POWER IThe Champions of Freedom
Anarchists: who recognize no authority above themselves nor consent to coercive power. Self-sufficient or independent: capable of meeting all their vital needs on their own. Anti-capitalists or anti-market: believing that competition, accumulation, and maximum profit are not universal human conditions.
Old Nemesio sits to watch the flow of the Pisqui River, ancestral territory of the Shipibo people. To make his first canoe, in the late sixties, Nemesio found a cedar tree just a few meters from his house. Today there is no cedar left; decades of logging have wiped out this precious species. The overexploitation of natural resources threatens the autonomy of the Amazonian peoples.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 207 of Cáñamo magazine, March 2015.
The knocking sounds regularly like a heartbeat on the misty morning, spreading through the community of Vencedor and calling me. Between his house and the river, behind the lush tobacco crops, Nemesio Serrano leans axe in hand over a log, precisely shaving off chips to turn it into a canoe. The old Shipibo looks like a yoga master devoted to a practical meditation exercise: feet apart, knees slightly bent for stability, the torso straight, thin, and fibrous, tracing a short path to drive his arms and the blade that cleaves the wood. In his father’s time, when metal tools were scarce, men still knew how to hollow out with fire and patience, but Nemesio learned with an axe, and his sons use chainsaws.
Nemesio remembers that by the age of twenty he already knew how to hunt and fish, and build a house, but he lacked the greatest skill: canoe-making, essential in the fluvial culture of the Shipibos. In his childhood, watching his father, he had become familiar with the process, from felling the tree to launching the canoe, occasionally helping at each stage. But with his marriage, arranged for a few months later, it was time to try on his own, to prove the self-sufficiency expected of every man, so that, as he told his father, “I wouldn’t be bothering the neighbor later” looking for help. Although that time he needed his father’s experience to successfully finish the work.
A few weeks later, when Nemesio and Alina’s marriage was consummated, the couple made a trip in that same canoe to the mestizo town of Contamana; it took them a week rowing down the winding Pisqui and several turns of the majestic Ucayali; Nemesio had sold a good corn harvest and had enough money to buy pots and plates, machetes and axes, clothes and blankets. There the merchants cheated them with the accounts, and the mestizos despised them for being indigenous, but Nemesio would sit on the riverbank, mesmerized watching the large iron boats that sailed toward Pucallpa or Iquitos.
The thread of memories, timed by the knocks, breaks with the strengthening sun. We take refuge in the shady kitchen where we have breakfast. The sons, who live in nearby houses forming a large household, have fished during the night; Alina, Nemesio’s wife, and the daughters-in-law have cooked. They serve us soup and masato, the yucca beer. The men sit at the table; the women, with the children, sit on the dirt floor around the pots, distributing the food. Of all the food we consume, only the salt is of industrial origin. Nemesio and Alina maintain large garden plots; the river is rich in fish, the forest in wild fruit and game. We eat amid jokes; they ask about the time difference with Spain, how much a worker earns, how much a plane ticket costs. And immediately: “Do you know how to make airplanes?” Nemesio asks, serious and composed, without the slightest irony in his birdlike features. His innocence brings a indulgent smile to my face. “No,” I say, “it’s very difficult, you need a lot of people and a lot of money to build a plane.”
Canoe-building is one of the many masculine skills every adult Shipibo man treasures. It is thanks to this pluricapacity (a term coined by Swiss anthropologist Jürg Gasché), complemented by that of a woman, that a couple can live autonomously.
* * *
Months went by, the fieldwork in Vencedor was left behind, along with new ethnographic experiences on other rivers, with other peoples. Little by little, a new way of living began to unfold before me. “Freedom,” I thought, “for me the Amazon is freedom”; but it was no more than a feeling—powerful, yet inarticulate—perhaps a fantasy, a longing, until I paid closer attention to the writings of Jürg Gasché. Based in Iquitos for decades, with extensive ethnographic experience in Colombia and Peru, this Swiss anthropologist has devoted recent years to composing Sociedad bosquesina, an ambitious explanation of the way Amazonian people understand and live in the world. Gasché argues that the multiple skills of men and women to engage with the forest’s resources allow them to independently meet all their vital needs: food, shelter, medicine, transportation… Productive pluricapacity, Gasché argues, is the cornerstone of personal autonomy.
It was upon grasping the importance of this idea that Nemesio’s question no longer seemed laughable to me: he took for granted that we too possessed such pluricapacity. Then it struck me as tragic that Nemesio could build a canoe to navigate freely along his Pisqui River, and I could not build a plane to cross the heavily controlled skies; that Nemesio and Alina could produce their own food, and I had to buy mine from a store; that they could build their house in a matter of weeks, and I would have to go into debt for the rest of my life; that they had at their disposal an infinite pharmacopeia, and a flowing source of drinking water, and…
Nemesio and Alina, each in their gender role, brought together in their partnership all the knowledge necessary to be self-sufficient. Ultimately, the combination of culturally accessible knowledge and freely available natural resources resulted in, let’s say it plainly: freedom.
