on the dynamic exchange between seemingly opposite forces. This exchange fertilizes the constant flow and transformation of vital energy. But for energy to flow, people must do their part. If they are lazy, money not only will be useless; its accumulated heat will start producing all kinds of problems. This explains the high-spending binge behavior of the leaders, a fact that is often seen by non-indigenous people as an obstacle to their economic development, while it rather reveals how accumulation and abundance are opposite notions in indigenous understandings. The work of community leaders includes preparing mambe and ambil3 before visiting institutional offices in town, infusing these substances with intentional thought-power (con un pensamiento). The aim of leaders should be “bifocal:” catching institutional money and providing for community wellbeing. People refer to project money using the term cacería, meaning ”hunting” and “game,” such as in ir de cacería “to go hunting [a project],” armar cacería, “organize a hunt,” or repartir cacería, “divide up the game [project money].” Seemingly, the world of the white people is like the forest, where exogenous and potentially pathogenic substances that are nonetheless indispensable to human life are controlled by powerful others —alien institutions or the masters of animals— who are construed in analogous terms: tricky, dangerous, but also seducible (Echeverri, personal communication). As any exogenous substance resulting from a predatory undertaking project money is potentially pathogenic: it is “hot.” To make it fit for human consumption it must be “cooled” and transformed through work and other social practices that imply the skillful capturing and reallocation of vital substances in open cycles of energy exchange (Santos-Granero, 2009, p. 209; Fausto, 2001).

No tenemos conocimiento de una administración. Está en una parte básica de lo que es unificar criterios, y dejar de ser paternalistas, y conocernos nosotros mismos, qué tenemos.

130 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Leaders and community members share responsibility for the failure of development projects when they go after money motivated by personal interests rather that collective well-being, when they idly await for the arrival of money without committing to work, or when they fail to channel money into the vital circuits of reproduction. In brief, they are not “thinking with a principle of origin,” so the “other criterion” takes over.

The Crisis We always talk about development, but what did it bring to us? We are complaining. In what did we fail? We have to become aware, and wake up the truth that has been shaded: we are not thinking with our principle of origin. What is the value of education? We are sending our children to school, but will they learn indigenous…? In the indigenous tradition we have video screen, radars, telecommunication. (Uitoto Muina I ndigenous leader) […] In trying to identify it with a name, we are inclined to call it crisis of utopia, since it seems that its more grave manifestation is the fact that we are losing, if we haven’t already lost, the ability to dream […]. We struggle with an exhausting insomnia that hinders the indispensable lucidity for facing, with energy and imagination, the problems that affect us. Instead, we turned into a certain kind of drowsy administrators of a crisis that, we sense, is impossible to solve by our own means. The drowsiness in which the crisis of the utopia induces us, manifests itself with many faces: defeatism, demobilization, apathy, exacerbated individualism, fear, anxiety, and cynicism.25 (M anfred M ax-Neef, D esarrollo a E scala Humana . p. 24)

The resguardo leaders’ discourses and practices reflect a struggle for understanding history and for harnessing historical change. Uncertainty has 25. “Al tratar de identificarla con un nombre, nos hemos inclinado por llamarla la crisis de la utopía, porque su manifestación más grave nos parece el hecho de que estamos perdiendo —si es que no hemos perdido ya—nuestra capacidad de soñar […]. Nos debatimos en un agotador insomnio que nos impide la lucidez imprescindible para enfrentar con vigor e imaginación nuestros problemas. Nos hemos convertido, en cambio, en una especie de somnolientos administradores de una crisis a la que intuimos imposible de resolver por nuestros propios medios. Esta somnolencia en que nos hace desembocar la crisis de la utopía se manifiesta con muchos rostros: el derrotismo, la desmovilización, la abulia, el individualismo exacerbado, el miedo, la angustia y el cinismo”.

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 131

a key tactic potential in this process, but it is also experienced as unsettling. This state is conceived as a cultural illness, the “crisis:” a clash of exogenous and endogenous energies, which becomes pathogenic and manifest itself through physical, psychological, social, and environmental symptoms. Community leaders meet nightly in the maloca, where they ritually prepare and consume mambe and ambil to comprehend and cure the crisis. Multiple fields are taken into account in this endeavor: the history of the resguardo, modernity, the reconfiguration of indigenous identity, power in its old and new forms. These are the strands with which to weave “a new basket”, and to rework alterity into the fabric of society. As suggested, the leaders’ narratives and performances can be seen as the creation of “a gap in the order of things – /a gap in which there is ‘room for maneuver’” (Stewart, 1996, p. 3), and endeavor that may eventually result in “a new and more effective integration of the components of experience for which there is no traditional precedent” (Turner, 1992, p. 148). Indigenous people conceive history as an ongoing process of conquest and resistance. “La conquista sigue,” “conquest goes on” is a concept uttered and debated over and over in the maloca talks. Conquest sediments in memory and in the needs of personality, at times becoming vividly present in people’s lives, resulting in what Paulo Freire called a permanent prophetic vision (Giroux, 2001, p. 81). However, the relationship between conquest and resistance is not conceived as a dual opposition, but as a gradual process of incorporation and self-antidote reminiscent of a homeopathic treatment, a process mostly enacted through the Speech of Coca and Tobacco. Leaders argue that “our own government does not change; the indigenous law always stays the same.” This apparently static view of social rules, one that would ideologically hinder the process of ethnic rearrangement, must be understood together with another view, according to which the Speech of Coca and Tobacco has the power to bring the mythical world into being. I venture to compare the Speech of Coca and Tobacco to a looking glass, where the mythical feats of creation and daily events reflect into each other. Its goal is to restore the healthy fabric of abundant life on a permanent basis, a process that embraces all aspects of reality, entangled in complex and contradictory ways and often mistakenly classified as “Indigenous” versus “Western.” To summon the mythical world is a dangerous endeavor, which must be approached with knowledge and the capacity for controlling and building

132 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

defenses against the power of primeval energies. To be able to prove these capacities is a permanent challenge to leadership. When the leaders claim “estamos enfermos con la tradición” —‘we are ill with respect to tradition,’ but also ‘we are ill with tradition,’ as if tradition were an illness— they suggest that a shattered tradition is a symptom of a generalized illness, but also that tradition may become pathogenic if not dealt with appropriately. Similarly, the talks of the crisis intertwine two different perspectives: one that attributes the source of problems to a badly managed relation with “tradition,” and the other to a badly managed relation with the Whiteman. Allured by the development illusion, people neglected the construction of appropriate defenses; consequently, they consider themselves to be partly responsible for the negative effects caused by development. This can be seen as the subtle working of hegemony, which operates so deeply in the minds of “those to be developed” to persuade them of being responsible for their own underdevelopment. I am inclined, though, to see people’s assumption of responsibilities as a way of escaping the paternalism of an asymmetric relationship, gaining control over such relationship by articulating agency from one’s own conceptual structures. As the leaders say, “our own government is like to look at your face in the mirror.” The crisis manifested itself dramatically in the summer of 1999, during a project targeted at indigenous youths of the Km. 11 community to train them in the use of video cameras. The project had been carefully designed since its onset in coordination with the leaders and the community, and it had been officially named by council of the elders: Gebuide Juaï Janaï Ofiya Urukï (production [of fruit and people]/manguaré [communication]/image [statue, representation]/to seek/people: ‘communication and video production for seeking people’). The project was intended to provide students with an understanding of how the visual media works, stimulate a critical use of such media, and, eventually, provide the participants with an opportunity to get paid jobs. This occasion also engendered a reflection, eagerly initiated by the elders, about the real and fictive nature of images, the significance of which will be discussed shortly. A group of adolescents of both sexes started training assiduously. After they had learned how to operate the video camera, their first project was to investigate, write, and film a short story of the Uitoto oral tradition. The students worked in close contact with the elders, and for the first time they began to participate to the nightly meetings in the maloca. Then, suddenly, an appalling thing happened. In a lapse of few days, four students attempted suicide by ingesting barbasco (Lochocarpus nicou),

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 133

a poisonous plant traditionally used for fishing, and less commonly for self-poisoning. One after the other they had declared their intention whilst running away to get barbasco in the gardens, the alarmed relatives immediately engaging in a frantic search for the suicidal and the plant antidote. Fortunately all the students were promptly saved, and suffered no physical consequences, but anxiety lingered on in the community. Some said that such things always happen when a new work begins. Others attributed the events to the envy of a maloquero. All agreed that it was the responsibility of the leaders to guard against danger, protecting their people under “a dome of energy.” Whatever the reason, I do not intend to offer an interpretation, but to evoke the looming sense of threat that is woven through individual and collective life experiences; a sentiment that lies dormant, controlled by the daily practice of caring for life, and to be unleashed unexpectedly when extra-ordinary events loosen this practice up. The suicidal attempts, though, suggest one explanation of the development’s failure that is elaborated on the basis of native conceptions about the complementarity of material and immaterial domains of reality. Several people with whom I discussed this issue described the “material side” of life as a manifestation of the “spiritual side.” Reversing, in a way, the equation of the visual era: the visible = the real = the truthful (see Debrey, 1999), this view suggests that by exclusively investing in what is apparent, development has come to weaken the invisible side that is seen as the matrix of life, and the imbalance between material things and spiritual powers has brought forth a diffused loss of control. More generally, this explanation stresses the inconsistency between development’s stated goals, hidden intentions, and tangible results. This inconsistency is perceived to run against the People of the Center’s pursuit of health, which hinges on the moral integration of intentional thought, speech, and work. Intentional thought progressively materializes in good speech, in tranquil, productive work, and ultimately in generalized health and abundance. The following statements were pronounced by two young Uitoto leaders during the preparation of mambe in the maloca, a process that involves toasting, grinding and sieving the coca leaves, burning the leaves of yarumo (Cecropia sp.) into ashes, and mixing coca powder and yarumo ash together. These statements were not part of a structured discourse, and speech was punctuated by long pauses. I see it as the thinking aloud of two friends who are engaged in a routine, but concentrated practical activity. However, this unruly verbal expression is also related to ritualized Speech; it is spoken in

134 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

the mambeadero in the afternoon, anticipating the issues that will be discussed, organized, and cooled down in the mambe session at night (see the discussion of ‘chispero’ in the prologue). —Before we went from practice to theory, now it is the opposite. The truth is that needs arise from the senses, not from what has been implanted. National political administration has created these problems because it starts from theory, it does not know reality. The one who wants to dominate does not live in the reality of the one who does not want to be dominated. —We stick to the crisis. This is contemporaneity: everything goes on by misunderstandings. —Conquest goes on. When these psycho-physical-animistic problems arise is because there is no solid base. These are messages things send to us, but we don’t pay attention to them. We devalue them. —We distort them. —We are sick. We are sick psychologically. —One of the weak points is education. They are not interested in teaching about reality. While we talk and talk about how to reaffirm indigenous culture our children go down the road (nuestros hijos se van carretera abajo). —For culture there are only 5 million pesos [$ 2,200 approximately; he is referring to the budget of the Municipal Development Plan]. These people don’t know about culture, that’s all. We have invested in second hand technology, which is useless, because we are not trained. —I need about all the documents of the zonal [ACITU, formerly AZCAITA, the resguardo’s organization]. —We have no importance whatsoever. We are useful for negotiation. —This is what is called neocolonialism. This is a new way of colonizing, doing contracts. —Strike! —And support!

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth • 135

—The problem is that indigenous people are like the oxen, pulled by the ring in their nostrils.

First of all, these narratives portray “contemporaneity” as the locus of misunderstanding, a view that evokes Marshall Berman’s definition of modernity as “perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish” (1988, p. 15). They focus on the clash between different conceptions of reality, and ways of experiencing it —from theory, or from the senses— embodying a sensuous critique that expresses the pervasive and painful feeling of powerlessness, the awareness of being used by politicians, the idea of development as neocolonialism, the contradictory consciousness of inadequacy (not being trained), and the self-reflection on the incapacity to act effectively, not listening to “the messages things send to us.” This discussion engenders a critical response, one that entails classconsciousness (“Strike!” “Support”), the study of administrative documents, and the questioning of an ideology that creates needs against the priority given to the senses (again, evoking Gramsci’s “good sense”). The leaders state that “cada proyecto tiene que pasar por el canasto de la salud,” ‘each project has to go through the basket of health.’ What do they mean? How does the symbol of a woven knowledge can become a source of resilience, and how does it work to create political schemas for surviving development? We shall explore these issues in the next chapter.

136 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Photo 6: Extracting the poison of bitter manioc. Kilรณmetro 11 community. Photo: Giovanna Micarelli.

Chapter 3. Policies, Politics, And Orders Of Worth โ ข 137

Chapter 4 Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances ¡Siéntate bien! ¡Piensa bien! Sit well! Think well! (Muinane man)

The reasons given by the People of the Center for the failure of development call for an examination of indigenous conceptions of health and illness, asking how they are linked to notions of knowledge, speech, and agency, a connection which is clearly established by the axiom of mambe initiation: “think well, speak well, work well, and turn this into abundance for all.”1 This chapter explores the meanings and performances of the Speech of Life in relation to cosmology and sociality, focusing in particular on the connections it draws between thought and the senses toward the goal of recreating and maintaining collective well-being. My suggestion here is that adherence to the Speech of Life is a way to reaffirm indigenous values in contrast to the development’s values. In this context, the daily performance of the Speech of Life acquires a deep political significance particularly because it conceives of people as creative agents, able to envision and care for well-being. In so doing, the Speech of Life provides an implicit commentary to, and it becomes a source of resilience against, the alienation brought about by development. 1. For a strikingly similar conception of the relationship between thought, speech, and action see Gary Whiterspoon (1977)

A Muinane Way to Conduct a Project Unplanned in my project proposal, but soon apparent, indigenous conceptions of health and illness turn out to be a central topic of my research. This realization, though, was met with a frustrating difficulty; all attempts on my part to approach these issues with my neighbors only achieved the result of unsettling them. This reaction puzzled me particularly since health is a favorite subject of conversation, and I spent hours listening to my neighbors’ health problems. I soon suspected that it was not the issue of health itself what was causing so much embarrassment, but my inquisitiveness. Coincidentally, at a certain point of my fieldwork I was introduced to Nemesio, a Muinane-Bora health practitioner formally trained in both traditional and Western health promotion and prevention. He had recently arrived from the Caquetá region after serving for several years in indigenous communities as promotor de salud of the Amazonas Department’s Health Office. Following a conflict with one of the lineages of his own clan, he had eventually lost his job, and when I first met him in the N.N.I. maloca he was hopelessly entangled in bureaucratic turnarounds to get his job back. It was during that time that he started cultivating the idea of a research proposal for integrating indigenous perspectives on health promotion and prevention in the institutional training curriculum of the Secretaría de Salud (Secretary of Health). He had learned from experience that, first, the ineffectiveness of health programs in indigenous communities is the result of the Secretaría’s lack of understanding of indigenous conceptions of health; and second, that the decline of the elders’ knowledge explained the deterioration of health in indigenous communities. He was determined to make the Secretaría aware of these issues. Shortly after we met, he paid me a visit; he offered me coca and tobacco, and asked me if I was willing to help him write a project proposal for the Secretaría. I gladly accepted, and that was the beginning of a labored path into the intricacies of the People of the Center’s system of knowledge and health. Our meetings went on for more than a year. When I finally had to leave the Amazon, the proposal was ready to be presented to the Secretaría. Nemesio’s project was eventually funded, and he spent the following year and a half working with his father and other knowledgeable elders in systematizing the People of the Center’s Health Science. This chapter is based on our collaboration, as well as on my participant observation of ritualized speech performances in various settings and my observant participation in healing sessions. During my fieldwork in Leticia I also had the opportunity to attend

140 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

the Meeting of Traditional Doctors for Actions of Promotion and Prevention (Encuentro de médicos tradicionales para acciones de promoción y prevención, April 29-May 5, 1999). This closed meeting was organized by the Secretary of Health “to continue the process of intercultural dialogue […] on how to improve actions of health promotion and illness prevention,” and it was attended by traditional health practitioners from the whole Amazonas Department. Although I was not authorized to divulge the information transmitted in the meeting, it helped me validate the data obtained in the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto, as much as it provided me with a perspective on the broad regional, supra-ethnic significance of this knowledge system. Nemesio always stressed that the information he was passing on to me was “encimita no más:” merely superficial. At the beginning of our collaboration, Nemesio made clear that I could not consider myself his apprentice for different reasons. Firstly, knowledge is transferred through genealogical lines from father to odd children, and from mother to even children. Secondly, Nemesio’s specialized knowledge is tied to the consumption of coca, which is a male prerogative. The fact that I was given coca on a daily basis put me in an ambiguous position, marking out my non-indigenous identity even more, but at the same also connecting me in very concrete ways to coca’s symbolic universe. Thirdly, the apprenticeship for becoming a health practitioner demands a long-time commitment. It lasts an average of seven years during which the apprentice has to comply with strict restrictions, living at times a secluded life, passing a series of tests on the basis of which the elders will decide his path of specialization. He has to pledge his commitment to this endeavor and keep with it constantly; any deviation constitutes a life threat to himself, his teacher, and their extended families, and, more generally, to the whole social and natural universe. Last but not least, to exclude (formal) apprenticeship from our relationship was a way to protect both of us from the dangerous power inherent in the knowledge of health and illness. A person who does not have knowledge of the spiritual world “nourishes him/herself only of material things, and follows a material path, without any commitment (sin ningún compromiso)”. As soon as a person starts learning “spiritual things”, he/she becomes the target of spiritual powers. Knowledge pursuit unlocks this dangerous, warlike world. For knowledge’s intimate relation with mythical substances, it is considered to be ‘hot’ and a potential source of debilitating illnesses. If humans let these topics alone no harm will incur. But if someone “opens” (destapar, like to take the top off

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 141

a basket) any of these topics, she/he must know how to cool them down. Both teacher and the learner share the responsibility of relentlessly guarding against evil, of controlling, and barricading the “paths” from where evil (disease, conflict, famine, madness…) arrives. Nemesio and I worked mostly at night, after the sessions in the maloca ended, often beginning just before midnight and going on until the early morning hours. Traditionally, this is the appropriate time for the utterance of the Speech of Life, “when the pestle stopped pounding coca,” the heat of the day and of daily social activities cools down, and everything is quiet. However, it is said, “evil never sleeps.” The pursuit of knowledge is an endeavor riddled with obstacles: laziness, negligence, inadequate defenses, wrong behavior, wrong speech, wrong thought. But the most powerful enemy, as Nemesio says, is the “pressure of the world,” namely, the dark side of knowledge: the quest for personal power. Notions of human agency and responsibility are inherent in the People of the Center’s view of knowledge. To talk about knowledge means to talk about knowledge’s purpose and outcome. “Why do you want to know?” is a question repeated over and over to the apprentice. Following an ideology of conviviality diffused in Amazonian societies, the People of the Center argue that true knowledge is aimed at generalized well-being, while false knowledge is aimed at acquiring personal power over others. This difference corresponds to the classification of knowledge specialists. The chamán, in Spanish, is the true knowledgeable one who uses his power mostly for the welfare of the people. In contrast, the evil sorcerer (hechicero2 in Spanish), spreads illness and misery all around in his quest for personal power. Even though these are seen as two separate paths, they can get easily entangled, hence the stress on daily commitment and discipline. Shamanic knowledge-power is intrinsically ambivalent: curing and killing, as vengeance and conviviality, or predation and reciprocity, can easily transform into each other in native Amazonian thought.

2. The term brujo has ambiguous connotations. Jokes about people being brujos are very common, but I have never heard jokes making use of the terms chamán or hechicero, which reveals the halo of respect that surrounds them. To define someone who uses magic powers in a ‘non-orthodox’ way, they sometimes use the attribution ”ser del otro bando,” (being of the other side), or the Afro-Brazilian term macumbero. In any case, reactions to these attributions are set on a hair trigger.

142 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

As individuals engage in teaching and learning, they carefully attend to the material qualities of the body and the senses and deploy regulatory bodily practices —such as vomiting, cleansing with fragrant herbs, inhaling the smoke of hot chili and other plans, and restraining from food, sleep, movement, speech, and sexual intercourse— which they describe as ways to “educate the body” and “open the mind.” On the other hand, thinking, as any work, produces filth that has to be disposed of in order to prevent the inception of debilitating illnesses. Before starting to work on the proposal, Nemesio decided that I needed to undergo a cleansing treatment; he considered this to be a necessary step to be taken, as both a form of a protection, and to improve my comprehension of the topics involved. For the cleansing treatment, Nemesio conjured a specially prepared ambil, hot pepper, and palo fósforo, as well as a cigar and incense that he sent me to buy at an esoteric shop run by two Ingano Indians at the river port. Ambil —a concoction of tobacco mixed with vegetal salt and other plant additives— has powerful purgative and emetic effects, while the smoke of hot pepper and palo fósforo provokes the profuse secretion of mucus and tears, cleaning up the sinus and actually giving the feeling of a clear mind. Other continuing therapies for the apprentice include inducing vomit in the morning and bathing with water infused with aromatic herbs, such as basil (Ocimum sp.) and dirímao (Compositae). Particular stress is put on the need to bathe after the session. To avoid the inception of illness, the “heat” produced by the work of thinking has to be cooled down before sleep. When it is not possible to take a bath, one should sprinkle water on one’s forehead, ears, and the back of the head; memories are stored in the back of the head and they are brought back to the forehead when they are recalled. Particular emphasis is also put on diet. To diet not only means to avoid particular foods and to reduce the intake of food in general, but also to control “one’s thought, word, and work” to restrain from rage and gossip, work eagerly, limit sleep and social and sexual intercourses, and keep a cheerful and positive mood. Discipline is considered to be a preventive medicine, not only because proper behavior “no deja entrar al mal,” “does not let illness/evil in,” but also because discipline sharpens one’s senses and makes them able to detect illness “in the distance.” To tame one’s emotions and to perfect and tune one’s perception for capturing elusive bodily and environmental signs is a process reminiscent of a variety of meditation practices found in Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist traditions. According to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991, p. 23), Buddhist

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 143

meditation is body-mind activity, the purpose of which is “to become mindful, to experience what one’s mind is doing as it does it, to be present with one’s mind.” To sit in an upright position, holding still for long periods of time in almost complete darkness, appeasing the rhythm of breath as well as the state of mind, and maintaining attentive awareness of environmental clues brings forth a state described by Nemesio as “to become luminous.” Differently from other meditation practices, speech is a central aspect of the People of the Center’s form of meditation. The repetition of formulas that evoke physical and psychological states such as “cooling down,” “relieving,” “being surrounded by the breath of life that disperse tiredness, worry, rage” and that “makes everything tranquil, peaceful, and cool” activates imagery and synesthetic integration that work to appease the body-mind. Also, speech makes this practice a fundamentally social activity. Nemesio recalls how he started mambeing because he could not stand to see his father mambeing alone, with no one to listen and reply. However, even when just one elder speaks, the Speech is not a soliloquy, but a dialogue engaged with other beings at the spiritual level. Moreover, through speech the effect of “cooling down” diffuses from the individual body to the social body and the environment. Even if curing begins with the self, speech multiplies and propagates its effects, in this way linking personal agency and generalized well-being.

