Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Series Editors
André Liebich, Professor of International History and Politics, Graduate Institute
of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
Marc Galvin, PhD, Head of Publications, Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
As tomorrow’s challenges become increasingly global and the North–South divide
narrows, the International Relations and Development Series edited by the Gradu-
ate Institute in Geneva relies on an approach to global problems that integrates
international relations and development studies. It aims to promote research con-
centrating on global and multi-level governance, involving the United Nations
and other international organisations as well as key regions and regional organi-
sations. The distinctiveness of this series lies in the combination of a wide disci-
plinary range, including political science, international economics, international
law, anthropology and history from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Titles include:
Alana Mann
GLOBAL ACTIVISM IN FOOD POLITICS
Power Shift
Katrin Milzow
NATIONAL INTERESTS AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
Discourses and Politics of Blair, Chirac and Schröder
Seunghoon Emilia Heo
RECONCILING ENEMY STATES IN EUROPE AND ASIA
Jean Ziegler, Christophe Golay, Claire Mahon and Sally-Anne Way
THE FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO FOOD
Lessons Learned
Peter Bille Larsen
POST-FRONTIER RESOURCE GOVERNANCE
Indigenous Rights, Extraction and Conservation in the Peruvian Amazon
Acknowledgements x
3 Frontier Narratives 35
Notes 162
References 166
Index 182
v
Tables and Maps
Tables
Maps
vi
Foreword
This book emerged out of a research project that the author initiated at
the EHESS in Paris and the IHEID in Geneva. The issues that we debated
in our discussions covered the paradoxes of development as well as those
of political ecology and the contradiction between development and
ecosystemic maintenance which have dominated a great deal of the
debates in the field. The author plunged into the issues with alacrity
after having worked in the development field for quite a few years out-
side of the academy. His return was marked by questions of framing his
previous activities, by reflecting on his own very broad experiences in
both Asia and Latin America. The history of indigenous peoples is one in
which empires have continuously encroached on the latter’s domains.
There is of course a logic to this confrontation, one that can be said to
pit ontologies but, more importantly, life strategies against one another.
The focus of this study is the complex relation between indigenous pop-
ulations, multinational extractive industries, the state and NGOs. Much
of the literature in the field has been constructed on the basis of oppo-
sition between the linear strategies of exploitation and accumulation
and the holism of indigenous society. This book re-situates the prob-
lem in terms of what is referred to as the post-frontier. Resources are no
longer just there for the taking and accumulation cannot so easily run
its savage course. Extractivism is interlocked in a conflictual articulation
with indigenous actors, and the latter are clearly not mere representa-
tives of a Batesonian holism or even primitivism. They are practical and
engage in activities that are far removed from any simple understand-
ing of the former type. A number of important challenges are generated
from this approach. First, the notion of the indigenous population as a
passive victim of encroaching capitalism needs to be rectified. Indige-
nous populations are neither passive nor mere victims, even if this may
have been closer to the truth in times past. In an era saturated with
precisely an ideology of anti-victimization where human rights and
especially indigenous rights have been adopted by the United Nations,
for whatever that is worth, there are instruments that can be invoked
against pure extractivism. And this is further complicated by the reality
that indigenous actors are not necessarily green in their ideologies, nor
even in their “ontologies”. While casino indigenism is not necessarily
anti-ecological, it is clearly not anti-capitalist. Studies from Melanesian
vii
viii Foreword
mining zones indicate that populations are often split between those
who would close the mines and those who support them as long as they
bring in revenues. The Maori, who have had one of the strongest indige-
nous movements, have achieved a great deal of autonomy as well as a
substantial revenue base in New Zealand’s Kiwi production and fisheries.
The latter has been capitalized upon and led Elizabeth Rata to qualify
the phenomenon as “tribal capitalism”. I remember showing this to a
leader for the Hawaiian movement who said, “so what’s wrong with a
little capitalism?”
The world of the post-frontier is one that follows the rise of indige-
nous movements, their consolidation in international organizations of
various sorts and their representation at the United Nations, first in
the form of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and now the
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. This is a major shift in the
constellation of power relations and cannot be dismissed when con-
sidering what has happened to the relation between multinational
companies’ extractive strategies and the indigenous peoples whose terri-
tory houses the coveted resources. Larsen demonstrates the importance
of ethnography for transcending simple ideological versions of indige-
nous actors, versions that are still prevalent in debates concerning
indigenous rights and even the very existence of the very category itself
(as evidenced in the recent debate triggered by Adam Kuper’s “Return of
the Native” (2003)). Now as this book focuses on the interface between
ecology, indigeneity, capital and the state, the issue of intentionality
becomes all the more important as well as interesting. If the issues raised
here concern the post-frontier, we might suggest that today we are also
in a period of post-indigeneity in the sense that the focus on indigeneity
as such has become transformed into one concerning the strategies of
indigenous actors in real time and not the category of indigeneity itself.
One might call this the study of “real existing indigeneity”. The lat-
ter was once conceived as a kind of actor, however, passive, but this
was wrong in the past and it is clearly inadequate in the present. In
detailing the articulation of strategies in a period in which extractive
expansion and the destruction of nature for the sake of accumulation
are no longer as simple as they were in the past, the invoking of ecologi-
cal sustainability, local and indigenous knowledges and resource-specific
management has become something different, even if there is no reason
to hope that this is part of a transition to a new and better world. After
all, there is a balance of power involved in all of this so that critical
junctures might well reveal the fragility of extractive industries’ power
to maintain their accumulative practices or perhaps their capacity to
Foreword ix
Jonathan Friedman
University of California San Diego
Acknowledgements
x
Acknowledgements xi
José Marín provided excellent comments. Laura Rival, Dawn Chatty and
Barbara Harriss-White made the stay at the Oxford Department of Inter-
national Development most enjoyable. Colleagues at the University of
Lucerne, in particular Bettina Beer and Don Gardner, offered helpful
critiques on earlier chapters. I am also thankful to Gisli Palsson for com-
ments on the introduction. Morgan Scoville-Simonds, Paroma Ghose,
David Matley and Harsh Bedi kindly helped out with the language edit-
ing. Many thanks also to Marc Galvin, Barbara Coghlan and Catherine
Fragnière (IHEID), as well as Ambra Finotello, Christina Brian and the
anonymous reviewer from Palgrave for their patience and insights. I am
also grateful to Anselmo Mariño Cruz for the artwork appearing on
the cover. Finally, this research would never have materialized with-
out the generous research grant and continuous support from NCCR
North South colleagues, a CRUS grant to work at the EHESS and a Swiss
National Science Foundation grant enabling the visiting fellowship at
the University of Oxford.
Acronyms
xii
List of Acronyms xiii
Introduction
1
2 Post-frontier Resource Governance
The post-frontier
A frontier is an edge of space and time: a zone of not yet not yet
mapped, not yet regulated. It is a zone of unmapping: even in its
planning, a frontier is imagined as unplanned. Frontiers aren’t just
discovered at the edge; they are projects in making geographical and
temporal experience. Frontiers make wildness, entangling visions and
vines and violence; their wildness is both material and imaginative.
(Tsing 2005: 28–29)
“Loreto has come a long way since the rubber era and is no longer gov-
erned by the logic of frontier expansion” (Santos-Granero and Barclay
2000: 308). So ends a landmark study, entitled “Tamed frontiers”, of
Loreto in the Peruvian Amazon at the turn of the millennium. The post-
frontier at stake was not simply the “low” after the resource high had
dried out; rather, the authors pointed to an evolution of governance
practice. Horror stories of enslaved Indians and rights abuses, reflect-
ing the dark side of rubber and other resource booms, belonged to the
past. After almost two centuries of Peruvian independence, and further
waves of violence and dispossession, the Amazonian frontier had been
tamed in Loreto through “the suppression or containment of the worse
traits identified with the frontier economy” (Santos-Granero and Barclay
2000: 5). In a critique of sweeping statements about violent Amazonian
frontiers, the authors concluded that there were no doubts about the
magnitude of positive change (ibid.: 308), emphasizing the “assertion
of civil rights, the shaping of a regional identity and the development
of a regionalist ideology” (ibid.: 320).
In Brazil, Cleary would judge the notion of frontier to have “run
its course” and become meaningless as an academic construct (Cleary
1993: 349). The demise of frontier development politics seemed to sug-
gest that “frontiers” had become a thing of the past. The historical
events leading to the post-frontier are well illustrated by the Amazon
gaining global media attention, notably in the 1980s, as a stage for
iconic frontier battles in response to ruthless development, coloniza-
tion and forest clearance on the one hand, and for forest dwellers and
environmentalists on the other. The Amazon “crisis”, epitomized by the
murder of the rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes in 1988 and the arrival
of indigenous leaders to the global scene, triggered waves of protests and
sustainability planning (Cleary 1991). Most countries in the Amazon
now have complex legal bodies, institutional systems and safeguard
measures that – on paper – sustain the forests, secure the rights of indige-
nous peoples and protect biodiversity. Whereas the literature stressed
how sustainability was ignored in Latin America just two decades ago
(Goodman and Redclift 1991), it has since become omnipresent.
In narrative terms, the arrival of a post-frontier of social complexity
would appear to signal the end of frontier dynamics, which since the
The Post-frontier Paradox 7
and oil sectors today speak about minimizing negative impacts and gen-
erating benefits. Environmental plans are now staple ingredients in both
local and national administrations. Today, projects on carbon sequestra-
tion, mitigation and biodiversity conservation, among others, appear
side by side with agricultural expansion, road penetration and resource
extraction in a new narrative of post-frontier sustainability order in the
global South.1 The post-frontier not only concerns resource planning,
but also the wide array of land rights, redistributive mechanisms and
labour legislation, which equally transform the social landscape. The
absence of citizenship and other papers, which were common just a few
decades ago in the peripheries of nation states, are increasingly being
replaced by registers, identity cards and associated rights regimes. The
frontier property landscape of state and private ownership has increas-
ingly, notably in Latin America, been complemented by other forms of
individual and collective property forms (Sunderlin et al. 2008). Beneath
global post-frontier trends are huge differences, of course: 98% of forests
are under government ownership in Africa, 68% in the Asia-Pacific zone
and 33% in Latin America (Hatcher and Bailey 2011: 16). Protected
areas also vary considerably in terms of recognizing community rights
and needs, just as safeguard measures in the extractive sector differ
substantially between countries.
