Shaping Natural Regions. Capitalism, Environment, and the Geography of Post-Colonial Peru (original) (raw)
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This article explores how local people in the Amazon negotiate different and conflicting rationalities, how they appropriate meanings and negotiate discourses on nature, gender and modernity. Ethnicity is used here to explore different temporalities and different forms of modernity at the “margins”. This article contextualizes this process of negotiation within the historic process of subordination and commoditization of nature and the subordination and control of indigenous populations in the Amazonian región of Loreto, where cultural hybridization is part of hybrid livelihoods that reflect and challenge the structural limits defined by the political ecology of Loreto and the contradictory nature of modernity in the Third World. This article use ethnographic data to unveil the ambiguous ethnicity of ribereños and the unfinished and multidirectional process of assimilation of indigenous peoples in the Amazon.
Traditional Dwellings and Settlement Review, 2005
This article examines the makings of post-traditional environments through processes of urban ethnogenesis among the Ese Eja, an indigenous Amazonian group living in the border areas of Peru and Bolivia. We argue that the use of “tradition” as social currency by the envi- ronmental service sector, particularly by a thriving international ecotourism industry, has exac-erbated processes of urbanization, dislocation, and social and ecological alienation of indigenous peoples. We examine how an Ese Eja “past” is selectively reinvented through discourse and appropriated by “participatory” projects and development. This unearthing and reburial of history is then used to “authenticate” the present and its environmental agenda in a postglobal world of environmental moral righteousness.
Perspectiva Geográfica
The double colonization of the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon, coming from the Southern Amazon but mainly from the Coast and Sierra, has multiplied perceptions, rights, and management methods in this territory. This article explores these differences and reconstructs the history of this colonization and the rights of access to land, which are private for the colonos (settlers) and mostly communal for the indígenas (indigenous people). These legally differentiated groups are similar in their perception of the territory and their socioeconomic and environmental limitations: most agricultural products are not profitable. Between thegrowing metropolises and the remaining forest, the countryside is slowly shrinking. Communities are appearing that combine indigenous people and settlers and that copy the indigenous communities’ rights and practices. However, this communal right is acquired for the Amazonian groups but not for others, indígenas or colonos, defining de facto a jus aplidia, along...
Perspectiva Geográfica: Revista del Programa de Estudios de Posgrado en Geografía, 2020
The double colonization of the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon, coming from the Southern Amazon but mainly from the Coast and Sierra, has multiplied perceptions, rights, and management methods in this territory. This article explores these differences and reconstructs the history of this colonization and the rights of access to land, which are private for the colonos (settlers) and mostly communal for the indígenas 1 Researcher, Ph.D. in Rural Development,
This article examines the makings of post-traditional environments through processes of urban ethnogenesis among the Ese Eja, an indigenous Amazonian group living in the border areas of Peru and Bolivia. We argue that the use of “tradition” as social currency by the environmental service sector, particularly by a thriving international ecotourism industry, has exacerbated processes of urbanization, dislocation, and social and ecological alienation of indigenous peoples. We examine how an Ese Eja “past” is selectively reinvented through discourse and appropriated by “participatory” projects and development. This unearthing and reburial of history is then used to “authenticate” the present and its environmental agenda in a postglobal world of environmental moral righteousness
Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, 2023
Recent focus on Indigenous urbanization in Lowland South America has rightfully drawn attention to the dangers of strictly rural images for Amazonians (Alexiades and Peluso 2015, 2016; Peluso and Alexiades 2005a, 2005b). This chapter is premised on the importance of understanding Indigenous peoples as diversely participating in rural-urban flows, yet it also pays close attention to the particular complications that urban images pose as many conscientiously uphold them. Such an examination does not question the significance of stressing urbanization in the way that Indigenous peoples are represented, yet it aims to be cognizant that such images are often manipulated by agents with vested interests in divesting rural areas of its inhabitance. Indigenous people "living at the borders" in Amazonia actually, apart from the symbolic underpinnings of the phrase as intended in this volume, do often tend to live on physical borders and have a long history of rural-urban flows that might not immediately seem apparent. Indeed, archeologists have now verified that pre-Columbian Amazonian settlements were large-scale and urban, centralized, densely populated, and stratified (Denevan 1992; Erickson 2006; Heckenberger et al. 2008) and were thus metropolises in their own right. Such findings expose large and expansive trade networks and challenge deeply rooted misconceptions of Amazonia as an area of pristine wilderness with minimal human impact on the environment and settlements (Fausto and Heckenberger 2007; Alexiades 2009).
This article examines the makings of post-traditional environments through processes of urban ethnogenesis among the Ese Eja, an indigenous Amazonian group living in the border areas of Peru and Bolivia. We argue that the use of "tradition" as social currency by the environmental service sector, particularly by a thriving international ecotourism industry, has exacerbated processes of urbanization, dislocation, and social and ecological alienation of indigenous peoples. We examine how an Ese Eja "past" is selectively reinvented through discourse and appropriated by "participatory" projects and development. This unearthing and reburial of history is then used to "authenticate" the present and its environmental agenda in a postglobal world of environmental moral righteousness. The Ese Eja are a lowland Amazonian group comprising about 1,500 people, living in several communities along the rivers Beni, Madre de Dios, Heath and Tambopata, in the border regions of Pando, Bolivia, and Madre de Dios, Peru (figs.1 , 2). The Ese Eja language belongs to the Tacana language family, itself part of the Macro-Panoan group of languages of Western Amazonia. Most Ese Eja plant swidden fields, hunt, fish, and extract forest resources, both for consumption and commercial trade. Madre de Dios, the third largest and least populated department in Peru, is itself home to eighteen different ethnic groups and seven linguistic families. The department has also a significant importance for global conservation. As a biodiversity "hotspot," with more than three million hectares set aside for conservation, it is heavily targeted by external conservation and community-development funds and projects. 1 The popular conception of Amazonia as a place inhabited by forest peoples is outdated: most people today live in urban and periurban environments. Throughout the twentieth century, Amazonians have moved between urban and rural areas in response to
Ethical Cosmologies in Amazonia
Mester, 2020
Author(s): Varese, Stefano | Abstract: In this article, I am making the argument that addressing issues of cultural and social representations of Peruvian Amazonia by the national community – both political civil society – with a narrow temporal synchronic and spatial materialistic perspective (three or four hundred years of history and the reduction of bio-physical diversity to a few commoditized “resources”) lessens drastically our ability to fully understand and interact intelligently and ethically with this vast portion of Peru’s national territory. I am proposing the qualitative shift to an emic way of thinking and analyzing Amazonia, that is to say adopting the indigenous way of knowing and co-existing with the forest as a living entity peopled by thinking and feeling entities with will, intentionality and teleological energy-synergy.
Cultural Conception of Space and Development in the Colombian Amazon
Indigenous, Aboriginal, Fugitive and Ethnic Groups Around the Globe, 2019
With the objective of recognizing the cultural conception of space and development in the Colombian Amazon, an exploratory approach of documentary nature is developed to analyze the history of Amazonian settlement, the cosmogony-cosmology, the enrichment and/or impoverishment that generated the interaction between the indigenous and conquerors in "the creation of the new world," ecological relations, multilingualism, as well as the development of territory since a "geographic-environmental-humanistic" view, and the laws that currently protect indigenous peoples. It is concluded that the history of social relations has framed a syncretism between the visions of the populations about the world, the territory, development and economic interest, which positively and/or negatively feedback the protagonism of the ethnicities, the worldviews, the language, as well as the ways of relating to nature and therefore the indigenous perpetuity in the territory.