The Shipibo people inhabit the banks of the Ucayali River and several of its tributaries, such as the Pisqui, which have traditionally been rich in fish, although in recent decades the variety of species and the size of the fish have significantly decreased.
* * *
I will not fall into mystifying idealizations. In Vencedor, Nemesio’s village on the Pisqui River, money is now indispensable. Axes and machetes, matches, gasoline, clothes, flashlights and batteries, fishing hooks, cartridges, salt, and nowadays, above all, school expenses… Parents foresee a better future for their children through school and university. They want to turn them into professionals and try to send them to study in the city. The young, far from home and the forest, stop learning from their elders much of the knowledge that once provided the community’s autonomy; in school, they internalize hierarchy and productive specialization as ideals—bureaucratic, preferably—the antithesis of what characterizes their own culture. When they return during vacations, they look with disdain at their parents’ calloused hands, dirty work clothes, hunting trips, and the food grown in the chagra. They want to be professionals: to obey in exchange for money.
It is especially for their children's education that parents pressure forest resources beyond what is conceivable. Nemesio suffers the consequences when he has to make a new canoe: in his youth, he used cedar, a prized wood found just meters from his home; the one I saw finished, after decades of logging, was made of catahua, a wood that doesn’t last as long and is harder to carve. But there is catahua (luckily), there are fish (although the larger, tastier species are scarce), and there is game (though instead of wandering into the village by mistake, as they used to, herds of peccaries are now found after several hours of walking).
Autonomy is declining. “Welcome to the world of scarcity and money!” say the owners of the new global stage, who send their agent to Vencedor (or to so many other Amazonian villages) with the respectable title of engineer to implement productive projects in the name of prosperity and development—and even patriotism, long live Peru, damn it—managing funds that come from this or that foreign country with the intent that all humans submit to the discipline of the absolute market. In Vencedor, the engineer has helped launch a bolaina sawmill, a low-quality wood (cedar and mahogany are gone) that grows in abandoned chagras and is used to make boxes you’ve probably seen at the corner fruit stand.
But let’s visit the sawmill for several days and talk to the people, and we’ll discover: that there are no specialists, that everyone does everything (today I’m in the forest, tomorrow I’ll cut down the trees, the day after I’ll load the planks onto the boat and take them to Pucallpa); that if a few of us feel like drinking beer in the morning, maybe others will too and no one will go to the sawmill; that on Tuesday I went to work to earn a few soles (I need salt and two cartridges), but tomorrow I’ll go hunting, and the day after I need to fix the roof of my house; that there are plenty of jokes and banter (the boys masturbate too much and lose their strength); that someone’s dog dragged an armadillo into its den, and we helped the hunter catch it (even if he didn’t succeed); that next Wednesday is the football club’s anniversary party and sawmill work will stop for the entire week because we have to prepare the field and food for the guests, and there will be communal drinking and a hangover the next day with a restorative feast, even though the engineer is in a hurry because he says he needs ten thousand planks, that he’s made a deal with some client, and he gets angry but we stay quiet and think about the upcoming party. Poor misunderstood engineer… Not so poor.
I’ll let Jürg Gasché summarize: “Unlike the urban worker, who, in his work environment, obeys bosses who give orders and is embedded in a hierarchical corporate structure, and who, in his city, is subject to laws and regulations of written origin and to representatives of public order (police), the forest-dwelling neighbor has no one commanding him in his daily activities, and the communal authorities, including assembly decisions, have no recognized power to command. No comunero gives orders to another comunero. Adults decide what they are going to do at any given moment of the day or night. There is no schedule, no boss enforcing any activity. Adult men and women decide each day and each moment what they are going to do.”
Moisés, the young man on the left, decided at the age of fourteen to leave his hometown and travel to Vencedor to work at the communal sawmill, earning some money to cover the costs of the school year. Once children cross the threshold of puberty, they are no longer subject to family authority. Autonomy is breathed from an early age.
* * *
The Franciscan missionaries who entered Ucayali—land of the Shipibo and Conibo peoples—at the end of the 17th century discovered this to their dismay: the respect for personal freedom was so great that their attempts to impose religious discipline failed time and again. Subject to ecclesiastical and imperial hierarchy (always obedient, always obeyed), the missionaries sought a similar structure among the peoples they aimed to evangelize: groups of people under the rule of a chief with whom they could establish alliances. But since people lived scattered in small autonomous domestic units and there were no chiefs, they attempted to create what did not exist, by the grace of iron, from the very first encounter, when the padres tried to obtain permission to establish their missions: “They handed out the few tools they had to the principal Indians and said to the curacas, ‘If you want the padres to come and teach you the way to heaven, take us to your land in your canoes, and later we will return with more padres and bring axes and knives and other things.’” No one could be left behind; iron was an extraordinary technological advantage. They would accept the doctrine of the foreigners if that’s what it took to get the precious metal. “The chieftain greatly desired that we give him padres to teach them the Catholic faith. And for that, he said he would gather all his friends, who were many, and build a very large settlement, upon which the father president ordered that ten axes and eight machetes be given to him for the necessary clearings, for which he expressed great gratitude.” Grateful—and suddenly powerful; perhaps a threat among his own people. Iron then, money today: the metals of the whites always creating hierarchy and inequality.
