The Salt of The Montana - Interp - Veber, Hanne

The Salt of the Montana: Interpreting
Indigenous Activism in the Rain Forest1

Hanne Veber
Institute of Anthropology
The University of Copenhagen
Indigenous populations are seldom recognized as subjects engaged in innova-

tive projects of their own making. The anthropology of indigenous Amazonian
societies has tended to reflect a basic view that sees change in native culture as
involving processes where the distinct characteristics of the original native are
gradually dissolved. The native and the native culture may then begin to reflect
imagery borrowed from mainstream national society through an adaptive pro-
cess of homogenization. This perspective, and the images and vocabulary which
go along with it, has allowed little scope for conceptualizing ongoing indige-
nous activism, its message, and its outcomes as anything but elements in this ho-
mogenization process. Observers of ethnic conflicts, social movements, or cul-
tural rebellions in other settings tend to conceive of these phenomena as socially
constructed and continuously negotiated processes and action systems through
which the world is being reimagined and reshaped. Yet when it comes to similar
cultural or social manifestations among indigenous populations in the Third
World, analysts have hesitated to follow this line of interpretation. As often as
not, interpretations have continued to rely on conceptual frameworks that are
part of the inherited baggage of modernity and not very well suited to answering
the kinds of questions raised by the indigenous movements.
This article discusses interpretations of the social conflict and political or-
ganizing activities of the Pajonal Asheninka, an indigenous population in a re-
mote Upper Amazon region in eastern Peru that has seen some highly unex-
pected and unforeseeable social and political changes in what for a long time
counted as the established order of things in this part of the Amazon. These
changes, moreover, have been brought about mainly through the agency of the
indigenous ("nonmodern") rather than the immigrant, nonnative ("modern") lo-
cal population. In conventional social analysis and development discourse, as
well as in some of the more recent interpretations of current changes in indige-
nous cultures, the latter has generally been considered the promoter of change
while the former has been perceived as merely adapting, if sometimes even
creatively, to external impacts. Researchers such as Alberto Melucci interpret
Cultural Anthropology 13(3):382-413, Copyright © 1998. American Anthropological Association.
382
THE SALT OF THE MONTANA 383
contemporary movements as signs that "signal a deep transformation in the

logic and the processes that guide complex societies" (Melucci 1996:1). Yet old
ways of thinking may prevent us from hearing the message of such movements
when they are located within exotic native Amazonian settings rather than in
more quotidian vicinities, whether Western or modern Third World. Apart from
reporting the changes, the challenge then consists in grasping the nature of the
indigenous movements capable of effecting profound changes and questioning
the modes of thought that inform the observer's perception while exploring al-
ternative conceptual frameworks for interpretation. Inspired by what has been
termed "new social movements theory," this article considers its applicability
and conceptual advantages in relation to the interpretation of indigenous activ-
ism in the Amazon.
The Progress of the Victims

The movement considered here is that of the Pajonal Asheninka, a native
population of some 4,000 who occupy a 3,600-square-kilometer plateau region
known as the Gran Pajonal in the Upper Amazon of central Peru. These people
have literally made the move from relative oblivion and apparent near-physical
extermination a mere 30 years ago to relative cultural and social autonomy
within their territory by the early 1990s. The Pajonal Asheninka form a sub-
group of the Arawakan-speaking Ashaninka and Asheninka2 (known by the ge-
neric term Campa in the older ethnographic literature), with a total population
of some 50 to 60 thousand people—one of the more populous ethnolinguistic
groups in today's native Amazonia. The Pajonal Asheninka consists of aggre-
gates of independent communities localized within a particular territory and
sharing a similar culture, native language, and history. Their ongoing struggle to
gain control over the conditions of their lives may be understood as a social
movement to the extent that it takes the form of organized, collective actions
based on solidarity and confrontation while being conscious of the expressive
and strategic goals they are pursuing (cf. Alberoni 1984; Melucci 1985:795).
The Pajonal Asheninka movement, made up of people with limited experience
with the nonnative world, developed into a challenge to the system of opportu-
nities and constraints defined by local representatives of national society. It
proved capable of navigating successfully between nonnative regional interests,
on the one hand, and state and international agencies, on the other, while these
various parties were busy espousing their own different agendas for change or
preservation of the status quo ante. As this indicates, even marginal populations,
such as the Asheninka, who succeed in maintaining viable cultures and identi-
ties do not constitute bounded cultural repositories of exotic primordial senti-
ments insulated from the surrounding world; rather, they owe their success
partly to their own creative efforts, partly to their existence within the frame-
work of a weak nation-state, and partly to their existence as objects of a trans-
national discourse that, for reasons that shall not be explored here, pays increas-
ing attention to the world's indigenous peoples and the environments in which
they live (see also Brown 1993; Conklin and Graham 1995).
384 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The Pajonal Asheninka are marginal, however, only from the point of view
of modernity: that is, in this case, from the point of view of national Peruvian so-
ciety and, perhaps, some anthropologists.3 The Asheninka do not see themselves
from this perspective. To them, the world is conceivable as a social space where
Asheninka language, beliefs, and customary practices continue to be the defin-
ing parameters. Long-standing economic relations with nonnative settlers have
not induced the Pajonal Asheninka to conceive of themselves as marginal in
terms of a totalizing system in which settlers (basically migrants from the An-
des) or other non-Asheninka (such as Peruvian criollos or even Caucasians) rep-
resent the center. On the contrary, as far as the Asheninka are concerned, they
themselves are the center of their world; other people may have their own cen-
ters, but these are not important to the Asheninka (Hvalkof 1989,1997a; Varese
1973). It is from within this ideational context that their activist striving has
been oriented. The aims, to the extent they may be discerned, are directed to-
ward the creation and defense of social and political space for the continued
practice of indigenous values and existent forms of organization. The movement
is in no sense neocommunitarian, Alain Touraine's term for the "effort to reject
a historical transformation which comes from abroad and destroys traditional
values and forms of social organization" (1985:758). Nor is it a "fourth world
strategy of exit from the system," as Jonathan Friedman has designated attempts
"to re-establish previous forms of existence" (1990:25). To the extent the
Asheninka espouse a vision of identity that includes elements of a narrative of
modernization, such vision is expressed through a rhetoric of becoming civi-
lized, a rhetoric that in the late 1980s still could be met only sporadically: that is,
mainly in conversations with informants challenged by the anthropologist to ex-
plain the Asheninka demand for schools.4 The notion of civilization is borrowed
from settlers but carries somewhat different connotations and meanings when
used by the Asheninka. To them, "becoming civilized" (civilizarse) refers pri-
marily to the acquisition of certain forms of nonnative knowledge that may al-
low a wider range of maneuver vis-a-vis, and control over, relations with set-
tlers. It does not include an acculturative vision of the Asheninka becoming in
any way "like" one of the other ethnic categories known to them, including the
mestizo!cholo and white categories.5 The Asheninka movement obviously oper-
ates in a system of opportunities and constraints heavily conditioned by external
structures of power and influences. It reflects a basic conflict of interests be-
tween the local indigenous population and the immigrant, nonnative settlers
over territory, access to resources, and control of the instruments of production
of social life. It involves questions of self-awareness on the level of the social
group and a concomitant focus on cultural issues, but it has no revivalist tinge.
Indeed, to consider its orientation and accomplishments merely in terms of cul-
ture and identity might render the social and political conflict invisible or hard
to detect and, hence, might miss out on understanding how the capacity for
agency is activated and socially organized.
In some of the anthropology concerned with relations between Amazonian
populations and the surrounding national societies, indigenous groups are figured
as victims (for some eloquent examples see Bodley 1975, 1985; Davis 1978).
And indeed, victims they have been. When John Bodley visited the Gran Pajonal
in 1969, he found the area nearly depopulated through the combined effects of
lethal epidemics and social disintegration resulting from them. The Gran Pa-
jonal had been devastated by measles just a few years prior to Bodley's sojourn
in the area. While it appeared that as many as 6,000 Asheninka had been living
in the Gran Pajonal in 1950, Bodley noted, much to his dismay, that by 1969 as
few as 1,500 Asheninka were left there and this population was not even repro-
ducing itself. Bodley interpreted the situation in terms of a systematic destruc-
tion of the peoples and cultures of the Amazon basin at the hands of Western
civilization, a destruction he felt was "nearly complete" (Bodley 1972:3-10).
This perspective, however justified in its depiction of the ethnocidal catastrophe
resulting from "progress," ties into much wider ranging constructions of native
peoples as dominated and others ("us," the West) as dominant. This construction
positions the native in the role of the perpetual object of projects conceived by
the dominant other and presents the indigenous peoples as deprived of the ca-
pacity of agency. Hence it implicitly denies their role as authors of their own his-
tory. It has been difficult to discover the native as a creative subject in his or her
own right but invitingly easy to focus on, for example, the invention by some na-
tives (or some few self-proclaimed native leaders) of self-representations in
terms of Western imagery of Indianness that only confirm the native's position
as dominated.6 In this sense, the native is epitomized as doubly conquered,
physically and mentally. Wedded to the perception of the native as dominated,
the conceptualization of the new and emergent forms of indigenous activism (or,
in fact, of any behavior not explicable within the ethnographic conceptualiza-
tion of "traditional native culture") has had difficulties with vocabulary and
theoretical framework (see, for example, Jackson 1989). The approach sketched
out by new social movements theory may provide a partial remedy to this ana-
lytical impasse. As Alain Touraine points out, "An analysis based on the idea of
social movement can .. . help rediscover that these alienated and excluded cate-
gories are nevertheless actors and are often more able than the 'silent majority'
to analyze their situation, define projects, and organize conflicts which can
transform themselves into an active social movement" (Touraine 1985:782).
That new social movements theory may hold advantages in this respect over
other analytical bodies of thought is due to the fact that it seeks to evaluate di-
rectly the capacity of various categories of people to transform themselves into
actors capable of shaping their own situation and its transformations.
History, as it turned out, has proved Bodley's pessimism about the Ashe-
ninka's ability to survive, as well as his discouraging prospects for their future,
to be mistaken. When the present author and S0ren Hvalkof commenced field-
work in the Gran Pajonal in 1985, a demographic survey by the latter showed the
Pajonal Asheninka population to be upward of 4,000, and even though there was
some colonization in the region, the Asheninka continued to be in possession of
the major part of the Gran Pajonal territory. They made (and continue to make)
their living from swidden horticulture, hunting and gathering, and some contract
or debt-peonage labor for colonists who, in return, have provided them with
metal tools, shotguns, ammunition, and other desired items. This relationship
has been fraught with conflicts over land and the remuneration of Asheninka la-
bor. Colonist enterprises of petty ranching and coffee growing were never very
profitable, and the colonists habitually cut down on expenses by underpaying
their Asheninka field hands or not paying them at all (Hvalkof 1986, 1987,
1989; Veber 1989). For a long time, the colonists had managed to restrain
Asheninka dissatisfaction by violence and threats, but by the early 1980s things
had started to change. The Asheninka had begun organizing around three major
issues: (1) the building of small schools in local settlements, (2) the formation of
native communities (comunidades nativas) as defined in Peruvian law, and (3)
the cultivation of coffee, which they hoped would provide an alternative source
of cash income. By 1987, as many as 24 comunidades nativas had been formed
and the Pajonal Asheninka had gained legal title to most of the Gran Pajonal ter-
ritory, much to the resentment of the colonists. Within the next few years, Pa-
jonal Asheninka set up the Organizacion Ashaninka del Gran Pajonal (OAGP)
with their own leaders and a "minister of defense." Also, although poorly armed
with bows and arrows and a few shotguns for which they did not always have
ammunition, they subsequently managed to avert attempts by groups of the in-
famous Sendero Luminoso to invade the area in the early 1990s (Hvalkof 1994).
This emergence of the Pajonal Asheninka as a conspicuous social agent
stands in sharp contrast to the image (previously held by anthropologists, mis-
sionaries, Peruvian authorities, colonists, and others) of the Asheninka as a van-
ishing race on the brink of physical and cultural extermination. Coming to terms
with this development requires not only a closer look at Pajonal Asheninka po-
litical practice, cultural orientation, and collective identity springing from col-
lective action but also a perception of the wider contexts in which this action is
set and, last but not least, a critical reconsideration of the notions that have con-
tinued to inform the anthropological imagination of indigenous people and their
environment. The conceptual tool bag that provided these notions was geared
toward studies of self-contained cultural units imagined as clusters of people in
virtual isolation from other clusters of similar order. Much anthropological self-
criticism and many interesting debates regarding the ways culture and society
may be reimagined have generated interesting suggestions as to how the disci-
pline may proceed (Barth 1989; Borofsky 1994; Brightman 1995; Bruner 1994;
Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Wagner
1981).7 But this self-criticism and these debates have yielded few concepts or
methods that can productively be used to study collective action and intercultu-
ral interaction while avoiding both the pitfalls of essentialism and the sterility
common to systems and structures approaches (see Escobar 1992a; Friedman
1994; Sahlins 1994; Turner 1993). It has hardly equipped anthropology for the
close-up study of indigenous social movements requiring at the same time a
wide focus on contested structures of domination and opposing social projects
of the groups or populations implicated.
The Anthropology of Culture Change