Take a deep breath and sense the green, biodiversity-rich and equitable
post-frontier. Listen to the World Bank in Brazil listing the protec-
tion of 24 million ha of forest, the classification of 45.4 million ha of
indigenous lands, and 2.1 million ha of community-managed extractive
reserves resulting from their support (World Bank 2013: xii). Also lis-
ten to the Colombian Ministry of Environment informing a Norwegian
delegation that 84% of the Amazon is protected and conserved,2 while
proposing a park expansion plan to secure 0% deforestation by 2020.
The post-frontier paradox, however, soon becomes apparent and makes
you snap for oxygen.
Across the Amazon, 24 million ha of forest, or the size of the
Ecuadorian Amazon, or the area protected through World Bank sup-
port in Brazil, were deforested in the first decade of the 21st century,
while 84% is also the extent of coverage of oil concessions in the
Peruvian Amazon, an area overlapping with half of Peru’s protected
10 Post-frontier Resource Governance
Comaroff 2012: 13). Is this, then, the moment of truth for modern
regulation in the postcolonial era, which is questioned as being “espe-
cially, excessively, distinctively violent and disorderly” (John Comaroff
and Comaroff 2006: vii)? Indeed, does it make sense to retain the
notion of the post-frontier if all it amounts to is a re-orchestrated
political rhetoric used to render further frontier creation acceptable?
As David Harvey notes, capitalist history is littered with technologies
and “utopian schemes for the promotion of new social relations . . . only
to be either co-opted or abandoned in the face of a dominant capitalist
logic” (2010: 130).
From the World System perspective, post-frontier measures do not
replace frontier creation because the very essence of the capitalist sys-
tem requires expansion to survive. At stake is a zero-sum world where
global production and consumption patterns depend on continuing
unequal exchanges of energy and entropy, the constitutive elements
of the resource frontier, as a reproductive necessity (Hornborg 2009).
New “external” areas, peoples and resources – what Wallerstein named
hinterlands – are incorporated as frontiers in the system under asym-
metrical conditions defined by the centre (Hall 2009). Frontiers are,
from this perspective, not simply outdated development models, but
“necessary” for capitalist reproduction and are structured in global sys-
temic terms. New regulatory regimes, in essence, do not fundamentally
alter this structural condition. This creates a systemic contradiction
between nominal attempts to close frontiers and the continuous frontier
openings required to feed the global system.
The post-frontier, from this perspective, is merely shallow window
dressing, a Marxist supra-frontier so to speak, disguising the “raw mate-
rial diplomacy”3 and the geopolitical mediation necessary to sustain
economic growth. It represents a form of state intervention to normal-
ize frontier appetite through a sort of “crisis displacement” which allows
for continued capital accumulation (Hay 1994). What is tamed or closed
in the post-frontier, from this perspective, is social critique, not the
structural demand for resources. Post-frontiers do not abandon unequal
exchange or resource utility, but simply reconfigure them to a mod-
ern regulatory legitimacy framework. Do post-frontier institutions then
merely communicate regulatory order without any (significant) regu-
latory effect? Do post-frontier regulatory measures then simply reflect
the identity-marking process of coming to terms with frontier con-
tradictions and defusing counter-politics without resolving underlying
structural tensions? Much of the post-frontier reform hype certainly dis-
appears when one looks at the governance of non-renewable resources,
The Post-frontier Paradox 13
has ignored these factors would be unfair, yet this book argues for more
explicit treatment. Much anthropological literature is caught between
opposite poles of rejecting frontier narratives of progress and calls for
change, on the one hand, and dismissing the fragile nature of post-
frontier alternatives, on the other. What is needed is a less normative
approach to the post-frontier, thus enabling empirical attention paid to
its forms of practice to “steer clear of both apology and denunciation, to
avoid both prophecies and caricatures” (de Sardan 2005: 1). Post-frontier
institutions are not, this book contends, merely poorly camouflaged
public control mechanisms, but cover a rich terrain of complex insti-
tutional processes, power dynamics and social battlefields. A number of
arguments support this claim.
Firstly, while the World System perspective helps to explain the pro-
liferation of frontiers, it offers only a starting point for making sense of
the practice of post-frontier institutions. Furthermore, dismissing hol-
low or weak measures framed by neoliberal and globalization tropes
easily disguises the complexity of actual social processes. Arguing, for
example, that protected areas have failed globally to halt biodiversity
loss (Mora and Sale 2011) is not wrong per se, but it does not actually
tell us what then is taking place. Consider the intensified spread of oil
concessions into fragile ecosystems. This would, at first sight, illustrate
the effects of deregulation or piecemeal safeguards. Yet, contrary to the
critique of neoliberal deregulation, the post-frontier gaze rests on the
exact opposite observation: namely, that most frontiers have become
ever more regulated in both environmental and social terms. The recent
oil concession bonanza across the Amazon has taken place in “mature”
post-frontier landscapes, not in open lands up for grabs. Transnational
access to frontier resources does not entail less regulation, but specific
“flexible” regulations, often sanctioned by trade agreements, woven
carefully to retrofit conservation restrictions that allow investments to
move forward. The paradoxical nature of protected areas overlapping
concessions is not an anomaly, but part of the emergent post-frontier.
What has changed is not the retreat of regulatory mechanisms per se,
but evolving forms of re-regulation, modus operandi and state practice.
Contemporary frontiers are not invisible sites of deregulated violence,
but visible sites of re-regulation. In a similar vein, what Charles Hale
named neoliberal multiculturalism (Hale 2002) did not in fact involve
neoliberal deregulation per se, but a re-regulated multicultural space
involving distinct forms of recognizing rights.
Secondly, post-frontier institutions do not settle the power politics
of the frontier once and for all. Rather they cover a vast and highly
The Post-frontier Paradox 15
I was drawn to Latin America and the Amazon not only because of
the presence of centuries of deepening frontier pressures, but equally
so by the proliferation of indigenous rights and environmental mea-
sures in recent decades. The Peruvian Amazon covers more than 78
million ha or some 61% of Peru’s total surface, with a total popula-
tion of around 3.6 million. Of these, some 332,975 live in 1,786 native
communities – the term used to simultaneously describe indigenous
communities and their land titles in the Amazon region. By 2010, 1,254
of these communities had received titles covering some 11 million ha
(13.6% of the national territory) and five territorial reserves had been
created for indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. The 2007 census
lists 1,786 indigenous communities, which constitute 9% of the total
Amazonian population. In total, the combined figure of protected areas
and indigenous territories covers 36.3% of the Peruvian Amazon (IBC
2011).
Before setting my feet in the Peruvian high jungle, I had discussed
protected areas, oil exploration and indigenous titling with lawyers,
activists and anthropologists in both Europe and Lima. The institutional
contact of the Swiss research network financing my initial PhD research
grant was the Instituto del Bien Común (IBC), an action research NGO.
Upon arriving in Lima in 2007, staff members showed me maps of
indigenous communities, oil concessions and protected areas produced
by the organization’s GIS unit. Counter-mapping, as Nancy Peluso
labelled it, was at the heart of their efforts. Their message conveyed
conflicts and tension, which would intensify and sharpen in the public
debate in the following years.
21
22 Post-frontier Resource Governance
The history of the Selva Central can largely be read as a series of fron-
tier waves (rubber, agriculture, timber and now oil) involving upfront
colonization programmes, road construction and spontaneous migra-
tion (Santos-Granero and Barclay 1995). As a result, today it harbours
a particular demographic mix of indigenous peoples, Austrian-German
descendants settling in the area from the 1850s, and Andean settlers.
Compared with certain other areas of contiguous and large indigenous
territories, intensive colonization processes have largely left indigenous
land titles as a dotted mosaic throughout the province, interspersed with
relatively large settler holdings, small migrant lands and vast forest areas
mainly covered by state-owned protected areas.
Oxapampa, by the 1980s, had shifted away from being an iconic
frontier towards becoming an emblematic post-frontier for ordering
development and territorial management. It was even being used as a
model for developing guidelines (Beauclerk and Narby 1988; OAS 1987)
and became a widely quoted text book case for transforming projects
to include indigenous concerns and titling needs (Burger 1987; ICIHI
1987). One text about Peruvian ecology highlighted it as the first
province in Peru to achieve the “ordering” of development (Brack and
Mendiola 2000). World Bank anthropologist Shelton Davis called it an
example of how “native rights and interests can be included in regional
resource management plans without sacrificing either local or national
goals” (Davis 1988).
The province not only hosts some of the earliest efforts to title
indigenous lands in the lowlands, it also has the highest concentration
of protected areas in the country from a provincial perspective. This
includes the Yanachaga–Chemillén National Park, the San Matías–San
Carlos Protection Forest, parts of the El Sira Communal Reserve and the
Yánesha Communal Reserve. The latter was the first protected area of its
kind to be recognized in the country along with pioneering efforts to
support community forestry. In 2010, the whole province was even rec-
ognized by UNESCO as the Oxapampa Ashaninka Yánesha Biosphere
Reserve. The fate of these post-frontier institutions was at the heart
of my field research. Still, paradoxes abounded. While the majority of
forestlands had been classified for protection, clear-cutting and preda-
tory harvesting of high value species were rampant. Despite its reordered
status, the province area paradoxically harboured all the ingredients
of an Amazonian frontier thriller. Illegal logging, land trafficking, road
construction and latent extractive industry conflicts were widespread.
There were major concerns regarding the explosion of oil exploration,
consultation practices and potential environmental impacts (Map 2.2).
