“It Makes Me Sad When They Say We Are Poor. We Are Rich!”: Of Wealth and Public Wealth(s) in Indigenous Amazonia

Abstract

Finding out what public wealth is in legal terms in indigenous Peruvian Amazonia is simple. The Ley de Comunidades Nativas (Law of Native Communities) states that all comuneros, the legal members of a comunidad , have collective usufruct rights over the natural resources within the territory they have been granted by the Peruvian state. However, anyone who has visited a comunidad or follows the struggles of the indigenous Amazonian political movement knows that this is not so simple. Defining public wealth in this region is complex. This is because of the culturally constructed quality of wealth and value (Graeber 2001) and indigenous Amazonian notions of ownership (see Santos-Granero, chapter 3, and Guzmán-Gallegos, chapter 4). It is also because of the difficulty to define what is “public” in this setting. Further, concepts of value and wealth must be contextualized by taking into consideration indigenous Amazonian practices of ownership as a moral relationship, as well as local ideas of the connection between moral labor and the acquisition of socially constructive wealth. 140 Land, Money, and Care This chapter approaches these issues from the perspective of the Ashaninka people of the Bajo Urubamba River in Peruvian Amazonia.1 I argue that some of the most important assets that Ashaninka people conceptualize as public wealth are the materials that the comunidad receives from contracts with timber companies, involvement in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and/or state projects, or compensation from oil/gas companies, as well as the public spaces (e.g., communal house, football pitch, medical center, etc.) built through their dealings with these external agents. All comuneros have usufruct rights over these spaces and materials , and whenever the latter are redistributed, it is done in a completely egalitarian manner. Yet, their rights are deployed through relationships of care toward these assets that resemble those expected between “real” human beings as taught by kametsa asaiki, the Ashaninka ethos for “living well.” I make three points in the following discussion of Ashaninka notions of public wealth. The first is to highlight how complicated it is to define the public sphere in the comunidades, as these contain a multiplicity of “communities.” As I show later on, these communities are defined by different criteria of belonging (e.g., legal or kin based), which their members can appeal to in different contexts. However, if as pointed out in the introduction to this volume, the public is that which “is open to, may be used by, or may or must be shared by, all members of the community” (my emphasis ), then on which of these communities should we place our focus? I suggest that we look at Ashaninka notions of public wealth on the basis of the different conceptions of community that coexist at the local level.2 Dan Rosengren (2003) has already highlighted the existence of two parallel views of community for the indigenous populations of this region. Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988), Rosengren argues that indigenous Amazonians may follow two distinct models for the construction of identity. The first is the “taproot” model, an arbitrary system that stresses “origin as unique and culture as identified with ethnicity” (Rosengren 2003, 223). This model uses indigenous self-denominations in ways that agree “with Western geopolitical notions assuming the existence of an organic bond between people, place, and language” (Rosengren 2003, 223). This model can also be applied to the conceptualization of belonging to a comunidad nativa as a political entity, for although not all comuneros within a comunidad are related by kinship, they are related by their shared legal rights to the titled territory they live in. The Peruvian state has granted this land to the group based on an ethnic criteria of being an indigenous Amazonian. Their receipt, use, and care of items of public wealth confirm that they are all comuneros within a same comunidad. “It Makes Me Sad When They Say We Are Poor” 141 Rosengren further argues that self-denominations can also be understood through a rhizomic model of identity that emphasizes “the local, ‘unimagined’ community where concrete relations are what counts” (Rosengren 2003, 224). So, while the taproot model is based on the notion of belonging to the comunidad as a political space, the rhizomic model is based on the notion of belonging to kin-based units living within that physical...