SHIPIBO MATRIARCHY IIIHuman Rights vs. the Power of Mothers
Until recently, the moral code governing everyday life in Shipibo society stood in stark contrast to the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—drafted in 1948 by a handful of Western diplomats and jurists. But is there truly a universal morality, one that applies equally to every person, in every place, and across all times?
The Shipibo women are an example of female power, based on the union of the family women.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 212 of Cáñamo magazine, August 2015.
Mercedes Agustín, the matriarch, is a fat and old woman who constantly complains about joint pain; it does not occur to me to suggest that losing twenty kilos would be an effective solution because she loves to eat. She sits on the floor among pots, surrounded by daughters or granddaughters, and devours food greedily while managing the meal, one of her essential powers.
At seventy years old, Mercedes has witnessed a radical transformation of the world. The jungle that provided sustenance, shelter, and medicine has been devastated in her town, San Francisco de Yarinacocha, near Pucallpa, but the Shipibas have adapted with unusual success to the challenges of the global stage: thanks to their unbreakable unity and the beautiful crafts they make and sell throughout Peru, they are able to feed their families and send their daughters to university, hoping to turn them into prestigious professionals.
The matriarch lives surrounded by four daughters (and their husbands). The houses adjoin and form a large domestic core of a feminine nature. There were five sisters until Lidia died, a victim of hemorrhagic dengue; she left behind a young woman and two boys, whose sustenance and education have been naturally assumed by aunts and grandmother. The widower’s fate, however, was written: he left the house and found another woman.
Glenny, Cat's Eyes, Lidia’s daughter, discovered shortly after the death that she was pregnant. At that time, she was in her penultimate year of secondary school but dropped out and now dedicates herself to the home and crafts. As is customary, her young husband has moved in with her and, although he does not have regular work, he helps as much as he can; he is reserved and docile.
In the afternoons the women gather around a table, stringing seeds or painting fabrics or embroidering handkerchiefs, while they talk and share jokes or gossip. Among them is now Glenny, who in a few months has gone from wearing a uniform, playing with friends, and going carefree from place to place, to assuming the role of an adult: cooking, cleaning, making and selling crafts… But when I ask her if she misses school, she emphatically says: “Yes,” and I think I perceived a certain lament in her voice.
At fifteen years old, Glenny “Cat’s Eyes” became pregnant and had to leave school. She will have a girl, as her mother wished: the birth of girls is always more cherished than that of boys in Shipibo culture.
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The overwhelming message is to become professional (work in an office, dress nicely), and for that, acquiring technical knowledge at the university is indispensable. Young Shipibos are told this by every possible means. Any other consideration is dismissed: neither motherhood nor handicrafts, cultural elements that guarantee Shipibo women a favorable position in the market, are taken into account; on the contrary, they are seen as burdens from a past to be left behind. Thus, to establish a new moral code for family and gender relations, in line with globalization times, a Peruvian NGO, funded by the European Union, carries out a sexual and reproductive health project in San Francisco de Yarinacocha. Its fundamental premise is that the “empowerment” of young Shipibo women lies in delaying pregnancy until they have completed their academic trajectory, so they can realize their “personal project” (professional career).
This approach ignores and subverts two fundamental elements of Shipibo culture. First, there are no teenage pregnancies, because young girls (menstruating youths) who become pregnant are automatically considered adult women (even if they are thirteen), and those who do not conceive are considered girls forever, no matter if they are fifty. Second, for Shipibo culture (and for all Amazonian cultures), having children and caring for them is the culmination and meaning of life, for both men and women; that is what they are (were) educated for—that is (was) their “personal project.” Hunting, fishing, pottery, cooking, all occupations were means, not ends as professions are in our society.
About thirty meters from where fifteen year old adult Glenny cooks fish, older girls attend a workshop given by that NGO, from which they will emerge trained as sexual health promoters: preachers of the new moral code among cousins and neighbors. The workshop leaders are two mestizo twenty-somethings from the nearby city of Pucallpa, who are neither psychologists, anthropologists, nor sociologists, but socio-cultural animators, and it shows because they have charisma to develop group dynamics focused on violence and peer pressure to condition behavior. The workshop ends with vehement recommendations: “You have to make your decisions without pressure. For example, if your dad wants you to go to the chacra (plantation), negotiate. ‘Daddy, I’ll finish my homework and then I’ll go to the chacra,’” explains the female instructor, establishing new productive priorities, relegating horticulture to an “outdated” way of life. The male instructor agrees: “Watch out! Nobody can hit us, nobody can shout at us, nobody can beat us. Let them give us another kind of punishment: don’t let us watch TV, but don’t hit us with a cane. We want another kind of punishment,” questioning the once absolute authority parents had over their children, and the physical discipline, understandable in a society where bodily hardening was fundamental for life.