26
Returning to Oxapampa
Methodological notes
Introduction
35
36 Post-frontier Resource Governance
to use and claim them?” (Tsing 2005: 30). This chapter suggests careful
attention to the cultural production involved in creating frontiers and
legitimating particular forms of frontier agency and intervention. This
is particularly relevant in the Amazon, where resource abundance is
frequently listed as an obvious or naturalized property despite decades
of critique. Careful attention is, in other words, needed to address the
specific processes reconfiguring certain places in terms of both resource
abundancy and frontier permeability. Frontier creation is not simply the
result of labour, capital and resources adding up in economic terms,
but relies on narrative configurations of people and places that per-
mit, attract and incite. Frontier narratives “open” up areas, whereas
post-frontier narratives nominally close them. Such frontier narratives,
particularly when presented in a state expansion context, involve lin-
ear projections of social change, the mobilization of certain forms of
knowledge and the protagonism of external agency. This chapter offers
an alternative to the common anthropological critique of frontiers as
spaces of social, cultural and environmental disorder. Building on histor-
ical and ethnographic material spanning the 18th to the 20th century,
the chapter zooms in on different moments in the history of Oxapampa
Province in the Peruvian Amazon to explore the nature and significance
of frontier narratives. Particular focus is on the intertwined roles of sci-
entific description, entrepreneurialism and state expansion in carving
out distinct frontier places and forms of action. In contrast with nar-
ratives emphasizing frontiers as spaces of disorder and the absence of
regulation, the chapter underlines the significance of ordering devices
in both environmental and social terms. The chapter also serves as a
historical introduction for the book as a whole.
Towards the end of the 19th century such pressures intensified with
the grant of a 500,000 ha concession to the British-controlled Peruvian
Corporation Company (Barclay 1989). As a result, the Yánesha were
gradually enrolled in the burgeoning market economies of coffee and
timber production, on the one hand, while further settlements, on the
other hand, reduced their settlements to small enclaves within increas-
ingly colonized landscapes. By the second half of the 20th century, the
majority of the Yánesha had moved to the lower-lying valleys of Palcazú
and Pachitea. The dramatic process of dispossession, however, is not
the prime object of concern here. Rather, I seek to illustrate how such
a process was made possible by a series of frontier gazes. An 18th cen-
tury scientific mission to the province, led by Hipólito Ruiz, offers a
good starting point for exploring the kinds of narrative reconfigurations
appearing in the Central Jungle area in the footsteps of earlier mission-
ary accounts. As the chapter gradually moves up through history, I also
seek to demonstrate the changing nature and types of frontier narratives
employed.
Ruiz described some 403 plants, gathered seeds and “odd native things”
while staying in the tropical warmth of Pozuzo, today part of Oxapampa
Province, in July 1784. The advance of a year’s salary from the Spanish
Crown financed a final travel of the first Spanish-led scientific inves-
tigation into the plants of the New World. Whereas the remaining
parts of the Selva Central were closed off from the viceroyalty due
to indigenous revolts, and would remain so till the mid-19th century,
Pozuzo had remained accessible for the scientific mission. Ruiz, from
the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, headed the expedition made
up of botanists, artists and helpers from 1777 to 1785. Having spent
days walking, observing and felling trees in the forest, Ruiz commented
how “We botanists worked so hard here that we left Pozuzo practically
naked and with our legs and thighs flayed.” Pozuzo was described as
“the last Spanish pueblo . . . reduced to fifteen small huts, one church,
the house of the missionary father which they called the convent, and
a hut for the traders that are in the habit of coming to this miser-
able town” (Ruiz et al. 1998: 171). Ruiz portrayed lazy Indians and a
variety of plants “so great that all of them could scarcely be exam-
ined in one hundred years by a whole succession of botanists” (ibid.:
183). The diaries of Ruiz illustrated the New World frontier of botani-
cal investigation into plant utility within the American dominions. The
Frontier Narratives 39
the geographer Raimondi visited the area in 1867 his account portrayed
images of peaceful colonos, picturesque houses and agricultural activity
rather than the profound difficulties the people encountered (Raimondi
1874: 278).
Linear frontier projects, transforming observation of things, places
and people into new lines of action, economic opportunities and project
geographies, would continuously shape the very foundation and gover-
nance dynamics of the Central Jungle area. Take Father Gabriel Sala,
prefect for the Ucayali Franciscan mission, requested by the govern-
ment to undertake explorations and draw up geographical maps of the
area. The end of the 19th century saw the quest for the quickest road
to reach a navigable port for the Amazon. A member of the Sociedad
Geográfica de Lima, Sala not only described environments but equally
prescribed road construction. He first explored the path to Palcazú, and
is considered the initiator of the “Via Pichis” and the roads linking
Chanchamayo with Oxapampa (Dionisio Ortiz 1967; Santos-Granero
1991). He was not alone. As indigenous rebellions, keeping the Selva
Central sealed off from the rest of Peru, ended, land in Huancabamba
south of Pozuzo was gradually reappropriated for missionary activity
and the production of sugarcane and other commodities for upper-lying
mining centres (Dionisio Ortiz 1967).
Colonizing Oxapampa
decision to have a feast, it’s custom to have a feast, but then the peo-
ple came with their arms, not to kill them, only to scare them, just
to shoot. When the Yánesha wanted to grab their bows and arrows,
this person whose name I don’t remember, had hidden away all their
weapon, the Yánesha arms. As it was a feast they didn’t think any-
thing would happen. When they looked for their arms to defend
themselves, there weren’t any. The others showed that they didn’t
want to kill. They sat down, started conversations, convincing the
Yánesha that they were a group of people who wanted to enter pacif-
ically, but what they really wanted was to colonize, the whole valley,
little by little. They began making friends, building houses. Now the
Yáneshas weren’t going to prevent them.
(Personal communication, Carlos, a Yánesha elder)3
rubber boom (Ordinaire 1892: 138). Don Guillermo, called “El Capitan”,
told of encountering 12 Campa families when arriving seven to eight
years earlier. He had “succeeded in attracting and attaching them by
real kind deeds” and there were “now more than 60 disseminated in
a circle of several places . . . in constant relationship with the Capitan
[author’s emphasis]”. He offered them rifles, sold gunpowder, procured
cloth for their cushmas and helped them cure eye infections in return
for rubber. He also protected them against slave raids taking place in
the Amazon (ibid.: 139–40). Several rubber companies would operate
in the basin in the following years with large concessions, prevent-
ing further settlements up till the agrarian reform in the late 1960s
when the last concessions were annulled (Miller and Martinez 1981).
Both the Huancabamba agricultural frontier and the rubber dynam-
ics in the Palcazú were connected to global commodity chains and
frontier policies. Huancabamba was connected to Andean mining cen-
tres, demand for agricultural output and a revived settler economy.
The Palcazú, in turn, involved an extractivist economy with rubber
being transported downstream to Iquitos every two years, while incor-
porating indigenous inhabitants as labour in the Amazon-wide rubber
economy.
Instrumental geographies
About 4 p.m. the next day, we came in full view of the lovely Perené –
a birds [sic] eye view, as it were, from an altitude of 5300 feet, looking
down almost perpendicularly upon the lonely domicile of an Indian
chief.
(Ross 1892: 386)
44 Post-frontier Resource Governance
Ross would conclude that “immense tracts await only the introduc-
tion of Chinese or the Indian coolie to turn what is now magnificent
forest into a rich and thriving province” (ibid.: 392). The narrative dis-
played a void ready for intervention, and frontier agency necessarily
came from the outside requiring investments and masses of labour.
It was instrumental frontier geography, Ross making the presentation
to the Royal Geographical Society in England upon his return. Not
surprisingly, the Peruvian Consul in London, F.A. Pezet, responded by
mentioning government exploration of the interior and the recently
inaugurated Geographical Society in Lima. Pezet described the efforts
to build roads, connect San Luis de Shuaro to Pichis, and eventually
shorten the distance to Liverpool, “bringing Lima within twenty days to
London” (ibid.: 392). He was on a sales trip, but as he also said to the
British geographers:
Frontier indigeneity
Indigeneity was not absent from such frontier narratives, but was rather
framed as question of social transformation and conversion (Santos-
Granero 1991). As indigeneity became a pan-American matter in the
20th century, Peruvian experiences played a central role in debates
46 Post-frontier Resource Governance
The solution, Troncoso argued, was “to incorporate the indio into civi-
lization and the economic and social structure, making him an effective
element of progress and, a conscious and productive citizen, an effec-
tive production and consumption asset” (ibid.: 8, my translation).
Specifically, related to the jungle area, the author noted how “various
indigenous tribes live there in a state of semi-savageness; the govern-
ment, in collaboration with some private institutions, is working on
a slow effort to penetrate and civilize” (ibid.: 11, my translation). The
frontier notion of indigeneity was unmistakable. This was the occasion
when the Eighth International Conference of American States, held in
Lima, recommended the creation of the Inter-American Indigenist Insti-
tute, triggering decades of assimilation and integration thinking. I make
this brief detour, not to repeat well-rehearsed critique of early 20th-
century assimilationist thinking, but to underline the appearance of
core linear aspects, that of indigeneity becoming a topic of increasingly
institutionalized debate and even topic of concern by international
organizations. It was not merely an internal political concern, but was
analysed as a shared problem, involving new knowledge holders project-
ing change and debating how to do things right framed in frontier logics
of the day. Linearity in the 1950s was about penetration, conversion and
social change being replaced by protectionist measures. In Peru, this
was manifest in the protective measures established for the “Montaña
region” established by a supreme decree (DS 03 AG) in 1957. Respond-
ing to a rapidly expanding national frontier, the instrument established
some use and possession rights through “communal reserves” whose
size was calculated as 10 ha per individual older than five years of
age. The reserve model was a protective mechanism, however weak,
employed in the context of oil exploration, railway development and
heavy in-migration. The process to obtain a resolución directorial involved
a population census and the fixing of boundaries according to natural
features – all in areas “that colonization, already underway, had left
available”.
Frontier Narratives 47
Today, in the midst of national and racial unity wrought by the com-
mon denominator of mestisaje – the fusion of two cultures – it may
now be asked if we Peruvians have managed to fully conquer our own
territory. The answer is negative.
(Belaunde 1965: italics inserted)
The question was not whether or not to conquer the internal frontier,
but how. Modern frontier governance involved a struggle against nature
in order to exploit its potential, support people and liberate individual
agency. Foreign migrants in Pozuzo, President Belaunde reckoned, had
been abandoned (1965: 217). Belaunde’s vision of a more paternal state
sought to conquer upper jungle areas for the sake of a needy population
characterized by food and land shortages. More comprehensive colo-
nization programs were needed. Incorporation of new agricultural lands
in the Ceja de Montaña was “the fastest and most economic solution
to problems of food-shortage and population growth”. Modern agrar-
ian reform would replace previous conquest failures for the few armed
with a more democratic frontier, technical support and road building.