Native Classifications La tradición está al 99% metida en la religión Tradition is 99% ingrained into religion (Muinane intellectual)

Specialists and Diagnoses Following a view expressed by indigenous leaders, the maloca, as image of both the cosmos and the self, provides a native model for classifying knowledge into four main areas, described as the “pillars” of knowledge: health, education, government (gobierno propio), and production. These “pillars” are interconnected with one another. However, people claim that “health is the principal basket:” the basic principle and ultimate goal of knowledge in all its aspects and applications health takes the lead over the other domains. Four other categories intersect with the first four: sovereignty, ecological management,

144 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

justice, and university of knowledge (soberanía, manejo ecológico, justicia y universidad de conocimiento). I venture to see them as agential categories, denoting individual and collective agent-power extending across the territory. Information that often emerged non-elicited from the conversations with the leaders suggests that before the devastating effects of the rubber boom, different malocas were actively interconnected in a regional system of social organization. To appeal to a complex traditional system may be seen as a way in which the leaders legitimate their effort for reestablishing political authority, and it certainly stands out against the dominant representation of Amazonian indigenous societies as “primitive,” disorganized tribes. However, reasons for not seeing this as an invented tradition are provided by a growing number of ethnohistorical and archaeological findings on the functioning of regional policies in Amazonia (Heckenberger et al., 2008; Whitehead, 1993), and similar views were confirmed by various leaders of different ethnic groups, from different areas of the Colombian Amazon, in a quite detailed way. This system hinged on the distribution and differentiation of knowledge. Each maloca, or more precisely, each patrilineage, owned specialized hereditary knowledge and was characterized by a certain degree of expertise and exclusive rights. Areas of expertise basically corresponded to one of the four areas of knowledge listed above, but they were further specified. At a lower level, members were appointed to each of the four areas of knowledge, mostly on the basis of birth order, and they constituted the maloca council, ruled by the maloca chief. Representatives from different malocas assembled periodically into regional or subregional councils to plan collective activities. For instance, health representatives from different malocas met to plan prevention activities for particular times of the year, including dance rituals and other activities described as “spiritual vaccinations.” Higher-level regional inter-maloca councils were also held periodically. Chieftaincy rotated among malocas and it was partly dependent on activities at hand. The articulation of such specificities through exchange relationships and regulated managing practices was the source from which the ordered territory was created and maintained. Nowadays, newly acquired areas of expertise such as those pertaining to bureaucracy and development, fill the gap left by abandoned forms of specialized knowledge— war and cannibalism for instance. As it was in the past, the malocas of the resguardo maintain communication through the manguaré drums. These two-tone drums can be heard miles away, and they convey simple messages such as calls for help and invitations. My data suggest that they

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 145

can actually be quite precise; for example, they can name a person’s clan and lineage, or types of diseases. People also claim that the leaders of the past had enough mental power to communicate with other leaders telepathically. With regard to the classification of health practitioners this includes: (a) “those who use speech to cure”, (b) investigators/promoters, (c) herbalists, and (d) auxiliaries, with an additional category consisting of those who fix fractures and sprees. These categories are ranked, with “those who use speech to cure” being the most powerful ones. Prior to the healing treatment, an investigation must be conducted in order to identify the type of disease. This investigation involves the interpretation and classification of signs, “naming and asking Chuchito3 until he enlightens,” so that finally the causal agent of the disease can be addressed: “usted, ¿por qué hizo esto?” (“you, why did you do this?”). This process is described as a continuous flow of questions and answers, which Nemesio compared to messages running on an electronic sign. The ability to detect and interpret signs and symptoms is a central aspect in the training of the promoter. Signs are both physical and psychological, both external and internal; they can be detected not only in the patient, but also in the health practitioner, their mutual families, society at large, and the environment: “everything in the world speaks,” says Nemesio, “otherwise, how could it give answers?” The promoter must be able to listen to and to, interpret these signs through mythological knowledge. Bird songs, smells, humors (described as internal energy and halo), atmospheric and climatic changes, and dreams are all vehicles of information. The color of lightning, for instance, conveys information about upcoming illnesses: Red above: snakes will be born. Yellow: the Creator is going to cool down the world. Red: some problem will arise. Blue with red, three times, a sign from the maligno (the evil one).

Signs mostly appear in specific times of the day. At sunset, when the sky is tinged with red, one must observe. To the North, it announces eye diseases. To the South, it means viral skin diseases. To the West, there will be fighting. To the East, it means a spiritual illness that will manifest itself in the digestive apparatus. 3. The ‘little elder:’ God.

146 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

These signs are often arranged to create complex sensory images: When at sunset The light turns yellow-green And the animals are quiet And it drizzles, This is a delicate sign.

Signs and symptoms are detected, evaluated, classified, and eventually addressed through a complex interpretive system based on mythological knowledge. As noted, from a People of the Centre’s perspective all knowledge originated in mythical times; it emerged from the cosmogonic fight between the creator’s thought/substance-of-life and malevolent agents who sabotaged the ordered world with powers, but without true knowledge. All things created encode these primeval events together with the creator’s knowledge of how to maintain life. Various subsystems are interwoven in the process of “classifying illness” and producing a diagnosis. The first one divides illness by groups —aggie in Muinane— on the basis of symptoms, for example, pneumonia, diarrhea, and skin infections. Another system organizes illnesses on the basis of the cause, if it is spiritual or non-spiritual. When the cause of an illness is spiritual, “the symptoms change, they appear and disappear, and it is very difficult to detect them, particularly with Western tools.” Another classification divides illness on the basis of target population (age, sex, capabilities, clan and lineages, ethnic affiliation, or territory). Another focuses on the development of illness, if it is slow or sudden, chronic or acute, accompanied by strong or light pain. Since the same symptom may have different causes at different times of the year, all classifications are evaluated on the basis of the ecological calendar. Some diseases, though, are not linked to the epoch, but they are triggered by the defiance of norms. Malaria, for example, “comes from the White people. It is generated in the salados, which are mythological sites with prohibitions. If you don’t respect those norms you can get ill.” Various Amazonian indigenous groups consider the salados —salt springs in the forest— as sacred places. Animals gather there to drink, but also, it is said, to hold their own dance rituals. In fact, the salados are considered to be the animals’ malocas, also in the sense of “seat of power,” and the knowledgeable ones go there in search for power. But to

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 147

be able to manage and control such power one has to have the capacity, and to comply with a series of rules. The White people’s defiance of the norms that rule the management of the salados has unleashed malaria, a water illness that now affects both white and indigenous population. As this example indicates, it is not just the person who misbehaves to be affected by illness. Instead, his/her actions “multiply,” breaking that balanced arrangement that keeps the world in a healthy condition. Like knowledge, all illness has been created at the beginning of time, and it is unleashed by humans’ improper behavior. From this, other four classes of illness derive: 1. Illnesses of the White man’s path [enfermedades del camino del blanco], i.e. illnesses that are released by the relationship with the White people. 2. Improper management of the environment and of the components of health (food, hygiene…) including spiritual components (people disobeying the norms). 3. Illnesses of the leaders (“functions of the elders”). 4. Illnesses by witchcraft [with a pun, informants name these illnesses “de-porte.” Deporte means ‘sport’ in Spanish. When hyphenated it means ‘deportment,’ and it expands to other fields of signification that are linked to the idea of witchcraft, such as the idea of payment (as in ‘porte pagado’), and the idea of weapon (as in ‘porte de armas’)]. Consequently, health promotion and prevention are aimed at regulating the following areas of human conduct: 1. One’s thought. 2. One’s speech. 3. One’s work. 4. Procreation. 5. What one eats (broadly intended, including “spiritual” food). 6. Social relations. 7. One’s steps (los pasos del hombre). 8. The management of the world. 9. The very human being (el hombre mismo). 10. Spiritual power.

148 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Different Types and Functions of the Word The promotion and restoration of health requires different kinds of verbal strategies which depends on the purpose at hand, if it is teaching, promoting, or restoring health. Two Uitoto and Muinane friends, produced the following list, which I was able to confirm with other consultants: 1. “Metaphor: it serves to say a whole lot of things at once in an intentionally indirect way. It is used during apprenticeship (La metáfora sirve para decir de todo en una cosa, de una manera intencionalmente no directa. Se utiliza en el aprendizaje). 2. Counsel: This is direct. It is easier to write it down. Similar to: 3. Orientation. This is a sweet word. 4. Singing: how many things are said through songs! [Songs, for instance, are used to express criticism in a dance ritual. Competitions of mythological knowledge also involve duels of singing riddles (adivinanzas)]. 5. Manguaré [drums]. 6. Signs [gestures]: they have another function...4 7. Conjura: it is not spoken nor sung; it is blown (soplada). It cannot be written down because there are two intertwined paths: good and evil (no se puede escribir porque hay dos caminos que se cruzan, el bien y el mal). It is used to cure. It has power. 8. Written word: trifling talk (mucha carreta). Its function has not been established, therefore it is archived; it is not used to transmit, to return knowledge, to make it circulate. It betrays the norms of learning. Why do I want to learn? How do I return the knowledge acquired? How do I defend it? The one who is going to pay is the teacher, and knowledge once archived gets messed up, it becomes useless.” (No se ha establecido su función entonces es archivada, no sirve para transmitir, para devolver el conocimiento, para hacerlo circular. Traiciona las normas del aprendizaje. ¿Para qué quiero aprender? 4. An instance of this is how to adjust mambe in one’s cheeks: “Right hand toward the left, and left hand toward the right. With the thumb: a cacique, an elder. With the index: one who gives direction, a leader. With the middle finger: an apprentice. With the ring finger: a dumb one. With the little finger: a novice.” In addition to this, there are other usages of gesture that need to be investigated. One is the suggestion that kinesthetic metaphors, such as the metaphor of ‘weaving a basket of knowledge’ are actually enacted in the context of speech performance (A. Velazco, personal communication). Another, is the use of gestures to mark the flow of speech.

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 149

¿Cómo lo devuelvo? ¿Cómo lo defiendo? El que va a pagar es el maestro, y el conocimiento archivado se embolata, ya no sirve). 9. Mythology: it is not from ancient times, it is circular [makes a mudra by uniting his thumb and index fingers in a circle], from past to present to future. Speech of Life, or better, Speech of Origin. It is the knowledge of the Grandfather of Tobacco. It has a power of life. (No es de tiempo atrás sino es circular, del pasado al presente al futuro. Palabra de vida, o mejor, Palabra de origen. Es el conocimiento del Abuelo de Tabaco. Tiene un poder de vida). 10. Legend or tale: ‘it is said that…’(se dice que…). A Speech transformed by people. It may have a mythological basis but it lost its power. When it mentions places, they already have no power, like they do in mythology. 11. Histories/stories of the ancestors of what happened in the past. They have a moral end.” Then they added the following commentary: During apprenticeship no se habla (‘people don’t talk’). The orientation is more difficult. You have to learn how to scold, yes, but with a sweet word. Don’t you know what energy gets in through language? Counsel, instead, is meant to stir doubts at once. But everything has its own time. Counsel, for example, has three phases: discussion, counsel, and projection into work (obra, trabajo); otherwise it is missing something. Retrospectively, it was not a good thought: a Speech of Life. It is said ‘to put it in the land of dawn’ (ponerlo en tierra de aurora, o en tierra de amanecer). That is why we stay up all night, until dawn: to cool everything down.

Side Paths: Learning How to Learn The People of the Center’s obsession with classifications seems at odds with the fact that classifications have a way of mutating, so as to slip out of any normalizing attempt; meaning is always simultaneously revealed and re-veiled,5 and like the Cheshire Cat, it disappears, leaving behind just the trace of a grin. This can be frustrating, as the following excerpt from my field journal shows. 5. I owe this description to Juan Monsalve, who made his point by hyphenising the Spanish word ‘re-velar.’ It definitely works better.

150 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Tonight they started with the counsel. They came here to interrogate me. But about what? They did not say it. —“Dialogue, it is said, is energy [corriente]. It controls illness from its origins. The Speech is the materialization of the spiritual act of thinking. To get ill is to enter a world: the world of laziness… the world of rage… the world of worry. With thought, one maintains and cures the world daily. Hay que mascar todos los días para cuidar y cuidarse (one has to mambe every day to take care of one self and the world). All the cells that form a body. We are a conglomerate.” They say that dialogue must have a theme, an unspoken question. Otherwise thought gets confused. I do not understand what the theme is tonight. I have to sit quiet, do not anticipate, just listen, and concentrate. “Stay still. Do not bother with the mosquitoes. Do not move. Not even if you have to pee, or if your body aches… If you move you don’t let me listen to the Father Creator.” That is why I cannot write. First, they don’t allow me. Then, it is difficult as I’m trying to catch the thread, “the theme.” —“How many levels there are?” They are interrogating me on the topic “stages of a conversation.” At least that’s what I thought. I believed that the third level was “putting it in the land of dawn” (that is, “projection”), but I’m wrong. I was almost sure and I stated it with confidence. —“No!” No. They look at each other. —“No?” —“You start from the fifth.” The fifth? Weren’t they three? From the fifth I am now going backward. Without even realizing it, I shifted classification and direction. From the fifth level, that of , watch out, “vulgarity,” I move downward. Yes, the most important level lies below, like a seated thinker: 5. Vulgarity 4. Diplomatic

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 151

3. Apprentice leader 2. Mythology by histories 1. Mythology by origins But this is another path. They intertwined as threads of basket. Thought is not kept in and it slips away.

During my collaboration with Nemesio and other intellectuals of the People of the Center, I had to make myself familiar with a series of tacit rules that govern the acquisition and transmission of knowledge. Since for the People of the Center all knowledge is already given, learners do not construct knowledge but achieve it through a personal search that is simultaneously a process of self-discovering and self-shaping. Accordingly, knowledge transmission is typically nonintrusive, and it deliberately avoids direct didactic explanations. Nevertheless, knowledge transmission is far from being unarticulated. Support for learning is meticulously organized, and it deploys sophisticated pedagogical strategies that foster the learner’s heuristic method, alertness and capacity for introspection. This process does not fit in either of the traditional categories of formal and informal learning. As Precourt rightly suggests (1988), this distinction should not be based on the institutional context in which instruction takes place: school-related or outside the school. Rather: “Informal” refers to education in which the rules governing educational activities and processes are generated from within the immediate context. “Formal” education is governed by the rules imposed from outside the immediate context. The immediate context is the particular setting where educational activity takes place, e.g., a classroom, playground, or teacher’s meeting.’ (Precourt, 1988, p. 447; quoted by Herrera, 2000, p. 150; italics are mine)

The People of the Center’s modes of knowing clearly undo the distinction between formal and informal learning. Knowledge transmission-acquisition is governed by cultural rules that transcend the immediate context, and are at the same time ingrained in it. Even though learning follows a series of steps, it is always responsive to empirical circumstances, and thus it may occur unexpectedly. People enjoy the serendipitous, unpredictable nature of knowledge transmission-acquisition, and warn the apprentice to always be alert.

152 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Another classification is based of the kind of cognitive processes involved, rather that of the rules governing learning (Strauss, 1984).

Learning

Intentional learning

Incidental learning

Well-deﬁ ned procedures Ill-deﬁ ned procedures

Attention-directing

Rehearsal

Chanting

But not even this approach suits the particular situation at hand. Indeed, a typical pedagogical strategy deployed by the instructor is to trip the learner’s focus and attention. The outcome is that the apprentice appears to learn “incidentally” and in a serendipitous way. That is, s/he does not learn what s/he intended to, but something else. Above all, s/he learns how to learn. The instructor begins with the premise that each statement “may have up to five different meanings:” the five levels mentioned above. The meaning one will access depends on training and talent, as well as on personal quest. Attempts by the learner to create well defined, general learning procedures are systematically discouraged. To explain the use of dissimulation in knowledge transmission-acquisition, the People of the Center often use a hunting metaphor. When a man goes hunting, they say, he never declares: “I am going to hunt tapir,” or “I am going hunt peccary.” To call the animals by their real names would provoke the resentment of their master and scare the animals away, So, he names them as fruits: black umarí (Poraqueiba sericea) for peccary, green umarí for tapir, Moriche Palm fruit (Mauritia flexuosa) for deer, and so on (a list of correspondences appears on Candre and Echeverri, 1996). Knowledge is hunting. When one is looking for

cHAPTER 4. WEAVING THE BASKET OF LIFE: POETIc PERFORMANcES • 153

knowledge, health knowledge in particular, one does not announce it. “If you name it, you call it” it is said, equating locution to illocution. And also “as you name it, that is how it will happen”. Naming unleashes (“destapa:” takes the top off) the disease. Illness, or better, its master, can be addressed directly only when one is “ready to shoot,” that is, when through investigation one has identified the illness’ causal agent. Tobacco and Coca become “actual hunting weapons” (Candre and Echeverri, 1996, p. 105) when they are prepared with a specific intention: to resolve an intellectual dilemma, make a diagnosis, “set a trap” to a politician, obtain a grant, or win a soccer game. Hunting is more than a metaphor for thinking. Similarly to basketry, I see it as a performative use of signs (see Whitehead, 2002) that merges rules and intuitions. Another explanation for the use of dissimulation comes from the allegory of the ‘orphan.’ The orphan personifies the Orphan-Grandson-of-theCenter, a key character of creation myths who is described as “holder of knowledge.” By feigning his true capacities, he is able to fool the evil agents that threaten creation, and to attain a “node of power”. The importance of concealing one’s aim is made clear by one of the basic rules of conversation: “one must have a question, but do not ask questions…” Questions confuse, they open arguments over arguments that cannot be talked over. One always has to close what one has opened [referring to the ‘basket of knowledge’]. But without an [unspoken] question the dialogue wanders around. The Speech has to calm, to cool down, to cleanse, and leave only one thought. (Muinane consultant)

To dissipate any doubts about the lack of tolerance or flexibility of this knowledge system, the knowledgeable ones suggest that tradition should not be taken to the letter; rather, people should always strive to create “new baskets.” Knowledge dissimulation constructs an open pedagogy, a learning in action that does not involve the blind obedience to the rule, but the ability to “read the clues” and to improvise, strategically turning potentially harmful events into the very sources of sociality. To “leave only one thought” does not mean to discard the plurality of thoughts that characterizes social interactions. It does mean that thinking should be projected to concrete goals, such as health, abundance of food and people, or political and cultural recognition. This moral ideal is based on the view that knowledge and wellbeing are daily and personal pursuits, in which the emphasis is put upon individual responsibility as much as creativity.

154 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

How Does the Speech Cure? El mal puede convertirse en bien, si es bien manejado. Evil can turn into good if it is well managed. (P eople of the C enter' s maxim)

It was nothingness, there was no thing. There the Father palpated the imaginary, the mysterious. There was nothing. What could there be? Naainuema [He who is nothingness], in a state of trance, concentrated, seeking inside himself. What could there be? There were no trees. Surrounded by nothingness, the Father controlled it with the help of a dreamt thread and his own breath. Everywhere void reigned. The Father examined the bottom of such emptiness, but there was nothing. He recited the oration of nothingness, but everything was void. Then the Father sought our life, the bottom of our story (jiyaki6), but there was only emptiness. He tried touching the bottom of nothingness, bind it with the help of the dreamt thread, but everything was empty. In his state of trance he obtained the magic substances arebaiki7 and izeiki8. With them he bound the bottom of nothingness (Preuss, 1994, p. 19-21). 9

“El mito es un filtro”: Myth is a Filter At the beginning of time, the Father Creator “started thinking and ordering, he organized everything, like putting together the different sounds that make a word,” says Nemesio, while imitating the gestures of basketry making. 6. “To tell the story is ‘to weave a basket’ so that jiyaki [in Uitoto language] simultaneously means ‘bottom’ and ‘beginning’” (Preuss, 1994 [1921/1923], pp. 19-21; translator’s commentary). 7. “Sticking substance” 8. Izeiki is “like tobacco smoke or a cotton wad.” 9. Era la nada, no había cosa alguna. Allí el Padre palpaba lo imaginario, lo misterioso. No había nada. ¿Qué cosa habría? Naainuema, el Padre, en estado de trance, se concentró, buscaba dentro de sí mismo. ¿Qué cosa habría? No había árboles. Rodeado de la nada, el Padre la controló con ayuda de un hilo soñado y de su aliento. En todas partes reinaba el vacío. El Padre examinaba el fondo de ese vacío, pero no había nada. Recitó la oración de la nada, mas todo era vacío. Ahora el Padre buscaba aquello que es nuestra vida, el comienzo (jiyaki) de nuestra historia, pero solo había un vacío. Intentaba palpar el fondo de la nada, atarlo con la ayuda del hilo soñado, pero todo era vacío. En su estado de trance obtuvo las substancias mágicas arebaiki e izeiki, con las quales sujetó el fondo de la nada.

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 155

When everything started combining, he laughed. At that moment, thought materialized into words, and he began naming: ‘this is like this, this is like this…’ He sweats a lot, because this is a lot of work, and he puts all this filth in a place. When he gets angry the Mother talks to him, to calm him down, to cool him down, and puts all that heat in a hot pepper. With this she cures rage, stab wounds, rabies, bites, and fights. The Speech of Life can transform evil into good by calling it from its origin: ‘…The hot pepper of our Mother, that she keeps in her basket...’ This is why knowledge cures; it is a remedy. Everybody received the same power to dominate evil. This is the seed of origin (semilla de origen). When one speaks well, one throws away tiredness, worry… That is why one doesn’t need to sleep. That is why, afterward, one has to bathe, because this is hard work. What one does during the day must be cooled down at night, with dialogue.

And he goes on: The Universe is not in a state of perfection because evil and good are joined. Within the origin of health is the origin of illness. It begins from the Creation, because any work produces some waste, like sweat, tiredness. Then, all the diseases were created. With their actions, humans pull them out; they call them in. Humans are the most dangerous viruses. Everything they do, if they don’t do it well, evil gets multiplied.

This quote is reveling in many ways. First, it shows how, in native understandings, mythological time-space and the present one are inextricably entwined. Second, it puts emphasis on the ability of the knowledgeable one to move between these two domains to actualize the process of creation through speech. Third, it expresses a cosmological view in which good and evil are intertwined; the daily work of the leader-thinker is to pull them apart. This is a daily practice. Everything that happens during the day, the knowledgeable cools it down during the night through the creative power of thought-speech; he ritually tidies up the cosmos, assigning a place to daily events, and separating what will be eventually incorporated into the body of society as nourishment, from useless or polluting waste. This symbolic process of detoxification and sterilization mirrors what women do materially, in the processing of manioc to produce food.

156 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

In contrast to the “noble savage” myth, the leader-thinker is said to be the enemy of nature. Harmony with nature is achieved through the spiritual and physical work of managing exchange relationships with the spiritual masters of natural resources. Nature castigates humans when they break the rules— and thus “offend” nature, but also nature has to be castigated when it “offends” humans. As a way to maintain such contract, humans send poison back to nature, for instance planting barbasco. The leaders-thinkers plan these activities in coordination with the community, “like a health company.” With Speech, the knowledgeable ones purify the polluting agents that get into the “components” of health —food, water, air, and social and psychological “components”— and keep nature producing. The people find refuge under the “protective dome of energy” irradiating from the thinkers. Thunder is produced when illness hits against this dome. As noted, any sign indexes several semantic levels. Working across such semantic range, the knowledgeable ones selectively name negative signs to turn them into positive ones. For example, they will name a flash of lightning ‘boride,’ a term that denotes the sound of tobacco seeds popping up; or they will name thunder “gïrïde,” the sound of kneading the manioc dough when squeezing out the starch. These naming practices draw on phonosymbolic correspondences, which are poetically activated to direct perception and awareness toward positive things. In this way, “the one who knows can make everything sweet.”

