Predatory Economies: The Sanema and the Socialist State in Contemporary Amazonia 9781477327098

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Predatory Economies

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

Predatory Economies The Sanema and the Socialist State in Contemporary Amazonia Amy Penfield

Austin 

  University of Texas Press

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2023 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form All photographs courtesy of the author. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Penfield, Amy, author. Title: Predatory economies : the Sanema and the socialist state in contemporary Amazonia / Amy Penfield. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022034869 ISBN 978-1-4773-2707-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2708-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4773-2709-8 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4773-2710-4 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Guaharibo Indians—Venezuela—Economic conditions. | Guaharibo Indians—Venezuela—Social conditions. | Guaharibo Indians— Venezuela—Social life and customs. | Guaharibo Indians—Political activity—Venezuela. | Predation (Biology)—Economic aspects—Venezuela. | Predation (Biology)—Social aspects—Venezuela. | Natural resources—Social aspects—Venezuela. Classification: LCC F2520.1.G68 P46 2023 | DDC 305.898087—dc23/ eng/20220823 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034869

doi:10.7560/327074

For Na’ai and Japa

Contents

Key Characters  ix I N T RO DU CT I O N . Locating

Predators and Prey  1



C H APTE R 1 . Predation,

Then and Now  27



C H APT E R 2 . Extracting

Good Things  49



C H APT E R 3. Horizons



C H APT E R 4 . Subterranean



C HAPT E R 5. Invoking



C HAPT E R 6. Forest

of the Unknown  69 Forces  89

the State  111

Papers  133

EP I LO G U E . Predatory

Economies in Amazonia and Beyond  157

Acknowledgments 171 Notes 175 References 189 Index 207

Key Characters

note: All names are pseudonyms. Anita is Marco’s mother and my host mother in my main research community, Maduaña. She is also mother to four other household heads in Maduaña as well as grandmother and great-grandmother to many of the younger generation residing there. At the time of research, Anita was approximately seventy years old. She is one of the founders of Maduaña and a matriarch figure in the community. Feliciano was one of my research assistants who lived a city-oriented life. He was educated to high school level in the non-Indigenous town of Calamonte and later served in the Venezuelan army. He spends most of his time in Calamonte. Héctor was my main research assistant who helped me with my interviews, translations, and transcriptions in Maduaña. At the time, Héctor was in his mid-twenties. He was educated in the missionary-run school in the previously inhabited upstream mission community Sakuniña, and he speaks fluent Spanish. Unlike Sanema youths who spent time attending high school in Calamonte, Héctor married young and spends most of his time providing for his family in Maduaña through hunting, fishing, and occasional stints of paid labor in Calamonte. Ignacio is Marco’s brother-in-law and was the Sanema’s salaried representative in the local offices of the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples attending to all Sanema communities in the municipality. To carry out his role, he was based in Calamonte but undertook regular trips to Maduaña and other Sanema communities, particularly to lead meetings related to state initiatives.



ix



x

Key Characters

Marco was the chief (kaikana) of Maduaña and is one of Anita’s sons. He was educated in the cities in the north of Venezuela when fostered by a missionary family as a child. He speaks fluent Spanish, was the former teacher of Maduaña, and has held roles as a Sanema representative in the municipal government and the regional Ministry of Education. As a self-professed aspiring politician, Marco spends most of his time in Calamonte, where he built a house made from breeze blocks covered by a tin roof. Nelly is Anita’s eldest daughter and Marco’s sister. She is also Héctor’s mother. Nelly was one of my closest female confidants, and we worked together almost every day in the gardens. René was Anita’s husband and the oldest member of the community. He was a revered shaman who frequently sang to his spirit allies to ward off evil forces or to cure community members of illness. René was beyond ninety years old at the time of my fieldwork and told me many stories of his strength, abilities, and fearlessness as a young man. Santiago is Marco’s younger brother and a teacher in Maduaña’s state school. When Santiago is not teaching in Maduaña, he travels to the non-Indigenous port town of Calamonte to engage in state-initiated projects or to search for gasoline. Valentín is the schoolteacher in Ulinuwiña, a remote Sanema community in Amazonas state. Valentín spoke little Spanish yet was the community resident most familiar with life beyond Ulinuwiña. At the time of my fieldwork he was just beginning to learn about state projects and bureaucracy.

Predatory Economies

I N T R O D U CT I O N

Locating Predators and Prey

The house was finally calm. Most of its inhabitants lay asleep and silent, oblivious to the droning backdrop of rowdy nocturnal insects. The fire in the hearth had dwindled to an amber glow, and only an occasional muted crackle betrayed its sluggish burn. Bundles of bodies, barely visible in the dim light, sagged heavily in nearby hammocks. I knew that some were probably sleeping badly because they had told me they were afraid. Earlier that day, rumors blazed through the community claiming that angry non-Indigenous state officials or miners were coming. They were furious with the Sanema and perhaps even homicidal. The ominous rumor brought a palpable atmosphere of foreboding to which few were immune. No one knew where these rumors had surfaced from, and no one admitted to originating the reports. In fact, no one seemed to know much at all, except for Anita, my sagacious Sanema host mother, who had listened attentively to the rumors before providing her own testimony. “It is true,” she declared, gesturing toward the nearby trees. “Last night I heard a noise far away in the forest over there. It was a spirit screaming.” Rather than raising further questions for its inconsistency with the original rumor, this comment seemed to confirm to those present that there were fearsome adversaries nearby or harmful events afoot. The timing of the rumors was no coincidence. Simmering anxi­eties had been intensifying for some time, and conversations bristled with whisperings of suspicious deaths in more distant Sanema communities, or trepidation surrounding an influx of unknown people in the area partaking in a recent gold rush. As I lay in my hammock unable to sleep, pondering the unusual and contradictory conversations swirling around that day, my host father, René, began chanting softly in the neighboring hammock. His rhythmic singing started gently, but as night drew on it grew in amplitude, becoming an intense, enveloping sonority. As a shaman (sapili) to his

1



2

Introduction

community, René was compelled to perform his chanting at dead of night while others lay asleep in their hammocks, especially when sickness and anxiety were rife in his community—a pair of afflictions that invariably arrived simultaneously. By dint of shamanic invocation, René solicited the assistance of his hikula spirit allies, who would oblige by striking down the evil external forces that caused sickness and misfortune. I wondered that evening if he was chanting to avert the rumored encroachment of dangerous others, until eventually the rhythmic cadence swelled to become one with my approaching dreams. By morning the atmosphere in the house had returned to normal; my host family seemed less perturbed, chatting jovially as they rekindled the dying embers of the hearth fire. I decided to ask René if his hikula had succeeded in warding off the hostile forces that had so troubled them the day before. “Yeees!” came his hoarse voice from beneath the cloudy mosquito net overhanging his hammock. He paused to erupt with a hacking cough, and after a long and languorous inhale, he added, “I have lots of songs, that’s why. That is how I call my hikula to me, that is how I tame them and make them do what I say.” It was evident that he was proud of his adeptness in forfending unwanted forces, but he also seemed to take pleasure in the manner by which he achieved this skill. He chuckled when describing how he lured his spirit allies to his chest, where they now reside, and how he manipulates their powers through his beautiful songs. One could say that he was seducing them, capturing them by wiles as subtle and artistic as the songs themselves. There are two reasons I chose to begin this book by recounting this particular event. First, it provides the reader with a snapshot of life among the Sanema, a group of Indigenous peoples who live in the forests of Venezuelan Amazonia and on whom this book is centered.1 But second, I present this vignette for another, far more important reason. Condensed to its common elements, the story is suffused with predators and prey; it is, in a word, all about predation. Let me explain. Predation is in its primary sense an act of taking without permission, typically in forceful or violent ways. The biological definition states that predation is the killing of one living organism by another for food. One might immediately think of large carnivorous animals stalking their prey at close range as the literal, paradigmatic example of predation. But one can think about predation in more general terms too, not just hunting for food and not just undertaken by carnivorous nonhuman animals. Among humans, predation takes the form of nonreciprocal acts of attacking or plundering to seize resources for oneself. At yet another

Introduction

3

remove in the range of conceptualization, it is possible to abstract the core concept of predation further to describe it as an appropriation of value in its broadest sense. Value can include objects but also souls, loyalties, attentions, and energies. What is more, the value appropriated can sometimes be seized by force, but in many cases it can also be willingly handed over without undue coercion through ingenious gestures of manipulation. It is necessary to provide a wider definition of predation in this way to introduce the idea that it encompasses far more than undifferentiated forms of raw aggression. The impending threat of violence on the day of the rumors was rooted in a notion of predation. Sanema-speaking people historically viewed invaders as predatory strangers resolved to despoil their community by snatching items or abducting women. Plundering is typically a way to circumvent reciprocal exchange, and as far as the Sanema are concerned, raiders always take things without providing anything in return. My Sanema hosts believed that the rumored intruders of that day were no different, seeking to aggressively snatch objects or lives away from their community. But in the story recounted, there was another form of predation taking place, one based not on violence but rather on seduction. René described his hikula spirits, who were enlisted to keep malevolent forces at bay, as being tamed so that they might do his bidding. In his account, he had lured the spirits to him with his songs and trapped them in his chest to thereafter work for him. This is likewise an appropriation of value while giving little in return, even by René’s own admission. Both the threat of invading others and the seduction of hikula spirits are forms of unidirectional seizure, of appropriation without reciprocity. Predation thus entails seduction as much as violence or persuasion as much as threat. This book is about predators and prey, but I seek to untie the concept of predation from its moorings in fierceness, cruelty, and violence, accommodating within its conceptual range nonaggressive schemas of empathy, emulation, and manipulation. My central concern is to show that predation is not always a desire to harm or enact gratuitous violence but a strategy for negotiating selfhood and sociality in a volatile world, a way of conceptualizing what is accepted as much as what is yet to be fully understood. During my time living with Sanema people I observed how they often cast encounters and interactions around predator-prey relations, a framing that was used as readily in the context of forests as it was in the context of cities. Fast becoming a central preoccupation among Sanema people, new intercultural encounters with



4

Introduction

non-Indigenous people were regarded as baffling and unnerving as much as they were exciting and desired. In this work I attend to these contemporary encounters by exploring how the Sanema deploy and fall prey to predatory strategies in daily economic pursuits of production, exchange, and consumption. This is a story about Indigenous Amazonians, but it is also a story about market economies, socialist revolutions, and neoliberal ideologies. Indeed, the wider economic backdrop hovering at the fringes of Sanema worlds reveals just as much about the modality of predation as do forest cosmologies. One may say that nonreciprocal appropriation is fast becoming the prevailing lived experience of the modern world. Predation Today Undoubtedly, predation can be interpreted in many ways and applied in many different contexts, so that attempting to pin it down to one particular form is therefore not without its difficulties. Above, I sketched a broad definition of predation as the act of appropriating value, typically but not always by force, while offering little or nothing in return. By virtue of its central concern with value, predation is by and large a schema associated with political and economic life at all scales. Another story from my field site illustrates this idea. During the early days of my research in 2009, while in the regional capital Ciudad Bolívar stocking up on supplies, I sat chatting with my friend Evelio of the Indigenous Ye’kwana people, who inhabit the same territory as the Sanema. Evelio lived in the city, working as an Indigenous guide for tourists wishing to partake in an authentic Amazon adventure. We were in the lounge area of my hostel discussing the most contentious yet ubiquitous topic in Venezuela: the socialist state. Evelio grew animated, as most Venezuelans do when they discuss this topic, and stated that the section on Indigenous rights in the new constitution made no difference on the ground. He pointed to his computer, its screensaver a profusion of stars continually rushing forward, and said, “It’s as though I showed you these stars and said, ‘Here, you can have these.’” He reached toward the laptop in mock temptation and continued, “‘Oh, those are beautiful!’ you think, but then you realize they are not real. It’s just a dream, an ideal.” I mumbled in agreement, which prompted him to continue his train of thought. “Our president Chávez has a lot of bait, but he never actually lets you have any of it. It’s like saying to a child ‘I have a lollipop for you’ and showing it to them,

Introduction

5

making them dance for it but never actually giving it to them.”2 In that moment I was struck by Evelio’s insightful analogies, which illustrated how those in power cunningly yet deceptively beguile the masses with bait. The state, from Evelio’s perspective at least, is a predatory entity in the sense that it entices citizens to invest in its political agenda with the promise of rewards that ultimately never materialize. His description, rich in its images of citizens akin to snared animals, shrewdly identifies the common element of predation as an economic strategy centered on unidirectional control and appropriation. Kevin O’Neill notes that predation is “a root experience of the contemporary” because governance in the modern era is a process of exploitation but specifically by way of capture, containment, and control (2019, ix). Although Evelio was referring to a socialist and rather illusory state doctrine in Venezuela, his lollipop metaphor bears out the view that the underlying political and economic configurations he witnesses conform to these predatory procedures of capture, containment, and control. But when O’Neill talks of predation in contemporary economic life, he is referring more specifically to global capitalism, which is a form of predation characterized by acts of appropriation, sometimes aggressive but also oblique and insidious, for the purposes of profit accumulation. “Accumulation” is the key term here; capitalism is, by its very nature, the accrual of capital that is usually reinvested to produce yet more capital. This is a global economy defined above all else by growth. In his book Less Is More, Jason Hickel points out that capitalism “works according to a simple, straightforward formula: take more—from nature and from labor—than you give back” (2020, 40), and it is this uncompensated appropriation of nature and labor that growth relies on. Practices of capture and accumulation actually promoted capitalism’s emergence in the first place. During mercantilism and colonialism, Europeans seized enormous volumes of resources, from gold and land to timber and rubber, frequently exploiting enslaved labor to this end such that the appropriation of materials relied on the appropriation of workers and their labor. Even the term “capture,” in its ordinary semantic field meaning to take or seize, has roots in the mid-sixteenth century with the emergence of English commercialism backed by the slave trade, aggressive resource expropriation, and the emerging biopolitical control of populations and bodies. Seizure and capture occupied a central place in ideological and legal frameworks during this era. The “Law of Capture” adopted in Britain and the United States of America, for instance, secured private claims to subterranean assets in the



6

Introduction

nineteenth century (Degani, Chalfin, and Cross 2020). To this very day, the process continues unabated; wherever one turns, value is being seized and appropriated, whether in the form of minerals, labor, consumption, votes, personal data, or financial speculation, to list but a few examples. In short, unidirectional capture allows the accumulation of surplus that in turn leads to expansion. This economic model, which Hickel terms “growthism,” is “pure extraction; pure theft” (2020, 75), so deep-rooted that without it the economy collapses into recession.3 Predation is moreover a lived experience as much as an economic strategy, and the everyday arrangements that formalize and implement appropriation have long been realities for people all over the world. This is where anthropological insights come to the fore. In the 1990s, an awareness of the long reach of predatory economies triggered a disciplinary shift to what Ortner (2016) describes as “dark anthropology.” Some scholars began to turn their attention to declining livelihoods wrought by the liberalization of trade and industry, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the privatization of state-owned industries that define late capitalism, otherwise known as “neoliberalism.” Others started to look more closely at how the new market values of individualism, competition, and personal accountability ultimately smothered whatever vestiges of social solidarity remained. Overall, neoliberalism was regarded as a predatory economy writ large.4 In more recent anthropological work, the language of predation has emerged more frequently in researchers’ field sites, often marked with the vocabulary of captivity, exploitation, and deception (O’Neill and Dua 2017). These expressions may emerge from very real zones of incarceration, where detainees become lucrative resources for profit-making actors (Andersson 2018; Buck 2017; O’Neill 2018), or from the victims of profit-making policies (Bear 2015; K-Y Taylor 2019). But these narratives sometimes take the form of mystifying tales of alien abduction or conspiracy theories that index economic exclusion and powerlessness (Crockford 2021; Lepselter 2016) or from the barely detectible yet omnipresent algorithmic “traps” that permeate the apparently autonomous will of internet users the world over (Seaver 2019). In all such instances, value is appropriated, profit is extracted, and the captured remain interminably confined. To be sure, economies that lure and capture are by no means new; they are strategies that unquestionably define economies of feudalism, commerce, empire, and industrialization. But the striking thing about contemporary predatory economies is that this modality of captivity

Introduction

7

defines people’s experiences within an era espousing freedom as its cardinal norm. Hegemonic ideologies of late capitalism paint a utopian picture of autonomous individuals who flourish when “free” to manage their own destinies and who enact their liberty predominantly in a field of ostensibly unfettered markets. Yet behind this eternally dogmatic trope lie myriad attempts to manage and endure not freedom but rather captivity in its many forms. Scholars who apply the heuristic of predation do so in contradistinction to earlier analytical frames wherein capitalism was articulated as a regime of abandonment and disconnection (Povinelli 2011; Tsing 2015). In these endeavors to reflect on the vicissitudes of contemporary economic life, efforts to uncover a spectrum of concepts emerging from the research participants themselves can be a powerful way to facilitate a much deeper understanding of the manifold ways that economic predation is encountered, whether as seduction and deceit or as violence and exploitation. Although the story in this book is told from the perspective of an Indigenous people, I nevertheless provide a wide-ranging vocabulary of unidirectional predatory actions that could equally define the various political and economic arrangements discernible anywhere in the world. But now, with the knowledge garnered from the domain of economic predation, broadly defined, it is time to take a journey upriver to a subsistence economy in the Amazon rainforest where a different predatory economy prevails. Amazonia is by no means a stranger to predator-prey relations. Quite the contrary: predation is an archetypal Amazonian mode of relation. Unsettling Characterizations By the time I took my first trip to Venezuelan Amazonia in 2005 I had already heard numerous tales of a group called the Sanema. The stories intrigued me in part for their contradictory portrayals, two representations, to be precise. One was attributable to my undergraduate training; the other reflected narratives recounted by my nongovernmental organization (NGO) colleagues who had been working in the region for some years. The first account related to the broader Yanomami language family, of which the Sanema make up the northernmost branch.5 While an anthropology undergraduate at University College London in the late 1990s, I read Napoleon Chagnon’s provocative monograph Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968), about the southern branch of the Yanomami. I was immediately captivated by his engaging prose and compelling



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Introduction

descriptions of lives far removed from my own. At the time, the book enjoyed wide exposure within and beyond academia and had become standard reading for anthropology undergraduates owing to its candid descriptions of the hardships of fieldwork. Nonetheless, even in those days it was heavily critiqued for its crude misrepresentations of these remote hunter-gatherer people, whom Chagnon described as “violent peoples” prone to outbursts of intense hostility, deadly assaults on others, and even domestic cruelty. In later work Chagnon took this prickly analysis even further, describing the imputed aggression as a valued behavioral trait that grants the most ferocious individual the highest status. Many anthropologists, unsurprisingly, found that this sensationalized trope failed to capture the complex and frequently tranquil lives of Yanomami people. Even so, I noticed that some of those same critics, who themselves worked among Yanomami people, proclaimed that great value was placed on assertiveness and hostility, that a Yanomami man must “be capable of showing himself fearless in battle and ready to publicly demonstrate the power of his determination” (Albert 1985, 97), such that “submission is contrary to Indian morality; it is dishonorable” (Lizot 1994a, 857). Even today, one of the most celebrated exemplars of Indigenous authority and assertive political action is the award-winning activist Davi Kopenawa, a member of the Yanomami community. In his book The Falling Sky (2013), Kopenawa mentions the fierce portrayal as being falsely exaggerated (24, 357), while at the same time he repeatedly celebrates Yanomami bravery and warriorhood (21, 170).6 This backdrop of a fierce characterization, albeit disputed, was perhaps why the second representation of Sanema people came as such a shock to me. This alternative designation emerged from my North American and Venezuelan NGO colleagues with whom I traveled to Venezuela in 2005. I arrived as a volunteer for a small organization that offered basic health care training to the local Ye’kwana people. My NGO colleagues jarringly described Sanema people of the region as “the Ye’kwana’s slaves.” To my ear, this phrase came across as rather offhand, apparently merely a borrowed description, since none of my colleagues had spoken with the Sanema people firsthand to discover whether there was any truth in the representation of a slavelike relationship. My first experience with Sanema people seemed in some ways to echo this depiction when by chance I encountered their apparent deference toward the Ye’kwana. While my companions and I were loading a boat

Introduction

9

in a frontier town for our first trip upriver, two figures materialized out of the twilight close by to help unload some canoes belonging to the Ye’kwana. Their presence was so subdued it barely registered, so stealthily did they move about in the fading light. They might even have gone entirely unnoticed were it not for their physical appearance, strikingly different from the Ye’kwana both in stature and demeanor. Unlike the communicative and confident Ye’kwana people we had met up to that point, these men hardly spoke, and when they did, it was in inaudible mumbling tones spoken with downcast eyes. Their physiques were small and lean, whereas the Ye’kwana were large and robust. Everything about these men came across as distinctly passive and apprehensive. At one point they sat near us to take a rest, watching with curiosity as we piled up our supplies, only to be promptly scolded by a Ye’kwana man who evidently disapproved of their unauthorized respite. In an instant, responding to the reprimand with whiplike swiftness, the men rose to their feet and returned to lifting cargo out of the Ye’kwana canoe to haul it up the riverbank. At that moment I realized that these deferential helpers were no doubt Sanema men, and just as swiftly, it struck me that they were as far from “fierce” as one could possibly imagine. I would later find out that Sanema people were almost always near Ye’kwana people to elicit the bestowal of resources in one form or another, but often precisely by means of their obeisant behavior. That is to say, they exploited power differentials through what Bonilla (2005) describes as “parasitic” encounters with dominant others.7 The incongruity between the alternately bellicose and subservient modes of acting that so perplexed me on my earlier trips to Venezuela was something I continued to think about when I went to live among Sanema people as part of my doctoral fieldwork from 2009 onward, particularly given that they could be placid and subdued one moment but raging and uncontrollable the next. The Sanema I met regularly described themselves as mighty and fearless (waitili) in the same breath as emphasizing the importance of peace and tranquility within their community. Their prima facie inconsistent declarations seemed to confound any definitive characterizations so readily available in the early literature. As time went on, however, I began to understand that expressions of ferocity and deference denoted not polar opposites but rather two distinct forms of predation enacted by my Sanema hosts as part of their wider moral ethos. Given that predation can be defined as an appropriation of value, it is, by its very nature, an extremely broad

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Introduction

paradigm. Predation in the form of warfare such as marauding raids is paradigmatic of the modality, as this entails literal theft and hostile confrontations. But predation can also be an oblique form of appropriation, manifesting as manipulation rather than surface aggression. Acting deferentially is a precise example of this shrewd but nonaggressive tactic to seize value, as a submissive demeanor elicits empathy in the interlocutor, prompting them to bestow resources with little expectation of a return. This too is predatory action. Reflecting on my hosts’ endeavor to extract value through different forms of appropriation, both hostile and passive, I came to notice that predator-prey relations existed in almost every aspect of Sanema life. There were unmistakably overt and recognizable predatory acts involving hunting techniques, vengeance attacks, and threats from rapacious outsiders. Predation could, in equal measure, also include far more oblique strategies of seduction and extraction that were moreover the lens through which my Sanema contacts made sense of the world beyond the forest. Predator, Protector, Parasite Predation is a time-honored conceptual framework employed to theorize Amazonia and its people, generally as a way to comprehend antagonistic relations between groups. It is immediately apparent when reading ethnographies of lowland South America that Indigenous people pay close attention to a broad array of outsiders beyond their communities. But outsiders are not necessarily avoided or attacked; they are just as frequently sought out and emulated. These others form the axis for sociality and personhood within the group, a principle described in the literature as “alterity.”8 At the very least, external others provide marriage partners (affines) beyond the immediate circle of kinfolk who are excluded from spousal relations on the grounds of incest prohibition. What is remarkable about affinity in Amazonia, though, is that historically marriage partners were not always acquired through friendly acts of exchange between groups but could equally be obtained by force; a spouse could be seized from another settlement and integrated into that of the captors. This practice alone conveys how predation defined sociality from its inception in that even reproduction was achieved by stealing wives. The Amazonian scholar Philippe Descola has identified predation

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11

as the theft, seizure, or wrongful appropriation of things of value (2013, 318).9 In effect, this modality is a deliberate rejection of peaceful exchange, a way to obtain something for nothing. Spouse abduction, for instance, is an optimal form of affinity because it reaps the benefits of reproduction while remaining free of any obligation to reciprocate (Descola 2013, 341). Simply put, through capture the group does not need to give up any women to obtain women (Clastres 2010, 269). Yet the seizing of affines forms just one component in a much broader field of predatory appropriation, the overarching aims of which are to forcibly seize external value and integrate it into the socius (Fausto 1999, 947).10 Captured items can be material and symbolic, the former referring to snatched physical bodies or objects and the latter to spiritual souls appropriated through the customs of headhunting and ritual exocannibalism. Neither is practiced today, but in the past they were believed to make hunting more abundant and women more fertile. Nevertheless, predatory appropriation, despite being rooted in violence and coercion, in time actually yields benevolent relations because what emerges from capture is an intimacy that transforms abductees into kin through a process of protection—game animals into pets as much as humans into kindred—described as “familiarization” by Carlos Fausto (1999, 2007).11 Although derived from a predatory starting point such as hunting and seizing, the subsequent acts of feeding and caring for captives may eventually eclipse the relationship’s violent inception and thus, it is argued, situate predation within a broader process of the production of persons (Santos-Granero 2009b; A-C Taylor 2001). Predatory acts still take place to this day, though in a different guise. Elizabeth Ewart (2013) has described how the Brazilian Panará traditionally appropriated “fertile things” from enemy others through raid or theft in keeping with a cultural logic of innovation and a fascination with the outside world. Nowadays, the Panará desire the material items of the whites rather than the feather headdresses, garden crops, or immaterial songs they had previously seized from neighboring peoples (Ewart 2013, 47). Though today the source is very different, valuable resources continue to be obtained through new acts of appropriation, whether cattle-camp raids or compensation demands in the wake of forced resettlement (Ewart 2013). It is easy to see, then, how predatory relations with the exterior constitute enduring strategies that determine Amazonian social and economic actions past and present. Predation can be seen to provide the necessary condition of social life (Viveiros

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Introduction

de Castro 1992, 215) or even comprise an all-encompassing “political economy of life” (Santos-Granero 2009b). To suggest that predation is an encompassing existential reality in Amazonia is certainly a bold claim, one that has been critiqued by some scholars for ignoring crucial factors pertaining to history, political economy, and agency (Rival 1998a, 635; A-C Taylor 1996, 206). To be sure, life within the Amazon rainforest has changed vastly since theories of predation were first developed. In a world where many Indigenous peoples have abandoned warfare for political activism, replaced war paint with soccer gear, and now wield computers rather than spears, such portrayals of bygone aggressions seem scandalously anachronistic. An assertion that predation is a quintessential aspect of Amazonian life might be taken to minimize the very real value placed on conviviality and autonomy in most lowland societies while omitting many other categories that sit outside the model of predation, such as friendship.12 One might reasonably question the value of predation as an analytic beyond reaffirming the allure of difference or foregrounding the marvelous and unfathomable cosmologies of supposedly untouched Indigenous peoples, a view that does no more than revive colonial predilections. While these objections express an important point about the limits of adhering to a single framework to the exclusion of all else, the tension between maintaining internal harmony and retaining predatory external relations continues to be a distinctive and enduring preoccupation in Amerindian life to this day (Fausto 2012a, 172), albeit in altered form. There are benefits in viewing predation as extensive if not entirely exhaustive precisely because it is a far more wide-ranging and intricate modality than previously understood. But this shift requires a new way of thinking about the subject matter. To begin with, it ought to be actively detached from its stubborn roots in enmity and violence, where it is invariably pitted against the admirable values of peacefulness and passivity. Predation need no longer be viewed merely as a “dangerous energy” (Walker 2013b, 196) or as “unmanageable, chaotic, and immoral” (Kohn 2013, 202) but rather as an ever-transforming mode of relation with immense nuance. Predation is, after all, not merely the negation of a relationship but a mode of “engendering and sustaining forms of relationality” (Dua 2019, 498). My first encounter with Sanema people revealed that they seemed to elide the predation-preying dichotomy and that the conceptual pairing is unduly reductive more broadly, unable to encapsulate complex

Introduction

13

engagements between people and things on a more mundane level. In many contexts, predation and preying are facets of a single phenomenon, such as when the Sanema act deferentially qua prey in order to procure wealth from powerful others. The men unloading the canoe evidence this scenario; even though I did not witness money or gifts changing hands in this instance, I later learned that Sanema people acted in a similarly deferential manner in numerous contexts that resembled a patron-client dynamic. In these encounters, they see themselves as taking more than they give. The theoretical frame of the parasite, appropriating value in a docile rather than hostile way, has been employed by some scholars to make sense of occurrences such as these and to rethink predation in a general sense. In another instance of blurring the line between predator and prey, my Sanema contacts attempted to invoke the generosity of the state through mimicry techniques not unlike those honed in hunting, even though in the end they became prey themselves, entrapped in complex webs of inscrutable procedures and impenetrable paperwork. These scenarios will be explored throughout the book. Although some anthropologists have attempted to expound on analogous oscillating predator-prey orientations (C. High 2015b) or have provided alternatives to the dominant language of alterity (Nahum-Claudel 2017), limitations persist in the analytical language deployed when exploring this cardinal modality. This shortcoming ought to prompt the pursuit of a new vocabulary of predation that gives nuance to the complex encounters that fall within a predator-prey dynamic and might even provide a perspective through which one may comprehend predatory economies more broadly. In this book I extend the language of predation by accommodating a constellation of corresponding Sanema concepts that include hunting (namohu), taming (pi noniama), avenging (noa köa), seizing (tili), taking (plikö), seducing (pi noniama), and mimicking (horomai), all of which foreground an interconnected web of predatory actions. This endeavor departs from the popular portrayal of Indigenous peoples as ontologically static or as undergoing a process of total acculturation. Instead, it provides an exploration of how novel social forms emerge from intersecting cultural forces (Ramos 2012). It must be acknowledged that interethnic relations, political movements, and economic transactions are now central to Amerindian lives and deeply inform the way they think about their place in the world, be it temporally through their emerging subjectivities, historical memory, and fears about the future, or spatially in terms of the community, the forest, and the cities.

14

Introduction

Río C

BOLÍVAR

aur a

AMAZONAS

Rí

o

Or

in o

co

The region of Venezuela inhabited by Sanema-speaking people. Map by Erin Greb.

Pink Socialism, Black Gold, and Green Movements The heuristic of predation illuminates the exterior realm’s immense sociocosmological significance in providing reproductive fertility and social creativity in Amazonian daily life. Among Indigenous populations, predation plays a central part in the incorporation of the material possessions, substances, and identities of others, with the specific aim of obviating customary modes of reciprocity. Still, the rainforests of lowland South America are by no means disconnected from the globalized forms of economic predation that were outlined earlier. Far and away the most pressing and existential concern in the Amazon today is precisely the “predatory economic interests” that exploit mineral-rich regions of the forest habitat (Holst 2016, 217).13 One can almost observe in real time the accelerating ingestion of whole ecosystems by the distended “capitalocene” world economy (Moore 2016). Colonial expansion has always relied on the extraction of resources from global peripheries. In South America this included sixteenth-century

Introduction

15

silver mining in Bolivia, seventeenth-century gold mining in Brazil, late nineteenth-century propagation of plantations in the highlands and rubber extraction in the lowlands, oil exploration from the early twentieth-century, large-scale logging from the 1960s onward, all the way up to present-day agribusiness.14 Structural adjustment initiatives, a condition of the loans proffered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, intensified these extractive practices by plunging poor nations into debt and placing them under pressure to deregulate extractive activities in order to meet their debt obligations. The policy of forcibly liberalizing these economies further compounded the damage by obliging poor nations to dismantle protective tariffs and environmental laws to open profitable new frontiers for foreign capital ventures. Mining, often undertaken in Amazonia’s dense forests, henceforth became a principal feature of the national development plan of many South American nations, leaving inevitable environmental destruction in its wake. Global capitalism has continued this trend of accumulation by cashing in on forested lands deemed largely unoccupied and ripe for exploitation (Escobar 2017, 243). For a time, a new regime known as “twenty-first century socialism” brought a glimmer of hope in this cycle of devastation and a tentative optimism that environmental annihilation might cease. Beginning with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, Venezuela pioneered political reform that inspired Latin America’s “pink tide” movement, namely the rise of leftist politics, democratization, increased public spending, nationalization of industries, and a move away from imposed austerity measures. Countries of the leftist block—Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador principally among them—aligned their political philosophies as a response to the many failures of neoliberal development and structural adjustment, introducing instead a set of plurinationalist policies that fostered community and environmental welfare. One notable example is the Quechua concept of sumak kawsay (living well), which has been co-opted by Ecuadorian and Bolivian political discourse to champion an alternative to capitalist accumulation by linking human well-being with that of the natural world. Other environmental initiatives sought to maintain this progress, such as the adoption of an article on the Rights to Nature in the Ecuadorian constitution and the championing of Amerindian “eco-warriors” as stewards of biodiversity (Becker 2011). In many ways these efforts substantiate the popular perception that Indigenous peoples evade the strategies of coercive modern states as they resist the environmentally destructive activities of capitalist expansion.

16

Introduction

Sanema peoples’ experiences of resource extraction, however, are anything but straightforward in this regard. For many decades, periodic waves of illegal gold prospectors, known as garimpeiros in the Brazilian Amazon, have invaded Sanema territory and formed a central preoccupation in the lives of my hosts. The destructive potential of illegal mining is immense in terms of deforestation, river pollution, degraded ecosystems, and increased rates of malaria and sexually transmitted diseases among local populations. Despite these alarming conditions, very few people in this region actively opposed mining in their territory, owing to the huge wealth on offer to those able to tap that potential. Consequently, a government-initiated plan to eradicate illegal mining had very few beneficial results, and many people, Indigenous people included, continued to participate in small-scale extraction in one way or another. These illicit activities were an extremely delicate issue during my fieldwork, and their description requires considerable sensitivity and attentiveness to confidentiality. It is for this reason that I have kept locations in this book as vague as possible and have provided pseudonyms for persons and places throughout. Participation in small-scale mining activities may seem inconsistent with the prevalent portrayals of Indigenous people as impassioned eco-warriors, but contradictions like these abound in this context, and they often turn out to be as meaningful as they are puzzling. In another paradox, while the pink-tide philosophy might give the impression of endorsing environmentalism, even these “post-neoliberal states” also rely on advances into Amazon territory because their approach to development, like neoliberalism, relies on economic growth (Holst 2016). Growthism is by its very nature predatory because it is premised on the unidirectional appropriation of labor and capital. Other observers of Latin American leftist movements have similarly argued that the pink tide represents not an alternative to neoliberalism but a particular typology of that system; its configurations are based on corporate concerns and procedures much the same as in capitalist states, largely because their capital emerges from the global market of primary goods (Arsel, Hogenboom, and Pellegrini 2016; Gold and Zagato 2020). The rise of the Left in Latin America coincided with the commodities boom of 2003 during which the “nature exporting countries” (Coronil 1997) of the global South shipped out their raw materials to the global North. In many pink-tide countries the commodities boom funded progressive policies (Arsel 2012), and it is crucial to recognize that in Venezuela, socialism and its vast public spending were made possible only

Introduction

17

by its “black gold”: its windfall oil revenues. Although President Chávez outwardly condemned capitalist extractivism, resource capture formed a key component of his “anti-imperialist” economic plan since it guaranteed economic and thus political sovereignty. Venezuela’s oil deposits are situated in the coastal regions to the north of the country, and thus for a long time the Amazon rain forest to the south escaped attention. Yet since oil prices began to plummet in 2014, the state has turned its gaze southward, toward untapped mineral reserves in the bounteous forested regions.15 On the whole, widespread neo-extractivism in South America has dashed hopes of an alternative to the commodity-export model. Alongside the paradoxes of Indigenous participation in mining and extractivist development in progressive states, I also noted a profound discrepancy between economic policy and lived experience of the economy in my field site. In Venezuela, what is widely described as a socialist state is experienced by many citizens, Sanema people included, as an influx in merchandise, increased participation in the market economy, and integration into consumption practices. While in recent years economic diversification has become increasingly limited by a continued dependence on oil, capital flight, dwindling private investment, and restricted access to dollars, during the time I conducted research for this book (2009–2011), Venezuela presented many features of free-market capitalism, in particular private property, the presence of multinational corporations, profit motivation, class conflict, and a powerful elite who controlled the means of production. This is undoubtedly attributable to the pegging of the national economy to a single commodity that fuels global capitalism, namely petroleum. The dominant commodity of oil and what it represents became inflected in the technologies, practices, and ideologies that continue to flourish in Venezuela. The nation’s long colonial history and contemporary position as an oil-exporting country place it squarely at the receiving end of political, economic, and cultural forces that originate from the global North (Strønen 2020). It seems somewhat inevitable that hydrocarbon and thereby capitalist ideologies and practices would become deeply entangled with Venezuela’s trademark socialist agenda because engaging with state initiatives is a matter of engaging with the broader global economy: its products, representations, technologies, and even financial markets that make up the inescapable “-scapes” of globalization (Appadurai 1990). It is no easy task to analyze what is often abbreviated as “the economy” when recounting the minutiae of lived experience of those inhabiting diverse economic regimes. This is

18

Introduction

where predator-prey relations provide a fruitful analytic. In this book I explore how predation is mobilized to govern the broader management of resources available to the Sanema, determining how they produce and consume in spheres as diverse as hunting, trade, shopping, mining, and party politics. Examining these predatory regimes through an Indigenous optics presents an alternative perspective on the seemingly homogenizing global economy that is thought to entrap and disempower people far beyond the Amazon rainforest. Into the Not-So-Deep Amazon After my first encounter with Sanema people, in 2005, I returned to Venezuela in 2007 on a half-year volunteer trip to again work with Ye’kwana people, this time on a microenterprise development project that exported decorative Ye’kwana baskets to international trade fairs. Having felt the kindling of interest on my first trip, I resolved to make use of this opportunity to contact and learn more about the Sanema. I mentioned to my Ye’kwana hosts on a few occasions that I was interested in meeting some Sanema-speaking people, and one day they quite spontaneously facilitated my request. We were in a canoe traveling downriver when they suddenly pulled into the riverbank without warning. My traveling companion motioned me out of the canoe, and only then did she explain that we had stopped at the Sanema community nearest to her settlement. We were soon crossing the large, open common area when my Ye’kwana friend, spotting a man meandering down a path carrying a child on his shoulders, flagged him down with a quick gesture. As we were introduced, he extended his hand and said in Spanish that his name was Marco. To my surprise, the Ye’kwana woman asked him, unprompted, whether I could stay with them for a few days. Without hesitation, Marco enthusiastically agreed, and before I knew it, my Ye’kwana companions were unloading my belongings from the canoe and bidding farewell. This was the moment that marked the beginning of my relations with Sanema people. This very same settlement, which I call Maduaña, would later become my host community throughout my doctoral research, and Marco, my first connection with the Sanema world, went on to become my host brother and one of my main research collaborators. Maduaña is a small community in the forests of southern Venezuela that at the time had around 150 residents and twenty households, comprising five main families all related by descent or marriage. Numerous

Introduction

19

Household structures and a Venezuelan flag at the edges of Maduaña’s common area. Photo by the author.

interlacing paths snaked across the central grassy field (sapöno) and between the scattered wattle-and-daub houses that encircled the field at the fringes of the trees. Encroaching on the central lawn were several half-finished concrete-block constructions. These, I later learned, were state-funded communal buildings jutting out incongruously in stark contrast to the subdued thatch houses that seemed to blend effortlessly into their surroundings. The settlement was strewn with manufactured items that evinced its proximity to the non-Indigenous towns: an old two-way radio, a large blue plastic rainwater container, empty gas cans, colorful clothes strung on clotheslines, dented pots and pans discarded across floors, and battered plastic chairs that the inventive children had salvaged and repurposed for their games. The background cacophony of forest birdlife was intermittently punctured by the baseline accompaniment of a motorized canoe passing on its way upstream. At the edge of one of the paths stood a slightly sloping pole with a torn Venezuelan flag fastened to the top. This Sanema community was a relatively new settlement in the hot lowland territories to the north of Venezuelan Amazonia, having

20

Introduction

splintered in 2006 from a mission community that I call Sakuniña in the southern hinterland regions. Maduaña occupies a markedly different social and political landscape from the more remote upstream settlements, specifically in its strong ties to the state and to Spanish-speaking non-Indigenous people known as criollos (setenapö töpö). Maduaña was only eight hours away by motor-powered canoe from the criollo port town of Calamonte, situated where the river meets the regional highway, a rapidly growing township of approximately 5,000 ethnically diverse inhabitants. I was to learn that Maduaña’s proximity to Calamonte marked an intensifying interest in criollo goods and practices among Sanema people more generally. So acute was this fascination that on any given day a new person I had never previously met seemed to materialize out of nowhere in Maduaña. I would later be told that they were visiting from distant upstream settlements to be closer to Calamonte. Since its founding in 2006, not only had Maduaña grown rapidly as a result of these visitors who often ended up staying, but two more Sanema settlements appeared, as if by magic, even farther downstream, motivated by the same yearning to be close to criollo society. The frontier town of Calamonte also housed semipermanent encampments of upstream Sanema communities, and it was in Calamonte that I met Sanema people from all corners of Venezuelan Amazonia. Maduaña’s base in Calamonte provided a simple shelter where visitors were free to suspend their hammocks as they pleased. One could argue that this locale was an extension of Maduaña itself and some, particularly teenage boys attending the high school in Calamonte, lived there permanently. Maduaña was the first direct link to national society for Sanema people inhabiting the region and the first community to independently interact with outsiders beyond missionary folk and Ye’kwana intermediaries.16 The founding of Maduaña was nevertheless somewhat serendipitous. The party who first journeyed out to find new territory had not intended to venture so far north; they were merely looking for a plot of land on which to resettle, driven by an ongoing feud between families that had taken a sinister turn when one man attacked another with a machete. But each time the initial group settled on a location, they found themselves being harried out by the Ye’kwana, who claimed that it was their territory. For several months they were driven from place to place, made to set their sights farther and farther north until finally some Ye’kwana people permitted them to establish themselves in an abandoned garden site they no longer used because it was inhabited by evil spirits (kanaima). This site is now Maduaña. Despite this narrative of a

Introduction

21

fortuitous end to an arduous and unplanned journey, my host mother Anita offered a different story that was more purposeful, describing the long migration as motivated by the educational opportunities available in Calamonte. She uttered this alternative account emotionally when a youngster claimed he wished to marry and remain in Maduaña rather than attend high school in the criollo town. While scolding him, she declared forthrightly, “For you we came here without food! We suffered from hunger, traveling and traveling so that we could found a community here and that you all could study to become teachers.” During the two years I spent living in Maduaña, the residents’ regular visits to Calamonte increased markedly. In the beginning, they embarked on the eight-hour journey approximately once a month, and toward the end of my fieldwork the community canoe would occasionally travel downstream one day and back up the next and sometimes even up and down in one day. It was clear that something was stirring, and I wanted to find out what it was. It was not long before I realized that the people of Maduaña were in the process of becoming Venezuelan citizens. That is to say, they were becoming more deeply integrated into the state’s objectives and initiatives, and the topic of the socialist state was pervading their daily preoccupations. Mobility to the urban centers was initiated by government schemes but also accelerated by the material infrastructure that the state provided. Even the outboard motor on the canoe that took Maduaña residents to Calamonte was donated by the municipal government, and it was also that same engine that had enabled them to migrate closer to the cities in the first place. “Luckily the government had given us a Suzuki 40-horsepower motor back then,” Marco once recounted. “With this we brought our family downstream, little by little.” In this book I focus on an unfolding acquaintance with the state as precisely a series of unexpected occurrences like these, of discovery and good fortune but also of uncertainty and disorientation as integral to their flourishing encounter with translocal economies. As I look back over my field notes, the omnipresence of the state is starkly brought home to me. Barely a day was recorded in which the state did not loom large. The brand of socialism transpiring in Venezuela at that time had significant consequences for my Sanema hosts but also for me. My new designation as a field researcher placed me in a more politically delicate position than had my prior involvement in NGOs, particularly in the wake of a controversy over unethical research in a Yanomami context (Borofsky 2005). This contentious issue, heightened by the anti-imperialist sentiment of Chávez’s government, fomented

2 2

Introduction

a widespread suspicion of foreign researchers who wished to work among Indigenous peoples. Public criticisms and accusations of spying for European and American governments were surprisingly frequent, and consequently many local academics were understandably reluctant to help me situate myself in the field for fear of becoming embroiled in yet another polemic. Working in Maduaña and its encampment in Cala­ monte assuaged many concerns on this front because this frontier region of Amazonia was not associated with the imaginaries of remoteness and Indigenous cultural preservation that were of concern to those in power. The focal point of my research thus organically turned toward the residents’ regular trips to the cities, their burgeoning political participation, and their encounters with state initiatives. Nevertheless, I became concerned that my data would narrowly reflect the experiences of a single community in the midst of rapid social change. In the early days I was advised by local anthropologists to find what they considered a more authentic community for the purposes of my research, and around the same time I was given the opportunity to live among a more remote Sanema settlement, Ulinuwiña, in Amazonas state, in conjunction with a health project run by the Amazonas Center for Research and Control of Tropical Diseases. But what I found in Ulinuwiña was rather unexpected. Although it was geographically far removed from criollo life, residents there were similarly oriented toward obtaining what the state could provide, albeit in a more nascent form at the time. Whenever possible, Ulinuwiña inhabitants traveled to urban centers despite those journeys’ taking several weeks by river or on foot, and when I was there they were in the early phases of compiling paperwork to initiate their own state-funded projects. Orientations toward the outside were, perhaps predictably, reflected in my relations with Sanema people too. I was referred to as a “criolla” (setenapösu), which to some degree was true, given that I am a non-Indigenous woman. Still, on one occasion a group of foreign tourists briefly stopped in Maduaña on their way upstream to an eco-camp and my Sanema hosts looked at me in anticipation, as though expecting me to jump up and greet them. One woman jerked her head in their direction and said softly, “Look Amy, your people.” I glanced toward them and realized with a tinge of embarrassment that they too had strikingly pale skin, rendered ghostlier still by the liberal use of factor-50 sunscreen. All of them had donned, as if in obedience to an unwritten norm, the same khaki trousers, sun hats, scruffy T-shirts, and plastic flip-flops. Their resemblance to me was glaringly obvious, as though we were kindred

Introduction

23

or wearing an intentionally identifiable uniform. It was evident in that moment that my hosts distinguished me from the Venezuelans they routinely encountered in Calamonte. At the same time, they seemed to loosely associate me with the state representatives who would frequently visit Maduaña, radiating the wealth of the exterior. I asked Marco his opinion on the matter, given that at times I felt residents expected me to provide goods in abundance. He agreed that this might be true: “To them you are an outsider, and so you have lots of money.” I was, and am, acutely aware of my privileged position vis-à-vis my Sanema hosts, yet this topic remained part of an open dialogue between us. Although it was clear that I was perceived as different, most of the time I enjoyed a status akin to that of an awkward and dimwitted youngster who must be guided and steered along for her own benefit. Simultaneously, though, I was also regarded as someone who, in the proper adult way, must enact virtue through generosity. While in Maduaña I lived as the daughter of an elderly couple, René and Anita, and was allowed to sling my hammock in their back room. Anita took me under her wing as one of her own children, feeding me, crying for me, and laughing with me. She was affectionate, indefatigable, and staunchly loyal to her kin. My other main companions were Anita and René’s daughters and granddaughters, as we worked together daily in the gardens (hikalia). Thanks to the atmosphere of a close-knit female intimacy, they showed less reserve toward me than did many of the men of the family. Nonetheless, Anita and René’s second-eldest son, Marco, became one of my closest friends. Marco was sent by evangelical missionaries in the 1980s to be educated in a coastal city where he lived with a Christian family, learned fluent Spanish, and obtained a high school education. He then returned to the Sanema mission community to take up a state-salaried role as an Indigenous teacher. He later went on to obtain a four-year post at the regional offices of the Ministry of Education as an Indigenous representative and then to become president of Maduaña’s state-funded collective committee known as the communal council. These roles required him to spend a great deal of time in Cala­ monte, and over the years he gradually built his own house on unclaimed land at its outskirts. His ambition was as tireless as his gregariousness, and he regularly taught himself new skills, be it guitar, computer literacy, or brickwork, in his quest for expertise and social connections. As the chief (kaikana) of Maduaña, Marco was steeped in political pursuits and state initiatives, and he, more than others, undertook the regular trips to the cities that ended up forming the focal point of my research.