It was a modernist architecture with maps drawn up of population and
resources for large-scale societal constructions to house a needy people.
Territorial conquest was a matter of satisfying basic needs of the nation.
It was conquest for the sake of the people, in “a region full of promise for
48 Post-frontier Resource Governance
Concluding remarks
Introduction
50
Decolonizing Indigenous Governance 51
Much must be done in organizing the tribe before they can effectively
confront the Reforma Agraria. The tribe is extremely divided and for
that reason weak. They must regain the sense of community, realize
that all groups are suffering the same problems and abuses, and go
to the reform as one united tribe. As a small group of 10 or 20 fam-
ilies, they cannot possibly defend themselves. As one tribe of 8,000
they can.
(Letter by Smith to Chiappini, 5 May 1968)
Decolonizing Indigenous Governance 53
Smith was to pursue such ideas ten days later with two young Yánesha,
Tomas Colina and Domingo Ballesteros, while crossing the Yanachaga
range by foot to visit Amuesha settlements in the lower-lying Palcazú
valley. In letters to his supervisor, he speaks of three meetings where he,
with the help of teachers, tried to “implant the following ideas”:
1. That, even without land titles, they must continue and work the
land in an orderly fashion without any doubt that it is theirs;
2. that they must not move from place to place as it only will make
it that much more difficult to get their claims recognized;
3. that if they are threatened by the advance of outsiders, they must
not give in and move elsewhere, but rather stand firm and defend
their lands, preferably acting as a unified group;
4. that rather than promote separatism and competition among the
groups, they must understand that their needs are common and
act accordingly;
5. that the three groups as one present a new solicitude denouncing
one large tract of land and ask for a single title in the name of
the Amuesha tribe (reservation) for the following reasons:
The letter reveals the interest of the Agrarian Reform office in collec-
tive titles, but also points to the constraint of granting 10 ha of land
per person above the age of five, in 1968. Land claims entailed census
calculations of land needs per inhabitant rather than the identifica-
tion of ancestral lands per se. Numbers had already been employed by
the Franciscans who, since the 18th century, had kept registries of the
mission posts at regular intervals, and conducted censuses to generate
for support (Santos-Granero 1987: 43). The instrumentality of numbers
would now be employed to secure land titling. This involved work-
ing officially for the Agrarian Reform office and making contacts to
Amuesha settlements, conducting censuses and planning land reserves.
Smith concentrated his census work on the Palcazú Amuesha, and later
secured further involvement by another Peace Corps couple (Jeff and
Kathy Spiegel) to help undertake similar work in the higher-lying areas
through the Villa Rica Agrarian Reform office. Smith lists 25 Amuesha
settlements (13 in Oxapampa Villa Rica and 12 in the Palcazú) petition-
ing for communal reserve recognition in that period, for 11 of which
it was granted.4 The events in Oxapampa were soon to gain national
significance.
Such ideas would soon be pursued. As one of its first activities, Varese’s
centre reviewed agrarian reform legislation and initiated a regulatory
project with regards to the territorial possessions of “ethnic groups in
the jungle” (Varese 1969b: 19–20).
The Congress
The meeting held between 1 and 3 July 1969 became the first Congress
of Amuesha leaders, paving the way for one of the first Amazonian fed-
erations on a continental scale. The resulting memorial was a collective
demand from the “Amuesha tribe to the Peruvian government”, signed
by 20 communities raising tenure insecurity and precarious economies.
Moreover, it highlighted the “total lack of laws referring to jungle
tribes”. Land was demanded in “communal reserves and not in indi-
vidual plots”. Closely tailored to agrarian reform logics of the new
revolutionary government in place since October 1968, it claimed land
“we are currently working”, cooperative creation and “incorporating
ourselves into the national system of production” (Líderes Amuesha
1969). The first issue of Stefano Varese’s journal was virtually dedicated
to the Amuesha Congress and the memorial (Varese 1969). Alberto Chirif
described it as the first “global Amuesha attempt” to confront land and
invasion problems (Chirif 1969). Similar problems, he noted, were also
found among the Aguaruna, Huambasi, Campa, Yaminagua, Culina and
Sharanagua.
The participatory agenda of the Velasco government needed inter-
locutors in the lowlands. The Amuesha memorial provided social legit-
imacy for state support in the area, and congresses were suggested as
efficient for state agencies engaging with indigenous voices (R. Smith
1969: 6). The Amuesha Congress had gone from being a local encounter
to becoming a political event, with linear consequences. As Smith noted
later, the “majority of these nations do not have mechanisms of central
government” (Richard C. Smith 1979). Congresses became a “necessary”
next step in the emerging linearity of political organization of lowland
Peru. Chirif mentions how a result of the Amuesha congress was:
Amazonian governmentalities
Decolonizing governance
The report also noted how African examples of “tropical forest horticul-
turalists being transformed into farmers should be used for the aguaruna
Decolonizing Indigenous Governance 61
Critics however noted that the first years of titling resulted in only
some 315 community titles, largely reflecting previous reserves without
expanding landholdings. It was argued that the law resolved the imme-
diate material reproduction problems of the communities, without ques-
tioning the legitimacy of colonization and mono-ethnic orders (Barclay
and Santos 1980: 44). Furthermore, while maintaining indigenous
rights as its core principles, it was mainly a development instrument
promoting agriculture and livestock alongside property rights, use and
land in accordance with wider agrarian reform principles. Property was
limited to renewable resources, while sub-surface resources remained
safely in the hands of the state. The decree specified how oil pipelines,
gas, installations for exploration and mining, and oil extraction could
pass freely without the need for compensation.
While community language emerged to undo centuries of inequal-
ity, in other respects it reproduced existing frontier relations. Indige-
nous agency thus emerged in dialectic, without necessarily replacing
previous frontier rationalities. It could, in a Foucauldian sense, be inter-
preted as the state maintaining and deepening relations with Amazonia
and its subjects merely regulating, rather than fundamentally contest-
ing, colonization of the Amazonian region (Barclay and Santos 1980).
As soon as the heat of the Velasco revolution had cooled off, state sup-
port for titling, upon the revised Native Communities Law in 1978,
was gradually dismantled revealing the relatively shallow strength of
Amazonian policy reform. Nevertheless, critique that the category only
served to normalize internal colonization of the Amazon is contradicted
by the decade-long use and re-articulation of communities to cement
indigenous territorial claims in the Peruvian Amazon.
Introduction
67
68 Post-frontier Resource Governance
The managerial shift went beyond protected areas. In Peru, the build-
ing blocks of a timid environmental agenda also appeared in the same
period. ONERN, Peru’s National Office for Natural Resource Evalua-
tions, till then largely extraction oriented, developed guidelines for the
conservation of renewable resources (ONERN 1974). A forest law was
adopted, consolidating a system of conservation units, the basis for the
subsequent national protected area system. Yet, it was far from a blan-
ket commitment to greening. As an Organization of American States
(OAS) consultant, hired at the time to develop “a functional strategy”,
concluded:
Greening Oxapampa
their environmental relations (R. Smith 1969) shared traits with what
Dasmann in the above quote called “ecosystem people”. Alberto Chirif
contrasted native sciences valuing complementarity with colonization
projects seeking to reap profits from the jungle (Chirif 1979). By 1973,
Smith had developed a proposal suggesting the creation “of a large
territorial unit” combining the lands of 16 titled communities, com-
munal reserves and a national park covering the Yanachaga-Chemillen
Mountain range (R. C. Smith 1977a). As Smith described it:
Look, when the proposal was developed . . . there was very little
fieldwork in the zone of San Carlos. People like Antonio Brack said
there were no people, but no one knew if there were people . . . there
were many estimates in San Carlos . . . yet it was all protection land,
Greening the Frontier 75
Reformulation of the project and the release of funds did not termi-
nate negotiation. Instead, they recast battlefields within the realm of
techno-politics, data production and project implementation. While
the immediate victory was the inclusion of social and environmental
components in project reformulation (its linear post-frontier manifes-
tation), non-linear forms of contestation soon appeared. There were
efforts by state officials to dilute or change imposed environmental pri-
orities. Funds assigned for protection were diverted to other purposes,
and implementation of social and environmental safeguard measures
was particularly slow (Moore 1989). Nevertheless, USAID conditionali-
ties and the new project framework installed a new legitimacy structure
for greening Oxapampa, at least on paper. This reoriented project space,
with only nominal state support, carved out a distinct managerial vac-
uum ready for NGO support. Just as international project support had
been instrumental in the creation of protected areas in the province,
NGO support became essential to maintaining Oxapampa as a green
space.
The Fundación Peruana para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (FPCN),
later recognized as ProNaturaleza (created in 1984), was the first
national conservation NGO founded by key Peruvian conservationists
in response to the limitations of state action (Husock 1997). Protected
area financing was not a public finance priority, and conservation-
ists established the foundation to receive international donor support.
Although no formal mandate was given, FPCN initially had a “gen-
tleman’s agreement” and later, through donor pressure, obtained a
“compact of cooperation” (1986–1989) to spend money on protected
area management activities becoming like a de facto state-protected area
76 Post-frontier Resource Governance
authority (ibid.: 4–5). One of its first major operations, with USAID and
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) support, was the direct management of
the Yanachaga National Park in 1987. By 1990, the NGO was adminis-
tering all the protected areas in the province. Like many other NGOs,
expansion relied heavily on a project economy. Fuelled by international
funds, the valley became a site of green experimentation whose nature
and intensity would evolve over the years. In the Selva Central, this
went from park-oriented support in the period between 1991 and 1997
to a second phase (2003–2007) supporting other protected areas in the
province (the San Matías-San Carlos Protection Forest and the Yánesha
Communal Reserve).
In subsequent years, a series of projects on biological diversity, forests
and fauna nurtured a “green vision” of Oxapampa and its manage-
ment needs. This led to an emphasis on natural forest management
and protected areas, and less on agricultural production, soil conserva-
tion and contamination issues. The fuelling of green managerial power
had social effects. The previous interlinking of conservation and social
rights, which had mobilized protests and enabled protected area cre-
ation in the first place, was being undone. Indigenous communities,
who had fought against logging and road expansion, were becoming
more and more distanced from protected area management.
