Discursive Formations and the Violence of Patronazgo

The elaborate oral traditions of the Urarina, along with other historically exploited indigenous peoples of the Upper Amazon illustrate “in painful detail the abuses and mistreatment inflicted on them by the local rubber barons” (Muratorio 1991: 121), labor bosses, and itinerant traders.

Our patron gave us our new machetes, these new ones from Colombia [pointing to three shiny new orange handled machetes propped against a nearby log]... but we are the ones who sweat in the sun, our hands ache after working all day with our new machetes. The patrones shout and call us ‘shimaco' [derogatory label]... they only watch us from the cover of shade. When we are finished working, then they will eat from our bowls.

While the Urarina are grievously aware of their vulnerability at the hands of abu­sive labor-bosses who revile them for being lazy and ignorant “savages,” they are also mindful of their own moral “superiority.” Urarina political oratory constantly alludes to the value of Urarina community, which headmen discursively frame in diametric opposition to the labor bosses and outside traders' asocial behavior. In­variably, expressions of profound ambivalence emerge from the Urarina's ongoing perception that they, the worthy ones, toil for the unworthy mestizo labor bosses.

Throughout indigenous Amazonia, the most respected orators are those who lead: the elders, the religious diviners, the warriors, and the political chiefs. Urarina male leaders' understandings of debt peonage are routinely expressed in their graphic accounts of commodity flows. Ambivalence figures prominently in their nar­ratives about inter-ethnic exchange that relay a sense of the moral ambiguity of overt symbols of power, such as trade-goods, literacy, and the Spanish language.

Kane Kuanra—the creator of our world—sent the Anazairi [mestizos] in canoes to deliver trade-goods and silver coins [plata] to us. “Go and deliver these things to the Kacha—the Urarina people” commanded Kuanra [the creator god]. But the Anazairi refused to heed his command. They kept the trade goods instead of giving them to the Urarina. They robbed like a regaton [a river merchant]. Because the Anazairi refused to give the Urarina their trade-goods, today they have everything—they tricked our ancestors.

Kirina's account of the origin of trade goods was recorded during a time when the leader had just returned—with his sons-in-law in tow—to his long house settle­ment after an extended period of arduous work escorting massive tree boles down­stream. His tale of the origin of trade goods was part of a longer series of narratives about patrones Kirina recounted that day to the junior men who had gathered around his hearth platform. Over time I came to realize the importance that narratives de­scribing exchange relations with outsiders play in Urarina political oratory. This point alerted me to the fact that the headmen's discourses of violence are an intimate part of the processes of commemoration, and political engagement that draws them into more encompassing, supra local collectivities that characterize postcolonial states worldwide.

Reference to Urarina male leaders' oral narratives describing labor-bosses, peon­age, and imported trade goods helps to situate our understanding of the inherently violent nature of economic and socio-cultural production in the Chambira. While further study of the expressive tropes of metaphor, surreal juxtaposition and meton­ymy will undoubtedly illustrate how Urarina male leaders and mestizo interlocutors regularly reassign meaning to erstwhile dominant cultural symbols, it is important to note—as Tsing has—that “even distorted or oppositional forms of consciousness can reproduce the contours of power” (1993: 75). On this point, I want to stress that Urarina men's narrative accounts of their experiences with notoriously evil patrones bolster their own image as fearless negotiators, especially with representatives of the alien and dangerous non-indigenous world.

Urarina headmen rely on their reputations for commercial acumen, bravery and munificence in constructing their social networks and public personae that extend well beyond local relations. This, I argue, points to a partial explanation of the co­nundrum put forth at the outset of this paper. When Urarina headmen recount their cunning flights from avaricious patrones, their narratives about commodity peonage are framed by a broad geographic landscape that encompasses distant points, as well as diverse and dangerous experiences with malevolent labor bosses, unfair traders, and malicious enemies.

By recounting stories of violent exchange, Urarina headmen legitimize their own monopoly over access to encounters with “alien” human beings and the trade goods they offer. Successful Urarina leaders have a diverse corpus of myths that cele­brate—and thus reify—the retaliatory potential of the patrones. By framing the con­dition of alterity in violent ways, headmen position themselves as the only ones ca­pable of dealing with representatives of national Peruvian society, including (and perhaps most importantly) the traders and labor bosses.