When the workshop ends, I talk with Jorge, the male instructor, who considers himself a “project professional” (he has worked in other conservation and development projects). He boasts of having learned “a lot” about sexual and gender relations among the Shipibos: “Fathers tell the boys they are the men, that the girls have to take care of themselves.” He assures me that women are discriminated against: “Here boys are prepared to be leaders from a young age. They are the ones who speak. Women are quieter.” Then, to my surprise, he states: “It’s a macho society!”
However, according to the anthropologists who have studied Shipibo society, what we have is a society that is the exact opposite of machismo: a matriarchy. “The birth of girls was valued more than that of boys,” assures Francoise Morin. “They enjoy more rights, freedom, self-realization, and spontaneity than women from other cultures could dream of,” says Angelika Gebhart-Sayer. “The autonomy that Shipibo women exercise over the control and distribution of goods within the family unit reinforces the strong position they have always had within the group,” adds María Heise. But it doesn’t matter much how the Shipibos really are; what matters is what they must become to fit into a specialized and hierarchical productive system, governed by a moral code with divine pretensions: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
NGOs arrive in indigenous communities spreading a new moral code, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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The head and founder of the NGO in question, who came from Lima to Pucallpa for some sessions on “teenage pregnancy,” wore an elegant suit and moved confidently on stage to explain how, in rural Peru (including the Shipibo, although they hardly resemble mestizo peasants), women leave school more than men due to family reasons, such as caring for children. Ana María considers this a gender issue and believes a major social re-education effort is necessary so that young Shipibo women delay pregnancy and can study to “realize their personal project” (profession), suggesting in passing that having children (the life goal in indigenous cultures) is not a worthy “personal project.”
Regarding the specific situation of Shipibo women, the presentation was given by Jéiser, a young Shipibo who, helped by Swiss missionaries, lived and studied for seven years in various countries in Latin America and Europe; he now lives in the city of Pucallpa. He presents himself as a leader of Shipibo youth, although he has little connection with boys and girls from any community along the Ucayali River. He says he will offer an “intercultural perspective” on sexual and gender relations among the Shipibo: “Girls had no freedom to choose their husbands; they were forced to marry the best fisherman, hunter, or shaman. The mothers gave them away, and I have always said it: it was a violation consented to by the parents towards the girls. Because they were practically raped; they were given away by force without their will, without their consent.” He then condemns the clitoridectomy to which girls were subjected until the mid-20th century. Paradoxically, after this forceful anti-cultural (rather than intercultural) diatribe, Jéiser closes his intervention asking that when sexual health programs are implemented, “the cultural patterns of the peoples and their cosmovisions are not forgotten.”
I find Jéiser’s intervention mistaken and biased, so during the question and answer session I take the floor and explain that regarding marriages, the boys’ opinions were also not asked, since it was the mothers (more than the fathers) of both spouses who arranged the union (something I have explained extensively in a previous chronicle). I emphasize that, practically, the “given away” one was the boy, as he had to go live in the large house of the mother-in-law and live with all the women of the family; in that inferior position, violence against his partner was practically nonexistent. I try to make the audience understand that in these types of extended families living together, the boy joined the entire family, so marriage was a matter of state-family. Then I refer to the now-vanished clitoridectomy, “a terrible mutilation, without a doubt,” but I try to explain the atypical context: a matriarchy in which older women tried to control the sexuality of the young ones to guarantee the stability of the female power nucleus (a tricky issue that I have dealt with more extensively in another previous chronicle). I end my intervention addressing Jéiser: “What intercultural dialogue can there be if you condemn fundamental customs of your culture without explaining the reasons and circumstances under which they were carried out?”
Ana María then speaks: she assures that regarding “intercultural dialogue,” her NGO will not “legitimize cultural practices” that violate the human rights code “which is a conquest of humanity.” She mentions Leonardo da Vinci, the French Revolution, and the rule of law; she states that “cutting off a clitoris is barbaric, and the causes do not matter”; she calls my stance “anachronistic anthropological visions”; and she concludes ironically by asking whether among the Shipibo an adulterous woman is treated the same as an adulterous man.
Although she wants to end the heated exchange, I reply that when a married Shipibo woman had extramarital relations, the punished one was the husband: during a ritual combat, the cuckolded husband inflicted a deep incision on the offender’s scalp, thus settling the offense. I clarify that, like her, I consider clitoridectomy a “negative practice,” but I do not believe I am anachronistic for trying to understand. And finally, I also refer to Da Vinci, the French Revolution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948: “None of that has anything to do with the reality here sixty years ago.”
The matriarch Mercedes, on the left, accompanied by daughters and granddaughters in the backyard of her house in San Francisco de Yarinacocha.