Recent anthropological writings on indigenous movements have acknowl-
edged a need to grasp the nature of such collective manifestations as they are
situated within wider contexts of hegemonies and discourses over which they
have little or no influence. (Urban and Sherzer's edited volume Nation-States
and Indians in Latin America [1991] provides good examples; others may be
found in Brown 1993; Conklin and Graham 1995; Jackson 1995; Ramos 1994;
Turner 1992, 1995; Whitten 1981.) Yet attempts to conceptualize the articula-
tions between indigenous groups and their sociopolitical contexts are often
caught in dualistic thinking that categorizes groups as dominant or dominated
and ascribes a capacity for agency primarily to the dominant while reducing ac-
tions of the dominated to what I would term induced agency, that is, actions de-
termined by the discourse of the dominant "other." This categorizing is obvi-
ously attractive whenever issues of power are implicated. Yet as long as a
specific distribution of power is taken for granted, the a priori acceptance of the
dominant-dominated binary leads to a recycling of concepts and analytical
frameworks which presuppose an automatic, self-evident, worldwide cultural
homogenization. Hence the disappearance of the nonconforming, "uncivilized,"
or "tribal" entities is prophesied as the result of an assumedly "natural" process
of "development" and intensification of domination by the already dominant.
Yet native peoples, indigenous populations, or tribal groups (whichever label is
preferred) have not simply failed to disappear; groups that until recently were
thought to have assimilated into national society, as well as groups thought to
have remained more "purely" traditional or "tribal," continue to pop up with as-
sertions of difference and claims to separate rights and identities (Clifford
1988). Peter Gow (1991) and Terence Turner (1992,1995) have shown how na-
tive Amazonians incorporate nonindigenous concepts and technologies into the
fabrics of their social cosmologies and how these inform viable, novel, localized
practices and meanings in currently changing environments. Borrowing a meta-
phor from Stacy Pigg (1996:193), we may say that the optic through which these
cases have been viewed has been a wide-angle perspective of translocal inter-
connections in which the native populations are positioned, combined with the
close-up, high magnification view of the micropolitics of local life. Yet translocal
perspectives may lead to widely different interpretations and do not by themselves
ensure anthropology's conceptual liberation from its pernicious dichotomies.
Some studies of indigenous activism and manifestations of identity depict
the articulations between the global and the local as involving "Westernization"
and "self-orientalization," that is, acculturation in terms of Western images and
notions of native "otherness." The dominant-dominated dichotomy then be-
comes a question of authenticity/inauthenticity. According to this line of think-
ing, new indigenous identities are being formed through an invention of a "tra-
ditional" Indianness based on imported notions (Abercrombie 1991; Jackson
1991, 1995). Jonathan Friedman and Marshall Sahlins, among others, have ar-
gued that this implies a view of the proposed new identity as inauthentic: as
"a modern invention that deviates from the true past by virtue of the politically
motivated circumstances of its creation" (Friedman 1994:12; see also Sahlins

1994). Friedman further refers to this "invention of tradition" approach as a
"modernist retrenchment" that does, Friedman explains by quoting Sahlins, in
theory "just what imperialism attempts in practice" (Sahlins 1994:381; quoted
in Friedman 1994:12). This is not to refuse the scholarly obligation to write
against essentialism (Segal 1996) or to deny the value of rejecting earlier no-
tions of culture as self-grown wholes (see among others Berger and Luckmann
1967; Clifford 1988; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Wagner 1981). Yet the very
term invented tradition suggests uneasiness with, and suspicion of, new "old"
cultural traits and self-conscious identities. Thus the concept of "invented tradi-
tions" may preempt the possibility of acknowledging the simultaneous exis-
tence of an authentic native way of life, on the one hand, and an effective politi-
cal subjectivity on the other. Furthermore, as Charles Briggs argues, the
"invention" literature implicates an assertion of extensive rights to decontextu-
alize and recontextualize highly politicized discourses in ways that imbue schol-
arly work with authority and simultaneously undermines the rhetorical and po-
litical options of the subaltern (Briggs 1996:459-462). Briggs further notes that,
while the goal "is clearly to advance postmodern critiques of nationalist ideolo-
gies, . . . it extends and deepens modernist projects at the same time that it falls
victim to a number of the political quagmires bequeathed to us by postmod-
ernism" (1996:464).
Recognition of these problematic dimensions of "the invention of tradi-
tion" literature has led one of its founding figures to distance himself from the
concept. Thus Terence Ranger has recently acknowledged that the concept he
helped to produce assumes an ahistorical dualism between precolonial and colo-
nial (or postcolonial) societies. Furthermore, recognizes Ranger, the concept
has generally been used in ways that suggest that "invented traditions" are typi-
cally products of hegemonic (or Western) rather than oppositional (or native)
discourse (Ranger 1994). From this perspective the "invented tradition" ap-
proach presupposes Western hegemony. It is thus an inadequate conceptual tool
for interpreting the character and significance of the new indigenous movements.
Urban and Sherzer note that one of the outcomes of linkages between tradi-
tional and seemingly isolated indigenous communities, on the one hand, and
broader national and international arenas, on the other, is the persistence of
autochthonous forms of language, ritual, myth, and clothing style (1991:1). The
cultural forms retained may be relatively recent historical creations or they may
be legacies of the past turned into symbols of resistance toward state hegemony.
In any case, there are assertions of difference and claims to autonomy that reflect
a complex dynamic of differential self-representation according to context (Ve-
ber 1992,1996). These manifestations may not be immediately comprehensible
insofar as they represent what Clifford has termed "an unresolved set of chal-
lenges to Western visions of modernity" (1988:7). Jean Jackson has suggested
an amendment to the ethnicity concept in the sense that an ethnic group should
be thought of as a "subculture, its inventory of culturally distinct traits having
been produced to a significant extent by interaction with other sectors of the
society" (1991:131). In this way the significance of a contextual articulation of