Concluding remarks
For the last few decades, protected areas have formed part of the arsenal
of tools promoted by conservationists to close frontiers. Protected areas
epitomize the notion of the post-frontier through the nominal isolation
of a zone within a larger span of “non-protected” areas. They involve dis-
tinct ways of seeing, understanding and producing the world (West et al.
2006). Much literature has emphasized the imposition of systems based
on a Western worldview, managerial logics and top-down-driven solu-
tions. Relying on Cartesian divisions between nature and culture, state
incorporation and dispossession, the dramatic consequences of their
establishment have repeatedly been noted (Colchester 2003). This has
led to massive calls for change, from both conservationists and social
movements.
In response to the critique of top-down fortress approaches to conser-
vation, the last decade has witnessed a major transition in protected
area policy and discourse (Phillips 2003) towards socially inclusive
language framed around participation, social benefits and sustainable
development (Larsen and Oviedo 2005). Much effort is being invested
in reinstating conservation in a local context and levelling the playing
field between state actors, conservation organizations and local com-
munities. Community-conserved areas, in particular, are seen as the
solution to long-standing protected area legacies combining culture,
conservation and social equity. This chapter interrogates the significance
of the recent shift to participatory and community conservation pro-
tected area discourse. In particular, it offers an ethnographic portrayal
of the Reserva Comunal Yánesha, one of the first global experiments
in community-based protected area management. It addresses the role
78
The Double-bind of Community Conservation 79
Ambiguities of contractualization
Ambiguities of planning
Finally, officials also agreed to release the equipment stored in the park
headquarters, allowing AMARCY staff to use it for the planning pro-
cess. The idea to do participatory planning was also taken over by the
planning team, who began to schedule meetings in the respective com-
munities. Despite donors pushing for indigenous involvement, actual
involvement remained a highly negotiated outcome in a field charac-
terized by power asymmetries. The question now was to what extent
the process itself and the proposed planning contents could reverse this
trend. If properly implemented, could planning processes empower the
Yánesha to get a tool which would fit their needs despite long-standing
institutional constraints?
The plan maestro for us is like a bible for our protected area. The jefes
will elaborate it themselves
Managerial zoning
identified cultural areas of importance within the reserve,” the GIS con-
sultant noted during a public consultation meeting. Cultural matters,
having been first objectified to sites, objects and archaeology, were ulti-
mately left out all together due to a lack of consultant data. Less than
2% was classified as under strict protection. Forest zones, defined as rel-
atively intact areas where only scientific activities and education could
take place, made up slightly more than half of the protected area,
whereas 43% of the protected area was classified as a direct use zone
(SERNANP 2012). It was a highly virtual exercise with arbitrary lines
drawn to reflect standard “good practice” rather than local realities. The
closing of half of the reserve was truly remarkable for an area initially
created to protect customary hunting.
How had such a shift in thinking to “no-use” been reached despite
the adoption of a special regime, a participatory process and a broad
orientation towards local benefits? Clearly, the reconfiguration of the
reserve as a standard protected area and a consultant team made up
of former NGO professionals was central to this. Major gaps in under-
standing local practices within the reserve undoubtedly contributed to
the confusion. For one, the sociologist in the team had initially only
prepared zoning ideas for areas outside the reserva. She could say noth-
ing about areas inside the reserve as she had not collected information
about actual use of the area and knew little about its social, economic
and cultural significance as a result. This was compounded by the fact
that the biologist hired for the management plan did not enter the
actual reserve either. Lists of species and descriptions were purely based
on second-hand information. The biologist had, I was told, even called
for key hunting areas, known as the colpas, to be classified under strict
protection. Other members in the team had declared this unfeasible,
in part because the colpas, sites of high animal densities, neighboured
many communities. Fundamentally, management decisions were ema-
nating from consultant team perceptions of conservation with very little
empirical basis.
Public consultation meetings about the zoning plans did not change
this fact. The proposed zoning maps seemed awfully abstract and far
from immediate user considerations. The contrast between the maps,
zones and regulations, on the one hand, and the lives, uses and spa-
tial practices, on the other, was astounding. Towards the end of the
planning process, I asked the team leader about local reactions and was
informed that people were generally accepting of the zonation except
for one private (non-indigenous) landowner, who had previously been
resettled. Planning was not a neutral process about what was at stake and
what was needed, but became fundamentally about reordering Yánesha
90 Post-frontier Resource Governance
people and the reserve along standard protection categories. The result-
ing management plan largely aligned local realities to central language
and power maintenance, rather than reflecting local socio-ecological
realities.
Similar contradictions appeared in the identification of conservation
priorities. The consultant team sought to identify eight “conservation
objects”, borrowing language from a priority-setting method developed
by the Nature Conservancy. The biologist, without entering the reserve,
had identified seven so-called conservation objects including bears,
jaguars and salt-lick ponds for birds (colpas). It appeared as a random
selection of species and attributes, yet from another perspective, in part,
it reflected perceptions of high-profile species and standard conserva-
tion priorities. Where the initial proposal emphasized hunting practices
and species to be sustained for the Yánesha, such priorities were being
replaced by a human-free biodiversity gaze listing species as intrinsic
values. Hunting was no longer the justification per se, but had become
a potential threat to the area. While a notion of local benefits was
retained, it was watered down and framed in standard protected area
language. The last conservation object identified was “Yánesha knowl-
edges and traditional practices”, as the coordinator explained to me, “to
also cover the human importance of the protected area”. Not only did
the conservation objects reduce complex ecological processes to a few
key species and habitats, the process equally reified Yánesha culture as
knowledge and traditional objects worthy of preservation. While the
draft management plan spoke of conservation priorities being identified
“by participants in workshops and participatory planning meetings”
(INRENA and AMARCY 2008), what had finally determined conserva-
tion planning were mainstream notions of biodiversity conservation.
As we shared a soft drink a year later, I asked Armando what he thought
about the zoning plans. “I don’t understand anything of it – not even
the strategies”, he replied, then busy with other activities. The mas-
ter plan, which was only to be officially approved two years later, had
become a stepping stone for other action. Yet what had taken place had
consolidated a series of local uses and practices as acceptable, and others
as unacceptable and illegal.
the 22nd we’re thrown out of the office,” Armando complained. The
plan was being finalized and most consultants were already on other
assignments. Soon thereafter, I met the team coordinator on his way to
the district to recuperate the computer equipment AMARCY had used
during the planning process. Their participatory time was up. It was
normal, even a trivial fact, that Yánesha representatives were responsi-
ble for the project, and yet had no budgets, poor working conditions
and were expected to volunteer their time. The whole process was, after
all, in their “interest”. Shortly thereafter, the rent for their office space
was being paid by Petrolifera, the oil company working in the area.
Important shifts appeared in 2008 with the creation of a Ministry of
Environment and a better-financed protected area agency (SERNANP).
This reinforced a shift towards governmental management and only
indirectly supported the community organization. In practice, a pro-
tected area chief was hired along with the nomination of official forest
guards, leaving AMARCY as a residual institution there to somehow
facilitate contacts with communities and develop separate projects.
As I met up with Armando of AMARCY in the main district town in
2010, I found him badly hurt following a motorbike accident. He was
suffering from a high fever and a serious leg infection. He had pawned
his watch for a first treatment, yet the infection had worsened, as he
couldn’t afford a second round of antibiotics. Though his position was
heavily contested, he was nevertheless the only democratically elected
protected area representative of the area, and had neither a salary nor
health protection, despite a recent funding boost for conservation in
the area.
It was a two-tier system of haves and have-nots. Many of the AMARCY
board members were hired as formal forest guards, now housed in a
newly built government agency building.3 They were occupied with
cleaning the garden, and painting the buildings in advance of a visit
from Lima from the head of the agency and the German donors. Where
staff had been absent in 2007, the state had now hired a chief, three
specialists and nine forest guards. The new jefe at the time, the for-
mer GIS specialist for the management plan, argued that illegal logging
within the reserve had been successfully stopped. Even the long-awaited
master plan seemed to be ready for approval only after some three
years of gestation. Two staff members had also been hired by the state
to “support” AMARCY. Still without a regular budget, Armando and
AMARCY were occasionally contracted by the jefatura for specific tasks.
Here was the essence of being a contract ejecutor. As I arrived he was wait-
ing for a new “terms of reference”. Armando and vigilantes depended
92 Post-frontier Resource Governance
Where is our power? They are taking away our power . . . my jefes don’t
say anything. What I say is that we need to put our organizations
in the centre. It should be one force. Where is the Yánesha force?
It was our idea. Now I don’t see anything. I don’t hear anything. It’s
like what happened to Yanachaga park. Now there is not even one
Yánesha . . . There are so many jefaturas . . . and the Reserva is still being
invaded.
Concluding remarks
Introduction
95
96 Post-frontier Resource Governance
Peru has the eighth largest forest cover in the world, stretching out over
some 69 million ha of natural forest of which 91% lies in the Amazon
(Suárez de Freitas 2009). For decades, Amazonian forests have been the
target of commercial timber operations. “The timber used here came
from our forest,” a Yánesha friend commented upon visiting the wooden
house my family and I rented in Oxapampa. Forestry extraction had
played a foundational role in the history of the province and the col-
onization of Yánesha territory. Still, the deforested upper-lying parts
of the province are better known today for agriculture than for their
forestry history, and the whole region produces less than 3% of national
timber outputs (CIF 2008). Today, it is difficult to imagine Oxapampa
half a century earlier as the second largest producer of timber in the
country. Timber concessions overlapping with indigenous lands com-
mon in the 1960s and 1970s had, with a few exceptions, ceased to exist.
The majority of remaining forestlands were located either within titled
communities through long-term user rights or within protected areas.
Major timber operations had long moved elsewhere, leaving behind
small-scale extraction in the lower-lying districts of Palcazú and Pichis.
Nevertheless, three decades-worth of establishing forestry offices,
management plans and building forest management capacity of indige-
nous communities do not seem to have closed the timber frontier.
Extraction dynamics in the lower-lying districts appeared to contradict
conclusions that protected areas and indigenous land titles provided
effective protection against forest damage (Oliveira et al. 2007). It was
estimated that the Pichis and Palcazú valleys have lost some 30% of
their forest cover within the last 30 years (UNODC and MINAM 2011).