24

Introduction

It is worth noting that my focus on intercultural and Indigenous-state relations conditioned the kind of ethnography I have written. It reflects the dominance of men in the political realm. Women, to be sure, are no less engaged in predatory actions than men but in distinctly different ways. Women are described as requiring taming and cajolery to become fully social beings and viewed as physically soft (ipöti), fearful and reticent (kili), and predisposed to anxiety about dangerous others. Notwithstanding these descriptions, within the community women have considerable autonomy and can be fearless (waitili) like men, even though they fight with poles rather than machetes, or so I was told. I observed them playing soccer just as much as men, even those who were heavily pregnant or had recently had a baby, and I knew that some hunted with dogs or practiced shamanism. It is outside the community that women’s predatory pursuits are curtailed.17 Women do not voyage beyond the community as frequently as men do and so have limited interaction with criollos and exterior abundance. Although I do not focus specifically in this book on gender, the gendered dimension of predation is peppered throughout. In general, my ethnography is set around the prosaic events and monotonous humdrum of daily life in which all Maduaña and Ulinuwiña residents engaged. In this book I explore how the Sanema deploy and fall prey to a repertoire of predatory activities in all facets of economic life. I explore these ideas without losing sight of their historical experiences, moral ethos, and ecological sensibilities. In the ensuing chapters, I discuss these modalities in light of historical economic encounters, raiders, non-Indigenous others, state projects, resource extraction, and bureaucracy. Chapter 1 presents an introduction to the history of predation as described by my Sanema hosts, from hunting activities to shamanism and from interethnic relations to contemporary politics. In exploring their connection to their Yanomami cousins, I explain how a historical view of Sanema experiences can provide insight into changing economic subjectivities, culminating in their recent orientation toward national society. Rapid incorporation into popular politics has induced a swift acquaintance with a new and immensely abundant, not to mention generous, other: the Venezuelan state. In chapter 2 I explore how my Sanema hosts are endlessly preoccupied with what they call “good things” or “things we want.” These are manufactured items they desire and seek to obtain. Virtuous practice is manifest in the way that beautiful things are employed in social

Introduction

25

relations, but obtaining these valued items is no easy task. Historically, Sanema people had to offer arduous labor in exchange for merchandise, predominantly for their neighboring Carib-speaking Ye’kwana, who monopolized access to trade goods for many decades. While the relationship seems on the surface to be one of dominance on the part of the Ye’kwana, a closer analysis reveals that Sanema people engage in submissive extraction through voluntary deference, a demeanor that facilitates continued autonomy through predation. Anxieties associated with inhabiting a predatory landscape will be investigated in more detail in chapter 3, where I examine the Sanema fear of the oka, entities loosely glossed as sorcerers or raiders. Despite never being seen firsthand, oka are described as ever-present. Sanema historical narratives are infused with stories of death by oka poisoning and of perpetual fleeing from these mysterious vengeful beings. But the expansive concept has become entangled of late with more recent encounters with non-Indigenous peoples and government initiatives. This merging of narratives on state processes and dangerous invasions calls to mind notions of alterity, in which powerful others are seen both as predators and as purveyors of endlessly renewable wealth. The chapter concludes with a consideration of oka as manifestations of a terror of imminence, the lurking unknown of a near future that defines the rapidly approaching new economic era. In chapter 4 I examine economic subjectivities that emerge from the intersection of three synergistic subterranean resources: oil, gasoline, and gold. Occupying a resource-rich frontier, Sanema people experience minerals with an immediacy that reveals the intricacies of their predatory cosmos as a whole. Crude oil trickles down into Venezuelan life in the form of ubiquitous petroleum-derived gasoline, which is then used to extract valuable gold. These extractive resources are far more than run-of-the-mill minerals of value; they are predatory entities that seduce through the desire they evoke, ensnaring the Sanema in their dangerous rapacity. In chapter 5 I turn to government-initiated activities in an ostensibly stateless setting. When state prosperity was at its height during periods of elevated oil prices, frequent meetings were performed by my Sanema hosts to invoke the state. President Chávez, the presumed source of this state bounty, was described as the paternal benefactor by many, a narrative that interlaced the socialist collective ethos with a Sanema philosophy of sharing and generosity. At the same time, Sanema people also appeared to be stealthily extracting the guaranteed abundance of

26

Introduction

the state by mimicking the popular rhetoric of being organized. This encounter between the Sanema and the state is not a matter of Indigenous rights and inclusion but a predatory engagement with powerful others as a means to appropriate their abundance. Building on ethnographic insights into on state encounters, in chapter 6 I look into an apprenticeship in bureaucracy that the Sanema have experienced through their participation in party politics and state initiatives. Engaging as citizens in Latin America, not least in an economy bolstered by oil wealth, requires intricate rituals of administration. Taking inspiration from literature on audit culture, I consider paperwork as a form of organizational rationality that produces obedient subjects. The state apparatus of bureaucracy in this instance generates new embodied and highly mobile dispositions essential for accessing state resources. Ultimately, however, my Sanema friends find they become entrapped in bureaucratic processes that they have attempted but largely failed to master. In the epilogue I bring together the different strands of the book to map out an approach to predatory economies in Amazonia and beyond. The Sanema’s location at the intersection of a predatory animist cosmos, dangerous translocal forces, bureaucratic procedures, state abundance, and enigmatic resources offers a view of Amazonia not frequently encountered in the literature, in which Indigenous peoples enthusiastically live out practices of modernity from within their own frames of understanding. In the conclusion I offer thoughts on Indigenous ecological sensibilities and the adaptability of their ontological worldviews. In closing, I reflect on predation as an economic modality of the global economy at large, bringing to light what Sanema experiences might contribute to a new way of contending with this contemporary era of precarity, inequality, and ecological catastrophe.

C H A PT E R 1

Predation, Then and Now

Early one afternoon I was on my way back to the house after bathing in the river when I stumbled across a group of young children squatting in a circle by the entrance of the hut. They were congregating around my host father, René, jabbering excitedly and poking a miniature pile of entrails on a banana leaf next to him. In his hands he held a tiny carcass that he passed from palm to palm as he inspected it carefully. I leaned in for a closer look. The insignificant form fit neatly into his large grip and displayed a long, red, fleshy slit down the middle where he had removed the intestines to package up in a leaf and place on the embers of the fire. Without its natural padding, the creature looked deflated and slight, its legs limp and outstretched. The curious children continued to prattle away, and as I asked René what the creature was, he thrust it closer to my face and responded cheerfully “a little peccary!”—a baby wild boar. I squinted at the thing in his hands, attempting to make out its form. “Are you going to eat that?” I asked, incredulous. “Awaaaaaaiiiiii!” (Yes!), he responded in a husky and lilting tone. This was almost certainly the baby peccary I had seen only days before running after the boys squealing, the same one the girls had been carrying around in their slings like a baby. This had been a pet (hiima), a creature that “walks with you,” and thus, or so I had thought, not suitable for consumption. I watched as René slowly creaked from a squatting position into his not-quite-upright stance, shuffled into the house, and placed the baby peccary onto the wooden roasting rack over the fire before collapsing with a groan into his hammock. I felt a pang of sorrow at the sight of the tiny creature splayed over the hearth like a miniature bear-skin rug, its head now peculiarly oversized. Although no one knew his actual age, residents of Maduaña would often retort that René was “probably over 100 years old.” This was not hard to believe when witnessing the rare occasion that he heaved himself out of his hammock and tottered along clutching his gnarled walking

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28

p r e d at o r y e c o n o m i e s

stick, wheezing, bent double, his skin leathered and sagging. He was by far the oldest man in Maduaña and was in his prime far before the arrival of the first missionaries. René was a patasibi, an old man. This is an age set that, if reached, can grant one numerous freedoms, among them minimum food prohibitions (waio). I was accustomed to seeing René prepare all manner of meat outside his house: tortoise, snake, anteater, howler monkey, caiman, and sometimes baby animals like this peccary that had been temporarily adopted but eventually passed away “for no reason.” These were forbidden meats for most young and vulnerable folk. Unfamiliar or mysterious animals that were killed during hunting expeditions were often passed on to René by other members of the community out of respect but also because many feared the consequences of consuming uncommon game meat lest it possess potent samani töpö, tutelary spirit-masters who watch over their designated species of animals and who are liable to attack if provoked. It is this spirit-master attack that causes illness. For an elderly man such as René, the risks associated with eating dangerous illness-inflicting animals were greatly diminished. He frequently proclaimed that he would eat anything because he was not afraid, unafraid of the vengeful animal spirits just as he was unafraid of his inevitable mortality. Some of the younger residents even described with fascination the strange species they had never even seen firsthand but that René was more than willing to eat. René had not always settled for the unwanted animals that other people offloaded to him. When in his prime, he was a prolific and respected hunter. He was, one could say, a master predator, at once a fearless man (waitili), a skilled huntsman, and a powerful shaman. René would often recount long stories of the namohu (hunts) he undertook when he was young and energetic, with an articulation almost mundane in its shopping-list-like accounts of the species and quantities of animals he had slain in his long life. The bland delivery of these narratives was a stark contrast to the exuberant tales of bygone vengeance raids or colorful myths of the ancestors, yet at the same time there was great power behind his hunting stories because they revealed how René had fed and sustained an entire community for decades. As time went on, I also began to hear the subtle joy in his recounting, a pleasure in the sheer plentitude of resources on offer, illustrating the magnificence of possibility that nostalgia often brings.1 Namohu, above all else, defined him. This was the case for many of the older men of Maduaña, who, when narrating tales of sudu upa (long ago) in the nightly glow of the hearth, invariably offered lengthy commentaries of hunting activities that



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denoted their prowess in capture and trickery. Particularly abundant hunts provided landmark moments with which to recall other important concurrent events: “That was the time we killed lots of peccary, but we were too sad to eat it because a girl had been abducted”; “One time we killed a large tapir, but that was the time I was fighting with my brother so we didn’t share it”; “I once killed six monkeys on one hunt; that is why my niece became ill from spirit attack.” One could say that hunting is the cardinal economic activity in Amazonia in that it comprises the acquisition and consumption of available resources for sustenance. But it is also a fundamentally predatory activity inasmuch as it procures said resources by way of seizure and slaughter. Even the term used to express one’s success in a hunt reflects the notion of unidirectional appropriation: “tili!” (Seized!). Yet, this economy of predation exploits abundant resources through a range of practices entailing much more than a singular act of annihilation. Instead, hunting incorporates a repertoire of techniques involving seduction, trickery, and entrapment. Entrapping Forest Abundance My Sanema hosts regularly referred to the forest as a place teeming with plentiful resources. Much like the stories of hunting that older men in Maduaña recounted, there was a general sense that the forest was overflowing with bounty at every turn. My Sanema friends frequently described this environment in exuberant language and gestures, as when one man gave a long account of his foraging expeditions: “We grab crabs from the stream to bring home for the children, and if my wife sees a snake on the path on the way home, she will kill it and put it in the basket for the children too.” It is as though one need merely pluck provisions from their surroundings when passing. There is similarly a sense of celebration when hunters return from namohu with enormous tapirs or scores of peccaries. This is far from unusual in accounts of forest superabundance, a sentiment that is articulated by scholars with phrases such as a “riot of fecundity” (Nahum-Claudel 2017, 3) or a “limitless fecund resource” (Gow 1994, 100). Laura Rival (1998b) maintains that this Amerindian perception of the forest’s endless bounty typifies a widespread appreciation for natural abundance among forest peoples whereby natural provisions are considered plentiful to the point of extravagance.2 Even the shaman’s spirit allies are perceived as abundance held securely in his chest, forest denizens as tiny as specks of dust

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who gain their power from the sheer force of their multiplicity (Viveiros de Castro 2007, 167). In defiance of this profusion, however, is a less than forthcoming provider. In Amazonia one commonly finds an ongoing tension between this notion of a cosmos filled with readily available bounty but also with unpredictable, vengeful beings. My Sanema research collaborators often detailed how spirit-masters, by their very nature, can never relinquish the game under their protection willingly but are intent on enacting a “return” gesture (noa köa) following the hunt by way of violent reprisals that give rise to all known illness and misfortune. Evading such outcomes was a central concern in daily life and involved intricate processes of concealment and subterfuge in the form of behavioral and social proscriptions. Many of my Sanema friends, for instance, would refrain from entering forests at inauspicious moments, such as when the sky swells with black clouds or when babies cry incessantly; it is at times like these that spirits behave in particularly wrathful ways. Likewise, Sanema people would avoid certain meat during liminal life phases such as menarche, pregnancy, and nursing so as to protect kin from the angry spirit-masters of those very same game animals. Circumventing spirit return is precisely why subtle acts of deception are deployed during hunting, not just to ambush prey but to ensure that hunters are not detected or recognized. It is easy to see, then, why hunting is an economy of appropriation, in which resources are seen to be there for the taking but need to be acquired in shrewd ways, through “exploring” but also by “extracting” (Rival 2002, 71). The detail with which hunting stories are recounted reveals the relish with which huntsmen recall their intricate techniques of trickery and trapping. While my Sanema hosts rarely set physical traps, many of their activities could be described as complex modes of entrapment or subterfuge that form the day-to-day “cajoling” of forest beings (Descola 2013, 5). Many hunters plan attacks by tracking prey movements, such as when prowling near fruiting trees at the end of the day when birds normally arrive to feast. This is one example of a low-labor way of laying a trap. Some men describe how they follow the noise of wild turkeys at night to shoot them at first light; others stay alert for the smell of certain prey—“You can smell a peccary from 100 meters”—or follow the footprints of tapir after a night of steady rain. All activities are forms of ambush by drawing on sensory knowledge of prey behavior and the environment they inhabit. Namohu itself was described as a movement of enclosure in which



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Spoils of namohu. Photo by the author.

the hunter walks noisily in circular or zig-zagging motions through the undergrowth. One described his technique in detail, gesticulating the movements as he did: “When you are very far from the community, then you start to walk in large circles to round up animals. If you see leaves moving, you wait and listen.” He paused as though listening and then raised his arms to mime holding a shotgun and said, “When you see a monkey, you shoot. Wapow!” Even without a shotgun, entrapment can be achieved in other ways, specifically with dogs that track down prey and corral the animals until they are unable to escape. A partially sighted young man in Maduaña remained an active hunter despite his visual impairment thanks to his nimble hunting dog. He explained how his predatory companion would chase an agouti or armadillo into a hole in the ground, where it would become trapped. At that point all he needed to do was start a fire and waft the smoke into the hole until the creature died or was stunned enough to be easily unearthed.

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It is noteworthy, too, that the very life force of Sanema humans is composed of these relations of seizure and containment through the hunt. After the birth of each new child, a father must capture the newborn’s soul by embarking on a ritual hunt during the couvade period. The spirit of the slaughtered animal enters the child through the lower spine and there becomes fixed in place, transforming into a constituent of a polymorphous Sanema soul. This is known as the humabö, a coccyx spirit that forms part of one’s personhood and namesake (Ramos 1974). It is clear that predation in its most cardinal sense of killing and consuming another organism involves complex strategies of ambush and entrapment prior to the final assault, but it also draws on more cunning strategies of seduction and deception. Seduction and Deception The most common form of seduction during namohu (hunting) was the use of vocal mimicry (horomai) while lying in wait ready to ambush. A hunter explained, “If you see a bird called kulema [guan], you call out ‘ee-ee-ee’ and like that it will come close to you, and then you can kill it. I always call them to me like that.”3 Such actions are more than mere mimicry; they are analogous to amorous enticement by which the hunter simulates a mating call to “annihilate the animal’s willpower” (Descola 2013, 15).4 So closely bound are techniques of hunting and seduction that game meat is frequently offered to women as a way to allure them as potential wives (Walker 2013c), and sometimes the sexual act itself is considered a counterpart to hunting (Vilaça 2005, 451). Anne-Christine Taylor (2001) notes that seduction is a key component of capture more broadly, as stalked animals and rebellious women are made to succumb to their desires in analogous ways. Hunting is also connected to conjugal enticement at other scales. A man’s suitability as a husband may be evaluated according to his skills in hunting, which in turn indexes his capacity to care for his family. René often described how he was able to convince Anita’s parents that he would be a good son-in-law through the meat he was seen bringing back from hunting trips. René Junior, René and Anita’s eldest son, offered a similar story about seducing (pi noniama) his own wife and conquering her parents: “Her father didn’t want me to marry her, so we had to meet up secretly at night. But when they saw I was a good hunter, her family let us marry. They saw I could bring food.” Statements of this



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kind abound when talking about courtship with potential spouses and marriage negotiations with her parents. This form of seductive predation is far more than a terrestrial pursuit of game animals or the conquest of potential wives; tactics of enticement and ambush are deployed in otherworldly interactions too. Shamans (sapili) are experts in cunning manipulation, most notably in their communication with their spirit allies. Hikula are metaspirits of the animal world, each a guardian of a particular species, and able to impart knowledge on the tracking and coaxing of their designated animals. René once told me that if he sings all night long, his hikula help him with hunting by enticing game close to the community for him to easily locate the following morning. Hikula arrive in dreams and provide auguries of real-world possibilities. As René described it, if you see the jaguar spirit in your dreams, you will hunt like a jaguar; if you can entice the tapir spirit to you, then they show you in your dreams how to slay tapir. Peccary tutelary spirit-masters, appearing as birds with a high-pitched “solokokoko” song, can provide game in abundance if sufficiently captivated by their shaman hosts. In the hikula’s world, peccaries inhabit the subterranean realm and must be gently coaxed from their undercover sanctuary. The spirit-masters fly under the earth and call the herd to move aboveground, telling them that “up there on the earth there is lots of food. Come up! There is no food down here.” But it is a trap. When the peccaries emerge, the tutelary spirit’s avian incarnation emits the loud “solokokoko” call to notify the hunter of the arrival of the troop so he can kill them with ease. In short, hikula assist in trickery and entrapment and in so doing help shamans to become adroit hunters. One could argue that shamanism is a lifelong process of seduction. It starts with the gradual enticement of hikula toward the trainee shaman (sapulimönasö), who ignites their curiosity with his burgeoning musical oeuvre, entreating them to reside in his chest.5 But the persuasion does not end there. A shaman must continually beguile and amuse hikula through recurrent and zealous performances so that his allies become amenable to his frequent requests. A great shaman, known to have cured several people, will have so many hikula in his chest that they argue among themselves, and he will have a large repertoire of beautiful songs that regularly punctuate the night’s silence. Being temperamental pleasure-seekers, hikula are most active and loyal when shamans entertain through dynamic shows of shuffling dances and roaring chants

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sometimes so powerful they can be heard from distant garden sites during the day, spectacles that are intensified by the consumption of hallucinogenic virola snuff (sakuna) or alcohol. The virola trance brings forth apertures to spirit worlds where shamans accompany their hikula in pursuing, entrapping, and slaying offending malevolent spirits that make people sick. If a shaman ceases to provide these diversions, the hikula grow bored or become angered and take revenge on a member of the shaman’s family in a fit of temper before departing for good. These detailed descriptions of predation in its elementary form, in interaction with the forest and its inhabitants, demonstrates how predator-prey relations transcend a simplified portrait of chance encounters and immediate slaughter. One can seize prey (tili), but to do so one must first engage in sophisticated techniques of trapping and intricate acts of manipulation. Although not expressly stated as a form of sexual seduction (Descola 1986, 323–324), my Sanema hosts lure prey by taking advantage of the animals’ desire to mate. Significantly, these predatory techniques provide a broader “venatic ideology” beyond hunting (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 472), meaning that hunting principles inform a wide-ranging predatory ideology that transcends the forest realm. Among Sanema people, their venatic logic articulates with approaching economies of Venezuelan national society and the state. But the question of how predatory strategies are brought to bear in contexts beyond hunting, even as far as intercultural encounters and citizenship projects, is an important one to ask. One place to start is with the kind of predation that made Yanomami groups famous long ago. A Fierce Association “They had gone hunting but had gotten drunk,” responded Florinda when I asked her where her husband, Wanawai, had received the deep and tangled scar on his shoulder. “The man with the machete was angry because they had had an argument. When my husband tried to take the machete from the man, there was a struggle and he cut someone nearby on the face.” Florinda gestured a backward-swiping motion to emphasize the unintentional action. “Wanawai snatched his shotgun and hit the other man in the head with the barrel. The other man fell to the floor but managed to grab his machete and he sliced my husband in the shoulder very hard. They are both still alive today, though.” It was hard not to think about the southern Yanomami-speaking group when hearing frequently recounted stories such as this. As



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Florinda recounted the events of her husband’s fight, scenes from Timothy Asch’s famous 1975 ethnographic film The Ax Fight popped into my head, much to my chagrin. Asch’s film offers a somewhat voyeuristic, decontextualized portrayal of Yanomami violence in which a fight broke out between two extremely agitated families. The film is notorious not only because it was used in anthropology classrooms throughout the 1980s and beyond but also because it depicts a startlingly violent portrait of Amerindian life. Above all, the film’s infamy emerged also during the heated debate over the Yanomami’s alleged fierceness because it was the kind of portrayal that generated a misguided view of Amazonian peoples as antagonistic, if not inherently predatory. But how can one situate the Sanema in relation to the supposed fierceness of their Yanomami cousins? Rewinding to the 1960s, the world was just being introduced to this little-known remote rainforest people who apparently lived in a state of chronic warfare. The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon provided this aperture into Yanomami life after having spent two years living among them and developing an interest in the concept of fierceness (waitheri), which he claimed was the dominant principle governing various aspects of their lives. Later, Chagnon’s depiction of fierceness became arguably more radical, certainly in the eyes of many scholars, and by the 1980s he started to propose that waitheri was a sociobiological adaptation of “inclusive fitness” that improved reproductive success through access to women.6 There was a strong backlash to these ideas, not least for the biological framing, which suggested that these traits where immutable and perhaps even instinctive (Albert 1989). But there was another dimension to the earlier critique that related to the inaccuracy of the translation of waitheri, an interpretation that was too crude and one-dimensional, reflecting nothing more than a widespread desire for stories of the exotic (Ramos 1987). Chagnon interpreted waitheri as “fierce,” but the anthropologist Jacques Lizot underscores the immense complexity of the term that actually encompasses a wide variety of concepts including courageous, gallant, bold, reckless, and stoic. Waitheri is embodied not in the deadly jaguar, as one might expect, but in the gentle sloth for being able to “endure the greatest physical or psychological suffering” (Lizot 1994a, 857). Other experts claim that waitheri is often used in tongue-in-cheek ways or performative contexts rather than outright violence (Albert 1985). This nuance was clearly lost on Chagnon. And then there was the idea of chronic warfare. This too is a

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misrepresentation, certainly when Chagnon describes it (1968) as a competition over reproductive resources, meaning women. Many other anthropologists, by contrast, have noted the importance of historical and political factors surrounding conflicts between Yanomami communities, in particular competition over manufactured goods that were brought in by outsiders, compounded by demographic collapse wreaked by newly introduced diseases.7 It was steel tools, above all, that triggered such extensive conflicts because they were so scarce and valued that most Yanomami language groups resorted to any means to obtain them. Yet violence and raiding were only the most radical and conspicuous strategies within a range of many others, which also included alliances, settlement near mission outposts, and amalgamation of villages. These ill-conceived representations of instinctual violence had far-reaching political repercussions when Brazilian politicians deployed the depiction to justify penetration into Yanomami territory and even to propose the group’s resettlement so that their resource-rich territory could be freely exploited. Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado (2000) further denounces the portrait of their fierceness by suggesting that Chagnon himself incited violence through his reckless distribution of goods that caused vicious competition between communities, the real reason the conflict in The Ax Fight occurred, and that he even fabricated much of the data on violence that appeared in his writing. The controversy that broke out after the publication of Tierney’s book impelled the American Anthropological Association to launch a task force in 2000 to address the allegations as well as the ethical conduct of anthropologists in the region more generally.8 But what of the Sanema? Despite many similarities to the southern branch of the Yanomami family with whom Chagnon conducted his research, my Sanema collaborators actively differentiated themselves from other Yanomami language groups. They often spoke with fear and derision of an upstream people they called waika who were described as “naked Sanema who live in the center of the forest,” as “different people” who speak a similar but unintelligible language, who lack knowledge of criollo things, and who kill each other indiscriminately. After some time, I began to wonder if these waika were the southern Yanomami peoples, but it was clear they were at the very least members of the wider Yanomami language family that dwell in the isolated hinterlands. What is perhaps most interesting about Sanema people in relation to their Yanomami cousins is the similarity of their equivalent term to waitheri, which in Sanema is waitili.9 Notwithstanding the



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multidimensional nature of the term that Chagnon reduced to “fierce,” life in Maduaña and Ulinuwiña was in no way devoid of violence, as fights were a common occurrence in both communities. Yet the Sanema word waitili was used frequently and in similarly complex ways among my hosts, and I translate it as “fearless” to address the multifaceted meanings behind the term. In Maduaña the word was used to express both admiration and disapproval, utilized to highlight a delicate balance between managing danger and provoking it. This is because laudable traits such as courage, resoluteness, and strength were to a greater or lesser degree impelled by distinctly inimical attributes such as aggression, unpredictability, and recklessness. It was telling that my research assistant Héctor would typically interpret the phrase “Sa waitili” (I’m fearless) into Spanish as “Soy mala gente” (I’m a bad person) but with a tone of respect in his voice. Although the expression was predominantly associated with men, women with particularly spirited personalities were also described as waitili. Often these women were bold, spoke their minds, sought alcohol when it was circulating, placed wads of tobacco in their gums, and had sexual relations with many men. They were also more likely to be shamans who had unforgiving and man-hating hikula allies. In this, and in the many other ways that the term was deployed, I began to note that waitili and its multitude of configurations were forms of predatory agency, and its aggressive manifestations were historically mobilized in contexts such as raiding and vengeance. Nowadays, though, violent forms of waitili by and large bubble to the surface spontaneously only when alcohol is circulating, so that when liquor appears, knives are rapidly placed out of sight. It occurred to me at one point that waitili might be the most discernible gloss for the concept of predation. The varied and anomalous ways my Sanema hosts used the term suggest that it could refer to aggressive or bold acts but equally cunning and enterprising ones too, aligning with my interpretation of predation as a broad moral principle. Many of my contacts would use the term waitili to describe Sanema youth living in Calamonte who were unafraid to confront criollo and Ye’kwana people and who used their knowledge and skills to appropriate wisdom and resources from others. And yet I believe that predatory principles should not be limited to the concept of waitili because in many other predatory encounters the term is not used; at times even the antonym kili (fear) was employed as a predatory technique in contexts of “parasitic” deference. Since the Sanema do not have a precise word for predation, I employ a

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broader and more nuanced vocabulary to explore the concept in detail throughout this book. In any case, my Sanema hosts spoke repeatedly about fierceness, violence, and intercommunity conflicts of bygone times, the very same topics that resulted in accusations being leveled against Chagnon. As with the Yanomami, Sanema historical conflicts were most likely related to the influx of steel tools over which they undoubtedly fought. Alfonso Vinci, an explorer who undertook an expedition in the region in the 1950s, pondered the potential impact of his own supply of steel trade goods. “A store of goods like that,” Vinci states, “would have set in motion every Shirian [Sanema] from the Caura to the Orinoco and enough battles would have been fought over it to destroy the entire race” (1959, 186–187). There is no doubt that Sanema historical trajectories of conflict were inflamed by steel tools and a preoccupation with obtaining them. Later rivalries extended to a desire for other manufactured items that they were able to access only through external others. These goods were so valued that they were the main impetus behind the Sanema’s gradual migration northward over the past two centuries. Northward toward Resources The previous chief of Maduaña was a man named Felipe who had ambitions for his people. He wanted them to “go down” (kalö), downriver. This northward movement follows the river’s current as the banks gradually widen out and the tributary finally meets the immense Orinoco. “Going down” meant looking for a territory that was abundant in more ways than one. It had more game meat because there were fewer Indigenous settlements lining the river, but it also had more merchandise because it was closer to criollo towns. The impetus for change was an episode in the early 2000s of increasingly violent disputes between Felipe’s kin and another family within the mission community Sakuniña, but the promise of downstream abundance also drove them to leave. Felipe went ahead with some other men to start clearing land, with the plan of returning to collect the women and children at a later date. The men’s journey was a long and arduous one that ended five months later so far north that they were no longer in the forest hinterlands but suddenly on the doorstep of Venezuelan society. These kinds of movements northward are not new; they have a much longer history. Over the past two centuries, Yanomami groups have been undertaking a gradual expansion northward from the Parima highlands



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to the fluvial regions of the Orinoco Basin for two main reasons. The first is that they were nudged forward over time to escape intergroup conflicts in the south. The second and perhaps more important reason is that they were lured toward the valuable trade goods, specifically steel tools, that became more accessible the farther north they went. These reasons mirror Felipe’s motivations for migrating with his kin, to move away from conflict and toward goods. What is more, the two factors are often interlinked. One reason steel tools were so coveted is that perpetual fleeing from aggressive neighbors, sorcerer attacks, and disease required the grueling task of creating new manioc gardens with each resettlement. The process takes several months even with steel tools but much longer when using only rudimentary devices such as stone axes (Carneiro 1979).10 The long migration northward that ended in the founding of Maduaña became a fabled saga within the community precisely because they had to move on several times while in the midst of clearing land for gardens, long before those gardens could provide the first harvest. They went hungry. Hunger was all they thought about, indicated in Anita’s angry response to the boy who did not want an education in Calamonte: “For you we came here without food. We suffered from hunger.” They had to stop off at Ye’kwana communities several times and offer labor in exchange for food. Intense hunger like this, even famine, defined the older generation’s memories of their youth, when they moved from place to place fleeing raiders and relying only on forest fruits to sustain them while they cleared new gardens and waited for the first manioc harvest to mature. It is easy to see why they would go to great lengths to obtain steel tools that enabled them to clear land quickly. It was a matter of basic survival. It is equally easy to see why competition over such scarce and valuable items might initiate the exact conflicts that pushed them forward in the first place. This was an endless predicament into which they were unwittingly ensnared. Sanema people initially obtained steel tools from Ye’kwana people to the north who had more direct access to goods going back as far as the mid-eighteenth century, when Spanish colonizers invaded their territory in search of El Dorado.11 Catholic missionaries buttressed Ye’kwana access to resources from the 1950s onward by offering long-term credit and manufactured goods in exchange for handcrafted items they sold to shops in the cities. It was not until much later that Sanema people were able to obtain resources independent of Ye’kwana intermediaries through newly established connections with an evangelical mission

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network that started to appear in their territory in the 1980s.12 The first of these mission settlements, Sakuniña, was the community from which Felipe wanted to “go down.” It was established in 1984 by a criollo man named Guillermo and his wife, Norma, who, after arriving, began to gradually clear land for their airplane landing strip. Rumors quickly spread among surrounding Sanema settlements that there was a criollo man clearing land for his airplane and that he was calling for them to come. Slowly but surely they arrived, many to “see an airplane,” as some described it, but most to obtain manufactured goods as payment for helping to clear the airstrip. Many of my research collaborators defined their migration to Sakuniña as a time of welcome access to items that had previously been difficult to obtain. In relative terms, these goods were arriving in abundance. From the Sanema perspective, the divine moral dimension of missionary activities was closely linked to the goods given alongside the sermonizing.13 It was striking how the material dimension of mission life was always foregrounded in discussion, as when a man described Guillermo to me: “He was a missionary, so he gave us pots, machetes, and hammocks. This is how he made the community grow.” On another occasion, when I asked my host brother Santiago what the missionaries did for him and his kin, he responded in notably material terms: “They brought us a lot of machetes, a generator that made light at nighttime, and files for sharpening machetes. They built a clinic, a school, and a church.” The religious philosophy of the mission was presented as secondary to the goods that could be plikö, that is, taken but with very little expected in return. Missionaries were largely seen to be a wellspring of resources, much like the forest, that one could access through mimicry or persuasion (horomai). If Anita’s approach was anything to go by, praying was closer to inveigling than to an indication of conversion.14 She occasionally mumbled “prayers”—she used the Spanish term orar to describe the act—often concurrently with René’s shamanic chants, which I thought odd given that she never attended church sermons. When I asked her one day why she prayed, she responded that she did not know, that it was what missionaries wanted. Analogous to shamanic chants in both form and context, praying was enacted as a performance that indulges and seduces powerful entities with a view to appropriating value. Now in the abundant regions north of the mission community, Sanema residents of Maduaña are acquiring resources in new ways. Many moved to Maduaña for more convenient access to goods, and they deemed this proximity fundamental to a new sense of well-being.



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“Before I came here, before I moved to Maduaña, I had no pots, no clothes. But now I do,” a woman stated proudly to me once. “I have a machete, I have a pot, I even have a yucca-grating machine. I am happy, I have everything I want!” With Calamonte an important and adjacent frame of reference, many came to focus on what this new wellspring of resources could provide. Even bush meat was being partially displaced by processed foodstuffs such as rice, arepas (cornmeal flatbreads), beans, and chicken. People also go to criollo towns to purchase and collect supplies, attend state-run meetings and workshops, purchase gasoline, collect schoolteacher wages and pensions, complete bureaucratic errands, receive political gifts during electoral campaigns, or sometimes merely to drink a sweet, carbonated soda. It is in this locale that they access new desired resources and where their predatory activities are now directed. But there was more going on here too. When I first started spending time with the Sanema back in 2007, a new entity was appearing on their horizon, and over the years it would become a central preoccupation in their lives. This new entity was the socialist Venezuelan state and its so-called Bolivarian revolution. Socialist Indigenous Warriors It was after the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 that everything changed for the Sanema. Chávez was different from previous presidents because he resolved to direct the nation’s immense oil wealth into a range of economic benefits and social services aimed specifically at improving life for the poor and previously excluded majority.15 President Chávez initiated an unprecedented phase of social and political reform in response to the corruption and inequality that had deep roots in the country’s colonial history. The movement, known as the Bolivarian revolution, or Bolivarianism, is so named because it takes inspiration from the nineteenth-century liberator Simon Bolívar, who led the struggle for independence from Spain throughout South America. Bolivarianism was developed from a model of citizen activism through popular participation, organizational spaces, and political mobilizations, with the aim of encouraging citizens not only to get involved in social programs but also to initiate and run them. During the time I conducted research for this book, Chávez’s polarizing renown, boosted by inflated oil prices, was at its zenith. For those opposing his rule, he was nothing more than a populist autocrat who divided the population and swindled the nation’s wealth while

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imposing strict economic regulations that would ultimately cause the most acute economic crisis in the Western Hemisphere.16 His critics often complained about corruption, rising crime rates, and food shortages. Nonetheless, a great many Venezuelans known as chavistas supported Chávez’s ambitions to empower previously disenfranchised people through participatory democracy and equal economic opportunities, recognizing that those not in the higher echelons of elite society had experienced decades of marginalization and economic plight.17 Indigenous people who spoke to me about Chávez were generally enthusiastic, and many of my Sanema research collaborators stated that before Chávez, no one in power ever cared about them. Under Chávez’s socialist platform, the Indigenous citizens of Venezuela, despite making up merely 2.8 percent of the national population, were thrust into the spotlight. They immediately became central figures in political rhetoric, accorded special status, hailed as quintessential representatives of the roots of Venezuela’s racially mixed population, and lauded as revolutionary warriors. The Venezuelan Constituent National Assembly of 1999 introduced a section on Native peoples into the newly drafted constitution, Chapter VIII of Title III, which emphasized their role in the national identity and their duty in “safeguarding the integrity and sovereignty of the nation” (article 126). New clauses espoused rights to collective landownership, Indigenous education and health practices, and prior consultation for natural resource extraction in their territory. The Ministerio del Poder Popular para los Pueblos Indígenas (Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples) was established to attend to these new measures. Since then, several laws related to cultural rights have been approved, among them the Law on Habitat and Land Demarcation (2001), the Organic Law on Indigenous Peoples and Communities (2005), the Law on Indigenous Languages (2007), and the Law on the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous Peoples and Communities (2009). These changes were an extraordinary move of recognition for a population that had previously gone unnoticed in the political imaginary. Alongside this multiethnic vision, Chávez simultaneously directed attention to Indigenous people’s history of exclusion and so concurrently promoted their incorporation into criollo-standardized development initiatives, inclusion in party politics, and equal participation in the grassroots projects of Bolivarianism (Mansutti Rodríguez 2009). For Chávez, “popular power” was also Indigenous power and a way, as he put it, to pay historical debt to Indigenous peoples.



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Native Venezuelans were also central to the ideological narrative of an emerging socialist state that consciously employed “the Indian” as a symbol of a utopian past, as socialist Indigenous warriors who upheld the revolutionary rhetoric. Indeed, the phrase “socialist Indigenous warriors” was printed on red T-shirts and jackets distributed to Indigenous people all over the country. Luis Fernando Angosto-Ferrández (2015) refers to this form of political indigeneity in Venezuela as “Guaicaipu­ rismo” because it blends the iconic vision of Guaicaipuro, a historical Indigenous leader of resistance, with the contemporary political identity of chavismo, Chávez’s socialist ideology. Guaicaipurismo is central to the symbolic narrative of resistance to colonialism and to a collectivist ethos envisioned as emerging from an Indigenous past that Chávez described as “an original, indigenous socialism” (in Angosto-Ferrández 2015, 99). This was most evident in that the flagship Bolivarian development initiatives known as communal councils (consejos comunales) were seen as a translation of Indigenous collective organizing. Guaicaipurismo was buttressed by further gestures of recognition such as the introduction of an annual Indigenous Resistance Day and the face of Guaicaipuro printed on new bank notes. Nevertheless, these political maneuvers did not emerge from the kinds of Indigenous mobilizations that commonly give rise to multicultural reform in other Latin American contexts.18 It was arguably the other way around; Indigenous activism in Venezuela started to take shape only in the wake of the multicultural narratives endorsed by the Bolivarian revolution and the strengthening of Indigenous participation in national politics. It is safe to say that despite special rights assigned to the Native peoples of Venezuela, very few multicultural measures have materialized within Indigenous territories. What was immediately evident to me when embarking on fieldwork in 2009 was that my Sanema hosts benefited from their new recognition in ways that distinctly digressed from tenets of multiculturalism. They did not conform to the apolitical model of the Hyperreal Indian (Ramos 1994), who is portrayed as concerned solely with cultural preservation and environmental protection. Nor were they aspiring to gain political recognition within the new multicultural framework, at least not recognition as Indigenous peoples with specific rights. This is in part because, broadly speaking, the Sanema have a weak sense of united ethnic identity, having only recently had contact with the political ideologies of states and institutions that prompt notions of bounded ethnic groups.19 To date, Sanema people have not formed their own representative organization, nor were political cohesiveness,

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land rights, or resistance to state incursions in their territory ever topics of conversation during my two years living among them. This was not unusual among Indigenous Venezuelans. Any lack of ethnic coordination or political pluralism reflected a broader atrophy with regard to multicultural initiatives that stemmed in part from the prioritization of political enfranchisement and social service provision over unique rights. My Sanema research collaborators desired above all to be incorporated into the political structures of abundance that they consistently observed emerging from the projects of Bolivarianism. That is to say, they were, knowingly or otherwise, drawn into a homogenizing criolloization of political recognition. Bolivarianism is, in the end, a universalizing form of development conceived around the needs of non-Indigenous criollo people. Communal councils are one example. As the trademark initiative of Bolivarian endogenous development, communal councils are grassroots projects that confer decision-making powers to local citizens who set up, oversee, and carry out local development projects themselves under the direction of an elected executive body.20 Once accepted and certified, the communal councils start to receive significant funds deposited directly into community bank accounts. But these schemes are designed on the model of representative democracy that is not necessarily a customary organizational norm for many Indigenous peoples. In addition to this, normalized expertise in fields such as construction work, machine operation, and IT, as well as standardizing systems of knowledge including budgeting, project management, and form-filling, is indispensable for running these projects. Observing firsthand how the Sanema of Maduaña managed, or rather failed to manage, their projects revealed to me that these programs were incompatible with polyethnic or minority-sensitive objectives, to say the least. Even those policies designed to preserve Indigenous culture fell short of achieving their aims. The Law of Indigenous Habitat and Land Demarcation was soon eclipsed by the conspicuous and thriving abundance of the communal councils.21 True, communal councils did grant a form of recognition to Indigenous communities, but at the same time they were conveniently exempt from legal titles of collective property that is central to Indigenous territorialization. One could even argue that regularized Bolivarian initiatives undermine Indigenous land-titling reforms by displacing large-scale ethnic coordination with small-scale community-based organizing. Thus, while the 1999 constitution testified to upholding rights to traditional cultures, in reality equal and democratic rights were promoted with greater fervor. The provincial office



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Calamonte’s Misión Mercal, a store selling Bolivarian subsidized food. Photo by the author.

of the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous People in Calamonte spent the greater part of its resources promoting elections, one-size-fitsall development projects, grants to attend high school in the cities, and soccer tournaments rather than programs advancing cultural diversity such as those listed among the constitutional amendments: rights to distinct Indigenous religions, languages, health care, and education. In this way, the state actively incorporated Native peoples into its schemes predominantly as Venezuelan citizens rather than as “Indigenous warriors.” The overall politicization of Indigenous Venezuelans was nevertheless evident even among the Sanema people I met, who historically had very little direct contact with state institutions or agents. The Indigenous representative of the government offices in Calamonte told me that as of 2011, approximately 22 percent of the Sanema population was registered to vote in that municipality. This could simply mean that they had obtained their ID cards at one of the state-run voter registration drives that often take place in distant forest settlements, but it nevertheless represents a strikingly high percentage given their ostensibly remote location. That said, while at first glance it might seem that the Sanema’s enthusiastic participation in state projects attests to their acquiescence to the ideologies of Bolivarianism or standardized development, that they have become more criollo and less Indigenous through this integration,

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the way Sanema people engage in state projects is in many ways consistent with their existing venatic logic. Their political participation is informed by practices of appropriating abundance. State Abundance When I arrived in Maduaña to commence fieldwork in 2009, it struck me as unlike any other settlement I had visited. As I walked up the short path from the river, what came into view was startling. I could see the flimsy pole-and-thatch household dwellings, but unexpectedly sprinkled between them were several odd-looking buildings made from concrete blocks, metal, corrugated iron, and solar panel–clad roofs that had popped up since my first visit in 2007. At the far side of the community, peeking above all other structures like a clumsy giant, rose a steel tower with an enormous metal tank triumphantly perched on top. I later learned that these structures were the school building, the school lunchroom, and a lofty water tower, all of which were the result of projects funded by the settlement’s communal council that had been registered in Maduaña a few years before. The structures were all incomplete, but their presence marked an era of opulence derived from the state’s bounty. Maduaña was, after all, the first Sanema community to implement significant Bolivarian initiatives and the first to become actively drawn into party politics. Many of my research collaborators associated the Bolivarian government with the receipt of political gifts and the direct supply of funds for projects that defined the increasingly familiar terms “socialism” and “revolution.” This wealth figured prominently in descriptions of their desire to live closer to the cities. One man stated, “For those who live far from the cities, it’s not easy to bring these gifts all the way upstream. But here in Maduaña it’s good, because it’s so close to the cities. Travel up here, nothing more, work is done. So for us, it’s easy to receive heavy things like solar panels and generators from the government.” Marco also put it well when he explained the elation with which the first donations were received: “The first thing we got was a metal boat with a motor attached, and the people saw that and cried out with excitement, ‘Let’s vote for Chávez because he gives us things!’” It was clear that there was a current of excitement surrounding this new era replete with miraculous opportunities, evident also when Maduaña received a set of brandnew laptops for the children as part of the Proyecto Canaima Educativo, a Bolivarian initiative of providing a laptop for each schoolchild. When



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Marco brought the laptops back to the settlement, he proclaimed with delight, “Look at this, now we have computers! We are already civilized like the criollos! After twenty years our children will know everything.” Notwithstanding the aim of Bolivarian grassroots development to mark a move away from the political clientelism and corruption characteristic of earlier Venezuelan governments, donations to supporters at the local level continue to be deep-seated practices in the socialist regime and very much central to Sanema enthusiastic encounters with the state.22 During the run-up to elections, ostentatious events of benefaction in the cities resembled bounteous hunts or the seasonal eruption of abundance characteristic of foraging and harvesting cycles, and sometimes they were even described to me in precisely this way.23 On many occasions I accompanied residents of Maduaña to Calamonte to receive political donations amid much political fanfare and charismatic rallying. During one such event, astonishingly large stacks of shiny new goods were piled at the edges of the town square—machetes, wheelbarrows, chainsaws, two-way radios, grass trimmers, and outboard motors—each labeled with the name of the Indigenous community to which they were allocated. Excited representatives from numerous forest settlements traveled from far and wide to receive their endowments of abundance. During such times, the chavista mayor of Calamonte would visit Marco, well aware of his influence over Sanema constituents of the region. One day she arrived at the Maduaña encampment in Cala­monte knowing full well that she would find him there. Her socialist-red pickup truck drove to his encampment along a dirt track, pursued by rising plumes of dust. As she emerged from the front, Marco sat up in his hammock and greeted her enthusiastically by name, and her assistant jumped out to unload several sacks from the back. She spoke briefly about the value of his support before handing over the bulk bags filled with basic supplies—rice, flour, sugar, cooking oil—for him to distribute to community resident “as promised.” During these times of opulence, I would speak to other Sanema people I encountered in the town of Calamonte; some looked like newcomers, wearing nothing more than red loincloths. They had come far downstream, they explained, to “get their credit,” which was described as a one-off payment for those registered with the ruling chavista party, the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV). “It’s for chavistas only, for poor people,” I was told. What distinguished this wealth from previous opportunities my hosts were afforded from former political leadership or from stints of labor within the market economy was that it seemed to be practically free for

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the taking if one could extract it in the correct way. Often the recipients merely needed to show up in order to receive their bundles of gifts, bags of food, or payments of credit. Marco noted with delight, “See all these free things we get? This is all thanks to the revolution!” If not miraculous, then the abundance was certainly unbounded, at least some of the time, anyway. If anything was required in return, from their perspective it was something oddly, almost comically, trifling, such as votes or proclamations of collective organizing. But this dynamic was in no way lost on them, as encapsulated by my assistant Héctor’s statement “Because we vote for the mayor, she gives us a motor.” One can discern the analogies between this readily available bounty and the natural abundance of the forest, and my Sanema hosts frequently described the appropriation of state bounty in equivalent ways to forest resources or mission wealth that were there for the taking or merely seized: “tili!” These descriptions of Sanema predatory economies past and present show that the state does indeed lure citizens with bait, as Evelio had intimated when we chatted about socialism in my hostel. What is more, underpinning this new form of predation lies a broader market economy with strategies and ideologies that are extremely effective in colonizing Indigenous needs and aspirations (Rubenstein 2004, 158). In a highly politicized setting such as Venezuela, the common perception was that Indigenous people can be “tamed or ‘bought out for a bag of food’” (Angosto-Ferrández 2015, 166), a perspective that presents the state as a predatory entity that extracts empty votes through material seduction. Yet there is clearly more to it than this. Portraying Indigenous subjects as mere victims of predation denies them political agency. One could argue that recognition in any form offers opportunities for socioeconomic and political enfranchisement even if prioritized over what are often considered to be quintessentially Indigenous concerns, such as territorial and political autonomy. Sanema people cannot be described as apolitical forest stewards or as hyperpolitical enemies of the state; instead, they gladly engage in party politics to receive a bag of food, but only on their own terms. While a self-reflexive pursuit of socioeconomic and political sovereignty was nominal among my Sanema research collaborators, they nevertheless enact political agency in ways that are meaningful to them and that facilitate community well-being. They could be portrayed as victims of predation, but they could equally be portrayed as predators because they can seize or inveigle gifts through the mere promise of political participation.