the intercultural relation would be acknowledged. In a more recent article, how-
ever, she goes on to talk about the process in which natives of the Colombian
Vaup6s "orientalize" themselves, that is, turn themselves into something the
West conceives of as Indian (1995). Although useful as a classification of one
type of contemporary cultural construction, the idea of Indian "self-orientaliza-
tion" poses the same risk of creating the ahistorical before/after duality that Ter-
ence Ranger has warned against in his critique of the invention of tradition lit-
erature. The notion perpetuates the idea of progressive acculturation and
Westernization, insofar as it is used to describe a general phenomenon, rather
than particular instances of strategic impression management limited to a hand-
ful of indigenous spokespersons under pressure to operate in an alien environ-
ment.8 Urban and Sherzer offer yet another example of the troubles anthropolo-
gists often have analyzing indigenous political activism. They propose that
indigenous groups be categorized on a continuum, from uncontacted native
populations to full-fledged ethnic groups (i.e., "Indians") based upon the extent
of each group's explicit awareness of how outsiders represent them (Urban and
Sherzer 1991:5). This proposed continuum presents indigenous peoples as re-
creating themselves as mirror replicas of Western images of "them" rather than
attempting to carve out separate spaces for themselves where they might survive
and exist within their own structures of meaningful discourse and cultural prac-
tice. Thus despite recent well-founded critical reevaluations of the imaginations
of colonialism and developmentalism (see Escobar 1995; Thomas 1994), a ten-
dency to take domination of "the rest by the West" for granted (almost as a
"natural fact") continues to cloud the anthropological ability to imagine "the
other." This tendency leaves unanswered the question of how we can recognize
and describe the muddy waters of intercultural intrusion involving differently
positioned groups vying for control of the socioeconomic and territorial spaces
where their lives are lived and cultures forged.
To the extent that indigenous societies have maintained some of their own
political, social, and economic features (as has been the case to greater or lesser
extent for Amazonian groups such as the Asheninka, the Kayapo, the Shuar),
their politic action to survive colonization may be explained in terms of prac-
tices inherent in these structural properties. Through mobilization, a collective
self-reflective consciousness at the level of the group may or may not emerge.
Jean Jackson credits Stephen Hugh-Jones for having very aptly perceived the
difference between the situation where members of an indigenous culture be-
come aware of themselves as a culture and one where they are merely aware of
themselves as a distinct people. The latter is presumably how the natives per-
ceived the differences between themselves and their neighbors in pre-contact
situations (Jackson 1989:132-133). I would argue that, although the distinction
is extremely useful for understanding the emergence of collective identity, its
inherent before/after duality creates a risk of ahistorical essentialization of na-
tive culture similar to the one pointed out by Ranger's self-criticism (see above).
Surely, no products, native or otherwise, are "pure." They are as often as not the
results of blurred zones of interculturality (Clifford 1988). The idea of "cultural

purity," as well as its partisan prospect of semiautomatic cultural Western-
ization of "the other," hinges on illusory premises. Since few populations live
hermetically isolated from the rest of the world, cultural phenomena are seldom
entirely "homegrown." Indeed, cultural and social vitality seems to be contin-
gent on the possibility or necessity of constant manipulation and activation of
aspects of interculturality. Why then continue to use vocabulary and conceptual
presentations of "the other" that imply inauthenticity and unreality?
Certainly, the outcome of group activity need not be predetermined by an
existent power balance between parties differently located on a fixed cognitive
and political-economic world map. To the extent that the stakes of the new
movement activism are social control of the main cultural patterns (Touraine
1985), the outcome of the negotiations, conflicts, and transformations set in mo-
tion by them are quite unpredictable. This is precisely why the current era is said
to be a "crisis of modernity." The grand metanarratives have lost credibility.
Their former "victims" may repudiate their alleged powerlessness and regain
historicity, as Alain Touraine has termed the capacity of a society to produce it-
self (1985:778).
New Social Movements Theory at the Margins

Arturo Escobar suggested a few years ago that new social movements the-
ory may provide a route for the reimagining of anthropology through a refocus-
ing on social agency for the purpose of gaining a more complex perspective on
the interaction of system and practice in the historical production of societies
(1992a). In contrast to the "old" social movements that espoused grand projects
of radical and all-embracing social and political change, often of a totalitarian or
fundamentalist nature, the new social movements instead focus on grass-roots
politics aimed at the creation and defense of spaces for social autonomy.
Influential theorists such as Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci view the
new social movements as a specific feature of postindustrial society. In postin-
dustrial society, according to Touraine, power, investment, and domination are
situated at the level of cultural production itself. Therefore, the field of social
movements extends to all aspects of social and cultural life, and social move-
ments come to reflect the capacity of various categories of people to make them-
selves into actors participating in their own context and its transformation. This
constitutes nothing less than the very capacity of society to produce itself.
Touraine sees this as the distinguishing characteristic of postindustrial, and, by
implication, Western society. In Third World societies, this capacity for self-
production is supposedly limited because the field of social action is limited.
Lingering within state sponsored industrialization and "low-level" defensive
nationalism in response to domination by foreign companies or international
banking and trade systems, these societies are seen as still caught up in the idea
of modernity or of development: the "metasocial guarantees of social order"
(Touraine 1985:778). Jean Cohen (1985) has criticized the circularity in this line
of argument on methodological grounds. Others have pointed out its inherent
Eurocentrism and its failure to take into account important anthropological

documentation of the capacity for self-reflexivity and historical consciousness
characteristic of many Third World societies. (See Escobar 1992a: 404-405 and
Tsing 1994 for a similar observation.) The capacity of non-Western peoples for
self-reflection is hardly less sophisticated, even if to a lesser degree conditioned
by modern technology, than that of movements in the postindustrial West.
Moreover, marginalized, never fully integrated, nonnationalized Third World
social groups may find Touraine's perspective on a "metasocial guarantee of so-
cial order" a daring generalization not entirely warranted by the facts.
Postindustrialization is certainly not the only way to achieve self-reflective
consciousness at the level of society as Touraine claims.9 New social move-
ments are manifesting themselves in many forms and places of the Third World
"often working at the margins and in the fissures of peripheral capitalism"
(Escobar 1992b:68). Even if founded on cultural matrixes not of modern origin,
as in the Pajonal Asheninka case, the aims and strategies of these social move-
ments are in no way "innocent" or culturally "pure" phenomena. Rather, they
are the results of blurred zones of interculturality. What is significant, then, is
not the observation that even indigenous populations in remote areas have long
since lost any presumed "innocence" they might have had. Nor is the problem
one of recognizing the presence of the modern state or the world system as con-
text, as most observers in fact do. The problem is one of understanding the pro-
cesses by which groups of people deal with the world and contribute to its cur-
rent transformation. Conceptualizations of the world that ascribe the capacity
for agency to the followers of hegemonic discourse while "orientalizing the
other" impede this understanding. One invidious example of practicing one such
discourse of dominance, the discourse of development, is found in the coloniza-
tion of the Amazon.
Peru's Amazonian Development Fantasy

