Indigenous Networks at the Margins of Development

INDIGENOUS NETWORKS

AT THE MARGINS OF

DEVELOPMENT

GIOVANNA MICARELLI

Reservados todos los derechos

© Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

© Giovanna Micarelli

Primera edición: noviembre 2014

Bogotá, D.C.

ISBN: 978-958-716-819-8

Número de ejemplares: 200

Hecho en Colombia

Made in Colombia

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Corrección de estilo

Nicolás Barbosa

Matthew Battle

Diseño de cubierta

Claudia Patricia Rodríguez

Diagramación y montaje de cubierta

Marcela Godoy

Desarrollo ePub

Lápiz Blanco S.A.S

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

C.

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

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 "Nimaira Naimeki Ibiri, Muina-Murui," also known as Kilómetro 11

Photo 3: Introduced housing in the indigenous community "Nimaira Naimeki Ibiri, 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

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 8: Building a maloca. Resguardo indígena Tikuna-Uitoto,Km. 6-11. 2005

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 Rierue Nabiñ maloca, Resguardo indígena Tikuna-Uitoto, Km. 6-11. 2010.

Photo 11: Workshop of Social Photography, TAFOS. Indigenous community Nimaira Naimeki Ibiri, 2000.

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. 6-11.

Tables

Table 1. Clans and ethnic groups of the Kilómetro 11 Community, Comunidad Indígena Nimaira Naimeki Ibiri, 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

i, 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 Tikuna- Cocama-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 Nimaira Naimekí Ibiri 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 Nimaira Naimeki Ibiri 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.

Introduction

Full of merit, yet poetically / Humans dwell on this earth

(F. HOLDERLIN)

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

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, 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 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 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; Riviere, 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 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 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.

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,