C H A PT E R 2

Extracting Good Things

Valentín crouched in the shadows of the Ye’kwana communal house without saying a word. His eyes were fixed firmly on the floor ahead of him as he nervously fiddled with a small bunch of keys hanging from a cord around his neck. Despite the multitude of people bustling around him, slinging up their hammocks and slurping gourds of cassava gruel after their long journeys, Valentín barely looked up to acknowledge the activity. He and his companions, who were assembled around him in a tight cluster, seemed to exhibit acute apprehension at their surroundings. They had just arrived, like many others from surrounding communities, to receive a medical checkup at a Bolivarian pop-up clinic in the large Ye’kwana community for the weekend. They had not been there long when a stocky and stern-looking man strode over to Valentín and asked him something in Ye’kwana with an irritated tone that betrayed a shade of reproach. Valentín seemed to draw back, turning his body away almost imperceptibly. I observed this interaction with interest because the Valentín whom I was witnessing in this context was nothing like the Valentín I had been getting to know over the past month. Just days before in his Sanema community upstream, he had been asserting his bravery and confidently threatening to fight anyone who underestimated him, stomping his feet to imitate a ferocious peccary and shouting, “Sa kili mai ke!” (I’m not afraid!). I was learning that he was known for speaking his mind, for being an excellent hunter, and for often beating his wife, all characteristics of a wano waitili, a fearless man. Yet Valentín, face to face with Ye’kwana people in the communal house, seemed to be the antithesis of such assertiveness. He appeared awkward, vulnerable, and even afraid. This change in behavior was not unique to him but something I observed frequently in Sanema people I had met. What I was seeing was a stark contrast between their fearless and commanding disposition when in their communities and

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their submissive and deferent demeanor when in the presence of their neighboring Ye’kwana. The two ethnic groups have long been in close contact, so the interaction I witnessed at the pop-up clinic was not a one-off; it had a complex historical backdrop. The relations between the two groups provide compelling insights into the sorts of inequalities that tend to be upstaged by a preoccupation with egalitarianism in regional scholarship. Moreover, the Sanema’s deference is not as incidental as it may seem on the surface because through their obeisance, they seek to subvert balanced relationality by shirking their reciprocal debts so that they can maintain their freedom. The primary purpose of this endeavor is to extract manufactured goods essential to moral personhood and sociality. What the association between the Sanema and the Ye’kwana ultimately reveals is that where voluntary submission is the dominant dynamic, the relational schema can be viewed as an ingenious form of predation on the part of those positioned as dependents. Good Things Make Good People During one of my first visits to Maduaña in 2009 I brought Anita a few packets of beads as an offering to solidify my role as her adoptive daughter. I was well aware of the importance of gift-giving in forging social ties, but I also learned that the one thing my Sanema hosts became most excited about were these tiny glass beads that they marveled over specifically because they were “oooosowai!” (soooo small!). When I handed over the beads to Anita that day, she seemed at first to be taken aback by an unexpected gift from a setenapösu (non-Indigenous woman). Nevertheless, since I made a point of calling Anita “Mom” (napa) from the first moment I met her, it was as though in this moment she began to understand why. Her eyes widened as I handed the beads over to her. “Witi, witi!” (Give, give!), she repeated softly, followed by howls of “Aitakööö!” (Wooonderful!). Women processing manioc nearby heard the cries of joy and dashed over to see the offering, besieging Anita with shouts of pleasure as she examined each hank of beads carefully. Then she turned to me through the huddle of excited women and said something while gesturing her two hands cupped together as though clasping something the size of a watermelon. I turned to Marco for a translation, and he giggled. “She says to next time bring her more, like that much,” he explained, pointing to her cupped hands. It was hardly surprising that from that moment on, requests for goods began to surge my way from many others.



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It started with a few requests from Anita’s daughters and granddaughters but rapidly spread outward from there. By the end of my fieldwork, residents would appear at the port every time I was boarding the canoe to take a trip downstream and demurely rattle off a list of items I should bring back for them. My willingness to return with these requested goods was no trivial thing, but crucial to their assessment of my moral conduct as a member of Sanema society. Other non-Indigenous people who had been key characters in Sanema historical memory were likewise evaluated on these terms; it was their material artefacts and their willingness to share them that were foregrounded. Compassion (otetaö) in kinship relations was strongly associated with the gifting of externally procured items—clothes and lollipops for children, yards of cloth and pots for women, and shotgun cartridges for men—a gesture that indexed moral virtue in daily life. Most of these items were purchased by young men with the money they earned from labor undertaken on criollo farms, portage work for the Ye’kwana, or jobs and funds acquired from the state. When asked why they bring these gifts, most simply say that one must bring family good things. The items considered most valuable within the Sanema communities that I visited were those obtained from the outside, described by the term matitö, which can be glossed as “things” but was most often translated into Spanish with the phrase “good things” (cosas buenas). Incorporating the word “good” into its translation is significant in that the Sanema word for “good,” toita, ties up both aesthetic and moral values. Toita is used to describe beauty and perfection in the material world but also proper and correct behavior among people. And given that correct behavior is expressed through the sharing of beautiful items, one can see why these things are said to be explicitly good.1 Matitö was defined by Marco as “things made by criollos in factories,” and indeed their manmade origins were frequently reported as the reasons they were both beautiful and durable. The immense value placed on such items is far from mere extravagance; steel tools, for one, were historically necessary for survival. In the present day, too, manufactured items are sought because they enhance community well-being by easing arduous tasks as when felling trees with chainsaws, or affording pleasure in beauty through the donning of colorful clothing, or providing enjoyment with technology as when playing music on CD players. But these items were notoriously difficult to access in times past. Alongside the buoyant narratives of plentiful hunts and forest abundance recounted by the elders were tales of the deprivation of products

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obtained beyond the forest. A common motif in historical narratives (sudu upa) is the material poverty of bygone times, often emphasized by a declared lack of good things. Many elders opened their sudu upa accounts with statements such as “What I am saying is the truth, the ancestors did not have good things, they walked around poor.” The word “poor” (pebalo) also means “to be without” or “to suffer,” indicating an emotional distress that accompanies a deficiency in material possessions. Insofar as such suffering would doubtless have been associated with a shortage in sustenance such as meat and manioc among previous generations, it rapidly became bound up with manufactured goods and their absence in oral histories. The woeful times of the forebears indexed by the specific items seen to be lacking, such as machetes, soap, chainsaws, pots, and shotguns, encapsulated the hardship that previous generations endured. These narratives are significant because the generous gifting (tota jötöpo) of matitö does more than make people happy. Sharing makes one truly human, and providing valued goods to loved ones constitutes relatedness such that their deficiency results in a physical weakness perceived to be precipitated by neglect. The link between stinginess and sickness was apparent when failure to receive coveted items resulted in an anguish in some instances akin to illness. Unexplained and unrelenting childhood wailing, for instance, is treated with considerable urgency not only because it signals a distress associated with inattention but also because it attracts evil spirits and can cause the child to fall seriously ill. An infant who is “soft” (osiati) after birth remains so in their naked, unadorned form and can become “hot,” “distressed,” or “sad” without bodily embellishments such as beads or clothes given by their kin. Neglect of teenagers can likewise result in their “laziness” (moi), a concept closer to that of sickness than of apathy and that requires shamanic intervention lest a youth withdraw into their hammock, abandon the community, or worse still, lose their soul. Washai, Anita’s five-year-old adopted son, unwittingly depicted this shame of neglect to me one day when he decided to joke around by sucking his stomach in so hard that all I could see were his ribs and a hollow space where his belly had been. He smiled mischievously with his shoulders drawn up to his ears, and I chuckled at his lighthearted jest. Anita did nothing of the sort, however. She frowned and snapped at him, “Stop making yourself look hungry!” It was apparent that this harmless antic reflected badly upon her acts of care, implying that she was



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negligent or stingy. Providing for kin in this material way is a primary expression of other-regarding social virtues (Overing and Passes 2000, 18), similarly exhibited as a responsive distress in those who observe suffering in their loved ones. This empathy was often communicated in a high-pitched, quavering voice very similar to mournful keening and was regularly adopted by Anita when concerned about my well-being.2 Matitö undeniably provided joy and facilitated relatedness in Maduaña and Ulinuwiña, and they frequently emerged in conversations. Yet it was only recently that Sanema people were able to independently access these valued goods. Before the generous and abundant state appeared on their horizon, Sanema-speaking people extracted matitö from their neighboring Carib speakers, the Ye’kwana. Wealthy Neighbors Brian Ferguson observes, “The main thread running through Sanema history is their changing interaction with the Yecuana” (1995, 100), and it is fair to say that this connection continues to define the Sanema population of Venezuela to the present day. From the perspective of my Sanema contacts, this relation is characterized above all else by material disparities. My host sister Nelly described it well: “Our forefathers weren’t rich and so now we are poor even today. The Ye’kwana are rich. In the beginning, they had pots, shotguns, machete, griddles. They are the ones who had them first, not the Sanema.” When Nelly talked of the Ye’kwana receiving things first, she was referring to their long history of trade relations with colonial representatives and missionaries but also to their depiction in mythology. Ye’kwana myths present primordial Sanema as naïve, depraved, and malevolent beings who required pacification (Civrieux 1997, 90), while Sanema mythology portrays Ye’kwana in a more ambivalent light, foregrounding their relative good fortune, particularly in terms of their material wealth. In a Sanema myth that recounts the origin of modern goods, the first Ye’kwana beings accepted merchandise—airplanes, shotguns, pens, blankets, and shirts—offered by the mythical creator demiurge Omaö, while the Sanema rejected them all. In his frustration, Omaö proclaimed, “O dear! This is really bad. These Sanema don’t want to be like Yekuana at all I’m afraid. Not yet it seems. I think it must wait until later” (Colchester 1981, 68).3 It was Omaö’s trickster brother Soawë who instead furnished the Sanema with rudimentary items such as arrows and hammocks

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made from weaker forest materials. When Omaö observed the Sanema’s resistance, he decided to “prepare them really slowly,” so that they remained as “children” while all the others, especially Ye’kwana and criollo people, flourished thanks to the manufactured goods they graciously accepted. The way my Sanema contacts saw it, since that primordial time, they have been consumed with a desire to get hold of these superior items, and their expansion northward over the past two centuries was principally motivated by the very same yearning: to obtain the goods to which only Ye’kwana people had privileged access. Sanema communities were entirely dependent on their neighboring Ye’kwana for manufactured items over a number of decades because few other trading options existed for them; itinerant traders did not operate in their territory, and there were sparse opportunities for long-term debt-peonage (habili­ tación) because the rubber trade in Venezuela was short-lived (Barham and Coomes 1994, 41). The earliest recorded Sanema encroachment into Ye’kwana territory occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, around the time that steel items began to flood into the region, specifically into Ye’kwana communities, during an era of accelerated development. In the 1920s, Sanema settlements began to appear closer to Ye’kwana communities in the Upper Ventuari and Merevari River regions so that they could access scarce steel tools through the peaceful trade of arrows and cotton. But when amicable exchange was not forthcoming, they resorted to assault and raiding. By the 1930s, Ye’kwana communities in the Ventuari region had become so vexed by Sanema aggressive thievery that they decided to take action. A renowned chief named Kalomera rallied surrounding Ye’kwana villages, and together they made a plan to end Sanema truculence once and for all. After obtaining shotguns from neighboring Pemón people, various Ye’kwana communities united in a vicious attack against their enemies. Scores of Sanema were slain, their futile arrows no match for mighty Ye’kwana firearms.4 Historical records describe this period of interethnic conflict as a “war,” but I wanted to find out for myself what my Sanema friends had to say about it. When I asked, most claimed they knew nothing and remained silent on the matter. After a few months, however, one of the youths of Maduaña, Wilmer, decided it was time to reveal more of the story and put an end to my questioning. He told me that all he knew was what his grandfather used to tell him as a child and that he



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did not know what happed to precipitate the first instance of violence, most likely prior raids. This was the past, sudu upa, he told me, a time when Sanema people were waitili (fearless). His grandfather was a child at the time, and their people used to walk from place to place. One day they arrived at a Ye’kwana settlement and decided to kill the inhabitants. The Sanema family hid where they could not be seen, and when the Ye’kwana appeared on the trail, the Sanema men shot them with arrows and then ran away. “The Ye’kwana had a motor and shotgun, so they pursued them. They shot at them. That’s how my grandfather’s father died. They shot him in the chest,” Wilmer said, gesturing to the middle of his torso. His great-grandfather died that day, and his kin undertook the customary funerary practice of burning the body to facilitate the departure of his soul. Wilmer continued with long descriptions of raids, counterraids, and vengeance attacks. Many Sanema people were shot, including women. Settlements were burned to the ground, and even their dogs were slaughtered. Wilmer recounted how his grandfather described blood everywhere. But the Ye’kwana were river people and Sanema were forest people, which gave Wilmer’s forefathers an advantage; they managed to cunningly conceal themselves in the forest when silently approaching for an attack. In the end it was the Ye’kwana, according to Wilmer’s grandfather’s account, who decided it was time to call a truce. They sent a message asking the Sanema to meet them face to face but had actually set a trap. Many Ye’kwana communities had joined forces to launch one final, brutal strike to definitively deter Sanema people from future raids. Wilmer’s ancestors, he told me, had been fearless, but after that moment things changed. Now Sanema people are “ordered around” by the Ye’kwana. This, he said, is probably why everyone was afraid to tell me the story before now. The outcome of this war, according to the literature, was a Sanema defeat and subsequent interethnic cooperation. After the final skirmish, Sanema people participated in fewer raids and adopted a servile relation to the Ye’kwana, shifting “to a pattern of peaceful but subservient coexistence with their former enemies . . . all to obtain worn-down steel and other second-hand Western manufactures” (R. B. Ferguson 1995, 113). Rather than retreating after their defeat, however, Sanema families drew even closer to their neighboring group, since withdrawal would have resulted in a severe deficiency in steel tools that were increasingly indispensable for daily subsistence tasks. They instead established satellite

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settlements affiliated with Ye’kwana villages, usually only a short walk away or at times even within the Ye’kwana communities themselves. When the anthropologist Marcus Colchester conducted his fieldwork among the Sanema in the late 1970s, he noted that only four of the seventeen Sanema settlements in the Caura Basin were not associated with a Ye’kwana community (1982, 104) and that this close association was a dynamic initiated by the Ye’kwana (55).5 These postwar satellite communities operated in a patron-client dynamic in which the Sanema supplied cheap labor for Ye’kwana communities, collecting thatch, constructing houses, felling trees, and portaging supplies around river rapids (Arvelo-Jiménez 1974, 43), in exchange for the goods on which the volatile relations had been premised. On observing interactions in these contexts of labor relations, Colchester felt that the patron-client association was exploitative, with the Ye’kwana paying only in goods rather than their promised cash remuneration (1982, 348–349). He also notes that during the height of the “satellite” era, the Ye’kwana took an active role in “civilizing” Sanema people, often temporarily fostering their children, who would later return to their natal communities ready to disseminate Ye’kwana values and objectives. Although this seemed to be an endeavor to improve Sanema political cohesiveness and thereby organize them into a more effective and reliable workforce, Colchester questions the effectiveness of these strategies because imposed roles were seldom accepted within Sanema communities (107). There is no mistaking the mutual disdain between the two groups in the historical records, with the Sanema often referred to as “dirty pigs” or “treated as sub-human” by Ye’kwana people (Gheerbrant 1953; Ramos 1979, 20). Sanema-speaking people are shown to equally despise the Ye’kwana for their overbearing, unsympathetic, and humorless character (Colchester 1982, 104–105) and for being “pompous and presumptuous, incest lovers and caxiri [manioc beer] drinkers, who exploit them and bother their women” (Ramos 1979, 6). Despite the contempt surfacing in historical accounts, what I observed from 2005 onward was a dynamic that seemed to be changing once more, now prioritizing mutual political endeavors and cooperation within a multiethnic tribal council called Kuyujani that purports to defend the rights of both ethnic groups. Although the council was set up and coordinated by Ye’kwana people, the two groups collaborated in a management plan for the Caura Basin in 2001, working together to map their shared territory with GPS technology in preparation for a joint land-titling application.



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A Ye’kwana man speaking to a group of visiting Sanema at a pop-up health station. Photo by the author.

Nevertheless, Sanema participation in Kuyujani activities has greatly waned since this management plan was developed, in part because they were originally invited to participate by now-absent foreign NGO personnel rather than by Ye’kwana people themselves. Some of my Sanema friends complained that many of the benefits they were promised as part of their participation in this initiative, scholarships and machinery among them, did not come to fruition, and as a result they decided to cease collaborating with Kuyujani. To this day, many of my Sanema contacts speak of the Ye’kwana peoples’ continued easy access to and monopoly over resources, now in relation to the abundant Bolivarian revolution and state largesse. A Sanema man told me, “During the election, the government was giving away gifts and the Ye’kwana got them all.” Over the decades, then, relations between Ye’kwana and Sanema people have changed from ones of hostility and violence to ones of peaceful codependence. But while at first glance it appears as though Sanema people continue to be exploited by the Ye’kwana, closer scrutiny of their current association reveals that often it is the Sanema who pursue this dynamic of dependence and take on a passive disposition for their own objectives, namely, to obtain goods with little fuss. Submission can be regarded as an ingenious act of power on their part.6

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Fearful Ones The trip to the pop-up health clinic highlighted the deferential and somewhat contradictory demeanor of my hosts, who were confident and assertive within their own community but mute and humble among Ye’kwana people. Valentín and his companions resided in Ulinuwiña, a nearby satellite settlement associated with the community hosting the clinic. Ulinuwiña residents were dependent on their associated Ye’kwana community for goods, medicine, and trips downriver in Ye’kwana-owned canoes. Contrary to my earlier impression of their servitude to Ye’kwana people, however, as time went on I began to see the relations between the two groups in a different light. It increasingly seemed as though Sanema people were willingly taking on the role of dependents, and Ye’kwana people were revealing themselves as more generous or impartial than I had previously thought. On many occasions I accompanied Sanema friends to Ye’kwana communities for medicine or on visits, and I noticed each time that they switched to an unusually quiet and austere demeanor, a far cry from their typically chatty, humorous, and sometimes even aggressive selves when in their own or other Sanema communities. Even so, quite oddly, their deference toward the Ye’kwana was accompanied by a bold encroachment into homes and gardens, usually followed by a meek and passive acceptance of the offerings that inevitably issued forth: small gifts, medicine, food, and invitations to watch films on Ye’kwana DVD players. When I talked with Ye’kwana people about it, they often used the language of sympathy and support, stating that they “take pity” (tenemos lástima por in Spanish) on the Sanema and that the reason they are “poor” (humilde) is because they do not understand or are not used to the civilized way of life. I also noticed that Ye’kwana men would often approach Sanema men to shake their hands and refer to them as “our Sanema brothers” (nuestros hermanos sanemá). This should be taken not as an indication of fictive kinship but rather as the harnessing of political rhetoric. The Ye’kwana are politically sophisticated people and use the popular language of multiculturalism and Indigenous unity on a regular basis. That being said, one cannot entirely exclude kinship from asymmetrical relations either. Numerous family relationships among Sanema people are governed by forms of dependence and nonequivalence that underscore the importance of symbolic rankings between those of different kinds. Some examples are younger and older siblings, women and men, child and parent, and even shamans and their hikula.



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All are marked by specific terms of stratified distinction: unripe (oshiati), soft (ipöti), and little (osowai) versus real (sai), firm (amatosi), and big (pada). Those in a position of authority in relation to others, such as a shaman and his hikula or a village chief and the village residents, are referred to as kamasai, the owner.7 The paradigmatic relationship of asymmetry in everyday Sanema life is that between a son-in-law and his parents-in-law, exemplified in the ubiquitous morpheme kili. The basic translation of this significant term is “fear,” but it also encompasses a great deal of other dispositions, such as shame, wariness, modesty, cowardice, and obedience. In expression of this “fear” toward his parents-in-law, a son-in-law’s autonomy is restricted until his second child is born, and he is obliged to offer physical labor in horticulture, hunting, and construction tasks for his in-laws during his period of uxorilocal residence in which he lives in his wife’s settlement. His fear is manifest most strikingly in extreme deference toward his mother-in-law in particular; he is forbidden to address her or even to face in her direction, a striking physical submission described locally as “mother-in-law fear” (pisisima na kilipa). It is often dramatically apparent who the in-marrying men are within a household, as they are the ones who sit silently in the corner of the room with their backs to the group while everyone else faces one another chatting and laughing. Sometimes a son-in-law does not even bother entering the house of his wife’s family during mealtimes but chooses instead to sit outside eating alone to avoid the shame of being near his mother-in-law. Despite this demeanor of deference that sons-in-law must assume, it is women who are described as experiencing profound kili on a daily basis because they are prone to tearfulness, always anxious about what they perceive to be bad omens or lurking unknown beings, and they are acutely apprehensive in urban contexts. One man encapsulated this attitude when he stated, “Men go there [to the town] because they are men. Men aren’t afraid like women.” The term kili is also used to describe those who beg submissively and elicit pity (pebalo kiliai, poor little fearful one), such as cowering dogs with frantically wagging tails.8 More significantly, kili is used to describe Sanema conduct when in the presence of Ye’kwana people that manifests in a similarly deferential, pity-eliciting demeanor. In this sense the term is as close as one can come to the concept of asymmetry in Sanema vernacular.9 This sentiment of nonequivalence expressed through registers of kili was perhaps best exemplified in the feminized role that some Sanema men were assigned when residing with Ye’kwana people, specifically

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when carrying out tasks of collecting water, taking care of the children, harvesting and processing manioc, and cooking. On a trip I made to the region in 2007 during which I lived in a Ye’kwana community while working on a basket-export project, my host family had an elusive young teenager residing at their house whose relationship to the others at the time I could not place. He was often solitary, seemed more introverted than other residents, and was always hard at work doing chores that women would normally do, such as collecting water and firewood and looking after the babies while the rest of the family members were elsewhere. He was ordered to do my cooking for me and carry my bags. On the few evenings I saw him free of chores, he would sit silently with the Ye’kwana girls at the edges of the community, watching the boys play soccer. It was only years later when I saw him again in Calamonte, now self-assured and talkative, that I realized he was a Sanema youth and had been going to school in the Ye’kwana community while under the guardianship of the family with whom I had been staying. Modes of feminization became embodied by the Sanema on other levels, too, because, like women, they speak less Spanish, have obtained less formal education, are only marginally politically active, and are far less familiar with the criollo world than are the Ye’kwana.10 Although gender dynamics within Sanema communities are relatively equal, some of my interlocutors recognized that this adoption of female roles had degrading undertones. During a community meeting in Ulinuwiña, Valentín emphasized his irritation over Ye’kwana people’s overbearing condescension by stating that Sanema men are strong adult males and ought not to be treated otherwise: “We are not children! We must work hard like men, not in the work that the Ye’kwana assign to us. We’re not old, we are strong! We must make our own community. We must live apart from the Ye’kwana. We are people too!” Despite this assertive statement, along with a few others I heard during my time among Sanema people, most communities maintained their intimate association with and dependence on their neighboring Ye’kwana and spoke little of any discontent. One might argue that there is a degree to which the relations between Sanema and Ye’kwana people could be deemed analogous to potential affinity (Viveiros de Castro 2001), meaning that Sanema deference demonstrates their eagerness to assume the role of the Ye’kwana’s sonsin-law. However, real affinity with the Ye’kwana is never fully realized and is outwardly rejected. Furthermore, it became clear over time that the Sanema were not forced to interact with their Ye’kwana interlocutors



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according to any assigned roles. On the contrary, they seemed to choose to take on certain duties and often did so willingly. This is not to suggest that the demeanor of submission was somehow disingenuous; rather, it was a mode of action reserved for interactions with powerful others, a temporary affective register employed to procure goods. Extracting Goods Many forms of historical capture in Amazonia resulted in what Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman refer to as “domestication without assimilation” (2010, 57), whereby “wild others” were seized and “civilized” but subsequently incorporated into village life as subservient residents rather than equal kin. These were relations predicated not on the creation of sameness through co-residence, as outlined in Carlos Fausto’s theory of “familiarization” (1999), but on the preservation of long-term inequality. A burgeoning literature on Amazonian relations of asymmetry have provided detail on similar cases (Costa 2017; Fausto 2012a), although frequently from the perspective of the dominant party, leaving the viewpoint of those in the subordinate position somewhat opaque. Are they able or willing to abandon these dynamics of asymmetry? Are all relations of dependence in Amazonia active predation on the part of the captor? To the extent that Amazonian Indigenous people may view themselves as participants in a predatory cosmos, literature has indicated that they might not necessarily see themselves as predators but can sometimes define themselves as prey. Laura Rival describes how the Waorani of Ecuador identify with the “prey position” and see themselves as victims of non-Waorani “cannibal predators” (cohuori) who are intent on perpetually pursuing and attacking them (1998b, 51–52). The prey position is not just one of self-proclaimed victimhood, however; prey also can elicit impulses of pity and “paternalistic benevolence” in powerful others as a form of agentive mastery in its own right (Walker 2013b, 167). Oiara Bonilla, who conducted research among the Brazilian Paumarí, introduced a new way of thinking about these kinds of asymmetrical relations in Amazonia, shifting the emphasis away from notions of prey and victim to that of willful deference in which “parasitic” power is employed (2005, 47). This term should not be confused with the pejorative English language word for parasite, which gives a sense of a conniving freeloader or an unwelcome pest. In the sense that Bonilla uses the term, inspired by the work of Michel Serres, she is referring to

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a nonmutual symbiosis whereby the dependent party exploits a willing interlocutor while retaining a degree of autonomy and control.11 Power lies in empathy. Paumarí people dominate the relationship with their interlocutor because by eliciting pity in powerful others, they force them to assume the position of domesticating boss or adoptive parent (Bonilla 2009, 141). The dynamic is orchestrated by the subservient party, and even though the host might feel that they control their own will, they are swayed by their sympathy and an impulse to act as providers of material and symbolic wealth. These affective strategies, Bonilla (2005) argues, provide a counterpoint to the familiarization schema wherein the captor feeds and cares for a helpless captive, to one more analogous with clientelism but in which the “boss” is compelled to act as provider and the dependent party cunningly inveigles resources from them. When considering Bonilla’s shrewd assertion that “the predatory weapon of the Paumarí is their capacity for submission” (2005, 59), one might concede that prey can simultaneously be predator. A similar process plays out among Sanema people. When the Ye’kwana take pity on them, this is precisely the emotive response elicited by the Sanema in order to evoke empathy and impel their interlocutor to provide goods or opportunities in response. Although my Sanema hosts did not explicitly describe their behavior in this way, similar elicitations of compassion (otetaö) are a driving force behind their internal demand-sharing economy. Demand-sharing (totoma hötöpo) is a nonreciprocal form of relationality based on an obligation to give things on request without the expectation of equivalent return. The idea is that anyone can demand things from kin, so that across the whole unit it amounts to sharing or the equal distribution of wealth. Importantly, deference is the typical conduct of those making nonverbal requests, such as when people loiter submissively nearby when women are cooking (Peterson 1993, 869). Were it not for the central dynamic of nonequivalence that underlies Ye’kwana-Sanema relations, their relationship might well be consistent with this demand-sharing model, yet systems of exchange become predation when devoid of mutuality over the long term. Most of the oral histories I collected from my Sanema contacts told stories of a life alongside Ye’kwana people, either in Sanema encampments at the outskirts of Ye’kwana communities or in satellite settlements a short walk away. Some described amiable and family-like relations with Ye’kwana people; some stated they lived nearby but with little interaction, while others recounted that Ye’kwana interlocutors ordered them around, were always angry, and regularly beat them.



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Though historical accounts indicate that the satellite structure following the war in the 1930s was forced upon the Sanema as a form of control, conversations with my Sanema associates revealed something quite different. Most of my collaborators stated that they looked for a Ye’kwana community where they could set up camp briefly, as Anita’s sister Coromoto described: “Our group used to travel wherever we wanted in the forest. One man went ahead one day and discovered a Ye’kwana community. When he returned, he said, ‘There are Ye’kwana there,’ and so my parents responded, ‘Let’s go there and see what they have.’ We asked them for land to make our house and we stayed there for three years.” While accounts of life in satellite communities varied greatly, in each retelling it was clear that the Sanema chose when to live there and when to move away. An elderly woman, Iskisioma, described it this way when recounting her movements as a youth: “The Ye’kwana gave us a garden and a lot of manioc, but because there were many of us, the manioc ran out quickly, so we said, ‘Let’s leave now and return to where we were.’” Sanema people’s willingness and desire to live near Ye’kwana settlements were evident in their historical accounts, often expressed in terms of opportunities, the most important of which was the chance to receive desirable goods. In some accounts they obtained pots, hammocks, beads, clothes, and machetes, while at other times they were given only manioc to eat. Other stories emphasized the acquisition of important new skills such as weaving sebucáns (manioc straining baskets), producing manioc beer, and learning the Ye’kwana language. A research associate known as Old Juan illustrated the central motivation of goods procurement when I questioned why his family decided to live near Ye’kwana people in his youth. With wide, animated eyes and exaggerated hand gestures, he bellowed in characteristic Sanema style, “Oooh, they gave us soooo many things!” On another occasion, a woman speaking of her childhood in a satellite community recounted how her father would describe the Ye’kwana as “good people because they gave us pots, hammocks, and clothes,” even though these same people would “beat them with poles.” When they decided they had had enough, however, they simply moved away. At least three times during my research period I witnessed firsthand the abrupt appearance of large Sanema encampments within Ye’kwana communities, unprompted, according to the Ye’kwana residents, and usually to obtain goods or manioc. Without doubt, Sanema contact with Ye’kwana people throughout history has not been formed purely by

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acts of coercion or capture. To the contrary, many Sanema life histories recount continual movement from place to place, frequently stopping at Ye’kwana communities for several months to obtain resources before deciding to move on, often to another satellite community for a time. That is precisely what occurred when my host family embarked on their long trip northward that resulted in the founding of Maduaña: they frequently stopped at Ye’kwana settlements for intervals when they ran out of food or supplies. Writing on debt-peonage among the Ashéninka of Peru, Evan Killick (2011) illustrates how relations of debt are frequently pursued by those formerly seen to be oppressed and coerced by patrones (non-Indigenous traders). He shows how Ashéninka people willingly entered into such relations to develop an ongoing dynamic of delayed and balanced exchange, and moreover that they exerted considerable power within the relationship because they threatened to disappear without notice if the patrones did not instill sufficient trust. What I saw among Sanema people resembled that type of inverted interplay of power, and yet while they sought similar relations of dependence, they did not seem to pursue ongoing and balanced exchange and the equal ties at its heart. Rather, a submissive demeanor enabled a freedom of mobility similar to that described by Killick because by being subservient they did not engage as equals and hence were not bound to the relationship in the same way. In short, their obligation to reciprocate in delayed exchange was subverted. With this in mind, the relationship of dependency that I have thus far been describing might be viewed as a strategy for dodging one’s debts. Pertinent to this strategy is a bond predicated not on exchange but rather on predation: taking while giving little or nothing in return. Dodging Debts as a Predatory Act One of my first introductions to Sanema life was in the company of a Ye’kwana woman in 2007. We had stopped at a Sanema settlement on our way downstream to Calamonte, and she was giving me an impromptu tour of the community to observe the Sanema going about their daily lives. “They learned that from us; they copy everything we do,” she stated while gesturing toward one household hard at work grating manioc. She went on, “In the past they didn’t have anything. Everything they have they got from us.” While stressing that it was important to help these unfortunate people, my Ye’kwana companion followed with complaints that they always begged her for things and continually requested lifts to town because they had no canoes or motors



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of their own. “Do they offer anything in return?” I asked hesitantly. She looked at me with discernable surprise. “Nothing!” she replied. “They don’t have anything!”12 Her declaration that they entirely lack material wealth was undoubtedly overstated, and yet I did note that rarely had I ever seen any Sanema people offering goods to the Ye’kwana. While a leg of peccary might be demanded of the Sanema if cunningly spotted when visitors passed through, gifts were seldom offered in return for goods bestowed. What the Ye’kwana obtained from the Sanema, if anything, was labor and even then only with a great deal of effort and frustration. One might argue that reciprocity is clearly established through the provision of labor, though from the Sanema perspective the tasks that were set for them were not viewed as a straightforward exchange because they cannot be actively coerced or made to commit to their labor obligations, a conduct that created palpably strained relations between individuals from the two groups. Many of my Ye’kwana contacts grumbled that Sanema people were lazy, refused to work, and sometimes disappeared or “escaped” without a word before tasks had been completed. They claimed that their workers often packed up camp and departed for good while in the midst of their commitments. I did indeed observe on a number of occasions the Sanema’s reluctance to perform their assigned labor for Ye’kwana or criollo people, often deigning to exert themselves only after being yelled at. It seemed that my Sanema contacts did not feel impelled to work in return for a gift, nor did they see labor as a long-term strategy for continual reciprocity, mutuality, or some form of bondage. Sanema communities generally did not respond well to Ye’kwana attempts at imposing leadership strategies to improve their cohesiveness (Colchester 1982, 107), indicating that they were far more difficult to control than might at first appear. The demand-sharing model indicates that possession of material goods does not guarantee exclusive rights to ownership because all items could in theory be appropriated through demands. Control over one’s labor, on the other hand, is the essence of the autonomous self in Amazonia, and people can be made to do chores only through leading by example or oblique persuasion via oratory, never by coercion.13 My Sanema friends would assert their autonomy with the phrase “I’m just like that” (ina sa kuaö), which is regularly tacked onto the end of personal stories or accounts to emphasize unique perspectives and choices. Certain personalities did foment conflicts more than others and were generally the source of a great deal of gossip and frustration, but those people were never told what to do or how to behave. Gossip may help to articulate moral principles pertaining to acceptable behavior, but it does

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not create coercive or restrictive rules. When describing flawed behavior, many simply stated that the person “is just like that.” In the same way, people could never be forced to execute tasks, and they regularly rejected their obligations; to put it another way, they often dodged their debts. An example of this would be bride-service (suhamo). This role was described in terms of the moral register of fear (kili), but when speaking Spanish, my Sanema friends would describe the process as “paying for the daughter” (pagando por la hija). This latter phrase suggests that bride-service among Sanema people might be understood as a relationship of debt to the father-in-law (Hugh-Jones 2013, 369), but debts that might not always be honored. In truth, the regularity with which Sanema sons-in-law would eschew their bride-service responsibilities, much to the frustration of their parents-in-law, led me to question the degree of indebtedness perceived in these supposedly uncontested duties. In a similar way, I witnessed Sanema people regularly and surreptitiously evading debts of labor to their Ye’kwana hosts; they would depart when they wished and usually partook in labor activities only at their whim. Thus, rather than being exploited, Sanema people seemed to be extracting goods (plikö) and eliding reciprocity, an insight that when coupled with the value placed on autonomy leads one to question who the predators really are and to reevaluate the concept of predation more broadly. Dependencies of Empowerment Predation is an economic activity whereby resources are appropriated without adhering to customary modes of reciprocity. Put another way, it is a paradigmatic tool for dodging one’s debts. Past descriptions of predatory relations in Amazonia tended to portray the captors as predators and the captured as helpless, yet Sanema people are far from powerless in their interactions with the Ye’kwana. The practice of submitting oneself to others is not a last-resort reaction, nor is it inimical to agency or subjectivity. On the contrary, it is a form of power in its own right. My Sanema hosts elicited empathy while at the same time rejecting any long-term commitments of reciprocity that symmetry demands. In essence, they were eschewing their debts to the Ye’kwana just as they were to their fathers-in-law. Even though some local non-Indigenous people described the Sanema as Ye’kwana’s “slaves,” Sanema people continue to maintain their social structure, kin ties, and autonomy even when coexisting with Ye’kwana in their satellite encampments.14 Hence, they are not “ripped from their context” (Graeber 2012, 168) and do



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not suffer a “social death” (Patterson 1990), nor do they relinquish any prior rights and obligations, as would have been the case with past enslavement in Amazonia and beyond (Santos-Granero 2009b). On analyzing the moral principles of economic relations, David Graeber (2001, 219–221) notes that what makes reciprocity unique, as opposed to “communism” or “hierarchy,” is that it can, in theory, be cancelled out or “closed off.” By this Graeber means that one can nullify ongoing ties and maintain a degree of freedom if one wishes to do so. Given that gift economies are continually creating shifting “inferiorities,” as he describes them, they are defined not by absolute equality per se but by a “fragile, competitive equality between actors” (221). For the Sanema, though, the dynamics of inferiority or disequilibrium are intentional and prior to the relationship of exchange, not the result of it. Albeit an apparent contradiction in terms, it is their dependent position that grants them freedom because they are absolved of the long-term responsibilities inherent in ongoing exchange, as was evident when Sanema people decided abruptly to leave a satellite community and abandon their labor obligations to the Ye’kwana. Though the liberal ideology presupposes equality as the only real route to freedom and autonomy, the Sanema demonstrate that this might not be universally true. For them, it is actually asymmetry, the act of willful submission, that permits freedom and autonomy. After the war with the Ye’kwana, procuring goods through raiding was no longer plausible. Once their lives had later become entwined with the state and its institutions that promote a logic of multiculturalism, peace, and cooperation, Sanema people were prompted to further adapt their predatory acts in new and creative ways, namely through a submissive demeanor. What is compelling about this form of extraction without reciprocity is that it offers a view of predation that departs from the violent typecasting with which it is usually associated, such as warfare, headhunting, and cannibalism. In these forms of predation, predators are always portrayed as aggressive adversaries “continuously snatching creativity, vitality, and life force” (Rival 1998b, 77). Predation in the contemporary context can be a peaceful and in some ways even cooperative act, a symbiosis, albeit nonmutual and by definition parasitic. Given that predation is the nonreciprocal appropriation of value, the Sanema’s tactic of rejecting their obligations and obtaining resources with as little effort as possible should be seen as a predatory act made possible by the value placed on the autonomous self. Submission can, quite unexpectedly, be deployed as a predatory strategy for empowerment.

C H A PT E R 3

Horizons of the Unknown

As I slept, the gentle morning chatter around the hearth surged excitedly. It was earlier than normal, still misty, but even through my own morning daze, I distinctly heard the phrase oka töpö rising up through the conversation. It was repeated several times with hushed apprehension. Oka töpö, sorcerer people, are mysterious beings that lurk with insidious intentions in the forests. The chatter on that morning was by no means unusual; my Sanema friends talked about oka regularly, not as idle chit-chat but as narratives impregnated with intense fear and trepidation. This particular morning, after extricating myself from my hammock and joining my family around the hearth, I learned that they were talking about a recent event with oka as its central focus. The neighbor’s teenage son had come with news that made all present acutely uneasy. He told how the previous day three people in his family had paddled a canoe upstream to go fishing nearby. They stopped by the bank of the river to throw out their lines when suddenly they heard an eruption of noise in the nearby foliage. The boy’s voice and gestures grew more animated as the story unfolded: “As they looked closer, they saw movement. ‘Who are they?’ they whispered to each other in terror, and quickly rowed to the other bank to get away. When they returned to the community, they told everyone they’d seen oka people.” Upon hearing this, my elderly host father René growled angrily from beneath his mosquito net that he was going to confront the oka himself, seemingly undeterred by the limitations imposed on him by his frail and crooked body. The others seemed not to hear him and continued their tense conversation. One retorted, “Now everyone will be afraid to go into the forest,” and the others responded that they should avoid unnecessary trips beyond the community space for the time being. I asked my host sister Nelly sitting next to me why the oka were here near Maduaña and why they would be



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spying on people from the shadows of the undergrowth. She responded that they were there to kill. “This is what they do,” she confirmed. I continued to listen to the animated discussion, as intrigued as all the others by the descriptions of a mystifying presence close by, but having heard many similar stories by that point, I was not particularly concerned. In the earlier days of fieldwork my inner skepticism told me that these were merely rumors, part of the daily hyperbole that marked the Sanema’s fondness for drama. Alcida Ramos had written about rumor among the Sanema many years earlier (1979), presenting it as an important form of knowledge dissemination but also as a marker of widespread anxiety in moments of sociocultural transformation. Yet the visceral fear of oka was so real among my hosts and the matter so frequently discussed that it became an inescapable feature of my two years living with Sanema people. The life histories of Maduaña women come to the fore when exploring the oka because women experienced an anxiety (pii pieko) associated with malicious forces more intensely than men and often exhibited that anxiety as a concern for the well-being of kin. The first time I heard the term oka töpö was when visiting Ulinuwiña far upstream in the forest hinterlands. A young man had come to warn me about some people his mother said she had seen hidden in the forest near her gardens, dangerous people called oka. He seemed concerned, describing them in Spanish as “malandros,” a Venezuelan colloquial term for thugs, gangsters, or criminals, but he also quite oddly referred to them as “demons” (ai pupo), making it hard to determine whether they were tangible or preternatural phenomena. When I pushed him for more details, he could do no more than tell me that they were real people and that I should go nowhere alone and be sure to tie my door closed with a rope at night. This first mention of oka left me perturbed in part because explanations were vague and responses to questions subdued. When I questioned other community members, attempting to gain more clarity on the matter, they looked somber and afraid at the word’s mere mention, unwilling or unable to give more information. Eventually I would have most of my questions answered many times over without even trying, as oka would be discussed with almost prosaic regularity in Ulinuwiña and Maduaña. At the beginning of fieldwork any mention of the word would immediately rouse my interest, and by the end of two years among the Sanema, the term had become so ubiquitous that it began to blend in with many other day-to-day discussions. Fear of and fleeing (wasimo) from oka were at the heart of Sanema perceptions of their predatory surroundings past and present. Insomuch



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as my hosts harness a prey position as a form of agency when becoming submissive predators, they can also fall prey and become defenseless victims in other settings. In the context discussed here, the predatory cosmos becomes a threat to daily existence. But the concept of oka has numerous layers to it, marking out a particular historical memory of loss while also merging with more recent encounters with non-Indigenous people and the state. Oka, in this way, index the chronic insecurity of surrounding predatory forces as they meanwhile interweave with anxieties of rapid social transformations associated with the ever more immediate Venezuelan national society. In short, oka can be viewed as manifestations of a fear of an unknown near future. The Unknowns While my view of oka was relatively impartial overall, I was not always a passive observer to the palpable ambience of fear. My own sense of apprehension heightened over time. Reading through my field notes many years later, I noticed a progression from exploring oka as an object of inquiry to gradually regarding them as a threat to my own well-being. As time went on and the rumors intensified, I began to perceive a strange presence in the nearby forest when bathing in streams alone, or a sense of responsibility toward children I accompanied in the forest for fear that they might be snatched by oka. I began to cover the window opening in my house with a towel so that, as I wrote in my field notes, “the oka people would not see me in there.” One day, at the peak of my paranoia, I was sitting in my room writing up my notes from the day when an incident occurred. Out of nowhere, an immense pressure surged in my head as though it were being crushed with a heavy weight. My face grew fiery hot, and my heart started to pound perceptibly in my chest. I knew something was not right. I fumbled in my bag to retrieve my pocket mirror and when I brought it up to my face, I was shocked to see that my skin was bright red. Not flushed, but crimson. Looking down at my legs, they too were red, and pulling up my T-shirt I could make out a mosaic of mottled red and pink shades that had erupted over my entire body. My immediate thought, despite myself, was to recall the frequently reported symptoms of oka attack, one of which was an unmistakable and sudden rash. My breath quickened, and with a rising sense of dread I dragged my enfeebled body out of the house in search of someone who might be able to identify the sudden outbreak. The first person I saw was

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my research assistant Héctor. Before I had even reached him he looked at me with a perplexed expression, and when I approached he instantly commented on my red skin and said he thought I had painted my face. Before I even said anything in response, he mentioned that I had probably unwittingly been poisoned by an oka while walking in the forest to collect stream water. Evidently not conscious of my alarm at this passing comment, he nonchalantly proceeded to recount a time when someone in his childhood community had similarly turned red like that and died the same night. This was the only time during fieldwork that I genuinely panicked. I became immediately lightheaded, not knowing where to turn or what to do. I had been attacked by oka, just as Anita said I might, but I was miles from any hospital. Why had I not listened to her and avoided trekking into the forest alone? Abruptly turning away from a bewildered Héctor, I briskly walked toward the river port to flag down the next canoe passing downstream to Calamonte, where I might at least seek medical attention. I tried to compose myself so I could note any change, good or bad, in my physical senses. I ended up waiting at the port for an hour before a canoe finally passed, and by that time I already noticed the symptoms subsiding and the rash fading, and so I decided it was probably safe to stay in Maduaña. Later I realized that my host mother had been pounding chilies in the house and that my body was perhaps reacting to the chili dust wafting invisibly through the air. Rereading my field notes, however, it was clear that my fear surrounding an uncertainty of what the eruption might be and what it might lead to had mingled with earlier rumors about oka. Not only that, but my rash took on a life of its own beyond the incident; it incited new rumors in Maduaña that oka had attempted to kill me and were likely still surrounding the community unseen. Gossip of oka filled the air anew, immediately changing the mood from one of tranquility to one infused with anxiety for weeks to follow. Many became afraid to leave the settlement to hunt, fish, or collect stream water, and some began to see movement or hear strange noises in the forest. Chatter around the hearth yet again became tense and solemn. If nothing else, this incident demonstrated how the surging and abating of oka presence in daily life affected everyone in several ways. In spite of the gossip, my Sanema hosts asserted that oka were not rumor or abstraction, they were real. Never were they portrayed as anything but people, represented as just like Sanema but simultaneously unlike them. An interlocutor once described them as sirisana people, a term used to describe so-called uncivilized forest dwellers who, in



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his words, “don’t wear clothes, have dirty pots, and never sweep their houses.” In this and in every sense of their description, oka are associated with radical otherness, with centrifugal orientations such as “up” or “upstream” (olam) or with “inside” or “in the center” (hisomia; en el centro del bosque in Spanish). Upstream and inside the forest are domains characterized as wild, unknown, and uncontrollable, inhabited only by savage and immoral beings (Lizot 1994b, 227). More than just inhabiting the inside of this fearsome realm, oka also continually move around within it, somehow adrift or untethered to the social arrangements that tie people to specific locales. But they roam the forest for a specific reason: they are searching for Sanema to kill, just as Nelly had intimated. They have a preference, it is said, for young men, whom they watch from a concealed location in the forest, camouflaged in the undergrowth and painted with a layer of charcoal. The oka lies in wait for a young man to venture into the forest alone, and when he sees a boy, he blows an imperceptible poisonous dust (alawalia) in the youth’s direction with a small blowpipe, a gesture mimicked with a brisk “shwee” sound when tales are recounted. “I have pain in the head,” the young man will say, and in his discomfort he returns directly to his community. Shortly thereafter he develops a high fever while his skin and the whites of his eyes turn blood red and his abdomen bloats up from the oka poison. He will be dead by nightfall. It is hardly surprising that intense fear stems from the perceived senselessness of the attacks, as affliction from oka strikes evades both identification and cure. But just as horrific as the obscure and grisly nature of the death is its speed, described as shockingly quick (sili), too brisk and perplexing to be cured even by a shaman. Jacques Lizot notes that the southern Yanomami also use the term oka, and he translates the word as sorcerers who practice magic substances: “Oka usually come in groups at night, and in utmost secrecy, painted black as warriors.” Lizot goes on to explain, “A large amount of armed conflicts arise from witchcraft by alleged oka, members of neighboring communities more or less distant” (2004, 281). Descriptions from my Sanema interlocutors were consistent with this portrayal, although oka were depicted as traveling alone or in pairs and rarely described as using witchcraft or spells from a distance. They deploy a lethal venomous dust at close range, positioning themselves eerily close without being seen.1 Oka’s predatory strategies are inconsistent with many portrayals of Amazonian sorcery and witchcraft in that oka are neither represented as possessed beings nor related to malignant primordial forces