In the easternmost foothills of the Andes, in the watershed of the rivers Per-
ene, Pichis, Ene, Tambo, and Ucayali (an area in central Peru known as la selva
central), lush rain forest covers the low mountains and the river valleys among
them. Since the turn of the century, this area, the montana, has tempted diverse
colonization and development schemes. These have ranged from vast coffee
plantations of the jungle's "eyebrow" (ceja de la selva) by a major British-
owned corporation (Barclay 1989) to rubber and timber harvesting through
ruthless exploitation of the native peoples (Hvalkof in press), and the clearing of
extensive tracts of rain forest by individual small-scale settlers making room to-
day for cash crop production and cattle ranching.
Advocates of colonization have equated this "conquest" of the Amazonian
lowlands with development. But colonists emigrating from Peru's coastal and
Andean regions into the Amazon have hardly brought "development," in any
positive sense of the word, with them. On the contrary, they have contributed to
the region's underdevelopment. A number of factors over which settlers nor-
mally have little or no control often combine and force them to overutilize the
land and thus debilitate the forest's potentials for recovery once cultivation is
discontinued. In addition to bringing soil erosion, settlers bring diseases and
lifestyles inappropriate to the Amazon, and often their very presence contributes
to a proliferation of political corruption and social disorder typical of the state of
flux that characterizes colonization anywhere (Schumann and Partridge 1989;
Sj0holt 1988). Obviously the unequal distribution of power, wealth, and access
to resources prevailing in Peru (conspicuous as a source of misery in the Andean
provinces) represents structural problems that are not alleviated by moving peo-
ple. On the contrary, the movement of people merely reproduces the same struc-
tures in new surroundings.
The Peruvian government has actively stimulated immigration into the
Amazon by the construction of a network of roads connecting the lowland prov-
inces to Andean population centers and to urban centers on the coast. It has been
assumed that Amazonia holdsrichresources and that any colonization would be
warranted. Accumulating evidence of the mistakes in these beliefs has not dis-
couraged a continuing promulgation of the development fantasy. Ex-president
Fernando Belaunde allegedly boasted during his election campaign in 1985 of
having installed 900 kilometers of road during his presidencies (1963-68 and
1980-85). These road construction projects were made possible by the World
Bank, the InterAmerican Development Bank, USAID, and other international
funding agencies. The result was a virtual flood of migrants into Amazonia. In
the provinces of Chanchamayo and Satipo in the central upland forest (selva alta
central), where a new road system was completed in 1974, the population more
than tripled between 1961 and 1981, from 49,000 to 156,000, many of whom
had settled in the area in anticipation of the road, years before its completion
(Sj0holt 1988). This colonization was generally unplanned. There were no re-
strictions on settlement and land appropriation and no overall organization of
economic activity or social and political life, leaving the fates of individual
peasants and small-scale farmers entirely to private initiative.
Colonization in the Gran Pajonal is an example of one of the early versions
of this development endeavor. It was initiated in 1935 by the Franciscan mission
that, however, abandoned colonization in 1965 when MIR (Movement of the
Revolutionary Left) guerrillas passed through the zone in an attempt to escape
the military. The road constructions of the 1960s and 1970s brought massive
waves of immigrant settlers to the provincial town of Satipo in the lower Perene
valley, and from there, many found their way into the Gran Pajonal, led on by
promises of lands free for the taking. By 1980 about one hundred colonist fami-
lies had established themselves in the Gran Pajonal, hoping that a road might
eventually reach the area and facilitate access to markets and thus make their
dreams of economic enrichment come true. These colonists, most of whom are
immigrants from the rural Andes, are themselves victims of underdevelopment
as much as they are simultaneously its agents and perpetrators in the Amazon.
The Ashaninka and Asheninka have over the years adjusted to coloniza-
tion, whether spontaneous or part of state-sponsored development schemes, in a
number of ways. John Bodley, who carried out dissertation fieldwork among
them during the late 1960s, described their responses at the time as experimental
adaptation, ranging from withdrawal from the colonization frontier into remote
corners of the forest to various degrees of partial involvement in the capitalist
economy while maintaining some independence through subsistence horticul-
ture and hunting and gathering (Bodley 1971). Despite continuing involvement
in relations with settlers, relative independence has been maintained in particu-
lar by Asheninka in the isolated region of the Gran Pajonal plateau and in some
areas around the rivers Tambo and Ucayali and the upper Pichis.
Lately, the entire central Amazon region has seen the active presence of
Maoist-inspired Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas, or senderistas,
who have forced thousands of Ashaninka in the Ene and Satipo-Pangoa regions
to either collaborate or evacuate their homes and seek refuge elsewhere.10 In the
latter case their lands were sometimes taken over by nonnative settlers, even for-
mer senderistas (Hvalkof 1994)." Meanwhile, Asheninka in the Gran Pajonal,
Pichis River, and Ucayali River regions succeeded in forming their own armed
defense and successfully confronted senderistas whenever they showed up in
Asheninka territory (Voz Indigena 1993). Through this action they avoided the
massacres, atrocities, and mass starvation inflicted by the senderistas on Asha-
ninka in the Ene and Satipo-Pangoa regions since the mid-1980s. The accom-
plishments of the Asheninka organization, however, were not limited to keeping
the senderistas at bay. By spring 1994, the Asheninka in the Gran Pajonal,
Pichis, and Ucayali had managed to take control of the region, as well as run
their own representatives for mayor in the regional towns otherwise dominated
by nonnatives (Hvalkof 1994, 1997b).12 This utterly unexpected resistance to
colonization and its side effect of "revolutionary" terrorism reflected the Ashe-
ninka's readiness to take matters into their own hands rather than wait for the Pe-
ruvian state to do so.
The basis for their successful resistance was the self-organizing they had
initiated during the early 1980s. The conspicuous result of this had been the for-
mation of comunidades nativas (native communities) as defined by Peruvian
law for the indigenous peoples in the Amazon. A major land-titling process had
subsequently been set in motion and legal titles to Asheninka territory had been
secured. Hvalkof has argued that the explanation for the success of the Ashe-
ninka and the simultaneous incapacity of the Ashaninka in the Ene and Satipo-
Pangoa regions to avert senderista incursions is due to differences in the in-
volvement of the native populations in the processes of land titling and
community organizing in the previous decades. His point, in brief, is that the
Asheninka in the northern regions of Gran Pajonal, Upper Ucayali, and Pichis
had been the initiators of land titling and community organizing themselves. In
contrast, developments in the Ashaninka regions to the south (Ene, Tambo, Sa-
tipo-Pangoa, Perene), where colonization pressure was greater, have been
largely controlled by government agencies and NGOs. Similarly, the massive
presence in these areas of nonnative NGOs and missionaries of various persua-
sions has to some extent derailed the Ashaninka political and organizational
process and exacerbated existing factionalism among them (Hvalkof 1994:30).
Surely, most if not all of these nonnatives had intended to help the native people
achieve some sort of progress or development. That the result turned out to be
exactly the opposite was not just an unintended consequence of their cumulative
actions. Rather, it was a result of natives having been direct targets of the sender-
ista version of "revolutionary" development, which, as Hvalkof has shown, is
not revolutionary but very conservative (1994:31-32).
Comunidades Nativas and the Facilitating External Influences

