Mythopoesis and the Violence of Debt Peonage
Mestizo patrones and traders—whether today or during the rubber boom—have subjected the Urarina to a world for which their prior experiences and corpus of myths have often proven inadequate to regulate commercial transactions.
But this has hardly prevented Urarina headmen from mobilizing their oral, performative genres as a means of coping with the changes wrought by outsiders and the world they represent. The ethnographic record is replete with many instances in which indigenous peoples such as the Urarina, or the Rucuyayas (the Quichua of Ecuador), resort to “irony, mockery, humor, dissimulation, and protest... to talk down the patrons or the authorities” (Muratorio 1991: 211). By way of subversive bricolage, Urarina headmen have sought to depict not only “empirical social realities, but to control and change them” (Hill 1993b: 48). The discursive formations associated with habilitacion have given the Urarina a means to apprehend the past, and a way to cope with an ever-changing world.When taken literally, mythical narratives explaining the creation of trade goods, exposing the evil patron, or demonizing rival peoples are socially consequential because they tell people where they come from, where they are going, and how they ought to live. Mythological narratives are a body of socially constituted “facts” which are themselves the result of specific cultural and historical forces, such as the rubber bonanza and habilitacion relationships. Mythical tales of violent exchange give Urarina headmen the intellectual space for the articulation of countervailing tendencies, namely, the ineluctable pull of immeubles valuables and the forces of impersonal chattelization characteristic of petty-commodity production and peonage worldwide. The latter tendency, which imperils the ties that connect the living to both the remembered past and the envisioned future, is nullified in the domain of myth, which celebrates the reciprocity of gifting while denouncing the commoditized relations of mercantile exchange (Dean 1994).
In conclusion, my comments about debt peonage and mythopoesis are aimed not as a contribution to the well-established debate over the sociological utility of the gift-commodity polarity. Many recent accounts of exchange (i.e., Dean 1994; Bloch and Perry 1989; Thomas 1991; and Carrier 1992) suggest that the contrast between the polar types of gift and commodity exchanges and sociality is not as consequen- tialist as many have assumed (e.g., Strathern 1988). Rather, they are offered to further our understanding of how aesthetic and rhetorical practices are embedded within power relations, and the flux of social experience—here, the history of violent exchange associated with habilitacion. As “performance events” patronazgo tales function as types of “social and aesthetic exchange that are themselves produced from various logics of social interaction” (Flores 1995: 150). The actual performance, or telling of mythical narratives, enables historical memories not only to persist, but also to evolve over time (Graham 1995: 185). As a form of power, the violent discourses associated with debt peonage produce multiple subjectivities, histories, and identities. The process of mythification, or what Hill sees as “the establishment of cultural continuity through verbal signification,” serves as a means for linking contemporary social life to “a remembered past” (1993a: 34; cf. Clastres 1994: 68). For Urarina headmen, the encroaching “outside” world is resisted by engendering society in terms of cultural categories refracted through a mythologized conception of the historical past. However, the Urarina's mythic thought, like other native Amazonian peoples, “does not engulf history but distills from events and individuals, memories and experiences, an ordered set of categories but it does not obliterate its sources from consciousness” (Hugh-Jones 1988: 142).
Elaborate narrative accounts of evil patrones exemplify the Urarina headmen's intensely dialogic and historical understanding of their own violent entanglement in debt peonage and petty-commodity production.
Attempts at understanding patterns and processes of “interethnic dependency and conflict” have now become crucial to the analysis of indigenous cultural and social formations in Amazonia (Turner 1993: 11). It is simply no longer tenable to represent indigenous and nonnative peoples of Amazonia as if they constituted completely distinct groups. Urarina headmen's mythical narratives are not only overt expressions of theatricalized brutality, but also part of an ideology that mediates authoritarian power and unequal-exchange relations. The historical experience of habilitacion has given Urarina headmen a vocabulary of power and authority that they share with the labor bosses. Violence, fear, and senseless brutality punctuate stories that both mestizo patrones and Urarina headmen tell about one another. Nonetheless, the foundational discourses to which Urarina pa- tronazgo narratives belong consistently emphasize the dialectical interplay between relations of violence, aggressive domination, and those characterized by community and relations of reciprocity.References
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