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or metamorphosed demons (Whitehead and Wright 2004). Although occasionally described resembling monkeys, oka are living people, and moreover they are Sanema people. Angry people, but people nonetheless. Though in some ways partially consistent with the sorcerer typology inasmuch as they too utilize poison, oka also blend with the raider classification. Raiders (wasö töpö) are enemies who storm Sanema communities to abduct women, steal goods, or enact revenge. But oka are far more mystifying than raiders, in part because they are visually and conceptually obscured. This is perhaps the most feared characteristic of oka, that they are unidentified beings who lie in wait, unseen, at the outskirts of social space, in nearby shrubbery or just outside the gardens. They are even occasionally referred to in Spanish as “the unknowns” (los desconocidos). In contrast to raiders, they do not violently enter communities with bows and arrows, shouting, struggling, abducting, and stealing. Their attacks are the inverse: silent, swift, and unprompted. Although people talked of these oka regularly, it gradually became clear to me that no one confirmed having seen one firsthand or knew of anyone who had seen one directly; most people simply stated that they knew when oka were there.2 Some claimed that they were aware of oka presence not through sight but rather through the sound of their distinctive high-pitched whistle, emitted in three bursts as a way to communicate among themselves. Nelly described it well: No one has ever seen the oka people, but when one comes near, people would know they were there. I always knew it that way. If a man goes out hunting and oka people are hiding nearby, they whistle when the man passes. This is how they call each other to kill. That’s how we know it’s oka people. When the man returns to the community he asks “Who was that? Which of you was whistling back there?” but no one knows. Then the people think, “Oh, oka people have arrived!” They know that oka people are eager to kill. That is what people say, anyway. These whistle sounds were described as part of the oka’s predatory repertoire, a way to ambush unsuspecting Sanema. Interpretations do vary, with some explaining that the whistling sound emerges from wild turkeys (palulia) warning Sanema of nearby oka through their distinctive “solili kakakakaka” call. In each description, however, the unidentified sounds are always perceived to portend sinister events. A Maduaña resident once told me an alarming tale of a community resident enticed



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by an unusual noise one day, only to be hounded by beings that never quite materialized: Manuel went hunting one day and he heard the whistling noise that oka make. At first, he thought it was a wasi [spider monkey], so he went to look for it so that he could kill it. He left his bag and all his stuff in the middle of the path. There was no monkey, so he came back to get his stuff and it was all gone. He searched for a long time and then found it wet in the river like someone had thrown it there. He got scared because he knew it was oka. He grabbed all his stuff and ran home quickly, and he could tell they were chasing him the whole way until he got to the house. The oka people are there. Their furtive movements reinforce the fear surrounding them, as though watching without being seen enhances their power but diminishes that of the victim (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 35). Girls have been clandestinely snatched, and boys have died with scarcely any awareness of oka presence. For the most part they lurk in the surrounding forests but are on occasion said to silently creep into communities while residents are sleeping, drunk, or busy with other tasks. They come to have sex with slumbering women or to touch dead bodies that they themselves have killed in order to steal their spirit. One of my friends gave this as a reason not to drink the alcoholic amitu (manioc beer) and to avoid communities that consume it on a regular basis: “I don’t want to live in a community that drinks amitu. When people drink lots of amitu, oka people come to that community. You think you hear just a normal person walking around, but it’s not. They come to have sex with the women.” Consumption of amitu generates uninhibited behavior that in extreme instances leads to scandalous conduct or alarming acts of violence. It seems that intoxication attracts oka because they are drawn to Sanema people during times of moral rupture. Death, Disappearance, and Escape The oka’s immoral existence is partially attributed to the domain they inhabit, the obscure and formidable forest realm. Regardless of the widespread perception of the jungle’s propitious abundance, many of my Sanema contacts simultaneously expressed surprising unease about this domain. It is commonly perceived as a predatory and portentous

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realm filled with powerful beings and unforeseen hazards. Even my host mother warned me against bathing in forest streams alone because, as she said, “the forest is dangerous.” Hunters likewise tell stories of strange encounters when on long hunting trips, signs of activity like smoldering fire pits, abandoned pots, whittled poles, and occasionally even lone hammocks in the center of the forest containing unknown dead bodies. These are all signs, they say, that oka have been here, the corpses being victims of oka attack. The hunters are not particularly surprised to see victims of oka brutality because they know that others like themselves have been running from them for generations. When my Sanema interlocutors tell their life stories, death and catastrophe infuse each tale, presented as tragedies that were almost always attributed to oka. Most residents of Maduaña, even the younger among them, provided innumerable accounts of people they knew who died from oka poison. Héctor and I spent many hours speaking of these casualties. He told me that in the upstream settlement where he grew up, he saw many dead bodies over the years, casualties of gruesome deaths preceded by vomiting, bleeding from the mouth, rigid bodies, and eyes rolled back in the head, one being his best friend from childhood. All, he told me, died from oka attacks. While I was living in Maduaña, his wife’s family often sent messages downstream pleading with them to return to this upstream community to visit, but he refused to go because he feared the many oka that roamed the surrounding forest there. Nelly’s story of her childhood comprised a similar string of griefstricken episodes, one death after the other. One of her earlier memories was of one young oka victim, a girl Nelly’s age, who was so unwell that her family made the uncharacteristic decision to carry her for days to a mission settlement to seek medical attention for her, but the girl tragically died en route. They had to burn her body in the forest to allow her spirit to depart, and then they decided to change course as they no longer needed to go to the mission clinic. Not long after that, though, another person died, too late by then to turn back toward the mission. Many other stories like these were recounted. I was told of an old man whose only three children, three sons, died in quick succession from oka attacks. There were even those whose entire families were killed by these terrifying beings, leaving them the sole survivors of a kin group. “It always happened that way” was the common phrase that ended these somber narratives. Alongside countless tales of swift and unrelenting deaths were stories



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of mysterious disappearances. One was about a woman who briefly walked off the forest path to relieve herself when on a hunting trek with her husband, and she never returned. Most believe she was taken by oka. In another story, two young girls on a foraging trip heard the oka whistle and out of curiosity went to investigate; they were never seen again. One repeatedly recounted story told of an episode many years earlier in which two young girls vanished from a former settlement when all others had gone on a communal hunting expedition. The two children were left in the care of an elderly woman who was too frail to join the trek, and she lost track of the girls. When the others returned from the trip and found that the girls were missing, they searched for days and days. A man even heard the children crying in the distance when he was in the forest, and though he tried to follow the sounds, he failed to locate them. The girls were never found. Many claim that oka people have them to this day.3 It was these sorts of incidents attributed to oka attacks that were reported most frequently as motivation for living a mobile existence in the past rather than fleeing from enemy groups, searching for more abundant lands, or trading for steel tools. Most of my Sanema friends outlined their childhoods not as nomadic roaming but as continual escape (toköso) from these beings who were always following their footprints or walking the same path as they did, invisible from view. A family member would die, and they would burn the body and immediately flee again. Anita’s life history was a lengthy journey of such escape from oka; wherever her family went, the oka would not be far behind. They even killed other families with whom she and her kin sought refuge along the way. Her family’s movements could never cease: Eventually we realized who was following us. It was the unknowns, the oka people. One man died from very strong poison, so we knew it was them. These oka only want to kill. They killed my family. One died, then another, and another. We wanted to kill those who had killed us, so one time we hid near the dead body of our kin and waited to see if anyone would arrive to steal their spirit. But no one came. The following day we started to move again to a different place. We moved from place to place to escape the oka. They always arrived wherever we went, so we had to keep on walking, keep on walking. We walked around like peccaries. That’s how we lived. But they kept following us, they followed our footsteps. The oka people wanted to kill us all.

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When Anita’s family reached the mission community, they thought their persistent fleeing might finally be over. Many others felt the same, that seeking refuge among the seemingly invulnerable criollos would make them equally impervious to attack. But even there, my hosts reported, oka caused so many deaths that even the criollo missionary became afraid of the mysterious beings. During my time in Maduaña, Anita cried whenever one of her sons decided to take a trip back upstream to that mission community to visit family, sobbing that they might die of oka assault once there. Only once the family moved far downstream to Maduaña and settled in a terrain that Sanema do not traditionally inhabit did my host family seem satisfied that they had moved beyond oka reach. Some residents of Maduaña mentioned that they decided to move to this community and toward criollo society for that reason, to be where oka do not go. Yet the looming potential of oka attack remains, evident in the many fearful tales that infused daily life, the numerous deaths still attributed to oka attack, and the rumor that erupted after my rash incident. Anita remained vigilant despite reassurances that this was safer territory, and she frequently advised me not to walk alone beyond the community space during the day or even within the community after dark. What still puzzled me, especially having recently emerged from an oka scare myself, was why these dangerous beings would want to attack unknown people in a faraway community who were essentially keeping to themselves. Vengeance Beings When I asked my friends why oka would want to kill them, most people simply said that oka love to kill Sanema, as though this defined the oka’s very existence. But the reason given for their thirst for slaying was that they are in a state of near-perpetual homicidal rage, seeking retribution for the deaths of their own kin to ease their excruciating grief. Oka live, it was said, for the purposes of indiscriminate retribution alone. In Amazonia the general principle of “homosubstitution” precludes persons being substituted or exchanged for things (Descola 2001, 110), meaning that when a life is lost, that loss must be balanced by sacrificing another human life. An overriding need for revenge impels one to claim any life as compensation regardless of the potential victim’s involvement in the initial death. When talking about visiting the upstream mission community, a Sanema friend spoke of her fear in this regard: “If an oka wants to take revenge, it doesn’t matter if you were involved or



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not. They are angry and just want noa köa [vengeance]. They will kill anyone; it doesn’t matter who.” This commitment to revenge stems from its deep significance as a Sanema moral code, a fundamental social ethos of “return” encapsulated in the expression noa köa. This term can mean “consequence” or “follow-up” and plays out in daily practices as wide-ranging as revenge, reciprocity, compensation, and fulfilment.4 So fundamental is this drive to enact follow-up that it forms a component of the partible human soul known as okola, the spirit of revenge that is employed by men during physical reprisals and by women for retaliatory sorcery during periods of mourning (Colchester 1982, 449). Okola appears to have the same semantic root as oka, and there is no doubt that both are defined by a compulsion for retribution. Acts of noa köa were daily occurrences in Maduaña and Ulinuwiña, but most were performed as small-scale tit-for-tat, particularly noticeable between children because among them it was so intentionally and visibly played out. If one child were to strike another, the one who was hit would be forced by nearby adults to undergo a series of steps to conscientiously act out noa köa; the perpetrator is held still while the original victim retaliates with counterblows, sometimes with the adult mediator moving the child’s hands to hit the original assailant. Children are ardently urged to perform retribution during squabbles from a very young age, and similar actions continue throughout life in the form of systematic and ritualized blows. For adult men, tensions are often diffused with reciprocal machete slaps in which the men take turns striking each other on the back with the broad side of a machete for an agreed number of times. Noa köa as an inherent and virtuous human obligation was evident one day in Ulinuwiña when a man hit his wife during a party where everyone was exceptionally intoxicated. The woman did not retaliate and instead sobbed incessantly without moving from the dark corner of her house. Her female companions approached her and shouted at her to take revenge as was the expected and honorable practice in such circumstances. They pressed a machete into her limp hand, repeatedly goading her to go slap her husband with the blade. One woman shouted angrily at her, “You are afraid! You don’t hit your husband, so you are not a person!” When I recounted this story to Héctor a few months later in Maduaña, he agreed, saying, “She is not Sanema [human] because she did not take revenge. If you hit a dog, the dog doesn’t hit back, so she is like a dog.”5 Though stealthy in their actions, oka are believed to be unceasingly

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enacting this impulse for noa köa. Paradoxically, however, in executing revenge for their kin, oka become kinless because murderers are expected to temporarily flee their communities following homicidal acts, or at least to separate themselves from kin during the polluting post-homicidal phase known as kanene, “blood guilt.” At a gathering around a fight in Maduaña, an old man spoke up on this very topic amid the ruckus. Those around him came to a hush as he described how women do not want to be with murderous husbands. He asserted, “Those who kill can’t have sex with their wives and they can’t eat with their children because they become dangerous people. So, if you kill a man you will become like a demon [ai pupo].” The man was using this example to dissuade others from fighting, and he was drawing attention to the risks associated with homicidal violence because killers become temporarily asocial and sometimes permanently kinless.6 It follows that on the one side are mystifying oka who are dangerous by virtue of their otherness and on the other side are kin who can become categorical others as a result of dangerous acts. In both situations there is an intimate connection between violence and alterity (Overing 1996), all the more pronounced for oka owing to the seemingly haphazard nature of their retribution acts. Anyone can fall victim at any time. One might justifiably consider the concept of oka as a means through which Sanema people come to terms with the terrifying catastrophe of social and epistemological disorder following repeated and ravaging epidemics in the past. Widespread outbreaks of measles, chicken pox, flu, and other diseases decimated populations following contact and cannot be underestimated in their centuries-long cataclysmic effects on Indigenous populations of lowland South America (Walker, Sattenspiel, and Hill 2015). Epidemics also wrought devastation on the social and moral order of those who survived and seem to be similarly reflected in Sanema social memory.7 Notwithstanding this crucial historical factor, however, oka persist in an altered guise in the present day, even in the absence of devastating epidemics or raiding neighbors.8 New Encroaching Threats For my Sanema research collaborators, ceaseless fleeing in the past was a consequence of their perceived position as prey to malevolent entities always lurking on the peripheries of their known world. Today the situation is quite different. They now seek to draw closer to a new kind of other: criollo non-Indigenous Venezuelans. This is because the



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natural abundance that was once sought from the forest has been reoriented toward resources supplied by national society and the state. By no means does this orientation result in the threat from oka receding altogether; rather, hazards take on new forms whereby stories of attacks by oka have become progressively associated with the encroaching non-Indigenous world and the city of Calamonte. Although many of my interlocutors were dubious that oka would come as far downstream as criollo cities, most new stories of oka in the northern reaches of Sanema territory tell of them targeting people in urban centers, particularly when navigating bewildering criollo norms and practices. Criollos are now a new source of anxiety in contexts of frequent excursions to the cities and engagement with new forms of knowledge. Wariness toward their seemingly unpredictable behavior and their potential for hostility frequently bubbles to the surface, and rumors analogous to those associated with oka suffuse narratives. One such rumor was of the Maduaña resident Otoniel, who was visiting Calamonte to stock up on supplies when he was invited by some criollo men to join them for a beer in a local bar. The story was permeated with uneasiness as Otoniel professed to feeling disconcerted, suspicious of their motives and sensing that they were insidiously watching his every move, even when he went outside to urinate. After they had several drinks at the bar and were becoming increasingly intoxicated, the criollo men invited Otoniel back to their house, and in that moment, I was told, Otoniel knew that the criollos wanted to kill him. He managed to finally escape (toköso) but claimed they searched for him the whole night. The encounter left him deeply perturbed and baffled by their actions. As a result of this strange event, Otoniel decided not to stay a day longer in town and returned directly to his forest community, hitching a ride with some Ye’kwana people at first light. It struck me how similar his story was to those about oka, of being watched and pursued, uncertain of their oblique motives, and ultimately forced to flee. Undoubtedly the accuracy of secondhand narration is uncertain, but the importance is not in the details; rather, as with all rumors, the significance lies in the sentiment, impregnated with a sense of imminent disaster or wrongdoing at every turn. Despite the frequency with which my hosts recounted the murderous intentions of non-Indigenous people, each time I pushed for details as to specifically why criollo people would want to kill innocent Sanema people, they seemed uncertain or simply stated that this is just how criollos are.9 On more than one occasion, concern regarding a potential threat of

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an organized criollo attack was raised in community meetings. Maduaña residents frequently spoke of a “war” (guerra in Spanish) that might erupt with nearby criollos any day, a theme that resonated with similar accounts of unexpected raids from neighboring communities that forefathers experienced in the past. Santiago announced during a gathering on the matter, “As our community grows, we will come closer and closer to Calamonte and the criollos will start to be angry with us. They will say, ‘Let’s wage a war with them because the number of people is growing.’ There will be a war and the National Guard will come.” Many friends confirmed to me that they believed a war was imminent, and some even stated that conflict had occurred between their ancestors and criollo people of times past, and so they knew it was likely to happen again.10 When criollos other than missionaries appeared in historical narratives, they were frequently portrayed as unpredictable and antagonistic, engaging in surprise attacks that forced Sanema people to swiftly retreat deeper into the forest. It struck me how the accounts were remarkably similar to those of oka encounters, in particular when using the word toköso (escape) to talk about responses to both oka and criollo adversaries. Not only was there a parallel between the unpredictable actions of oka and those of criollos, but tales of continued oka attacks emerged more frequently during miscommunications, conflicts, or perceived immoral behavior in association with criollo people. When state representatives from the Ministry of Energy withheld solar panels allocated to Maduaña without clear motive, for instance, fear of oka attacks seemed to intensify. Likewise, oka surfaced more frequently in association with opaque government administrative processes. The Sanema promotor (state official) Ignacio, who was from Maduaña but worked for the office of the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous People in Calamonte, was frequently the target of oka rumors. Many said that oka were searching for him not to request his assistance in bureaucratic procedures, as was his role, but rather to kill him for his disregard of their needs. Oka, it was said, want to receive gifts from the state like anyone else and were angry that the promotor had not provided these goods promptly. By the same token, some said that Felipe, the founder and previous chief of Maduaña, was killed by an oka attack because he refused to share his knowledge of government paperwork procedures. This intertwining of state processes and dangerous others resonates with theories of alterity as the dominant lens through which Indigenous Amazonians understand their encounters with wealthy and powerful others. Laura Rival notes that the Waorani have a somewhat paradoxical relation with and perception of non-Waorani others such as



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missionaries, private institutions, and oil companies, because while they are seen as “sources of endlessly renewable wealth” (1998b, 76), they are simultaneously perceived as quintessential predators. At times I wondered why my Sanema hosts should fear such a seemingly innocuous and even highly beneficial extralocal realm. But for them the criollo world epitomized an unintelligible unknown that could not be fully controlled or mastered. Predatory economies are invariably abundant ones, and among Sanema people this abundance can comprise multiple portentous sources, the abundant forest as much as bounteous Venezuelan cities. New emerging economies, it seems, are feared in similar ways as preceding predatory ones. Villainous and Pathogenic Assault Descriptions of oka arriving as far north as Venezuelan cities and expressing an interest in state processes emerged concurrent with stories of malicious attacks by violent criollo criminals known as malandros. In the later months of my fieldwork I began to notice that the terms oka and malandros were merging or becoming increasingly indistinguishable regardless of whether the interlocutor was speaking Spanish or Sanema. When a criollo man had allegedly stabbed a drunken Sanema man for not getting out the way of his moving vehicle in Calamonte, the criollo was described as an oka. When bands of gun-wielding criollos ambush city dwellers, they are described as oka. Enemy raids in the forest were likewise occasionally described as malandro attacks. I frequently found myself puzzled by these misplaced or merging concepts and asked several follow-up questions to establish which kind of oka they were referring to, until I finally realized that the two terms could not so easily be teased apart conceptually. Like oka, criollo malandros are paradigmatically fierce yet faceless, and like oka they are defined by their unpredictable and senseless acts. Anxiety surrounding the perplexing motivations of malandros is epitomized in ostensibly unsubstantiated phrases such as “There are lots of malandros in Calamonte who want to kill Indigenous people.” It is thought that malandros are motivated primarily to kill, not for purposes of vengeance as are oka but to steal belongings. Malandros frequently attempted to mug Sanema people making their way along Calamonte trails in the darkness of night. But they are also said to lie in wait in the forests near the gold mine, their weapon of choice a machete rather than a blowpipe and their purpose to steal gold rather than life force. Malandro existence, like more recent accounts of oka, is presented

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Calamonte at sunset. Photo by the author.

as tightly bound up with power, violence, and corruption in the current political context. Some politicians, such as the mayor of Calamonte, were said to have their own group of malandros, and some oka were entwined so intimately with Venezuelan politics that one rumor claimed they stole a helicopter from the national Indigenous health organization, CENASAI.11 Clearly the sentiments surrounding these stories have some basis, as politics in Venezuela have historically been infused with corruption and violence (Coronil 1997; Gallegos 2016), not to mention that the term malandro might be viewed as an expansive gloss for criminals of all scales. That said, the blending of the terms oka and malandro points to something as arcane as it is threatening. The turmoil evoked in my Sanema hosts by unfamiliar and unpredictable predatory encounters at various scales is real and harrowing on a level I have not encountered in other contexts. While the Sanema of Maduaña did not explicitly relate oka to epidemics, the underlying motif of unanticipated and contaminating otherness pervades the stories. The Yanomami activist Davi Kopenawa makes a more direct link between oka, white people, and disease: “After my tuberculosis, my stepfather did not want me to go back to the white people. Yet I did not listen to him. I had forgotten the city and my desire to become a white man. But in the meantime another of my uncles had also died. Enemy sorcerers from the highlands had blown harmful plants



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on him and had broken his bones” (2013, 223). Although the sources of the two forms of illness are conveyed as distinct, in this account the merging discord associated with different unknowns emerges subtly but powerfully in Kopenawa’s words. A sudden surge in deaths after contact with non-Indigenous people among the southern Yanomami was related to a constellation of new phenomena they were negotiating simultaneously: the novel goods, the unfamiliar practices, and the rife illnesses that accompanied encroaching white people at every turn. So intertwined were these phenomena that the metal tools, reams of cloth, and hammocks that missionaries donated as part of the process of pacification were held to be permeated with a sickening smell that immediately made the Yanomami gravely ill, a phenomenon known as xawara, epidemic smoke. White (criollo) people are, like oka, dangerous due to their unpredictable and immoral behavior; they are widely considered to be angry, stingy, and bereft of compassion. In a typically predatory act of trickery, whites entice with their goods, often with fatal results, as Kopenawa explains: “These strangers duped them [the ancestors] by flourishing their merchandise with good words: ‘Let’s be friends! See, we offer you so many goods as presents! We do not lie!’ This is always how the white people start talking to us! Then the xawarari epidemic beings arrive in their footsteps and we immediately start dying one after another” (2013, 177). In essence, pathogenic substances, whether from the forest or the cities, are related to the predatory realm of the other and the malign intentions of its denizens.12 Through paradigmatic predatory entrapment and seduction, the Yanomami, much like the Sanema, were lured into a new and exciting abundance that often proved to be catastrophic. While my Sanema contacts did not make such an overt connection between criollos, goods, disease, and mysterious fatalities, their stories nevertheless reflect an analogous affective register that points to a perceived danger of the unknown. Imminent Unknowns Unlike the theory of opacity of mind associated with Amazonian autonomy, namely the refusal to infer other people’s thoughts unless they are verbalized (Walker 2020), rumors are in some ways the inverse: they are infused with speculation and conjecture.13 Some narratives go into extensive detail about the murder or disappearance of a person who was clearly alone at the time and so could not possibly have relayed

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the details of their abduction or death. Motivated by curiosity, I often asked my interlocutors how they knew events occurred in this way, to which they would often respond that they had heard it from someone else. Indeed, what defines a rumor is its intractable mutability; it takes on a life of its own from unknown sources.14 Curiously, some rumors even tell of oka perspectives and motives—“The oka people were angry with him” or “His dog bit them” or “His son had drowned so he wanted revenge”—even though these persons ranged from unknown Sanema to quasi-supernatural beings. A paradigmatic frame with which to explore such anxiety and pervasive feelings of unpredictability vis-à-vis otherness in Amazonia would no doubt be that of alterity, in particular the idea that others are dangerous but nevertheless essential to social reproduction. Comparable representations of horrifying and advancing unknown forces appear in other forms across Amazonia, with one example being monstrous pela­ caras (“face peelers”) associated with white invaders of the past (SantosGranero and Barclay 2011). Alterity in Amazonia is often explored as a spatial phenomenon, in that one’s enemies are perceived to inhabit nearby spaces or that unknown forces are never far away. Nonetheless, fear of oka was as much a temporality as it was a spatial configuration or sentiment since there was a feeling of unease in anticipation of alarming incidents that might occur at any moment. When out of the blue rumors materialized claiming that people were coming to Maduaña with murderous intentions, the tone of dread was often expressed with the future clause piakule. The phrase töpö hu piakule, “They will come,” drifted through the rumors. Alterity has on occasion been presented in a temporal frame, typically as an exploration of the past and its erasure (Cormier 2003; Gow 2001). It becomes a future orientation most notably when associated with the evangelical doctrine brought by missionaries.15 The cataclysmic Judgment Day was indeed a mainstay theme of the relatively infrequent sermons delivered in Maduaña by Sanema pastors, who fervently preached about imminent colossal fires, earthquakes, and floods as warning signs of the forthcoming day of reckoning. Elusive omens of the fast-approaching end of days appeared around every corner and converged with a general sense of anxiety concerning ominous happenings. When the sky was full of black clouds, for instance, the women in my family refused to work in their gardens, as overcast skies forewarned the approach of maleficent spirits or an impending apocalypse. Failure to heed these warnings could result in sinister outcomes, as when Marco’s



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young wife was suddenly stricken with facial paralysis interpreted by the women in my family as resulting from her working in the fields beneath a darkened sky. The collective perceptions of fear and anxiety surrounding an uncertain near future that typify oka stories could be said to emerge through a vernacular timespace of anticipation. Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight argue that the obscured future horizon gives it an indeterminate “emptiness” that must be assuaged through speculative imagination (2019, 43). This anticipation cannot always be resolved, and failure to provide rectification and reorientation can instead create times of crisis. The resulting perception is that imminent futures are entirely unknown, unimaginable, and unpredictable. This, I believe, is what the Sanema are experiencing: an epistemological unfamiliarity that is seemingly insurmountable. Oka index this chronic insecurity in contexts of rapid social, political, and economic change. Although in recent years there has been an overall enhancement in well-being owing to better access to resources and improved health care among Sanema people, unfamiliar phenomena continued to be daily concerns for my hosts that manifested in the conjectured approach of mysterious and opaque beings. The unknown does not merely appear as fierce raiders prowling the nearby forest; it is also exemplified in a transforming world where non-Indigenous people, nation-states, and global economies play increasingly central roles. Powerful and occult forces can be mysterious and vengeful sorcerers; they can be city criminals coveting wealth and power; they can be messianic stories of approaching catastrophe; and they can even be omnipotent but indecipherable governments whose endlessly renewable wealth is held just out of reach. All constitute predatory forces intent on seizing value that impinge on Sanema lives but remain occult, arbitrary, and hazardous. This is not unique to the Sanema. Predatory economies on a global scale generate anxieties associated with imminent uncertainties, whether the potential arrival of debt collectors, imperceptible data surveillance, emerging new virus strains, or the tipping points brought about by climate change. These predatory economies induce a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness among citizens and consumers, but occasionally they can even manifest in local settings as a preoccupation with transcendent or supernatural powers analogous in some ways to Sanema uneasiness about oka. Terrifying rumors of organ theft and witch hunts (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Scheper-Hughes 1996; White 2000), fears of alien abduction (Lepselter 2016), and the conjuring of the divine (Srinivas

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2018) are all occult strategies for dealing with the unsettling configurations of economic dispossession within late capitalism. In all such situations, people mobilize the uncanny to make sense of the incomprehensible. These strategies provide meaning in times of uncertainty. Oka people are described on occasion precisely as “the unknowns,” appearing most frequently at times when change and uncertainty are foregrounded. Most importantly, the coalescing entities of oka and malandros are the embodiment of a future orientation, a sense of forthcomingness that is unpredictable and potentially even catastrophic. Their imminence, the sheer act of always waiting on the sidelines, portends an uncertain near event. Even when referring to past devastation, oka embody a persistent sense of barely perceptible nearness. These beings seem to be perpetually lurking, watching, listening but are never truly seen. However, oka are also a force of change because they impel a constant movement forward through time and space, a fleeing as much as a drawing nearer. Aptly named “the unknowns,” oka are horizons of the unknown.

C H A PT E R 4

Subterranean Forces

On one of Marco’s trips back to Maduaña from Calamonte he brought with him a roasted chicken, an oily and heavily seasoned meat very much desired but rarely consumed prior to this abundant era, to share with his family. He invited me to join them, and as we ate we caught up on recent news from town. We drifted into the topic of state development projects, and Marco made a spontaneous and uncharacteristic reference to the nation’s oil wealth: “Sanema communities are now progressing thanks to Chávez. He gives them money that he gets from petroleum, a liquid that they take out of the water in Maracaibo.” He paused to lick grease from his fingertips before continuing. “Now this petroleum costs 200 dollars per barrel because they need it to build lots of things these days. Chávez has donated this money, and thousands of communities have received it, even Indigenous communities.” I found Marco’s comments remarkably astute in part because during my time in Venezuela I was often struck by the lack of reflection on the topic of oil even though politics was discussed with an emotive regularity. Themes of the declining condition of the country, the corrupt administration, increased crime rates, lack of essential products like milk and sugar, and Chávez’s dynamic personality were a standard motif running through almost all exchanges I had with Venezuelans, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Yet very rarely would my interlocutors discuss any of this in relation to oil and its impact on wider political and economic arrangements.1 And so to hear Marco talk so explicitly about oil and the opportunities it generated for Indigenous people was, to my mind, extraordinary. This discussion on the matter, however, was the only time it came up in conversation unprompted. Even though oil goes seemingly unnoticed in citizens’ perspectives of the national economy, it routinely appears in scholarship on Venezuelan political and economic history. By focusing predominantly on the

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petroleum industry and its political formations, however, this literature largely overlooks day-to-day perceptions of oil from the perspective of citizens. The prominence of oil is palpable at the national level in Venezuela, but it also trickles into everyday life in forms other than political rhetoric or oil wealth. It also arrives as petroleum derivatives such as gasoline. What is more, this precious fuel facilitates the informal extraction of gold in remote forested regions of the country. For my Sanema hosts there was something even more unusual going on with relation to these three resources; oil, gasoline, and gold were viewed as preternatural entities situated, or at least partially situated, within a predatory cosmos. The characteristics of these extractive resources were actively and conceptually merged as a means to make sense of the new economic context into which Sanema people were finding themselves rapidly integrated. Now I turn more directly toward market economies and the state, toward Sanema experiences with petroleum-infused citizenship and encounters with small-scale resource extraction in their territory. Although women participate in decision making on these matters, it is the male perspective that now dominates, owing to men’s outward orientation, their education in the cities, their political participation, and their formal and informal engagement in the market economy. Venezuela’s Shadow During the early years of the Bolivarian revolution, growing interest in the nation’s Indigenous peoples emerged side by side with a spike in oil prices and a flood of petro-dollars into Venezuelan public life. The discovery of oil in 1914 was a turning point in Venezuela’s economic history, not to mention popular imaginaries of citizenship and national progress. In Fernando Coronil’s 1997 book on Venezuelan oil wealth, The Magical State, he observes that since its birth the oil industry has been central to Venezuelan social and political life. As an emerging postcolonial state, its burgeoning authority was legitimized by forging a link between the natural body and the political body, between the rich subsoil and the state, and yet this link required a kind of social amnesia among Venezuelan citizens. Simply put, the sources of windfall wealth were kept relatively obscured in order to conjure an illusion of miraculous progress seen to arise from political leaders’ vision and skill rather than from state wealth in petroleum reserves (Coronil 1997, 5).2 Before oil, Venezuela was a geopolitically insignificant state with



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unstable political structures and a markedly subjugated global presence. Life with petroleum was distinctly different; Venezuela became one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels and was consequently catapulted into an era of global resource capitalism.3 The country rapidly entered a new epoch of economic promise marked by social and cultural transformation that had unmistakable impacts on subsequent political arrangements. An orientation toward international markets, particularly in North America, where most oil investments derived, defined Venezuela’s new political direction. In the early years of oil exploration (1908–1914), President Juan Vicente Gómez negotiated concessions with foreign oil companies, and when the oil wealth began to surge in, it provided opportunities for long-awaited industrialization, infrastructural development, and political centralization. The citizenry benefited directly from oil wealth in the form of extremely cheap gasoline thanks to a fuel subsidy introduced by the Venezuelan government in 1945. To this day, affordable fuel is commonly considered a national birthright. Notwithstanding the benefits, beneath the surface, revenues from oil were deepening the already entrenched social and racial stratification that has endured in Venezuela since the colonial era. Gómez granted preferential opportunities to his allies, who were principally domestic elites riding the swell of the oil tide. On the outside of this impenetrable sphere of privilege was a working-class majority that experienced worsening conditions as a result of a diminished investment in and the undermining of agricultural production, which in turn led to weakening labor movements as thousands of rural citizens migrated to the cities to find work, giving rise to a mushrooming dispossessed urban poor. This pattern of wealth disparities continued for many decades after the Gómez era, compounded by cronyism and a restrictive spoils system initiated by way of a 1959 pact to shut down the political Left.4 Private foreign investment resulted in significant wealth leaving the country, but other factors contributed to growing discontent, including strong-arm politics, corruption, foreign debt, and increasingly prosperous middle and upper classes that had exclusive access to oil jobs. Above all, any subsequent political arrangements became circumscribed within this petroleum-fueled backdrop. Venezuela’s political leadership in power since the discovery of oil engaged in a snug liaison with foreign oil companies, such as Dutch Shell, Gulf, and Standard Oil, that then gained immense influence in shaping ideological and lifestyle values among local oil workers, intellectuals, and members of the middle class. They also altered Venezuela’s

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broader political landscape, with interests centered on extensive privatization and other capitalist logics. At the tail end of a short-lived oil boom in the mid-1970s, Venezuela emerged with massive foreign debts tied to anticipated future oil revenues that never materialized. Rather than progressing into modernity as the oil magic had promised, Venezuela yet again took a subordinate place on the global stage. The oil shock of 1983 touched off deepening economic hardships, and by 1989 Venezuela entered a deal with the International Monetary Fund that required neoliberal austerity reforms in exchange for loans.5 The dissolution of several subsidies triggered an inauspicious turn for the Venezuelan population. Adding to a backdrop of falling oil prices and endemic corruption, the government added insult to injury by proposing to eliminate the gasoline subsidy that had been in place since the 1940s, the only benefit many citizens received from oil wealth. The price of gasoline rose 100 percent, and as a result the cost of transportation rose 30 percent. On February 27, 1989, demonstrations and rioting erupted in response to the steep increase in transportation costs for an already struggling population. As protests and looting spread throughout the country over the following days, the government response became progressively more heavy-handed, resulting in thousands injured and hundreds dead.6 The weeklong clashes became known as El Caracazo (the Caracas Smash) and marked a turning point in Venezuelan political history because this oil crisis was what eventually brought Hugo Chávez to power. Following El Caracazo, popular sectors became radicalized, and Lieutenant Chávez, who had already founded a leftist revolutionary movement known as the Ejército de Liberación del Pueblo de Venezuela (Venezuelan People’s Liberation Army), attracted more support at that pivotal time. He led an uprising against the state in 1992 that, although unsuccessful and resulting in his incarceration, boosted his popularity. In 1993 President Carlos Andrés Pérez was impeached on corruption charges, and his successor, Rafael Caldera, released Chávez from prison. Still, neoliberal measures persisted, most notably in the continued privatization of the oil industry, a move by President Caldera known as “the opening” (la apertura). After this cyclone of oil-infused political maneuverings, Chávez was democratically elected to office in 1998. The most significant change instituted after the election of Chávez, and indeed the reason he was able to secure such power and popularity, was his move to regain control over the semiprivatized oil industry that had for decades focused its gaze outward toward foreign interests rather



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than inward toward the nation’s populace. Without control over the national oil company PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.), Chávez would have been unable to gain the political and economic clout necessary to implement his burgeoning socialist agenda. He vowed to dismantle the pro-privatization interests and entrenched patronage ingrained within the organization, but in response, petroleum personnel and political elites staged a lockout to paralyze the oil industry and force a recall referendum of Chávez’s presidency. The oil strike lasted more than a year, and fuel supplies were severely compromised as a result. Again, gasoline became a source of conflict for the population, with knock-on effects in halted mobility, cancelled domestic flights, suspended business and banking activities, and the breakdown of supply chains. But the government finally managed to take over PDVSA in 2003, and thereafter Chávez lobbied fellow members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to reduce oil outputs and ensure that prices remained high. Not long after that agreement, Chávez redirected the country’s oil income toward poor people rather than its previous elite beneficiaries.7 I recount this history of petroleum in Venezuela to move the spotlight squarely onto oil and to thereby demonstrate how a history of Venezuela is a history of Venezuelan oil. Petroleum was just as central to the lives of my Sanema hosts. This is not because they inhabit lands rich in oil reserves, as do many Indigenous peoples in Ecuadorian Amazonia (Cepek 2018), but because oil seeps into political possibilities and civil imaginaries in ways that cannot be overstated. Marco’s insights about oil indicated that my Sanema collaborators experienced politics like most other Venezuelans, as a flood of petroleum-funded resources donated to previously excluded citizens. In this way, their experiences of political inclusion can be understood as a form of “petro-citizenship,” described by Gabriela Valdivia as a political-economic configuration associated with petroleum governance that “shapes not only people’s belonging within the boundaries of the nation, but also political identities through which to claim rights to the benefits associated with national membership” (2008, 457). Sanema people were, without doubt, becoming petro-citizens. Despite the integral positioning of oil within Venezuelan political formations, it was generally not discussed with great depth or frequency among the Venezuelan people I met. Typically, they do not see oil, in part because it is literally not there to be seen and because its power manifests in other influential ways in everyday life, in particular as

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an illusory and miraculous fecundity or a metonymic device (Appel, Mason, and Watts 2015). And yet, the petroleum-derived substance of gasoline emerged periodically as a focal point in the tempestuous history of oil in the country. Venezuela’s gasoline is the least expensive in the world, at less than two US cents per liter in July 2022, astonishingly cheap even after a 1,900 percent price hike introduced in October 2021.8 It is clear that gasoline has evoked as deep a sense of entitlement and as much passion and conflict as the frequently cited magic of oil. Gasoline was at the center of the transformative Caracazo clashes when the price was raised under neoliberal reforms, and on an everyday level its significance was apparent in the commonly and proudly proclaimed quip “In Venezuela gasoline is cheaper than water!” One could say that gasoline rather than oil provides a metonymic centerpiece for all national ills, yearnings, and conflicts. The interrelated phenomena of immense oil reserves and cheap gasoline parallel petroleum’s twofold bearing in the lives of Venezuelans, that is, its rhetorical and tangible omnipotence. What is more, gasoline brings the phenomenon of the oil economy into sharper relief for most citizens as it parallels oil booms and busts, fluctuating between abundant floods that generate deep dependencies to moments of grave shortages that halt mobility and leave scores of people agonizing for its speedy return. In many ways gasoline is the everyday manifestation of the Venezuelan oil-fueled state. Trapped in Gasoline Dependence In Maduaña, gasoline permeated everyday life. Above all else it was used in the ever more abundant machinery, such as outboard motors, generators, grass trimmers, manioc graters, chainsaws, and water pumps, and siphoning fuel into these machines was fast becoming a valuable new skill. Residents of Maduaña spoke of gasoline frequently and with great interest, often in terms of their desire to procure it for use in motors and equipment or for sale at a profit in locations where it was hard to come by. Most importantly, gasoline is associated with and floods in from the state. The more politically savvy Sanema people become, the more gasoline they deal with on a daily basis because arriving at political centers such as Calamonte involves traveling with diesel-powered outboard motors but also because the Venezuelan state lubricates its participatory democracy with large endowments of gasoline and gifts of gasoline-run machinery.



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Indigenous people could access extremely cheap fuel in huge quantities because they were allocated monthly quotas (cupos in Spanish) of the fuel, normally dispensed into several 200-liter drums for each community. This quota of fuel was intended to be used for their outboard motors to enable them to travel to the cities and back, as well as to power the many machines in their settlements. In effect, not only is the Bolivarian revolution funded by petro-dollars from the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, but subsidized petroleum derivatives propel the Indigenous mobility required to participate in that very same political process. What is more, gasoline is rapidly used up in the mere act of procurement, as large quantities are needed to power outboard motors on long journeys to the cities to collect the fuel from the regional gas station. They regularly return to the urban centers for more fuel, which in turn requires more fuel, not to mention further dependencies on the benefits that national society and civic connections provide. In short, Indigenous people use fuel to get fuel. At the same time, political patronage swiftly entraps them in a circulatory system of gasoline collection and usage while their to-and-fro movements bring them right back where they started. It is easy to see why gasoline’s tangible and rhetorical connection to the political and economic context in Venezuela, for my Sanema hosts at least, can hardly be exaggerated. Regular trips to the city were often couched as a search for gasoline, and when in criollo towns, a preoccupation with obtaining fuel was invariably entangled with highly political endeavors. Marco, the most politically sagacious Sanema person I came to know, was also the one most occupied with and adept at obtaining and managing gasoline. This may sound like an odd statement, as one would imagine that obtaining gasoline merely demanded a trip to the gas station with a 200-liter drum, filling it up with gasoline, and arranging a trip back upstream to the community with the stash. But that is far from the case. Supplies at the Calamonte gas station were notoriously erratic. Located on a highway leading to the border with Colombia and serving a large municipality of Indigenous peoples with high fuel demands, the gas station had frequent shortages. Nowhere was this more evident than in the regularly uttered exclamation “There’s no gasoline!” that accompanied periods of stagnation and discussions about inept political leadership. Subsidized gasoline has moreover generated a widespread black market, with an emerging class of diesel entrepreneurs in Cala­ monte accumulating provisions and selling them at elevated prices when

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Young Sanema men in Calamonte siphoning gasoline into cans. Photo by the author.

supplies are low or to smugglers who transport fuel across the border to sell at a profit. In 2014 it was estimated that as much as 14 percent of Venezuela’s gasoline ended up in Colombia (Gallegos 2016, 135), and given that each gas station receives a limited quantity of fuel each week from PDVSA, it is easy to see why such large-scale smuggling caused frequent shortages. Add to this a long list of bureaucratic errands required to obtain a fuel quota, and people can find themselves ensnared in a deeply complex system of procurement. Indigenous Venezuelans seeking fuel in this region must be supported by the local organization Kuyujani, run by the Ye’kwana, who have the jurisdiction to grant communities a place on the official list (la lista) of sanctioned gasoline purchasers that they provide to military personnel installed at the Calamonte gas station. Those traveling with fuel must also compile a dossier of official papers known as la guía that authorizes the transportation of gasoline in large quantities and itself requires scores of signatures and stamps from numerous parties, including the military lieutenant stationed in Calamonte.9 The value of bureaucratic and legislative proficiency comes to the fore in contexts of gasoline acquisition because the procedure necessitates a familiarity with red tape and social links to influential administrative actors, such as government functionaries, representatives at Kuyujani,



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military personnel, and sometimes even the chavista mayor of Cala­ monte. Relations with these powerful people can ensure that one’s name appears on the correct lists and that the signing and stamping of appropriate documentation proceeds without hindrance. This constellation of factors makes the regular search for gasoline highly political. Marco, who once told me that he intended to run for mayor of Calamonte, is a politically oriented person who actively cultivated many Indigenous and non-Indigenous acquaintances, but he was also incidentally the one most adept at obtaining gasoline. It was often evident how social links in Calamonte were entangled with gasoline, whether because fuel enabled one to travel to the towns to develop these associations or because the relations were a means through which one could obtain gasoline. Fuel is political in another sense too: it agitates emerging inequalities within and between communities. The strategies that provide access to fuel are not accessible to all, as is most evident in the Ye’kwana’s control of la lista through their organization Kuyujani and thus their monopolization of the gasoline market. They have the power to support and withdraw at will regional Indigenous applications for monthly quotas of gasoline. Ye’kwana people are politically accomplished and head most of the district ministry offices, as well as holding high-ranking government positions (Lauer 2006), among them the national minister for Indigenous peoples. This, the top-level and most prestigious role an Indigenous citizen can occupy, was previously held by a Ye’kwana woman, Nicia Maldonado. There is no doubt that the Ye’kwana dominate expertise in bureaucratic procedures and political alliances that open up routes to much-desired fuel. But emerging power by way of access to and control over gasoline is also evident within Sanema communities. Some people clearly stood out as those with forever-full barrels, whom others approached to meekly request small quantities for their machinery so they might grate their manioc or take the canoe out on a fishing trip. Those with power to acquire fuel are the people who decide when a trip with the communal outboard motor can or cannot be made and when the community generator will offer light, recharge flashlight batteries, or power the television on which everyone can watch movies. Indeed, this is the problem with nominally communal machinery donated by local politicians for collective use: the essential fuel on which the equipment runs is never entirely communal but rather under the control of those who invest labor in its procurement. I even noticed that over time, certain households were permeated with the smell of gasoline as their inhabitants would hoard

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and hide their supplies indoors, attempting to elude requests that were difficult to deny. I would often hear my host brother Santiago grumbling to himself that there was never any gasoline left because community residents always wanted to eat with the lights on in the evenings. Irregular supplies meant that at times fuel was hard to find and quickly used up, resulting in community tensions that became more palpable in the later months of my fieldwork. Control over diesel supplies indexed emerging disparities in power within the entire community. People like Marco and Santiago who had lived with missionary families as children and spoke fluent Spanish were able to secure state-funded jobs as teachers and government representatives and thus develop a political wherewithal that enabled them to keep their barrels full and thereby control the fuel that fuels social life. Gasoline for Extraction Oil’s power trickles down into daily life in more ways than gasoline quotas. Informal mining sites in the region are also powered by gasoline because the huge machines used to extract gold, each owned by a single criollo man overseeing a small group of miners, run on enormous quantities of the oil derivative. This type of small-scale mining, also known as wildcat mining, consists of illegal incursions of thousands of prospectors into the hinterlands of Amazonia hoping to strike it rich. These clandestine sites of extraction are situated far from any formal infrastructure, weeks upstream in isolated regions of the forest. The large mining machines that guzzle the fuel are aptly known as chupaderas (suckers) and run on two huge motors, one to blast water out at high pressure to break down the soil into sludge and the other to suck the resulting silty water toward the sluice box where the gold is extracted using mercury. A wildcat gold mine like this existed upstream from Maduaña, and though activities remained covert, it was well known to people throughout the region. An abundance of gasoline makes its way upstream into the hinterlands of Venezuelan Amazonia on a daily basis, many 200-liter barrels embarking on a long upstream journey to the now-infamous wildcat gold mine. I once met some tourists who were passing through the region, and they told me how their dreams of an idyllic Amazonian escape had been spoiled by views of nothing but fuel drums. They recounted how their beautiful encampment on a beach below a waterfall was cluttered by



