Patronazgo: Postcolonial Stories of Violent Exchange
Expertise in the various verbal arts—including expressions of satire, ridicule, burlesque parody, and the grotesque—plays an important role in the way indigenous leaders have responded to the reality of living with extractive entrepreneurs in their midst.
Determining the role that narratives play in constituting society enables us to discern how imaginary structures are deployed by Urarina headmen to mediate the internal contradictions accompanying the intrusion of market relations into the vast, yet geographically isolated Chambira watershed. Recently, Kensinger has argued persuasively that the Cashinahua of central Peru employ Inka myths as a way of not only comprehending the identity of nonnative traders, but also for associating with them (1995: 259). Similarly, stories about Dog Spirits and diabolic patrones enable Urarina male leaders intellectually to negotiate the presence of merchants and labor bosses from the outside. In both the Cashinahua and Urarina cases of narrativized violence, one encounters a rhetoric of brutality animated by a historical context of real aggression. During fieldwork I collected a number of remarkably similar tales from headmen about Urarina encounters with representatives of the “Caguachai Patron,” recounting the death of the archetypal malevolent patron, which tales illustrate the influence that participation in the regional extractive economies has had upon the leader's discourse of retaliatory violencePatronazgo myths also reference the area's inter-ethnic relations (Urarina— Mestizo—Cocama—Murato) and can be “read” as a commentary on the profound influence extractive economies have had on the area. They can also be seen as a reflection of violent inter-ethnic conflict. In many stories, the burden of moral incerti- tude—and ultimately death—counterpoises the paradox accompanying the Urarina's mythical transformation from being victims of peonage, to becoming violent, murderous aggressors.
Violent inter-ethnic conflict figures prominently in the story of the Bajkaga, which stands as a testament to the dangers associated with the condition of alterity. Yet alterity is central to Urarina notions about the reproduction of the social body. From the Urarina's perspective, the Bajkaga are alien beings who are necessary for all of those “purposes in which the symbolic and material interpenetrate” (Henley 1996: 235), such as trade.