“El mito es como la guerra”: Myth is Like War The leader-thinker is seen to sit in the middle of a battlefield. His work is to make order out of chaos, a sheer hard work that assimilates him to the Creator. Depending on personal specialization this pursuit involves different practices of the spoken word that draw on mythology in different ways. Traditional health promoters, for example, search into mythology to teach and guide, to detect illness, and to plan specific collective actions of prevention according to the times of the year. They do not recount mythology, but extract information from mythology to build barriers against illness, communicate effectively with the people, and organize the community for the practical works of prevention. Instead, the work of curing revives the creative force of myth. It involves entering the “land of myth” to separate good and evil at the origin of creation. This endeavor is compared to going to war; it is a dangerous ordeal, and only the warrior who is prepared and able to fight can get out of it with no damage. “Conjure [a spell] is a fight to separate the paths of good and evil to create a remedy.

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 157

It means to create ‘a pill’ from the spiritual power of the creator, the mythological power of the medicine, the positive power of nature, the power of speech, and put them either in a material excipient, or in a drug with power.” The relation between health and promotion is phrased in the idiom of mythological kinship. The spirit who oversees health is the “grandfather of cool grass” (abuelo de hierba fría), while the one that oversees prevention is the “grandson of cool grass” (nieto de hierba fría). Grandfather and grandson are said to be the shadow of each other, but they are also one and the same. Nemesio gave me an example of a class of mythology used in teaching: rather than instantiating a fight, it gives an account of a fight occurred in mythological times, indicating the remedy to be cured at the beginning. In round parentheses I include Nemesio’s commentary to the text, and in square parentheses my commentary: The Mother of the Center had a disabled child (a blow; to cure nettle) She was very sad She wanted her child to walk; he was her only boy The Grandfather of Nettle watched this No one remembered him He was the one who did this to give rise to an origin [the origin of this illness and its remedy] He illuminated her so that she remembered (this mythology is used to cure a child who doesn’t walk) How did she want Him to come in! At time one says: “He may be” She was sitting, watching the child She let loose this thought: “Grandfather, I know you are here. I want him to be useful. Do something! You are the beginning, origin of life” (He is the creator himself, Grandfather of tobacco, Son of tobacco) She began to bless the nettle (that is why this myth is different [it offers the remedy right away]) “You are the grandfather of loosening up. Answer to me!” (He was the one who was leading this. In other kinds of mythology is the maligno. Here not; He opens the world: hwoof)

158 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

“I truly need this for a good purpose It is not for pride, nor for a bad thought” When she said this, something came down It made the atmosphere to change “I am here because you are calling me I am the beginning. Here I am For your negligence this is happening. Go get that…” But immediately she felt a hot smoke Her body started to itch “If You are the origin of life how comes that you have such a humor?” (He was giving her power, working through her) “It is said that the Grandfather of Nettle is cold; He does not bite You are not the Grandfather of Nettle You are the ancient [forebear] of such and such That is how you come” (at once she’s conjuring) “You are going to be like that for the new generation You are going to have this humor You are going to present yourself in this way” (is telling you how to get stronger for curing) Then the next one would come, and by means of Him she was conjuring “The forebear of such and such animal” (a category of spirits; He is giving examples) “Ancient of the ants” (a whole group of demons, is an example for curing. The forebear of ant is hot, itchy, poisonous… If nettle is not cured, it is itchy, it bites, it makes you sick) “Forebear of owls. Humor of sleep, of tiredness That’s how you are going to be called” And she is closing him up Each one was entering as if he was the Grandfather of Nettle “Forebear of caterpillar: humor of hair, itch That is how you are going to enter”

After He showed all this, then He came down (He is showing her the road of evil, He is teaching her how to cure a blow, how to classify nettle. It can be used at birth)

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 159

“With this nettle of loosening up, I will loosen it up Forebear of porcupine: arrow of revenge Forebear of jaguar: all animals that bite, humor of rage Forebear of anteater: humor of madness, drunkenness, nausea Nettle of fly: nuisance Nettle of fish: paleness, weakness” (Before doing a treatment, the new generation has to strengthen the medicine and to reject evil. Open the path. This is the first scheme for teaching how to actualize knowledge into practice. I throw all of this away, and I am consecrating the nettle)10

10. La madre de centro tuvo un hijo inválido (golpe curar ortiga). Ella es muy triste, quisiera que el hijo caminara, es el único varón. Esto lo miraba el abuelo de ortiga. Nadie se acordaba de él. Él fue que hizo esto para generar un origen. El la iluminó, cuando de pronto ella se acordó. (esta misma mitología sirve para curar un niño que no camina). Cómo quisiera que él llegara. A veces uno dice “él puede ser”. Ella se sentaba, miraba al niño, soltó este pensamiento “abuelo, yo sé que usted está. Yo quiero que él sirva. Haga algo. Usted es el principio, origen de la vida (es el mismo creador: hijo de tabaco, abuelo de tabaco). Ella empezó allí mismo a bendecir la ortiga (por esto es diferente). “Usted es el abuelo de soltar ¡Contésteme!” El mismo era que conducía esto (en la otra mitología es un espíritu maligno, aquí no, el abre el mundo, hwoof”. “Realmente necesito esto por un bien. No es por orgullo ni por mal pensamiento”. Cuando ella dijo así bajó algo, hizo un cambio de atmósfera. “Yo estoy aca porque usted me llama. Yo soy el principio. Aquí estoy. Por su mismo descuido pasa esto. Consígame esto...” Pero entonces ella sintió el humor caliente, el cuerpo empezó a picar. “Si usted es el origen de la vida, ¿por qué tiene este humor?” Él le daba poder trabajando por medio de ella. “Se dice que el abuelo de ortiga es frío, no muerde. Usted no es el abuelo de ortiga, usted es el antiguo de tal, así usted entra”. De uno, conjura: “Usted va a ser así para la nueva generación, va a tener este humor, se presenta así.” Como hay que fortalecerse para curar. Después venía otro, y por medio de él ella iba conjurándolo. El antiguo de tal animal, el antiguo de tal otro animal (es una categoría de espíritus). Él pone ejemplos: el antiguo de la hormiga (todo un grupo de maligno). Ejemplo para curar. Antiguo de hormiga = caliente, rasquiñoso, venenoso. Si uno no la cura la ortiga le da razquiña, le muerde, perjudica. Antiguo de los búhos = humor de sueño, de cansancio. “Usted se va a llamar esto”, y le va tapando. Cada uno se presentaba como fuera el abuelo de ortiga. Antiguo de gusano = humor de peluza, rasquiña: “así es que usted va a entrar”. Cuando entró todo esto, el sí bajó. Esto le está mostrando el camino de la maldad. Le está enseñando como curar un golpe, como clasificar ortiga. Hay un parto, sirve para parto. “Con esta ortiga de soltar lo voy a soltar”. Antiguo de puercoespín (flecha de venganza). Antiguo de tigre colorado (todo animal que muerde, humor de rabia). Antiguo de oso hormiguero: humor de locura, borrachera, mareo. Ortiga de mosco: fastidio. Ortiga de pescado: palidez, debilidad. La nueva generación antes de hacer un tratamiento tiene que fortalecer la medicina y rechazar el mal. Abrir camino. Primero esquema de enseñanza para llevar a la práctica el conocimiento. Boto todo esto y voy consagrando la ortiga.

160 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

“El mito se abre. ¿Cómo se puede escribir? ”: Myth Opens. How Can You Write it Down? The mythology above was visually represented by Nemesio in the following graph, in which the conjuror’s trail moves down up:

edy

Rem

als)

e anim

of th spirits

s ptom

Sym

Reme

Good

path

In this conjure or spell, the remedy —conjured nettle— is indicated at the beginning, and the healer follows a straight path. This limits the risk, and that’s why this type of conjure is used in apprenticeship. A more dangerous procedure is represented below. The remedy is discovered and formed through the conjuring process itself, in which the conjuror unravels the “knots,” so to speak, between good and evil paths.

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 161

Remedy

res Conju

ate th separ

ath

Evil p th

Good pa

These ‘maps’ may help us understand in what sense myth “opens up” and why “it cannot be written down.” Besides being truly multidimensional, and moving in several directions at once, myth is seen as endowed with illocutionary power; it can do and undo things. Myth performance makes use of a wide range of communicative strategies beyond the spoken word. In a way, it expands the semantic field through a dialogue with the whole universe. For instance, a birdcall occurring during the narration becomes meaningful, and it is dialogically incorporated in it. Through this process, myth performance creates an emotionally dense environment that draws on unspoken knowledge and on a broad pool of sensory elements found in the phenomenological world, and using speech to focus and manipulate the perception of the people involved.

Poetic Performances “The deep part the tape recorder does not capture it, because the elders do not let it capture” (La parte profunda la grabadora no la coge, porque los abuelos no la dejan coger). This view —that was made clear to me time

162 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

and again during my fieldwork— is not merely intended to protect the Speech from artificial reproduction. Rather, it puts emphasis on a distinctive quality of speech, one that involves tacit and sedimented structures of knowledge and feelings, as much as emergent ones. According to Bauman (1977, p. 38) “the emergent quality of performance resides in the interplay between communicative resources, individual competence, and the goals of the participants, within the context of particular situations.” Similarly, Hymes (1981, p. 81) sees “performance as situated in a context, [and…] as emergent, as unfolding or arising within that context. The concern is with performance, not as something mechanical […], but with performance as something creative, realized, achieved, even transcendent of the ordinary course of events.” These definitions highlight the inherent potential of performance to construct new meaning and experience, a proposition I agree with. But while Bauman and Hymes are concerned with the interplay of formulas and emergent text structures in speech-centered events, I am more concerned with the interplay of implicit knowledge and meaning and its effects on body-mind. Behind the Maia veil of the speech event, my argument is that such performances hinge on participants individually drawing together sedimented structures and body-mind affects to achieve the ideal state of health and sociality. It is in this sense that my interpretation particularly benefits from Victor Turner’s analysis of ritual performance (see 1975, 1987). These daily rituals reestablish society not as conformity to rules and obligations, but as a tension engendered by the task of taking care of life. Thus, the context cannot be seen as a background that exists independently from the performances being observed. Context itself is reshaped by performance in the process of enacting the possibility of different articulations (Grossberg, 1992; Fabian, 1996). I noted before how the Speech of Life is predicated on the use of coca and tobacco. However, coca and tobacco are not limited to the ritual sphere. For example, coca and tobacco are a protection for traveling (riding on the anthropologist’s motor-scooter always involved getting a mouthful of mambe). Recently, young leaders started mambeing coca in governmental offices in town, and to mambe coca has become a public statement of indigenous identity and power against urban mestizos prejudice. With tobacco (ambil), things are more delicate. While coca stands for the power of speech, tobacco is the substance of human people as sentient and intelligent beings. We are “the juice of tobacco,” it is said, that is, the juice of the Creator, the Grandfather of

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 163

Tobacco. In addition to this, to lick tobacco together has the force of a contract, and, for instance, it was used in the past to decide the death of an enemy. Differently from the consumption of coca and tobacco, place does not determine the utterance of the Speech of Life. While it usually takes place in the mambeadero, a house or other enclosed spaces may also serve the purpose. Although current cultural and political processes dwell in the maloca as a symbol and material “icon” of emplacement and empowerment, an idea that the elders often express is that a nimairama doesn’t need a maloca, because he is the maloca. By contrast, body posture —sitting on a low bench, called pensador, “thinker”— is indispensable for the utterance of the Speech. The thinker is described as a “seated person,” and “to sit” is often used as a metaphor for thinking. This reflects a view of wise speech that is found in all Native Americas, according to which to think and speak right one has to be seated low. Like in the classifications saw above, the most important level is the lowest one. Speech performances are also linked to time. The Speech of Life is always performed at night, and nighttime has acquired symbolic relevance in contrast to daytime and institutional discourse. Consequently, the process of negotiation with institutions implies inviting the representatives of such institutions to attend meetings held at nighttime in the maloca. Every night, adult men and at times women, meet in the maloca to discuss and appease the events of the day, and plan next day’s work and the strategies for the near future. Some of the participants have been hanging around since the early afternoon, making coca, reporting about diligencias (trips to offices in town), coming and going from the chagras, the stream, or their homes. When it gets dark, briefly after sunset (which happens regularly at 6:30 p.m.) the maloquero (master of maloca) starts the session asking those present for the topics to be discussed. During the first stage of the talk various issues are brought up. The participants may read documents, discuss problems with neighbors, relate about rumors, or the course of a development project. The participants state their opinion, whether they are asked for it or not (although not all feel they have acquired enough personal power to speak), and the discussion may go on for hours, often acquiring the tones of a verbal competition. To prove their verbal capacity, the speakers may go on at length, ignoring other peoples’ requests to speak or straightforward interruptions. This behavior is criticized by the mesa (the council of mambeadores), as it is seen as an imposition of personal power that deters dialogue. In contrast, dialogue interweaves

164 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

individual voices as threads of a textured “basket of knowledge.” Dialogue is also compared to “corriente,” a flow of energy in which individual thoughts and speeches converge. Next, I shall explore how this integrated whole is pursued.

“Got the Swing?” To Put Flavor to the Speech Even though the mambeadores often claimed that “el diálogo es corriente” (“dialogue is energy”) at first I had disregarded this aspect and focused instead on another reason that was given to me for the importance of dialogue: since every elder does not know everything, and knowledge is seen to be scattered all over, dialogue is needed to literally re-member this body of knowledge. This explanation stresses the place of dialogue in reconstructing and reshaping the contents of knowledge. To say that dialogue is energy, instead, highlights the role of speech in orchestrating individual voices to achieve a tangible quality, and tangible effects. Rules of interlocution and paralinguistic elements are intended to accomplish a textured flow that pleases the senses (“has flavor”). Shortly before leaving the Amazon, Nemesio had me doing an exercise to, he said, “ponerle swing [sic] a la palabra:” “put ‘swing’ to the spoken word.” This technique is aimed at “defining the speech, synthesizing all that has been said, and forming it into a fruit with a sweet core.” One way of giving flavor to dialogue, he said, is through the affirmative reply “jii”, which is pronounced by the interlocutor as a counterpoint to each phrase uttered by the main speaker. The intonation of the reply is seen to convey different meanings.

Jii: “¿Ah sí? ¡Siga!” Really? Go ahead.

Jii: “¡Aha... así! ¡Siga!” That’s it, keep going

Jii: “Ah sí” (ya lo sé) Ok (I already knew that)

After a while, these roles are switched: the interlocutor takes on the word, and the one who was speaking now answers. If the speaker “makes a mistake” (i.e. breaks the flow of the speech), someone else will take on the word, and so on. Apart from the meaning conveyed by words, this rhythm has an aesthetic appeal. At times, participants move out of the circle, and lay down for a while in a hammock or a bench on the opposite side of the maloca.

cHAPTER 4. WEAVING THE BASKET OF LIFE: POETIc PERFORMANcES • 165

As they contemplate the dialogue from afar, without being able to actually hear what it is said, they still approve or disapprove what is going on in the circle of speakers. Evidence from the traditional territory, which unfortunately I was not able to confirm, indicates that conventional gestures, often mimicking the action of weaving a basket, play a role in giving form to a “sweet speech.”

The vantage point of the pilonero: Sensual Integration, Imagery, and Emotional Density As I concentrated on speech utterances, there was something in the first stage of the mambe session that I tended to discard or classify as background noise: the rhythmic sound of the toasting, grinding, and sieving of coca leaves. Little by little I came to understand that the sounds involved in coca preparation should not be taken as background noise, but as a constitutive element of the performance that defines its contours. More than that, the background noise seems to link together speech events. At times, these sounds move from back to foreground, filling with thick presence the pauses of discourse. Some other times they seem to give rhythm to a dull speech. They accommodate the utterances, ‘weave’ them, and provide them with sensory coherence. The multi-sound character of these narratives is especially significant as it is set against the mode of rhetoric speech and the decontaminated formalism of bureaucratic procedures. I suggest that there are at least two effects produced by the noise of coca making. First, it provides the sequel of the utterances with rhythm and continuity. In a way, using Nemesio’s image, it is the “skin of the fruit” that defines its contours. Second, it is a method that triggers what Jeremy Narby (1998, p. 47) calls “defocalization.” As an example of defocalization, he mentions Sherlock Holmes’ “‘lateral’ methods, where he would lock himself into his office and play discordant tunes on his violin late into the night to emerge with the key to the mystery.” By shutting off ordinary perception, rhythm allows the participants to refocalize perception in an extra-ordinary way. That’s why it is said: “el pilonero es el último a llegar pero el primero a aprender,” “the one who pestles is the last to come but the first to learn.” A clue for understanding the elders’ claim that “the tape recorder cannot capture the most important part” comes from theater performance. In an essay on Hijikata Tatsumi, one of the founders of Japanese Butô theater, D’Orazi (1997) argues for a simple yet crucial effect of a successful performance: that of engaging perception and emotion to stir a transformation in the spectator-participant.

166 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

When in 1959 Hijikata Tatsumi presented for the section “new talents” of the Dance Association of Japan, a piece with no music, completely performed in the dark […] He wasn’t merely disregarding any common expectation of the audience but he was irremediably transforming the canonic idea of the body, and with it the modes of artistic fruition. Scholar Goda Nario, who first discovered and supported Hijikata, remembers it in this way: “it was impossible to see anything since the performance developed in complete darkness. We simply had to perceive the atmosphere, the emotional density. A boy was fleeing in the darkness while a man was chasing him. We could hear the noise of the steps and the labored breathing. What was happening could not be clearly seen but still it could be understood. The dancers and the choreographer offered only some conditions, but the feelings, the situation, and the drama were constructed by the public: the drama took place within ourselves. The first difference that Butô established between itself and any other dance genre was the kind of involvement it asked to the audience: the activation of a physical and emotional receptive level. “If everything would have been comprehensible —Goda comments— the public would have been able to understand everything, but only with the brain, it would have been just an intellectual comprehension. Instead, since they could not see clearly, they had to feel it with the whole body. And this is exactly the meaning of dance. (p. 15)

On a similar line, “the perception of bodies in movement induces a kind of echo of subtle tonic variations in the observers, who respond to the perceived movements with their own body…” (Pradier, 1989, quoted in Barba and Savarese, 1991, p. 215). According to Feld (1997, p. 93) “this metaphoric and synesthetic potential recalls iconicity, or the ways in which perceiver and perceived blur and merge through sensuous contact, experiencing inner resemblances that echo, vibrate, and linger as traces from one sensory modality to another, present at one level while absent at others, continually linking bodily experience to thought and to action.” Orientation in this sensual and semantic density is accomplished through the creative manipulation of sedimented and emergent knowledges that are embedded in an embodied system of health and sociality. This embodied system is instrumental in "sifting" and transforming negative emotions toward the pursuit of social harmony, conviviality, and well-being.

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 167

Weaving a Basket: More than a Metaphor Mirando tejiendo descansando Mirando tejiendo descansando Se convierte en experiencia. Watching weaving resting Watching weaving resting It turns into experience. (Uitoto woman)

In a path-breaking study of Desana basketry, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (1985, p. 1) showed that woven artifacts “contain a body of condensed information that transform these simple objects into icons recognized by all as embodying ideas that express organizational principles and guidelines to proper individual and collective behavior.” Reichel-Dolmatoff found out that the symbolism of material, form, and ornament, conveyed a complex body of information that indexed conceptions about fertility and exogamy. Moreover, geometrical outlines referred to the flow of life-sustaining energy as deployed in shamanistic curing rituals. When anthropologist David Guss (1989, pp. 1-2) set off to translate the Yecuana creation epic known as Watunna he realized that “there were not neatly framed ‘storytelling events’ into which the foreign observer could easily slip […]. Rather Watunna was everywhere, like an invisible sleeve holding the entire culture in place.” This led Guss to seek another entrance into the mythic universe. Noticing that “conversation simply did not occur without someone making a basket” and that this activity “orchestrated each dialogue, with pauses and transitions paralleling the critical moments of basket’s construction” he decided to engage in the long apprenticeship of becoming a basket maker. Through a rich learning process he realized the role of basketry in translating and communicating the symbolic system of the Watunna. Guss noticed that that basketry designs represented mythical processes mostly concerned with the transformation of toxicity into something suitable for human consumption. Through these comparative examples we can better understand the specificity of the People of the Center’s complex basketry image, and how it reveals native views of historical agency and continuity. Let us return to the explanation of the basket given by Ocaina sage Kinerai.

168 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

The basket, Kinerai says, is a person. A tradition of rituals is also called a basket, and the master of those rituals is called ‘the basket holder.’ When a person completes a training (as healer or master of rituals), it is said that he/ she ‘closed his/her basket.’ The places where ancient people lived are also referred to as baskets, and if a person wants to live in those places he/she has to know the Word of that basket [...] Baskets are made with threads of vines. The thread (igai) stands for ‘thought.’ The thread is what holds us to the Mother, the umbilical cord, the thread of life. When a sorcerer or a powerful person travel with his/her thought it is said that he/she is traveling ‘in the thread of dream.’ A material basket is a woven thread, likewise a person is a woven thread of dream. […] Men make baskets and other woven devices for women to work with. Basketry symbolizes exogamy and marriage alliances. These alliances are going to hold new life—children. (Candre and Echeverri, 1996, pp. 49-51)

This image weaves together consanguinity and affinity, knowledge and rank, ritual and the power of thought, day-to-day care and the creative power of dream, and the relevance of all this for place-making. Through this image, indigenous societies respond to alien representations of culture as bounded and uniform entities frozen in time, with their own views of culture as textured, relational, and historical. Similarly to Novalis’ analogy of theories and fishing nets, baskets are woven with a specific goal in mind. They represent the complexity of knowledge and culture as the weaving process, both creative and constrained; as both structured and emergent pattern, and as what the basket contains: information, food, people.

Performances for Survival: Curing the Body, the Society, and the World Arquímedes is son of maloquero and a leader of the resguardo. He has a reputation for being a philosopher, a fine craftsman, and an apprentice brujo. Everyone knows his penchant for caçaza, and he knows that that is the “power of the White men.” One day he shows up drunk like hell at an important meeting that has been organized between the Gobernación del Amazonas and the resguardo´s leadership. Burning issues need to be discussed, since the Gobernación has bypassed the local government and presented the resguardo’s Plan of Territorial Ordering without consulting with its inhabitants.