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large barrels. Their nature trek through the forest to the top of the falls followed a busy route for gasoline smugglers, queues of them coiling up the path to the upper reaches of the forest above, 60-liter plastic drums strapped to each one’s back. Many Sanema-speaking people themselves engaged in this work of lugging heavy containers of fuel to the top of the steep incline, a task offered by prospectors or traffickers in exchange for a small quantity of gold. This alone was more wealth than they had ever previously known. Rather than extracting gold directly, my Sanema contacts took advantage of other activities associated with mining, gasoline portage work above all else. Other local Indigenous people sometimes purchased and smuggled gasoline to the mine site because they were able to take advantage of their unique access to large supplies of the fuel. Indigenous settlements already used huge quantities of diesel for their own machines, but the scale of fuel required for mining activities was immense; the equipment was bigger, the demand was higher, and the rewards were greater. Those from politically powerful ethnic groups such as the Ye’kwana and Pemón benefited from privileged access to fuel and so were more likely to be involved in its illicit trade. Selling gasoline at the mine site was a highly prestigious activity that afforded the successful trader the potential to earn impressive wealth. I was not surprised, then, to discover that some of my Sanema friends had also attempted to fill their own barrels with fuel and transport them to the mines to sell to the criollo owners of the hydraulic machinery. Following the 2008 financial crisis and around the time I conducted research from 2009 to 2011, the price of gold was exceptionally high, approximately 350 bolívares per gram, which at the time was around US$40. On top of this, chupadera owners were willing to pay a phenomenal price for a 200-liter barrel of gasoline, reportedly 50 grams of gold for each. One day Marco announced to me that he had calculated that if he could fit ten 200-liter barrels into his canoe, he could sell their contents for an astonishing 175,000 bolívares (US$20,000) in one trip to the mine. I could sense that the cogs were turning as he seemed to be hatching a plan. I have to admit, when he told me his calculation I was shocked; it is a huge quantity by anyone’s standard, let alone for Sanema people, whose access to cash had up to that point been limited, to say the least. Understandably, Maduaña started to buzz with excited talk of the riches that mining could offer. Santiago even jokingly described the nearby mine site as “the Central Bank of Venezuela,” an apt analogy to the abundance that the country’s so-called twenty-first-century socialism

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had initially provided and to the central bank as a reserve merely waiting to be tapped. Once the seed of resource abundance had germinated in his mind, Marco resolved to attempt a gasoline-smuggling expedition for himself. He disappeared in his canoe the following day bound for the Calamonte gas station with his barrels. After many months of hearing excited talk about gold, about riches that were there for the taking, about the opportunity provided by their huge gasoline quotas, I was perplexed to find little change in daily circumstances in Maduaña. If my friends could obtain $20,000 with relative ease, as they presumed, then why was there not more evidence of such prosperity? Where were all the material items they continually claimed they needed? Another outboard motor, new clothes for children, a new CD or DVD player, or a much-desired corrugated iron roof on a brick-and-mortar structure, perhaps? There was very little evidence of money entering individual households. If anything, I was used to hearing disappointed proclamations of their shortage of money or ineptitude in saving up. Marco had even purchased several large items on credit in Calamonte, including a virus-riddled desktop computer whose cost, he declared, he could not afford to repay. I was soon to discover that very little gold money ever ended up in Maduaña. Although Marco attempted several times to transport ten barrels to the mine, he seldom succeeded, in part because fuel cannot be just bought and transported. Gasoline was only procured with and accompanied by difficult-to-obtain paperwork. On one occasion, Marco and his brother Santiago succeeded in filling only three 200-liter barrels at the Calamonte gas station, lacking community permission to buy any more. Marco was committed to supplementing his official provision with black-market fuel, but supplies were running low due to severe shortages at the time, so the price had skyrocketed. Even if he had been able to fill more barrels through informal routes, they would have been highly risky to transport without a guía fuel-transportation license required to ferry them upriver. Try as he might, he could find no more fuel and ultimately decided to just embark on the excursion with the supplies he did have. One of the three barrels of gasoline was used up just in transporting the other two upstream to the mine. Even when he and Santiago excitedly received 100 grams of gold for the remaining two, they had to hand out half of it for portage workers and bribes to pass the military checkpoints. Then, when they managed to return to Calamonte by hitching a ride back downstream, they had debts to pay and more black-market gasoline to



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purchase so they could get back to Maduaña. Marco returned with far less money than he had anticipated. Even so, the unexpected challenges of this new economic opportunity did not stymie the enthusiasm of Maduaña residents who remained pi noniama (seduced) by the magic of these subterranean forces. Nevertheless, as I learned more about mining, I began to notice that there was an undercurrent of something going on here as otherworldly as it was pragmatic. Gold and gasoline were understood to be extremely dangerous substances that comingled in a complex logic of moral responsibility and frightful underworlds filled with formidable spirits. Speedy Gold Although gold has the potential to deliver up immense fortune, it was greatly feared among my Sanema contacts. It was often described as silimo (speedy, apurado in Spanish) because it was easily seized (tili) and generated such an intense desire for wealth that miners eagerly rushed back to the commercial centers to exchange it for cash. Gold, I was told, creates a cyclical existence whereby the speedy squandering of gold money forces prospectors to immediately return to the mine to repeatedly toil away for their treasures without clear signs of advancement. These repetitive movements mirror those undertaken when ensnared in gasoline dependence. In many ways the recurring dissipation of promised abundance, often described as a curse, is common in various global contexts where small-scale mineral extraction is involved (M. High 2013). But the speediness of gold for Sanema-speaking people had an altogether more menacing undertone, and the quick squandering of their wealth was the least of their worries. Gold was described as having a malevolent force pertaining from its pernicious spirit-masters known as the orotil töpö (gold people). These tutelary spirits of gold are said to look after it and enact noa köa (revenge) upon those who remove the mineral from the ground or have it in their possession for any length of time. One of my female friends, Irayda, described the nearby mine site to me once. She had traveled there with her husband to cook for him while he worked portaging barrels from the river through the forest to the mine site. The site itself, she said, was a forbidding place without trees where the earth was wet and soft. When she slept, the orotil töpö entered her dreams and terrified her so much that she pleaded with her husband for them to leave the place immediately. I asked what the gold people do to people and she referred

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to Marco’s wife and her sudden facial paralysis, which had developed a few months prior. That is the sort of thing, she said, that happens to people at the mine. The orotil töpö make bad things happen. Most people describe how orotil töpö are more likely to gain noa köa by attacking family members of miners or those in close proximity to gold rather than solely the miners or smugglers themselves. This deflected form of causality is common in Amazonia, most apparently in couvade, whereby the father must adhere to certain prohibitions to protect his newborn child (Rival 1998a). When a whooping cough epidemic acutely afflicted the children in Maduaña, the women furiously blamed the men who had traveled to the mine and thereafter stayed in the community too long with deadly gold in their pockets. They said the children were ill because the gold was enacting noa köa. When I asked my friend Feliciano about it, he confirmed what the women said: “When you have gold you must leave the community as quickly as possible. It is only when you take it to a trader in the city that you are truly safe.” Another man described a time his father almost died when he had malicious gold in his possession for too long: “I won’t go to the mine because of my father’s experience in the past. He worked for some Ye’kwana men, and they gave him a little bit of gold in payment. He almost died because he brought it to his house and left it there.” What punctuated the Sanema’s apprehensive discussions about gold was its location, that it resides, indeed belongs, beneath the earth. My Sanema hosts see the underworld as a dreadful and ominous place where illness is expelled during shamanic incantations, an action strikingly portrayed in healing sessions when René mimicked scooping something from sick patients and tossing it aside while chanting, “Lute, lute, masitali, masitali!” (It smells bad, it smells bad, in the earth, in the earth!). Many of my interlocutors described the subterrestrial domain as the home to vengeful spirits of the dead (nopolipö töpö) or malicious dwarf cannibal beings known as “the hungry ones” (ohinamo töpö) who emerge from their vile subterranean worlds and voraciously consume Sanema people if puberty rites are not strictly adhered to.10 A baby’s birth directly onto the bare earth is also a bad omen, as it is said to cause lifelong sickness in the child. The aversion expressed toward the underworld was discernable when I was talking about funeral rites with a friend. She looked at me with disgust when I mentioned burial and stated emphatically that one must never bury the people they love but instead “must do what the ancestors did and burn them.”11 It is not surprising, then, that many Sanema people consider their



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participation in mining with some misgivings, as the activity itself invades this menacing telluric realm and greedily removes the gold residing therein, an activity that awakens the wrath of the orotil töpö. Davi Kopenawa describes gold as emerging from fragments of stars that were placed under the earth by the mythical hero Omama because such minerals are “evil and dangerous things, saturated with coughs and fevers” (2013, 282). But the catastrophic falling of the sky during primordial time that marked the inception of the modern era was also followed by the release of all existing illness and suffering, some of which originated from these beguiling but deleterious resources that escaped when the celestial sphere crashed to earth. Although aware of the dangers of unleashing gold, Sanema people nevertheless continued to participate in its extraction and thus the liberation of ever more sickness. Unlike oil or gasoline, gold is unique in that it prevails as part of an older Sanema political and moral schema. It was already a participant in their cosmological worlds and part of their social memory for several generations. Gold people appear in mythology and engage as agentive players in the Sanema’s cosmological surroundings just like game animal spirits-masters and hikula spirit allies, albeit potentially more malicious. In this way, gold is somewhat an intelligible entity for my hosts, evident in the confidently and often uttered phrase “It was the gold people who did this.” Oil and gasoline, on the other hand, were altogether more ambiguous, unfamiliar entities that emerge from national society, criollo people, and the state. For the Sanema of Maduaña, gasoline was surrounded by a great deal of uncertainty precisely because its relational backdrop and reactive capacities were highly mysterious and required a degree of speculative reasoning to elucidate. Fierce Gasoline My curiosity was piqued after my conversation with Marco during which he spoke of petroleum wealth. I decided to actively probe others on their knowledge of petroleum, asking them what it was and where it came from. Most had not heard anything about it. The furthest I got on the subject were a few pondering expressions, with only a couple of people saying with uncertainty and slight frowns that they had heard it comes from the ground like gold. After a time, I gave up asking. I was not entirely surprised by their lackluster responses. Why should they know what petroleum is? Non-Indigenous Venezuelans with their fingers more directly on the political pulse seldom talk of the elusive

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substance. Although it is highly pivotal in political formations and economic arrangements, it is not experienced empirically and rarely, if ever, enters daily life as a material substance for the majority of the population. Gasoline, on the other hand, was experienced very directly and at times viscerally because it was handled almost daily. Unlike petroleum, gasoline was discussed and evaluated with much frequency among my Sanema hosts, sometimes as a functional substance but equally as something far more enigmatic. Being a highly unusual and versatile fluid, it was employed in several occasionally unexpected spheres. Its vaporous potency was harnessed to suffocate the overabundance of cockroaches that scuttle beneath belongings, to set fire to a trail of ants making their way toward a cassava bread stash, to stifle the itch of scabies, to douse feet riddled with chigoe fleas, or to soak the scalp to remove lice. I was shocked to hear that a young man had even drenched a deep machete wound on his wrist with gasoline to “make it better” (hacerlo mejor in Spanish). In addition to these practical capacities, gasoline was also assumed to possess a kind of liveliness beyond mere chemical potency. The volatile and transformative nature of the fluid was often remarked upon but frequently in terms of some kind of capricious and malicious conduct (salia bai), as though skin abrasions and swelling that occurred from frequent contact were caused by its intentional ferocity (waitili). Deo, Anita’s grandson, described a time when he was attempting to prepare a barrel of gasoline for a canoe trip back upstream from Calamonte. “Every time we tried to put the cap on the barrel, the gasoline jumped out,” he recounted to a wide-eyed audience. He laughed nervously and said, “It hurt. It hurt so much. It burned my hands and my face. It just kept jumping out fiercely.” His family tentatively joined in with his laughter, yet the tone was not the usual joy and hilarity Sanema so often express; it was one of notable discomfort, as if they were all wondering what this could signify. Analogous cryptic narratives of the substance declared that it surged and leaped without warning or when left unattended for long periods. I was told it was being used more frequently in vengeance alawalia (spells), during which reactive substances are thrown on a funeral pyre to bring about the agonizing deaths of elusive enemies such as oka töpö. The language used to describe gasoline often resonated with that of stimulants such as tobacco and the hallucinogenic virola snuff, both of which affect mood or consciousness and can even provide a portal



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to other worlds where hikula spirits dwell. The altered states offered by both are granted by their tutelary spirit-masters,12 and although typically my Sanema friends denied that gasoline itself had spirits because it originates from the cities, I was surprised one day to hear a woman talk about the substance rather differently. She stated in passing that “gasoline also has spirits, because when you sniff it, you get dizzy and see men. But they are not men, they are the spirits of gasoline.” I assumed that this knowledge had emerged from her personal experience but also noted that her description made sense according to the logic whereby substances that stimulate the senses or distort perceptions do so because spirits animate them. Gasoline has a striking resemblance to gold in its purported agentive volatility. A few of my interlocutors who remarked on its derivation from petroleum mentioned that it accordingly must have subterrestrial origins. Like gold, its potential to bring about community contentment through wealth obtained when sold to traders is counterbalanced by its pathogenic effects. One example of gasoline’s threat to well-being is when it is used as an intoxicant by Maduaña youth who surreptitiously siphon off small quantities from their parents’ stash. They inhale the substance to “get drunk,” as it was described, a practice also known as huffing.13 On one occasion Héctor and I stumbled across a youth alone in the shadowy corner of one of the houses cradling a small plastic bottle containing the distinctive ochre liquid. A faint smell of gasoline infused the air, and the boy stared at us with a glazed look and bloodshot eyes, stupefied and disconnected. After we left, Héctor confirmed that he was probably huffing gasoline, adding in a disconcerted mumble that he was already almost “mad” (nani) from it. His concern over the boy’s madness was associated with his isolated and foolish behavior. Such teenage self-indulgence might seem inconsequential when laid alongside the risk of child deaths brought about by vengeful gold, but huffing appears less trivial when situated within Sanema concepts of sociality and moral responsibility. The action of gasoline huffing, predominantly undertaken alone or secretly in pairs, exemplified worryingly immoral behavior because it indicated that the youths were slipping gradually away from otherregarding values and toward individualized pursuits of pleasure. This amounts to an inability to see beyond the self, similar to what Eduardo Kohn refers to as “soul blindness” among the Runa: “an isolating state of monadic solipsism” (2013, 117). While certain tasks such as basket weaving and cooking undertaken alone for the good of kin or

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community are acceptable, unjustified isolation from the group is generally discouraged, since extreme and self-imposed solitude is considered improper at best and an indication of impending illness or madness at worst. Much concern, for instance, is expressed over youths who spend considerable time alone in their hammocks. Even though other Amazonian societies such as the Ashéninka intentionally live in dispersed individual households as a strategy to diffuse social tensions that arise when living in nucleated settlements (Killick 2005), in Maduaña this kind of living apart was emphatically discouraged. When Marco was community chief, he actively disallowed residents from building houses a short walk away from Maduaña, as to do so would erode conviviality, as he saw it, and precipitate an inevitable rupture of the community core. Here again one sees how gasoline’s pathogenic effects become more disturbing than inconsequential, all the more so because many of my Sanema interlocutors recognized that excessive exposure to gasoline could cause serious derangement. Bizarre gasoline-triggered conduct was no mere speculation; it was something they had observed firsthand in a local Ye’kwana man who was famous throughout the region for regularly “drinking” fuel. He was, meanwhile, also renowned for his inappropriate behavior, gibberish talk, voluntary isolation, and quick aggression. Often described as “going around without a place and without people,” the man would spend weeks at a time wandering the streets of Calamonte and then would hitch aimlessly from community to community with seemingly no awareness of kinship rules, the importance of sharing, or other social interdictions. As rumor had it, he was abandoned as a child and left on his own, causing him to inhale gasoline in solace, which resulted in his madness and in turn the further intensification of his alienated and anomalous behavior. Despite gasoline’s parallel with other reactive substances, such as tobacco and virola snuff, on most occasions the matter of gasoline’s animate qualities was met with considerable ambivalence, predominantly because criollo cities, the place of gasoline’s perceived creation, are generally considered devoid of occult forces, where forest spirits (salopö iki töpö) do not reside and where even gold is said to lose its occult propensities. Other matitö, industrial goods produced by criollos in Venezuelan cities, similarly lack spirit-masters; they do not “think anything” or “have a heart” because they are “made by men,” as my Sanema friends put it.14 In a comparable instance of existential interpretation but with very different conclusions, Cofán people of Ecuador regard petroleum as the blood of a subterranean being known as coancoan, who, by virtue of



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his underground origins, is considered to have the potential for agentive action (Cepek 2016, 631).15 At the same time, uncertainty and skepticism suffuse Cofán evaluations of oil. For my Sanema interlocutors, while holding similar uncertainties, the question of whether gasoline might originally have emerged from the earth and thus have preternatural propensities seemed to be eclipsed by its rumored transmutation by non-Indigenous people following its initial beginnings as petroleum. And yet, gasoline was still perceived to be linked to oil and hence to have underground origins, thus precluding its straightforward legibility. Much of the apprehension and ambiguity surrounding gasoline surfaced from the many ways it was seen to conform to or contradict the attributes of cosmologically embedded natural and reactive substances, above all gold. At the same time, it was detached from the spheres with which Sanema people are familiar, particularly given its extraordinary and reactive properties and its provenance from criollos. Gasoline seemed to belong to no definitive domain and thus seemingly to any. Distress surrounding fuel huffing compound these ambiguities because illness and demise that do not emerge from vengeful forest spirits are a cause for greater concern, with oka attacks being the most terrifying exemplar, because they have no spirits that shamans and their hikula can track down and slay. Even for people adept in its use, gasoline is somehow unfathomable and never entirely predictable. Predatory Resources Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, a former Venezuelan minister for mines and hydrocarbons and founding member of OPEC, referred to oil as the devil’s excrement, an ill-fated substance that would do nothing more than “bring us ruin” (in Karl 1997, 4). He uttered that statement at the peak of the first oil boom, 1959–1964, and was referring to a familiar pattern of economic collapse in oil-producing nations brought about by inflation, failing democracies, political instability, and corruption. The inevitable demise for petro-states was considered so tenacious that Michael Ross begins his book The Oil Curse with this powerful statement: “Since 1980, the developing world has become wealthier, more democratic, and more peaceful. Yet this is only true for countries without oil” (2012, 1).16 But it is not just oil that is cursed; gold is also seen to be the cause of much misfortune at the local level in numerous global contexts, including for the Sanema of Maduaña. Beyond oil and gold, the oil derivative of gasoline has flooded into

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Venezuelan Amazonia as a consequence of Chávez’s leftist policies that endowed large quantities of the fuel to citizens to guarantee their political inclusion. While this petroleum derivative indexed a particularly generative political milieu, it also brought with it unique and inexplicable properties: volatility, transformability, flammability, and pungency among them. Furthermore, gasoline was a key player in facilitating the release of equally volatile yet potentially advantageous gold. In short, without oil there would be no gasoline, and without gasoline there would be no gold. In many ways, the ambiguities that arise from experiences with gasoline and gold point to a disruption of Sanema moral order resulting from a host of new experiences they were confronting on a daily basis. Not least among them was the unfathomable criollo realm and its miraculous abundance but equally the alienation, greed, and breakdown of social ties that resulted from that new encounter. Yet, everyday experiences with powerful and predatory resources are far more multifaceted and dialectical than this. By traversing the life of gasoline among Sanema people, in its link to the larger political-economic context and in their everyday cosmological encounters with the substance, it is clear that this unique and powerful fuel can offer an alternative view of the magic of oil economies. Experiential encounters with gasoline—transporting, siphoning, huffing, burning—lead to what one might refer to as quasi-animist interpretations that bring it conceptually closer to other reactive and receptive substances, such as gold, tobacco, alawalia, and viola snuff. My Sanema friends would often attempt to ascertain the legibility of one resource with reference to what is known about others. Gold already exists within their cosmological repertoire and so formed the foundation of Sanema ruminations regarding oil and gasoline: their origins beneath the earth, their dangerous or polluting capacities, desire surrounding their procurement, and their animist or quasi-animist propensities. In this light, animism is clearly not “a religion against the state” (Costa and Fausto 2010, 99) after all; quite the contrary, it is a cosmological worldview deployed to render the state and non-Indigenous society legible. Indeed, it is by virtue of Sanema peoples’ fluid and ever-adapting cosmology that the unfathomable (gasoline) can be partially interpreted through the intelligible (gold), bringing to the fore the nondual nature of small-scale cosmological and large-scale economic worlds. Encounters with extractive resources and subterranean forces and the economies from which they emerge are intimately informed by



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assessments of the predatory animist cosmos into which the Sanema are already situated. These resources are predatory in their harmful retaliations, their tendency to bring misfortune, their pathogenic effects, and their capacity to allure prospectors and entrepreneurs with promises of miraculous abundance. In contexts of predation, seduction is often followed by seizure and sometimes even annihilation. Resources are predatory because they take, predominantly lives and the lucid consciousness of the living, while refusing to relinquish what is desired of them. This is fundamentally an appropriation of value while giving nothing in return. In the end, extractive resources continued to bewilder many of my friends, and upon my queries they would merely respond with a dismissive “I don’t know anything about that.” One thing they were certain of, though, was the power of those resources: the metonymic magic of oil, the quasi-animist capacities and miraculous opportunities provided by gasoline, and the risky but staggering wealth derived from gold. These subterranean forces are constituent of the multiple and imbricating predatory economies with which my Sanema friends negotiated daily.

C H A PT E R 5

Invoking the State

Early one morning in May 2010, just after the sun had risen but had yet to burn off the lingering mist, I was jolted from my slumber by an unusual wake-up call. One of the Maduaña residents was standing on the community’s central lawn eagerly shouting through a megaphone about an assembly to be held that morning. It was a meeting, he bellowed, about setenapötöpö nowö, “criollo matters.” Prematurely stunned into an alert state by the racket, I pulled myself out of my hammock and went to ask my host family, already chatting around the hearth, about the unusual style and hour of this overzealous intrusion. Sipping his coffee, Santiago told me that they were going to have a meeting with people from Misión Guaicaipuro who were coming from the city to talk about projects. I knew that the Guaicaipuro mission was one of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian initiatives designed to bring a range of social welfare reforms to poor and rural Venezuelans. One of almost thirty “missions,” Guaicaipuro was the only one specifically created to advance constitutional amendments related to Indigenous peoples and their unique cultural rights, the most prominent being land-title applications and safeguarding against resource exploitation within Indigenous territory. The mission was named after a sixteenth-century Venezuelan Indigenous leader who led a resistance movement against invading Spanish forces and whose image regularly appears in the public sphere as a warrior to emulate. Mission Guaicaipuro, along with the relatively newly developed Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples, was at the time perhaps the most visible incarnation of Bolivarian reforms related explicitly to Indigenous peoples. Calamonte had its own provincial office of the ministry housed in a barely noticeable brick hut where Indigenous representatives would organize regional initiatives and support local Indigenous people in



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their frequent administrative tasks. Ignacio, a Sanema representative who was employed by the ministry and worked in the Calamonte office, told me that some of the functions he undertook there were related to communal councils and some were for the Guaicaipuro mission. He described his job as primarily delivering school supplies and chairing meetings within communities. Although the presence of the ministry offices in Calamonte was discreet, to say the least, one sight that was anything but subdued was its huge metal speedboat languidly jutting out amid a cluster of modest wooden canoes at Calamonte’s river port. Two colossal outboard motors weighed the vehicle down at the back, and the words “Fortaleciendo la Conciencia Revolucionaria de los Pueblos Indígenas!” (Strengthening the Revolutionary Awareness of Indigenous Peoples!) were emblazoned on the sides in red paint. With this powerful message of cultural pride and Indigenous revolutionary consciousness, I was excited by the prospect of finally seeing a red-beret-clad Guaicaipuro representative soaring up the river at top speed toward Maduaña, perched aloft the domineering motorboat with wind in their face. I mused over how they would arrive to deliver an inspirational presentation about reversing colonial exploitation, the importance of providing special rights for Indigenous people, or tips on submitting a land-title application. When the time for the heralded meeting finally arrived, I excitedly glanced across the overgrown playing field from my hut to see that residents were already slowly arriving in the communal house, slouching in hammocks, making small talk, and wearily kicking up the dust as they waited. As I grabbed my notebook to join the other villagers, it occurred to me that so far that morning I had not heard the unmistakable signal of arriving visitors; there had been no groan of an outboard motor escalating in volume as it approached Maduaña. Perhaps they had arrived in the night when I was sleeping, I thought to myself. This would be slightly unusual but not unheard of. Then I realized that I had not noticed any of the other common signs of visitor presence. No loud conversations in Spanish, no excited rush of residents toward the river, no young boys shuffling up the path under the weight of guests’ luggage, no women sweeping the earth floor in the visitor’s house, and no welcoming blast of joyous music. This was all conspicuously absent. As I made my way over to the communal house, my suspicions were confirmed; there were no setenapö töpö or Misión Guaicaipuro representatives to be seen. Their rumored arrival from the city had not materialized, if it had even been intended in the first place. Instead,



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Marco was already pacing the dusty center of the communal structure bellowing the usual exhortations, interspersed with the phrase “We must be organized!” He spoke with a forbidding tone and shook his finger with each emphasized syllable of the Spanish word “OR-GA-NIZARRR!” (to organize). I sat down on the ground next to Héctor, who was dispassionately carving holes into one of the nearby wooden posts with his machete. Marco continued his speech: If the people of Maduaña aren’t well organized, then all the good things we want won’t come, like grass trimmers and machetes. This community is organized and that is why we get gifts like grass trimmers! In two weeks, the criollos will come to put up solar panels. We must be organized! I’m going to take a photo, so everyone must sit together. That is all I wanted to say, nothing more.1 His perfunctory conclusion was a cue to proceed to their task of sitting together for photographs, and as they were doing so, Héctor uttered skeptically that this was for show, a way to demonstrate that they had in fact had a meeting about the matter of solar panels. Shortly thereafter, everyone left to work in their gardens. Merely ten minutes after I arrived, the meeting was already over. Not only had the gathering been unusually short, but it seemed to have nothing to do with Indigenous rights, land titling, or territorial protection. As Héctor had suggested, participants were merely going through the motions; they dutifully listened to the plea to be organized before compliantly gathering for a photo session to mark their presence.2 Perhaps my disappointment stemmed from an expectation that something impressive was to occur, having been awakened so early with such a spirited announcement. But it was more than that. In outward appearance, this gathering took the form of a meeting, but it had none of the elements I had come to expect from meetings, not just the ones I had participated in back home but also ones I had encountered among Venezuelan friends and even Ye’kwana people. There was no discussion, no opinions were voiced, no proposals put forward, no decisions reached. The meeting “about criollo matters” struck me as a simulation, an invocation or summoning of criollo matters by way of a distinctive performance. But this was not just any performance; it was a statelike spectacle. Over time I came to see that this style of meeting was a crucial component of my hosts’ engagement with the administrative rhetoric of the state and an important way to benefit from the opportunities it provided.

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While Indigenous inhabitants of lowland South America today are actively participating in state initiatives and broader economies in various ways, limited formal infrastructure and communication channels give rise to novel representations of those external forces. Many anthropologists have noted how unique forms of localized states continue to exist in frontier regions of the world despite a distinctly weak administrative presence. In such settings, citizens themselves often create their own interpretations and imitations of governance as strategies to obtain rights, resources, and legal privileges (Campbell 2015; Neilsen 2011; Oppermann 2015). Even in its absence, the state can be made to materialize in domesticated form. One could even say that my Sanema hosts invoked the state through their creative actions as a way to bring forth its fecundity. Situated within a broader ethos of predation through acts of seduction and trickery in particular, they conjure state power in distilled forms of statecraft and administrative-cum-ceremonial displays. The state here is a very particular state of their own making, with the concept of being organized central to their attempts at rendering politics legible. Chávez Is My Father! At the hasty meeting about “criollo matters,” Marco clearly stated that the motivation for enacting these statelike practices was the receipt of gifts that ultimately would issue forth. “This community is organized and that is why we get gifts like grass trimmers!” he proclaimed. At the beginning of my fieldwork in 2009, political gifts had already started to trickle into Maduaña, and it was not long before that trickle became a flood. When talking about this arrival of material resources, my Sanema friends often described the source of that flood as a compassionate benefactor in the form of President Hugo Chávez. Maduaña villagers were familiar with this inimitable figure since hearing repeated utterances of his name when taking trips to the cities or when visited by government agents but also because his image was ever-present, appearing on posters, graffiti, television screens, shop signs, and T-shirts all over Venezuela. Even in Ulinuwiña, two weeks by canoe upstream from the nearest town, a poster with an image of Chávez hung in their communal house, placed there by a ministry promotor during one of his fleeting visits. Héctor astutely explained to me that when people use the name “Chávez,” what they actually mean is the Venezuelan government, but there was also something important in the enigmatic persona of Chávez



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himself that figured prominently in Sanema people’s frequent acclamations of state abundance. Upon asking my contacts about Chávez, one of the first responses would always be something like, “He is a criollo who lives far away [iamökö],” a comment often uttered alongside large, sweeping arm gestures in the general direction of the cities. Yet he was not merely a distant criollo with little significance in their lives; he was the one criollo who always “looked out” for them (está pendiente in Spanish). Some described Chávez’s ethnic heritage as Indigenous, which was regarded as the reason he felt a special compulsion to care for Venezuela’s Native population. One man told me, “He is indio, his father was indio. When he grew up, he remembered this. So now he loves indios.” It was apparent that the figure of Chávez was framed in strongly relational terms. While compiling genealogies in Ulinuwiña, I was surprised to discover that two newborn children were named Chávez. In many ways, Ulinuwiña was far removed from state ideologies and initiatives, and so this naming attests to the reach of the socialist regime and its infusion into everyday ideologies and relational dynamics. Naming children Chávez is a significant indication of the president’s diffuse power and influence. More personal still, most of my Sanema friends described Chávez as their father (ipa hawani), to indicate not merely that he was the “father of the revolution” but more specifically that he acts as benefactor whose role it is to care for them in a material way.3 The bestowal of material things is a responsibility specifically undertaken by the paternal figure, as he is the one who travels, trades, and carries out short stints of paid labor. Sanema men who spend time working on criollo farms or portaging gasoline up the waterfalls for the purposes of buying their kin merchandise are described as admirable and caring people. Conversely, those who do not give such gifts are denigrated as inattentive and likened to enemy others or immoral criollos. Fathers of neglected children were regularly characterized with the disparaging words “He leaves his children naked.” The material dimension of fatherly duty is perhaps most evident when people are said to have two fathers, one who “everyone says is my real father” and one whom “I call hapa [Dad].” The one called “Dad” is the one who raised the individual and expressed care through the provisioning of meat and gifts of clothing, shoes, beads, and other items. My research assistant Feliciano described his own situation in this way, explaining that even though in some ways he has two fathers, the one people say is his father was never around when he grew up. Even when

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present in the village, this man continued to neglect Feliciano in food sharing and gift giving. The one he calls “Dad,” by contrast, was close to him when Feliciano was growing up, gave him the meat that made him grow, and supplied him with things he needed, such as schoolbooks and a hammock. The significance of describing Hugo Chávez as “my father” is particularly evident when uttered alongside enthusiastic accounts of changes since his arrival as president. Statements pertaining to his care for the Sanema abounded, such as “Before, no one cared about the Sanema, no one else helped us. But Chávez does” and “When there is an election, you must vote for Chávez. He is our father, he helps us.” Notably, the term pasila palai (help), which is regularly used to describe the help received from compassionate kin, is also now the principal term used for Bolivarian initiatives and projects. Materialized in an identical way to fathers’ compassionate giving, Chávez’s help is interpreted likewise as resources given out of benevolence, exemplified in statements such as “If we work like Chávez, he will be happy and give us more things” and “Chávez sends solar panels and things like that to all people who love him.” Significantly, the compassion goes both ways, as Marco explained when Chávez was first diagnosed with cancer: “I would cry for him if he died. I must, he is my kaikana [chief].” Even so, as Feliciano’s description of his two fathers attests, the paternal figure can fall short of his responsibilities, and Chávez was no exception. Some distant Sanema communities have not yet received Chávez’s pasila palai, and rumors often drift downstream of these faraway forest people feeling angry with Chávez for not alleviating their suffering. On one occasion I showed Héctor some photos of Ulinuwiña, where I had just visited for two months. When seeing the photograph depicting the poster of Chávez conspicuously hanging above residents’ heads as they danced, Héctor stared at it silently for a long time. I asked him what he was thinking, and he described how he noticed that the residents of this community were pebalopai (poor, suffering). Their clothes were dirty and ripped, and they had no “good things” (modern possessions), no outboard motor, no generator, and not even shotguns with which to hunt. He asked me, incredulous, if Ye’kwana people had put the poster there, and I responded that I was unsure. With knowledge of the suffering that people in Ulinuwiña endured, Héctor became derisive about Chávez, mumbling as he stared at the photo, “If I lived in a community that didn’t have any projects and the community received no help from



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A dance in the Ulinuwiña communal house, under a Chávez poster. Photo by the author.

Chávez and there was a poster of him, I would rip it down because he doesn’t help.” Feliciano made a similar comment about his disillusionment with Chávez for not fulfilling his fatherlike duties toward him personally: “Chávez is no good for me because . . . yes, it’s him that gives the money to the community, true, but he’s never given anything to me. He hasn’t given me any money.” In a similar tone, a man angrily interjected during a meeting, “I’m not going to vote again! Chávez sends money and you bought two motors but where are they now? I’ve never even touched these motors, so I won’t vote again!” These affective registers that intertwine with the figure of President Chávez are not unique to the Sanema. Lucia Michelutti (2017) notes how the charisma embodied in Chávez also seeps into the religious and social narratives of his supporters in urban Venezuela. Surfacing alongside this devotional brand of politics are what Michelutti describes as “mini-Chávezes,” regional political figures who replicate Chávez’s sacred revolutionary genealogies by performing a “divine kinship repertoire” (2017, 241). The way my hosts used kinship terminology when talking about Chávez exhibits an analogous “vernacularization” of the state, wherein citizens deploy idioms of kinship and religion to inform popular perceptions of national governance (Michelutti 2007).

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One might even regard the use of these idioms as practices of invoking the state, bringing forth its abundance through affective and evocative performances. Beyond the use of kinship terminology, however, for my Sanema hosts the process of accessing the state and its munificence was also one of other-becoming. Being Like a Criollo It took a while for my Sanema hosts to get used to my curious traits and practices during fieldwork. One of the activities that greatly baffled them was my ceaseless writing (tosokama). Anita often passed into my room when I was jotting down notes so she could collect some fruit hidden from the children, only to stop dead in her tracks and stare at me quizzically as I moved a pen over paper. Many residents of Maduaña knew I was living among them to learn about Sanema people, and some had even heard of other anthropologists who lived with their grandparents in the past. Generally, however, the easiest way to explain why I was in Maduaña was to say that I was a student. This was a concept with which they were familiar, having attended school at the upstream mission community and in Maduaña. With the arrival of the Bolivarian revolution, some also received grants to attend high school in Calamonte, an initiative known as Misión Ribas. But I was not the kind of person they would normally associate with studying, and Marco even remarked once, “You must have started school very late if you are still in school now.” He nevertheless took a particular interest in my perpetual writing, often finding me scribbling up my field notes when he visited me in the evenings. “Always writing! Always writing!” he would proclaim in amazement. “What are you writing about?” he ventured to ask on one occasion, leaning over to glance at what mysteries I had in my notebook. “Oh, I just write about what happens during the day, things like that,” I replied nonchalantly. A few months later, when visiting Marco’s house in Calamonte, I noticed a notebook, not unlike mine, open on a table. Upon glancing at it I saw that inside were pages covered in Sanema and Spanish writing. I asked him what he had been writing. “Oh, just things about my family and what I have been doing,” he said. I could not help but notice the resemblance to my own writing, and in that moment I was reminded of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s description of the Nambikwara chief who mimicked acts of writing he observed in non-Indigenous others to simulate activities perceived to bring forth resources (1955, 350). I had rarely if



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ever seen any Sanema person write much beyond ID numbers and signatures on the copious state project paperwork they were increasingly expected to compile. Nevertheless, in many ways I was not particularly surprised by Marco’s ostensible adoption of this writing performance, if not echoing my actions, then certainly mirroring the perpetual form-filling, letter-writing, and proposal-drafting that typifies the Bolivarian era. The putative emulation of others is a cardinal theme of Amazonian scholarly literature and a core component of the modality of predation. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2011) has suggested that other-becoming is one of the fundamental ways that Amazonian persons engage with the exterior as a means to access and tap into the sources of fecundity they observe there. Michael Taussig describes acts of mimesis not merely as openness to novelty but also “an art of becoming something else, of becoming other” as a means to abduct the other’s power (1993, 36).4 This is a quintessentially predatory act because it is a means to appropriate value from others while evading norms of reciprocity. I had seen this sort of transformative emulation in Sanema encounters with Ye’kwana people in which they adopted many aspects of their cultural practice, physical appearance, and material culture. The Ye’kwana’s response was to proclaim, “The Sanema always copy us!” Sanema people themselves would not entirely deny this claim. Ulinuwiña resident Valentín told me of a festival they performed every year during which the women dressed in bead skirts and danced in unison. When I mentioned that this sounded just like a Ye’kwana ritual, he responded enthusiastically, “Yes, I know! That’s good, isn’t it!” Despite this emulation, I never once heard a Sanema person proclaim that they wanted to become Ye’kwana. On the other hand, I did hear them state vociferously and on numerous occasions that they aspired to “be like the criollos” (setenapötö kua kua wina).5 Marco, for one, frequently spoke about criollos and how he had to learn to be like them in his new orientation toward Calamonte and his participation in state initiatives. He encouraged others to do the same so as not to become “like the old man my father,” referring to René, who “doesn’t understand anything” (jinni mi ipö) because he came from where the forefathers lived. Marco was perhaps the closest to becoming criollo as any other Sanema person I knew, as another resident similarly attested: “He has contacts with everyone, missionaries, criollos, the mayor, the government.” That is indeed why he was elected as the kaikana of Maduaña and the president of the communal council: because he knows

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criollos but also knows how to replicate their practices. Although I never witnessed the process of selecting a leader for Maduaña, I was told that it was one of community agreement, even though those decisions may not always reflect overall harmony. Rumblings of discontent regarding the direction of Maduaña’s communal council projects were always present, with Marco’s brother Santiago being one of the key figures to furtively urge leadership change. He told me in confidence that some wanted Marco removed as communal council president because he was rarely present in Maduaña, intimating that a new leadership election might be in the cards.6 Marco even addressed this matter during one of the village assemblies, having evidently heard the rumors himself. He explained that his absence from the community was necessary for acquiring all the machinery and technology that residents desired. To emphasize his point, he outlined using Spanish terms the difference between a community jefe (chief) and a community líder (leader). Lideres like him and Ignacio, he argued, “bring things from the outside” and thus must devote much of their time to activities away from the community. The jefe, by contrast, was the person responsible for leading internal village matters, such as settling disputes and ensuring that communal spaces were clean, a function he had now decided to assign to another resident while he was away. Marco’s role as líder of Maduaña was also reflected in his political engagement. During the Venezuelan parliamentary elections of December 2010 he took on a serious and driven demeanor, speaking frequently about Chávez and spending most of his time in Calamonte, where he had stuck a chavista campaign poster on the door of his home. On the day of the election, Marco stayed up all night watching the results on his aged and misty television screen, at one point turning to me to explain why he was hopeful that Chávez’s political party might win: People in Sanema communities don’t vote like people in the cities. People in cities vote individually for who they want. In the communities the líder decides who the community will vote for. If I say they must vote for this one, for example, they will obey. If I say, “Vote for Chávez,” all will vote for Chávez. It’s because I am the líder of the community. Besides, if Chávez helps, why wouldn’t you vote for him? Marco’s statement indicates that for Sanema people, voting is not the individual and private decision that the model of liberal democracy



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Maduaña residents learning how to vote in national elections. Photo by the author.

would have it, but a matter of obeying a chosen leader. This should be interpreted not as a form of coercion but rather as another act of emulation, this time of residents taking cues from a knowledgeable líder. Marco fittingly pointed out that the national election was no different; just as one would heed a village leader, voters must express loyalty toward Chávez.7 Maduaña residents followed Marco’s lead, I was told by many people, because he was “the one who knows” (taö öpa). In this instance, he was the one who knew the ways of the criollos, how to travel to cities, how to talk to officials, how to use money, and how to fill out forms. Community leaders are often selected for their skills in simulating the actions of powerful others in this way. But Marco had not always been so adept in this criollo emulation. He admitted that although he obtained a formal education when living with an evangelical foster family in a coastal city in the north of Venezuela, he “knew nothing, nothing about the government and voting” before he moved to Maduaña. It was only when he started regularly traveling to Calamonte that he began to gradually pick up the skills.

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By the time I met Marco, he had learned to be like the criollos so well that he was teaching others to do the same. Prior to the Venezuelan parliamentary elections in 2010, he made sure that several Maduaña residents had registered to vote at the municipality, and the day before election day he filled a canoe with voters and took them down to Cala­ monte, where he led them through an impromptu training in democratic procedures. He showed them how to line up outside the polling station, how to locate the correct party logo among a multitude of others on the ballot, how to make their mark beside the distinctive red letters “PSUV,” and how to dip their fingers in election ink when they finished. He gathered the voters around him to point out the PSUV logo on the sample ballot, ensuring that they were aware it was only by making their mark next to the red logo with the star that they could continue to receive the gifts to which they had become accustomed. Success in political participation and the attainment of state abundance are achieved most notably through the technical skills of mimesis, that is, modeling the behavior of powerful others. One of the principal ways that mimicry is accomplished is through a particular interpretation of “being organized.” Learning to Be Organized As was clear in the perfunctory meeting about solar panels, any discussions about Bolivarian projects, Chávez, or socialist missions were peppered with the word “organize,” appearing like an exclamation point at the end of every performative utterance. It struck me as odd that my Sanema friends should use this term so frequently and emphatically, as though they were enunciating a newfound concept or a ritual incantation. Evidently swayed by popular portrayals of Indigenous political mobilizations, I assumed at the time that what Amazonian people did best was organize. But when I noticed that my Sanema research collaborators were “learning to be organized,” as they put it, I soon discovered that it was not such an inherent value as I had first presumed. Among my Sanema hosts, the term organizar was deployed to encapsulate their rationalization of the very particular state with which they were gradually becoming acquainted. This term did not emerge out of the blue but as part of the paradigmatic language of Bolivarianism in its promotion of endogenous development through grassroots community organizing. The term appears frequently in propaganda, paperwork,



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television programs such as the weekly president’s talk show Álo Presi­ dente, and even in the updated constitution. The idea that one must learn to be organized is deeply inculcated in the Bolivarian ethos, evident in the various free workshops, some that my Indigenous contacts themselves attended in locations as far as Cuba, that purport to train citizens in community organizing skills. Even Indigenous peoples needed their “revolutionary consciousness” strengthened, according to the text painted on the side of the Calamonte ministry boat, despite being a sentiment somewhat inconsistent with the assumption that they represent an “original Indigenous socialism,” as Chávez once stated. Politically savvy Ye’kwana people use the term “organize” frequently, even on occasion to distinguish “good Sanema” (“This is a good place. The Sanema here have learned to organize”) from “bad Sanema” (“They are not organized”). Whether consciously or not, the Sanema of Maduaña likewise made the connection between the state and this popular vernacular of collective coordination. Frequent avowals on the merits of organizing were uttered during each meeting about pasila palai, an example being Marco’s declaration: “Chávez is a good man, he gives us lots of things. He works well in the city; he makes communal councils. You must work well like him. Organize the village!” Tellingly, the trope of “being organized” was performed side by side with the regular receipt of gifts, as though one generated the other.8 The word organizar was invariably uttered in Spanish, evincing the foreign origins of the concept. This is to suggest not that Sanema-speaking people are unorganized but rather that the idea of arranging unrelated parts into a united and unanimous whole is in some ways an imported idea. Historically, large groups of unassociated people could in theory be brought together in collaboration but only infrequently and with some form of incentive. The word for “work” among the Sanema, tadamo, has a similar history, derived from the Spanish word trabajar, which was introduced by missionaries in the 1980s. Prior to the arrival of this concept, labor was organized around kin cognatic and affinal obligations that comprised the dominant relationality of community life.9 When family groups needed to undertake labor-intensive tasks such as felling trees for garden sites or constructing thatch roofs, reciprocal work parties would be arranged in which surrounding communities were invited to help in exchange for copious offerings of manioc beer and the cheerfulness and flirtation that inevitably ensue. The implicit expectation was that help would be offered in return at some point in the future.