Let us examine the case of Cayampay, one of the “chiefs” about whom the missionaries say he “has dominion over all,” to whom “obedience is rendered.” But when the time comes to house the visitors, it is Cayampay himself who gets to work: “They immediately decided to build next to the church a very large house so our religious men could live in it, and in less than three days they completed it with great grandeur, the principal men working personally” (and I remember Gasché’s concept of pluricapacity, of autonomy, of equality). When the missionary expedition was preparing for its return journey, Cayampay himself urged the expedition to say farewell, house by house, to all the residents. “He warned us to prepare our gear and go with him to bid farewell to everyone in their longhouses” (and I remember the egalitarian society). And I imagine—because I experienced it myself three centuries later—the tensions caused in a remote community by the arrival of a white man with money: the powerful visitor (and his gifts) must be shared; Cayampay then, any comunero now, must not monopolize the new source of power.
The French traveler Paul Marcoy, who traveled down the Ucayali River in the 19th century, portrayed a Shipibo man in this way. Before Marcoy, the Franciscan missionaries who had attempted to evangelize the region since the 17th century had repeatedly failed in their efforts to impose their discipline and morality: they did not understand the egalitarian essence of Amazonian cultures.
* * *
The anthropologist Pierre Clastres writes in his essay Society Against the State that in Amazonia “there is no king in the tribe,” and that the figure (very poorly named) of the “savage chief” is one to whom the people “owe no duty of obedience.” There were no chiefs capable of imposing their decisions on others through coercion, because there was no police force. What did exist, Clastres concedes (and still exists), were men and women—generally older—whose life experience, oratory skills, technical knowledge (of hunting, fishing, weaving), ritual or shamanic wisdom, composure, and generosity earned them prestige among their people. “But prestige is not power,” Clastres clarifies, and the role of these prestigious individuals in the lives of their people was limited to mediating conflicts. “The means the chief possesses to fulfill his task as peacemaker are limited exclusively to the use of words: not even to act as an arbiter between opposing parties, for the chief is not a judge; he cannot afford to take sides; he can only attempt, armed solely with eloquence, to persuade people to calm down, to abandon insults, to imitate their ancestors, who always lived in harmony. A task whose success is never assured, an always uncertain bet, for the chief’s word carries no legal force. If the effort to persuade fails, the conflict may end in violence, and the chief’s prestige may well not survive it.” Never, Clastres warns, will that prestige—derived from technical or shamanic superiority—turn into political authority. “The chief is at the service of society; it is society itself (the true locus of power) that exercises its authority over the chief. This is why it is impossible for the chief to reverse that relationship for personal gain, to place society at his own service, to exercise what is called power over the tribe: primitive society will never tolerate its chief becoming a despot.”
The anthropologist David Graeber, in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, affirms that for anarchist societies (among which he includes those of Amazonia), greed and vanity—the pillars of Western society—are unappealing as a foundation for their civilization. “They consider such phenomena morally dangerous and end up organizing much of their social life to prevent them.” He concludes: “Counterpower, at least in its most basic sense, exists even in societies without state or market. Counterpower is then raised against a latent, potential, or, if you prefer, a dialectical possibility inherent in society itself.”
Juan Alumías, the “chief” of Vencedor, was accused by the community of keeping some money for himself, vilified for it, and removed from his position.
* * *
Since I met him, I felt a special sympathy for Juan Alumías, who at that time was formally the “chief” of the formally established community of Vencedor. Formally: a law passed by the Peruvian government in the 1970s created both the native communities (a misleading name) and their authorities (who only command themselves). But Juan also fit, in my view, Clastres’s definition: he was a vigorous, determined man in his sixties, with considerable experience dealing with the world of the whites, oratory skills, and great ability in fishing and working the chagra (garden); Norma, his wife, daughter of the village founders, was the first neighbor to draw me into her kitchen, her space of power, and she held a highly sought-after knowledge of natural medicine among the villagers; together they formed a highly respected couple.
And that remained so until the (not so poor) engineer appeared (to mess things up, of course). He had traveled to the city accompanied by Juan to deal with certain matters related to the communal timber company. In a controversial assembly, some suspicious financial maneuvers came to light, from which surely both had benefited. David Graeber would have seen the whip of counterpower crack: the enraged villagers accused both of stealing and deceiving, betraying the trust granted by the community. The engineer tried to excuse himself; Juan remained silent, distressed. They said many things to him, but what struck me deeply was that they called him a “senile old man,” with general approval. Within weeks, Juan ceased to be the formal chief, and his prestige among the villagers diminished.
I confess I also began to see him differently.