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 169

Arquímedes arrives late and puts up a show interrupting the meeting. He accuses government officials of corruption and bribery, faults everybody is aware of but no one has the guts to denounce. Armed with the truth of cane alcohol and with the colombian political constitution he speaks out without fear. His neighbors pull him out of the hall, while the outraged government officials send for the police. At that point, Arquímedes puts his papers back in his bag, gets on his bike, and rides safely away, showing that he is not that drunk, or at least not as drunk as he wanted the funcionarios to believe: “the shaman is a show man.” Is it possible to find similarities in performances such as Arquímedes’ act, the Speech of Life, and Butô theater without forcing them into the procrustean bed of a general theory? In a performative approach to ritual, Stanley Tambiah (1979, p. 119) argues for a multifaceted definition of performance. Ritual action is performative in three senses: “in the Austinian sense of performative wherein saying something is also doing something as a conventional act; in a quite different sense of a staged performance that uses multiple media by which the participants experience the event intensively; and in the third sense of indexical values —[deriving] this concept from Peirce— being attached to and inferred by actors during the performance.” By developing a cosmological perspective of ritual performance, Tambiah moves beyond the neo-Tylorian dichotomy between religion and the secular. The idea of cosmology he deploys, however, is exceedingly rigid, as performance ends up being merely the enactment of preexisting cosmological rules. In the resguardo, there is no such thing as certainty of meaning, no sacrosanct principles “constantly used as a yardstick” (Tambiah, 1979, p. 121). Instead, these performances are ceaselessly creating a tension between the normal, the unexpected, and the imagined. They push beyond the unthinkable to envision an altogether different cosmology, one in which humans have the power to do such things as debunking a politician or curing the cosmos. The purpose of these performances is not the restoration of order and conventional meaning. When order is an ideal, or better an illusion always slipping away and always changing, the purpose of these performances cannot be to reestablish order, but to learn how to deal with disorder. They involve rummaging through disorder to create with the true spirit of a bricoleur. Along this line, Johannes Fabian (1990, p. 13) points out that performance can have “a guiding function in investigations where we encounter neither social order nor equilibrium, nor a homogeneous shared culture

170 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

embodying undisputed values and norms.” He developed this idea dialectically by analyzing two shortcomings he saw in some performance theory: positivity and political naïveté. With positivity he indicates: “the tendency to privilege theoretically and empirically as ‘the rule’ behavior which affirms or enacts presumed societal values. Conversely, action that denies, contests, lacks commitment, or simply dissimulates will be qualified as anything between curious and deviant” (p. 16). But, he argues, performance is the tip of an iceberg, and does not represent its submerged part. “That tip is not a token of the submerged body. It is a part, a moment of a process” (p. 12), one that can only be conceived as metonymic, not metaphoric. The other shortcoming Fabian saw in performance theory is political naïveté: the “fascination with the communicative, esthetically creative, inspiring, and entertaining qualities of cultural performances [that] all too easily make us overlook that the people who perform relate to each other and to their society at large in terms of power” (p. 117). Performances are often the only vehicle of public dissent left to people. But also, as the people of the resguardo show us, they provide possibilities for empowerment that go beyond the expression of dissent. In this regard, the distinction made by Raymond Williams (1973, pp. 10-11, quoted by Bauman, 1977, p. 48) between “residual” and “emergent” culture is particularly relevant. “Residual culture” refers to those “experiences, meaning and values which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, [but] are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue —cultural as well as social— of some previous social formation.” Williams contrasted this “residual” culture to “emergent culture,” in which “new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences are continually being created.” The Speech of Life is able to transform residual into emergent culture. In so doing it reverses the view of knowledge, speech, and agency put forward by development institutions, and it gains control upon that alien view through a process of curing. As Fabian (1990) remarks, Victor Turner’s work constituted a noticeable exception to the shortcomings of performance theory for its attention to negativity as anti-structure. Turner’s last essays (1987) express “the need to ground performance, to seek its foundations in those depths of human acting that are about survival” (p. 17). In spite of finding Turner’s suggestion appealing, Fabian maintains some doubts about the possibility of finding in performances “anything ‘harder’ than political praxis.” Fabian is “unable to

Chapter 4. Weaving the Basket of Life: Poetic Performances • 171

see how reductions to brain structure and ethology could justify explanations or interpretations of performance that would lead us to ignore historically established conditions of power and oppression” (p. 18). But I believe Turner goes beyond what Fabian contends. Turner’s notion of liminality highlights the subversive role of performance on both cognitive and political levels. Performance “draws its materials from all aspects of experience, both from the interior milieu and the external environment” (Turner, 1987, p. 169), and it rearranges these materials according to what Turner calls “the subjunctive mood.” Subjunctivity “refers to what may or might be. It is also concerned with supposition, conjecture, and assumption, with the domain of ‘as-if’ rather than ‘as-is’” (p. 169). I think it is possible to take Turner’s direction of linking performance to resilience without reducing it to brain structure or ethology. Bakhtin (1984) provides an interesting suggestion in this regard when he noticed that a link existed between the expressions of popular medicine, and those of popular art. Street performers and drugs sellers were often one and the same. This connection is still visible nowadays in Andean South America in the person of the culebrero (street healer). But I cannot avoid thinking of that wonderful definition —“el chamán es un show man”— given to me by Don Voltaire, a mestizo ayahuasquero of San Juan de Socó. As Taussig argued (1987), ritual mobilizes history in order to cure it. Then, it is possible to ground performance in cognitive and emotional processes, as Turner indicated, and still keep a focus on power struggle, by seeing performances as complex creative acts that manipulate both sedimented and emergent structures to bring an imagined, different world into being.

172 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Chapter Five Organization: Histories and Territories Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting. (M ilan K under a . Testaments B etr ayed, p. 128) I speak as an indigenous person, yes! It is biculturality that we are managing nowadays. Even when I am mambeing. Even when I am sleeping. In this way we are going to have voice with authority and the strength to order all this. (Murui leader)

A Place to Sit Doña Eulalia yearned for knowledge. In a yagé vision she saw her ancestors: there were three of them. They said: “how come you ask for knowledge if you are a woman? Women cannot ask for this.” She answered: “nosotras también tenemos derecho,” “we too have the right.” The ancestors said: “you have knowledge. It is here,” and hit the ground with a stick. They said: “look at your hand. There’s where knowledge is.” Then, they showed her a huge chagra (swidden plot) with plenty of manioc, plantain, coca, peanut plants. “Había de todo,” “it was plenty of everything.” She narrates. Doña Eulalia’s husband, Don Rafael, is a Quechua-speaking Ingano and ayahuasquero. He moved down to Leticia in the early 1990’s, and after three months Don Rafael and Doña Eulalia went living together. In a series

of visions, the ancestors taught him about mambe and they gave him to mambe for the first time. In a vision, the ancestors (who were now five) told Doña Eulalia: “Your husband is going to build a maloca. He is your husband.” And they pointed to Don Rafael (“because the others were not my grooms,” says Doña Eulalia, who had had two partners before she met Don Rafael. “They lived off me. They did not respect me”). The ancestors said: “If you don’t want anything to happen to you or your husband, you must build a maloca, because we don’t have anywhere to go, we don’t have anywhere to sit. If you build the house, there we will go.” “When my father died,” says Doña Eulalia, “I cried and cried: ‘I am an orphan.’ He died scorched like a rat [while burning a swidden field]. My husband consoled me: ‘A nimairama never dies, his heart lives, listen to his voice.’ And I heard him when he sang at a dance in the maloca offering cahuana to the guests.” Doña Eulalia had lots of coca growing, but an envious maloquero living nearby called the police to uproot the plants. With the remaining plants, about thirty, and the help of three other families, she built her maloca. It took them eight months. She fed them casabe, plantain, cahuana. So far (in the year 2000), they have already had three inauguration dances. The reason I chose this narrative to begin a chapter on indigenous organization, is at least threefold. First, Doña Eulalia’s narrative reveals that leadership for the People of the Center is not merely predicated on inherited rank but on the ability to attain such rank through knowledge and its tangible outcome: people and food. Second, it points to the creation of an intercultural identity through the dialectic practice of cultural negation (see Fabian, 2001). Third, it locates the processes of re-organization at the intersection of memory and forgetting, and place-making, what Keith Basso (1996) called “place-worlds.” All this is developed through processes of constant redefinition that imply claiming rights, occupying territories, debating histories, contesting, as well as reaffirming, cultural norms and values, re-envisioning social relationships, and imaging the future in the place of memory and loss. The narrative opens with Doña Eulalia’s passionate claim for knowledge. She is a middle-age woman of high-rank, daughter of a nimairama, a man of knowledge master of maloca. She has traveled various times back and forth from Putumayo to Leticia. She is actively involved in the resguardo’s cultural and political activities, and as a member of the council of elders

174 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

she is often invited to give her advice on current events. She is an esteemed woman, knowledgeable of woman’s choirs and prerogatives, and speaker of a good word, not the word of gossip or quarrel, but the word that gives advice and that makes things soothe and grow. What is, then, the knowledge that she so much longs for, but is not allowed to request? The narrative suggests that it is the knowledge for becoming an iyaima, a chief, master of maloca. But Doña Eulalia negates many cultural rules for becoming a maloquero: she is a woman, she is foreign to the territory, she lives with an outsider whose ethnic group does not use mambe traditionally, she drinks ayahuasca (or yagé; Banisteriopsis caapi with plant additives), a potent hallucinogenic brew not commonly accessible to women and, among the People of the Center, used only in exceptional cases by shamans. However, with a simple answer (“we too have the right”), Doña Eulalia is able to persuade the ancestors. She is not asking for knowledge for her personal benefit, but as part of a collectivity. Her answer is the wise word of a nimairama, always aimed at harmonizing unbalance. By showing her adherence to a higher authority, as both the collective interest and the “law of origin,” she breaks down the cultural rules that do not allow her to access a position of power commonly held by men. Once convinced, the ancestors show her her own path of knowledge, which is embodied in the land and in the work of her hands. Her power depends on how she manages this relationship. She has a dream of abundance: a chagra plenty of all kind of food. This is a dream on how to gather people and care for them. But it is also a dream of people (see Candre and Echeverri, 1996). As different species grow in a chagra without harming each other, different people can live harmoniously together if tended by good spiritual and physical work (we will see shortly how the chagra is mobilized as a symbol of interculturalit, that engages ideas of cultivation, symbiosis, and bio-diversity). Now her intentions must be put in practice. The ancestors teach Don Rafael how to mambe, they legitimize their union, and press her to build the maloca. They start crowding her dreams (“now they are five”), with an almost threatening presence. Now that she called them, and, metonymically, the knowledge they own, she must provide them with a place where their knowledge can “sit.” By linking her visions of the ancestors to the memory of her dead father, Doña Eulalia gives us a clear message on the significance she attributes to the maloca. First of all, the maloca provides Doña Eulalia with a sense of emotional dwelling (see Basso, 1996). As she tries to overcome the

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 175

sorrow for the death of her father, lamenting she is now an “orphan” —that is, someone without parents, but also an outcast (see Chapter 2)— she hears him singing in the maloca as he offers cahauana to the guests gathered for a dance ritual. Like a seashell, the maloca retains and reproduces the voices of the past that inspire and lend poetic force to the ways in which the present can be imagined.1 The maloca is a symbol of community, founded on affinal alliances, and more generally on alliances with the natural environment, other malocas, the neighbors, and State institutions, and made possible by the sweet “thought, speech, and work” of the spiritual leader. As the place where the wisdom of the ancestors sits, the maloca is a vehicle for cultural reproduction, enacted through daily work and the performance of rafue (as both dance and speech rituals). This center of power is built on the work in the chagra and the word of coca (the word of education, discipline, healing, and organization). When these elements are strong, they act as a defense. Not even the envy of a powerful maloquero can against them. The idea of interculturality emerges strongly in this narrative. I suggest that interculturality is closely dependent on what Fabian (2001) recently called “negativity”. This refers to a “critical mode of reflection […] that negates what a culture affirms, […] and the idea of culture itself” (p. 93). According to Fabian, we should see negativity —“negation of the concepts we work with, or of the beliefs we hold— as a condition of forming concepts or holding beliefs” (p. 89). The idea of negativity helps us understand hybrid cultures in their own right, and not as the leftover of an idealized ‘traditional’ culture. Agency implies historical selection, and the People of the Center have made their program to forget certain histories. This voluntary act of forgetting concerns the “baskets” of cannibalism, interethnic warfare, and the Cauchería, which —they say— have been buried away. However, they are not obliterating the past, but they are implicitly acknowledging the impracticality of certain memories for their present struggle. In so doing, they are putting down the conditions for their program in the present, based on more or less peaceful interethnic alliances, including with the Whites. In general, mythical knowledge does not negates history, but is as expression of historicity itself, produced through a dialogue with the past that enables the acting in the present.

1. The ending -ko of the Uitoto name for maloca, ‘ayoko,’ indexes a semispherical container such as a nutshell or a gourd vessel.

176 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Photo 7: They showed her a huge chagra (swidden plot) with plenty of manioc, plantain, coca, peanut plants. “Había de todo,” “it was plenty of everything”. Photo: Giovanna Micarelli.

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 177

The concept of negativity also allows us to see the negation of culture as a form of resistance against colonial and post-colonial oppression. This creative resistance, which is expressed often times by means of dissimulation and mimesis, cannot be accommodated by the dominant concept of culture that, following Fabian (2001, p. 88), “deserves being castigated for its emphasis on integration, conformity, and equilibrium; for privileging identity over change; for advocating purity and authenticity over hybridity and syncretism; for being fixed on symbols and meanings rather than on performances and praxis.” Fabian also points out that “what makes a culture, any kind of culture, viable, that is imaginable as a way of living and surviving, is the capacity not only to negate and resist that which attacks you but also to contest that which embraces you or makes you embrace it.” This helps us understand how Doña Eulalia’s speech is able to seep into the fissures of the hegemonic norms that establish masculine authority and crack them open. She is an agent of change who responds innovatively to internal domination, at the same time reestablishing cultural norms at a more inclusive level.

Routes and Roots: The Performance of Identity For the People of the Center demands for rights seem to contrast ideas of exclusivity or individuality, a view that can be found among several Amazonian people. As recent indigenous struggles reveal —for instance those against oil companies—, rights claims draw their motivation from ideas of interdependence of a collectivity of beings, and based on such idea indigenous groups affirm their responsibility to defend life for everyone, not only for their own people. In general, the intention to elevate oneself above others is considered a symptom of an anti-social disposition, one that brings about conflict and illness. So, for instance, the Gente de Centro claim that “the one who really knows never say ‘I know’; rather he/she says “this is the Word entrusted to us by the Creator, the Grandfather of Tobacco”. Quoting the ancestors is a way to strengthen a collective sense of identity. At the same time, the nightly obsession of the knowledgeable-ones for reordering relations is an instance of how the real or virtual incorporation of the other is fundamental to indigenous understandings of who they are. The analysis of current processes of identity formation and organization cannot be taken apart from the recognition of the complexity of native social worlds that is revealed by a growing number of ethnohistorical and archaeological studies. These studies shed light on forms of stratified organization

178 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

of pre-conquest Amazonian polities, their complex and large-scale economies and organized warfare, and the regional patterns of indigenous settlements (Whitehead, 1993). In the Llanos de Mojos of Northeastern Bolivia, for instance, a complex of thousands of ridges, drainage ditches, and raised platforms associated with causeways and habitation mounds is “indicative of large, well-organized populations” (Denevan, 1992, p. 210). Roosevelt (1993, p. 274) brought archaeological evidence to indicate “the presence for more than a thousand years of populous complex societies of indigenous origins, with urban-scale settlements, intensive subsistence and craft-production systems, and rituals and ideologies linked to systems of social hierarchy and political centralization.” The importance of long-distance trade networks to maintain such polities has also been pointed out (Scazzochio, 1978; Helms, 1987). These data shape a view of ethnicity that “did not necessarily coincide with particular economic, political, or linguistic, systems but could also be founded on an economic technique or specialization that was part of […] a wider system of exchange.” (Whitehead, 1994, p. 37). Accordingly, the intense longstanding hostilities between riverine and backwood groups need to not to be determined ecologically, but could be understood in connection with the differential control of flows of exchange goods and information, and the participation in a system of prestige reflected in cosmological views. Despite the relatively small-scale economy on contemporary Amazonian societies, an ideology of hierarchy and dependence that we would associate with chieftaincy is still at work and it seems to affect the ways in which interethnic relations are currently organized. In the Colombian region of the Vaupés, for example, the relation between the Tukano, Arawak, Carib, and Makú, is still thought of locally in hierarchical terms, suggesting that these groups were once possibly joined into a single social order. According to Goldman (1993) “the Cubeo, for example, consider themselves to have been the ‘junior’ of the Desana, and the Tukano tribe is still recognized by some as the highest in rank of all [...] Although Tukanoan and Arawakan intermarriages are predicated on social equality, they nevertheless bear a taint of assimilation […] The Makú, who are regarded by Tukanoans as intrinsically alien […] are nevertheless enmeshed with them. [They] are still the traditional servitors of Tukanoan masters, in relationships that have persisted for generations” (p. 139). The strategic adoption of foreign physical appearance through body-tattoo, skull deformation, or style emulation observed in different regions of Amazonia (DeBoer, 1990; Erickson, 1986; Henley and

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 179

Mattéi-Muller, 1978) may also be understood as an attempt to appropriate and deploy the visible signs of rank. For the People of the Center, hierarchy denotes both the relationship between linguistic groups, and their internal organization. Rank, though, is based on specialized knowledge and skills, so it may be rearranged every time on the basis of specific activities. These ethnographic findings cannot be taken apart from the specificity of native Amazonians’ theories of society, in particular the view of identity as highly unstable, not just constructed in contrast with, but shaped through the incorporation of the Other (Descola and Palsson, 1996; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). In reviewing studied on social structure from Central Brazil, Vaupés, and Guiana, Overing-Kaplan (1981) notices that in spite of differences in social organization an underlying philosophy of society seems to be at work. This philosophy, which finds correspondence in mythology and cosmology, expresses the idea that contact and proper mixing of difference is prerequisite to the existence of life and society, and it points to a model of circulation of energy based on the control and transformation of toxicity in a source of life. This concept is sometimes visually represented in crafts (Guss, 1989). If for native Amazonians “the self is only possible through the incorporation of the other” (Santos-Granero, 2009, p. 478), such incorporation is not meant to completely erase alterity, but to rework it into the fabric of society, like different fibers are interwoven to make a basket. For instance, the classification of human beings into We, the Others (similar to us), and the altogether foreign, observed among Panoan, Quechua, and Arawak groups (Erickson, 1986; Keifenheim, 1990; Renard Casevitz, et al. 1988; Scazzocchio, 1978), attributes to the Others the role of mediating between We and absolute alterity; they are potential affines and designated as ‘wife-givers’ (Descola, 1986). Data on multilingualism and linguistic exogamy in the Northwest Amazon (Sorensen, 1967; Jackson, 1983; Hugh-Jones, 1992; Whitten, 1976) add further detail to this picture. The idea of proper mixing of difference also permeates local historicities. For the Piro of the Bajo Urubamba (Gow, 1991), both intermarriage and the ability to channel productive activity into relations of exchange with the outsiders is what make people civilizados in contrast to the bravos (wild) Yaminahua. In a similar way, the Canelos Quichua of Amazonian Ecuador (Whitten, 1976) construct ethnic continuity out of the symbolic duality between alli runa (caserío people), and sacha runa (forest people). So, the complementarity Self/Other is not just constitutive of identity, but it allows indigenous people to harness cultural change through the

180 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

acquisition of power from external sources of technical and symbolic knowledge. In a comparative study of millenarianism in Amazonia, Michael Brown (1991) describes the role of outsiders in the quest for new conceptual categories and political empowerment, and he argues against the reduction of utopian renewal to an expression of resistance to colonial and neocolonial State control. Prophets are figures marginal to the community, and by virtue of their status they are capable of bypassing the political constraints of existing social units, establishing alternative forms of social integration. These include attempts to reject social ranking, as in the Tupi-Guaraní movements, or to establish new social hierarchies. Following Brown, Amazonian millenarian movements should be seen as manifestations of political struggle internal to Amazonian societies, grounded in the tension between hierarchical and egalitarian tendencies. These processes […] Exemplify the capacity of Amazonian millenarian movements to steer native societies through the rough waters of their own internal contradictions: tendencies toward hierarchy versus a fierce commitment to equality; the continuity of myth versus the need for change in response to new circumstances; ethnic boundaries maintenance versus regional integration; resistance to new symbol systems versus their active assimilation. (Brown, 1991, p. 406)

In this light, the concept of identity becomes highly problematic. To avoid obscuring both internal differentiation, and the active participation of indigenous people to complex processes of intercultural exchange and transformation requires an acknowledgment of the centrality of performance to the indigenous project of fabrication of the self and sociality. In this perspective, interculturality cannot be seen as the result of hybridization or syncretism. Rather, it emerges from cosmological orientations that establish interdependence as a life-supporting principle, always created anew, but at the same time appealing to the “law of origin.” This picture of intercultural dialectics, and the need to envision senses of self and history that contrast t, comment on, and also include, foreign representations of such selves and histories, is echoed in the ongoing resignification of coca and tobacco. In Preuss’s early 20th-century collection of Uitoto mythology (1994), ambil is not associated with ‘intelligence’ or ’wisdom’ but rather with shamanic trance and transformation (p. 168), vengeance by cannibalism (pp. 203, 223, 255), spiritual aid in hunting, curing, and fighting (pp. 148, 168), with conjuring up the spiritual power

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 181

of the ancestors (pp. 300), with inviting people to a dance ritual, and as a payment for songs. In a commentary, one of the informants states that it is because of ambil that people have knowledge of tradition. On the other hand, in contrast to its omnipresence in contemporary indigenous ritual and public discourse, coca is rarely mentioned in Preuss’s collection. When it appears, it is associated with conviviality and alliance: it is offered to guests, and consumed before leaving for a trip in a foreign territory (pp. 223, 329), it is given as thank or payment (pp. 143, 302, 418), or to infuse courage (pp. 418). And like nowadays, people mambe at night to teach tradition and appropriate behavior (p. 680), and they plant coca before a dance ritual. To complicate this interpretation is a fact that Preuss mentions only in passing. He collected these oral narratives in a settlement of Uitoto people who were working as debt-bondsmen for the rubber patrons. So, it is highly possible that the narratives convey a commentary on such circumstances. In any case, a slippage between different shades of meaning is palpable. On one side are the contemporary connotations of coca and tobacco that underline values of peace, coexistence, tolerance, and wisdom, which may seem rather acquiescent— at least on the public forefront. On the other are past connotations that stretch between alliance and sorcery, vengeance, warfare, and cannibalism. Slippage in this semantic spectrum gives people room for adjusting their footings in an ongoing dialogue with the past. Ambiguity here becomes a basic tool for strategic redefinition. In any case, as evidenced by the leaders’ discourses below, coca becomes not only a symbol of resistance, and the basis on which to articulate demands for rights and equality, but it also emerges as a vehicle of intercultural solidarity and conviviality. Cocaine is of the white men because it is white. Coca is green because nature loves the indigenous people, as indigenous people love nature. What indigenous person drives around in a brand new SUV? What indigenous person owns a luxury home in Leticia? Cocaine circulates in the streets, in the neighborhoods, in the bars, in the luxury hotels of Leticia. The judge consumes it, the lawyer consumes it, the doctor consumes it, the soldier consumes it, the policeman consumes it. What do we consume? We simply mambe, to awaken a spirit of social well-being. This is what we are seeking today. Respect us! We have to produce an upfront document with a copy not only to local authorities, but to authorities at a national level as well, because here one of the fundamental rights of indigenous people is being violated.(Murui leader)

182 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

The wisdom that this medicinal plant gives us […] has been corrupted by some who frenzied of improving their economic conditions by leaps and bounds, that has left vice in our society, both of the colonos and of the Indians, the vice of frantically earning income, and we forgot about the authorities and the State, and we thought of ourselves as being independent.(Muina leader) Coca for us is not a vice. It is our custom. Comparison is made between coca and alcohol. What do you see with alcohol? Widows, orphans, dead, wounded, imprisoned. Go look and see with coca, there are no widows! When I came here I was sad, because to a maloquero to uproot his coca is to destroy him. Coca is our book of intelligence and wisdom, coca is our law, coca is our regulation, coca is our sixth sense, coca is our wife, and our spiritual mother. This is coca for us. With this we cure, with this we fix problems. That’s why the Amazonas stands as an example of peaceful world! We are not differentiating between one and the other because we unite our strength by means of coca. We are not saying to the Bora, the Muinane, the Andoke “your coca is useless.” No. We speak different languages but it is the same use, directly from the Creator. On the contrary, you the whites do this. Because when the Bible arrived, thousands of sects were born and this is what is confusing humanity nowadays, because each one pulls to his side. The Catholic says: “mine is good.” The Evangelic says: “No. Mine is good.” On the contrary, for us coca is good for everyone, where there is integration, where there is compassion, where every situation of sadness and danger is solved by means of coca, of dialogue. Among all of us, we have to regulate this law to get strong again, and since this is our law we are not up to negotiate, this is for the survival of all humanity. (Muina leader) Why do they accuse us of cocaine? Accuse instead the gringos who put chemicals in the coca! Coca is one of the plants of yesterday, today and tomorrow for the ethnic groups that manage it. It must be established as the primordial base of a true Departmental Plan of Development. To get stronger, not to recover, but to strengthen ourselves who live in this quotidian time. My proposal is that the lots of each maloquero, each cacique, or each capitán, be respected. […] Because from that the defense of our people comes. And that each mambeador has his lot too. This within a record of our authority, let’s say, a census, for a better equality of respect for our authority (“para una mayor equidad de respeto para nuestra autoridad”).(Murui-mestizo leader)

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 183

Such emphasis on intercultural meanings does not necessarily dismiss the existence of distinct ethnic or cultural identities. As a matter of fact, native Amazonians are very precise in establishing the boundaries of their identities. These boundaries, though, are relational, situated, and performative. According to indigenous leaders, they are predicated on age, gender, lineage, clan and supra-clan membership, zonal association, class, religion, guild, regional, national, ethnic, supra-ethnic, and Pan-Indian identity. It seems that the more there are, the better it is, because the objective is not recognition on the basis of identity, but on the basis of diversity, or better “biodiversity,” as they name it with a term borrowed from the sustainable Development vocabulary. An element that is excluded from one’s identity may suddenly become constitutive of it. We may look at such processes of identification as based on “communities of practice.” Following Lave and Wenger (1991, p. 98) this notion does not imply necessarily “co-presence, well-defined, identifiable groups, or socially visible boundaries. It does imply participation in an activity system about which participants share understanding concerning what they are doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities.” This does not exclude that side by side with interdependence, essentialism can become prevailing, for example as it is used in the critique against the re-indianizados to establish rights over a territory (see Nash, 2001). However, these ideas are not predicated on a priori concepts of exclusion. Rather, they engage notions of morality based on everyday practice.