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When missionaries arrived, settlement organization shifted kincentered obligations to broader associations with numerous “others,” people whose kinship links were more distant but whose spatial proximity suddenly shrank. Everyday conviviality required immense effort to maintain because would-be affines remained permanently “potential.” That is, they did not necessarily become true affines related through marriage, but nevertheless inhabited the same space through missioninstigated coresidence.10 Thus, village inhabitants had to be regularly and actively united in novel ways, and crucially without the now-forbidden stimulant of manioc beer, for the new collective good that missionaries were advocating. This was achieved with tadamo. I was often told by my Sanema interlocutors that tadamo was a new term that missionaries brought to introduce the idea of collective work for the benefit of everyone, such as clearing weeds from the central lawn, repairing the roof of the church, and tidying up the school classrooms. Unlike traditional work parties, in which alcohol was offered as an incentive for helping people in their individual pursuits, such as clearing trees for their household gardens, community work (tadamo) was assumed to be for the good of all and thus did not require payment in the same way. Marco often described this form of work in Spanish as colaboración, collaboration. It is for these same reasons that Chávez was frequently described as “working,” in particular “working well” or “working for the Sanema.” Work, in this sense, is framed as a virtuous act connoting an aesthetic orderliness but also collective organizing for the common good that could in turn lead to an advancement in material abundance and collective well-being. This was made evident when people contrasted an organized and hardworking community with the directionless wayfaring of the forefathers, who were said to rove around like peccaries. Marco voiced this sentiment during one of his meeting speeches: “You should not live like peccaries. Peccaries walk wherever they want without working at all.” Christian evangelism and Bolivarianism thus brought with them a new constellation of social, ethical, and material practices that emerged simultaneously, among them a multifamily community structure, the influx of much-valued goods, and the introduction of the notion of the wider collective. As such, tadamo and organizar have moral connotations beyond mere practical labor and allude to new forms of cooperation with people who had previously been categorized as “others” (“not my people”) at best and as enemies at worst. In this light, it is easy to discern how the concepts of tadamo and organizar promote a new, broader



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frame of responsibility toward non-kin: affinal others and community, but even Venezuelan society as a whole. The explicit manner by which Bolivarianism creates collective mindfulness is through continual rhapsodizing about organizing a group of unrelated parts, an arrangement exemplified by the communal council projects. Marco put it this way: “Socialism means that everyone gets equal help. Chávez thinks this way [kaikana hidu tapui]. He himself said, ‘We’re all going to unite.’ There are no poor, no rich, no blacks, no indios. We are all equal.” Socialism, Marco said, promotes a particular notion of collectivity wherein all citizens are equal, with common goals and responsibilities. Bringing Forth Fecundity Although the desire for schooling has been recognized as a principal reason for establishing larger, collective, and more sedentary communities in many Amazonian contexts, among the Sanema of Maduaña it was the communal councils that became the main incentive for creating permanent communities.11 It was also the reason Marco refused to allow families to break away and form small satellite settlements a short distance from the central core. “In Maduaña I don’t want people to live apart. We live together!” he frequently exclaimed. Funded by the state, communal councils were legally established collectives that were expected to develop and oversee their own projects. After passage of the Law of the Communal Councils (Ley de los Consejos Comunales) in 2006, a large number of Indigenous communities began to set up communal councils in their forest settlements in order to receive funds to build schools and clinics, develop cash-crop initiatives, and purchase collectively held machinery.12 But before they could do that, they needed to self-identify as bounded, state-sanctioned, and legally recognized communities. For Maduaña, that meant becoming officially registered at the municipal government offices in Calamonte before the residents could apply to set up their own communal council. Once established, communal councils confer decision-making and managerial powers to citizen assemblies that are led by an elected executive body consisting of a president, a vice president, a secretary, and a treasurer.13 Much like other forms of community institutionalization, these legally defined groupings inculcate values of self-governance through administrative, legal, and bureaucratic procedures developed to be recognizable to state officials but that also dictate a precondition for accessing public funds. I was told that the Sanema term for community

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was uli (place), but it was noticeable that the Spanish word comunidad was used in talking about matters related to wider political and administrative endeavors. Among the most tangible ways that residents of Maduaña organized and substantiated their comunidad in the state-inspired sense was by holding regular meetings (reuniones in Spanish). It was particularly revealing that around the time that Bolivarian prosperity was at its peak in the years of my fieldwork, meetings and the “organize” rhetoric repeatedly and frenetically escorted incoming wealth at every turn. Community leaders would emphatically state, “Everyone must come and listen to meetings” and “Meetings are for the people.” A young, aspiring leader of Maduaña told me that meetings were a recent phenomenon and their absence a clear way to distinguish upstream waitili (fearless) others from “civilized” downstream people. “Sanema people never had meetings before,” he said. “My father’s people didn’t have chiefs or meetings. They didn’t have a place. They moved around all the time. They basically lived in their gardens. Those people were all waitili, even the women, and they liked to kill people. When they fought there was no chief to solve problems.” Before the arrival of modern forms of statecraft advanced through the medium of reuniones, earlier forms of information dissemination took the form of impromptu gatherings known as wöoti that were often held after a traveler returned from a long trip away. These informal crowds, some of which I witnessed during fieldwork, were far more animated; the audience would laugh and regularly interject excited comments amid a hubbub of energy. Even in more somber gatherings to resolve conflicts, the format was more dialogical than hierarchical, albeit with an obligation to allow speakers to complete their oration. New forms of wöoti that now include church sermons and the state-simulated reuniones have a different aesthetic and purpose. One speaker drones on at length, interspersing monologue with bellowed exclamations. Although there are occasional opportunities for comments at the end, the audience generally remains mute and detached, signaled by their distracted fidgeting and general air of disinterest. Meetings run by Ignacio, the Sanema promotor for the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples, provided examples of these kinds of statelike enactments. When I asked him what Indigenous promotores for the ministry do, he said quite explicitly, “My job is to tell Indigenous peoples to organize their communities, tell them how to work well, tell



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them how to do socioproductive projects.” The commanding nature of his role was notable, with any hint of discussion or negotiation largely absent. Like the listless gathering I witnessed about solar panels, Ignacio’s meetings seldom centered on organizing as a strategy for political recognition, democratic processes, or multicultural initiatives. Rather, the themes were amorphous with little or no concrete agenda. At other times they would focus on very tangible although somewhat digressive topics that seemed to be quite baffling. The most popular theme at the time of my fieldwork was that of a community bank account independent from the communal council bank account, which was discussed on several occasions in repetitious and drawn-out homilies. During one such meeting Ignacio exhorted the following to a weary audience: We must open a community bank account. We must advance the community so that the Ye’kwana say that the Sanema are well organized. In this way we will be rich. But first we must open a bank account. That’s the only thing missing. Do it like Chávez! Chávez makes communal council projects for poor people; he helps people who don’t have money. Do it like him! The only thing missing is the bank account. With this, the people can work united in the community. They will be organized. So, I am talking about opening an account so that people will work united. Following Ignacio’s protracted speech, residents were permitted to respond, and several people piped up with skepticism or disregard. One man shouted, “Speak quickly because I need to work on building my house. You don’t pay us anything, so why did you come to make a meeting?” The audience erupted in animated laughter at his remarks, and Ignacio’s countenance immediately betrayed his awkwardness. Another man responded cynically that he had tried to open a bank account once but had journeyed all the way to the city to withdraw money, only to discover that it contained a mere eight bolívares (at the time approximately one US dollar). Others were more conciliatory, stating that a bank account could bring benefits that were previously inaccessible. Marco’s brother-in-law José said, “Before we came here to Maduaña there was a lot of illness but there was no medicine. The women cried and they didn’t have clothes. Now we are close to Calamonte, we must accomplish what Ignacio is saying. We must do this for our children.” Another participant emphasized his willingness to comply with taö öpa,

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those who know: “What I know is how to hunt monkeys, nothing more. I don’t know how to open accounts. You know, Ignacio. If you say so, I will trust in this.” He turned to the audience and added, “You all must trust him too!” For my part, as the meeting unfolded, the question that continually returned to my mind was the source of the funds. The discussion was notably tied to the objective of being organized and united, as the contents of the bank account were assumed to be used for communal purposes. Yet, the debate was bizarrely abstracted from the topic of money or budgets. At one point, Ignacio did suggest that funds from mining activities or sales of baskets could be deposited, but overall there was very little mention of what money would fill the bank account and where it would come from. The following day I asked Héctor if he knew what money would be used, and he responded after a pause that he too had no idea. What was clearly being expressed here was the act of joining efforts for the social good, creating a collective reserve that might act as a safety net for all residents during times of need. That is a quintessentially socialist ethos or a Bolivarian one at any rate. But it was also something my Sanema hosts struggled to grasp, perhaps because the focal point was money rather than any form of labor, and very few had funds to contribute. What also added to the air of ambivalence was the notion that the community as a whole could simultaneously contribute to and claim rights over a single reservoir of wealth, not to mention that their equal access was somewhat dubious. In truth, a notion of the collective is not quite what it seems in Amazonia. The value placed on autonomy means that a form of commons can exist without absolute equivalence between its members (Walker 2020). By extension, one could argue that consensus, such as that required for representational democracy, is a tricky process in lowland South American societies because a decision based on compromise reached by the group as a whole is contrary to this ethos of autonomy. In the same way, even though participants spoke little during meetings in Maduaña, the ethos of Bolivarian reuniones asserts that everyone should be allowed to have a voice, which translates into providing one’s personal viewpoint for discussion. My Sanema hosts typically reserved personal opinions for the private domain. Offering one’s opinion in a public setting, particularly if responding to other positions, impinges on the autonomy of those contributing and could explain why people generally refrained from debate during meetings.14 Moreover, people



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would generally defer to the ones who know, as Marco had indicated with reference to voting. Incongruities quite plainly emerged in the process of negotiating the democratic model of representative authority and collective unity promoted by imported ideologies of self-governance. This became evident when a woman uttered disdainfully with respect to Bolivarian projects, “Communal councils don’t help the people. They only help the community.” This comment may seem paradoxical, particularly the idea that the community and the people should be at odds, but it demonstrates a tension between an abstract, wider collective and the immediacy of compassionate kin ties such as those epitomized in proclamations of Chávez’s paternal connection to them. From Marco’s perspective, leaders regularly faced challenges in this regard. He once complained to me that communal councils were difficult to run because people misunderstood their collective purpose: “I try telling people that communal councils are for the community, but they always fight over stuff. ‘I want my own motor! I want my own motor!’ they all say. They don’t understand how communal councils work.”15 The idea that a community is an organically emerging entity should thus not be considered self-evident. Rupert Stasch (2009) has deconstructed assumptions behind the concept of community among the Papuan Korowai, noting that in this context society is defined by the hard work invested in uniting a multitude of others. Even relatedness arises from qualities of strangeness and separation rather than sameness and unity. The collective in Amazonia should likewise not be viewed as a given, certainly not the ways that state-sanctioned communities are circumscribed (Buitron 2020; Rosengren 2003). Rather, comunidades are formed through an ongoing negotiation with and a domestication of consensus, participation, and unification. When it came to Maduaña’s bank account, I was intrigued that the process of opening the account was described as though the act itself was generative in very much the same way as holding a lightweight meeting or utilizing state jargon. These actions alone were seen to bring forth fecundity, so much so that lack of participation denied access to such resources. Those who frequently refused to attend meetings were disparaged for their disengagement, and it was suggested that they should not be allowed to benefit from state provisions. Opening a bank account was representative, like the performance of meetings themselves, of collective organizing and unity, specifically so that the community could improve or advance. By the end of that meeting, most residents agreed

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to follow Ignacio’s suggestions and open a bank account for the good of the community and, crucially, to represent their competence in being well organized for the benefit of external observers. Invoking the State My research collaborators discussed the state and its abundance daily, yet their engagement with its collectivist ideology appeared unusually perfunctory, disconnected from the so-called revolutionary awareness of Indigenous peoples, and perhaps even at times well-nigh ritualistic. What little they encountered of the state in their remote locale was translated and simulated in creative ways. When it came to enacting state principles and objectives, they did so predominantly by means of regular reuniones during which they periodically grappled with new concepts, most notably the idea of becoming an organized collective. Meetings in Maduaña did at times yield some achievements, among them minor discussions on what projects they might want to implement in their communities, logistics in relation to bureaucratic errands, and plans for trips to Calamonte, while most major decisions were made outside the assembly context, often around Marco’s family hearth or in his home in Calamonte. Even so, Maduaña residents continued to consciously pinpoint and perform the scenario best suited to bringing forth the desired resources, whether by taking photos as evidence of meeting attendance, opening a community bank account, or enacting their own state rendering through proclamations of collective organizing. Patrick Wilson (2010, 221–222) has noted that among the Napo Runa, grassroots organizing is arranged in response to the receipt of resources rather than preceding them. My Sanema contacts took this same approach, or perhaps one could describe “organizing” and the inflow of goods as mutually generative. And gifts did frequently materialize as a result: the solar panels did eventually arrive, as did laptops, soccer gear, manioc grating machines, a metal boat, and many other items. Whenever such gifts appeared in the community, residents would crowd around and proclaim proudly, “Now we are organized!” The way I see it, the residents of Maduaña brought forth the state’s promised abundance through meeting renditions and distilled depictions of collective and organized arrangements. The content of meetings and any political ideology therein was secondary to the performance of the genre. Comparable with strategies deployed when hunting, Sanema



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people intimately studied the habitat and behaviors of the state and its representatives in order to mimic them (horomai) and thereby draw them close. Meetings and the accompanying rhetoric of organizing sustained a mimetic faculty and provided a way of presenting duplicates of a state prototype. My Sanema hosts were invoking the state on their own terms to refract its administrative spectacle. “Invoking,” in this sense, refers to the measures taken to actively entreat the emergence of state fecundity as well as to a statelike performance that is in many ways akin to the mirroring of missionary-style prayers or the seduction of hikula spirits. Though largely dismissed as an exoticized analytical frame of citizenstate interactions, cargo cults no doubt come to mind when hearing of these quasi-magical acts of state conjuring. In Melanesian cargo cults, ritual communications with powerful ancestors were performed to stimulate the arrival of boatloads or planeloads of manufactured goods. Among the Sanema of Maduaña, invoking the state through horomai, a mimicry of conventional administrative forms and popular rhetoric, could be viewed as an analogous strategy to magically bring forth state abundance in ways similar to cargo cults.16 Many scholars, however, have observed that what has often been labeled “cargo cult” could be seen as a broader strategy of appropriating the value that emerges from the powerful yet abstracted exterior.17 This is the definition of predation. While cargo is often portrayed as a form of resistance to or parody of modernity’s depravity, the Sanema of Maduaña instead domesticate the state when faced with its demand for a rhetoric of organizing to which they obediently albeit cynically adhere. This is not a case of being “governed from a distance” (Foucault 1991), but invoking an abundant but distant state through a form of what Morten Neilsen (2011) describes as “inverse governmentality,” a process by which citizens invent statedefined arrangements in its absence. Alice Street (2012) describes this as a way that citizens compel the state to “see them.” Statelike representations actively generated by my Sanema hosts have been reframed within their predatory hunting ethos, their venatic logic, whereby tactics of seduction, trickery, and entrapment are deployed to obtain the desired bounty.

C H A PT E R 6

Forest Papers

“I finally have it!” Marco said, grinning at me knowingly. I looked down at the source of his excitement, but all I could see was a stack of nondescript papers with the usual printed passages, signatures, and stamps. Granted, they were neater than any other stack of papers I had seen in Maduaña, most of which were torn, crumpled, or covered in dust. These were clearly official in some capacity, neatly organized and held together with a paperclip. A small photocopy of an ID card on the top displayed a faded image of someone I did not recognize, and beneath it lay several stamped and signed layers of immaculately preserved forms, letters, and receipts. As I turned over the copy of the ID stapled on top, I read the words “Guía de Control de Circulación de Combustible” on the cover sheet.1 “This is the guía!” he told me excitedly. It dawned on me then that this was the paperwork Marco had been striving to obtain when he had, months earlier, resolutely departed Maduaña with his barrels, determined to find fuel to sell at the mine. “Now I can peacefully pass the military with my gasoline,” Marco said as he beamed triumphantly. He was clearly relieved by the newfound freedom facilitated by this paperwork, as it authorized him to journey up rivers with large quantities of gasoline in his possession. But this guía paperwork also powerfully indexed two pertinent new phenomena in Amazonian life: bureaucracy and extended mobility. My hosts were always moving about: down to Calamonte, back up to Maduaña, upstream to other communities, back down to the waterfalls, near the mine site, back to the city, and so on. This was life for them now. Even though mobility among Sanema people has roots in the long-practiced pursuit and appropriation of fertile exterior knowledge, a new set of movements, prompted and necessitated by the current political setting and its bureaucratic demands, was also emerging. Venezuela’s all-pervading state cultivates self-governing individuals who identify as citizens of a nation, and it is often only by participating in its

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administrative rituals that citizens can reap the benefits of this abundant state. What is more, mobility was as important as literacy when navigating the ever-present bureaucratic state apparatus because mastering paperwork techniques requires extensive journeying, corporeal movements, and social maneuverings. Marco’s complex journey that led him to this moment with the guía meanders through the workings of Venezuelan politics and through an apprenticeship in government administration that began with his self-education in the customs of Bolivarianism. These organizational skills provided many benefits, but at the same time they generated a great deal of frustration and eventual failure because bureaucracy grew into a predatory tangle of abstruse and complex surveillance procedures in which Marco and many others became bewilderingly ensnared. This is the unusual world of forest papers. Governance in Motion During an interview with one of my research collaborators, I asked him what the future might be like for Sanema people. He paused thoughtfully before responding, In the future we need to do papers better, like the Ye’kwana. They have their secretario, the person who knows how to work with computers. In the past we wanted to make our own organization like Kuyujani, but we couldn’t do it because we don’t understand papers and don’t know how to write on a computer. So, we failed. But if in ten years’ time we all know how to write well, then we will create an organization like Kuyujani. It struck me that the future of well-being for this Sanema man was presented as a future of literacy but also of bureaucratic prowess, of being competent on a computer and successfully enacting the role of secretary, the elected position undertaken by those dealing with government-funded project administration. Maduaña was one of the first Sanema communities to establish a communal council, in 2007, and to gradually develop a level of political, bureaucratic, and managerial proficiency, even if community members were far from confident in their abilities. In truth, paperwork was a manifestation of the state that baffled them above all else, despite many attempts to “tame” it (pi noniama).



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Various scholars have argued that bureaucracy is the state’s linchpin, that mundane bureaucratic procedures are the medium through which the state “comes to be imagined, encountered, and reimagined by the population” (Sharma and Gupta 2006, 12). In thinking about the state’s administrative apparatus, many anthropologists have deployed Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality (1991), in which he explores the way the state fosters a self-governing citizenry who conduct themselves in alignment with broader political objectives. In the contemporary economy of neoliberal governance in particular, the analytical frame of governmentality has been modified to take into account the recent seepage of corporate ideologies and configurations into the state apparatus, a set of principles and practices described as “audit culture.” Although the practice of auditing emerged originally from the field of finance, Marilyn Strathern (2000) notes that the associated values of monitoring and efficiency for the purposes of producing high yields now permeate all areas of life, from the private sector to public institutions and from international affairs to nongovernmental organizations. Like governmentality, audit culture is an organizational rationality that renders citizens intelligible and obedient, but its processes of legibility center specifically on mechanisms of standardization, inspections that foster values of accountability, and numerical indicators that become normalized in everyday life (Shore and Wright 2015). David Graeber goes so far as to suggest that these bureaucratic techniques that blur the line between public and private power and whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profits should be described as “total,” as in, all-encompassing, but also as “predatory” (2015b, 18) in that they appropriate value from citizens. Such administrative regimes of self-governance are not as far removed from contemporary rainforest life as one might think. In just one example, conservation projects run by NGOs in Ecuadorian Amazonia sought to transform Cofán people into “environmental subjects” through standardized administrative activities such as data collection, monitoring, and calculation, all of which reflected exterior knowledge systems that prioritize universalizing procedures (Cepek 2011).2 These techniques ultimately failed because the projects were bereft of mutuality, and skeptical Cofán participants ultimately retained agency in the face of attempts to modify subjectivities.3 Governmentality in Amazonia can take other forms, too, most notably in an introduced set of highly formulaic spatial, civic, and corporeal arrangements that exemplify the

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ideologies of rationalization. Whether in the systematic administrative ceremonies of soccer tournaments (Walker 2013a), orderly community spatialization (Killick 2008), or the methodical corporeal activities that formal schooling inculcates through donning a school uniform, lining up outside classrooms, and reciting national anthems during flag ceremonies (Rival 1996; Tassinari and Cohn 2009), all entail standardizing procedures that espouse new forms of self-governing citizens. In Venezuela, the Bolivarian ideology does not always play out in the multicultural activities that it purports to embrace but rather unfolds as a kind of standardized and universalized audit culture found in other Amazonian contexts. Bolivarian politicization is by all accounts an organizational form of participatory democracy involving paperwork, portfolios, censuses, meeting minutes, and project management. In addition to this, administrative tasks were undertaken on a distinctly small scale; Sanema people had their heads down, attention squarely fixed on the close-range minutiae of local tasks and papers that they repeatedly had to fill out as engaged subjects. Infrequently were their sights set on bigger-picture matters such as the indigenous organizing we see in other Latin American contexts. One important outcome of Bolivarian normalizing bureaucracy among Indigenous citizens is an acceleration and extension of their mobility as a result of gifts of outboard motors, prolific political activities in the cities, grassroots development projects that require regular errands, and frequent paperwork submission. All these factors require them to move about faster and more frequently. Communal council paperwork is an important medium through which mobility is fostered but also through which obedient and self-governing citizens are produced. But these administrative procedures did not always end well. For most of my contacts the results were invariably disappointing. Even if they succeeded in completing the papers in the short term, the bureaucratic procedures invariably became more opaque and convoluted as time went on, resulting in anxiety, frustration, and failure as the most common outcome in the long term. Though people were seduced by the promises of what the paperwork could potentially provide, most participants ultimately became ensnared in predatory procedures they could no longer master. All was not lost, though. There was another unexpected outcome of bureaucratic procedures that facilitated a wide range of opportunities peripheral to state patronage. The maneuverability that paperwork facilitated provided Sanema people with new possibilities in mining



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Sanema women, dressed up and lined up with their children and documents to collect school supplies. Photo by the author.

ventures. This is because bureaucracy was more than just documents; it was a unique set of daily corporeal and social practices that accompanied writing. Chasing Authorization The moment Marco showed me his guía paperwork marked the pinnacle of his bureaucratic trajectory. The confidence and skills necessary for him to reach that point were a result of many years of rehearsing the art of bureaucracy, a prerequisite for participating in Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution. Still, Marco’s new paperwork was rather incidental to the Bolivarian enterprise. Referred to locally as “la guía,” the documentation that Marco was so happy to finally have in his possession was a state-conferred dossier of forms that confirm legal procurement and transit of goods, in this case, bulk quantities of gasoline. Officially, the guía proves that barrels of gasoline were purchased legitimately as part of a government-authorized monthly quota allocated to Indigenous communities for use in their communal machinery. It was normally distant upstream communities that were granted guías, particularly those with many machines such as large Ye’kwana communities, because they required more fuel to journey longer distances with their outboard motors and would stock up to reduce the number of trips required.

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In reality, however, gasoline is not used for community purposes alone, and this specific paperwork was just as frequently sought to facilitate the free passage of copious quantities of fuel to the gold mine upstream. Now military checkpoints are dotted periodically along the riverbank in an initiative to mitigate illegal mining, and when anyone traveling upstream is stopped for checks, military officers ask to see their paperwork. Dreams of gold wealth were not as easily realized as they first appeared to be because the military were on high alert for any suspiciously stockpiled or unaccounted-for fuel that could be commandeered by them at any moment. Sometimes even monthly quotas were temporarily revoked. As a result, some communities struggled either to buy (without their quota) or to transport (without a guía) substantial quantities of the precious fuel. Even if they were able to purchase it on the black market, without the guía gasoline’s mobility was significantly hindered. I was often present in Maduaña’s canoe when we were flagged down for inspections, and the air of suspense palpably stiffened everyone’s demeanor as we approached the checkpoint. At times we were all asked to disembark the canoe, and sometimes even to empty out our belongings so soldiers could conduct a thorough search. The young military personnel towered imperiously over my Sanema companions, who sat clustered at the river’s edge. Rather than expressing any suspicion, though, most of the soldiers looked bored or dispirited, as though resentful that they had drawn the short straw in their remote deployment. Their listlessness was accompanied by an air of aloof self-importance as they gazed nonchalantly into the distance while their Sanema interlocutor spoke with meek and pleading tones, searching their faces for an empathetic glance. “This is all the gasoline we have to last us until next month,” the Sanema man would explain. Sometimes the supplication worked, though now and then an elaborate story was also required and often even a bribe. But everyone knew that without the guía, gasoline supplies could be confiscated at any moment, indicating why the document was so highly valued. This is how I came to find myself accompanying Marco on one of his trips to Calamonte in search of this much-sought after paperwork. I joined him in his diligencia, an increasingly common Spanish term used to describe administrative errands, only to find that the days passed with agonizing official inactivity. “Paperwork, paperwork, so much paperwork,” Marco grumbled on one of our days of diligencia. His complaint seemed ill fitted to our idleness as we swayed in our hammocks doing next to nothing. Even more peculiar was the lack of actual paper, in



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that he had spent almost no time up to then filling out forms. When I pointed this out, he explained that he was looking for someone who had a guía they would be willing to sell to him since he had exhausted all other avenues to obtain his own. I did notice that he spent many days walking around Calamonte visiting contacts he had come to know when living in the town, asking if they might be able to help. Some directed him to people they knew, and those people directed him on to others still. Several gave him a glimmer of hope but said they were waiting for some phase in the paperwork process to be completed first. This went on for several weeks. The delay was often due to an impasse in one of the steps in the bureaucratic process that his contacts were encountering, be it their registration on the infamous lista of Indigenous communities entitled to a quota of gasoline each month, obtaining a letter of support from the lieutenant of the National Guard stationed in Calamonte, or seeking out several requisite official stamps. On the rare days that Marco had a lead or some stage in the paperwork procedure seemed to be moving forward, he would appear at my hammock smartly dressed in what seemed like a freshly washed polo shirt, smart jeans, and polished shoes. His new businesslike appearance was accompanied by a stern sense of purpose as he strode off to “meet with a man,” often a Ye’kwana man or a criollo acquaintance who might assist him in his quest to find the guía that he so desired. Eventually, the waiting paid off, and several weeks later he was able to buy the bulk of the documentation from a Ye’kwana friend, Hernán, for a fee. This is what he had excitedly shown me that day. The paperwork itself had been completed, stamped, and photocopied, so all that was left for Marco to do was purchase the gasoline and compose a letter stating that he would be transporting it to the Ye’kwana community on Hernán’s behalf, which Hernán would then countersign. All things considered, this errand was relatively straightforward for Marco, as the forms were already completed. For the most part, all that was required from him were contacts in the cities, funds to buy the guía from his acquaintance, and patience. With the guía in hand, Marco’s mobility within the region was at long last liberated; he could transport his gasoline much farther upstream than Maduaña, and he could make it to the mine with fewer obstacles. He would no longer have his gasoline confiscated, no longer be searched or chastised by the checkpoint personnel, and no longer have to anxiously conjure up an intricate story for the military to explain his reasons for traveling with several large barrels of fuel.

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Although Marco was not actually compiling the papers himself, this particular execution of bureaucracy through brokers and a stubborn forbearance during days of waiting were important aspects of his maneuverability within this new administrative regime. Importantly, though, his procurement of the guía was not the beginning of Marco’s experience with paperwork. On the contrary, he had over the years become quite confident in navigating the workings of bureaucracy, and this latest quest was just one in a number of similar pursuits he had come to perform daily. His apprenticeship in bureaucracy had begun with the Bolivarian revolution. Doing the Papers It all starts with a cédula (ID card). This small, thin, plastic document unlocks an abundance of opportunities by way of political patronage and the gifts that ensue. Fortunately for my hosts, obtaining an ID card requires few skills; they need only turn up at one of the cedulaciones (pop-up ID stations) that occasionally appear in the larger forest communities and provide a name, date of birth, and fingerprint, and a cédula will be duly issued. It is the other documents with which people must regularly engage, the many forms, letters, application packs, and dossiers, that require more nuanced skills in bureaucracy and maneuverability. My Sanema friends themselves described the Bolivarian era as a time of prolific papers and accompanying errands. Santiago, the schoolteacher in Maduaña, often spoke of the heavy administrative demands on teachers since the regime change: “Schools before were much easier. Now the Bolivarian schools are really difficult. Now it’s pure papers. Papers, papers! They want lots of reports and things like that so that they can monitor our work.” Marco had a similar experience of the proliferating administrative demands. Just as he was becoming more proficient in bureaucracy, requirements seemed to become more convoluted and abstruse. Mastering the more sophisticated government paperwork became possible only after he settled in Maduaña and closer to Venezuelan national society in 2005. This move, Marco explained, enabled him to travel more regularly to Calamonte, where he slowly learned to “do the papers.”4 He described himself and other such administrative maneuverers as civi­ lizado (civilized) and preparado (prepared), terms associated with the frequently uttered Sanema phrase setenapötö kua kua wina, “to be like a criollo.” The papers he was doing were not just any papers, however, but



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rather Bolivarian papers, and it was only during his role in the Ministry of Education in Calamonte that he was granted entry to a particular and esoteric knowledge that set him apart from others. Administrative requirements further intensified when Marco was faced with the onerous task of registering and managing Maduaña’s communal council, an initiative that requires community members to carry out projects themselves, which are later audited to evaluate success. In 2007, less than two years after passage of the Law of Communal Councils, more than 33 percent of Indigenous communities in Venezuela had established communal councils (Angosto-Ferrández 2015, 176), Maduaña among them. The initial deposits that Maduaña’s council received for the first three projects carried out—the construction of a school, a lunchroom, and a water-pumping system—amounted to a total of 1,136,000 bolívares (approximately US$142,000). When presenting the figures like this, it is little wonder that so many communities were eager to register their own communal councils. Most significantly, the standardizing administrative procedures required to even get to that point very quickly guarantee that administrative processes become a fundamental component of Indigenous people’s experiences of the state. Ignacio, who had worked with Marco in completing Maduaña’s communal council application packet years before, described his first experiences in this way: “I didn’t know what a project was, what a communal council was, what it meant to organize the community. Before I could work on the communal council, I had to go to the alcaldía [municipal government] so that they could explain how to fill out the papers [waheta tökö] and how to do the diligencia [errands] and where to take the papers to get them stamped and delivered.” Years later and with a job at the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous People, he is so adept in this expertise that he now imparts that knowledge to others. Ignacio demonstrated well how crucial the paperwork dimension of Bolivarian participatory democracy is when he explained that the first step in his role of helping other communities set up their own communal councils was to look for those who can write and sign their names. Ignacio’s description also emphasizes that bureaucracy does not involve form-filling alone but consists of a series of corporeal actions encompassed by the much-used term diligencia. Prospective errandrunners must learn to navigate the towns, traversing them in taxis and buses to search out official stamps from various governmental institutions, each with its own convoluted acronyms. They must dress well,

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have neatly trimmed hair, carry a mobile phone, and confidently march around with a legal folder in hand. Numerous hours are spent waiting in line, speaking Spanish, reciting ID numbers, making photocopies, signing names, and impressing fingerprints on dotted lines. These urban movements were in stark contrast to the rapid trips to and from the cities with outboard motors; in the administrative centers the days were dominated instead by hours of inactivity, milling about in waiting rooms, and shuffling in slow-moving lines. I was not able to witness Marco or Ignacio completing Maduaña’s communal council diligencia because they had begun the procedure long before I first arrived in their community, but I was able to follow Ulinuwiña’s process, as they were in the early stages of setting up a communal council when I first visited them in late 2009. I had by chance arrived directly after a Ye’kwana promotor from the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples had traveled from the state capital of Puerto Ayacucho to visit local Indigenous communities and disseminate the Bolivarian ideology. Ulinuwiña had no outboard motor, and the journey downstream by canoe to reach Venezuelan cities took several weeks, so until then residents had very little contact with state politics or projects. I was told that the promotor had arrived unsolicited and called a general meeting in which he emphasized their need to organize through the formation of a communal council. He fleetingly presented them with the paperwork required to set one up, before promptly departing to continue his evangelizing ventures farther upstream. The inhabitants of Ulinuwiña had heard tales of these pasila palai, the unprecedented floods of resources never before witnessed and the origins of which were somewhat mysterious. They had seen many of the results of so-called projects in neighboring Ye’kwana communities: concrete-block buildings, generators, rapid outboard motors, and even tractors used for the cattle-ranching cooperatives that had been set up in Ye’kwana communities near a savanna. Naturally, the people of Ulinuwiña were eager to get involved. I arrived to find the residents attempting to make sense of the sea of papers they had been left to decipher. Whenever I entered the communal house, the only literate man of the settlement, Valentín, the schoolteacher, was sitting at a table in a murky corner slowly scrutinizing each paper with a countenance to match the gloom of his surroundings. Over a number of days, he gradually assembled the forms, often attracting inquisitive crowds who stood agape, giggling, or clearly unsure what he was doing. He took several days to carefully write over and over



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again the list of community residents, their dates of birth, and their ID numbers, which were required on ten different documents that formed the staggering thirty-one pages that made up the complete portfolio.5 Next to their names on each form, residents were required to leave a fingerprint, the stamp of the illiterate. This was a ritual that many had learned to perform when obtaining their identity cards in a temporary cedulación they had attended in a nearby Ye’kwana community a year earlier, so they were versed in the thumb-pressing action that would become ever more mechanical in the years to come. While the form-filling progressed slowly over several days, I noticed that Valentín did not seem to be calling any gatherings or discussing the formation of a committee. He merely filled out the papers, silently and alone. Awareness of the connection between state initiatives and regular meetings had evidently not yet arrived in this remote settlement as it had in Maduaña. Instead, here it was as though the projects would materialize through the physical manifestation of paper rather than regular assertions to organize. Certify and Register I met Valentín again a month later in the state capital, Puerto Ayacucho. He had hitched the two-week ride downstream in a Ye’kwana canoe to present his communal council paperwork to the appropriate institution. I arranged to meet him on the final few days of his diligencia, when he would be seeking the essential stamps and signatures before submitting the registration packet. It was raining heavily when Valentín and his brother-in-law ran to meet me under the shelter of a supermarket awning. In contrast to his appearance in Ulinuwiña, where he would usually walk around in no more than a pair of torn jeans, Valentín now had a buzz cut and sported a brand-new orange shirt. I could see, however, that this was as far as his meager funds would stretch, and the bright shirt seemed only to draw attention to his tattered trousers and lack of shoes. Once out of the rain, Valentín proudly extracted a bulging file from beneath his shirt, where he had been keeping it dry. His communal council registration was a thick stack of chaotic papers loosely contained in a dusty legal folder. As I leafed through them, I could see the complexity of what had been compiled: scores of papers requiring lists, narratives, and categories made to conform to bureaucratic functions. I could see copies of ID cards of all community members, a sketch of the community, a demographic and socioeconomic study of every family, a historical

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outline of the community, a census, a list of elected representatives, and an electoral register, to name but a few of the documents contained therein. Much of this paperwork was written in a language even I found difficult to penetrate, dizzyingly verbose and esoteric legal parlance. Incidentally, just as I was noting with frustration how the standardizing requirements were nearly impossible to decipher, Valentín uttered in his stilted Spanish that he had been unable to fully understand the forms and thus had to seek assistance from a Ye’kwana acquaintance, Luis, whom he knew from a community near Ulinuwiña. As luck would have it, Luis happened to be in Puerto Ayacucho at the same time as Valentín and agreed to help in exchange for a proportion of the communal council funds when they came through. As soon as the rain subsided, I flagged down a taxi to take us to our first destination of the day, only to discover that Valentín had been to Puerto Ayacucho only once previously and had no idea where we were supposed to be going. He borrowed my mobile phone to call Luis, who instructed him to come to the offices of the Fundacomunal (National Fund for Communal Councils) to get certified. When we arrived, Luis was inside the building waiting for us, immaculately dressed, with a smart leather file holder in hand. He was perched on the edge of a table and chatting in fluent Spanish with one of the employees of the office, self-assured and undaunted by the official environment. Luis exhibited a stark contrast to my two timid and hesitant Sanema companions, who, now in the presence of criollo functionaries and an assertive Ye’kwana, became markedly passive. They spoke little for the remainder of the day and thereafter took a backseat in the proceedings. Meanwhile they were regarded with disdain by bureaucrats who often glanced at their torn clothes and bare feet. At times I wondered if the Sanema men were even aware of what was being discussed between Luis and the government officials, as they were often excluded from the conversations. I recalled that Valentín had lamented to me previously about his inexperience in the “ways of the criollos” and admitted that he felt uneasy when among them in the cities. Only the rattling hum of an old air conditioner filled the uneasy silence of the waiting room, and after a few sluggish hours of lingering amid a crowd of other hopeful Indigenous people, my three companions were finally called into a side room while I remained seated outside. As I watched them walk off, I could see that Luis knew the man who was to certify the paperwork and shook his hand while leaning in to murmur something in his ear. Just before the door of the room closed, I caught



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a glimpse of Valentin’s apprehensive expression and felt a sudden stab of sympathy for him in that moment, being all too familiar with the nervousness that these official contexts could evoke. In my restless state I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me, and our discussion inevitably turned to the subject of communal councils. She confirmed how convoluted the process could be to set one up but said that compared to the later stages, certification was relatively easy. Her community already had a communal council, and she was there at the Fundacomunal as the communal council president to verify its status through an annual audit. She seemed disgruntled when she recounted how her community was routinely visited by inspectors to ensure that operations were appropriately managed. Just then, sooner than I expected, my companions emerged from the side room with a look of relief and one stamped document satisfactorily obtained. But it was not time to celebrate yet. As I bid farewell to my new friend and began to walk out of the building with the others, Luis asked the time. When I told him that it was 5:30 p.m., he winced and responded that we still had to register the paperwork at the Taquilla Única (Offices for Paperwork Production) on the other side of the city, and we were running out of time. Once in a taxi, we told the driver to step on it. He seemed to know what we meant and dutifully sped through the back streets to bypass the thoroughfare congestion. When we arrived at the Taquilla Única, we were relieved to find it still open, only to come face to face with a frosty administrator who was in no hurry to help any one of the hopelessly expectant applicants lingering in a stagnant line nearby. His disinterested movements and body language were so deliberately languid that he picked up each paper in what seemed like slow motion. The minutes agonizingly slipped away and as closing time swiftly approached we were still nowhere near the front of the line. Suddenly, Luis, who I was fast learning was an impressively assertive mediator, strode past all the other dispirited applicants and approached the counter. Although I could not hear what he was saying, I could see him attempting to negotiate with the indifferent clerk, and after a brief back and forth Luis was haughtily passed a sheet of paper. When he returned to us at the back of the line, he showed us the document, which listed the application packet requirements, noting that we needed to submit two copies, which we did not have. I felt all hope deflate with this unexpected news, as there was only one day remaining before the deadline, a day notorious for being unbearably hectic and congested in the city due to a deluge of

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Indigenous peoples arriving from all corners of the state to submit their application packets. Ulinuwiña’s chances of registering a communal council now seemed slim. Yet, true to form, Luis took it all in stride, and we soon found ourselves in another taxi on our way to a photocopy shop, squashed together in the backseat. Luis announced his plan for the following day, explaining that he had a friend who worked at the Taquilla Única, so he would arrive first thing in the morning to pass the application packet straight to this contact and avoid the final-day horde. “I understand how these things work,” he stated with authority. “It’s important to know people who can help.” Standing outside the copy shop an hour later with a second copy of the dossier tucked under Luis’s arm, everyone agreed to call it a day. Luis promised to submit the packet first thing in the morning, and when I saw Valentín the next day, he reported that as far as he knew the application was being processed according to plan. Those Who Know Valentín’s bureaucratic undertaking highlights that just as significant as the documents themselves are the maneuverings required to become proficient in bureaucratic techniques: regular visits to the cities, daily diligencia, and social networking among people who can help accelerate the process or find loopholes. These intensified procedural movements are doubtless experienced by all Venezuelans to some degree, yet for my Sanema hosts this new maneuvering was more extensive and notably different than the kind they had been embarking on up to that point. That said, regular mobility is certainly not a new phenomenon for Sanema-speaking people; they have long undertaken frequent voyaging in one form or another to enhance their prestige and enable them to become taö öpa (one who knows). This was and still is specifically a male pursuit. From the moment of marriage and the subsequent uxorilocal residence in which the husband comes to live in his wife’s community, male maneuverability and attachments remain fluid among most Amazonian groups (Rival 2005). In the past, Sanema men tended to have distributed social networks, and they voyaged frequently between affiliate communities that were clustered at walking distance from one another. To this day, journeying out beyond the community on a regular basis is of vital importance, and men of all ages in Maduaña recounted significant moments in their coming of age that included not just a phase of puberty



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seclusion (manokosimo) but also their first voyages to distant Ye’kwana communities or to criollo frontier towns in the north. In contrast to narratives of permanent relocations in the past when family groups would flee (wasimo) from oka töpö, this individual and temporary voyaging for knowledge, pötaöpo piasalo a hama huköle (traveling to know), was a voluntary activity of great honor. Journeying for purposes of trading but equally to visit (nohimo) or see (mö) other locations was substantially connected to essential processes of knowing (taö) and developing valued wisdom from external sources. Even today, voyaging for knowledge is articulated as a process of combating fear of other people and places because during the pursuit of knowledge “the fear ends” (kilipa mapa soma). A man who knows how to travel becomes regarded as fearless (waitili) and hence is also often selected as the trusted community leader (Colchester 1982, 90). The powerful mythological creator figure, Omaö, was a great traveler who regularly ventured to “where the waters reach the heavens” (Colchester 1981, 36). In a similar explorative undertaking, masterful shamans fly far out into the forest or to distant communities when in a trance, as their hikula (spirit allies) show them distant and fertile locales. They often intersperse their songs with wide, sweeping arm gestures and growling expressions of iiiiamökö (over theeeere!) or baibarrrrram (faaaar away!) that emphasized the great distances they had to travel to encounter powerful beings who inhabited worlds somehow further than the imagination could stretch. If shamanism is what Graham Townsley describes as a “technique for knowing” (1993, 452), then what augments this knowledge is the shaman’s aptitude in encountering and translating distant exterior worlds, a maneuvering par excellence. Journeying to extralocal domains is an essential facet of the Amazonian predatory modality because acquainting oneself with and appropriating the fecundity of the other enhances social fertility, augments personhood, and stimulates creativity (Viveiros de Castro 2012). Most importantly, voyaging for knowledge in the contemporary context brings about new social relations that generate access to goods, expertise, and opportunities, with official papers playing an important role in this process. The idea that social relations and affiliations manifest in documentation has been detailed by Kregg Hetherington (2008) in his research among campesinos in Paraguay. Rather than taking an interest in the legal data or maps in their land-titling paperwork, the campesinos pointed to the signatures and seals that “traced networks of relations on the page” (52). It was the relationships preceding the

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documents that “spoke their reality” above and beyond the abstractions of the papers themselves. Like those Paraguayan campesinos, my Sanema research collaborators subordinated inscriptions to the social networks involved and often required those networks to satisfactorily obtain the documents. This is in part because they struggled to independently make the papers pi noniama (tame); instead, all that transpired was confusion, misunderstandings, and turmoil. A Sanema friend provided the pithy remark, “In the past things were more basic, when there were no papers.” The notoriously labyrinthine nature of Bolivarian bureaucracy often resulted in failures to do the papers, but a dearth of contacts also contributed to the problem. Some people illustrated frustrations inherent in the form-filling process by recounting the unfortunate though rather humorous story of Diego, who had recently established a new community close to Calamonte so he could access state resources. Try as he might, Diego repeatedly failed to comprehend the communal council registration paperwork. The tale tells of his amusing and slightly intoxicated rant at the papers themselves that ended in his tearing them up in a frustrated rage and throwing them into the forest while calling out to the sky, “Chávez! Chávez! Help me with my paperwork!” One thing is for certain; he was right in thinking that he needed help with these forms. He was a recent arrival to the area, and his lack of acquaintances in Calamonte or friends in the bureaucratic system clearly put him at a disadvantage. Diego would have benefited from contact with one of the local Sanema promotores of the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples, who are employed to support Indigenous communities in undertaking their diligencia. Ignacio was one such promotor, and the posture in which I most frequently encountered him was hunched over an impromptu desk in Maduaña’s Calamonte encampment filling out forms with Sanema leaders from various communities. Still, this service that he was expected to provide was not as evenly available as it was professed to be; often this assistance was attainable only through kinship ties to Ignacio or, failing that, gradually established relations of gift-giving and mutuality. Diego might also have benefited from closer affiliation with a Ye’kwana broker, perhaps someone like Luis, who helped prepare Ulinuwiña’s paperwork in exchange for a percentage of the funds received. Although these relations were marked by power disparities, many of my Sanema friends described them as “friendships,” alliances valued as much for their social ties as for the material opportunities they provided.



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A Sanema man filling out forms. Photo by the author.

Both contacts, with Ignacio or Ye’kwana brokers, could have been established through regular and new forms of maneuvering, as much political as corporeal. I hasten to add that only certain people can consider embarking on the communal council certification process to begin with. It seemed to be predominantly male, government-salaried schoolteachers who were most proficient in diligencia. They already were familiar with urban centers and social contacts because they had to travel to the cities to collect their wages, and they could invest these very same wages into the initial outlays required for diligencia activities: taxis, photocopies, clothes, and food in the cities. But more than money is provided; the Bolivarian education system, as Santiago lamented, is a highly bureaucratic system and thus trains a generation of teachers-cum-leaders in the norms of paperwork and auditing. These emerging bureaucratic capacities and relations with the outside are becoming ever more gendered, with a new trajectory of political maneuverability becoming male-dominated.6 Sanema-speaking women journeyed infrequently to the cities, held fewer

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government-salaried jobs, seldom spoke of undertaking diligencia, and tended to have fewer contacts outside of their kin or residential groups. Above all, this new form of voyaging for knowledge is a political endeavor arising out of interactions with valued alterity in the form of an abundant state. Revolutionary Voyaging For obvious reasons, the outboard motor was the most coveted political gift for those who did not yet have one because it accelerated valuable voyaging. Political patronage often led to the first gift of an outboard motor from a local politician that provided the capacity to travel more freely, farther, and faster. In the contemporary context, then, voyaging for knowledge has shifted in configuration; respect now arises from knowing the world of the criollos, and walking to nearby and affiliated communities has been replaced by a rapid to-and-fro to the cities with the occasional pit stop at other settlements en route. This new traveling is further propelled by political events and initiatives that take place in the cities. In essence, while voyaging in the past was a capacity available to all men, it is now determined by their access to an outboard motor and gasoline, which rapidly enhance mobility and thus also accelerate participation in state activities and diligencia. Community leaders, who gained their position because they were already the ones who know, oversee and safeguard communal appliances as part of their role, which means they also have access to many opportunities provided by this equipment, such as traveling to criollo towns with the outboard motor. The difference between Maduaña and Ulinuwiña exemplifies these disparities. It was certainly true to some extent that Marco was able to make sense of the bureaucratic regime due to his upbringing in an evangelical mission community that spatially and ideologically organized itself around two institutions that fetishized paper: the school and the church. While Valentín’s experiences with bureaucracy and diligencia in Puerto Ayacucho were undeniably bewildering to him, he was certainly not illiterate, as he attended school in a Ye’kwana community as a child. The convoluted and opaque nature of the document inscriptions was a challenge encountered by both Valentín and Marco, and thus the difference between the two was more than an imbalance in literacy skills or in ability to decipher the terminology of such forms. The difference between Valentín and Marco, as I understand it, was in their maneuverability. Advantages



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accrued through regular trips to and familiarity with the cities where one could learn all-important bureaucratic practices and, perhaps most important of all, maintain affable relations with brokers or bureaucrats who could push an applicant’s papers through the system. Marco had mastered these skills. When he was younger, he traveled extensively to many criollo cities, including cosmopolitan centers in the north of the country where the missionary headquarters were based. Yet he learned to do the papers only after moving closer to Calamonte, working in government institutions, and establishing networks of contacts within the administrative apparatus specific to the revolutionary state. Soon his maneuverability was propelled by new papers, which in turn widened his sphere of friends through diligencia activities, enhancing his maneuverability further still. Valentín, by contrast, struggled to accomplish many of the intricate diligencia tasks on his own partly due to his scant prospects for mobility. His community had no outboard motor and was far from the urban centers, resulting in his unfamiliarity with the ways of the criollos and a dearth of reliable friends in the framework of red tape. Even so, his community’s close association with a Ye’kwana settlement enabled Valentín to find a broker willing to help with the documentation. Although Valentín struggled, he nonetheless managed to succeed where Diego, tearing up his papers in his new community far from his established social networks, did not. Akhil Gupta (2012) has argued against an overemphasis on literacy as the sole route for accessing political spheres, as illiterate poor people may have other means to sidestep circumscribed bureaucratic structures by procuring counterfeit documentation. To do so, they must first have personal connections, thus highlighting how symbolic capital, money capital, and social capital are all tightly interlinked. Among the Sanema it was likewise not the durability and formalization of the documents that conferred power; indeed, I was often startled to find books and documents abandoned in the dust in Sanema communities. Folded Bible pages were used to store fishhooks, the lamination of ID cards was split apart, and photographs were scratched and worn beyond recognition. Documents did not seem to be cherished or safeguarded; they were not deliberated over, not read aloud, and not meticulously typed. Instead, they were left to disintegrate like discarded leaves or castoff cassava bread. It seemed to be the bureaucratic techniques that became paramount, the being like a criollo, the presentation of a particular ensemble of clothing, the bodily performance of diligencia, and the friends with whom one could shake hands or from whom one could request assistance.

