Abstract: This paper views the political struggles of the Maijuna, a people of the Peruvian Amazon, through theories of public space. I evaluate whether Western theories on the importance of public space for political action apply to indigenous peoples living in the interior of the rain forest. This evaluation builds upon field observations and interviews performed in the Sucasari village of the Maijuna, found along the Amazon River in Peru. It also draws heavily upon secondary publications about the Maijuna. Using these resources I discuss how the Maijuna lost many of their public spaces during periods of colonization and explain how this loss negatively impacted the transmission of traditional knowledge from one generation to the next. However, the Maijuna are mobilizing to stop these losses, and I examine how public space is important for this regeneration of cultural pride. I conclude that these public spaces are important spaces for political struggle for the Maijuna. In particular, the Maijuna are now using spatial techniques to gain further rights (including rights to more of their traditional lands) for their community. I conclude by analyzing the benefits of these techniques, such as participatory mapping and indigenous political coalitions.
Introduction
Numerous authors (e.g. Arendt 1998; D’Arcus 2005; Habermas 1991; Mitchell 2000) have theorized the connection between public space and political power. For many the urbanized city is the archetypal public space; it is a sphere in which differences collide and governments and citizens clash (Isin 2002). However, when authors like Lefebvre (2003) argue that the world will soon be completely urbanized, they fail to examine how issues of publicity affect those that live far from the city. Do these theories of public space and power apply to studies of indigenous groups that live far from both the West and cities? In other words, are public spaces important for the expression of identity by peoples living deep inside places like the Amazon rain forest? To answer this question I engage in a study of the Maijuna tribe of the Peruvian Amazon. I will follow their loss of traditional knowledge through to the present, when they are trying to mobilize political power to regain a sense of culture, to conclude that public spaces are integral for their own sense of identity and cultural power, even in the depths of the Amazon rain forest. These issues are deeply important because they both document a legacy of colonialism and a explore ways in which colonialism can be fought.
Methodology
Field research for this study was completed over a twelve-day period, from May 15 to May 26, 2006, within Peru. Eight of those days were spent within the rain forest itself, traveling along the Amazon and Sucasari Rivers. One full day was spent within the Sucasari community of the Maijuna people, which is approximately 126 kilometers by river from the city of Iquitos, Peru (Gilmore 2005). Within the village I performed observations to obtain data. Several of the Maijuna traveled to our camp on two different occasions, where they presented us with more information. Another half-day was spent with a mestizo community in the rain forest, where I mainly observed. Although the time spent in the field is insufficient for a sustained study, this work can still serve to begin to illuminate certain struggles within the community and serve to spark future research.
I supplemented my analysis of this fieldwork with historico-cultural works on the Maijuna, literature on the Peruvian government and its relationship to indigenous tribes, and theories on the interrelationship of space and power. These works help paint a richer picture of Maijuna traditions, and place their struggle for cultural survival within a broader theoretical context.
Framework of Power
Before describing the Maijuna’s struggle for power, a theory of what power is would be important. As a point of departure I take Arendt’s (1998) argument that power is energy between people. For the Maijuna this power is seen mostly through the lens of culture. They participate in many different traditions that have been passed down through generations of the tribe. These traditions allow for both social cohesion and individuation. For example, the Maijuna hunt for food in the rain forest. Young men base their hunting techniques on traditional knowledge that was passed on to them during hunting trips with their fathers. Thus, traditional hunting helps form a bond between generations of Maijuna. However, these hunters are able to gain fame and recognition within the tribe if they excel at hunting. Thus, tradition creates an intersubjective framework for individual achievement, which helps to cultivate both a sense of community and a sense of individual acclaim.
Isin (2002) points out that space is needed for power—people can only interact to build power if they have a space in which they can interact. For Arendt (1998) the primary space for the exercise of power was the polis; for Isin (2002) a claim to space in the city is needed for an individual to exercise political power. The Maijuna clearly have access to neither a polis nor space within a city. Although the space that they have had access to has varied over the time, that space has always been in the interior of the rain forest, and there has always been a fairly abundant amount of space (in other words, the population is fairly low-density). How does public space function in such an environment, and is this public space still important for power? To answer this question, we must turn to a genealogical investigation of how Maijuna identity has been impacted by the space in which they live.