O Abïmo Erokaï, ‘Look at Your Body’: An Indigenous Project Narrar é resistir. To narrate is to resist. (João G uimar ães R osa)

At the end of 1998 I found myself involved in a research project without fully realizing how that had happened. The Ministry of Culture-Fondo Mixto had called for proposals to pursue research on the theme “Histories of Daily Life.” In a country of precarious jobs and vast informal economy such as Colombia, the announcement of a grant never goes unnoticed. It stirs the wits of a wide range of people, from academics, to NGO practitioners, to bureaucracy’s officials, to indigenous leaders, and it mobilizes rumors and information that

184 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

foster oblique and temporary networks of alliance and antagonism. El rebusque (moonlighting) allows a big proportion of the population, including those who hold university degrees, to get by without a steady job. In indigenous Amazonia, this is complicated by the outbreak of witchcraft that typically goes along with any project that has to do with the acquisition of money. When the Fondo Mixto grant was announced I didn’t have the least intention to apply. My Wenner-Gren grant was not going to end soon, and I was busy conducting research with development institutions in town. One day, a friend who was at times collaborating with the Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï (N.N.I.) community, incidentally told me that a group of indigenous leaders were looking for someone to help them conceptualizing and writing a proposal for the Fondo Mixto. “I hope you don’t mind if I suggested that they talked to you,” he said. Later on I realized that he had told the leaders that I was interested in writing a joint proposal with them. So it went that our conversations started to converge, in a rather awkward way, on the theme “histories of daily life.” At first, these conversations were oriented by our mutual anticipation of an imminent disclosure that neither of us wanted to push, fearing that it might have hurt the susceptibility of the other party. But day after day, we became more and more intrigued in the discussion. When we finally realized that our common friend had set us up, we were so enmeshed in the topic that we couldn’t but write and submit the proposal. The decision was formalized with specially prepared mambe and ambil, and the proposal was given the name: Histories of daily life in the Indigenous Community Nimaira Naimeki Ibiri - Muina Murui, Kilómetro 11, with relation to interculturality. More mambe and ambil were prepared to catch this modern prey, something that proved to be effective as the prey fell in the trap we set, and we got the grant. The project itself was shaped by several events that took place in the preceding months. In 1996 the cacique of the N.N.I. maloca came to the realization that one of the reasons for the falling apart of the indigenous communities in the resguardo —the problems of internal conflicts, violence, drug addition, alcoholism, poverty, and so on— depended on the fact that from the 1950s on, the People of the Center had settled in a territory that was traditionally under Tikuna jurisdiction without asking for permission to the Tikuna spiritual masters of the land. Hence, he made the decision to hold a dance ritual to befriend the Tikuna spirits, and “clean” the territory. The dance ritual (inauguration of the manguaré drums) and the meetings that preceded it saw the participation of the parcialidades of the resguardo, and of Tikuna communities from as far as 70 miles away.

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 185

Another benchmark event was the 1998 election of progressive Arcesio Murillo to the Government of the Amazonas Department with the support of indigenous voters. His program— significantly called Agenda 21 for keeping to the resolutions of the Rio de Janeiro U.N. Conference on Environment and Development— was the result of broad consultations with the sectors of the regional society. The Plan Departmental de Desarrollo incorporated the local plans that each sector had produced. The Murillo Government had to face enormous opposition from its adversaries, mostly landowners and entrepreneurs often operating at the margin of the law. Using any possible means, including threats, Murillo’s adversaries were eventually able, toward the end of 1999, to force him out of office. In the same year of 1998, the U.S. backed war on drugs escalated, and the military started entering the resguardos to uproot coca plants, taking to jail the comuneros who dared to protest. Indigenous groups have historically been involved, willing or not, in each of the recurring predatory exploitations of Amazonian resources, being drawn by the promise of good earnings, paid the first time, and then trapped in a vicious system of debt-bondage. During the 1980s, to the early 1990s, the resguardo served as a labor pool for the process of cocaine production. Men and women were flown to remote areas in the forest, hundred of miles away from Leticia, where they worked for a few months in processing cocaine and then flown back to the resguardo. The catastrophic consequences of working for the cocaine business, the spiraling of abjection caused by violence, prostitution, addiction, and illegality, triggered a response that cling to coca as a valued cultural resource and remedy. Emerging from this scenario, the Fondo Mixto project was intended to provide a better understanding of the causes of the problems affecting the N.N.I. — Kilómetro 11 parcialidad, and to propose viable strategies to solve them. In the first place, it planned to analyze the “relations of contact” through the histories of settlement and the daily activities related to the appropriation of a new territory and of new cultural models. Also, research was aimed at identifying alternative resources and forms of organization, government, and administration. The goal of this process —the indigenous researchers argued— was to articulate an actualized vision of their society in relation to their history, a step which they considered indispensable in order to strengthen their capacity for organization and decision-making with respect to State politics, particularly the frameworks of multiculturalism, decentralization, and territorial ordering (Ordenamiento territorial). Moreover,

186 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

the project aimed to form young cultural promoters under the guidance of the cacique and the Council of elders. The project revolved around two main ideas. The first was that in order to actively participate in processes of development indigenous people had to start from the recognition of their actual situation, which had to be weighted against historical transformations, in particular of models of administration of the territory seen as a network of social and natural relations. The second idea focused on the role of education as conducive to cultural identity. Indigenous researchers claimed that a decontextualized education such as the one carried out in the community, could not respond, nor contribute to, the parcialidad’s Plan of Development, as it did not strengthen those visions and practices that guarantee a healthy relationship between humans and their environment, actually putting such relationship in danger. Moreover, the project engaged a critique of development as a magic formula capable of resolving the problems of the parcialidad. This involved examining how development had been introduced in the parcialidad; how it regulated the daily living; why it had failed and how it was appropriated and transformed by people; what effect it had on the processes of identification, and on the ways in which people positioned themselves with respect to the local and national society. Through such native analysis, development was revealed as a culturally and historically specific project of colonization of reality, one in which only certain thoughts can be expressed or imagined. The leaders argued that in spite of the good intentions of many development practitioners, projects failed in promoting people’s self-administration and participation, people were still depending on institutions to define their idea of development, and this hindered integral processes of endogenous development. The project’s pragmatic response to this state of things was to build new models of coexistence based on mutual recognition. “We lack models,” says Arquímedes, one of the Muina researchers. “This is the problem of speaking two languages. When we use one, we forget the other.” So, one of the project’s main questions was how to mediate between lo propio — “our own” — and lo ajeno— “the foreign”. This endeavor was revealed in the project’s planned activities, which included a comparison of institutional and local understandings of such concepts as family, community, territory, and economy, the assessment of the parcialidad’s human and natural resources, the elaboration of maps of the relationship between humans and their territory, and a workshop of social photography, using this information toward the design of the Plan de

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 187

Ordenamiento Territorial. It also included video-recording of ritual events, plenary meetings to report the project’s progress to the community, and the incorporation of the project’s findings in educational curricula. One of the ways in which the researchers asserted the specificity of their project was to organize it according to clans. As noted, clans and lineages manage specialized knowledge and skills and are marked by exclusive rights and duties. Rank is at the same time inherited and achieved through personal commitment and the practical demonstration of one’s capacity. In the dismembered communities resulting from the rubber boom genocide and diaspora, this may become a serious obstacle to social organization. As an elder claimed: “how am I going to listen to this cacique if I have to respect the lineage of cacigazgo that belongs to my Murui clan?” Development projects did not provide assistance for reconstructing this social system; on the contrary, they ignored it altogether, not only failing, but also becoming a source of conflict in the parcialidad. The argument of the Council of elders for refurbishing this system stressed that this is a system for organizing work. Consequently, the four researchers of the Fondo-Mixto project were designated according to the two main supra-clanic Uitoto groups: Muina and Murui. What’s more, one of the objectives of the project was to identify the prerogatives of each clan and lineage represented in the community, as this information was considered to be crucial for generating endogenous strategies of self-administration. So, native modes of thinking and doing managed to seep into a foreign genre such as “the project,” and to appropriate it. The intent of this discussion is not to describe the project’s outcome, nor to argue if it achieved or not its planned objectives, but to show how it turned into a scenario for asserting views of time, agency, and knowledge, that are alternative to those fostered by development.

Chronograms: Who Controls Time? Once we had secured the grant it was decided that I would withdraw from the group to let the indigenous researchers conduct the investigation on their own. The research team consisted of two elders and two young leaders, fathers and sons belonging to the Muina and Murui supra-clan groups. One of the requisites of the Fondo-Mixto was that the grant recipient had to hire a project supervisor, the interventor, and paid him or her 10% of the received sum. The interventor is supposed to mediate between the grant recipients

188 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

and the institution. He or she is in charge of controlling that the project complies with the set objectives and deadlines, periodically producing recommendations upon which the payment of subsequent grant installments depends. Clearly, this is a figure conducive to bribery, and oftentimes the interventorías are given away in exchange for political favors. A common scenario is that after the first phase of the project, the interventor starts quibbling, to make believe that the investigation is not proceeding well. He/she presents a different version to the institution to cash the next payments, which he/she may share with the bureaucrat in charge, and then makes him/herself unavailable. To avoid this scenario and to have better chances to complete the research in their own terms, the group decided to hire me as interventora.2 I was responsible for monitoring the research, and I had to make sure that the project’s goals were accomplished according to the timetable. At this point something would systematically happen when I tried to schedule a meeting with the research group. After we had set a time for the meeting either they would not show up, or arrive some hours late, or earlier, or even another day. I knew that if I had informally invited them at home they would have come at the time set. Though, such an informal approach did not work for the project. When I tried to raise issues related to the project during informal meetings, they forcefully stated that that was not the right time and/or place to talk about it. Everything had to be set in advance, and special coca and tobacco prepared for the purpose. So I tried to follow a more formal procedure: I sent them letters of invitation with receipt copy, I even presented them with tobacco in the maloca the night before the meeting, reminding them of the topics to be discussed. Nothing worked. There was something going on that I couldn’t figure out, a sort of statement either about myself as representing the funding institution, or about research procedures. It took me a while to realize the extent in which topics and types of discourse were dependent on specific places and times of the day. The opposition between nighttime and daytime indexes a deeper opposition between native forms of speech, on the one hand, and the discourse of State personnel, on the other. The time and place for making important decision is after midnight in the mambeadero, “when the pestle falls silent” (that is, it has stopped pounding coca leaves).

2. Not being able to count on a corrupted interventor, the head of the Fondo actually tried to pocket the last grant installment, and released it only after we chased him non-stop for two weeks. He still succeeded in keeping 50% of my paycheck.

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 189

However, these times and settings are connected in a complementary way. The word spoken at the night has to materialize during the day, just like the speech uttered at night recollects all that has happened during the day and weaves it into a basket of experience. This is more so, since: To go to the origin of the history of the community is a delicate theme. […] It is a source of conflicts. There is competition between clans, because there are clans that maintain knowledge, and clans that do not. There are things that cannot be named, like ‘Moniya Amena,’ which, in fact, is now having its name changed.3

Rather than something to be negotiated, punctuality became the symbol of an unspoken clash of underlying conceptions of time and form of organization of work. In this way, the group was trying to assert its autonomy with respect to a fundamental assumption of the developed world, one that marked the passage from ‘underdeveloped’ to ‘developed.’ Metonymically, the group was denying the whole world of development as having the power to define subjective attitudes and behaviors.

Methodology: Think, Speak, Work During the nocturnal conversations that established the basis of the project proposal, work emerged as a complex concept. From a People of the Center perspective —one shared by other native Amazonian societies, such as the Yucuna and Macuna— work is the source from which not only the human body, identity, and society, but also life and the cosmos are continuously recreated (Griffiths, 2001). Work embodies and materializes intentional thought and speech, linking such diverse domains as shamanic predation, food production, teaching-learning, and curing. All these activities are fundamental to the fabrication of sociable selves and relations, and more broadly, to the reproduction of life. Work is needed to turn exogenous assets into public wealth and conviviality, and it is culturally evaluated on the basis of underlying intention and tangible contribution to generalized well-being. Persistent work effort and the ingestion of proper foods and beverages — themselves the product of people’s work— gradually shape gendered bodily 3. Moniya Amena is the mythical ‘tree of abundance.’ Until 1999, it was the name of the Km. 9 community, when it was changed because considered to be too ”hot.” The new name given to the community was Manaïde Izuru, meaning ‘cold channel' changed again into Moniya Amena some time later.

190 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

forms, habits, and dispositions through a person’s life. Productive activity is also a way to reinforce benign sentiments among co-workers, and to create and maintain good relationships with both people and the spirit world (Griffiths, 2001, p. 248). These habits, which are a source of true identity, are mirrored in the human body and the territory. As noted, work is oriented, motivated, even constructed, by speech. The relationship between work and speech is the arena in which the dialectics between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, and between individuals and groups are played out: an arena for self-making that brings sentiments, memories, visions, and aspirations to bear on daily activities. Ochs and Capps (1996, p. 19) pointed out the role of narratives in giving shape to experience by “imposing order,” and by creating “a continuity between past, present, and imagined worlds.” But narratives also create fissures in order and continuity. To recognize that narratives are not monomodal, and that they integrate multiple forms of communication —such as gesture or facial expression— goes along with the possibility that these different modes may actually counter each other, and it is precisely this dissonance what makes the creation of alternative meanings possible. The center of this creation is the human body that, for the People of the Center, is the shadow of the ancestors and of the generations to come. The name the elders gave to the project —o abïmo erokaï, look at your body — constructed the project as a process of self-discovery, from which the purpose of curing and bringing abundance eventually ensued. Past and future worlds are mirrored on the human body, which carries the sensory traces of past generations, of overlooked illnesses, of potentialities to unravel. Illnesses will become epidemics, and potentialities will be lost, unless intentional thought, speech, and work address and transform them, in this way giving form to “a basket of abundance.” The People of the Center’s views of knowledge and knowing are particularly interesting for the emphasis put on the capacity for intentional, creative practice´, which characterizes not only the learning (and research) process, but also the perception of knowledge’s ends more broadly. The indigenous research project can be seen as a poetic performance, one that creates —at the same time as it investigates— the construction of interculturality. In this light, cultural identity is not something that can be recovered from the past, but it is something dialectically created and negated on a daily basis, “triggered by disjunctions in interactions, social and environmental”

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 191

(White, 2002, p. 1). Such process —which is not only deeply historical in itself, but which also reflects a particular kind of historical consciousness— lay at the disjunction of presence and absence. Presence may loose its grip, one may feel dislocated and incapable of acting, and solve to moor in the past, or be hurled into a future hard to envision; to paraphrase Leslie P. Hartley´s proverbial line4, not only the past, but also the present may become “a foreign country.” Absence, on the other hand, is made present by memory and imagination. The tripartite model of the People of the Center’s responsible science — “to think well, speak well, and work well, turning this into abundance for all” — sits at this disjunction, and it endeavors to make the unreal possible. At the same time, it upholds the People of the Center in assessing, resisting, and transforming foreign knowledge regimes, such as those deployed by Development’s technical knowledge apparatus.

Territories: The Ancestral Footprints Statements pertaining to the landscape may be employed to convey tacit messages about the organization of face-to-face relationships and the normative footings on which those relationships are currently being conducted. […] Landscapes are always available to their seasoned inhabitants in more than material terms. Landscapes are available in symbolic terms as well, and so, chiefly through the manifold agencies of speech, they can be “detached” from their fixed spatial moorings and transformed into instruments of thought and vehicles of purposive behavior. Thus transformed, landscapes and the places that fill them become tools for the imagination, expressive means for accomplishing verbal deeds, and also, of course, eminently portable possessions to which individuals can maintain deep and abiding attachments, regardless of where they travel. (Basso, K nowledge sits in P laces. pp. 74-75).

In 1998, the Murillo administration took on the principles of the New Colombian constitution of 1991 that recognize the multiethnic and pluricultural nature of the Colombian Nation, as the legal means for implementing broad processes toward decentralization and self-administration. The Programa de Gobierno of the Murillo administration stated that: 4. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”, opening line of The Go-Between.

192 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Photo 8: Building a maloca. Resguardo Indígena Tikuna-Uitoto, Km. 6-11, 2005. Photo: Hernán Gómez.

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 193

We must fight to recover the identity and culture of indigenous groups, to acknowledge their traditional territory, and to improve their conditions of life. It is a function of the govern management to establish a politic that recognizes indigenous groups as social groups, with their own identity and organization, leading state action toward the promotion of full effectiveness of indigenous people’s social, economic, and cultural rights. In this direction we will support the rights of indigenous groups of the property and tenure that assist them in the site they traditionally occupy, guaranteeing the right over use, management, and conservation of natural resources that exist in the territory.5

The POT is a necessary requirement of this process of decentralization, one that should ultimately lead to the creation of the ETIs —Entidades Territoriales Indígenas (‘Indigenous Territorial Entities’) — that if legally approved will have a greater degree of autonomy than that of resguardos.6 The Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial should involve citizens’ participation, and take into account ethnic and cultural diversity.7 Colombian indigenous people articulate their political and cultural strategies for the organization of the territory on the basis of a cosmological framework —a Pan-Indian model of, and for, political action— alternatively called “law of origin” (ley de origen) or “ancestors’ footprints” (huellas ancestrales). 8 Amazonian indigenous people also claim that to order the territory is necessary first to order thought (Fundación Gaia-Amazonas, 1999). As such, the territory is considered to be the reflection of the knowledge of the ancestors, 5. “Hay que luchar por el rescate de su identidad, cultura, reconocimiento de su territorio tradicional, el mejoramiento de su nivel de vida. Es función de la gestión gubernativa establecer una política donde se reconozca como grupos sociales con identidad y organización propia, dirigiendo la acción estatal hacia la promoción de la plena efectividad de sus derechos sociales, económicos y culturales. En este sentido apoyaremos el derecho de las comunidades sobre la propiedad y la posesión que les asiste en el lugar que tradicionalmente ocupan garantizándole el derecho sobre la utilización, administración y conservación de los recursos naturales que existen en sus territorios”. 6. In the meantime, a 1993 Decree enables indigenous people to create autonomous AATIs, Asociaciones de Autoridades Tradicionales Indígenas (‘Associations of Traditional Indigenous Authorities’). 7. Article 1, 2, 7, 286, and 329 of the Political Constitution of Colombia; law 388 of 1997; decree 879 of 1998; decree 1088 of 1999 substitutive of the Ley Orgánica de O.T., which regulates the creation of the AATIs, Traditional Authorities and/or Cabildos, recognizing them as public right entities. 8. This model is articulated in remarkably similar terms by British Columbia Indians (Brody, 1981), the Apache (Basso, 1996), and the Maya (Montejo, 2002).