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Paper Traps Sadly, neither Maduaña’s nor Ulinuwiña’s communal councils turned out well. In the beginning, the residents of Maduaña were able to buy numerous supplies and building materials to commence construction work on the school and its lunchroom. There was evidence that they had made a start, but they struggled to fulfill their plan with the money their communal council provided, and the criollo builders Marco contracted from Calamonte had overcharged the council and not completed the work. Another criollo man reportedly took money to buy replacement pipes for the water-pumping system but never returned. Maduaña residents indignantly told me that all the money and resources had just disappeared.7 A year into the project, I was told, the council was audited through a mandatory rendición de cuenta (external review). In this subsequent step of self-governance that follows the process of certification, the community was expected to submit an additional file of documents to add to the quagmire of mounting administrative requirements. I knew that this process was complex because the woman in the waiting room of the Fundacomunal in Puerto Ayacucho had told me so. I also knew this because when waiting for my companions to emerge from the meeting room there, I observed a notice pinned to a door that listed the requirements for a communal council external review. It stated, Requirements for communal council audit, originals and copies: • Invoices and payment receipts, • Client bank account statements that reflect the amount received and spent, • Three accounting books: daily, ledger, and inventory carried out by an accountant, • Records of approval of project execution by the committee, comptroller, and the community in general, • Photos of project execution, • All documents must be contained in a brown legal file with fasteners. These required documents convey how remote Indigenous communities are being swamped by a system of accountability and surveillance. Although the Sanema of Maduaña endeavored to obediently march along their extended paper trail, their attempts eventually failed. The



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state representatives who evaluated their ventures at self-governance concluded that the projects had been inadequately managed, and funds were consequently frozen before the lunchroom construction could be completed. For years, and to my knowledge even to this day, all building projects initiated as part of Maduaña’s communal council lay half-finished and collapsing in the harsh forest climate. It appears that even those proficient in the preliminary procedures are not guaranteed success in subsequent endeavors. I also later heard rumors that Ulinuwiña’s communal council did not receive any funding due to their difficulties in opening and accessing their own bank account, a factor that Valentín had not taken into consideration when applying. Notwithstanding the state’s efforts to generate proactive revolutionary subjects who do more than passively receive gifts, the bureaucracy involved was for many people excessively opaque and difficult to realize. In fact, those procedures seemed to get harder the more one became immersed in state mechanisms. Just as administrative competencies were budding, they quickly became ensnarled in deepening complexities of regulation, audits, and compliance.8 Meanwhile, residents of Maduaña grew disillusioned with Bolivarian projects and complained that those elected to run them did not complete tasks or fulfill promises. At the same time, many people in Maduaña had by that point grown accustomed to the goods that such government funds could supply, and thus Marco and many others decided to attempt the less mainstream but highly profitable enterprise of selling gasoline at the mine. Thanks to his nascent administrative capacities brought about by an apprenticeship in Bolivarian bureaucracy, Marco had become well versed in the sorts of networking that enabled him to procure a guía for his new entrepreneurial endeavors. This stack of forms was the material marker of his free movement within the region, his ability to at long last transport fuel and continue purchasing goods with the money derived from mining. Even though gasoline and the outboard motor directly facilitated this particular movement, it was the paperwork required to procure and travel with fuel that gave rise to a new document-driven mobility in Venezuelan Amazonia. In this administrative milieu, citizens, especially those with scant literacy and bureaucratic skills, were the victims of contemporary forms of predation and entrapment. Unidirectional appropriation of value played out as biopolitical techniques of surveillance and control through standardized state administration. David Graeber (2015b) describes these techniques as a global system of predatory bureaucratization. One could

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reasonably dispute this claim in the Venezuelan context by pointing out that the Bolivarian revolution does anything but reject reciprocity because it is committed to channeling state resources to the population. But for Sanema-speaking people, what makes the Venezuelan socialist regime fit within a broader predatory landscape are its impenetrable procedures designed almost divergent to Indigenous needs and epistemologies, and that often resulted in the inconstant flow of resources. These defining features are the very same reason that oka people epitomize predation: their actions are incomprehensible and erratic. Disillusionment surrounding these opaque bureaucratic techniques stood in stark contrast to the willing mimicry of state rhetoric through meeting performances. Those techniques were devised by the Sanema according to their logic of unidirectional appropriation by way of other-becoming. One could say that in invoking the state, Sanema acted as the predators. Bureaucracy, by contrast, was in most cases beyond their realm of knowledge or control, and they ended up falling prey to esoteric predatory bureaucratization because procedures intended to standardize did nothing more than alienate. It is somewhat paradoxical that the participatory and inclusive ideology of Bolivarianism was ultimately rendered inaccessible and hence created inequalities as a consequence of its incomprehensible administrative mechanisms. The Sanema Indigenous promotor Ignacio observed this very incongruity himself: “The help hasn’t arrived. Some communities receive outboard motors and communal councils, but others still haven’t received anything from the government. These communities are worried because none of their youth can do the paperwork errands.” Sanema experiences are not too dissimilar from other contexts in which documents mediate relations of exploitation, precarity, and inequality in instances as diverse as immigration, property rights, disability, and knowledge production.9 Neoliberal subjects endure much more than pressure to govern themselves; they encounter the daily vicissitudes of “strangulation by centralized control and management” (Agrawal 1995, 25) that play out as predatory forms of entrapment. In essence, this is experienced as an uncompensated capture of value. Alfred Gell has observed that traps have a particular form of temporality, of waiting and expectation, followed by “the sudden catastrophe that ensues as the trap closes” (1999, 202). His description of traps evokes Sanema experiences with Bolivarian paperwork, a tense realm of periodically empty time, unchartered territories, long waiting lines, and anticipation, followed by an external audit that abruptly ends their hope without



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entirely foreclosing their opportunities. In the end, this bureaucracy is an opaque and convoluted process that for some is nearly impossible to domesticate. This may be why some envisage a successful future for Sanema people as determined by their aptitude in navigating and averting predatory administration.

E P I LO G U E

Predatory Economies in Amazonia and Beyond

Predation—that is, relations premised on a predator-prey dynamic—emerges from Sanema encounters with their environment, surrounding resources, and nearby others. I have taken predation to connote a process of appropriating value, of taking without giving, or certainly taking more than one gives. Exploring Sanema vernacular in depth reveals that concepts as wide-ranging as hunting (namohu), taming (pi noniama), avenging (noa köa), seizing (tili), taking (plikö), seducing (pi noniama), and mimicking (horomai) all bear on predation in different ways. The predator-prey modality is thereby situated as an economic activity central to daily life, rather than merely a condition of warfare and bellicosity. For my Sanema hosts, the cosmos is governed by predation, in the threats that it poses—from which they must perpetually flee—but also in the actions required to harness its bounty. Sometimes this predatory appropriation entails hostile assault, as with the angry spirits of game animals that cause illness or the lurking oka people who endeavor to take a life to avenge the death of a loved one. And yet predatory occurrences clearly involve far more than aggressive attacks or theft, often entailing strategies of seduction and trickery, as when hunters inveigle game animals in preparation for an ambush. Predation exceeds the forest too. At the center of Sanema contemporary worlds are new rapacious forces one must escape, and new sources of miraculous abundance one can harness. Intercultural encounters now provide resources that were previously unattainable, but they often also carry with them some form of risk. Extractive resources that take the form of ubiquitous gasoline supplies and gold from mining activities are seen to be predatory in that they seduce and beguile but with dangerous



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consequences for the health and well-being of kinfolk. Much of the new wealth that Sanema people can now access emerges, directly or indirectly, from an opulent state eager to integrate impoverished and excluded citizens. My Sanema friends were equally eager to receive that promised state largesse, though it was not always effortless to obtain. In some cases, familiar predatory techniques could be deployed to access exterior bounty, whether through mimicry, empathy elicitation, or voyaging great distances to commandeer external knowledge. At other times, Sanema people became victims of unidirectional exploitation or failed to harness the new techniques required to navigate the unfamiliar workings of market economies and socialist regimes. They become ensnared in the bewildering worlds of opaque bureaucracy, mismanaged projects, and blockages to collective organizing. New economic subjectivities could in principle flourish when aspiring citizens succeeded in participating in those essential practices of self-governance and administrative standardization, but the very same procedures could equally disorient and disillusion citizens when they failed. Furthermore, while Sanema-speaking people have steadily become entangled in the ripple effects of national abundance and broader economic arrangements, the boom-and-bust nature of the affluence they encounter comes with a price. It started with optimism, indeed outright excitement. For my Sanema contacts, the Bolivarian state seemed to be throwing money and goods at them, and everyone wanted to be a recipient or to move as close to the generous source as possible. Oil prices were at an all-time high, and the benefits were regularly forthcoming, especially if communities were able to establish a certified communal council. After some time, though, the optimism started to fade, and skepticism set in. Promises were unfulfilled, funds dried up or were blocked, movements were restricted, and surveillance strategies were stringently applied. Marco also had moments of doubt. Even as he was waxing lyrical about the opportunities that Bolivarianism afforded, he occasionally noted with frustrated reflection how things had notably changed in the years since the arrival of this bounteous state. Now, he says, people are divided. He frequently used the pejorative term honimo (scroungers) to describe residents’ predatory extraction of state abundance. Honimo is a word that typically refers to people who furtively eat scraps from abandoned plates, a behavior that is deplored among coresidents because it exemplifies an effort to deflect reciprocal sharing practices by secretly obtaining food for free. By using this term in relation to state engagement, Marco

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alludes to unidirectional appropriation as counterproductive to their new aspiring economic subjectivities of equitable and collective action. Disenchantment and frustration were becoming more widespread, but by that time Indigenous communities all over southern Venezuela had already been drawn into the seductive promises of the Bolivarian revolution. Sometimes goods would flood in and sometimes they would reduce to a trickle or dry up completely. Just when Sanema people were becoming immersed in state patronage, resources were suddenly plucked from their reach. As Evelio put it, the state “makes you dance for your prize” that often never materializes. Eventually the promised abundance became erratic, and that unpredictability was compounded by unsuccessful external audit reviews and fluctuating gasoline supplies. Since the time of my doctoral research, conditions have gotten worse. Plummeting oil prices, exacerbated by international sanctions and economic mismanagement, have caused runaway inflation and political unrest that have led to shortages in food and medicine, triggering a migration crisis and capital flight, but also increased insecurity and widespread unemployment for those who remained. For me this has meant that returning to Venezuela grew less and less feasible with each passing year. But for my Sanema friends, the economic crisis has created immense challenges, not least on account of their dependence on highly volatile fuel supplies. Each new communication with my Sanema friends reveals a continued predicament of enticement and entrapment. During more recent telephone conversations with Marco, he has talked about their stagnation, their always being stuck without gasoline to travel to Calamonte and back. On another occasion Ignacio, the Sanema representative for the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples, pointed out that desire for goods had been ignited among Indigenous peoples and they want more. But there was nothing left to give them. “We have no resources left in the ministry, and there is no gasoline to travel with,” he said. “We started this, and now they want more, but we are stuck, motionless.” The promise of Bolivarianism abundance has succeeded in rousing desires that then inflate rather than recede (Rubenstein 2004), and in the process citizens become ensnared in a boom-and-bust economy that is defined by moments of abundant generosity and moments of disappointing scarcity. In more recent years my Sanema friends seem to have lost much of the predatory power they once wielded in relation to extralocal abundance. Voyaging is no longer possible, submissive

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predation is unwanted, and mimicry is now a redundant strategy if resulting resources are no longer forthcoming. But they have already been ensnared. Converging Economies, Overlapping Cosmologies As an analytical tool, Amazonian predation illuminates a form of relationality that in many ways conflicts with the usually presumed constituents of a well-functioning society: reciprocity, alliance, and compassion. In a predatory context, acute efforts are made to incorporate the material possessions, substances, and identities of others, sometimes by force but equally by manipulation or seduction, while eliding customary modes of reciprocity. The dyad of predator and prey is “a cosmological operator of great breadth and amplitude” that underpins the diverse range of Amazonian socio-cosmologies (Costa and Fausto 2010, 98). In lowland South America, predatory actions quite literally make society and the self (Overing 1996, 54) and the appropriation of value is reflected in almost all facets of life, from kinship (Costa 2017; A-C Taylor 2001) and mythology (Gow 2001), to missionization (Vilaça 2010), politicization (C. High 2015b), and material culture (Ewart 2007; Santos-Granero 2009a). Viveiros de Castro notes that Amerindians perceive the other as a mirror of the self but also as “a destiny . . . a pole of attraction . . . the becoming of being” (1992, 254).1 Yet at the end of this story on predation, one might venture to ask what broader issues are at stake here, among the Sanema but also in Latin America and beyond. Indigenous peoples in many South American contexts are often portrayed by external observers as natural conservationists preoccupied primarily with environmental concerns.2 This is unquestionably a way of life worthy of praise. Over the years, more Indigenous campaigns to counter capitalist predatory economies in Latin America have joined forces to defend fragile biospheres from the ravages of globalizing projects and large-scale extractive operations. Some movements push back against the rendering of the world into a homogenizing singularity that typifies global capitalism; instead they build a vision of a pluriverse made up of a multiplicity of mutually entangled and co-constituting worlds (Escobar 2017). Indigenous conservation movements are fast becoming the defining portrait of modern Amazonia because they provide a muchneeded new approach that foregrounds a cosmopolitics of nature and subverts the hegemonic narratives of progress and growth (Ødegaard and Rivera Andía 2019).

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Venezuela is somewhat of an exception in these kinds of global imaginaries of Latin America’s Indigenous population. In Venezuela, Indigenous people are depicted as innate revolutionaries and iconic warriors. They stand as symbols of an authentically egalitarian ethos, as crusaders for political rebellion. Still, notwithstanding the constitutional spotlight on cultural difference and Indigenous sovereignty, the everyday reality for most Indigenous peoples in Venezuela continues to be bound up with a notion of homogenizing citizenship that buttresses the ideology of Bolivarian unity. What this means is that they participate in standardized state projects as rural Venezuelans rather than as Indigenous people with distinct rights. Any environmental predilections they may hold are entirely eclipsed by this impassioned political milieu. On the other hand, perhaps this apparent divergence in priorities related to political or environmental objectives is the result of a particular way that observers tend to think about the environment in lowland South America, viewed as a pristine forest inhabited by ecological nondualists whose worldviews avert a separation between nature and humanity. Insofar as these principles provide an urgent critique of capitalism while bringing many political advantages to peoples resisting the structural drivers of environmental crises, sometimes these accounts are also driven by nostalgia for the exotic, and by stereotypical portrayals of Indigenous eco-warriors who are arguably obliged to adhere to external expectations of environmental consciousness (Conklin and Graham 1995; C. High and Oakley 2020). On top of that, a popular perception also holds that the kind of nature Indigenous peoples are defending is invariably a benevolent but defenseless provider, a feminine earth mother who requires protection from the ravages of modernity. This is not to suggest that Sanema people, lacking this ideology, thereby somehow fall short of environmental sensibilities. Quite the contrary: they have all-encompassing ecological principles, but the animist cosmos they deal with is governed by predatory relations rather than benevolent ones.3 And so, while the Venezuelan state might not designate Indigenous peoples as environmentalists, in an interesting reversal, the Sanema view the extralocal realm—the market economy, criollos, and state institutions—within their frame of ecological knowledge that gives weight to unidirectional appropriation. Consequently, a question of ontological othering, as much as predatory otherness, hovers at the edges of this analysis. One could rightly argue, as does Casey High (2015a), that theories of alterity and predatory appropriation often serve merely to perpetuate an entrenched notion of

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structural continuity within Amazonia rather than offering insights into processes that engender social transformation. It is true that cosmological and epistemological resilience (that is to say, continuity) is to some degree essential when facing centuries of social and economic incursions (Blaser 2004). But resilience ought not automatically connote cultural immutability, at least not the kind that aligns with ideas of primitive ontology that have roots in colonialism and persist in recent liberal metanarratives (Bessire 2014, 188–192). What is more, approaches to radical alterity, the suggestion that Indigenous cultures are so alien as to be barely commensurable with modern systems of knowledge, reify the kind of difference that denies Indigenous people political agency in the contemporary world (Bessire and Bond 2014). Moreover, those approaches intimate that Indigenous forms of knowing, in contrast to so-called Western epistemologies, sit beyond the realms of validity or reason (Agrawal 1995). In short, the purported openness to the other that characterizes Indigenous Amazonians, when deployed as an analytic, can paradoxically smooth over the impacts of those very encounters with others that motivate the theory in the first place, as though the more Amazonian people experience difference, the more they remain unchanged. Recent events in Venezuela and the global economy have affected Sanema everyday lives in profound ways. Still, it would be misleading to suggest that these impacts lead exclusively to defiance or resistance on their part. The sensibilities that prevail in these contemporary encounters are instead a tangle of “existential quandaries,” as David Graeber (2015a) has termed them, quandaries made of curiosities and doubts that reformulate cosmological boundaries (Scott 2016). Rather than remaining unwavering in their cultural convictions, my Sanema collaborators were periodically forced to negotiate failures and mishaps in their cosmological reasoning just as frequently as they attempted to actively mold experiences of the modern world into their already existing schemas. Change and continuity were occurring simultaneously. The new regimes and practices they encountered on a daily basis offered formerly unknown opportunities, such as access to manufactured items, infrastructure, cash, and gold. Yet those same encounters shocked and baffled people in their terrifying or indefinable features, such as when they manifest as violent malandros, illegible paperwork, and volatile gasoline. This is not to suggest that these recent occurrences are the first of their kind. Sanema-speaking people have come face to face with traders, missionaries, state agents, and anthropologists many times over the past decades, and their most recent intercultural

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A Sanema woman paddling upstream. Photo by the author.

experiences are merely a continuation of such encounters. Even remote regions of Amazonia have experienced centuries of resource extraction, settler migration, and infrastructural development (Penfield 2019), and it would be difficult to convincingly argue that such incursions consistently resulted in cultural immutability over time. Mario Blaser (2013) suggests that ontologies, different ways of being in or experiencing the world, should be understood not as existing “out there,” as fixed and changeless truths, but as multiple and continually negotiated frameworks. In that light, one can more easily grasp how Sanema forms of knowledge cut across external epistemologies, how economies converge, and how cosmologies overlap. The people of Maduaña and Ulinuwiña were unceasingly reshaping their ontological reasoning to adapt to an ever-changing world. I have sought to draw attention to these tensions and to avoid replicating the style of tradition-fetishizing ethnographies that were once so popular. For better or

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worse, what occurs in Amazonia today is an ongoing existential struggle that never quite ends in comfortably intact worldviews, nor does it result in outright social transformation, at least not the sort I could witness during a relatively brief period of fieldwork. Rather, Indigenous Amazonians endlessly negotiate what is and what will be, what is known and what is inscrutable. The Rise of Venatic Ideologies Although I have focused on the lives of a small group of Indigenous Amazonians, I have done so with a very particular lens of “predatory economies” for an important reason. Following Mette High’s suggestion that one should “pay more attention to the coexistence of multiple economies, beyond the boundaries of the nation-state and an exclusively human society” (2017, 3), I have similarly attended to the different economic realms that coarticulate in Indigenous lived worlds. For Sanema-speaking people, predation is a broad and nuanced economic phenomenon; it is encountered as much in Venezuelan cities as it is in forests. At these sites of converging worlds, different permutations of predation, in animist and market forms, meet and intersect and become the means through which Indigenous people negotiate their place in relation to states and capitalist mechanisms. Viveiros de Castro has argued that in Amazonia predation forms a generalized “venatic ideology” wherein hunting practices provide as much symbolic significance as they do ecological necessity (1998, 472). This is certainly the case for my Sanema contacts; for them the forest is seen as an abundant resource that must be exploited through a panoply of predatory practices, but this idea is also expanded to form a wider venatic logic in articulation with neighboring peoples, market economies, and state principles. Sanema people have shown that predation is a complex and multifaceted logic arranged around strategies of appropriation. But what if this venatic logic is extended beyond Amazonia? What if it is mobilized for thinking about broader market predation, specifically that of capitalism? When defining market forms of predatory economies, I have noted that they can be characterized by acts of appropriation for the purposes of profit accrual, that indeed, unidirectional accumulation arguably drives the global capitalist economy. This is precisely how Jason Hickel has described such accumulation. “Growthism,” the pursuit of economic growth for the sake of capital accretion alone, is governed by the logic of unreciprocated

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appropriation, of taking more than is given back. In order to amass the surplus required for growth, Hickel notes, “you have to extract uncompensated value from nature and bodies, which must be objectified and rendered as ‘external’” (2020, 282). Nature must be separated from society to justify its merciless theft, but growth also requires the appropriation of value from the outside. Capitalism thereby extracts from an externalized nature rather than reappropriating from the inside because out there, resources are cheaper or even free for the taking.4 This is a system based on theft and plundering from the fertile exterior. It is, simply put, predatory. A growing body of literature explores contemporary economic arrangements through the heuristic of predation, defined by capture, containment, and control. One might note here the similarities with an Amazonian venatic logic. Kevin O’Neill and Jatin Dua propose that captivity be seen as a germane concept that “provokes us to consider anew the complex contours of violence and economy, affect and agency, and bondage and freedom” that characterize life today (2017, 5). In a similar vein, Alberto Corsín Jiménez finds value in adopting a predatory heuristic, in his study focusing on entrapments or webs, which he sees as providing a deeper understanding of “our current predicament of expulsion, ruin, and precarity” (2018, 54). The value of an analytic of entrapment, Corsín Jiménez argues (2021, 118), lies in its capacity to communicate both antagonistic and beneficial social arrangements, thereby providing an alternative to the dominant notion of relationality within social theory.5 Venatic predatory modalities, however, are first and foremost economic modalities; they are methods for capturing value. Beginning with colonial expansion, the appropriation of raw materials and bodies from colonized lands fueled the Industrial Revolution and thereby facilitated the rise of capitalism. Even today, ten billion tons of raw materials continue to flow from poor countries to rich ones each year. But value capture appears far and wide in a multitude of forms, not just of raw materials but from people too. In recognition of this, many anthropologists have explicitly utilized the frame of predation to identify prevalent modes of appropriation through captivity. Predatory strategies are evident in the European border-security infrastructure that profits from refugee captivity (Andersson 2018); in the profit-making confinement of rehabilitation centers overloaded with addicted and dispossessed captives (O’Neill 2018); in the “predatory inclusion” of housing policy that makes billions for the real estate industry (K-Y Taylor 2019); in the

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mushrooming precarious job market that traps workers in overloaded zero-hour contracts from which they struggle to escape (Platzer and Allison 2018); and in the ever-increasing debt in which people find themselves ensnared (Kirwan 2019). These are just some examples of value capture that play out as experiences of entrapment by people living in predatory economies. Much like the subtle games of seduction and deception that Sanema people enact or experience in different Venezuelan contexts, market forms of predation similarly mobilize elusive strategies of enticement. Most people may be able to identify subtle phenomena that manipulate their choices, opinions, and actions in ingenious ways, often when it comes to consumption of the most recent must-have product. Some of the most notorious forms of insidious trickery that have come to light in recent years are the algorithms that now “rule our world” (Steiner 2012). Social media platforms like Facebook capture personal data for purposes of surveillance, but they also harvest, commodify, and sell those records to the highest bidder, who then makes billions of dollars in profit each year (Besteman and Gusterson 2019). The mined data are then used to develop algorithms that control users’ behavior by shaping allegedly autonomous desires and needs through ads and recommendations (Seaver 2018, 377). All of this occurs with surprisingly little dissent from the billions of mute consumers who become “hosted,” that is, sucked into nebulous micro-experiences that “facilitate activity while constraining it” (Seaver 2019, 432). Meanwhile, hegemonic doctrines of liberty continue to provide illusions of agency while all along holding consumers captive, manipulating their emotions so that they become “slaves to the algorithm” (Pettman 2016). Some authors have proposed compelling antidotes to predatory economies. Hickel suggests that in defiance of growthism, people ought to emulate animist societies, whose successes lie in an inherent “spirit not of extraction but of reciprocity” with nature. Inhabiting a cosmos of sentient beings, Hickel asserts, impels animists to engage with the ecosystem through rituals of respect and politeness, never theft (2020, 63). And yet, many animists in Amazonia are governed not by reciprocity but by a venatic logic not too dissimilar to market predation, if nothing else than by its defining features of seizing value while offering little or nothing in return. Beyond this simple definition, though, animist predation and market predation could not be more dissimilar. Over time, exponential growth has devastating outcomes for the ecosystem arising from skyrocketing energy and resource use, not to

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mention waste buildup, deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion, biodiversity collapse, and mass extinction. In most other settings, limitless growth has catastrophic consequences, as seen in the continual replication of cells that ultimately cause cancer or a self-reproducing virus (Hickel 2020). Inexhaustible growth promotes anything but equilibrium, let alone human and environmental well-being. Growth should be finite, but if societies are to overcome the current predicaments, income must also be distributed. Notwithstanding his omission of predatory modalities in some animist societies, Hickel is nevertheless right to point out that in many hunter-gatherer contexts, the appropriation of superfluous resources would ultimately invite misfortune brought about by angry animist beings, who activate tragedies that have the effect of forestalling the accumulation of excess, which under normal circumstances might lead to growth.6 This disavowal of excess enables ecosystems to regenerate, and it accounts for the preservation of biodiversity within habitats that animist societies occupy. Misfortune following the appropriation of excess is indeed evident among my Sanema hosts in the form of what they term onihamo, a word given for sudden deaths following instances of unintentional overhunting. Onihamo is a kind of curse in which forest spirit-masters gain vengeance for unnecessarily avaricious acts. One could justifiably argue that onihamo imposes a kind of limiting mechanism that prevents excess accumulation that thereby translates to an ecological ethos. It appears that if anything, the Amazonian cosmos is antigrowth because it comprises a limited closed-circuit biosphere of scarce vitality that compels predation in the first place (Menget 1985, 137; Descola 2013, 346–348). The available field of resources, particularly life force in the form of energy, souls, substance, and identities, cannot be perpetually expanding. It is finite, and new life can emerge only by seizing it from external sources, accounting for the widespread practice of raids and abduction (Descola 1992; Santos-Granero 2009b). Moreover, a delicate balance must always be maintained so that any life taken must be promptly recouped through vengeance. This dynamic applies also to nonhuman animals, who similarly seek to recoup lost vitality when humans hunt them; they enact retribution by making the hunter or their family sick. In short, animist predation is a system in which new value can only replace lost value and never exceed it. Conversely, an economy of growth, namely capitalism, takes predation to perpetuity, to its ultimate own demise. Amazonian society is antigrowth for another reason too: there seems

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to be little desire for surplus among many lowland peoples. This may sound like a contradiction, given that I have been arguing that my Sanema collaborators seemed to desire goods above all else, but they always stress that matitö are employed primarily to enact virtuous relationality. Beyond the central role of matitö in gestures of kin care, it was striking to see how little concern was granted to them; many externally procured items were strewn across the floors of houses, covered in dust, broken, or tossed away with the food waste. Smaller items purchased for curiosity and enjoyment, such as portable DVD players, plastic furniture, watches, sunglasses, backpacks, and children’s toys, did not seem to last long at all, and a surprising degree of indifference was expressed toward their fated destruction. The short life span of most goods was a consequence of the number of hands they tended to pass through as a result of demand sharing, which impels people to privilege generosity (ödö ipö) over the satisfaction of their personal desires. Antigrowth also relates to labor. In many Amerindian societies, people see no reason to work beyond what is required, and well-being is intimately tied up with satisfaction in one’s labor as well as the delight attained from leisure activities as distinguished from work activities (Overing 1983; Walker 2013b). Capitalism is the antithesis of this attitude toward work; it actively appropriates labor often even until workers are bled dry. The exploitation is evident in the long hours and efficient manner with which people are expected to undertake labor. It is also reflected in the hegemonic ideology that work, more than anything else, defines people and gives their lives purpose. Be that as it may, I do not want to end this story on such a gloomy note or imply that people should be resigned to their fate as prey in an increasingly venatic world. It is true that this era of predatory late capitalism is no longer about differences in ways of being in the world. It is now about something far more charged than knowledge. It is about values, ideological doctrines that drive growth and exploitation, create huge disparities between rich and poor, and despoil the earth. In keeping with recent moves to destabilize the ontological hegemony of market liberalization (Escobar 1999), now is the time for something different. The Sanema have shown that prey can themselves be predators in subtle and ingenious ways. To paraphrase Carlos Fausto (2007, 523), sometimes it is not entirely clear who seduces whom and who controls whom. Theorists of Amazonian predation have emphasized the potential for inversion in predation because deep down it is, as Fausto describes, “a power asymmetry which is positional and can therefore be reversed”

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(2012a, 305). There is no doubt that my Sanema hosts routinely mobilized their own predatory strategies to their advantage. They extracted resources from Ye’kwana people by eliciting empathy to obtain gifts while offering little or nothing in return. They similarly invoked the arrival of abundant resources from the state by mimicking its rhetoric, much as they might simulate animal noises during the hunt that entice game closer for the final ambush. O’Neill and Dua contend that power can at any moment present “the possibilities of reversal: that the hunted might one day hunt, that the prey may become a predator, and that the captive may escape” (2017, 7–8). My Sanema friends have indeed demonstrated that even those in a position of prey can outsmart their predators, that power, albeit oblique, can still be exerted from below in contemporary predatory economies. To ameliorate the ills of capitalism, Hickel proposes a process of “degrowth,” beginning with appropriating less and reciprocating more.7 Prioritizing human flourishing and ecological stability rather than predatory accumulation should now be the primary objective of all societies. But maybe there are other directions to simultaneously pursue, ways that we can learn from people like the Sanema. Perhaps a variation of antigrowth that is deeply informed by both reciprocity and certain forms of predatory power from below can provide new ways of thinking and living that devalue excess once and for all.

Acknowledgments

Research for this book was made possible by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. Earlier drafts were supported by a studentship from the London School of Economics and a Childcare Grant from the LSE Student Union. A University of Bristol Research Fellowship enabled me to draw this long journey to a close and finish the book. I am grateful to all funders for making this research possible. I wish to thank the journals that allowed me to reprint parts of articles in this book. Chapter 2 appeared, in a different form, as “Dodged Debts and the Submissive Predator: Perspectives on Amazonian Relations of Dependence” in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2017); a version of chapter 6 appeared as “Maneuvering for Paper: Physical and Social Experiences of Bureaucracy in Venezuelan Amazonia” in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (2016). There are many people without whom I certainly would not even be writing these acknowledgments right now. First and foremost, my most profound gratitude goes to the Sanema residents of both communities where I conducted doctoral fieldwork. They graciously accepted a strange setenapösu into their lives with laughter, generosity, and warmth. In particular, I am indebted to ipa sawa and ipa nawani, whose hospitality and patience were so precious to me over those years. It was only through frequent conversations with my Sanema brother that I finally became, like him, taö öpa, someone who knows. This all began thanks to the generosity and adventurous spirit of an inspirational friend, Dyan Summers, who is one of those people who can literally change your life. There were several people in Venezuela without whose hospitality, support, and bureaucratic acumen I could not have survived, among them Natalia Cáceres, Simon Caura, Piera Lo Curto Coelles, Bettsimar Díaz, Arturo Jose Garcia Arana, Magda Magris, América Perdomo, Alejandro Reig, Aurora Rodríguez, Claudia

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Urdaneta, and Carlos Zagala. I am grateful also to Marcus Colchester for providing me with a copy of his Sanema dictionary and for supportive conversations prior to my fieldwork. My amazing doctoral supervisors at the London School of Economics, Michael Scott and Harry Walker, pushed me think about my material in profound and creative ways and to see things I hadn’t at first noticed. It is thanks to the late Olivia Harris that I was able to embark on this whole process to begin with, as she encouraged me to undertake doctoral studies at the LSE; I only wish I wish I had had more time to get to know her. I am thankful to Laura Rival for taking me on as one of her supervisees for a period of time after Olivia passed away. Other scholars at the LSE provided important insights throughout the years by reading and responding to earlier drafts of what would later become this book. I am grateful to Ruben Andersson, Rita Astuti, Fenella Cannell, Alanna Cant, Ana Paola Gutiérrez Garza, Tamara Hale, Evan Killick, Daniela Kraemer, Aude Michelet, Mathijs Pelkman, Alpa Shah, Charles Stafford, Katie Swancutt, Anna Tuckett, Joanna Whiteley, and Matt Wilde for providing feedback in seminars, conferences, writing groups, and beyond. I have been fortunate enough to spend time in several excellent anthropology and Latin America studies departments since completing my doctorate, including at the Institute of Latin American Studies, the University of Manchester, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Bristol. David Cooper, Penny Harvey, Ainhoa Montoya, Camilla Morelli, Kit Opie, Morten Axel Pedersen, Graeme Were, and Juan Zhang have all provided insights, reading suggestions, and support along the way. Huge and immeasurable thanks go to a few colleagues and friends who took the time to offer close readings of chapters in the final stages of writing, particularly Olivier Allard, Agustin Diz, Casey High, and Miranda Sheild Johansson. A very special thanks goes to Francesca Mezzenzana, who helped greatly when I was attempting to tie it all together but who also showed me that it’s possible to enjoy the process again. At the University of Texas Press, Casey Kittrell has been an extremely patient and encouraging editor. The anonymous reviewers were superhuman in their willingness to read a draft of the manuscript so quickly during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I am deeply grateful for their amazingly useful feedback. Thanks also to Erin Greb for the marvelous map. Profound gratitude goes to family members who have helped in ways that are as important as talking through theories and ideas, if not more

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so. They provided love, laughter, and a calming presence at various stages throughout the years. But more valuable still, they offered welcome respite from child-care responsibilities so I could eke out time for writing here and there. My mother, Ali Cooper, went over and above many times by looking after my first child when I was finishing my dissertation and then providing a haven for writing in the later stages. I was lucky to have similar support from Kate Beaumont, Tony Beaumont, Jennifer Cole, Brian Cole, Louise Cole, and Pete Peters over the years. I also thank my father, Paul Penfield, whose adventuresome spirit brought him to my field site, where he helped refurbish Maduaña’s school. Finally, I am grateful to my two wonderful children, Otto and Arlo, for keeping me sane during the many years and the many permutations of this work. Of course, I saved the very best for last. It is difficult to think of a way to thank someone who put up with two years of my absence during fieldwork and numerous international postdoctoral relocations, not to mention the many years of angst and distraction. Alex Cole has accompanied me throughout all this since the first mention of a doctorate. And he has done so with more good humor, wisdom, and tolerance than I could ever have believed possible. He makes me a better person every day.

Notes

Introduction 1. According to the Borgman orthography (1990), the correct spelling for the language group would be “Sanuma,” although I have decided to use “Sanema” because this is the way my Sanema research collaborators chose to spell the name of their ethnic group in writing as originally established by ADIEL (Asociación de Iglesias Evangélicas Libres de Venezuela) missionaries. While occasionally I use terms such as “the Sanema” and “Sanema people,” this is not to suggest that the people with whom I worked were representative of the Sanema ethnic group as a whole; nor could one claim that Sanema people constitute a homogeneous unit regionally or even within a single community. On the contrary, a relatively weak sense of cohesive ethnic identification exists, connected to some degree to the exact forms of relational predation I explore in the book. 2. Hugo Chávez died of cancer in March 2013, shortly after I conducted research for this book. 3. Late capitalism requires growth by way of aggregate profits partly because most companies now rely on shareholder investments. If profits fail to grow, investors pull out and the firm collapses (Hickel 2020, 86–87). In turn, when economies slow down, governments cannot pay their debts, triggering a crisis that can quickly spiral out of control. Bonds lose their value and governments must raise interest rates, slowing the economy further and plunging them into more debt. 4. Anthropological literature has explored predatory ideologies and actions with relation to resource extraction (J. Ferguson 2005; Kirsch 2014; Swancutt 2012b), bureaucracy (Gupta 2012), exploitative and precarious labor (Millar 2018; Ong 1988; Prentice 2018), austerity measures (Bear 2015), debt (Han 2012; James 2014; Kirwan 2019; Zaloom 2018), migration (Andersson 2018; Hochschild 2003), financialization (Ho 2009; Ouroussoff 2011), and health care settings (Cooper 2018; Garcia 2010; Gomez-Temesio 2018), to name but a few. Late liberalism/neoliberalism, however, is not an all-encompassing or hegemonic paradigm but, as Postero notes, “a philosophy that is expressed in various policies, practices, and institutions that are constantly being conserved and/or contested” (2007, 18). 5. The larger Yanomami language family comprises about 35,000 people. The Sanema group makes up approximately 4,000 of the total family, and their language is said to be the most lexically distinct from other Yanomami languages, as they are believed to have been the first group to branch off from other Yanomami groups



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in pre-Columbian times (R. Ferguson 1995, 99; Ramos 1995, 21). The other three linguistic groups are Yanoama (Yãnomãmī, Yãnomãmö), Yanomamö (Yãnomãm), and Ninam (Yanam, Shiriana). Yaroamö has recently been added as a language. The language family as a whole has become known as the Yanomami, although the southern branch, which had been spelled “Yanomamö” by scholars such as Napoleon Chagnon (1968), are now also commonly referred to as Yanomami. 6. Kopenawa wrote this book in collaboration with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, who translated Kopenawa’s oration into French for the first edition. Albert also included an introduction, conclusion, explanatory notes, and supplementary materials for the book. 7. This notion is derived from the work of Michael Serres (1980). He argues that there are three components of the “parasite logic”: analyze (observe behavior of the host), paralyze (interrupt usual functioning), and catalyze (force the host to act differently). 8. Overall, I chose to mobilize the concept of predation over alterity (otherness) in this book because Sanema participation in economic life, immediate and distant, is concerned not so much with defining difference but rather with seeking resources in the broadest sense as well as how they themselves become a resource for other actors. This is a subtle yet important distinction; it is not the state of alterity, one’s indelible condition in relation to others, that motivates this analytic but rather a process of becoming, powered by predation and appropriation. (See also Bessire 2014, 21.) 9. The analytical field of predation encompasses a number of associated and interrelated theories. Key among them is perspectivism, which is generally associated with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), although also developed by Aparecida Vilaça (1998), Carlos Fausto (1999), Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (1998), and Tânia Stolze Lima (1996). Perspectivism describes the universality of humanity within Amazonian cosmology and, in turn, one’s positionality vis-à-vis others within a system of predation (Costa and Fausto 2010, 97). One of the core ideas underlying perspectivism is that “all beings perceive the world in the same way. What varies is the world that they see” (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 471). This became the crux of the “ontological turn,” a theory that explores radical differences in ways of being, championed by Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Marisol de la Cadena, among others (de la Cadena 2010, 2015; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Willerslev 2011). The ontology approach has been critiqued by many for fetishizing alterity, flattening out political sophistication, and ignoring historical factors (Bessire and Bond 2014; Cepek 2016; Graeber 2015a; Killick 2014; Ramos 2012; Turner 2009). A full description of the ontology debate is beyond the scope of this book, but it is nonetheless pertinent to note here that the relative absence of the term “ontology” throughout this book is a conscious choice in response to its highly charged associations. 10. Some scholars have drawn attention to nuances within the model of alterity, with some societies conceiving of alterity as complementary oppositions inside the social group, such as among groups inhabiting the Xingu region of Northwest Amazonia, and “acquisitional polities” that project otherness externally and actively seek to appropriate it from the outside (Hugh-Jones 1996; Viveiros de Castro 1992, 6). Carlos Fausto (2012a, 301–302) similarly notes that reproduction is not always sought externally because sociological difference can also be produced on the inside



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through intergenerational ritual transmission. Fausto distinguishes these centripetal activities from the centrifugal ones that are associated with acquisition from the exterior, although all Amazonian societies practice both forms to some degree. On internal ritual transmission see Nahum-Claudel 2017, 15. 11. Among the Parakanã, abducted women were gradually made to feel that their new community was their home through gentle persuasion rather than threat or violence (Fausto 2012a, 158159), and in many Amazonian contexts prisoners taken during war raids were frequently adopted, fed, and protected by their captors (Santos-Granero 2009b; Viveiros de Castro 1992, ch. 8). 12. Santos-Granero notes that often ties of friendship take preeminence over consanguinity and affinity and enlarge the sphere of safe relations in “a sea of actual or potential predation” (2007a, 15). In other circumstances, friends are designated as potential enemies, coexecutioners who are physically close to preclude unexpected arrow attacks, presenting an ambiguous “split between companionship and treachery” (Fausto 2012b, S203). Even friendship may not always be as distinct from predation as it first appears. What is certain about friends is that they are others who elide familiarization. 13. Even legal frameworks to mitigate illegal extraction in Amazonia were framed in this language. Brazil’s 1965 Forest Code (Law 4711 article 15) explicitly prohibits the “predatory exploration of the primitive forests of the Amazon basin.” 14. In Venezuela in particular, the capitalist frontier has gradually been approaching the Sanema since an initiative known as the Conquest of the South, a development project launched by Rafael Caldera’s government (1969–1974) that aimed to expand infrastructural development, colonizer settlements, and mining ventures in forested regions in the south of the country. 15. Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, presented plans to exploit resources from the southern states in a proposal to develop what is called the Orinoco Mining Arc, a 43,183-square-mile area of rainforest that was opened to exploration by multinational mining companies in 2016 (Alès 2018). Critics fear grave implications for the fragile forest ecosystems and Indigenous peoples inhabiting the region. 16. In Brazil the Sanema occupy a small area of northernmost Roraima state on the Auris River, and in Venezuela they occupy the Ventuari, Caura, and Erebato watersheds, all major effluents of the Orinoco River. According to census data from the two countries that Sanema people inhabit, their population in the 2011 Venezuela census numbered 1,444 (http://www.ine.gov.ve/documentos/Demografia/Censo2011​ /pdf/EmpadronamientoIndigena.pdf), and in the Brazil census of 2010, they numbered 2,334 (https://indigenas.ibge.gov.br/images/pdf/indigenas/folder_indigenas​ _web.pdf). During the time of my fieldwork, data I obtained from local municipalities in 2010 indicated that there were approximately sixty Sanema communities in Bolívar state and forty-five in Amazonas state of Venezuela. 17. See, for example, High 2015a, ch. 3. A trope of gender relations in Amazonia has often been that men assimilate non-Indigenous ways, and women are more conservative (Lepri 2006, 72; Lorrain 2000). Even symbolically, the world of the other is viewed as masculine, while women epitomize the interior of the socius (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 141). In a critique of this trope, some scholars have argued that women are predisposed to exteriority (Mezzenzana 2018) or that gender differentiation has been magnified only recently by contact with the capitalist economy (Seymour-Smith

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1991). One could certainly argue that Sanema women have a more contained form of agency with regard to predatory action. For example, all Sanema women possess a spirit of vengeance, as do men, although they enact it through sorcery spells performed within the settlement rather than in physical vengeance raids beyond. This is also indicated in some Amazonian contexts when outward-oriented predation is restricted among men, who then are said to be “like women” (Vilaça 2010, 13).

Chapter 1: Predation, Then and Now 1. Rival notes in her book Trekking through History that the idea of natural abundance is notable not in a directly translatable phrase but rather in the pleasure and excitement expressed at the sight of abundant resources. Such enthusiasm was not voiced in the same way when her Woaorani hosts spoke about and viewed their garden sites, whose products were deemed less bountiful or reliable (2002, 88–89). 2. Natural abundance is also discussed in Århem 1996; Bird-David 1990; and C. High 2015b, 131. 3. Seduction is common in trans-specific interaction, particularly in contexts of hunting. Anent songs sung by the Achuar serve to persuade prey to come close (Descola 1994, 260–263), and Siberian hunters sacrifice trade goods to bring the master spirit of elk into a lustful mood (Willerslev 2007, 100–105), to give a few examples. 4. Among the Desana Tukanoan peoples the term “hunt” is coterminous with “make love to the animal”; they copulate with them in dreams, and hunting is a set of techniques related to sexual seduction with love charms, aphrodisiac perfumes, and seductive invocations (Descola 2013, 347). 5. When I was talking with Héctor about this, he explained that even though René says the hikula enter his chest, “what he means is they enter his thoughts,” as he pointed to his head. Marcus Colchester notes, “The Sanema consider their chest to be the seat of their being. They say that they think in their chests” (1982, 446). 6. See Chagnon (1988, 1990), who was building on Marvin Harris’s work on “cultural materialism” in relation to resource scarcity (Harris 1979). 7. On competition for manufactured goods see Blick 1988; R. Ferguson 1990; Tierney 2000; Whitehead 1992. 8. Ultimately the report concluded that the majority of the allegations were unfounded, even though there were criticisms of Chagnon’s “minor lapses in judgment.” The report nevertheless provoked a broader debate on the need to reflect on ethical practices within the discipline, particularly the responsibility to do no harm (Borofsky 2005, ch. 11; Sponsel 2022, ch. 7). 9. This term seems to have some common roots with the word “seize” (tili), implying the latter’s connotations of assertiveness and forcefulness. 10. The entire swidden process involves cutting down trees, leaving the remaining foliage to dry, burning off the brush, planting manioc shoots, and then waiting for the harvest to mature. This can take up to a year. 11. On the history of Ye’kwana contact with outsiders see Arvelo-Jiménez 1974, 15–27; Koch-Grünberg 1979, 370. 12. The mission with which Maduaña residents had most contact was associated with ADIEL (Asociación de Iglesias Evangélicas Libres de Venezuela), which was incorporated into and funded by EFCA (Evangelical Free Church of America). ADIEL



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was also supported by Alas de Socorro (Mission Aviation Fellowship), which facilitated the easy transport of goods into the mission by plane. The expulsion in 2005 by Chávez of the North American New Tribes Mission from southern territories, in combination with the rapid arrival of grassroots Bolivarian projects, resulted in considerable weakening of missionary infrastructure throughout Sanema territory. 13. José Kelly has similarly noted that his Yanomami interlocutors understood the flood of manufactured goods from missionaries to be a “preparation for receiving the Christian message” in order to “better convince the soul” (2011, 97). See also Grotti 2013; Taylor 1981. The way my Sanema hosts described it, however, indicated that it was the resources on offer that were the end point, not the conversion of the soul. 14. On praying as a form of mimicry see A-C Taylor (1981, 672). Among the Wari’, Christianity was similarly a system by which they “familiarize” the powerful other through kinship relations with God and the ingestion of his words (Vilaça 2016). Christian teachings are received not as a rupture from the past but as a mode of “alteration” (reversible other-becoming) without outright transformation. Predation, in this case, forms a nonviolent fluid perspective (Viveiros de Castro 1998) in which one may switch from predator to prey and back again. 15. Initiatives included free health care (Misión Barrio Adentro), housing (Misión Vivienda), cash transfers for school scholarships (Misión Ribas) and single mothers (Misión Madres de Barrio), food subsidies (Misión Mercal), subsidized gasoline, community-run projects (consejos comunales), financing losses at state-owned companies, and civil servant pay increases, to name but a few. 16. Many would later criticize Chávez’s irresponsible economic investment strategies for this economic crisis, which started when the price of oil fell from 2014 onward (Gallegos 2016). In particular, Chávez’s administration ate into reserves and took control of the central bank in order to pay for social spending, resulting in runaway inflation. When these funds ran out, Venezuela had to turn to banks, bondholders, and foreign governments for loans. In recent years, inflation has increased 5,500 percent each year, with an all-time high of 2,296,981 percent in February 2019. Ultimately, though, the economic crisis was the result of numerous factors, including corruption, domestic political disputes, underdeveloped internal markets and infrastructure, an overvalued currency, and US sanctions on the Venezuelan economy (Strønen 2020). 17. Chavista is the term used for those who aligned with Chávez and his political party, the PSUV. 18. On multicultural reform in Latin American see Rice 2012; Warren and Jackson 2003; Yashar 2005. 19. The Sanema of Maduaña never use the term “culture” as do an increasing number of other Indigenous groups across Latin America. This could in part be due to a relative absence of the international NGO presence among Sanema communities that is common in other Amazonian contexts (Cepek 2012b). This dearth in ethnic self-reflection very much contrasts to the kind of perceived ethnic cohesion and public recognition that Yanomami people have developed largely as a result of Davi Kopenawa’s political activities outlined in his book written with Bruce Albert (2013). For more on these debates on indigeneity and metacultural performance see Brown 1993; C. High 2015b; C. Taylor 1994. 20. For more on communal councils see Ellner 2009; Valencia 2015; Wilde 2017.

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21. To highlight this point, the 2014 operating budget for the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous People allocated 1,350,500 bolívares to training related to the land demarcation process and 25,013,690 bolívares to the organization of the communal councils (Angosto-Ferrández 2015, 111). Very few land titles were granted to Indigenous people overall, with 85 percent of Indigenous territories still to be demarcated. Application processing was essentially suspended in 2015 (Mamo 2021, 487). 22. For discussions on Indigenous peoples and party politics in Venezuela see Allard 2012; Lauer 2006; Rodríguez 2020. 23. Giovanna Micarelli (2015) notes a similar terminology among the Uitoto of Colombian Amazonia, who describe the acquisition of institutional money as a process of “hunting” and “trapping” and even seduction and trickery.