First, however, I need to outline exactly what I mean by public space; if the Maijuna do not have access to the kinds of public spaces found in the city, such as public squares or government buildings, then what kinds of public spaces do they have access to? There have been numerous interpretations of the public sphere over time, but this paper takes Arendt’s (1998) conception of the public sphere as a starting point—the public sphere is the agglomeration of spaces in which everything “can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity” (50). It is the shared world. In contrast to the public sphere, the private sphere is a space “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others” (58).
Of course there are different degrees of publicity. Intertribal alliances that bring many different communities together are certainly more public than a communal meal that only brings the people of one tribe together. The interactions of a single family are less public than either of these events. The more people that a space brings together in interaction the more public that space is. Thus, when I speak of a decline in public spaces I am referring to a transition from spaces of more interactions to spaces of less interaction. Tying this back to the framework of power, when spaces force less interaction between people there is less energy between these people. Thus, there is less power. Does this framework correspond to the experiences of the Maijuna?
Historical Development
The Maijuna are the descendents of the Payagua people (Gilmore 2005). Originally, the Payagua dispersed themselves throughout the Peruvian rain forest in very low-density, isolated family groups. These family groups lived in communal houses, with satellite houses surrounding the communal house. These satellite houses were for married couples. Young men would leave these small communities to find a bride in another community when they came of age. It is clear here that culture coincided closely with what Lefebvre (1991) calls spatial practice. In other words, for the small communities culture was not so much an ontological identity as the traditions and day-to-day activities of the community. If a new male arrived in the community he could be welcomed if he could live harmoniously within the community’s space. Thus, the space is, in a certain sense, more important than bloodline or any other list of cultural identifications. In fact, Gilmore (2005) argues that the Payagua were “very geographically mobile and were in contact with a variety of Tucanoan and non-Tucanoan indigenous groups.” (6) Culture is only important insofar as it allows the members of the community to live together peacefully.
However, in the 1800s and early 1900s the government started herding indigenous people into territories ruled by government installed patrones. These patrones forced the Maijuna to work for them; they were used as laborers to further the rubber boom. After the collapse of the rubber boom they performed other tasks for their patrones, such as farming, hunting, and logging. These patrones found it easier to control the Maijuna if they all lived in individual private housing, based around Western conceptions, so the Maijuna abandoned communal housing around the 1930s. Around the 1970s the government finally recognized indigenous groups and granted them ownership of communal land. However, for the Maijuna this land is much smaller than what their traditional land had once encompassed. 97 residents now live on the 4,771 hectares of land that makes up the Sucasari village (Gilmore 2005).
These historical developments are spatially important for several reasons. First, the partitioning of the communal houses into private houses already hints at the importance that public space has for power. The patrones found it easier to subjugate the Maijuna when they did not live in communal housing. It is much harder to achieve political solidarity when each nuclear family is sectioned off from the rest of the tribe. [Foucault certainly appreciated this technique—look into Hannah 1993.] Second, this process clearly divorced space from culture. Prior to missionary influence, Maijuna families were dispersed throughout the forest in communal housing. There was no real preoccupation with culture; they lived traditionally but did not really reflect upon these traditions. When they were forced into the same space, different spatial practices were forced together and had to be reconciled. Choices had to be made about what practices were an important part of Maijuna culture, and the culture was reified in this manner (Mitchell 2000). Of course, this wasn’t the only way in which the Maijuna culture was reified. Reification suited the purposes of missionaries and the government, for strategies of reification helped them subjugate the Maijuna. If indigenous peoples are inherently inferior due to their ontological cultural identity, then superior groups are more than justified in forcing these peoples to work for them.
Decline in Public Spaces
This historical development has several implications for public space. The Maijuna already started with a disadvantage when it comes to public space, because they tended to be fairly dispersed within the private spaces of the rain forest. Their relative isolation prevented them from mounting any type of effective opposition to governmental or church forces; small groups of people dispersed throughout the forest are just not capable of an effective campaign against such well-organized entities. They were entirely incapable of creating the type of public that Habermas (1991) believed was necessary for checking state power. Additionally, even if the Maijuna were able to organize against the state, they had no access to spaces of visibility in which to voice their complaints.
For the most part the Maijuna were moved from their isolation into four concentrated communities (one of these being the Sucasari community) with the advent of colonization. However, rather than increasing communal interchange, these communities decreased it because they were modeled after Western conceptions of the city. The number of communal houses declined rapidly while private family homes became the norm. This transition from communal (public) housing to private housing made it easier for the patrones to subjugate the Maijuna. The impact of this rippled throughout the culture—even events like the sharing of game meats during communal dinners declined. When the Maijuna lived in communal houses, hunters would bring their catches back to the main house and share the game with the entire community. The food would be prepared, the community would be called to the main house, and all of the food would be dumped on plantain leaves on the ground. Members of the community could grab their share of the food from the leaves. These meals were built a sense of community among the Maijuna and would endear successful hunters to the entire community. However, it is now more common for hunters to only share their catches with their immediate (nuclear) family.