The concept of comunidad nativa came into being during the presidency of
Army General Juan Velasco Alvarado, who, with a junta of army officers, seized
power in 1968 to ensure reforms of Peruvian society which they felt were badly
needed at the time. As part of the reform program, the Law of Native Communi-
ties (Ley de Comunidades Nativas y de Promotion Agropecuaria de las Regio-
nes de Selva y Ceja de la Selva, D.L. 20653) was adopted in 1974 with the aim
of ensuring land titles for the native populations of the Amazon. This law was,
however, modeled on legislation intended to accommodate existing peasant
communities in the highlands, and it presupposed a communal village-type or-
ganization of the rural population, a form of social organization foreign to many
Amazonian peoples, including the Asheninka. Yet the law sets down the comu-
nidad nativa as the only legal entity under which formal recognition of indige-
nous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon may be granted. At the same time, the law
provides only a most general definition of a comunidad nativa and its organiza-
tion. The native people are not necessarily required to physically form villages
or otherwise give up their existent patterns of residence. In the Gran Pajonal, the
Asheninka have organized under the law of comunidades nativas yet continue to
live in small dispersed settlements, each exploiting their immediate territory for
their subsistence needs. The law was reformulated in 1978 as the Ley de Comu-
nidades Nativas y de Desarrollo Agrario de las Regiones de Selva y Ceja de
Selva, D.L. 22175, with the aim of facilitating business investments in the Ama-
zon lowlands and the montana. The changes, however, did not immediately af-
fect the status of the comunidades nativas.
The legal requirements for forming a comunidad nativa consist simply of a
group's agreeing upon a membership, electing a chief, a secretary, and a trea-
surer, and defining and designating the limits of the comunidad territory. This
being done, a petition is then filed with the Office of Agrarian Reform that the
community be inscribed in the public register. Upon completion of these proce-
dures, the comunidad nativa is recognized as an existing legal entity. This rec-
ognition, however, does not in itself grant possession of land. In order to acquire
a title to land, the comunidad nativa needs a field survey of the lands that they
claim. The native people themselves need to solicit funding for these surveys
from whatever outside sources may be available. The Velasco administration
had set up a special government agency (Sistema Nacional de Movilizacion So-
cial, or SINAMOS) to assist in the processes of land titling and community de-
velopment, but the work was discontinued as soon as the reformist army officers
were removed from power. The land titling for indigenous peoples in Peru's
Amazon carried out during the last decades has been paid for primarily with
money from foreign development agencies and NGOs. To gain access to these
sources, the native peoples most often have needed to rely on assistance from
resident missionaries, anthropologists, or other foreigners who can locate the
sources available and facilitate contact and flow of vital information. From the
point of view of the indigenous peoples, this obviously made these individuals
crucial resource persons whose actions on behalf of indigenous interests often
determined the outcome of any particular land-titling initiative.
The conspicuousness of these resource persons invites the easy inference
that any accomplishments are due to their particular virtues, whether as indi-
viduals or as representatives of outside agencies with charitable or various other
agendas. Yet these persons are able to serve as resource providers only to the ex-
tent that external support is actually available. The "crisis of modernity" in the
West has provided the environment for such support, in moral, political, and
economic forms. This environment has been manifest from the late 1960s on-
ward in the flourishing of numerous voluntary organizations dedicated to the
cause of indigenous peoples.13 By the 1980s, repercussions of the debates that
gave rise to these organizations had made important impressions on the policies
of most major international development agencies, from the World Bank and the
specialized subagencies of the UN to the most local NGOs. These organizations,
however, often operate under conditions of considerable detachment from in-
digenous realities, and their policies have seldom been tailored to indigenous
needs. Nonetheless, the discursive environment of the West creates circum-
stances in which principled good will can be translated into action. Resource
persons directly involved with the indigenous peoples operate in an environ-
ment that allows them to serve effectively as go-betweens, forwarding requests
for funding and other types of support for the native peoples. The subsequent
creation by indigenous peoples of their own political organizations is gradually
eliminating the need for these resource persons and is shifting the burden of
competence onto the shoulders of indigenous representatives themselves.
When the Pajonal Asheninka started to organize in the early 1980s, they had
little or no previous experience with the workings of the national bureaucracy,
nor were they aware of the existence of international development agencies, for-
eign support groups, or NGOs. These circumstances made the actual presence of
potential resource persons among them crucial to the process. In the Gran Pa-
jonal case, Asheninka leaders readily noticed when persons who could be made
useful to them showed up on their turf. Thus it transpired that, when a new mis-
sionary from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) assumed the Gran Pa-
jonal assignment in 1980s, he was quickly recruited by the Asheninka leaders to
assist them. Prior to this, other SIL missionaries had been working in the Gran
Pajonal for some 20 years, preaching and translating the Bible into Asheninka,
though with little apparent effect. SIL had also carried out vaccination cam-
paigns and had strove to put an end to the diseases that had been killing off the
native population well into the 1960s, an effort that had been successful and was
greatly appreciated by the Asheninka. The new missionary was now embracing
"community development," a trendy new model for missionary and NGO opera-
tions. Forming comunidades nativas and securing legal titles to the lands still
not taken by settlers might, from the outsider's point of view, be the obvious
place to start.
But the process of organizing is not simply a question of translating an idea
into practice. Few people with little previous experience at organizing in pursuit
of common interests will sit down to discuss such abstract concepts as land
claims or government recognition. The Pajonal Asheninka, accustomed to con-
ceiving of themselves in terms of kinship and small autonomous dispersed fam-
ily groups, are no exception. Inventing a strategy for dealing with the encroach-
ments by a particular settler on one's own gardens, and perhaps a neighbor's, is
one thing. Gathering in a meeting with strangers (even well-known and less
well-known fellow Asheninka) to discuss strategies and principles for collective
dealings with settlers as a category is a very different matter. To claim that the
Asheninka simply organized to attain government recognition of their existence
and their claims to territory is a retrospective rationalization. Rather, the Ashe-
ninka formulated their "project" in terms of self-defense against the settlers and
the winning of competence through the capture of certain tokens of civilization,
that is, written documents (the land titles and the registration papers) and
schools. Moreover, once the documents were in the headmen's possession, they
worked! They in fact served to break settler domination vis-a-vis the Asheninka.
The magical realism inherent in the Asheninka project was proven as true as the
legal-organizational aspects of it. Although the latter perhaps appeared more
important and "real" to the non-Asheninka involved, in the Gran Pajonal context
it is hard to imagine one without the other.
The Asheninka have off and on throughout recorded history (which goes
back to the 16th and 17th centuries) sought access to the foreign knowledge of-
fered by missionaries in the form of schooling for native children. The history of
these efforts is one of repeated frustration, as both sides have dealt with the in-
compatibility of their agendas, which for both parties has involved much more
than simply education. Neither missionaries, be they Catholic, Protestant, Ad-
ventist, or other, nor the Asheninka have wished to relinquish control to the
other. Although all previous experiments with schooling for the Pajonal Ashe-
ninka have failed, the Asheninka have never abandoned their interest in it. Ac-
cordingly, when the setting up of one or more schools for the Asheninka under
the SIL program for indigenous bilingual education was made possible through
the intervention of the new missionary, the Asheninka responded enthusiasti-
cally. Enterprising headmen realized that schools would attract attention to the
person taking charge of the organizational effort, and the building of schools
came to serve as an instrument for strengthening traditional leadership. This in
turn facilitated the organization of comunidades nativas. These were formed by
local groups that managed to agree on an alignment centering on the person of a
particular headman who they felt might be trusted to be the "chief of their new
comunidad nativa. Based on prevalent notions of social organization, prestige,
and resource sharing, old leadership practices fused into new strategies for col-
lective action in pursuit of common interests.
Obstacles to the progression of indigenous organization, however, high-
light the role of external resource persons. Many native communities in the
Amazon have never passed beyond the stage of "inscription"; that is, they never
have received legal title to their land even after many years of legal existence as
comunidades nativas. Authorities most often explain this failure as the result of
insufficient funding. Be that as it may, lack of funding is not the only reason for
ignoring native land rights. In the Gran Pajonal case, a more difficult hurdle to
overcome was opposition from settlers (colonos) and from local and regional
administrative branches of government identified with colono interests. These
parties found innumerable ways to obstruct the titling of land to the natives. To
beat these obstacles, considerable pressure needed to be exerted from "above,"
that is, from the central government in Lima and from foreign and national
NGOs and funding agencies (Gray and Hvalkof 1990; Hvalkof 1987, 1988).
Without mobilizing these external pressures, native land titling (and even the
preliminaries of organizing comunidades nativas) would have suffocated from
bureaucratic obstruction.
As a case in point, when some Asheninka who were inspired by the work of
SINAMOS among Ashaninka in the Perene valley had tried to introduce the idea
of organizing comunidades nativas in the Gran Pajonal in the 1970s, the effort
failed due to heavy propaganda against it from settlers. The propaganda in-
cluded threats to call in armed police forces to cleanse the country of this pur-
ported "communist insurgency." At the time, the Asheninka had no channels of
effective communication and lobbying with the national or regional govern-
ments. Few spoke Spanish. Fewer still had any idea of the political makeup of
national Peruvian society, and few had any precise understanding of the word
communist. Many did, however, recall the brutal 1965 massacre by the Peruvian
military of the MIR guerrillas and Asheninka who happened to be with them, as
well as the terror subsequently unleashed by the military upon both settlers and
Asheninka in the area who had never even met the guerrillas.14 To the Ashe-
ninka, who had been told that the guerrillas killed had been "communists," the
mere labeling by the settlers in the 1970s of the new "law of native communi-
ties" as "communist propaganda" was sufficient to make them wary of pursuing
any serious attempts at organizing. When the first comunidades nativas in the
Gran Pajonal were finally registered in 1981, it was thanks to the new SIL mis-
sionary, who certainly did not invite any suspicion of harboring "communist"
sympathies.
The process of land titling took several years. By 1985 a handful of Ashe-
ninka communities received the first land titles ever in the Gran Pajonal. This
encouraged the confidence of others. Organizing to achieve control of their ter-
ritory had proven feasible, and most Asheninka realized the extent to which they
could use the comunidades nativas and the land titles to stop further colono en-
croachments. They also felt assured that support would be forthcoming from the
missionary and from other gringos (such as anthropologists) and certain highly
placed government officials in Lima. Within a short time, the number of comu-
nidades nativas in the Gran Pajonal tripled (Hvalkof 1988).
The Structure and Practice of Native Leadership

Disregarding for a moment the role of external support, the Asheninka's or-
ganizational efforts could obviously be seen as predictable reactions to exploi-
tation and oppression by colonists. In this case, only the timing would need to be
accounted for. Yet exploitation and violent oppression of Asheninka was no
worse in the 1980s or 1985 than it was 30 years earlier. It might alternatively be
argued that the degree of Asheninka "acculturation" (understood in the minimal
sense of greater familiarity with nonnative cultural forms) today is more ad-
vanced than it was 40 years ago and that this may explain the timing of the or-
ganizational effort. It is probably true that more Asheninka today speak (some)
Spanish and have some understanding of the ways of non-Asheninka society
than in the past. It is noteworthy, however, that the individuals most knowledge-
able about non-Asheninka ways are not the ones who have assumed the roles of
local leaders and headmen. Some local leaders and headmen have a good com-
mand of Spanish and are to some degree familiar with certain aspects of national
society, while others speak no Spanish and conceive of the world surrounding
the Gran Pajonal in terms of an indigenous mythology that bears very little re-
semblance to nonnative perceptions of "reality." Being "acculturated" does not
in itself enhance the prestige of a Pajonal Asheninka headman in the eyes of his
following. Conforming to traditional notions of "headmanliness" does (Veber
1996). Asheninka systems of leadership are no different from those found in the
rest of the Amazon basin, where leadership is most often fragile and consensus-
oriented and where a few powerful, domineering headmen are also occasionally
encountered (Kracke 1978). In the Gran Pajonal as elsewhere, native settlement
patterns and modes of leadership to some extent reflect the peculiar characteris-
tics of the region. The Gran Pajonal is a marginal environment with scarce re-
sources, a fact that does not invite any clustering of population. Accordingly,
Asheninka settlements are small and widely dispersed over the Gran Pajonal's
grasslands and rain-forest-covered hills. In such an environment, the integration
of settlements for purposes of social and political cooperation represents a prob-
lem. The political order of Asheninka society seems to oscillate over time be-
tween a pattern of localized convergence around relatively few very strong and
powerful leaders (pinkathari), on the one hand, and a total diffusion of leader-
ship devolving onto practically each individual head of family, on the other.
When strong headmen have flourished in the past, they have been gifted charis-
matic leaders with a renown as either great warriors, great shamans, or both.
With the suppression of warfare subsequent to colonization of the area, the warrior
role obviously declined in importance. In addition, as lethal epidemics devastated
the Gran Pajonal during the same period, social units scattered, further diminish-
ing the scope for strong leadership. Yet as the native population has recovered dur-
ing the latest decades, the area has seen a resurgence of native leadership.
As much as this reflects the effort to cope with colonization, it should also
be noted that the Gran Pajonal Asheninka have had to adjust to their own "popu-
lation growth" of the past 15 to 25 years.15 During this period the Asheninka
population recovered from losses caused by severe epidemics that occurred up
to the 1960s and by coeval territorial encroachments by settlers. The Asheninka
have found themselves in increasingly confined quarters facing two basic prob-
lems: a diminishing territory and a need to accommodate, socially and politi-
cally, a larger population. Besides having to cope with colonist encroachments,
Asheninka in the Gran Pajonal thus have had to compete with each other for con-
trol over territory, people, and resources. This situation obviously has called for
the activation or development of systems of organization and lines of authority
geared to manage Asheninka production and social reproduction beyond the
level of the local settlement. Thus the formation of comunidades nativas appears
to be not simply a strategy to cope with advancing national society but a strategy
for adjusting Asheninka social structure and political leadership to demographic
oscillations in their own society. What we witness in the Gran Pajonal is there-
fore not merely a defense against, or adaptation to, colonization. It is also part of
an ongoing process through which small, autonomous, and highly self-centered
settlement units are being brought into larger political assemblages. In this pro-
cess unifying authority devolves onto strong local group leaders of the pin-
kathari type, which apparently characterized Asheninka society during certain
earlier periods of history as well.
Most Asheninka settlements consist of only a few households. The nuclear
family of a husband and wife and their children makes up the fundamental eco-
nomic and social unit. An Asheninka settlement is usually the equivalent of an
extended family organized into separate households, such as a parents' house-
hold and the households of one or more of their married offspring or other rela-
tives. The male head of the senior household is usually considered the leader of
the group. Settlements united by ties of kinship and marriage and localized
within a certain territory may form a loosely organized association, a local
group. The leader will invariably be head of one of the larger families and a man
considered more gifted and more powerful than most other family heads, a pri-
mus inter pares. But his authority will be recognized by his following only as
long as it suits them and as long as he is capable of appearing "strong." Such lo-
cal group leaders or headmen are charismatic leaders and men of great ambition.
They form the anchor buoys, so to speak, around which kinsmen and other
households gather. These households attach themselves as "satellites" to the
strong leader and his settlement, taking advantage of the protection and organ-
izational gravity emanating from him (Veber 1991b). In return for their alle-
giance, he is expected to provide for "his" people by ensuring their access to vi-
tal productive resources and overseeing peaceful order within the group. He
represents the group vis-a-vis outsiders and provides leadership by setting a
good example of Asheninka virtues, such as hard work, assertive independence,
and prowess. He does not give orders; he must lead through persuasion and in-
fluence, part of which is based on his ability to induce respect and fear. The latter
is accomplished through his alleged possession of knowledge and the communi-