Chapter 2: Extracting Good Things 1. Davi Kopenawa notes that the Yanomami equivalent term matihi is the word used for merchandise but in the past was also the term used for adornments (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 327). Bruce Albert translates the word in an endnote as “precious objects” (2013, 549). 2. A similar emphasis on the alleviation of suffering is expressed among the Yanomami, who go to great lengths to ameliorate the pain, sadness, hardship, and hunger of kin (Alès 2000). 3. This mythological theme of refusing superior goods offered by the culture hero and thereafter remaining poor is relatively widespread in Amazonia (Hugh-Jones 1988, 144; Vilaça 2010, 16). 4. For more detail on this history see Arvelo-Jiménez 1974, 42–44; Colchester 1981; R. B. Ferguson 1995, 102; Gheerbrant 1953 181; Ramos 1979. 5. The Caura Basin is a fluvial area surrounding the Caura River in Bolívar state, southern Venezuela. The Caura River is one of the main tributaries of the Orinoco, and the basin is the main territory of Venezuela’s Sanema-speaking people. 6. Growing scholarly interest in the perspectives of those who assume dependent roles has recently revealed that subordination is not always equated with deficient subjectivity or lack of control but rather strategies for empowerment (Devlieger 2018; James 2014; Sangaramoorthy 2018; Stasch 2021). James Ferguson (2013) explored a number of instances in southern Africa in which relations of dependence and paternalism continue to be sought despite the abolition of apartheid and cheap migrant labor. Saba Mahmood’s (2004) approach to subjection also appeals for an alternative to the liberal assumption that all humans have an innate drive to assert freedom and to resist coercive constraints. She argues that the veil in Islamic contexts, although viewed externally as exploitation of women, was experienced as the quintessence of piety and imbued one with profound agency in the religious experience. 7. Luiz Costa similarly notes in his ethnography The Owners of Kinship (2017) that many relationships among the Kanamari are premised on ownership, in particular the dyad of the feeder (owner) and the one it feeds. 8. When talking of Runa relations with their dogs, Eduardo Kohn draws a parallel between the submissive disposition of dogs and the Runa’s behavior toward outsiders. Kohn notes, “Dogs are submissive to their Runa masters in the same way that the Runa, historically, have been forced to be submissive to white estate owners, government officials, and priests” (2007b, 12).



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9. Lucas Bessire notes a similar vernacular among the Ayoreo, whose word for shame, ajengome, implies a subordinate position (2014, 149–151), particularly in relation to missionaries and other outsiders. 10. A number of Ye’kwana people have even obtained a university education, while only a few Sanema people at the time were educated to high school level. 11. Michel Serres (1980) explores parasitism as a core component of human sociality, arguing that life itself is founded on a system of taking without giving and that parasitism is one of the most basic survival strategies of all beings. This is described as an “abuse value” that precedes use or exchange value, drawn from the biological definition of parasitism as a predatory feeding behavior that exploits hosts for resources necessary for survival. Parasites, however, do not entirely annihilate their hosts as do other predators. For another example of the use of parasitism as an analytic see da Col 2012. 12. This echoes a statement about the Sanema in Ye’kwana mythology: “That is why they come to rob us for they have nothing to give in exchange for our things” (Civrieux 1997, 90). 13. On leadership and autonomy see Brown 1993; Clastres 1987, 168–169; Overing 2003, 307; Santos-Granero 1986, 664; Walker 2020. 14. This arrangement is not, however, the case with all relations of dependence in Amazonia. Captured Akuriyo families, for instance, do not retain their social structure but are assigned to a particular Trio family whom they serve for their entire lives (Grotti and Brightman 2010).

Chapter 3: Horizons of the Unknown 1. There were a few occasions when snakebites were attributed to oka because it was said that through sorcery they impel snakes to bite their victims. A research collaborator described it thus: “When they find a snake, they grab it with a long pole and then they grab the head and make it bite the footprint of the one they want to kill with poison. So, then the snake goes and looks for the man and bites him. That’s also how oka kill people.” Many deaths were rationalized as oka attacks in similar ways because it is frequently stated that oka come to kill, thus foregrounding oka motives over events or symptoms. See a similar example described by Casey High (2015b, 162). 2. See a similar description of indefinable nervous tension among the Ayoreo in Bessire 2014, 199. 3. Years later, rumors arrived in the upstream mission community that a traveling Sanema man had met a grown woman living in Amazonas state who told a story of having been taken from her family as a child. Many believe she was one of the abducted girls. 4. See Colchester 1982, 493. Similar terms exist among the Yanomami, with a strong affiliation between the verbs yuo (to take revenge) and kôãmai (to reciprocate). These two terms should not be seen as antithetical “but as similar expressions of exchange and reciprocity” (Lizot 1994b, 232). 5. Revenge arguably characterizes a profound Amazonian modality more broadly that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2011, 53) describes as the unshakable core of Amerindian humanity. In Indigenous Christian conversions among the Tupinambá in sixteenth-century Brazil, they were willing to agree to all other expectations set by

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missionaries, including renouncing cannibalism, polygamy, and alcohol consumption. Retribution against enemies, by contrast, was something they were staunchly unwilling to forgo because its enactment was the greatest honor a man could achieve. Vengeance was synonymous with being a proper man. 6. Rival has described a similar state of radical alterity that follows homicidal rage among the Waorani; rage is an emotion that dehumanizes and “turns the killer into a being with no relatives” (2005, 296). In the same way, orphans, being kinless, can sometimes be viewed as analogous to predators (C. High 2015b, 157; Overing 1996, 64). Carlos Fausto notes when discussing post-homicidal seclusion that the killer sees everyone as prey (2012a, 164–171). See also Costa 2017, 116. 7. On social memory related to epidemics see Duin 2021; Fausto 2020. 8. This is not to suggest that epidemics are merely a phenomenon of the past. During my time among the Sanema in Maduaña there were numerous cases of malaria and an outbreak of whooping cough that afflicted most children and even hospitalized a few. There is, of course, also the more recent Covid-19 pandemic (Silva and Estellita-Lins 2021). 9. Isabella Lepri (2006) recounts a similar kind of fear of mestizos among the Ese Ejja of Bolivian Amazonia, who also state that they believe mestizos want to kill them. Cofán likewise fear the cities because they are full of “thieves” and “killers” (Cepek 2012a, 187; 2018, ch. 4). See also Kopenawa 2013, 315; Vilaça 2010, 305. In other Amerindian societies, whites are seen to be supernatural figures or malevolent spirits (Albert 1992; Viveiros de Castro 2011). 10. Aparecida Vilaça (2010) has similarly noted how the Wari’ consider “foreigners” and missionaries as classificatory enemies who historically attacked them or waged war with them. See also Fausto 2012a, 289–291. Joanna Overing (1996) describes an analogous association among the Piaroa, for whom white people become symbols of violence and monstrous asocial behavior, corresponding strongly to Sanema descriptions of both oka and criollos. See also Bessire 2014, 156, for interpretations among the Ayoreo-speaking people of Paraguay. 11. CENASAI is the acronym for the agency Control de Enfermedades Endémicas y Atención Sanitaria al Indígena (Control of Endemic Diseases and Health Care for Indigenous Peoples). 12. Illness and accident in everyday life do not happen by chance but rather ensue from the predatory proclivities of human or nonhuman entities who have been angered (Descola 2013, 18; A-C Taylor 1996). On illness linked to contact and goods see Albert 1992; Kopenawa 2013, 178; Oakdale 2005, 91. 13. An example of a more widespread rumor in lowland South America is that of Kanaimà, a form of sorcery practiced in the Guyana hinterlands of Venezuela and Brazil, which span a number of ethnic groups. Kanaimà emerges in far-reaching rumors and accusations in the region (Whitehead 2002), even occasionally among Ye’kwana people and the Sanema of Maduaña. 14. Although very much intertwined, gossip and rumor differ subtly in their definitions. Gossip is a morally laden verbal exchange concerning the conduct of absent third parties that takes place among a small group within a private setting. Rumor is unsubstantiated information that passes by word of mouth in wider networks than gossip (Stewart and Strathern 2003). Anthropological work on rumor and gossip tends to explore the phenomena as directed at specific individuals as a means to



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slander rivals or compete for status within a defined group. Rumor of oka, by contrast, was infused with fear and its direction undefined. The rumors tended to focus more on events than persons, reflecting a general mood of anxiety. When taking the form of a wider social narrative, rumor can be seen as a device for making sense of ambiguous or oblique phenomena more akin to urban legends or conspiracy theories that appear in highly charged contexts of rapid social change (Kapferer 1990). This seems to be more in line with Sanema experiences. 15. For examples of Indigenous interpretations of messianic time see Bessire 2011; Dean 2009; Santos-Granero 2007b; Walker 2019.

Chapter 4: Subterranean Forces 1. While working on a draft of this chapter during fieldwork in Peru in 2017 I interviewed several Venezuelan migrants about their experiences and reasons for migrating. Not one interviewee mentioned oil or the plummeting price of oil at that time. They only reflected on the topic when I brought it up. 2. For more accounts from Venezuela see Ciccariello-Maher 2013; Karl 1997; Strønen 2017; Tinker Salas 2009. For similar patterns in other oil-producing nations see Apter 2005; Ferguson 2005; Watts 2004. 3. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, estimated in 2016 to be more than 300 billion barrels in total (OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin 2019, http://www​ .opec.org/opec_web/en/data_graphs/330.htm). 4. The Punto Fijo political pact was signed in 1959 by the three dominant political parties in Venezuela at the time, Acción Democrática, COPEI, and Unión Republicana Democrática. They initiated a number of measures to ensure that they retained a share of all future oil wealth, resulting in petroleum interests trumping democratic principles. 5. President Carlos Andrés Pérez termed the neoliberal changes El Gran Viraje, the Great Turn, a package that included privatizing state companies, introducing tax reforms, reducing customs duties, and diminishing the role of the state in the economy. 6. Official sources put casualties at approximately 300 civilians, although some estimate numbers to be as high as 2,000. 7. Chávez did establish joint ventures with foreign oil companies during his presidency. Though seemingly contradictory to his project, these ventures were nevertheless essential to enabling him to pay back historical debts to the poor while resisting the hegemony of free-market capitalism, the central ideological foundations of his political platform. 8. “Venezuela to Increase Subsidized Gasoline Price,” Reuters, October 23, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/venezuela-increase-subsidized-gasoline​ -price-2021-10-23/. The price is taken from Global Petrol Prices, which states, “All countries have access to the same petroleum prices of international markets but then decide to impose different taxes” (https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline​ _prices/). Prior to the October 2021 price hike, the cost per liter of gasoline in Venezuela was less than one cent, US$0.0011, estimated from the official exchange rate. 9. The full name of this document is Guía de Control de Circulación de Combustible (Guide to Control of Fuel Circulation). 10. Marcus Colchester (1981, 111n124) notes that these ohinani are by definition

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“crazy,” given that nani means crazy. This notion is closely associated with petrol huffing. 11. Jacques Lizot has noted that the Yanomami consider the ground a place of multiple layers, infused with rottenness and inhabited by grotesque giant worms (2007, 271–276). See also Gow 1989. Similarly, in an endnote in Kopenawa’s The Falling Sky (2013, 525n44), Bruce Albert remarks that Christian burials in the earth are considered a “revolting practice” that prevents the parting of the soul and in turn, the cessation of mourning. Beth Conklin notes this same sentiment among the Wari’, who regard burial in the “cold, wet and polluting” ground as horrific (2001, xviii). 12. On the spirit-masters of mind-altering substances see also Gow 1994, 95; Overing 1996, 73. 13. See Bessire 2014 (173, 180) for a similar description among the Ayoreo. 14. Harry Walker (2012) has argued, by contrast, that among the Urarina, manufactured goods have a powerful spirit-master called “The Burner.” 15. Michael Cepek (2016) actually makes clear that there is no consensus as to whether oil is the coancoan’s blood but that many Cofán people have interpreted it as a form of political discourse against mining. 16. Gisa Weszkalnys (2011), on the other hand, argues that economic models such as the “resource curse” do not have homogenizing social effects but rather become embedded in complex historical, cultural, and political worlds. Oil merely exacerbates existing conflicts and inequalities rather than causing them, demonstrating how economic models infrequently reflect the manifold social lives at play around the world (see also Gilberthorpe and Rajak 2017; Kirsch 2014; Sawyer 2004). Political instabilities that result from oil dependence often have deep roots in colonialism (Reyna and Behrends 2008).

Chapter 5: Invoking the State 1. The ending of a speech is marked with the phrase “That is it, I have nothing more to say” (Ina sa kupitopa apapöta kehe) as an indication that others may then respond. 2. This process of photographic evidence may be part of the official communal council assembly process in addition to or in lieu of a meeting minutes book (libro de actas) that are required as evidence of meetings and decisions made therein. I never saw my Sanema hosts take notes during meetings. 3. For a similar description of the language of care through state gifts among the Yanomami see Caballero-Arias 2003 (358). For the Brazilian Kanamari, the state, manifest in the Indigenous agency FUNAI and its representatives, is similarly said to “feed” them through the provision of merchandise, food, and shelter (Costa 2017, 176–181). Among the Parakanã, whites and state agents are treated as “father-givers” (Fausto 2008, 354). See also McCallum 1990, 412. The notion that leaders care for citizens is a common narrative in contexts with populist leaders more broadly (Auyero 2001). 4. In keeping with the modality of predation, many authors have made similar observations with regard to other-becoming. Alberto Corsín Jiménez (2021, 124) notes that Michael Taussig’s 1993 analysis of mimesis is suffused with the language of capture, drawing attention to the predatory nature of imitation. Likewise, Luiz Costa notes that the Kanamari use the term “to imitate” (ma-dyi) to describe vocal



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mimicry in hunting but also to mean the widespread practice of emulating one’s master or owner the way babies and pets do: “to imitate is to do as the owner does.” Costa also notes how imitation is analogous to or a form of seduction (2017, 50). See also Bessire 2014, 135; Santos-Granero 2007b; Vilaça 2016a, 71–74, 2016b, 8–9. Kopenawa (2013) too speaks of imitation several times in relation to the appropriation of power: aspiring leaders imitate the elders (302); shamans imitate their spirit allies (322); and Yanomami people in general imitate whites (311). 5. José Kelly (2011) observes a similar declaration accompanying Yanomami encounters with criollo (napë) doctors. Although the napë are thought to embody enmity, weakness, and stinginess, they are also embodiments of power and wealth, and thus Yanomami attempt to appropriate their “otherness,” or “perform napë,” that is, dress in trousers and sunglasses, smoke cigarettes, speak Spanish, eat rice, and use flashlights. Kelly describes the process as the “napë transformational axis.” On other-becoming among the Ese Ejja see Lepri 2006. 6. For references on conflicts around leadership and collective organizing see Århem 2001; Chernela and Zanotti 2014; Codjia 2016; Diz 2020b; Erazo 2010; C. High 2007; Wilson 2010. 7. Olivier Allard (2023) notes that his Warao research participants in Venezuela seemed to embrace electoral politics but not community-level assembly voting, the latter often resulting in village fissioning. He suggests that voting is not an individual private activity but a matter of following a particular, often kin-related, leader, just as Marco had described it. It has been argued that settlement aggregation in Amazonia was historically instigated by influential chiefs rather than chiefs being selected by a predetermined collective (Brightman 2010, 145–147; Heckenberger 2005, 255–290; Lévi-Strauss 1944, 53; Rivière 1984, 72–73). Allard (2023) thus argues that voting is a public expression of loyalty to a particular person more akin to clientelism and not a process of consensus and unity. In a national context this manifested as an expression of loyalty toward President Chávez. On a similar case of fissioning around leaders in association with an NGO presence see Mentore 2017. 8. Juan Luis Rodríguez similarly notes how semiotic acts and performative forms are key components of the Warao’s integration into Venezuela’s political public sphere, “as if gift and speech intrinsically need each other to make sense” (2020, 5). 9. Previously, terms for work tasks were divided according to the specific undertaking: clearing gardens (akehetö), collecting firewood (talika söpö), removing weeds around individual settlements (joka todiki), hunting (namohu), and so on. 10. As part of a broader Amazonian predatory ethos, a fine line exists between affinity and enmity. What this means is that people outside the coresidential group are to some extent viewed with suspicion while simultaneously also identified as potential marriage partners (Viveiros de Castro 2001; Fausto 1999; A-C Taylor 2001). This is the reason many Indigenous societies in Amazonia choose to locate residential households at great distances from one another, up to an hour’s walk, to mitigate daily conflicts that often occur when living together in a large, mixed, sedentary community (Killick 2005). 11. For literature of Amazonian communities forming around schools see C. High 2015b, 151; Killick 2008; Rival 1996. 12. Communal councils do not function precisely like other forms of legally sanctioned Indigenous communities, such as the Peruvian model of a comunidad

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nativa, which has shared legal rights to a titled territory, in part because communal councils are pan-Venezuelan. They nevertheless produce similar notions of community membership premised on political consensus building (Sarmiento-Barletti 2017). Although the Law of Communal Councils was the first law of its kind on community development projects, it was built on existing practices of neighborhood organizing (junta de vecinos). 13. In November 2009 the structure of the communal council was adjusted to constitute five units of the functioning committee: citizen assembly, executive body, financial management unit, social oversight unit, and community coordination collective, each of which requires several councilpersons and one spokesperson. The new structure was implemented to reduce corruption by spreading money management across different units. 14. This reticence relates in some ways to the historical lack of “suprafamilial means of judging, controlling, or punishing misdemeanours” in Amazonia (Walker 2015, 49), which stems from a moral rejection of imposing one’s opinions and advice onto others. Advice is often given in oblique ways, such as when accounts of depraved behavior are presented as impromptu stories or when food prohibitions are stated more as natural facts than rules (Ewart 2015, 222). 15. To understand the difficulty behind notions of the collective in Amazonia, one must consider the cardinal Amerindian concepts of mastery and ownership. Carlos Fausto finds that the categories of “master” or “owner” are pervasive within the Amazonian cosmos as a whole, so that “everything in principle has or may have an owner,” including animals, rivers, trees, and mountains (2008, 340). See also Fausto 2012c; Kohn 2007a; Viveiros de Castro 1992, 2007; Walker 2013b. So fundamental is this relational classification that even kinship ties are often perceived to be derived from ties of ownership (Costa 2017, 4) and orphans are sometimes described as being “without an owner” (Santos-Granero 2009b, 169). This encompassing schema of singular ownership, or singularism more broadly (Walker 2020), can create challenges for collective proprietary arrangements, such as community boats, generators, and outboard motors or the collective management of externally procured resources. This should not be confused with public wealth, such as forest resources, bodies, or vitality (Santos-Granero 2015). Among the Sanema of Maduaña, most items that were intended to be collectively managed were described as having an owner (kamasai) or at least were “looked after” (kolo pasitibo) by one individual rather than a collective, an arrangement perhaps more akin to rights to usufruct than property. The schoolhouse was described as “Marco’s building” that the children used for classes and the community generator was “Santiago’s machine.” In this sense, leadership and ownership could in some ways be seen as conterminous concepts. Costa (2017) has noted that the Kanamari describe village leaders as the owners of the community. See also Allard 2010, 20; Sarmiento Barletti 2015. 16. Agustin Diz describes a similar form of mimicry among the Argentinian Guaraní but through the language deployed in legal documentation that similarly captures the ethos of collectivity and unanimity (2020b, 177). 17. For cargo cults in the Melanesian context see Bubandt 2004; Friedman 1994, 249; Otto 2009; Robbins 2016. For similar discussions within the Amazon context see Caballero-Arias 2003, 359; Dean 2009, 235–238; Hugh-Jones 1994, 69.



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Chapter 6: Forest Papers 1. The “Guide to Control of Fuel Circulation” is known locally as simply “la guía.” 2. Cepek scrutinizes “environmentality” in his analysis, a concept he borrows from the work of Arun Agrawal (2005) who explored an emerging form of environmental consciousness in line with state interests in northern India, despite historical resistance to government-led conservation initiatives. 3. See similar descriptions of the introduction of standardizing procedures in Kelly 2011, 118; Mentore 2017; Postero 2007. 4. Marisol de la Cadena (2015, 72) similarly notes how her Andean interlocutors “walk” the papers or “make them work” to describe the wheeling and dealing required to “move the documents in the right direction.” 5. These procedures are similar in many ways to the standardized and legal procedures that an official comunidad nativa (native community) must undertake in Peruvian Amazonia (Sarmiento-Barletti 2017). 6. For examples of gender disparities that result from male extralocal orientations and wage labor, see Knauft 1997; Lorrain 2000; C. High 2010. 7. While this implies mismanagement of funds, using and distributing funds in Indigenous Amazonian contexts can be complex endeavors. Patrick Wilson (2010) notes that Napo Runa community leaders in Ecuador who might be seen as corrupt from the viewpoint of external institutions are actually conforming to local ethical expectations of generosity in response to multiple requests from community residents. In the same way, those who enact strict compliance with external rules of audit culture and who thus do not perform the expected redistribution were ultimately shunned as leaders by the community. 8. Similar examples of bureaucratic complexities are discussed in Cepek 2012a, 126–132; Mansutti and Alès 2007; Postero 2007, 182–185. 9. On migration see Abarca and Coutin 2018; Tuckett 2018. On property rights and legal procedures see Campbell 2015; Di Giminiani 2018; Nadasdy 2003; K-Y Taylor 2019. On disability see Devlieger 2018. On knowledge production see Corsín Jiménez 2013; Wynn and Israel 2018.

Epilogue 1. One could argue that the analysis central to this book is not unique to Amazonia. Many of the predatory strategies are recognizable in other regions of the world. See Devlieger 2018 and Grinker 1994 for similarities in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Harrison 1993 for a case in Melanesia; Steinmüller 2019 for an example in Myanmar; Swancutt 2012a for such strategies in China. 2. On this discussion see Bolaños 2011; Carneiro da Cunha and Almeida 2001; Cepek 2016; Conklin 1997. 3. See de la Cadena 2010 in the Andean context where beings that inhabit the earth (tirakuna or apu) are similarly dangerous and vengeful entities that demand recognition in the field of national politics. 4. Hickel argues that a circular economy based on the recycling of existing materials would never entirely work in a growth economy because in this case a requisite ever-rising surplus would be restricted (2020, 157–157).

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5. Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Chloe Nahum-Claudel (2019) also provide an outline of a heuristic of traps. 6. Hickel does note that predation “turns out to be more about balance and equilibrium than anything else,” as it limits excess growth among particular species (2020, 279). 7. Hickel puts forward a number of strategies for degrowth, including imposing caps on annual resource use and waste, scaling down profit-making tactics such as planned obsolescence, reducing advertising strategies intended to manipulate emotions, shifting from ownership to usership, decommodifying public goods, expanding the commons, shortening the working week, distributing income and wealth more fairly, and investing in public goods like universal health care, education, and affordable housing.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abductions: fear of, 3, 6, 74, 87; of girls and women, 29, 74, 177n11, 181n3; spouse, 11 abundance: from forests and hunts, 29–30, 33, 51–52, 80–81; mobility and, 24, 38–41; predatory economies and, 83, 85; of the state, 25–26, 46–48, 99–100, 118, 122, 130–131, 158–160 acculturation, 13 ADIEL (Asociación de Iglesias Evangélicas Libres de Venezuela), 175n1, 178–179n12 affect: charismatic leadership and accessing the state, 117–118; power strategies, 61–62 Albert, Bruce, 176n6, 179n19, 184n11 Allard, Olivier, 185n7 alterity: acquisitional politics and, 176–177n10; conceptual models of, 86–87, 176–177n10; definition of, 10, 25, 176n8; dominance of in anthropology, 10, 13; ontological othering and, 161–162; power relations and, 82; radical alterity, 162; violence and, 80 Angosto-Ferrández, Luis Fernando, 43 animist societies, 108–109, 161, 164, 167–169 anthropology: “dark anthropology,” 6; governmentality theory and, 135; predation theory and language in, 6–7, 13–14; writing (tosokama), 135;

Yanomami people in curriculum, 7–8, 35–36 antigrowth, 167–169 appropriation: cargo cults and, 131; in growthism, 16, 164–165, 166; of labor, 168; of otherness, 119, 146–147, 161–162, 176–177n10, 185n5; unidirectional, 3–7, 16, 29, 66–67, 109, 153–154, 158–161, 164; in venatic ideologies, 164–167 Asch, Timothy, 35 asymmetry, power relations of, 58–59, 61–62, 67, 168–169 austerity, 15, 92, 175n4 avenging (noa köa), 13, 78–80, 157; after hunting, 30; by children, 79; by gold people (orotil töpö), 101–102; as inherent and virtuous human obligation, 79; spirit of revenge (okola), 79; by “unknown” people (oka töpö), 79–80 Bessire, Lucas, 181n9 Blaser, Mario, 163 Bolívar, Simon, 41 Bolivarianism, 41–47, 179n15; communal councils, 125–130; community organizing, 122–125, 130–131; disenchantment with, 153–155, 158–159; Guaicaipuro mission (Misión Guaicaipuro), 111–113; meetings (reuniones), 126–130; multiculturalism and, 43–44, 67, 136; petroleum



207

208

Index

and, 90–98; pop-up health clinics, 49–50, 57, 58; PSUV, 48, 122, 179n17; Sanema-Ye’kwana relations and, 57; school laptop initiative (Proyecto Canaima Educativo), 46–47; school scholarships (Misión Ribas), 118; subsidized food, 45. See also communal councils (consejos comunales) Bolivia: Ese Ejja people, 182n9; pink tide movement, 15; political responses to neoliberalism, 15; silver mining, 14–15 Bonilla, Oiara, 9, 61–62 Borgman, Donald M., 175n1 Brazil: Christian conversions of Tupinambá people, 181–182n5; Desana Tukanoan people, 178n4; gold mining in, 15; illegal gold prospectors (garimpeiros) in, 16; Kanamari people, 180n7, 184–185n4, 184n3, 186n15; Panará tradition, 11; Parakanã people, 177n11, 184n3; Paumarí people, 61–62; prohibition on predatory forest exploration in, 177n13; resource extraction in, 15, 16, 36; Sanema population, 1771n16 bride-service (suhamo), 66 Bryant, Rebecca, 87 bureaucracy: administrative errands (diligencia), 138–139, 141–143, 146–147, 148–151; gendered, 149–150; ID card (cédula), 45, 140, 143, 151; Offices for Paperwork Production (Taquilla Única), 145, 146; pop-up ID stations (cedulaciones), 140, 143; power and, 97–98, 135, 148, 151; as predatory economy, 133–137, 153–155; seduction and, 136. See also communal councils (consejos comunales) Caldera, Rafael, 92, 177n14 capitalism: environmentalism and, 15–16, 160–161; late capitalism, 6–7, 88, 168, 175n3 (see also neoliberalism); petroleum economy and,

17, 91; predation and, 5; venatic ideologies and, 164–169 capitalocene, 14 cargo cults, 131 CENASAI (Control de Enfermedades Endémicas y Atención Sanitaria al Indígena), 84, 182n11 Cepek, Michael, 184n15, 187n2 Chagnon, Napoleon, 7–8, 35–37, 38, 178n8 Chávez, Hugo: Álo Presidente (talk show), 123; anti-imperialist sentiment, 17, 21–22; babies named after, 115; chavismo, 43; death of, 175n2; election of (1998), 15, 41, 92; as father figure, 114–118, 129; Indigenous policies, 41–43, 89; oil policies, 92–93; resource capture policy, 17; Venezuelans on, 4–5, 46, 89, 114–118, 120–121, 123, 124, 127 (See also Bolivarianism) chavistas: definition of, 42; Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), 48, 122, 179n17 climate change, 87 Colchester, Marcus, 56, 178n5, 183–184n10 collective ethos: Amazonian concept of, 128–129, 186n15; Chávez and, 25; communal councils and, 125–130; landownership, 42, 44; organizing, 41, 43, 48, 124, 129–131, 158; work (tadamo), 124–125 colonialism: material disparities and, 53; oil industry and, 17, 91, 184n16; postcolonial states, 90; resistance to, 41, 43; resource appropriation and, 5, 14–15, 165 coming of age, 146 commodities boom, 16–17 communal councils (consejos comunales), 43–46, 112, 119–120, 134, 141–142; discontent and disillusionment with, 120, 152–155; external review (rendición de cuenta), 152–153; Law of Communal Councils, 125, 141, 185–186n12; meetings

Index (reuniones), 126–130; mimicry and leadership, 119–120; National Fund for Communal Councils (Fundacomunal), 144–145, 152; organizing and, 123–125; registration paperwork, 142–146, 148–150 community chief (jefe), 120 community leaders (lideres), 120–121 compassion (otetaö), 51, 62 conservationism and environmentalism, 160; eco-warriors concept, 15–16, 161; hunting as ecological necessity, 164, 167; Indigenous ecological sensibilities, 26, 161; Indigenous imaginaries and, 160–161; NGOs and administrative self-governance, 135 constitution, Ecuadorian, 15 constitution, Venezuelan, 4, 42, 44–45, 111, 123, 161 Control of Endemic Diseases and Health Care for Indigenous Peoples (CENASAI), 84, 182n11 Corsín Jiménez, Alberto, 165, 184–185n4 Costa, Luiz, 180n7, 184–185n4 criminals (malandros), 70, 83–84, 88, 162 criollos (setenapö töpö): Bolivarian criolloization, 42, 44–47; criminals (malandros), 70, 83–84, 88, 162; definition of, 20; employers and businesses, 51, 65, 98, 99, 106, 115; emulating, 118–122, 140; meetings about “criollo matters” (setenapötöpö nowö), 111–114; proximity of Sanema communities to, 20–22, 38, 40–41, 78, 80–81; as source of anxiety, 80–85; voyaging to, 150–151 “culture,” use of the term, 179n19 “dark anthropology,” 6 debt-peonage (habilitación), 54, 64 demand-sharing economy, 62, 65–66 democratization, 15 Descola, Philippe, 10–11

209

disease and illness: Covid-19 pandemic, 172, 182n8; demographic collapse caused by, 36; epidemics, 80, 84–85, 102, 182n8; gifting and, 52; illegal mining and, 16; malaria, 16, 182n8; resettlement in response to, 39; sexually transmitted diseases, 16; “unknown” people (oka) and, 80, 84–85; whooping cough, 102, 182n8 Dua, Jatin, 165, 169 ecology. See conservationism and environmentalism economy: Bolivarian economic policy, 16–18, 179n16; gift economies, 67; growthism, 5–6, 16, 164–165, 166; hunting and, 41–42; moral principles of, 67; multiple economies, 164; oil industry and, 89–95, 100–101, 107–108; predator-prey modality and, 157; venatic predatory modalities and, 34, 165–166. See also capitalism; neoliberalism eco-warriors, concept of, 15–16, 161 Ecuador: agency of Cofán people, 135; Cofán views of petroleum and oil, 106–107; Napo Runa leadership culture, 187n7; pink tide movement, 15; Waorani identification with prey position, 61 egalitarianism, 50, 161 empathy: elicitation of, 10, 62, 66, 138, 158, 169; power of, 62; predation and, 3; vocal expressions of, 53 entrapment, 30–32, 33, 85, 131, 153–155, 165–166 environmentalism. See conservationism and environmentalism epidemic smoke (xawara), 85 Ewart, Elizabeth, 11 Fausto, Carlos, 11, 61, 168–169, 176–177n10, 182n6, 186n15 fearlessness (waitili; Sanema), 9, 24, 28, 36–37, 49, 55, 104, 126, 147. See also fierceness (waitheri; Yanomami) Ferguson, Brian, 53

2 10

Index

Ferguson, James, 180n6 fierceness (waitheri; Yanomami), 34–38. See also fearlessness (waitili; Sanema) Foucault, Michel, 131, 135 friendship, 12, 85, 148–151, 177n12 gasoline: dependence, 94–98; huffing, 105, 107, 108, 183–184n10; prices, 99; quotas, 95–98, 100, 139; siphoning, 94, 96, 105, 108; as threat to well-being, 103–107; transport, 98–101. See also petroleum industry Gell, Alfred, 154 gender: feminization and gender roles, 60; gendered bureaucracy, 149–150; gendered mobility, 146–147; kinship and gendered anxiety, 70; predatory economies and, 24; trope of gender relations, 177–178n17 gifts and gift-giving: generous gifting (tota jötöpo), 52; good things (matitö), 50–53, 168; kinship and, 51, 52–53; outboard motors, 21, 136, 142, 150–151, 153, 154; from the outside, 50–53; political gifts, 41, 46–48, 57; value of, 50–51 gold and gold mining, 98–101; colonialism and, 15; criminals (malandros), 70, 83–84, 88; gasoline and, 90, 105–108, 138; gold prices, 99; illegal gold prospectors (garimpeiros), 16; mythological gold people (orotil töpö), 101–103; in mythology, 103; predation of, 157–158; small-scale (wildcat) mining, 98–99; as threat to well-being, 98–103, 105, 107, 109 governmentality, 135–136; Foucault on, 135; inverse governmentality, 131 Graeber, David, 66–67, 135, 153, 162 growthism, 6, 16, 164–165, 166 Guaicaipurismo, 43 Guaicaipuro, 43, 111 Guaicaipuro mission (Misión Guaicaipuro), 111–113 Gupta, Akhil, 151

help (pasila palai), 116, 123, 142 Hetherington, Kregg, 147 Hickel, Jason, 5, 6, 164–165, 166–167, 169, 187n4, 188nn6–7 High, Casey, 161–162 “homosubstitution,” 78–79 housing, 19; Bolivarian initiative (Misión Vivienda), 179n15; communal houses, 49, 112, 114, 117, 142–143; pole and thatch construction, 19, 46; predatory policy, 165; wattle-anddaub construction, 19 hunting (namohu), 13, 157; deception used in, 32–34; entrapment used in, 29–32; identity and, 28–29; as predatory activity, 29, 31–34; Sanema techniques, 30–31; seduction used in, 32–34; spoils of, 31; sudden deaths after unintentional overhunting (onihamo), 167; venatic ideology, 34, 46, 131, 164–169; vocal mimicry (horomai) during, 32 “Hyperreal Indian” model, 43 Indigenous rights, constitutional, 4, 42, 44–45, 111, 123, 161 International Monetary Fund, 15, 92 Kelly, José, 179n13, 185n5 kinship: appropriation of value and, 160; compassion (otetaö) and, 51; demand-sharing economy and, 62; fear of “unknown” people (oka), 76–78; funerary practices, 55; gendered anxiety and, 70; gift-giving and, 51, 52–53; help from compassionate kin (pasila palai), 116, 123, 142; idioms of, 117–118; missionaries and changing concepts of work, 124; ownership ties and, 186n15; vengeance and, 78–80 Knight, Daniel, 87 Kohn, Eduardo, 105, 180n7 Kopenawa, Davi, 8, 84–85, 103, 176n6, 179n19, 180n1, 184n11 Law of Capture, 5–6

Index Law of Communal Councils, 125, 141, 185–186n12 Law on Indigenous Habitat and Land Demarcation, 42, 44 Law on Indigenous Languages, 42 Law on the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous Peoples and Communities, 42 Lepri, Isabella, 182n9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 118 literacy, 134, 142, 150–151, 153 Lizot, Jacques, 35, 73, 184n11 Maduro, Nicolás, 177n15 manioc: beer, 56, 63, 75, 123–124; gardens and harvests, 39, 50, 52, 60, 63, 64, 178n10; grating, 64, 94, 97, 130 material possessions and culture, 119, 160; Chávez as benefactor, 114–115; demand-sharing economy, 62, 65–66; disparities, 53; things or good things (matitö), 50–53, 106, 168. See also abundance; gifts and gift-giving meetings (reuniones), 126–130 Michelutti, Lucia, 117–118 migration and expansion: narratives of, 147; northward, 38–41, 54, 64. See also mobility mimesis, 119, 122, 184–185n4. See also mimicking (horomai) mimicking (horomai), 13, 157; acts and language of criollos, 119–122; missionary resources accessed through, 40; state abundance accessed through, 25–26, 130–131, 169; vocal mimicry during hunting, 32; of writing acts, 118–119 mining: in colonial expansion and capitalism, 14–15; large mining machines (chupaderas), 98, 99; Orinoco Mining Arc, 177n14; small-scale (wildcat), 98, 101 Ministry of Education, 23, 141 Ministry of Energy, 82 Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples (Ministerio del Poder Popular para los Pueblos Indígenas), 42, 44–45, 82, 111, 126–127,

211

141–142, 148, 159; creation and purpose of, 42; operating budget, 180n21 missionaries: ADIEL (Asociación de Iglesias Evangélicas Libres de Venezuela), 175n1, 178–179n12; alterity and, 86; collective work and, 123–125; fear of “unknown” people (oka), 78; Guaicaipuro mission (Misión Guaicaipuro), 111–113; material dimension of, 40; North American New Tribes Mission, 178–179n12; resources controlled and provided by, 39–40, 85, 98, 179n13 mobility: bureaucracy and, 133–134, 136, 138–140, 153; dependency and freedom of, 64; gendered, 146–147; oil industry’s impact on, 93–95; as response to fear of oka attacks, 77–78; to urban centers, 21 modernity, 26, 92, 131, 161 multiculturalism, 43–44, 58, 67, 136 mythology: Omaö (creator figure), 53–54, 147; orotil töpö (gold people), 101–103; Soawë (trickster), 53–54 narratives of the past (sudu upa): of death and attacks by oka, 25, 76–77, 81–82; definition of, 28, 52, 55; of fearlessness (waitili), 55; of hunting (namohu), 28–29; of interethnic conflict and warfare, 54–56; of journeys and migration, 146–147; of material poverty, 51–52; of resistance to colonialism, 43 nationalization of industries, 15 Neilsen, Morten, 131 neo-extractivism, 17 neoliberalism: “audit culture” and, 135; austerity, 15, 92, 175n4; daily pressures on subjects of, 154; definition and characteristics of, 6; gas prices under, 94; the Great Turn (El Gran Viraje), 183n5; late neoliberalism, 175n4; leftist responses to, 15, 16; “the opening” (privatization of

2 12

Index

oil industry), 92; “post-neoliberalism,” 16; as predation, 6 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): administrative self-governance and, 135; in Sanema communities, 7, 8, 9, 57, 179n19 oil industry. See gasoline; petroleum industry O’Neill, Kevin, 5, 165, 169 one who knows (taö öpa), 121, 127–128, 146, 171 ontological turn, 176n9 ontologies, 161–163 opacity of mind, theory of, 85 Organic Law on Indigenous Peoples and Communities, 42 organizing, community-based: in Bolivarianism, 113–114, 122–125; Christian missionaries and, 123–124; collective organizing, 41, 43, 48, 124, 129–131, 158; organizar, use of the term, 122–125; rhetoric of, 25–26, 122–125; Sanema-Ye’kwana relations and, 123; work (tadamo) and, 123–125 Orinoco Mining Arc, 177n15 Orinoco River, 38–39, 177n16, 180n5 Ortner, Sherry, 6 other-becoming, 117–119, 154, 179n14, 184–185n4 othering and otherness: appropriation of otherness, 119, 147, 161–162, 176–177n10, 185n5; Christianity and, 179n14; gender relations and, 177–178n17; predatory othering, 161–162; of “unknown” people (oka), 73, 80, 84–86 outboard motors, 12, 21, 94–95, 97, 136, 138, 142, 150–151, 153, 154 Overing, Joanna, 182n10 Paraguay, 147–148 parasitism, 9, 13, 37, 61, 67, 181n11 Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), 48, 122, 179n17 patronage, political, 95, 136–137, 140, 150, 159

patron-client relationship, 13, 56 Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 92, 183n5 Pérez Alfonso, Juan Pablo, 107 perspectivism, 176n9 petroleum industry: black-market fuel, 95–96, 99–108, 138; Bolivarianism and, 90–98; El Caracazo (the Caracas Smash), 92, 94; gasoline transport, 98–101; oil shocks, 92; pre-Bolivarian history, 91–92; Punto Fijo political pact, 183n4; as threat to well-being, 103–107. See also gasoline pink tide movement, 15, 16–17 politicization, 45, 48, 136, 160 Postero, Nancy, 175n4 power: affective strategies of, 61–62; in alterity theory, 82–83; asymmetrical relations, 9, 58–59, 61–62, 67, 148, 168–169; bureaucracy and, 97–98, 135, 148, 151; cargo cults and, 131; debt-peonage and, 64; dependencies of, 66–68; empathy and, 62; mimesis and, 119–122; in mythology and narratives, 28, 146–147; oil economy and, 91–94, 97–98, 108–109; “parasitic power,” 9, 37, 61, 67, 181n11; “popular power,” 42 (See also Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples); predation inversion and, 159–160, 168–169; of “unknown” people (oka), 75–76, 83–84, 87 prayer and praying, 40, 131, 179n14 predation: as abundant economies, 83; in anthropology, 6–7, 10–14; anxieties regarding “unknown” people (oka), 69–75, 83, 84–85, 87–88; anxiety and vulnerability of, 87–88; bureaucracy as, 133–137, 153–155; capitalism and, 5–6, 160–161, 166– 169; capture and, 5–7, 10–11; cargo cults and, 131; conceptual history of, 4–6; as contemporary experience, 5–7; debt and, 64–66; definitions of predation, 2–3, 4, 9–12, 157; entrapment, 30–32, 33, 85, 131, 153–155, 165–166; existential reality of, 10–11; fearlessness (waitili) and,

Index 36–37; gendered, 24; invoking state power as, 114; as lived experience, 2–3, 4; mimicry and emulation as, 119; mobility and, 147; neoliberalism and, 6–7; parasitism and, 9, 37, 61, 67, 181n11; perspectivism, 176n9; petroleum economy and, 107–109; political gifts as, 46–48; predatory othering, 161–162; protection and, 11; rumors and, 2–3; Sanema strategies of, 62–68, 168– 169; Sanema-Ye’kwana relations and, 50, 61–68; shamanism and, 28; shift toward “dark anthropology,” 6; submission and, 66–68; trickery and, 29, 30, 33, 85, 114, 131, 157, 166; venatic ideologies and, 164–169; violence and, 3, 10, 67; warfare as, 10, 67. See also avenging (noa köa); hunting (namohu); mimicking (horomai); seduction (pi noniama); seizing (tili); taking (plikö); taming (pi noniama) predator-prey dyad and relations, 3–4, 7, 10, 13, 17–18, 34, 157, 160 puberty seclusion (manokosimo), 147 raiders (wasö töpö), 24, 25, 74–75, 87 Ramos, Alcida, 56, 70 resilience, 162 Rival, Laura, 29–30, 61, 67, 82–83, 178n1, 182n6 Rodríguez, Juan Luis, 185n8 Ross, Michael, 107 rubber industry, 5, 15, 54 rumors: of dangerous others, 1–3, 70–72, 81–82, 84, 85–88; gossip and, 182–183n14; as knowledge form, 70; predation and, 2–3 Sanema people: author’s host community, 18–24; education levels, 181n10; fearless (waitili) and, 9, 24, 28, 36–37, 49, 55, 104, 126, 147; inhabited regions, 14, 177n16; terminology and spelling, 175n1; voter registration statistics, 45. See also avenging (noa köa); hunting

213

(namohu); mimicking (horomai); Sanema-Ye’kwana relations; seduction (pi noniama); seizing (tili); taking (plikö); taming (pi noniama) Sanema-Ye’kwana relations: historical interethnic conflict, 54–56; history of, 54–57; Kuyujani (multiethnic tribal council), 56–57, 96–97, 134; Sanema debts and repayment, 64–66; Sanema emulation of Ye’kwana, 119; Sanema extraction of resources through voluntary submission, 8–9, 24–25, 39–40, 49–50, 58–67, 169; Sanema post-war satellite communities, 55–58, 62–67; Ye’kwana “civilization” of Sanema people, 56; Ye’kwana wealth and economy, 53–54 Santos-Granero, Fernando, 177n12, 186n15 seduction (pi noniama), 13, 32–33, 101, 157; bureaucracy and, 136; in hunting, 32–34, 178nn3–4; imitation as, 184–185n4; material abundance and, 48, 85; in power asymmetry, 168–169; in resource extraction, 101, 157–158; seizure and annihilation following, 109; by shamans, 2, 3 seizing (tili), 178n9; colonialism and, 5–56; of gold, 101; in hunting, 29, 32, 34; predation and, 2–3, 5–6, 10–11, 13, 87, 157; seduction and, 109; of state abundance, 48; through deference, 10; in venatic ideologies, 166 Serres, Michel, 61–62, 176n7, 181n11 shamans (sapili), 1–3; abundance and, 28–30; chants, 1–2, 40, 102; power relations of, 58–59; spirit allies (hikula) of, 1–3, 33–34, 37, 147, 178n5; women, 24; youth curing by, 52 snake bites, 181n1 socialism, Venezuelan: Indigenous policies, 41–43; oil industry and, 16–17; “twenty-first century socialism,” 15, 99–100. See also Bolivarianism; collective ethos

2 14

Index

sorcerer people. See “unknown” people (oka töpö) spatiality: alterity and, 86; fear of oka and, 86; governmentality and, 135–136 spirit allies or metaspirits (hikula): altered states and, 104–105; invoking of, 131; power relationships of, 58–59; seductive predation and, 1–3, 33–34; shamans and, 1–3, 33–34, 37, 147, 178n5 state officials (promotores), 82, 114, 126–127, 142, 148, 154 steel tools, 38, 39, 51, 54, 55, 77 Strathern, Marilyn, 135 Street, Alice, 131 taking (plikö), 2, 13, 157; bride-service and, 66; missionaries and, 40; political gifting and, 47–48. See also appropriation taming (pi noniama), 13, 134, 148, 157 Taussig, Michael, 119, 184–185n4 Taylor, Anne-Christine, 32 things or good things (matitö), 50–53, 106, 168 Tierney, Patrick, 36 tools, steel, 38, 39, 51, 54, 55, 77 Townsley, Graham, 147 traders, non-Indigenous (patrones), 64 trickery, 29, 30, 33, 85, 114, 131, 157, 166 “unknown” people (oka töpö): avenging (noa köa) and, 78–80; criollo criminals (malandros), 70, 83–84, 88, 162; criollos as, 80–83; disease and, 80, 84–85; fear of, 69–75, 83, 84–85, 87–88; kinship and, 76–78; missionaries, 78; mobility and fear of, 77–78; narratives of, 25, 69–71, 75–77, 81–82; othering of, 73, 80, 84–86; power of, 75–76, 83–84, 87;

predatory economies and communal fear of, 85–88; raiders, 24, 25, 74–75, 87 venatic ideology, 34, 46, 131, 164–169. See also hunting (namohu) Venezuelan Constituent National Assembly of 1999, 42 vengeance. See avenging (noa köa) Vilaça, Aparecida, 182n10 Vinci, Alfonso, 38 violence: alterity and, 80; criollo criminals (malandros), 83–84, 88, 162; economy and, 165; predation and, 2–3, 11–12, 67; Sanema historical conflicts, 36–38, 54–55, 57; stereotypical portrayals of Indigenous people, 35–36; vengeance and, 30 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 119, 160, 164, 176n9, 181–182n5 voting, 45, 48, 116, 117, 121, 122, 129 warfare: chronic warfare, 35–36; political activism as alternative to, 12; as predation, 10, 67; Sanema-Ye’kwana interethnic conflict, 54–56 Wari’ people, 179n14, 182n10, 184n11 Weszkalnys, Gisa, 184n16 Wilson, Patrick, 130, 187n7 work (tadamo), 123–125 World Bank, 15 Yanomami language group, 36, 175– 176n5; Chagnon on, 7–8, 35–37, 38, 178n8; fierceness (waitheri) and, 34–38; film depictions of, 34–35, 36; Kopenawa on, 8, 84–85, 103, 176n6, 179n19, 180n1, 184n11; mobility and northward expansion, 38–39; NGOs and, 21–22. See also Sanema people Ye’kwana people. See SanemaYe’kwana relations