During fieldwork, timber was being felled from community lands, pri-
vate forests and even protected areas in the Palcazú Valley at shockingly
low prices. Comuneros interviewed argued that their forest reserves had
either been reduced substantially or converted into agricultural fields.
How are we to understand this paradox of degradation coexisting with
closed frontiers and massive investment in management? What does it
tell us about the nature of post-frontier institutions? In order to shed
light on the dynamics at stake, the chapter focuses on the fate and role
of community forestry schemes in the area.
98 Post-frontier Resource Governance
Between 1984 and 1988, the Costa Rican centre provided some 205
person-months of advice on forest research, wood conversion, coop-
erative administration and sawmill and lumberyard supervision. The
flagship technique, introduced to reflect ecological conditions, was the
“strip shelterbelt system”. This involved the clear-cutting of narrow
strips of forest, followed by 40 years of natural regeneration. The model
aimed to make optimal use of the totality of harvested products. Trees
with small diameter would be used for fences, larger ones for poles
and only the biggest trees would be used for lumber. The cooperative
received equipment: a transportable sawmill machine and a state-of-the-
art “press-cap preservation” system, using air, water and chemicals to
preserve processed timber.
The financial mechanism ensured a 25% return for the communities,
while 75% was retained by the cooperative. At the height of its activ-
ity 49 Yánesha individuals worked in the cooperative, which received
approximately 1.5 million USD in support between 1984 and 1988.
Local people bought lumber for building houses, and utility poles were
sold off in the region. The shipment of six containers of “sustain-
ably” harvested tropical timber to the US and the UK were among
the first to link indigenous forest producers with Western consumers
on a global scale. The final technical report from Costa Rica noted
how, by the end of 1987, “the native staff of the forest management”
were “doing work normally requiring graduate foresters . . . they were
100 Post-frontier Resource Governance
which made up the nucleus of economic action and vision. Nor did
the cooperative replace other forms of timber trade; individual traders
continued to purchase timber. Price levels were the same, but work-
ing with lumber dealers required less labour and the likelihood of
immediate payments. Nevertheless, illegal extraction became negligible
for a certain period during the 1990s. Yet, rather than being con-
strained by mature post-frontier forest management for the sake of
sustainability, it resulted from growing guerrilla activity and a thriving
coca economy.
Between 2007 and 2010, hardly any communities in the Palcazú Valley
had functioning permits, yet timber continuously went out of the area,
blocked only for short periods of time. Control posts and government
agencies, however, reported few confiscations.
Forest administrators were, at the district level, one-man shops in a
sea of illegal forest operations, intended to check permits, control trucks
and undertake field inspections. Among other things, they issued the
“guías de transporte forestal” certifying the origin of transported timber.
“In difficult environments, I can’t work alone, only with you,” a forest
official expressed once during a meeting with Yánesha in 2008 (“and
with the madederos”, someone in the audience whispered). “I will offer
a way out this time,” the official continued. Registering timber for self-
consumption was a legal way out. The experience of one community,
which in 2009 decided to close down all timber extraction in an attempt
to legalize operations, was telling. A special three-month exception to
extract timber was allowed for households with special needs, notably
health-related reasons. Within days, individual requests, with more than
100 sickness certificates, arrived at the jefe’s house. The social pressure to
give in and pursue illegal extraction was enormous. In another commu-
nity, pressure to continue illegal extraction came from highly indebted
villagers having used up their “timber account”. No one was happy
about debt or low prices, yet money was needed for school materials,
health, foodstuffs, mobile phones and so on. Timber dealers, in effect,
offered market access and alternative services in return for rock-bottom
prices.
Such extraction and trade, it seemed, escaped and circumvented for-
mal rules and regulations. As one forestry specialist noted: “it is much
104 Post-frontier Resource Governance
Where the common perception was that communities had simply given
in to illegal extraction, I argue for the necessity of a more detailed analy-
sis of the dynamics at stake. Specifically, I propose that a shift took place
among timber traders in the region from advocating against community
control (a battle they had lost in the valley) towards working within
and through the logics of community control and sustainability mea-
sures. The standard modus operandi for timber extraction in indigenous
communities involved timber traders striking deals with community
jefes, these being generally approved by the community assemblies.
The nature of these agreements typically involved financial contribu-
tions, road building or the opening of collective or individual credit
“accounts” in return for access to the timber. The basic logic was the
provision of advances in a highly disadvantageous economic agreement.
There were several cases of jefes being replaced due to poor deals. Despite
the glaring asymmetries, such agreements served a certain social purpose
by financing land claims, hospital bills and even satellite dishes.
Significantly, these deals were not extra-legal arrangements occurring
outside the formal framework, as one might have assumed from cursory
descriptions of illegal logging. Indeed, changing forestry policies, privi-
leging community operations over corporate concessions, had not been
ignored by the traders. As one lumber baron mentioned: “In the old
days, just one visit to the Ministry of Agriculture was enough (to get
an extraction permit), now it’s all about titles, permits and studies.”
Where the madederos had previously fought against community titles
their modus operandi now was different, working with rather than against
community decision making.
Community Forestry and Post-frontier Deforestation 105
One NGO worker accused the timber merchant of having paid people
to come and vote in his favour. Priority in the first nine years of the
adopted plan was given to areas needed by the madedero, and Yato Cooc
was only offered extraction rights by the tenth year. In addition, the
community permit granted was not intended for processed timber, but
only for selling trunks to third-party sawmills. “Which benefits would
remain if we only sell trunks?”, one Yánesha member asked bitterly. How
can one explain that two subsectors of the community prioritized an
agreement with a lumber dealer over far more beneficial community
arrangements?
Although they were titled as one community in 1975, forest dynam-
ics differed between the three sectors. One of the sectors, supporting
the timber dealer, had previously attempted to set up a forestry associa-
tion yet had in the meantime become heavily indebted. The elaboration
of the management plan, which had cost some 8,000 soles, was added
to the debt. These were not the only costs borne by communities.
Madederos charged for enabling road access to individual plots, counted
the number of hours of extraction and added rental costs for machines.
In the management plan, the company appeared as (expensive) service
providers to indigenous right-holders. Total costs for extraction in 2007,
for example, amounted to 177,860 USD for this single community.
106 Post-frontier Resource Governance
the problem, to begin with, is the roads no? . . . the impact of the
road . . . which only benefits the timber baron . . . the soil is very unsta-
ble. Apart from the machines sinking, no? . . . this generates high
costs . . . you pull out the timber and another landslide happens . . . in
some areas there is no longer a road. [and who pays for that?] well,
the community, that’s the irony of it, no? They pay . . . that’s why they
challenge it. Because the machines enter, take out the timber and
once they are out the road is ruined. They return to clean it up . . . who
pays? The community, yet by then there is no more timber left.
who takes the blame? The community, which gets suspended. Every-
thing falls back on the community. The trader simply does what
Community Forestry and Post-frontier Deforestation 107
The community does not put in 1 sol for the permit. I guarantee
that . . . I also pay in advance, even process the permit. Based on the
timber account they will later get a rice miller machine, 5–6.000
soles . . . [when?] when the permit is approved . . . that’s my guarantee.
Well, the community has the permit, no? . . . then there are all the
accounting documents. They’re held by the madedero. That’s how it
108 Post-frontier Resource Governance
is. That’s why I’m telling you, it’s as if we are incapable . . . Timber is
being leaked, papers are being leaked. Everything’s being leaked.
(Personal interview 2008)
Reverse governance
What explains the relative ease with which madederos could maintain an
asymmetrical, and clearly non-beneficial, modus operandi within titled
areas, and with which institutional efforts could strengthen community
autonomy in the market? The pervasive presence of social inequities
in the forestry sector was not simply about elite imposition alone,
but about a series of social interdependencies which worked far bet-
ter than the presumed social benefits of sustainable forestry projects.
Reverse governance was socially embedded and structured, not hap-
hazard. It was not a resource-specific phenomenon, but a historically
grounded non-linear social practice. The power, influence and abuses of
lumber barons are long and ongoing chapters in the forest frontier cycles
of the Amazon (Bodley 1972; Hvalkof 2002: 100). While land titling in
theory shifted the balance in this respect, the Yánesha experience reveals
the continuities and the limits of titling and formal empowerment.
Forestry was not a neutral linear space of divided roles and responsibil-
ities mediated through law, but a socially embedded space with actors
positioned differentially in terms of access and influence. The Yánesha
encounter with the market economy was indirect and socially mediated.
Community forestry was embedded in long-standing frontier rela-
tions constituted by the interdependence of patron-clients, debt and
political power. Debt-based relationships, for example, were long-
standing social practices. Some 33,000 persons were estimated to be
caught up in the habilitación-enganche system of debt-based, forced
labour in the timber sector (Bedoya and Bedoya 2005). Gow describes
the habilitación system of the lumber business in Alto Ucayali, not-
ing how credit access was controlled by the owners of the sawmills.
He argues that there was no market per se (except for those in con-
trol), but rather a system of credit flows (P. Gow 1991: 97). While
the habilitación-enganche practice was not recurrent in the Palcazú Val-
ley, other forms of debt practice tied labour and resources together.
Guillermo Frantzen, a late-19th-century rubber extractor in the Palcazú
Valley, bragged to a visiting Frenchman: “tout mon secret . . . est de leur
créer besoins [my secret . . . is to create needs for them]” (quoted in
Ordinaire 1892: 139–140). Frantzen offered Yánesha and Ashaninka
medicine, products and protection in return for rubber collected.
By the end of the 1960s, 90% of Yánesha men in the Palcazú valley
were “in debt to one patron or another and spent most of their produc-
tive time and energy working off their debts” (Richard C. Smith 1982:
31). This was maintained in a cattle economy, where patrónes controlled
air transportation, slaughterhouse and marketing channels combined
with a system of debt peonage. Known as the “al partir” system, it
involved Yánesha assuming the risks and costs of raising cattle provided
Community Forestry and Post-frontier Deforestation 111
113
114 Post-frontier Resource Governance
A recent boom in energy, metals and minerals has made extractive fron-
tiers an undeniable part of contemporary world affairs. In 2011, the
total budget of some 3,500 companies for non-ferrous metal exploration
reached USD18.2 billion, with increasing exploration in so-called “high-
risk countries” (MEG 2012). While much attention is now being paid
to the geopolitics of the “shale revolution” in oil and gas, expansion
of conventional oil exploration is no less significant a story (BP 2013).