194 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

and to organize the territory means to bring the knowledge of the ancestors —the “law of origin” — into being (Micarelli, 2009). While the POT is a fairly recent State requirement, the broader issues of organizing and managing a multiethnic territory have been a long-time concern for the residents of the resguardo. For the People of the Center in particular, the fact that they have re-settled in a foreign territory challenges this endeavor all the more, requiring skilful negotiation and consent-building with the Tikuna who are in their territories of origin. The resguardo dwellers started discussing the POT in 1998, with input from such state institutions as the Universidad Nacional and the Red de Solidaridad Social, and from NGOs such as Fundación Gaia-Amazonas. Advised by Colombian NGO Fundación Gaia, the Murillo administration promoted broad consulting processes with indigenous organizations of the Amazonas Department. Particularly during two interdepartmental meetings held in Leticia (Territorialidad Indígena y Ordenamiento en la Amazonia, Dec.1-2 1998; Ordenamiento Territorial Indígena en el Departamento del Amazonas, Nov. 13-14 1999), indigenous leaders were able to articulate the complex visions and forms of management of their territories as part of their political strategy vis-à-vis State policies. At night, the participants gathered in the malocas of the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto to comment on the day, and to participate in the mambe sessions. In contrast to some representations of indigenous politics in Colombia that stress the clash between traditional authorities, and the leaders of national indigenous organizations (Jackson, 2002), the processes toward self-determination in the Amazonas Department reveal the synergy of these different forms of representation: one that unravels at night in the maloca’s mambeadero, and the other at daytime in the arena of State institutions. The category of “leaders” includes at least three different kinds of political and social agents. The Cabildo are elected leaders who serve as intermediaries between the community and the State’s legal and bureaucratic apparatus. Another set of elected leaders are the heads of indigenous regional organisations, including the individual resguardos as well as associations encompassing several resguardos. These elected leaders also need the endorsement of the council of elders on the basis of such requirements as ‘knowing tradition’, being competent in both Spanish and the indigenous native language, and being able to deal effectively with State institutions. Pensadores (Spanish for ‘thinkers’), sabedores (‘knowledge-holders’), ancianos (‘elders’), abuelos (‘grandfathers’), or chamanes (‘shamans’) are traditional authorities, whose

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 195

knowledge-power —and thus prestige and authority— are both inherited and acquired through a demanding process of specialised ritual training. Combining, often in ambiguous terms, shamanism and morality, the elders’ authoritative knowledge acquires a crucial position in the contemporary indigenous struggle for rights and political participation. In order to understand the transformations of indigenous leadership and the construction of indigenous politics in contemporaneous Amazonia, we must look at how these different forms of representation complement each other, develop dialectically in the relationship between State politics and native social forms, and draw continuity between contrasting spaces and times. For the People of the Center, for instance, leadership is internally differentiated, with the “thinker” seated in his bank, watching and curing the cosmos in a silent dialogue with the spiritual world, and the “speaker” giving voice to the thinker’s intentions and handling the relations with the outside. Ethnographic data suggest that this differentiation is based on descent rules, according to which odd children (first, third, etc…) will master the domain of thought, while even children (second, fourth) will master that of speech.9 In addition to this, the thinker will appoint experts, chosen from particular clans and lineages, to realize particular activities at hand. So, to take seriously indigenous people’s struggle to translate their cosmologies to processes of political participation requires an acknowledgement of how “traditional” cultural models work to connect past and present while, at the same time, are co-produced by historical relations. From the perspective of different native societies of Northwestern Amazonia, the territory is ordered from the center, the maloca, which stands on the four pillars of Government, Health, Education, and Resource Management. En el centro central, the ‘central center’ of the maloca —the mambeadero— the knowlegeable ones organize the territory with their thought. Indigenous leaders put it this way: With knowledge, they bring into relation the indigenous world, the beings of nature, the [spiritual] masters of the trees, of the animals, of the rivers. The thought of the knowledgeable ones runs through the territory, and organizes it. Thought that shelters everything and cares for the territory. How do we see the territory? Not only the earth, and the vein of the mother earth, and inside it, the water, and the beings who live in the water. We also see traditional thought

9. Interestingly odd children are said to belong to the father, and even children to the mother, thus inheriting specific cultural knowledge such as songs from the mother’s side.

196 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

that run inside the sacred places. In the territory we see how the relation of thought [with everything else] is managed. We see it in all those who are here. While the masters of the territory are seated in their maloca, thinking, the Whites arrive to make decision. Our own government is in charge of managing the relations between thought, nature, the animals, and what lies below. Not only this space, but another space of the world as well: the sacred places […]. We don’t know how the knowledgeable ones manage this, from above, from below, from the four corners. This knowledge came from before, from the origin. In it, it is health. From the mouth to the source of the Mirití River, from the Caquetá to the Río Meta, is the area of each community […]. We maintain this by means of pure orations [por pura oraciones]. When we talk of the environment we talk about a whole lot of things. For us is the care of health by means of traditional thought. (Letuama leader) The base is centered in the elders, it is centered in the maloca where the thought is centered. They look through the territory with their five senses. They start thinking “what is the future” from the territory, which is not only the soil, but has another, deeper concept: all that is around, all that is into relation, including in the person. We have to consider not only the legal foundations, which define the territory in a superficial way, but also how we think, how we feel, and what we desire as an indigenous people and territory. (Miraña leader) Science, wisdom, is centered in the territory. Its social organization is centered in the maloca. From the beginning, all the special fundamentals for living exist. The wisdom of the indigene is in the air, is in the earth. From there, the word “health” takes its nourishment to become incorporated as a person. The Creator placed the site of origin of every species. And nature put what nowadays are the national parks. Subsistence is done by means of conscience and wisdom to manage the relation between people and nature. It has to do with the control of coexistence. Through the ecological calendar, when a dance ritual should to be realized, or certain fruits or animals consumed, we hold a parliament, we ask for permission, so to avoid a new epidemics, new illnesses. The master of each origin of the species is pleased, and let that things reproduce, including people.

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 197

We make the chagra, we plant orchards, there come the animals, which benefit from the work of people, as we benefit from hunting them. This is the mythological management of nature by people. The sense by which things are utilized, how they are restored, so that there is no unbalance, must be fully understood. We drew a map to record the animals, where their site of origin is. How traditional economy is sustained cannot be compared to market economy. Each time he [the thinker] thinks how he wishes to exist, inside him he is also telling how not to allow that, through evolution, the young forget our own concept of traditional economy. The investigation of natural resources is linked to education and to traditional medicine […]. This is our tool for dealing with the white man […]. Wisdom is in the environment. From there education, health, organization begins. Everything is based in these four fields […]. Peace and Development lie in the management of the knowledge of how people were born, and how they share wisdom with nature. This is the work we are conducting in the Andoke community. To carry this on it is important to have a clear communication with the institutions and all the sectors. We cannot live as we were strangers to each other. Let us look at each other’s hearts. Let us look at each other’ origin. Here nobody has four legs. We have the same heart, we have the same brain. So why not sit down and think how to go on. Respect and mutual understanding are the best path to peace and Development. This is not to offend anyone, but to define things that are good for all, to be happy. (Andoke leader)

These discourses were uttered by leaders of indigenous organizations at daytime, in front of the representatives of state institutions. They bring forward the word spoken in the mambeadero and make it public. In so doing, they accomplish a twofold goal: to boost the thought of the “thinkers,” and to establish it as a political authority in relation to the state and its requirements. Moreover, they articulate interethnic politics on the basis of shared moral principles that direct people’s relations in, and with, the territory. So, the territory is defined morally; it is the projection of the way in which socioenvironmental relations are managed, which involves the capacity to think the knowledge of the ancestors into being. As Basso suggested (1996, p. 32), ancestral knowledge works to “fashion possible worlds, give them expressive shape, and present them for contemplation as images of the past that can

198 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

deepen and enlarge awareness of the present.” To construct political agency in the present means to be able to deal with the encroaching forces of modernity and globalization by actualizing the mythical process of creation in which the attribution of peoples to places, and places to peoples, simultaneously produced locality, morality, and identity/difference. The world comes to be conceived as a body re-membered by the specific knowledge of each lineage, clan, and ethnic group. A major difference with Western conceptions of the territory as sustaining the life of the people is that for native Amazonians the people are the body of the territory, and sustain it with their lives. Here is the Uwa, the heart of the world. Here comes the Guambiano, the navel of the world. Here stands the Amazonian Indian, the lung of the world. A world is being identified. That is, we are trying to identify the world as a living being. The Indian has no timetable, because the world is vast, and if we want to know it we must sit down to comprehend it. (Uitoto leader)

This conception is made visible in the cartographic process, in which the knowledge of each group is mapped on the territory, and overlaps as layers of skin (for comparative examples see articles in Whitehead, 2003a). The articulation of such specificities through exchange relationships and regulated managing practices is the source from which the ordered territory is created and maintained. To develop the P.O.T. implies to take these particularities and their complex interrelationship into account. That is, to order the thought.

Indigenous Maps Several factors challenge the process of territorial ordering in the Resguardo Tikuna-Uitoto: the fact that the people who inhabit the territory have been recently displaced from their ancestral territory, the multiethnic character of the communities, and the proximity to the town of Leticia. This requires engaging not easy relations of neighborhood in the P.O.T., even though proximity to the town also provides an array of contacts with NGO and institutions, and the opportunity to exchange information with visiting indigenous leaders from other regions of the Amazonas. The first step toward the O.T. was a consultation workshop that was initiated by the maloca of the N.N.I.- Km. 11 community; it was named Atira Buinaiño - Finora Buinaiño, ‘The woman who brings, — The woman who transforms.’ Naming holds particular significance for the People of the Center, one that goes far beyond denotation, or even poetic evocation. To name is an illocutionary act;

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 199

for instance, the names chosen for the resguardo’s malocas committed them to a particular kind of agency. During this process, the zonal organization AZCAITA (Asociación Zonal Cabildos y Autoridades Indigenas de Tierra Alta) was also renamed, to make it, at the same time, more specific and more inclusive. AZCAITA is dead. We have to discuss, studying the name. ACITU [Asociación Cabildos Indígenas Ticuna Uitoto] means that looking at the work that we are going to realize we don’t create false expectations. What we can do, we tell it as organization. If we say Asociación Cabildos Indígenas of the Resguardo Ticuna Uitoto we are closing up. But ACITU it is open. (Uitoto leader)

Naming the workshop Atïra Buinaiño - Fïnora Buinaiño establishes the cooperation between the Whites —who bring in knowledge and methodologies— and indigenous communities— who transform these ingredients with their own knowledge and methodologies, as wild resources are transformed into food. This reflects the urgency to find an agreement between lo de adentro, and lo de afuera. Such contrast is not in itself a source of conflict; as noted, in indigenous cosmologies the complementation of these spheres is seen as indispensable to the reproduction of indigenous society.10 Rather, conflicts are generated by a lack of control over the ways in which these “sides” interact, and proper incorporation through transformative practices neutralizes the potentially negative effects of this relation. In this way, cosmology comes to be translated in political actions aimed at comprehending and managing the relation with the global world. “To become modern,” indigenous leaders say, “does not mean to become acculturated.” Accordingly, the first phase of the O.T. project was intended to strengthen indigenous authorities through the study of State law. The second phase of the P.O.T. consisted of the cartography workshop Huellas Ancestrales, ‘Ancestral Footprints,’ which took place during the month 10. For instance, the Whitemen’s word can be used to legitimize indigenous cultural practices. In a meeting with state institutions for discussing indigenous uses of coca, a Muinane leader of the resguardo read the following text by colombian philosopher and ethnographer Fernando Urbina (1992, p. 17). “La coca, símbolo de la lengua que permite hablar, hace grabar y recordar lo dicho en el mambeadero. Allí el ‘hombre sentado’, o sea el sabedor en su banco ritual, vértebra la realidad a través de su carrera. De niño, oye palabras de poder en la penumbra germinal del lugar materno; de adulto se inserta en el ámbito iluminado del coqueadero, en unión con los otros varones. Para el joven estas palabras irán cobrando sentido y realidad, visualizándose en los rituales comunitarios y en el diario acontecer, hasta afirmándose al llegar a ser ‘hombre completo’, mambeador, interlocutor: ‘hombre- coca-palabra’. De esa manera, en las rutas del vivir, cuando se requiere buscar en el saber tradicional una palabra orientadora, la coca, que es ‘lengua’ sabrá decir la justa, la oída allá, junto al abuelo”.

200 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

of October 1999 following several months of preparation. During this period, tensions between traditional leaders built up, resulting in the secession of a sector of the resguardo controlled by two maloqueros. These conflicts took a dramatic turn when a jaguar was seen lurking around the Km. 11 community. This was not a common jaguar (a jaguar rarely is) but an evil brujo attempting to disrupt the process of organization carried on under the leadership of the N.N.I - Km. 11 maloca. At the same time, four youngsters of the Km. 11 community who were attending a workshop on video techniques tried to commit suicide by ingesting barbasco. One night, while a session of mambeo was taking place in N.N.I - Km. 11 maloca, a coral snake was spotted in the middle of the maloca and promptly killed. These incidents were interpreted as attacks against the N.N.I. - Km. 11 shaman to test his capacity to protect the people. Two nights before the starting date of the cartography workshop, after concluding the mambeo session in the mambeadero, the men got involved in a binge of caninha (strong cane alcohol). Afterward, the son of one of the elders of the N.N.I. - Km. 11 maloca went home and drank pesticide. He died the following morning in the Leticia hospital. This death put the workshop at stake. Fierce criticisms stormed through the community against both the two shamans enemies, and their own leaders, who were accused of embarking on a project without knowing how to control the danger it unleashed. Eventually, the father of the dead, a knowledgeable master of ritual songs, expressed the desire to carry on the workshop. That was a proof sent to test their commitment, he said; they must not back off now. The workshop saw the participation of four parcialidades: Km. 6-San José, a prevalently Ticuna community; Km. 7, and Km. 11-Nïmaira Naimekï Ibïrï, both with a People of the Center majority; and ex Multiétnico-Kaziya Naïraï, a multiethnic community led by two People of the Center leaders. In addition to this, the workshop involved the participation of the Yucuna maloca and of the colonos, including the Israelita community León de Juda, which had illegally acquired a sector of the resguardo. The workshop was organized in three stages. The first stage involved the compilation of oral histories about the first settlers of the resguardo and how they got organized in the territory. The second stage consisted of social cartography; maps were drawn to make visible the texture of relations that existed in the resguardo. The last stage consisted of a two-day plenary meeting. The project also benefited from the traditional advice of a Muina elder, of the indigenous organization OZIMDE of El Encanto.

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 201

Photo 9: A shaman, a ritual chanter, and a young woman of the Uitoto ethnic group reflecting on the maps in the Kilómetro 11’s maloca (1999). Photo: Giovanna Micarelli.

202 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

As developed by Colombian NGO Fundaminga, social cartography is intended to “produce knowledge about reality, assuming the territory as referent and the collective construction of maps as tool” (Restrepo and Velasco, n.d., p. 114). Based on the general principles and methodology of the PAR (participatory action-research) social cartography aims at generating “a dynamic process of reflection and social production of knowledge, from the exercise of virtually reconstructing reality, intended as a network of multiple relations” (p. 123). Collective map-making is meant to foster a dialogue of knowledge between individual participants around the lived space, which enables people to convey, discuss, visualise, and recreate their own senses of space, eventually serving as a basis for elaborating collective concepts of needs and social and environmental responsibility. The first step consisted in the creation of economic-ecological maps to identify the location of key topographic features, strategic resources, and areas of key productive activities. These maps revealed the deep geographical and ecological knowledge held by resguardo dwellers, who corrected the outline of boundaries, river systems and paths in the reference maps. The rich topographic lexicon highlighted instead the importance of place-naming as a practice by which people appropriate the landscape and assert territorial rights. A second series of maps identified the productive, reproductive, and service infrastructure— roads, schools, and so on. A third series showed the network of relationships produced by peoples’ social and cultural activities, and a fourth showed past and present patterns of land use and tenure. Other maps were constructed to generate a reflection on particular themes that concern the territory. In this specific workshop, for example, maps of development projects, and of women’s activity were produced. Drawing on this, maps based on the widely-used DOFA methodology were created to identify weaknesses, opportunities, strengths, and threats involved in the relationship between people and the environment. These were first listed on a two by two field grid, such as the following one. A colour-coded zoning to mark different areas helped people to visualise the location of problems and/or potentials.

Strength/Opportunity GREEN

Strength/ Hazard ORANGE

Weakness/Opportunity YELLOW

Weakness/Hazard RED

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 203

By creating and interpreting maps, the collectivity recognized the territory as socially constructed, and the quality of life, degree of vulnerability, self-determination, and efficacy in claiming rights as dependent on the quality of the relations that conform it. Mapping of environmental features was intimately entwined with value judgments about how land forms and resources must be managed; they revealed not only how sites are occupied, but also how they are conserved and cared for by particular indigenous communities. What’s more, maps contributed to the construction of collective agency, and became a tool for political empowerment. This was evidenced in the case of the multiethnic community Kaziya Naïraï, which I will discuss in what follows.

Of Chagras, Green Parakeets and Red Tigers The multiethnic community of Kaziya Naïraï reflects many of the problems that affect the resguardo, as well as many of its potentials. The community was funded in 1992 by a Uitoto-Andoke elder following the secession of a group of indigenous families from another community of the resguardo (Km. 9) as a result of conflicts regarding leadership and land tenure. In the intentions of its founders, the community, which until recently was called Multiétnico, was to become a model of interethnic coexistence. But problems started to emerge when a group of reindianizados (individuals of indigenous descent who held bureaucratic jobs in Leticia) realised that by reclaiming their indigenous identity they could petition to be affiliated to the community and be assigned land plots. Initially, it seemed convenient to have educated funcionarios as neighbors, as they could help in handling bureaucratic procedures and in channeling project money to the community. But soon the comuneros realized how the reindianizados had turned into a threat. These reindianizados, who kept living in town, out numbered the people who lived in the community. In time of communal elections, they returned to the community and managed to have their representatives elected as Cabildo. Holding public offices, they could receive the nation's transfer money that was destined to the indigenous territorial entity, money that they did not allocate to the community. Some of them ever started to sell their plots to colonos, an illicit transaction under the legal figure of the resguardos, which prohibits selling or renting any portion of the land. Due to the lack of local leadership, the ideal of peaceful coexistence also started to crumble. Youth gangs from the Multiétnico community roamed the carretera

204 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

to steal, brawl, and drug dealing, finding refuge back in the community. At this point, the comuneros tried to suspend the elected Cabildo and designate a new one from the village. Tension escalated to the point that threats were made against some of the village residents. During that time, a Miraña-Carijona leader who had recently arrived from the Caquetá started talking the people into the importance of strengthening traditional authority to overcome problems linked to democratic representation based on vote. The leaders and comuneros “who manage coca in different ways” began “sitting at night talking tradition.” As it is said, when the word of coca is sweet, people are attracted to it like ants to honey, so more comuneros started to visit the mambeadero, and they eventually decided to build a maloca “the traditional way,” that is, without relying on institutional funds. A new name for the community was also chosen: Kaziya Naïraï, ‘to awaken new people.’ This name referred to a prophecy according to which indigenous people will awaken again to a new world as they emerged from the Hole of Awakening at the beginning of time, and they will strengthen again thanks to a new law of the Whites. As the man who told me this story maintained, this was Colombia’s Political Constitution of 1991. At the time the social cartography workshop began this strategy was starting to take shape. By appealing to both the law of the Whites, and the traditional judicial system, the people of Kaziya Naïraï had started tackling some of the problems that affected them. The social cartography strengthened this process even more. The drawing of maps made visible the rich internal diversity of their chagras (swidden fields), which people related to the custom of bringing seeds back from travels and exchanging them with other farmers. In a way, the biodiversity of the chagra mirrored the community’s ethnic diversity, with its complex history of mobility and ethnic exchange. Plant species were portrayed to coexist harmoniously in the chagra under the leadership of the coca and tobacco plants. The map of the chagra —the community of plants— became a map for the community of people. However, the DOFA map, with its green, yellow, orange, and red areas, also revealed the extent in which the plots of the reindianizados encroached over the land tenured by the community people, and it allowed to visualise and debate the claims and conflicts involved the relationship between town people and community people. The Miraña-Carijona man mentioned above interpreted the map as follows:

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 205

We painted this as a red tiger [a jaguar] with its jaws open, ready to devour the community. Red are the absentees who live in Leticia: some are colonos and some are indigenous people with a different thought (indígenas con otro pensamiento). Red are 57 absentee families who want to gain power over the community. They don’t know their territory. They want to sell their plots, and do not consult with the community. The Amazonas Department is the only painted white, but this red means that among indigenous people violence is arising. This stands in our way while we are trying to organize.

The land used by the comuneros was instead painted green. Its shape was seen to resemble that of green parakeet. Commenting on the maps, Uitoto elders identified the green parakeet as Kuyo Buinaima, a mythical character whom the Creator endowed with great intelligence and wisdom to refashion human society after the primal deluge. Kuyo Buinaima could “understand the language of irrational beings, of everything that the ear hears: crickets and all.” When evil spirits tried to steal his knowledge, God sent to him the “complete power” in form of a spark. The spark burned him down to ashes and his spirit flew away transformed in a green parakeet (kuyodo). From his ashes coca was born, and from his heart, tobacco. By means of DOFA maps, the people of Kaziya Naïraï evoked myth to re-establish local authority. As they brought the knowledge of the ancestors into being, they envisioned the territory as something created and maintained by people’s proper practice. Mediating between the moral and the material, practice provided the basis for the community’s social and political reorganisation. As they stated at the conclusion of the cartography workshop: “Strength is green, and those who are seeding violence are in the color red. But with dialogue we are turning red into green.” In this process, cultural models of the environment were revealed as socially mediated and emergent forms of knowledge which are created and re-created in social contexts. Such knowledge is shaped by practice —itself co-produced by people’s cultural upbringing and situated experience— as much as by the need to create collectivities with social and political agency.

206 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Conclusions

The peoples concerned shall have the right to decide their own priorities for the process of Development as it affects their lives, beliefs, institutions and spiritual well-being and the lands they occupy or otherwise use, and to exercise control, to the extent possible, over their own economic, social and cultural Development. In addition, they shall participate in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of plans and programmes for national and regional Development which may affect them directly. (ILO, C onvention No.169, 1989, A rt. 7.)

Indigenous discourses that position coca and tobacco at the core of cultural reaffirmation, and at the same time as the point of departure of the social and economic development of indigenous communities, reveal the way in which indigenous people interweave the many threads of their experience in their plans. This process takes shape in a dialectical relationship with the state and the global world; indigenous plans respond to development plans precisely because they put emphasis on the interconnectedness of all aspects of life that provide richness and meaning to human experience. In this way, indigenous people envision new modes of construction of the political. To weave these “new baskets” implies weaving again memory, and reorder relations that have become muddled. “If we know where we come form, and who we are, it becomes easier to understand what we want,” says a Muina leader. He also claims that: “a plan of life begins with education, on how we use the land, and see the world.” Indigenous people argue that the first step to construct a Plan of Life is to “individuate each of the cultural components that integrate the territory.” So, plans of life are built on diversity: the particular knowledges and agencies upon which the ordered network of socio-environmental relations is maintained. However, they are also built upon the diversity of indigenous realities in a broader sense, which includes White people, mestizos, and colonos. This recognition is meant to secure the commitment of all social actors to the achievement of well-being, and this lies at the basis of organization. In this way, indigenous people respond to the notion of wellbeing put forward by development rhetoric. Their version of well-being sees it as emplaced in, and dependent on, a web of life, properly tended by ritual experts. From this vision, both “basic needs” are defined, and the strategic praxes by which to satisfy such needs.

Chapter Five. Organization: Histories and Territories • 207

Photo 10: Jimoma dance ritual. Joko Ailloko Rïerue Nabïrï maloca, Resguardo Indígena TikunaUitoto, Km. 6-11, 2010. Photo: Marcela Lucía Rojas.

208 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Conclusions Four Pillars and a Dance Floor Living as we did —on the edge— we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked from both the outside in and the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. (bell hooks) All margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that, the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. (M ary D ouglas)

In a recent article dedicated to the possibility of envisioning an “anthropology of fragments, instabilities, and incomplete transition,” Kay Warren (2002) asks the question for engaged ethnographers of “how to resist becoming complicit in the misrepresentation of normative politics as stable systems” (p. 381). She suggests that there are at least two ways out of this problem. One is: to study the political acts of conjuring, idealizing, and protecting stability, of representing populations as bounded nations or cultures, and of pursuing modernist rationalism as an end in itself […]. Another is to focus on instability itself, on communities caught in contradictory transformations to pursue the current tensions and mismatches of neoliberal capitalism and democracy that are played out in the practice of local and national politics. (2002, p. 381)

In this book I have tried to take account of both the perspectives suggested by Warren, as it is through their contrast that we can gain a better understanding of development interfaces in Amazonia. My priority, though, has been to privilege a view at the ground level, one that can make visible the daily practices through which development is understood and appropriated by people living at its margins. My discussion is intended to move our understanding of indigenous societies beyond the opposition between a past of adaptive integrity and a future of disaggregation and anomie. It should be apparent that if development is not enough to undo indigenous cultures, neither it is simply assimilated into the “logics of the familiar,” as Sahlins (1999, p. xvi) would have it, unless we see such logics as sensitive to historical dynamics, and not as overarching sets of fixed meanings. Said in other words, we need to focus our attention on the margins of ideas as well as the center. This goes along with the realization that in native Amazonian perspectives humanity and sociality are energized precisely by what plays out at the margins, and by how margins are dealt with. To take indigenous peoples’ own understandings seriously, then, is not just asking how they incorporate development creatively into their social practices, but also how they deal with these dangerous margins in everyday life. Accordingly, I have tried to show how indigenous people link history and healing, cultural specificities and interculturality, ritual and politics, to harness change in an age of apparently uncontrollable transformations. These acts feed and expand their cosmological understandings, and as such they have more than political significance. To follow, I briefly review what I consider to be the main themes of my book: in a sense —to evoke the maloca cognitive model— its four pillars, and a dance floor.