cation of a capacity and readiness for violence, whether through the use of
physical or supernatural means. This show of readiness he shares with all
Asheninka males. Hence as a headman, he not only needs to show he is strong;
he needs to show he is stronger.
In the Gran Pajonal of the 1980s, strong headmen with large constituent so-
cial groups were found in some local areas, while in others each independent set-
tlement simply minded its own business. The formation of a local group is, in
other words, a latent possibility realized where circumstances and personnel en-
courage it. When formed, local groups provided the organizational matrix
through which the Asheninka acted for self-defense and change.
Group ness and Collective Identity

The group is the locus of cooperation in day-to-day activities and in the
sharing of resources, most clearly at the level of the settlement but also to some
extent at the level of the local group. Group pressures toward observance of
common values and styles of behavior are great and ensure a high level of con-
formity. This, however, does not preclude experimentation or change. It means,
simply, that when changes take place, they tend to encompass the whole group
rather than an individual. Asheninka identity is very much tied to this sense of
"groupness." The autodenomination "Asheninka" translates as "our fellow
countrymen," that is, people from the same country or geographical area.
Strictly speaking the word signifies people of the same local group, but in a
wider sense it is also used to designate all the native people of the Gran Pajonal.
The Pajonal Asheninka have a history and culture that has much in common
with that of neighboring Ashaninka in the Perene and Tambo and that of the
Asheninka in the Pichis and Ucayali areas, but that is sufficiently distinct to per-
mit characterization of the "Pajonalinos" as a separate territorial group.16 The
Pajonal Asheninka may be said then to possess a collective identity that, for the
purposes of this article, may be treated as a "given." This identity, however,
merely signifies the inclusion within a semantic category, not the belonging to a
body organized for collective action or in possession of a consciousness of itself
as such. An identity of this sort (i.e., the consciousness of the group for itself)
grows from an organizational process. Before this process was set in motion, the
Asheninka consisted of simple aggregations of local groups, each of which was
the location of social structures of solidarity and cooperation from which wider
networks of alliance and exchange would emanate and tie the dispersed groups
into a cultural community of communication. These structures of group-based
communal solidarity became the basic vehicles for the "new" collective action
and the collective identity that emerged from it.
The Asheninka movement may be said to have started when a few head-
men, or candidates for this role, eyed a chance of securing schools within their
individual orbits of control. Each quickly rallied the necessary manpower and
other local support for the construction of a schoolhouse, a wood and palm-
thatched structure similar to but somewhat larger than the Asheninka's family
houses. Apart from the schoolhouse, an additional house was needed for the
teacher to live in. Considering the amount of labor that goes into the construc-
tion of a house, plus the cutting, transporting, and preparing of the building ma-
terials with no other tools than axes and machetes, the endeavor represented no
small feat. Before it could be carried out, endless talks had occurred between the
families who might want to send their children to school and the local headman
or, in local settings where no particular head of family had previously taken a
leading role in communal affairs, the prospective headman. (Indeed, in such ar-
eas there had been no "communal affairs" above the level of the settlement or ex-
tended family.) In some places animosity between local leaders or competition
for the same following stalled the building of proposed schools and led to both
the movement of people and the shifting of alliances over a period of years.
Once a schoolhouse had been constructed, a petition was sent to the SIL for
a teacher. A teacher would then be provided, if the number of students for the
school was sufficient to meet government standards and if a qualified bilingual
teacher could be found. If the school was successful, it tended to enhance the
standing of the headman as more families would become allies of the core local
group in order to take advantage of the school. Over a brief period of time, this
school-building process led to the emergence of localized solidarities, tying a
great many scattered settlements more closely to each other than had previously
been the case. While dispersed residence patterns remained, networks of com-
munication and efforts at cooperating toward common goals involving multiple
settlement groups intensified. Out of this grew efforts to organize and legally
constitute the comunidades nativas as the Asheninka realized the protection this
could provide them. Although the comunidades nativas represented a form of
communal organization foreign to the Asheninka, their formation in the Gran
Pajonal did not affect existing social or political structures. Existing headmen
merely assumed the new role of jefe de la comunidad (community chief) while
strategic allies were named "treasurer" and "secretary." It remains to be seen
what new difficulties, conflicts, and meanings will be created in Asheninka so-
cial life as a result of the imposition of community boundaries, literacy, and in-
creasing involvement with national society.
The frenetic building of numerous little schools rather than a few larger
ones reflects the Asheninka proclivity toward independence at the local group
and even the settlement level. As the basic framework for Asheninka existence
and identity, the local groups are inclined to form around their own center and
to seek control of their environment rather than incorporate with other similar
systems or with systems foreign to them, especially if such systems substitute an
other-oriented hierarchy for the ego-centered order fancied by the Asheninka.
The ability to enhance control is sustained by the Asheninka's partial appropria-
tion and reinterpretation of notions and ideas held by nonnatives to fit Ashe-
ninka needs and cognitive categories. In this sense, the Asheninka appropriate
new ideas and use them to create and re-create their own world, fashioned thus
through the intertwining of strands of foreign and homegrown yarn to make a
much stronger fabric of Pajonal Asheninka society.
The Asheninka Appropriation of Civilization