That the government took a majority of the Maijuna’s land away from them also had important implications for spatial practices within the community. Here I think that Lefebvre’s (2003) distinction between habitat and habiting is particularly illuminating. Lefebvre argues that a habitat is a place in which people merely perform basic functions of survival: eating, sleeping, reproducing, etc. This is in contrast to habiting, which is a more poetic connection between a person and the place in which they dwell. Clearly, the Maijuna have gone from a type of habiting, in the form of social activities like communal meals, to the mere survival of eating food privately. This trend that Lefebvre (2003) identifies in urbanization is clearly also present in the Maijuna community.
The reallocation of Maijuna populations also changed the sustainability dynamics of the rainforest. The Maijuna lost a large part of their traditional hunting grounds, meaning that an increased concentration of people is now living off of less of the forest. Additionally, this space is subject to poaching by outsiders. This means that hunting trips are less successful, and, thus, that when fathers take their sons out to hunt, their sons are learning less. Once again, the change in space has hurt the Maijuna’s ability to pass traditional knowledge to future generations.
The Peruvian government also did an excellent job of preventing the creation of new communal spaces in the form of schooling. The government would not provide teachers to the Maijuna, so the community went without a school for over 20 years. If they wanted schooling they were forced to get it at a nearby mestizo community, which did not value traditional Maijuna knowledge. For years after that they were provided with a teacher, but it was a mestizo teacher that did not value Maijuna tradition. The effects of this lack have been profound, affecting far more than the physical spaces of the community. It profoundly affected the mental space of the community, robbing them of their language; none of the Maijuna children are now capable of speaking Maijuna. This, of course, further impacts the sharing of other forms of traditional knowledge, because there is no longer a shared heritage of language between the elders and the children.
D’Arcus (2005) argues that it is important to not only look at what public spaces are like, but to also look at the permeability of these public spaces. In other words, even if people can act in public spaces, can they get to these spaces in the first place? This concept of scale can also be applied temporally. In other words, even if the Maijuna are able to develop new forms of public spaces in the future, traditional ideas will not necessarily be able to pass into these future spaces. Traditional knowledge cannot be passed on to future generations because the children are incapable of understanding stories told by elders in the traditional tongue.
Recapturing the Public
However, the Maijuna are starting to value and reinvigorate their culture. This means that they are reifying their own culture to a certain extent, by viewing certain traditional practices or attitudes as integral to the Maijuna culture. Certainly, there is some danger to this; some local tribes now perform local displays of “indigenous culture” for tourists that come through the area. The reification of their culture has commodified traditional practices into spectacles for consumption. By representing the exoticism that tourists expect to see in the rain forest, this community allows itself to be dominated by a Western capitalism (D’Arcus 2000).
The Maijuna are careful to avoid this type of commodification, and they are reifying their culture for their own benefit, not for the pleasure of wealthy tourists. They need to define certain practices (such as speaking their traditional language) as cultural practices so that these practices can be restored to common usage. Returning to Isin (2002), we must recall that spaces are needed for these cultural practices. Thus, it is important to look at what new types of public space the Maijuna have adopted to cultivate their culture.
One practice the Maijuna adopted from mestizos in the area is the minga, or group work party. When a member of the community needs to build a house, fix a roof, or anything else requiring a lot of people, they call together their friends and family to help them. The minga thus replaces the communal house as a space in which people can observe traditional ways of working and thus learn these ways. Children can come to a work party and observe these traditional ways of working, so that they can perform them in the future and pass them onto their children. In a sense mingas also replace communal meals. Not only do they give the entire community a sense of investment in each individual home, but also they bring many different people together into a very social environment. One of the most important ingredients for mingas is alcohol; the host of the working party must bring ample amounts of masato, a traditional drink, to the minga if they expect anyone to show up. In a very real way the alcohol breaks down the boundaries between individuals, creating a very sensual and communal atmosphere.