High fossil fuel prices have permitted exploration in ever more distant
and technologically complex settings. From one perspective, the mas-
sive expansion of oil, gas and mining projects involves a fundamental
conflict of interests, resulting in social frictions. As Watts notes, “Oil is
unavoidably an engagement with some of the largest and most power-
ful forces of transnational capital (who show up on the local doorstep)”
(Watts 2001).
Whether from the perspective of social discontent or academic cri-
tique, much literature stresses extractive industry expansion as an
unholy, neoliberal alliance between capital-hungry complicit govern-
ments, multilateral agencies and multinational companies. Oil compa-
nies epitomize the empowered private sector, trumping both localities
and the very states within which they operate. Images of displaced
communities, environmental contamination and social conflict abound
in public representations of extractive industry projects. Sawyer and
Gomez speak of “a particularly exploitative record of colonial and
postcolonial predation” (2008: 25). Oil companies are seen to spear-
head an omnivorous, capitalist world system creating social and envi-
ronmental havoc at the frontier. Reports like the Gaia Foundation’s
Oil Exploration and the Extractive Post-frontier 115
for example, was hired to hunt game for the oil camp workers. Another
commented on the company’s past practices:
No, they never did like they do now. They just came and worked
here . . . Yeah, they looked for workers and I worked there some
time . . . But I didn’t get used to it. First of all it was hot, lots of ants
during the night. I only managed fifteen days.
The first that go are those from the social affairs unit, because we need
to inform the population what the study is about, what we seek for
the future. So, we, as social affairs, are the first to pave the road [and]
convince the population [ . . . ] because many people don’t want it to
pass through their site. [I see] that is, sometimes there are problems
like “I don’t want it” or they claim a very high price no? [Yes.] So the
company . . . in the end, well, we’re part of the company [ok] and we
need to respond and try to convince them no.
(Personal interview with Yánesha
community relations officer)
put the oil company at the risk of being associated with negative reci-
procity, that is “to get something for nothing” (Sahlins 1974: 195).
Rather than being able to impose operational peace or a convenient
oil governmentality, the company engaged in constant relationship
building to avoid radical alterity. Whereas Adam Smith emphasized
individual self-interest as the most effective social bond to tie society
together, company officials knew that generosity and gift giving were
far more effective alternatives.
Local oil operations entailed adapting to local forms, values and even
local power culture. What was considered good corporate behaviour was
not only about required safeguard measures, but also about engaging
with cultural prescriptions of sharing, generosity and correct behaviour.
“Relationship management” was all about mimicking local forms of
exchange and good behaviour. In the natural world, insects imitate
harmful species to avoid predators; the company officials did exactly the
opposite, and took on the hues of “friends” to avoid predatory accusa-
tions. Several indigenous leaders spoke of their “friend” or “friendship”
with the oil company relacionista. The company, from very early on,
engaged in support and gift giving. Small credits, sponsoring bus tick-
ets and giving rides were part of efforts to “help out”, as were a set of
agreements of “reciprocal assistance” with indigenous organizations.
Breaking rules, helping without an immediate return were imitations
of generalized reciprocity within an underlying instrumental logic of
keeping operations going. Company staff also entered into imitations
of patron–client and compradazgo relationships for social events, such as
indigenous conferences, a well-established social practice built up with
local elites. They wanted – indeed, needed – to show they were giv-
ing something in return. It was the exact opposite of the impersonal
business of the hitman about to liquidate someone; “don’t take this
personally, it’s just business” (Hart 2005). Oil companies were embark-
ing upon a project that fundamentally threatened indigenous ways of
life, yet they sought to demonstrate that “This is not just business,
it’s personal”, that they were “friends”. Where Marx in the commu-
nist manifesto emphasized how the bourgeoisie had “torn away from
the family its sentimental veil, and reduced the family relation to a
mere money relation” (Marx and Engels 1969 (1848): Section 1), oil
actors attempted to do the contrary by turning an asymmetrical money
relation into a family, friendship and shared development vision.
What had been the problematic basis for social claims in the 1990s
had been incorporated into its function ten years later. The com-
pany implemented programmes on information, local employment,
120 Post-frontier Resource Governance
In Calgary, they not only respect, but invest in, communities . . . we are pre-
pared here, we don’t want more deaths, let’s be careful, the impacts
(of oil) will be minimal . . . we’ve got drugtrafficking here . . . there is
no other way than negotiating with the oil companies . . . we have
recently begun on friendly terms, coordinating, they have social pro-
grammes here, but there is still not a business focus here. We should
be organizing businesses . . . with small businesses we can negoti-
ate, we can create viable initiatives, organize ourselves, build our
capacities.
(Personal interview 2008)
We are looking for the money and want to have a direct relationship
with their owner (“el dueño de la plata”). We don’t want the state to
interfere.
Populations in the interior are very isolated and count with very lit-
tle presence of the State. Conversely, thanks to a government that
promotes investment, the arrival of companies like ours gives these
communities a possibility of developing and improving their living
standards. They have spent their whole lives surviving and isolated
in remote areas of the Amazon region without any opportunity for
improvement. A company like Petrolifera brings a specialized knowl-
edge to a specific area, and explores seeking to find a possible source
of wealth buried in the depths of that territory. If there is a source
of wealth buried there, only an oil company will be able to discover
it. However, this requires a great investment, of money, time and
knowledge, and we provide this opportunity. Native communities
share this understanding and it is important that they participate in
these efforts; they too must share the risk, their time, their peace
of mind, and their territories. It is and must be understood as a
group effort . . . the planet belongs to all and by using high technol-
ogy there are ways to work in the exploitation of its natural resources
in a responsible manner which ensures the well-being of the entire
community.
(Vailija 2009)
Palcazú oil dynamics were not unique in the wider landscape. They
illustrated a broader shift from “reactive” or defensive approaches to
“proactive” social legitimacy production in the extractive post-frontier.
At the end of the first seismic phase, the community relations offi-
cer would summarize the results at an indigenous congress as follows:
“We have lived up to our compensation agreements”. “220.000 soles
have been distributed directly to communities,” he noted proudly dur-
ing a presentation at the Yánesha congress in 2008. The company had,
he added, worked with 500 people and paid some 1,500,000 soles in
salaries. It had provided social support and had even flown two emer-
gency cases to San Ramon for medical care. Finally, there had been no
“environmental damage”. “We have decided to continue exploration
in the south of the block,” he noted optimistically, adding that “there
would be major income for the region for years should we find some-
thing”. He ended his talk by committing 5,000 soles for a gender project.
He was applauded.
Petrolifera later communicated the first phase of exploration as a suc-
cess: “100% (completed), zero accidents, zero social conflicts” and, most
importantly, “significant potential” as the company put it. The report
spoke of “minimal capital expenditures” for pre-drilling and invest-
ment talks being held with larger companies (Petrolifera 2010). Block
107 had been transformed from a risky opportunity to becoming an
asset, ready to be farmed in a new set of capital(ized) relationships.7
In 2009 and 2010, the oil company initiated new rounds of workshops
and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) studies for block 107. The
company was shifting from seismic to drilling exploration, and had
narrowed exploration sites down to a number of private landholdings,
many bordering indigenous communities and protected areas. Tempo-
rary headquarters were moved and the establishment of agreements was
further limited to directly affected areas and communities neighbouring
drilling sites.
Portrayals of success were not accidental, but resulted from orches-
trated attempts to manage, negotiate and engineer relations of coopera-
tion, interaction and non-risk. Post-frontier safeguard mechanisms were
carefully managed instruments. In the Palcazú, this involved hiring for-
mer indigenous leaders as community relations officers, setting up and
132 Post-frontier Resource Governance
Introduction
134
Indigenous Power and Post-frontier Politics 135
Indigenous protests
The Baguazo and oil were not the first occasions when Yánesha
appeared absent from wider indigenous mobilization in the Selva Cen-
tral. Between January and May, 1990 an Ashaninka “army” uprising
(levantamiento), with between 2,000 and 2,500 mobilized men, took
place in response to the kidnapping and killing of their leader, Alejandro
Calderón Chávez by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA)
guerrillas. In some ways, the uprising stood as an invisible subscript
to questions of politics, power and indigenous people in the region.
An intensive campaign against presumed emertistas was initiated across
the valleys. Roads were controlled, population was registered and
MRTA sympathizers were sought (CVR 2003).
140 Post-frontier Resource Governance
In the end a “peace agreement” was reached and the Yánesha commis-
sion returned home.
As Yánesha spoke of the uprising, it struck me how their recon-
ciliatory peace process primed over taking control of the valley and
making the settlers leave. In contrast, the rebellion had mobilized
Ashaninka from Ene, Tambo, and Pangoa, “attracted by a revolutionary
discourse that called for the destruction of the exploitative old order and
Indigenous Power and Post-frontier Politics 141
announced the advent of a more just new order in which the Asháninka
were to become ‘millionaires’ ” (Santos-Granero 2002: 558). Where
Ashaninka testimonies evoked warrior practice and values, Yánesha gen-
erally emphasized the opposite. “As Yánesha we are passive. Whatever
the problem – we’ll try to solve it through dialogue,” one leader com-
mented. Another leader spoke of missionaries in the early 20th century:
“animating the Yánesha to not resist . . . because people weren’t there to
kill them, but to help them . . . ” A former Yánesha leader from an Adven-
tist community, in effect, formulated it as “solving problems through
dialogue – we should love the proximo (‘love thy neighbour’)” quoting
the New Testament. “It’s our culture,” he continued, contrasting it with
Ashaninka who:
take up the arrows and are aggressive . . . you know, in 1990 ANAP
[the Ashaninka federation, Apatyawaka Nampitzi Asháninka Pichis]
invaded us, thinking that we were hiding the MRTA . . . they killed
four Yánesha.
abducted for five days . . . I left quietly, they left me in a place where I
could reach my family.
(Personal interview 2008)
respecting their struggles, their fights and the armed rebels and where
we also said that we [Yánesha] were an independent nation . . . we
respect their rebel organization regarding politics, economics and
society . . . and in the same way that they should respect us . . . a
mutual respect.