The employment of the notion of civilization by the Asheninka highlights
their reinterpretative appropriation of a concept crucial to outsiders in the pro-
motion of colonization in Amazonia. To settlers, "development" is something to
be wished for, something originating far away which may eventually reach even
their destitute corner of the rain forest. But "development" does not appear to
settlers to be something that may be achieved through local efforts. By contrast,
what may be achieved by settlers is "civilization," something they generally
consider themselves as bearers of. Indeed, they find themselves in the process of
extending "civilization" to the native people of the area through their efforts to
cultivate the land and exploit the resources of the forest, including that of
Asheninka labor. "Civilization" is defined as the opposite of "Indianness" and is
measured by such indicators as a person's command of Spanish, formal educa-
tion, dress, occupation, and adherence to the Christian religion.
Settlers generally recognize that their grandparents were Andean Indians,
but they see themselves as having transcended this state by going through the
civilizing process of learning "cultured" ways of living. As far as the settlers are
concerned, individual Asheninka may choose to follow the same course and
change themselves from being "natives" to being "civilized." But the settlers
agree that most Asheninka do not want this, that they do not wish to "civilize
themselves," and that this proves that the Asheninka are inherently savage and
incapable of understanding the finer aspects of civilized life. According to set-
tler logic, it is therefore both justified and necessary to occasionally emphasize
the rules of, say, contract labor with brute force. It is also very easy when buying
Asheninka products to take advantage of their unfamiliarity with counting and
measuring and get away with paying them less. Although settlers may verbally
admit that such practices may not be morally right, there is a clear underlying
train of thought to the effect that Indians (read: the uncivilized) somehow "de-
serve" the treatment they are getting and that the superiority (read: power) of
civilization needs to be "shown" through the reaping of every material advan-
tage possible. The Asheninka share and understand this practice of power and its
symbolics to the extent it communicates an equation of weakness with lack of
civilization and strength with its possession.
Most settlers in the Gran Pajonal habitually practice underpayment and
miscalculation in accounts of exchange with the Asheninka who, in turn, often
realize that they are being cheated. But since they do not have access to an alter-
native market, their choices are limited to doing business with the settlers
known to be lesser cheats or with settlers who have formed ongoing relation-
ships of exchange of labor, products, and goods with them. The partners to such
a relationship may address each other by the term compadre, but the relationship
is not one of compadrazgo in the strict sense of the term, as it lacks the ritual as-
pects and most of the mutual obligations that otherwise go with it. While settlers
often look at these relationships as "civilizing" for the Asheninka, the latter gen-
erally fail to see this point. The notion of civilization carries some of the same
connotations to the Asheninka as it does to settlers, that is, the ability to speak
Spanish, dressing a certain way, and knowing how to read and count. But it also
alludes to a notion of power: the power to capture external resources and the
power to control the environment in which one lives and thus escape, among
other things, exploitation and abuse. The Asheninka are well aware that no such
power will ever simply be passed to them, and certainly not by the settlers.
Therefore, if the Asheninka want to improve their position, it must be accom-
plished through their own efforts. One way of doing this is by capturing some of
the symbols of civilization, that is, by becoming "civilized." But this certainly
does not imply that they will become "like" settlers. They will remain Ashe-
ninka, only Asheninka socially empowered. Culture change is not perceived of
as a risk or even as an unwanted corollary of contact with settlers. On the con-
trary, most Asheninka are quite interested in experimenting with new ideas,
tools, crops, and material items, but that certainly does not, in their view, make
them less Asheninka. Their identity is securely embedded in relations of kinship
and practical knowledge of the "right" way of living and working sociably with
other people, particularly fellow Asheninka. Settlers do not "know" any of this.
The author's Asheninka informants were very explicit that organizing into
comunidades nativas was a means of preserving their land base and simultane-
ously "civilizing themselves." They saw the comunidades nativas as a means of
self-defense against settler encroachments on their turf and as a first step in or-
ganizing their own cash-crop production of coffee. They hoped in this way to
liberate themselves from their dependence on settlers for access to industrial
goods. They had started building their own schools because they realized that
the possession of Spanish language skills, reading, writing, and counting would
enable them to better communicate with the world outside (Veber 1991a). Yet
the construction of schools clearly had an important additional function.
Schools were not merely set up according to the needs and numbers of potential
students. They were built in settlements where an aspiring headman could bene-
fit from the existence of a school within his orbit and thereby create a center
toward which people and resources could gravitate. Thus the schools became the
means not only of educating students but also of strengthening traditional lead-
ership, maintaining indigenous practices of local group organization, and en-
hancing Asheninka notions of prowess in achievement. Indeed, if the Asheninka
had laid away the old warrior prowess as a route toward power and control, they
were certainly on their way toward learning how to fight with written words.
The land-title documents that local leaders received from the government as the
land-titling processes proceeded (which few of them could read) were visible proofs
of this new way of arming for social and political control of the environment.
Settler Responses to the Native Movement

The initial response on the part of colonos to the Asheninka's incipient or-
ganizational efforts in the early 1980s was to direct propaganda against the SIL
missionary, whom they labeled a subversive agitator and accused of trafficking
in Indians in order to facilitate an imperialist plot to prevent progress from
reaching the central rain forest. In an open letter to a Lima newspaper, colono
representatives subsequently declared that the Asheninka population was ex-

tremely sparse and that the lands the settlers were appropriating were, therefore,
virtually unpopulated (Hvalkof 1987). They accused the SIL of transporting the
same bunch of Asheninka around the jungle by airplane to make sure larger
numbers of Indians would always be present whenever the government survey-
ing crews appeared in the area. The absurdity of this claim becomes apparent
when it is realized that the one-engine Helio Couriers of the SIL (the only air-
plane small enough to come down on the diminutive airstrip clearings in the
area) carried no more than five passengers at the most, that there were few spots
where it was possible to land even a small aircraft, and that the installation of
Asheninka houses and chacras are time-consuming tasks that cannot possibly
be completed quickly enough for simple propaganda. But the government took
the accusations seriously. Survey crews that arrived in the Gran Pajonal in early
1987 were commissioned to find out whether the Asheninka listed in the peti-
tions of the comunidades nativas were real or whether the colonos were in fact
right about the illicit transporting of propaganda Indians by the SIL (see also
Hvalkof 1987).
At this stage the Pajonal Asheninka had come into contact with CECONSEC
(Central de Comunidades Nativas de la Selva Central, a political organization
comprising Ashaninka comunidades of the Chanchamayo, Perene, Pichis, and
Palcazu regions) and with AIDESEP (Asociacion Interetnica de Desarrollo de la
Selva Peruana, a national political organization for Amazonian Indians
headquartered in Lima). These organizations had the know-how and experience
of influencing the national government, and they fully supported the Pajonal
Asheninka. When the conflict between settlers and Asheninka threatened to es-
calate into violence, a highly placed official from the Ministry of Agrarian Re-
form in Lima personally flew into the Gran Pajonal, summoned the colonos and
lectured them on the laws of the country and their duty to obey them. The
colonos were puzzled and shocked by this "betrayal" of their cause on the part of
national government. They clearly could not comprehend the direction things
had taken and responded with passive despair at this sudden upheaval of the
world order. They blamed the disaster on the "gringo imperialists" of the SIL,
not aware of the fact that their propaganda had already frightened the missionar-
ies into keeping a low profile. That Asheninka were actually capable of inde-
pendent action to the point of even drawing government support was beyond the
comprehension of the colonos. To them this meant an end to all prospects for fu-
ture expansion of colonization and an end to their dreams of becoming a pros-
perous vanguard of development in this remote corner of the rain forest.
Yet the settlers had lost none of their fields, none of their coffee planta-
tions, and none of their cattle. Their real loss (a most serious one) was the loss of
their dreams of expansion and progress through the dispossession of the indige-
nous population and the replacement of indigenous cultural practices by the
"civilizing" experience of working for the settlers at no or very little pay. The
Asheninka, by organizing themselves into comunidades nativas, not only had
blocked further settler expansion by reserving vast lands for their own use but
had also symbolically "proven" that they were actors that needed to be reckoned
with. By taking these organizational steps, the Asheninka appeared to have
placed themselves beyond the command of settlers, thereby denying the latter's
image of superiority. No wonder the colonos felt a deadly blow to their existence
(Hvalkof 1989).
The Asheninka Movement for a New Social Order