The Maijuna are also trying to regain their traditional hunting grounds. Working with the tourist group that owns much of their former lands, they are trying to reach a compromise that would allow them to hunt in this land. This would allow them to once again use hunting as an effective means of teaching. Cultural reasons aside, this hunting will increase the wealth and standard of living of the Maijuna in general.
One of the major techniques that Gilmore (2006) used to generate more interest in reclaiming traditional land was participatory mapping. While performing ethnobotanical research with the Maijuna he asked members of the community to participate in cognitive mapping. They were to draw a map of the land that they use, or have used in the past, and then label various areas of use. For example the Maijuna would label watering holes on their land at which they would hunt. Many scholars argue that “participatory methods can be empowering if they facilitate the sharing of knowledge and mobilize local communities for collective action.” (Medley and Kalibo 2005: 312). In fact, Gilmore (2006) cites several ways in which production of the map benefited the Maijuna community. First, the Maijuna can use the map as an educational tool—the professor can now use the map to teach the children about their traditional land and the “traditional knowledge embedded within it.” (Gilmore 2006: 176) Second, the map can help establish the boundaries of the Sucasari lands, which help the Maijuna police their land against poachers and loggers.
The most important benefit of the map is that it can “form the basis of land claims” (Gilmore 2006: 176). When Gilmore presented the map to the Maijuna at a communal meeting, many of the community members were proud of how well they know their traditional lands. They passionately argued that they should be in possession of this land since they know it so well. The tourism company that now owns the land knows very little about it, they argued. Thus, participatory mapping can serve both to motivate indigenous people toward reclaiming traditional lands and to legitimate these claims.
The Maijuna are now attempting to regain control of their communal spaces. Most importantly they are working hard to reform the community’s mental space, so that the Maijuna people are excited about a sense of community. For example, both of my interviewees constantly brought up the importance of teaching the children their native Maijuna tongue. They also understood the importance of traditional forms of knowledge and communal identity. This excitement about a communal identity is a prerequisite to any other communal reform. Already, it is having an effect: the teacher at the school has a plan to teach the children their language and the traditional knowledge they are missing. After so much neglect the school is finally getting attention, and has become a prized place in which the children can meet as a community.
Soccer also plays an important role in the lives of the Maijuna. One of the younger members of the Sucasari village proudly informed me that their community has a soccer team that practices year-round. He would travel with the team to other communities and play their teams. Several other members of the tribe expressed great enthusiasm about the team, and they would often joke with each other about their own soccer skills. Playing together was clearly a way to build solidarity between members of the team.
This passion for soccer was not isolated to the Maijuna community, and the case of a mestizo community helps to illustrate another important aspect of the sport. The mestizo community of Saco Playa has a team that plays against other communities. However, when speaking with players on the team, they stressed the intertribal sociality that soccer tournaments cultivate. The host communities throw large parties for both teams after the games are played, and these parties are good ways to bond with the people of the other community; in particular, the parties are good ways to meet a potential boy- or girlfriend. These intertribal relationships further bring the two communities together.
Intertribal Alliances
Soccer tournaments are a fairly informal way of organization between communities. The Federación de Comunidades Nativas Maijunas (FECONAMAI) is an example of a more formal organization. FECONOMAI was established on August 11, 2004 to unite the four Maijuna communities in conserving both the Maijuna culture and the natural habitat in which they live (Gilmore 2006). FECONOMAI formally introduced itself to the Sucasari community during a meeting on May 29, 2006, during which the organization’s president, Romero Rios Ushiñahua, explained the objectives of FECONOMAI to his fellow Maijuna.
During the meeting Ushiñahua wanted to make the purpose of the organization very clear to all of the Maijuna. Part of his strategy was to ask the participants two different sets of questions. First, he asked them what the terms family, community, and organization meant to them. Each participant was given a piece of paper to write down definitions of the terms. These papers were then hung up for all to see. Ushiñahua then proceeded to create one set of definitions that reflected all of the different definitions put forth by the members of the community. This activity helped to bring the idea of community to the center of everyone’s attention, so that Maijuna knew what they are fighting for with the organization.
Once solidarity was built in this way Ushiñahua asked the Maijuna another set of questions: 1) How can the Maijuna culture be conserved, 2) How can the environment be conserved, and 3) How can the Maijuna people be organized? (photo by Gilmore 2006) These questions correspond to the goals of FECONOMAI. By involving the people in the organization’s goals, FECONOMAI is clearly forcing the people to feel invested in the organization and the future of their community.