(Personal interview 2008)
He had been elected in 1993 during the time of the narcotraficantes and
considered his main achievements negotiating peace and keeping the
drug dealers out of the communities. A highlight had also been a secret
meeting with the ‘Shining Path’ (Sendero Luminoso) along with two
other leaders in the native community of Ñagazú. “Our demands were
that they did not recruit in our communities, could not be present in
meetings, or penetrate our communities,” he explained. Yet the senderis-
tas were keen to enter and negotiations continued till 3 o’clock in the
morning before a secret “peace accord” was established. Making do
required steady adaptation to narcotraficantes, guerrilla activity and mili-
tarization. It was the balancing act between social justice, surviving and
growing left-wing engagement among the Yánesha. It was also about
carving out a distinct ethno-political space within a complex setting.
The dramatic consequences of imposed social relations, physical vio-
lence or ideology did not make it a simple task to distinguish friend
or foe. Yánesha leaders took pride in their non-confrontational style.
One leader called it “Yánesha diplomacy” where the maintenance of
relations, even in situations of conflict, was fundamental. Open resis-
tance and politics was risky business during the internal war. The lawyer
and activist Fernando Mejía Egocheaga, who had defended the Yánesha
against the Catholic Church in 1986, was tortured and killed three
years later following the accusation that he had harboured guerrilla
sympathies. Yánesha leaders would repeatedly talk about the risks of
legal accusations and manipulations, and of law being instrumentalized
against them rather than protecting them against conflicts. It was social
chaos in Yánesha terms. Being with or without rights converged, the
Indigenous Power and Post-frontier Politics 143
that those present were socially and morally united. Identity politics did
not build on a pre-given shared “ethnic” interest but, first and foremost,
required reproducing or reaffirming moral and social connection in the
first place. The very survival, strength and nature of indigenous agency
was located in the identity and moral spheres, as much as in collective
organization and universal principles of grassroots organization. Reaf-
firming shared moralities was the starting point for ethnic politics, and
not the other way around.
merely about asserting resistance (Scott 1990), but also about finding a
modus operandi, working in the interstices of asymmetries and reproduc-
ing identity politics in the midst of dominant tales. It is not merely of
anecdotal significance, but also of analytical importance, to understand
indigenous politics in their continuity and complexity rather than as
singular – accidental, modern or postcolonial – phenomena. Just as we
need to denaturalize the post-frontier significance of environmental and
indigenous rights regulatory measures, an analytically open-ended and
historically grounded perspective is critical to capturing the meaning
and nature of contemporary indigenous politics.
Concluding Remarks: Theorizing
Post-frontier Governance
Introduction
Future historians may remember the late 20th century for its
proliferation of “sustainable development” tools to resolve long-
standing social and environmental challenges at the frontier. Where
Igor Kopytoff spoke of Africa as a “frontier continent” with new polities
spreading around mature African societies (Kopytoff 1989: 7), histori-
ans may even, with a hint of irony, speak of a “post- frontier world”
as the nominal taming of frontier topographies becomes globalized.
While much hope is still placed upon the discovery of new frontier
resources, the promised land of El Dorado is no longer about gold alone,
but involves sustainable harmony, underpinned by post-frontier insti-
tutions harmonizing environmental, social and economic objectives.
Just as modernism implies radical breaks from the past, the post-frontier
attributes transformative powers to new sustainability institutions. Yet,
similar to the fall of modernity, we are currently witnessing crippled
post-frontier institutions capable of securing neither environmental
sustainability nor social justice. A zero-sum conception of the post-
frontier, where new regulatory measures are ipso facto seen as taming
the frontier, is at best misplaced optimism, at worst misleading. As ever
more technico-salvatory means are invented and proliferate at the fron-
tier, failures and contradictions abound. This book has sought to shed
light on this post-frontier paradox. Nowhere are such paradoxes more
evident than in post-frontier Amazon, where sustainability institutions
coexist side by side with the degradation and marginalization of com-
munities. The post-frontier Amazon does not have fewer frontiers, they
have merely metamorphosed into different orders, or rationalized forms
and modalities of frontier expansion. Frontiers, it could be argued, are
149
150 Post-frontier Resource Governance
shift to recognize post-frontier assemblages for what they are and do,
rather than remaining caught in normative conclusions about their
deficiencies. Second, there is a need to further address the processes,
boundary setting and effects of negotiating new post-frontier arenas.
Third, there is a specific need to further document the shifting processes
of accumulation and frontier maintenance at the post-frontier.
Post-frontier arenas
process” (Moore 2008: 221) whereby linear boundaries are set for legit-
imate forms of agency and action in a given governance field. The
resulting publicly sanctioned governance arenas set out the boundaries
and standards for how resources, such as oil or timber extraction, are
governed. It was such arena production that, on the one hand, turned
renewable resources in the Peruvian Amazon into a “local” issue, linked
to long-standing territorial constructions and scalar politics (native
community, reserve, biotic resources). Sub-surface mineral resources,
on the other hand, were consolidated as a national level and state-
controlled domain. Clearly, the form and boundaries of such arenas
are not only space and time dependent, but emerge through contested
claims to scale, forms of agency and boundaries of legitimate action.
Therefore, the key question is one of explicating the negotiated pro-
cess of translating values into distinct governance arenas and what this
entails for other intentionalities and the accommodation of the cap-
italist necessity of frontier creation. As this book demonstrates, shifts
to conservation topographies and rights regimes are only a posteriori
retrofitted as rational shifts, but essentially emerge through a socially
negotiated and contested process. The Palcazú case illustrated how a
government-driven frontier project was renegotiated through intensive
political campaigns, international mobilization and managerial inter-
vention ultimately reconfiguring a post-frontier geography of protected
areas and land rights.
Post-frontier effects
A core claim of this book is the need to shift from analysis denounc-
ing a failing post-frontier towards analysis interrogating its specific
dispositifs and effects. In the protected area context, the shift towards
co-management revealed the pervasive force of managerial language,
disciplinary effects and bureaucratic power. Rather than empowering
communities, post-frontier mechanisms cemented the transformation
of a community hunting space into a state-driven protected area. While
contracts signalled recognition, in practice they left indigenous com-
munities in a double-bind of nominal inclusion and de facto exclusion.
While such effects are often explained as a result of weak measures, this
book claims more attention should be directed to the strengths in play.
Legality in the post-frontier is more than “dressing up”, as it entails
a reorganized and restructured social power field. On the one hand,
post-frontier recognition reinforces processes of state incorporation and
Concluding Remarks: Theorizing Post-frontier Governance 155
rehashed in “Rio +20” and other global arenas, the bottom line is the
convergence between academic and policy interest in seeing a host of
domains together, rather than as separate fields. There is a broad recogni-
tion that these are multi-dimensional and multi-scale challenges, albeit
organizations continue to propose tools crafted around single variables
(“if only we could get the economic incentives right”). What this book
argues is the importance of bringing social science and critique into
the managerial equation anew. Ethnography has a particularly impor-
tant role in resituating governance practices in its social fabric. It allows
analysis to start where people are, not where managerial models ideo-
logically begin. Rather than presuming the whole nature of prototypical
Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), rights or co-management
plans, ethnography reveals how these may be restructured to quite dif-
ferent ends. This may lead to their inversion, but is also the opening
for change. The question is no longer whether or not rights (territo-
rial or private property, depending on who is asking) or environmental
measures are being implemented, but how they are being produced,
lived out and socially assembled. Is this of more than academic interest?
How relevant are they for getting on with the actual work of halting
forest degradation, preventing further biodiversity loss and recogniz-
ing the rights of indigenous peoples? Don’t we not already know what
is needed (adequate titling, sufficiently funded protected areas, equi-
tably shared conservation regimes and strong legal frameworks, etc.)?
Is the remaining challenge not simply to ensure support, to get beyond
the policy obstacles and to mobilize adequate resources to put them
into practice? However seductive such policy “quick-fix” narratives may
appear, it would leave the social sciences caught in the straightjacket of
contemporary linearities. Within shifting terrains of governance there
are no policy panacea, simply shifting institutional forms and terrains
of struggle. Given that today’s solution might be the locus of tomor-
row’s problem, grounded analysis is ever more critical to tracking such
shifts and their social effects. In other words, this is not simply about
mobilizing the ethnographic gaze to generate local examples, but is
equally about reconsidering the ongoing social assemblages of gover-
nance fields through anthropological theory. This point is fundamental.
As new forms and sites of power and dominance emerge alongside, or
within, means of emancipation, new understandings are not only criti-
cal for anthropology to retain its relevance, but fundamental for global
quests to revitalize notions of sustainability, environmental governance
and rights.
Postscript: Biosphere Dreams
and Biosfears
160
Postscript: Biosphere Dreams and Biosfears 161
3 Frontier Narratives
1. Two hundred years later, Antonio Brack, a leading Peruvian ecologist (and
the country’s first Minister of Environment), would dedicate his encyclopedia
on useful plants not only to his natural science teacher, but equally to Doña
Narcisa, “a Yánesha native from Villa Rica through whom my mother learnt
about using plants to cure her sons”. (Antonio Brack, 1999). Brack’s parents
162
Notes 163
were frontier settlers in the customary Yánesha territory in the Selva Central.
By then some 25,000 plant species were known of which around 5,000 were
being used for 49 purposes, Brack argued.
2. Their aim was to connect Huancabamba with the Chanchamayo Valley fur-
ther south (a trip that would otherwise take eight to ten days, passing through
the highlands).
3. Smith has also suggested the dramatic impact of a yellow fever epidemic in
1879–1880 interpreted as a new colonist weapon: “their only chance for sur-
vival was to lay down their arms, burn their magical plants for war, and allow
the whites to enter the valley” (1974: 8).
4. Campa was the category employed to describe Ashaninka, Asheninka and
Yánesha in much of the older literature. There is a general confusion in the lit-
erature of this period between the Asháninka and the Amuesha. The Amuesha
were not thought of as a separate ethnic group until Sala made the distinction
clear early in the 20th century (Smith 1977a: 52).
5. The PEPP initially covered the Pichis, Palcazú and Pachitea River basins,
later also including upper-lying districts such as Villa Rica, Oxapampa,
Chontabamba, Huancabamba and Pozuzo. Later it also included other areas
in Huanuco and Ucayali.
drilling exploration in the area. New drilling sites were identified and another
round of impact assessments and management plans was implemented.
166
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Index 183