Situating Development The ways in which particular modes of thinking and doing are disseminated through such mechanisms of the development apparatus as bureaucracy, rhetoric, and technical training, reveal how development works to confine indigenous people to a disempowering physical and moral space which limits their capacity for agency. For instance, the trope “indigenous community” deployed in the development vocabulary, obscures, and consequently fails to engage, the complex texture of social identities on which indigenous processes of organization are predicated. This also reveals the legacy of a static

210 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

notion of culture and of the anthropological practice of fieldwork —based as it is on ideas of separation and geographical contiguity— in contributing to a view of indigenous societies as bounded and isolated entities. In contrast to such view, it has been the intention here to show that indigenous responses to development involve the reconfiguration of interethnic networks that have the potential to bolster political agency and recognition. What’s more, local interpretations of development reveal how cultural meanings are harnessed in political processes that challenge the implicit beliefs of development as well as its practical workings. For instance, the analysis of the vernacular idioms through which development is constructed locally suggests that power is indexed in complex and not univocal ways. To envision projects as “preys” stalked by the shaman-leader with the spiritual weapons of coca and tobacco is an example of how power can be wielded over such foreign form. Through such acts of ontological predation development projects are captured and transformed by indigenous societies, and —recast in cultural terms— they give continuity to indigenous worldviews. The unintended consequences of development, then, may also involve the strengthening of cultural forms, such as traditional systems of shamanic power, that run counter to the implicit telos of development.

The Poetics of Dissent A leading theme of this book was indigenous people’s conceptualization of development as illness. Before exploring this conceptualization within native notions of health and healing, I link it to a series of assumptions that pertain to the development ideology; first of all, the tendency found in the development discourse to represent the structural conditions of inequality as a pathology of “those to be developed.” As Arturo Escobar (1992a, p. 25) rightly argued, tropes of the development vocabulary, such as “the poor,” “the malnourished,” “the illiterate,” “pregnant women,” “the landless” —among others— work to construct categories of abnormality. This attribution of abjection by the dominant culture turns indigenous subjects into the cause of their own underdevelopment. It not only separates the “problems” from their historical causes, but it also ends up disallowing local conceptualizations of problems and needs, as well as local solutions. What I see to be probably the nastiest proposition of the development ideology is the imposition of a foreign notion of well-being, as it denies to the “underdeveloped” the right to pursue the life they wish to live. In this way, development establishes a

Conclusions. Four Pillars and a Dance Floor • 211

perceptual domain; its ideological constructs are internalized as subjective experience, framing what can be experienced, desired, or even imagined. Yet, development’s vision of well-being does not easily break into indigenous cosmological perspectives. In contrast to an overestimation of the efficacy of disciplinary power I see hegemony as more unstable and contested than often implied (1995). Relying in particular on Gramsci’s (1971) distinction of good sense and common sense, I suggested that the inconsistency between the development ideology and the knowledge emerging from people’s practical engagements with reality is the arena where the very possibility of cultural critique rests. Such inconsistency prompts an intellectual questioning that may eventually result in a strategic redefinition of meaning and practice. This provides an entry to the notion of “crisis,” which is articulated in indigenous accounts as a sense of uneasiness, an impending cosmic disease generated by a void of meaning in which different social, ecological, physical, and psychological symptoms juxtapose. However, the crisis may also become a locus of historical and political consciousness. This process hinges on the body as a site of resistance. Looking at how embodied notions of health and well-being become the starting point for contesting the silent production of underdeveloped subjects, I have proposed the idea of dissensus — “to feel or sense differently” — to mean a political praxis that is rooted in the way people see and feel the world. Growing out of a fracture between clashing conceptions of well-being and the actions and intentions through which well-being must be pursued, dissent ramifies to all domains of experience, guiding indigenous critique and decision-making. Dissensus is also a way to articulate inter- and intra-ethnic differences, projecting the construction of consensus through diversity in terms of the achievement of generalized well-being and conviviality.

Ritual and Politics My emphasis on the Speech of Coca and Tobacco is intended to show the relevance of ritual in contemporary indigenous processes of social and political re-organization and, more generally, in cultural resilience. In the particular resguardo case, the Speech of Coca and Tobacco serves to legitimize local endeavors that place culture at the core, while respecting cultural differences. So, the question is why these cultural performances have been so effective in shaping a collective sense of self in a multiethnic and multilingual context.

212 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

My research suggests that the philosophical system known as Speech of Life or Speech of Coca and Tobacco is sustained on the social differentiation of specialized competences, which it functions to bring into relation with one another, in so doing transforming potential antagonism into complementarity. According to creation myths, each group received its own share of the knowledge of life together with a territory; this entrustment was the source from which not only identity and difference, but also the need to maintain exchange relations with other groups (in a sort of “ecology of knowledges;” Santos, 2009) originated. These indigenous conceptualizations highlight the dynamics of social differentiation within indigenous social forms, the capacity for “cultural self-selection,” and the construction of sociality across the boundaries of the ethnic group, boundaries that have been often designed by alien “cartographers” — namely, Development and Anthropology. The way in which indigenous thinkers operate a selection on cultural models also reveals the relation between meaning-making and processes of identification, processes which are strategic and dialectical. The Speech of Life explicitly links the proper incorporation of exogenous substances to the maintenance of health. This connection can be found in underlying cosmological assumptions according to which the possibility for harmonious living depends on processes of transformation that rework diversity into the fabric of society, like different fibers are interwoven to make a basket. The Speech of Coca and Tobacco contends that the prevention of illness (disease, conflict, corruption, pollution), and the construction of a healthy cosmos is a personal, self-shaping moral responsibility. Ritual performances take place every night in the mambeadero with the purpose of restoring “a healthy world.” They disentangle the threads of experience and reweave them into a basket of health-knowledge. What is spoken during the night is put into practice during the day, aiming to the state of tranquility, conviviality, and generalized good health that constitute ideal community life. In so doing, the Speech of Coca and Tobacco reaffirms cultural practices that may ward off abjection and the attribution of abjection made by the dominant culture. At the same time, it upholds the People of the Center in assessing, resisting, and transforming foreign knowledge regimes, such as those deployed by development’s technical knowledge apparatus. More generally, these performances highlight the achieved character of sociality, the links connecting cosmology to human experience and historicity, and the sensory, embodied nature of knowledge. They are a visible

Conclusions. Four Pillars and a Dance Floor • 213

example of the mutual constitution of structure and practice and of the poietic and performative nature of cultural models.

Interethnic Networks and Place-Making As Stuart Hall (1996, p. 3) rightly argued “identification is in the end conditional, lodged in contingency. Once secured, it does not obliterate difference.” He also stressed that identification “is grounded in fantasy, in projection and idealization. Its object is as likely to be the one that is hated as the one that is adored” (p. 3). These suggestions are relevant to the understanding of the People of the Center’s identity politics, particularly as it concerns the reconfiguration of both cultural specificity, and interculturality. As seen, the People of the Center is a self-category that refers to a cluster of eight ethnic groups whose spoken languages belong to four distinct linguistic families. Historical processes, such as the genocide and diaspora perpetrated during the rubber boom, the patronaje system, displacement and development, have all contributed to the situation of living mezclados— intermixed. In this scenario, the ritual use of coca and tobacco has emerged as a symbol of differentiation and unity. Clearly, the People of the Center as a “moral community” (Echeverri, 1997) is a historical product. However, the suggestion here is that it cannot be conceived as a mere response to recent historical events. My ethnography suggests that before the devastating effects of the rubber boom the People of the Center were actively interconnected in a regional system which hinged on the distribution and articulation of specific areas of territorial control and corresponding forms of territorial management. Social differentiation was also reflected in particular skills, which, in turn, were engaged into relations of exchange between groups. These data, which echo current ethnohistorical and archaeological findings on the functioning of regional policies in Amazonia (Heckenberger et al 2008; Whitehead, 1993), also shape present rationales and processes of interethnic organization, providing compelling reasons for rethinking the categories of ethnological explanation. In documenting the extent of supra-ethnic, multilingual communities I also intend to contribute to the critique of the notion of “culture” as univocally matching ethnic or linguistic groups. This issue has been the focus of much discussion in Amazonian studies. In this regard, Santos Granero (2002) argues that: The dialectical relation between language and culture is historical […] It is in the boundaries between peoples of different linguistic affiliation that we may observe the intricate ways in which ethos, language, and history combine in

214 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

the negotiation of ethnic identity, sometimes reinforcing existing ones and sometimes promoting the formation of new identities. (p. 28)

My aim has been to shed light on the relationship between tenacious social and cultural inclinations, and the patterns of practice through which they are negotiated and reconfigured within dynamics of power that stretch beyond the local contexts. I engaged in this discussion Fabian’s notion of negativity as a “critical mode of reflection, that negates what a culture affirms […] and the idea of culture itself” (2001, p. 93). To take identification as a strategic and positional process requires accounting for how identities are constructed in specific historical contexts. This process partly reflects structural positions in the development environment, as well as a history of colonial modes of encroachment that resulted in new systems of ethnic differentiation (Whitehead, 1994). At the same time they are driven by cultural proclivities, themselves historically changing. So, in analyzing how interethnic networks form or are reaffirmed I looked at what resources circulate along these networks that construct shared cultural values and social ties, also addressing the question of how these interethnic ties and values are linked to local critiques of development. Processes of identification are emplaced in, and construct the territory “as an actively expanding, continuous network of political-material relations” (Hill, 2002, p. 146). Motivated by Trouillot’s (2001) call to rethink our understanding of the State in the age of globalization, I contrasted development —as a multiplicity of social fields, boundaries, and institutions that emphasize global integration while striving to reinforce national sovereignty—to indigenous struggles for consolidating and managing their territories as autonomous, although not independent, entities. In contributing to recent critical discussions of the taken-for-granted equation of culture and place I concentrated on place-making as the point of articulation of cultural practices and meanings and a broad field of power relations. The struggle for territory is not simply a struggle over land. It is a struggle for language, memory, agency, and more broadly, for quality of life. Politics of location are at the same time politics of identification. In the particular arena in which I worked, this process is challenged by several factors, including memories of deportation and genocide, constant migration across three frontiers, the multiethnic and multilingual fabric of the resguardo, and national programs for settling and pigeonholing indigenous people.

Conclusions. Four Pillars and a Dance Floor • 215

But in response to both displacement and “spatial incarceration” (Appadurai, 1988), indigenous people demonstrate their ability for re-creating commonalities across ethnic, linguistic, and national borders. At the same time, they link a sense of shared identity to particular ecological practices in the landscape, so that the proper care of the territory also becomes “a historical commentary and form of political positioning” (Whitehead, 2003a, p. 76). While I contrasted the interplay of multiple geographies with the personal and collective experience of displacement and emplacement, I also asked in which ways mutilated territories can acquire a more solid form as they provide anchoring to knowledge and emotion.

A Dance Floor Entwined with the above four main themes of inquiry a fifth one focuses on practice, understood as a material and intellectual engagement in everyday activity. Influenced by both cognitive anthropology’s practice theory, and social movement theory, I see situated actions and interactions —and the consciousness dynamically entangled with them— as a privileged field for understanding the mediation between structural conditions and the production of meaning. In contrast to other social theoretical approaches (Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1979, 1984), practice theory and social movement theory converge on a central argument: practice has an emergent, generative quality. The first argues that practice cannot be reduced to habitualized, rules-governed behavior; rather, as values and activity are generated simultaneously, practice has the potential to transform the structures in which it is embedded (Keller and Keller, 1996; Lave, 1990). Similarly, social movements are not seen as governed by an overall plan implemented from above, but as emerging from below— from interactions that benefit from simple and local rules, and which expand and self-organize according to a logic that they themselves produce (Escobar, 2003). According to Escobar (1992a, p. 41), social movements “bring about social practices which operate in part through the constitution of spaces for the creation of meaning. To the extent that they are also inevitably concerned with matters of economic and social transformation, they link together economic, social and political problematics within an overarching cultural field.” It has also been suggested that social movements work at the level of life’s basic norms, a suggestion confirmed by the people of the Resguardo, whose motivations for establishing coca and tobacco as principles of their organization rest precisely on the care of life. The ways

216 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

in which coca and tobacco are mobilized to construct new commonalities across ethnic distinctions, and in response to globalization, clearly reflect new modes of construction of the political. These ideas helped me understand indigenous interpretations of development not simply as “interpretations” that try to make sense of development, but also as active responses to development’s disjointed cosmology, and as radically different methods for caring for life. These performances, which are rooted in indigenous relational ontologies and epistemologies, interweave desire, memory, imagination, knowledge, action, experience, and self-evaluation to pursue another possibility of being in the world. In so doing, they subvert the epistemological and methodological space of development. By engaging the goal of “curing the world” they provide a local response to the imaginary of development that has a global projection. To conclude, I agree that theoretically informed alternatives to development should be practice-oriented (Escobar 1992a, p. 28). But that’s not enough. First, anthropologists should try and “reconsider theory dialectically as a praxis,” as Fabian (2001) advocated. To undo the power relations implicit in the act of theorizing, as well as in development, is not just proving that practice can be generated by theory. It is recognizing that theory itself is an activity shaped through relations with others, thus tuning anthropological knowledge to people’s concerns. As we become entangled in “unforeseeable reticular structures” (Melucci, 1988) through personal and intimate interactions in everyday life, we also are urged to develop an ethics of care. This is a way for anthropology to close the circle, contributing, as indigenous people say, to the construction of a “new basket.”

Conclusions. Four Pillars and a Dance Floor • 217

Photo 11: Workshop of Social Photography, TAFOS. Indigenous community N誰maira Naimek誰 Ib誰r誰, 2000.

References n.a.

(1987). Development as Ideology and Folk Model. University of StockholmSwedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries. Abu-Lughod, L. (1991). Writing against Culture. In: R. G. Fox (Ed.). Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 138-162. Akin, D. and J. Robbins. (1999). Money and Modernity. State and Local Currencies in Melanesia. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press. Alvarez, S., Dagnino, E., & Escobar, A., (Eds.) (1998). Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures. Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements. Boulder: Westview Press. Appadurai, A. (1988). “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place.” Cultural Anthropology, 3 (1), 36-49. Appadurai, A. (1995). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arce, A., and Long, N. (Eds.) (2000). Anthropology, Development and Modernities. Exploring Discourses, Counter-tendencies and Violence. London and New York: Routledge. Århem, K. (2001). From Longhouse to Village: Structure and Change in the Colombian Amazon. In: L. Rival and N. L. Whitehead (Eds.). Beyond the Visible and the Material. The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivièr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 123-156. Atran, S., and Sperber, D. (1991). Learning without Teaching: Its Place in Culture. In: L. Tolchinsky Landsmann (Ed.). Culture, Schooling, and Psychological Development. 4. Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 39-55. Asad, T. (1991). Afterword. From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony. In: G. W. Stocking, Jr. (Ed.). Colonial Situations. Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 314-324. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his World. (H. Iswolsky transl.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barba, E., and Savarese, N. (Eds.). (1991). The Secret Art of the Performer. A Dictionary of Theater Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge.

Barclay, F., and Santos, F. (1995). Guía etnográfica de Alta Amazonia. Quito: FLACSO. Basso, E. (1987). In Favor of Deceit: A Study of Tricksters in an Amazonian Society. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Basso, E. (1995). The Trickster’s Scattered Self. In: C. L. Briggs (Ed.). Disorderly Discourse. Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 53-71. Basso, K. H. (1970). “To give up on words: Silence in Westerns Apache Culture.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 26 (3), 213-230. Basso, K. H. (1979). Portaits of the Whiteman. Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols among Western Apache. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom Sits in Places. Language and Landscape among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New México Press. Bauman, R. (1977). Verbal Art as Performance. Chicago: Waveland Press. Baumann, G. (1996). Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multiethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bello, W. 2001. The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalization and Resistance. Oakland: Food First Books. Benavides, E. O. (1996). Tecnología, desarrollo de productos y diseño en artesanía. Bogotá: Ministerio de Desarrollo Económico-Artesanías de Colombia s.a. Berman, M. (1988). All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin. Bhabha, H. (1990). The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism. In: R. Ferguson et al. (Eds.). Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge: MIT Press, 71-89. Bloch, M. (1977). “The Past and the Present in the Present.” Man, n.s. 12, 278-292. Bloch, M. (1986). From Cognition to Ideology. In: R. Fardon (Ed.). Power and Knowledge. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 21-48. Bloch, M. (1995). How do We Think They Think. Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory and Literacy. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press. Bonfil Batalla, G. (1988). Identidad y pluralismo cultural en America Latina. Buenos Aires: CEHASS. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Briggs, C. L. (1996). Conflict, Language Ideologies, and Privileged Arenas of Discoursive Authority in Warao Dispute Mediations. In: C. L. Briggs (Ed.).

220 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Disorderly Discourse. Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 204-242. Brody, H. (1981). Maps and Dreams. Indians, and the British Columbian Frontier. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press. Brown, M. (1988). “Shamanism and its Discontent.” Medical Anthropology Quart. 2 (2), 102-119. Brown, M. (1991). “Beyond Resistance: A Comparative Study of Utopian Renewal in Amazonia.” Ethnohistory, 38 (4), 388-413. Camacho, H. A. (1996). Comentarios a la propuesta de Corpes. Mayo 09 de 1997. Unpubl. ms. Candre, H., and Echeverri, J. Á. (1996). Cool Tobacco, Sweet Coca. Teaching of a Colombian Sage from the Colombian Amazon. Foxhole-Devon: Themis Books. Casement, R. (1911). The Casement Report. In: W. E. Hardenburg (Ed.). The Putumayo: The Devil’s Paradise. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Castells, Manuel. (1997). The Power of Identity. 2: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Chaiklin, S., and Lave, J., (Eds.). (1993). Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, R., and Richards, P. (1995). Preface. In: D. M. Warren, L. J. Slikkerveer and D. Brokensha. The Cultural Dimension of Development. Indigenous Knowledge Systems, xiii-xiv. Clifford, J. (1988). The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cllifford, J. (1997). Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Comaroff, J., and Comaroff, J. (1991). Of Revelation and Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conklin, B. A. (2001). Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. Austin: University of Texas Press. Conklin, B. A. (2002). “Shamans versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest.” American Anthropologist, 104 (4), 1050-1061. Coy, M. (1989). Apprenticeship. From Theory to Method and Back Again. Albany: State University of New York. Crewe, E., and Harrison, E. (1998). Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid. London and New York: Zed Books. Crush, J. (Ed.). (1995). Power of Development. London and New York: Routledge.

References • 221

Dahl, G., and Rabo, A. (Eds.). (1992). Kam-up or Take-off: Local Notions of Development. Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. D’Andrade, R. (1995). Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Andrade, R., and Strauss, C. (Eds.). (1992). Human Motives and Cultural Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeBoer, W. (1990). Interaction, Imitation, and Communication as Expressed in Style: The Ucayali Experience. In: M. Conkley and C. Hastorf. The Uses of Style in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 83-103. Debrey, R. (1999). L’abus monumental? Paris: Fayard Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denevan, W. (1992). The Native Population of the Americas in 1492. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Descola, P. (1986) La nature domestique: symbolisme et praxis dans l’écologie des Achuar. Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme. Descola, P. (1992). Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society. In: A. Kuper (Ed.). Conceptualizing Society. London and New York: Routledge, 107-126. Descola, P., and Gisli Palsson, G. (Eds.) (1996). Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London-New York: Routledge. Dirks, N. B. (Ed.). (1992). Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. D’Orazi, M. P. (1997). “Uno scheletro che brucia fino a diventare carbone”. In: Maria Pia D’Orazi (Ed.). Butô: La danza sulla linea di confine. Roma: Istituto Giapponese di Cultura, (The Japan Foundation), 15-18. Domínguez, C. and Gómez, A. (1990). La economía extractiva en la Amazonia Colombiana 1850-1930. Bogotá: Tropenbos, COA. Domínguez, C. and Gómez, A. 1994. Nación y etnias. Conflictos territoriales en la Amazonia Colombiana, 1750-1933. Bogotá: COAMA. Echeverri, J. Á. (1997). The People of the Center of the World: A Study in Culture, History and Orality. Ph.D. diss. New School for Social Research. Echeverri, J. Á. (2000). The First Love of a Young Man. Salt and Sexual Education among the Uitoto Indians of Lowland Colombia. In: J. Overing and A. Passes (Eds.). The Anthropology of Love and Anger The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. London and New York: Routledge, 33-45. Echeverri, J. Á. (2008). ¿De chagrera a secretaria?: Balance dealgunas acciones en etnoeducación en el Amazonas colombiano. In: M. Bertely, J. Gasché,

222 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

& R. Podestá (Eds.). Educando en la diversidad: Investigaciones y experiencias educativas interculturales y bilingües. Quito: Abya-Yala, 135–166. Erickson, P. (1986). “Altérité, tatouage, et anthropophagie chez les Pano: la belliqueuse quête du soi.” Journal de la Societé del Americanistes, 72, 185-209. Escobar, A. (1992a). “Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development, and Social Movements.” Social Text, 31/32, 20-54. Escobar, A. (1992b). Planning. In: W. Sachs (Ed.). The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Escobar, A. (1997). Cultural Politics and Biological Diversity: State, Capital, and Social Movement in the Pacific Coast of Colombia. In: R. G. Fox and O. Starn (Eds.). Between Resistance and Revolution. Cultural Politics and Social Protest. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 40-64. Escobar, A. (2003). “Other Worlds are (Already) Possible. Self-Organization, Complexity, and Post Capitalist Cultures”. The WSF Challenging Empires, 349-358. Escobar, A., and Álvarez, S., (Eds.) (1992). The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy. Boulder: Westview Press. Ethnos. (1984). “Special issue on development”. Ethnos, 49, 3-4. Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fabian, J. (1990). Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fabian, J. (1996). “Ethnographic Misunderstanding and the Perils of Context.” American Anthropologist, 97 (1), 41-50. Fabian, J. (2001). Anthropology with an Attitude. Critical Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fals Borda, O. (2000). Acción y Espacio. Autonomías en la nueva República. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores. Fausto, C. (2001) Inimigos fiéis: história, guerra e xamanismo na Amazônia. São Paulo: Edusp. Feld, S. (1997). Waterfall of Song. An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. In: S. Feld and K. Basso (Eds.). Senses of Places. Santa Fe: School of American Research, 91-135. Feld, S. and K. Basso (Eds.) (1997). Senses of Places. Santa Fe: School of American Research.