The Asheninka movement has been founded on preexistent indigenous so-
cial and political forms of organization and meaning that are also ingredients in
the development of a strong sense of cultural identity. But even if culture and
identity form the basis on which the movement evolves, culture and identity in
no way make up its aims. The Asheninka have not conceived of their culture as
something broken or threatened; indeed, they have not thought of their culture
as "Culture." Theirs has not been a movement of revitalization or neocommuni-
tarianism. It has been based on, not seeking, a vigorous, taken-for-granted na-
tive identity and cultural practice. And its goals have been social: the securing of
space for autonomous existence and, concomitantly, political and territorial
control over local contexts of possibilities, including contexts where interethnic
interaction is involved. Hence the Asheninka identity has acquired a new dimen-
sion to the extent that the already "given" Asheninka-ness is being transposed
into a new political space as a legitimate and explicit identity imbued with new
meanings of empowerment in new social fields.
The goals of the movement, it should be noted, are limited to effecting
changes in local contexts, not directed against the state or against state sover-
eignty. Yet as Maybury-Lewis has pointed out elsewhere, "The presence of the
Indians, even their self-consciousness . . . does not so much threaten the state as
it does the profoundly unequal relationships institutionalized within it"
(1984:224). The Asheninka movement so far has benefited from the existence of
the Peruvian state, which has offered formal recognition and even protection,
however tenuous in practice, of native rights to territory and self-government.
With the Peruvian state being weak and often unable to enforce its own legisla-
tion, there has been considerable room for maneuver in the shaping of local af-
fairs. In the Gran Pajonal, decision-making used to rest with those who exer-
cised power, be it through the use of the whip, patronage networks, or other
means.17 The alteration of the status quo sought and partly achieved by the
Asheninka was effected through clever collective organizational action.
Through the tapping of external sources of influence, the implementation of ex-
isting legislation was forced and the power to control affairs in the Gran Pajonal
was shifted into the hands of Asheninka leaders and away from ambitious set-
tlers and abusive patrons, who previously reigned the land pretty much as they
pleased, aided by corrupted public servants, threats, and brutal force.
Colonization in the Amazon was carried out in the name of progress and de-
velopment. Yet international development discourse has gradually adopted a
critical attitude toward the granting of economic support to conventional settler-
colonization schemes. Some pressure has been exerted to protect the rain forest
and its wildlife, respect the human rights of the indigenous peoples, and halt the
illegal production of coca leaf. Accordingly, the indigenous social movement
operates within a trajectory where underdevelopment has already been pro-
duced in the name of progress, while alternative development is being espoused
in the name of sustainability and conservation. The Asheninka have rationalized
their movement as an effort to stop settler appropriations of the land and to "be-
come civilized" (civilizarse), which in their usage refers to the acquisition of
skills that may improve their relative power position (Veber 1992, 1996).
Insofar as the formation of comunidades nativas and the strengthening of
leadership have been structural adjustments of Asheninka society to changing
demographic, social, and political conditions, the process must be recognized as
occurring within Asheninka society and culture, in ways that serve Asheninka
needs and goals. The comunidad nativa, defined by Peruvian law and theoreti-
cally foreign to the Asheninka, is not simply adopted as a new form of organiza-
tion but is molded and redefined to fit Asheninka cultural practices and aspira-
tions. The amalgamation of imports, such as schools and comunidades nativas,
with indigenous practices and forms of organization points to cultural continu-
ity as a likely outcome of intercultural articulations. This disputes the idea that
indigenous culture and societal forms are undermined by foreign notions that
succeed in "penetrating" traditional practices. Thus not only does it question the
idea of cultural purity, it also challenges contemporary Amazonian anthropol-
ogy, which reproduces imagery of the native as incapacitated, even when seek-
ing to pursue new forms of constructivism.
The Asheninka have embraced the modern innovations that appeal to them
while simultaneously distorting beyond recognition, often in most unexpected
ways, the imported "developments." Through the process of organizing, the in-
digenous culture and social system has not simply been reinvested with new
meanings to fit the purposes and changing circumstances of the situation. The
process has effected changes in the social order of things that defines, in local
contexts, the differential distribution of power and access to resources among
conflicting social groups. For me as an anthropologist, the difficulty has been to
discover the capacity for agency and empowerment which occurs through col-
lective action by indigenous groups. New social movements theory has pro-
vided the inspiration and some of the tools fordoing just that.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The bulk of this article was written while I was a Five College
Associate at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I am grateful to The Five Col-
leges Incorporated for providing office space and facilities and to the Department of An-
thropology at the University of Massachusetts for providing collegial and moral support
as well as library access. A special thanks I owe to Arturo Escobar for clarifying com-
ments to the initial draft. I am also grateful to Charles W. Brown, Beth Conklin, Terence
Turner, and Michael Brown for valuable questions and observations. The final revisions
to the article were worked out during the time I served as lecturer at the Institute of An-
thropology, The University of Copenhagen, Denmark. I appreciate their support. S0ren
Hvalkof initially introduced me to the Gran Pajonal and enticed me into a long fieldwork
project there. His extensive knowledge of the Ashe"ninka world as well as his enthusiasm
and persistence in aiming for good ethnography has always been a tremendous source of
inspiration.
1. The title pays homage to Peruvian anthropologist Stefano Varese, whose ethno-
historic book on the Ashe"ninka of the Gran Pajonal bears the title La Sal de los Cerros
(The Salt of the Mountains). The book, published in Lima in 1968 and 1973, yet never
translated into English, long remained the only ethnographic monograph published on
the Pajonal Ashe"ninka. A dissertation on the Asheninka trading system was published in
German in 1988 (Schafer 1988). A monographic essay on the Pajonal Ash6ninka by
Hanne Veber and S0ren Hvalkof is scheduled for publication in Spanish as part of "Guia
EtnograTica de la alta Amazonia," currently being edited by Fernando Santos and
Frederica Barclay.
2. Differences in spelling AshaninkalAsheninka indicate differences of dialects of
a common language (Campa-Ashaninka).
3. Outside of writing about margins from the point of view of modernity, the pos-
sibility of writingyrom the margins is also being examined by some researchers. I have
found Anna L. Tsing's well-thought-out formulation of margins as a "conceptual site
from which to explore the imaginative quality and the specificity of local/global cultural
formation" (1994:279) inspiring.
4. The fieldwork on which this article is based was undertaken in the Gran Pajonal
during 1985-87 in cooperation with Dr. S0ren Hvalkof. My own project was financed
through grants from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities and the Council for
Development Research of the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA),
for which I am very grateful. Soren Hvalkof's project was separately financed. Shortly
after termination of the fieldwork in October 1987, the entire selva central was declared
off limits to outside visitors due to an escalation of senderista activities, a situation that
lasted until late 1994, when the Pajonal Asheninka declared the Gran Pajonal safe.
5. Besides terms designating various native Amazonian populations, the Pajonal
Asheninka vernacular includes the concepts oichori and viracocha. The former refers to
people of Andean origin or "people who speak Quechua"; the latter indicates "white"
people, or people of basically European origin. It includes individuals who by other stan-
dards might be designated as mestizos. The term kirinko is a subcategory of viracocha
used occasionally to designate missionaries and anthropologists who speak languages
other than Spanish.
6. Studies by Terence Turner (1992, 1995), Peter Gow (1991), and Norman Whit-
ten Jr. (1984) provide inspiring exceptions to this admittedly daring generalization.
Other exceptions may undoubtedly be found.
7. The list is not exhaustive and does not pretend to cover the current or recent de-
bates in their entirety. It merely serves the purpose of pointing to some of the more often-
cited works on the issue.
8. Going over reports on the different expressions of indigenous activism, one
often cannot help but get the feeling that what some observers report as being expres-
sions of people's collective culture are sometimes idiosyncracies of individual repre-
sentatives somewhat removed from the everyday life of their constituencies. Political
spokespersons of indigenous movements may perhaps present "indigenous culture" in
idealized ways designed to elicit sympathy. In the seasoned observer, obviously, this
may arouse a feeling that an "invented tradition," rather than "authentic" culture, is
being presented. It is probably wise to be wary that such strategic practice not be mis-
taken for the culture of the constituency being represented—whatever that culture might
be.
9. Numerous anthropological studies testify to the fact that many preindustrial so-
cieties indeed operate under quite sophisticated forms of historical self-consciousness,
often practiced in a concerted defense of their own way of life under conditions of vari-
ous forms of colonialism (Price 1984; Sahlins 1981, 1985; Spicer 1980; Tsing 1994;
Whitten 1984).
10. Literature on the Sendero Luminoso is substantial. See Poole and Renique
1992 and Starn 1992 for further references.
11. Hvalkof counts some 10,000 Ashaninka displaced, 5,000 in forced labor by the
Sendero Luminoso, and 2,000 killed (1994:31).
12. See Benavides 1991 and Hvalkof 1994 for a comparison of developments
among Ashaninka in the Perene, Satipo, Pangoa, and Ene River areas and the Asheninka
in the Pichis and Gran Pajonal. As to the organizational differences between the Ashe-
ninka army for self-defense and the rondas campesinas organized among rural popula-
tions in the Andes, see Hvalkof 1994.
13. The major organizations in this category are The Work Group for Indigenous
Affairs (IWGIA), based in Scandinavia; Cultural Survival, based in the USA; Survival
International in Great Britain; and Gesellschaft fur Bedrohte Volker in Germany. Minor
support groups of related orientations are too numerous to list here.
14. Michael Brown and Eduardo Fernandez, in their 1991 inquiry into the fate of
the MIR guerrilla in the central montana, place the death of guerrilla leader Guillermo
Lobaton in the Perene valley, while other guerrilleros were killed near Mapitziviari in
the Gran Pajonal (1991:182-184). According to Asheninka informants interviewed by
Soren Hvalkof in 1986 and 1987, the entire front of Lobaton was slaughtered near
Mapitziviari (S0ren Hvalkof, personal communication. See also Brown and Fernandez
1991: ch. 8, note 35).
15. The assumption of a "population explosion" is suggested by data collected by
S0ren Hvalkof pertaining to changes in Pajonal Ash6ninka demography. The data yet
await a thorough analysis. The assumptions made are therefore preliminary and subject
to revision.
16. This territorialization of an ethnolinguistic group may seem an abomination to
contemporary critiques in anthropology. It deserves a full discussion of its own, and this
is not the place to do it. Let it simply be said here that the idea of identifying through
place names is the Ash6ninka's rather than this author's. However, there is nothing "pri-
mordial" to this. The Ashaninka are very capable of moving to new areas of the rain for-
est and re-territorializing themselves without the least damage to their identity or sense
of culture.
17. Whitten 1984 provides an inspiring approximation to a conceptualization of
power that rests on symbolic and pragmatic cultural designs as they unfold in settler-
native relations in the Amazon.
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The Salt of the Montana: Interpreting

Indigenous Activism in the Rain Forest1

Indigenous populations are seldom recognized as subjects engaged in innova-

Cultural Anthropology 13(3):382-413, Copyright © 1998. American Anthropological Association.

contemporary movements as signs that "signal a deep transformation in the

The Progress of the Victims

The Anthropology of Culture Change

motivated circumstances of its creation" (Friedman 1994:12; see also Sahlins

society" (1991:131). In this way the significance of a contextual articulation of

results of blurred zones of interculturality (Clifford 1988). The idea of "cultural

New Social Movements Theory at the Margins

Eurocentrism and its failure to take into account important anthropological

Peru's Amazonian Development Fantasy

Comunidades Nativas and the Facilitating External Influences

The Structure and Practice of Native Leadership

is accomplished through his alleged possession of knowledge and the communi-

Group ness and Collective Identity

The Asheninka Appropriation of Civilization

Settler Responses to the Native Movement

representatives subsequently declared that the Asheninka population was ex-

The Asheninka Movement for a New Social Order

Schumann, Debra A., and William L. Partridge, eds.

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