While Urarina leaders can exhibit great disdain, anger, and on occasion even co­ercive violence against rapacious traders and labor bosses, individual acts of resis­tance to habilitacion more commonly take the form of heel-dragging, and only infre­quently dramatic outbursts of violence. Particularly efficacious headmen will unleash verbal assaults against unfair traders. Moreover, the Urarina enjoy a regional reputa­tion for having shamans (kuicha) among their ranks whose supernatural powers can take revenge against even the most unscrupulous of labor-bosses. Patrones' reports confirm mestizo fears of the power of Urarina sorcery. When asked how the Urarina respond to unfair exchanges or abusive treatment, mestizo informants most often cited witchcraft as the Urarina's ultimate sanction.

For their part, the Urarina have resorted sporadically to denouncing grossly un­fair patrones and traders by relying on the intervention of sympathetic priests, public radio announcements, and more formal, written legal declarations.

Urarina headmen engage with the “fronts of national expansion” (Dean 1990) through the violent imagery of the discursive formations I have designated pa- tronazgo. Urarina myths about the origin of trade-goods and narratives about the cir­culation of commodities position men as the primary interlocutors with the “outside world”—that is, the mestizo world of the Anazairi and the social universe of the Bajkaga, comprising the Urarina's arch rivals—the Jivaroan speaking peoples. The political discourse of retaliatory violence is used instrumentally by headmen to ad­vance their interests during the acquisition and distribution of scarce trade-items.

Although trade goods are earned through collective efforts, the headmen appor­tion them to various members of the long house. Headmen use their trading relation­ship with non-Urarina to forge relationships of patronage among their own people, especially their sons-in-law and dependent unmarried females. They employ mer­chandise to establish additional obligations, or debts within Urarina society itself. On the Chambira, the trader's principal clients become creditors in their own right to other Urarina individuals within their immediate spheres of influence. As such, the debt (rebeuk∂ri)—symbolized by the exchange of trade-goods—assumes a life of its own. “Debt-servicing” is reproduced internally according to the confines of local po­litical alliances. While Urarina headmen's trading function bolsters their power, their representations of patronazgo have helped to sustain not only the discursive violence accompanying the condition of alterity, but instances of actual violence originating from the demands of the regional extractive economy.

In the Chambira, the shortage of labor-power, coupled with the requirements of the region's extractive economy, has meant that patrones are not particularly inter­ested in immobilizing the local labor force, unless it comes time to repay the debt (see Muratorio 1991: 151, 155; cf. Barclay 1989: 168f.). The patrones do, however, rely on a political strategy of intimidation: they amplify their symbolic and instru­mental power over the Urarina by promoting an atmosphere of fear based on the po­tential threat of military incursions into the Chambira Basin. The rhetorical force of these discursive formations helps to explain why most young Urarina males and many adult men are apprehensive of traveling downstream to the Maranon or Ama­zon Rivers.

The mobilization of fear in the Chambira Basin is intimately linked to the narra- tivization of patronazgo. Tales of patronazgo, coupled with the perceived threat of forced conscription, a problem undoubtedly exacerbated over the past decade by the civil war between government forces and the rebel Sendero Luminoso and Movimiento Revolucinario Tupac Amaru groups (e.g., loss of habeas corpus), have served to create a “space of terror.” During the fifteen years I have known them, many Urarina have regularly expressed apprehension about the possibility (admit­tedly remote) of press-ganging, and the threat of outside military intervention into their ancestral homelands. Common throughout the Chambira Basin are reports of the patrones—as well as specific Urarina headmen's—illicit use of the regional po­lice force to further their own political and economic interests.

Intense factionalism (which mitigates against the development of strong horizon­tal ties among and between long house settlements), coupled with the generalized atmosphere of fear not only increases the patrones' leverage over the Urarina, but it also enables those headmen who are fluent in Spanish to wield a considerable degree of clout vis-a-vis their monolingual brethren. This in turn reinforces Urarina geron- tocratic tendencies: older men beyond the age of military conscription are more mo­bile, hence younger men are constrained by their inability to travel beyond the Chambira, and thus become considerably more dependent on their elders to manage their commercial transactions.