References • 223

Ferguson, J. (1994). The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ferguson, J. (1999). Expectations of Modernity. Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Flavell, J. H. (1963). The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget. Princeton: Van Nostrand. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (A. Sheridan transl.). New York: Random House. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1986). The Care of the Self. 3: The History of Sexuality. (R. Hurley transl). New York: Random House. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder & Herder. Friedman, J. (1991). “Consuming Desires: Strategies of Selfhood and Appropriation.” Cultural Anthropology, 6 (2), 154-163. Friedman, J. (1992). “The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity.” American Anthropologist, 94 (4), 837-859. Friedman, J. (1994). Cultural Identity and Global Process. London-Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Fundación Gaia-Amazonas. (1999). ¿Por qué los indígenas de la Amazonía están haciendo su Propio Ordenamiento Territorial?. Documento de Trabajo No. 7. Bogotá: COAMA. Gasché, J. (1972). “L’Habitat Witoto: ‘Progrès’ et Tradition.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 61: 177- 214. Gasché, J. (1982). “Las comunidades nativas entre la aparencia y la realidad. El ejemplo de las comunidades Huitoto y Ocaina el río Ampiyacu.” Amazonía Indígena, 3 (5), 11-31. Gatewood, J. B. (1982). Actions Speak Louder than Words. In: J. Dougherty (Ed.). Directions in Cognitive Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 199-219. Gebhart-Sayer, A. (1984). The Cosmos Encoiled: Indian Art of the Peruvian Amazon. New York: Exhibition Catalogue, Center for Inter-American Relation. Gebhart-Sayer, A. (1985). “The Geometric Designs of the Shipibo-Conibo in Ritual Context.” Journal of Latin American Lore, 11 (2), 143-175. Geschiere, P. (1997 [1995]). The Modernity of Witchcraft. Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville and London: The University Press of Virginia. Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

224 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Ginzburg, C. (1980a). Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method. History Workshop, 9, 5-36. Ginzburg, C. (1980b). The Cheese and The Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ginzburg, C. (1989). “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm”. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 99-125. Giroux, H. A. (2001). Culture, power and transformation in the work of Paulo Freire. In F. Schultz (Ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Dushkin, pp. 77--86. Goldman, I. (1993). Hierarchy and Power in the Tropical Forest. In: J. S. Henderson and P. J. Netherly (Eds.). Configurations of Power. Holistic Anthropology in Theory and Practice. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 137-159. Golob, A. (1982). The Upper Amazon in Historical Perspective. PhD. diss. City University of New York. Gómez, A., Lesmes, A. C., & Rocha, C. (1995). Caucherías y conflicto colomboperuano. Testimonios 1904-1934. Bogotá: Disloque. Gow, P. (1991). Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gow, P. (1993). “Gringos and Wild Indians. Images of History in Western Amazonian Cultures.” L’Homme, 33 (126-128), 327-348. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. (Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith eds. and transl.) New York: International Publishers. Green, M. (2000). “Participatory Development and the Appropriation of Agency in Southern Tanzania.” Critique of Anthropology, 20 (1), 67-89. Griffiths, T. (2001). Finding One’s Body: Relationships between Cosmology and Work in North-West Amazonia. In: L. Rival and N. L. Whitehead (Eds.). Beyond the Visible and the Material. The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivièr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 247-262. Grossberg, L. (1992). We gotta get out of this Place. Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J. (1997a). Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era. In: A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (Eds.). Culture, Power, Place. Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1-29. Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J. (1997b). Discipline and Practice: The Field as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology. In: A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (Eds.). Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1-46.

References • 225

Guss, D. M. (1989). To Weave and Sing. Art, Symbolism, and Narrative in South American Rain Forest. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guss, D. M. (2000). The Festive State. Race Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guyot, M. (1972). “La Maison des Indiens Bora et Miraña.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 61, 141-176. Guyot, M. (1979). “La historia del Mar de Danta, el Caquetá. Una fase de la evolución cultural en el Noroeste amazónico.” Journal de la Société des Americanistes, 66, 97-122. Hall B., Gillette, A., and Tandon, R. (Eds.). (1982). Creating Knowledge: A Monopoly? Participatory Research in Developmen.. New Delhi: Society for Participatory Research in Asia. Participatory Research Network Series, 1. Hall, S. (1986). “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10 (2), 5-27. Hall, S. (1996). Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’? In: S. Hall and P. Du Gay (Eds.). Questions of Cultural Identity. Sage: London, 1-60. Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbian University Press. Hardenburg, W. E. (1912). The Putumayo: The Devil’s Paradise. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Heckenberger et al. (2008). “Pre-Columbian Urbanism, Anthropogenic Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon.” Science, 321 (5893), 1214-1217. Helms, M. W. (1987). Art Styles and Interaction Spheres in Central America and the Caribbean. In: R. D. Drennan and C. A. Uribe (Eds.). Chiefdoms in the Americas. Lanham: University Press of America, 67-84. Henley, P., and Mattéi-Muller, M. C. (1978). “Panare Basketry: Means of Commercial Exchange and Artistic Expression.” Antropológica, 49, 29-130. Herrera Lara, R. H. (2000). Cultural Images, Education and Domination: The Case of the Mapuche of Southern Chile. Ph. D. thesis. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Herzfeld, M. (1992). The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hill, J. D. (Ed.) (1988). Rethinking History and Myth. Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hill, J. D. (1996). Introduction: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992. In: J. D. Hill (Ed.). History, Power and Identity. Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1-19.

226 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Hill, J. D. (2002). Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Woman: Fertility Cultism and Historical Dynamics in the Upper Rio Negro Basin. In: J. D. Hill and F. Santos-Granero (Eds.). Comparative Arawakan Histories. Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 223-247. Hill, J. D., and Santos-Granero, F. (Eds.). (2002). Comparative Arawakan Histories. Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hugh-Jones, S. (1992). Yesterday’s luxuries, tomorrow’s necessities: business and barter in northwest Amazonia. In: C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones (Eds.). Barter, Exchange and value: An Anthropological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 42-74. Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Hymes, D. (1981). “In Vain I Tried to Tell you:” Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Illich, I. (1999). Needs. In: W. Sachs (Ed.). The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London and New York: Zed Books, 88-101. Jackson, J. (1983). The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, J. (2002). Contested Discourses of Authority in Colombian National Indigenous Politics: The 1996 Summer Takeovers. In: K. B. Warren and J. Jackson (Eds.). Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 81-122. Jelin, E. (Ed.). (1987). Movimientos sociales y democracia emergente. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina. Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keesing, R. (1994). Theories of Culture Revisited. In: R. Borofsky (Ed.). Assessing Cultural Anthropology. McGraw-Hill, 301-310. Keifenheim, B. (1990). “Nawa – Un concept clef de l’altérité chez les Pano.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 76: 79-94. Keller, J. D. (1988). “Woven World: Neotraditional Symbols of Unity in Vanuatu.” Mankind, 18(1), 1-13. Keller, J. D., and Keller, C. (1996). Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keller, J. D., and Keller, C. (1999). “Imagery in Cultural Tradition and Innovation.” Mind, Culture, and Activity, 6 (1), 3-32.

References • 227

Kuper, A. (1999). Culture. The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Landaburu, J., and Pineda Camacho, R. (1984). Tradiciones de la gente del hacha. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, UNESCO. Latour, B. (1986). “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands.” Knowledge and Society, 6, 1-40. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lave, J. (1990). The Culture of Acquisition and the Practice of Understanding. In: J. W. Stigler, R. A. Schweder, and G. Herdt (Eds.). Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 309–327. Lave, J., and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1965). Le geste et la parole. 2: La Memoire et les Rhytmes. Paris: Editions Albin Michel. Lehman, F. K. (1994). Emotion, Symbolism and Cognition. Paper prepared for the panel “Sense and Sensibility I: Cognition Emerges from Perception.” American Anthropological Association, Atlanta. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1977). Structural Anthropology II. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Luna, L. E., and Amaringo, P. C. (1991). Ayahuasca Visions. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Londoño Sulkin, C. D. (2001). The making of Real People: An interpretation of a morality-centred theoryof sociality, livelihood and selfhood among the Muinane (Colombian Amazon). Ph.D. diss. University of Saint Andrews. Londoño Sulkin, C. D. (2004). Muinane: un proyecto moral a perpetuidad. Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia. Marx, K., and Engels, F. (1970). The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers. Max-Neef, M. (1982). From the Outside Looking in: Experiences in “Barefoot Economics.” Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. Max-Neef, M. (1993). Desarrollo a Escala Humana. Montevideo: Editorial Nordan-Comunidad. McNay, L. (1994). Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

228 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Melucci, A. (1988). Social Movements and the Democratization of Everyday Life. In: John Keane (Ed.). Civil Society and the State. New European Perspectives. London: Verso, 245-260. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. (C. Smith transl). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Micarelli, G. (1996). “Identity between Ideology and Cognition: Style Elaboration and Cultural Interaction in Amazonia.” L’Uomo, 9, n.s. – n.n. 1-2, 31-60. Micarelli, G. (2009). “Ordenar el Pensamiento”: Place-Making and the Moral Management of Resources in a Multi-Ethnic Territory, Amazonas, Colombia. In: M. Alexiades (Ed.). Mobility and Indigenous Amazonia. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 195-219. Micarelli, G. (2010). Pensar como un enjambre: redes indígenas en las márgenes de la modernidad. In: M. Chaves and C. d. Cairo (Eds.), Perspectivas antropológicas sobre la Amazonía contemporánea. Bogotá: ICANH/Universidad Javeriana, 489-510. Micarelli, G. (forthcoming). Divine Banknote: The Translation of Proyect Money into Public Wealth. In F. Santos-Granero (Ed.) Images of Public Wealth or the Anatomy of Well-being in Native Amazonia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Micarelli, G., and Gómez, H. (2002). The Body of Memory: Theater Anthropology as an Instrument for Cultural and Linguistic Revitalization in Indigenous Communities of the Colombian Amazon. In: R. McKenna Brown (Ed.). Proceedings of the Sixth FEL Conference. Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 93-98. Mitchell, T. (1988). Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mohanty, C. (1991). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse. In: C. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres (Eds.). Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 51-80. Montejo, V. (2002). The Multiplicity of Mayan Voices: Mayan Leadership and the Politics of Self-Representation. In: K. Warren, and J. Jackson (Eds.). Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin American. Austin: University of Texas Press, 123-148. Myers, T. P. (1981). Aboriginal Trade Networks in Amazonia. In: P. D. Francis, et al. (Eds.). Networks of the Past: Regional Interaction in Archaeology. The University of Calgary Archaeological Association, 19-30. Narby, J. (1998). The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.

References • 229

Nash, J. C. (2001). Mayan Visions. The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization. New York and London: Routledge. Nehamas, A. (1998). The Art of Living. Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Oberem, U. (1974). Trade and Trade Goods in the Ecuadorian Montaña. In: P. J. Lyon (Ed.). Native South Americans. Ethnology of the Least Known Continent. Boston: Little, Brown & C., 346-257. Ochs E., and Capps, L. (1996). “Narrating the Self.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 19-43. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (Ed). (1990). Culture through Time. Anthropological Approaches. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ong, A. (1997). Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ortner, S. B. (1984). “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26(1), 126-166. Overing-Kaplan J. (1981). Review Article: “Amazonian Anthropology.” Journal Lat. Amer. Studies, 13 (1), 151-164. Overing, J. (1990). “The shaman as a maker of worlds.” Man, n.s., 25 (4), 602-19. Overing, J. and Passes, A. (Eds.). (2000). The Anthropology of Love and Anger. The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. London and New York: Routledge. Pareyson, L. (1954). Estetica. Milano: Marzorati. Parry, J., and Bloch, M. (1989). Money and the Morality of the Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pigg, S. L. (1992). “Inventing Social Categories through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal.” Society for Comparative Study of History and Society, 34 (3), 491-513. Pineda Camacho, R. (1985). Historia oral y proceso esclavista en el Caquetá. Bogotá: Banco de la República. Pineda Camacho, R., and Alzate Ángel, B. (Eds.). (1993). Pasado y Presente del Amazonas: su historia económica y social. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes. Porteous, J. D. (1990). Landscapes of the Mind. Worlds of Sense and Metaphor. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Precourt, W. (1988). Ethnohistorical Analysis of an Appalachian Settlement School. In: G. Spindler (Ed.). Doing Ethnography of Schooling. Educational Anthropology in Action. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 4 40-453.

230 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Preuss, K. T. (1994). Religión y mitología de los Uitotos. Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Nacional. Rabasa, J. (1993). Writing and Evangelization in Sixteen-Century Mexico. In: J. M. William and R. R. Lewis (Eds.). Early Images of the Americas. Transfer and Invention. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 65-92. Rabinow, P. (1986). Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and PostModernity in Anthropology. In: J. Clifford and G. Marcus (Eds.). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 234-61. Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. (1985). Basketry as a Metaphor. Arts and Crafts of the Desana Indians of the Northwest Amazon. Occasional Papers of the Museum of Cultural History. Los Angeles: University of California, N. 5.Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. (1996). The Forest Within: The World View of the Tukano Amazonian Indians. London: Themis Books. Renard Casevitz, F.M., Th.Saignes, and A. C. Taylor (1988). Al este de los Andes: relaciones entre las sociedades amazónicas y andina entre los siglos XV y XVII. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala. Renfrew, C., and Zubrow, E. B. (Eds.). (1994). The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Restrepo, G., and Velasco, Á. (1996.) Cartografía Social: Metodología y Experiencias. Plan de acción forestal para Colombia. Bogotá: Instituto Geográfico Agustin Codazzi, Año 3, No. 2 Rival, L., and Whitehead, N. L. (Eds.). (2001). Beyond the Visible and the Material. The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivière. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rivière P. (1984). Individual and Society in Guiana: A Comparative Study of Amerindian Social Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roosevelt, A. C. (1991). Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical Archaeology on the Marajó Island. New York: Academic Press. Roosevelt, A. C. (1993). The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms. L’Homme, 33 (126-128), 255-283. Sachs, W., (Ed). (1992). The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Sahlins, M. (1999). “What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century.” Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 28: i-xxxiii. Sahlins, M. (2000). Culture in Practice. Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

References • 231

Salomon, F. (1981). Killing the Yumbo: A Ritual Drama of Northern Quito. In: N. E. Whitten, Jr. (Ed.). Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador. . Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 162-208. Santos, B. de Sousa (2009). Una Epistemologia del Sur. La reinvención del Conocimiento y la Emancipación Social. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, CLACSO. Santos-Granero, F. (1992). Ethnohistoria de la Alta Amazonia. Quito: Ed. Abya-Yala. Santos-Granero, F. (2000). The Sisyphus Syndrome, or the Struggle for Conviviality in Native Amazonia. In: J. Overing and A. Passes (Eds.). The Anthropology of Love and Anger. The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. London and New York: Routledge, 268-187. Santos-Granero, F. (2002). The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language, and History in Native South America. In: J. Hill and F. Santos-Granero (Eds.). Comparative Arawakan Histories. Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 25-50. Santos-Granero, F. (2007). “Of Fear and Friendship: Amazonian Sociality beyond Kinship and Affinity.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1): 1-18. Santos-Granero, F. (2009). “Hybrid Bodyscapes: A Visual History of Yanesha Patterns of Cultural Change”. Current Anthropology 50 (4): 477-512. Santos-Granero, F. (2012). “Beinghood and People-Making in Native Amazonia: A Constructional Approach with a Perspectival Coda.” HAU-Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 181-211. Santos-Granero, F., and Barclay, F. (2002). La Frontera Domesticada. Historia Económica y Social de Loreto, 1850-2000. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú-Fondo Editorial 2000. Scazzocchio, F. B. (1978). “Curare Kills, Cures, and Binds. Change and Persistence of Indian Trade in Response to the Contact Situation in the North-Western Montaña.” Cambridge Anthropology, 4 (3), 30-57. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Embodied Knowledge: Thinking with the Body in Critical Medical Anthropology. In: R. Borofsky (Ed.). Assessing Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 229-240. Scheper-Hughes, N., and Lock, M. M. (1985). “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quart., n.s. 1 (1), 6-41. Schumpeter, J. (1994). Historia del análisis económico. Madrid: Ed. Ariel. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

232 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Shore, B. (1996). Culture in Mind. Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singleton, J. (Ed.). (1998). Learning in Likely Places. Varieties of Apprenticeship in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sorensen, Jr. A. P. (1967). “Multilingualism in the Northwest Amazon.” American Anthropologist, 69 (6), 670-684. Sperber, D. (1974). Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, D. (1985). “Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations.” Man, n.s. 20, 73-89. Stark, D. (2000). For a Sociology of Worth. Center on Organizational Innovation. Working Papers, Oct. 2000. Columbia University and Santa Fe Institute. Stepputat, F. (2000). At the Frontiers of the Modern State in Post-War Guatemala. In: A. Arce and N. Long (Eds.). Anthropology, Development and Modernities. Exploring Discourses, Counter-Tendencies and Violence. London and New York: Routledge, 127-140. Stewart, K. (1996). A Space on the Side of the Road. Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stirrat, R. L. (2000). Cultures of Consultancy. Critique of Anthropology, 20 (1), 31-46 Stradelli, E. (1890). Il Vaupes e gli Vaupes. Roma: Bolletino della Società Geografica Italiana, 3a. série, vol. 3, 425-453. Strauss, C. (1984). “Beyond ’Formal’ versus ‘Informal’ Education: Uses of Psychological Theory in Anthropological Research.” Ethos, 12 (3), 195-222. Strauss, C., and Quinn, N. (1997). A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meanings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, L. (1988). Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions. New York: Macmillan. Tambiah, S. J. (1979). A Performative Approach to Ritual. Radcliffe-Brown Lecture. Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 65. London: Oxford University Press. Taussig, M. (1980). The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Taussig, M. (1987). Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. A Study of Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, N. (1988). “Marginal powers.” Critique of Anthropology, 8 (3), 53-74 Thomas, N. (1989). Out of Time. History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, N. (1992). Entangled Objects. Exchange. Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

References • 233

Todorov, T. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogical Principle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Touraine, A. (1995). Critique of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Trouillot, M. (2001). “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of a Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology, Spring 2001, 1-27. Turner, T. J. (1979). The Gê and Bororo societies as dialectical systems: a general model. In: D. Maybury-Lewis (Ed.). Dialectical Societies: The Gê and Bororo of Central Brazil. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 147-78. Turner, T. J. (1991). Representing, Resisting, Rethinking. Historical Transformations of Kayapo Culture and Anthropological Consciousness. In: G.W. Stocking, Jr. (Ed.). Colonial Situations. Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 285-313. Turner, T. J. (1993). “Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What is Anthropology That Multiculturalists Should Be Mindful of?” Cultural Anthropology, 8 (4), 411-429. Turner, V. (1975). Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1987).The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 156-178. Urbina, F. (1992). Las hojas del poder. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Useche, L. (1993). El concepto de la Amazonía y la colonización penal de Araracuara en la perspectiva de la colonización amazónica durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. In: R. Pineda Camacho, and B. Alzate Ángel (Eds.). Pasado y Presente del Amazonas: su historia económica y social. In: Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 81-90 Van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Vidal, S., and Whitehead, N. L. (2004) Dark Shamans and the Shamanic State: Sorcery and Witchcraft as Political Process in Guyana and the Venezuelan Amazon. In: R. Wright and N. L. Whitehead (Eds.). In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia. Durham: Duke University Press, 51-81. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1979). “A fabricação do corpo na sociedade xinguana.” Boletim do Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Série Antropologia, n. 32, p. 40-49 Viveiros de Castro, E. (1992). From the Enemy’s Point of View. Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society, (C. V. Howard transl.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

234 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Viveiros de Castro, E. (1996). “Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 179-200. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998). “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4 (3), 469-488. Warren, D. M., Slikkerveer, J., & Brokensha, D. (1995). The Cultural Dimension of Development. Indigenous Knowledge Systems. London: Intermediate Technology Publications Warren, K. B. (2002). Toward an Anthropology of Fragment, Instabilities, and Incomplete Transitions. In: C. Greenhouse, E. Mertz, and K. B. Warren (Eds.). Ethnography in Unstable Places. Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 379-392. Whiffen, T. (1915). The North-West Amazon. Notes on Some Months Spent Among Cannibal Tribes. New York: Duffield and Company. White, H. C. (2002). Strategies and Identities by Mobilization Context. Center on Organizational Innovation. Columbia University. Working Papers, Sept. 2002. Whitehead, N. L. (1992a). El Dorado, Cannibalism and the Amazon— European Myth and Amerindian Praxis in the Conquest of South America. Beeld en Verbeelding van Amerika, Studium General Series 9206. Utrech: University of Utrech Press, 53-70. Whitehead, N. L. (1992b). Tribes make States and States make Tribes. Warfare and the Creation of Colonial Tribes and States in Northeastern South America. In: N. L. Whitehead, and R. B. Ferguson. War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Santa Fe: Sar Press, 127-150. Whitehead, N. L. (1993). “Historical Discontinuity and Ethnic Transformation in Native Amazonia and Guayana.” L’Homme, 28, 289-309. Whitehead, N. L. (1994). The Ancient Amerindian Polities of the Lower Orinoco, Amazon, and Guiana Coast. A Preliminary Analysis of their Passage from Antiquity to Extintion. In: A.C. Rooselvelt (Eds.). Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present: Anthropological Perspectives. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994, 20-35. Whitehead, N. L. (2002). Dark Shamans. Kainaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Whitehead, N. L. (2003a). Introduction. In N. L. Whitehead (Ed.) Histories and Historicities in Amazonia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ix-xxi Whitehead, N. L. (2003b). Three Patamuna Trees - Landscape and History in the Guyana Highland. In: N. L. Whitehead (Ed..). Histories and Historicities in Amazonia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 59-77.

References • 235

Whitehead, N. L. (2009). “Post-Human Anthropology.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 16, 1-32. Whitehead, N. L., and Ferguson, R. B. (Eds.). (1992). War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Santa Fe: Sar Press. Witherspoon, G. (1977). Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Whitten, N. E. Jr. (1976). Sacha Runa. Ethnicity and Adaptation of Ecuadorian Jungle Quichua. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Whitten, N. E. Jr. (1985). Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side of Development in Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Whitten, N. E. Jr. (1987). Commentary: Historical and Mythic Evocation of Chthonic Power in South America. In: J. D. Hill (Ed.). Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South Americal Perspectives on the Past. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Whitten, N. E. Jr. (1996). The Ecuadorian Levantamiento Indígena of 1990 and the Epitomizing Symbol of 1992: Reflections on Nationalism, Ethnic-Bloc Formation, and Racialist Ideologies. In: J. D. Hill (Ed.). History, Power and Identity. Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 193-218. Whitten, N. E. Jr. (In press). Commentary: Ultimate and Proximate Contexts of Cosmology and History in Dark Shamanic Cultural Performances. In Journal of the Anthropology of Consciousness. Whitten, N. E. Jr., Scott Whitten, D. andChango, A. (1997). “Return of the Yumbo: The Indigenous Caminata from Amazonia to Andean Quito.” American Ethnologist, 24 (2), 355-391 Whitten, D. and Whitten, N. E., Jr. (1988). From Myth to Creation: Art from Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wilbert, J. (1987). Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Williams, R. (1982) Culture and Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Williams, R. (1973). “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review, 82, 3-16. Yates, F. A. (1966). The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

236 • INDIGENOUS NETWORKS AT THE MARGINS OF DEVELOPMENT

Este libro se terminรณ de imprimir Bogotรก D.C. en el mes de mayo del 2015. Fue compuesto con caracteres Berkeley Oldstyle Book y Futura.

en los talleres de Javegraf en