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Is it possible for a moral code to establish what is good and bad for all human beings of all times and places? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights aims to be such a code (which is why it was called universal), and it has certainly acquired that divine character: no one dares to question it (perhaps because very few people have actually read it). Human rights are generally understood as a very diffuse and vague body of what is “right,” according to Western consensus. The committee that drafted the document was composed of a Canadian, an Englishman, an Australian, a Chilean, a Lebanese (educated by Christian missionaries, graduated from an American university), a Chinese (graduated from an American university), a Frenchman, and two Soviets (although the USSR did not vote affirmatively when it was adopted) and a woman from the United States. The idea that this bureaucratic elite (jurists, politicians, and diplomats) came up with a “universal” morality strikes me as ridiculous (even the Ten Commandments given by Jehovah to Charlton Heston have become outdated).
No one asked the opinion of the Shipibo women who, in 1948, when the Declaration was enacted, practiced clitoridectomy as a way to maintain female power and arranged the marriages of their children. According to Article 5 of the Declaration, clitoridectomy would be considered “torture” or “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment”; according to Article 16, “marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.” Thus, Shipibo culture would, at its very foundation, be a barbarity, a savagery.
At that time, there were vast stretches of jungle inhabited by indigenous peoples who considered themselves the sole owners of their territory and would not have accepted belonging to or submission under South American states. They remained outside the system, trying to deal with or avoid the dangerous and powerful settlers, merchants, or extractors who increasingly arrived, protected by Article 13: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.” The Declaration, in its basic principles, constitutes an aggression against the self-determination and autonomy of these peoples, since from the Preamble it gives moral legitimacy to the state organization of the world—an order forged precisely through violations of the very rights it preaches: the “Conquest” of America and its subsequent division is the product of systematic genocide, slavery, rape, and torture (an episode unparalleled in the brutal history of the West: tens of millions of deaths and dispossessed with no Hollywood to do justice). The Declaration refers to (and morally legitimizes) rule of law, judges, democratic voting, governments, unions, vacations, paid work, social security… A whole series of concepts inapplicable in many indigenous cultures of the Amazon and the world, but necessary to morally dress the advance of a political and productive vision of the world with totalitarian ambitions. A significant example is Article 26: “Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be generally available.” Schools are thus presented as a “universal moral good,” regardless of any historical circumstance, but in reality they are nothing more than the foundation of the economic and productive system that, with such tragic consequences, dominates the planet: specialized, hierarchical, based on perpetual growth at the expense of nature’s destruction.
Indigenous children learned by working with their parents, in a system without hierarchies or specializations that relied on the forest without depleting it and guaranteed autonomy and freedom; this learning process is today globally disqualified by well-meaning minds as “child labor” or, worse, “child exploitation.”
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The new morality and the new productive system have been established in Shipibo territory over the past decades through roads, settlers, companies, missionaries, state institutions, and lately, the NGO in question (and others), which also confuses morality with production and politics, and seeks to "empower" Shipibo women by subjecting them to the inscrutable and terrible dictates of the market economy and those who push it from presidencies and ministries. But the new society, that of development and human rights (two sides of the same polyhedron), has dealt a harsh blow to the well-being of Shipibo families and to the power that mothers exercised: seventy years of development and human rights have brought contamination, misery, deforestation, scarcity.
Margot Ramírez, a Shipibo woman, councilor of the Ucayali regional government, and president of the commission on natural resources and native communities, says that the river’s water is so contaminated that "children have diarrhea, intestinal infections, fever, and some die"; she says that "loggers enter to cut wood and the animals go far away, the hunter cannot find his animal, the fisherman enters his lagoon and there is no longer any fish, the land is tired because there are no longer trees"; she assures that "it is a critical situation, food is already becoming limited"; she states that "visibly things are going from bad to worse." And the most ironic: "Twenty years ago there was no gender violence. Men and women talked, shared the work, knew their roles. But with these times, with the example of the mestizos, they are indeed doing it."
Shipibo women are a role model of independence and autonomy, capable of accessing public power spaces, like Margot Ramírez, Councilor of the Regional Government of Ucayali.
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Lidia, Glenny’s mother, was happy when she found out her daughter was secretly dating. “My mom wanted me to be with John,” Glenny says. “She told me to get married and have a daughter.” Despite the overwhelming campaign promoting professional careers, Lidia wanted her fifteen-year-old daughter to become a mother: she knew that women in the family, united, could face whatever comes with joy and strength.
Glenny wants to go back to school in the future; to become a professional. I’m inclined to suggest other options — to remind her of her cousins, who are certified nursing assistants, over 25 years old and unmarried, waiting for their “personal project” (professional career). But jobs don’t come, and professionalism, the path to all goods, reveals itself as a toxic mirage: after focusing so long on that ideological illusion, it’s hard to go back and give ancestral crafts the invaluable worth they truly have. I would tell Glenny to remember her mother, who, by selling her fabrics and necklaces, not only gave birth to, raised, and educated her three children, but also traveled around Peru, connected with people from all over the world, and never had a boss other than herself… She was a simple woman, without great aspirations, but cheerful and the owner of every hour of the day, every day of her life.