The Maijuna are also involved in broader forms of indigenous organization. For example, the teacher at the Maijuna’s school is involved in an organization of teachers focusing on indigenous teaching. The Peruvian government forces a general education plan upon all the different indigenous school systems, and this plan often fails the children it is meant to teach. Teachers commonly complain that the education plan is directed at indigenous tribes that live on the Western coast of Peru. These indigenous peoples live in a very different environment than do communities living on the interior of the country, where the rain forest, and not mountains, deserts, or the ocean, is the predominant ecosystem. This means that many of the ideas upon which education plan focuses are irrelevant to the daily lives of the Maijuna. Traditional teachings on how to hunt and survive in the rain forest have been replaced with lessons that describe an ocean that the children may never see. Thus, the Maijuna want the government to recognize that regional differences are important in education—by joining together with other indigenous tribes they can lobby the government to grant them more discretion in what they teach their people. Formal organizations stressing solidarity between indigenous communities give these communities the power to change their relationship with the government.
Spatial Theory
These descriptions of the political mobilization of the Maijuna can now be incorporated more completely into the spatial theory described at the beginning of this piece. First, recall the Arendtian interpretation of power: bonds or energy between people constitute power. To create these bonds people need public spaces in which they can interact. The Maijuna did not have nearly as much power as the government did during the 19th and 20th centuries. While the government was able to access the global spaces of religious organizations and Spanish supports, the Maijuna were isolated deep within the rain forest. Even within the forest patrones and missionaries were able to eliminate the Maijuna’s public spaces. They replaced communal houses with private ones, took away much of the people’s traditional land, commandeered the educational system, and generally attacked the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. By eliminating these public spaces the government was able to disrupt both the bonds between the living members of the community (spatial bonds) and the bonds that connected the traditions of the past to the community of the present (temporal bonds). These techniques not only aided in the forceful subjugation of the Maijuna people, but also destroyed cultural knowledge. The Maijuna now fear a complete loss of traditional hunting techniques, social practices like communal meals, and their traditional language.
Their response of the Maijuna has been to replace the lost public spaces. In order to recreate temporal bonds with their ancestors, the current community members have identified important traditions that should be kept, have revised their education system to emphasize traditional knowledge and language, and are attempting to regain their ancestral land so that children can be taught how to survive in the forest of their ancestors. Many of these techniques also serve to revive spatial bonds; for example, a better functioning school will create better bonds between the children of the community. To these techniques they have also added mingas and soccer as public spaces that foster bonds between community members. Finally, they are reaching out to other communities to create larger public spaces. FECONOMAI is an excellent example of this larger space.
By producing both small and large public spaces the Maijuna hope to mobilize enough power to be a successful actor within the larger political spaces of Peru. How does this role relate to Habermas’s (1991) conception of the public as a counterweight to the state? To a certain extent these spaces do allow the Maijuna to act as counterweights to the state; they can engage in lobbying and political activism to change government policies. They will work their way through the political machine and some type of deliberation will take place.
However, Habermas’s view is not the whole story. As Benhabib (1996) points out deliberative politics is often at odds with the identity politics the Maijuna desire. She posits agonistic politics, or a politics of “incessant contestation over…ethical and cultural questions,” as a solution for preserving identity. (Benhabib 1996: 9) However, deliberation is still necessary; the political body must still, at times, resolve to perform some action based upon the will of (most of) the people if it is to avoid paralysis in the status quo. Jane Mansbridge (1996) and Nancy Fraser (?) propose a solution to this dilemma: the public realm should be agonistic for the most part, but deliberation must take place at times; when deliberation does take place there must be subaltern enclaves within which those coerced out of the deliberative sphere can regroup. Within these “enclaves of resistance” the losing groups can “rework their ideas and their strategies, gathering their forces and deciding in a more protected space in what way or whether to continue the battle.” (Mansbridge 1996: 46-7)
Clearly the Maijuna are working toward such a model. They wish to have a protected enclave within the forest to foster their ideas and strategies, but they also want to emerge from the forest and enter the agonic and deliberative arena of the state. Both spaces are equally important, for they are mutually constitutive. To put forth an effective political strategy in the deliberative sphere the Maijuna need an effective enclave. This highlights the importance of the public spheres they have been re-building within their community, as well as the importance of regaining more of their ancestral land. However, to continue building their community, they also need to have success within the deliberative sphere. Political lobbying will help them preserve their culture by enhancing their own educational system and by giving them title to more land. Thus it is very important for the Maijuna to continue to create public spaces on both a communal level and a more global level.
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