Why is it that the leaders of one indigenous society—the Urarina of Peruvian Ama­zonia—rely on violent discursive formations when talking about debt peonage, even though coercive violence is not a primary aspect of this form of labor recruitment as practiced today?

In exploring the reasons behind why violence figures so promi­nently in the stories that Urarina headmen tell about their exchange relations with outsiders, this paper evaluates local conceptualizations of alterity and the appeal to the fears of the “natural” brutality of others.

Instead of hiving off the cultural or performative dimensions of violence from the instrumental domain of power, violence is interpreted here, “as a narrated form of symbolic exchange” (George 1996: 2). Violence, as Pareto noted, “is not to be confused with force” (1966: 135). In its narrative form, debt peonage is articulated through a common vocabulary of referents which binds its participants from distinct economic groups, in this case, traders, labor bosses, and indigenous peoples. I refer to the narrativized intimidation and social compulsion associated with extractive mercantilism and patron-clientilism as patronazgo. Characterized by vertical ties of mutual interdependence, patronazgo is a variation of a broader and more generalized pattern of patron-clientilism found throughout South America.

In areas of the Upper Amazon where patronazgo is operative, one notes the pres­ence of a symbolic web of mutually defining representations and relations. Cultural identity in these regions is bound not merely by ethnicity, gender or class, but rather by a shared vocabulary of authority, power and violence that conjoin indigenous peoples, mestizo peasants, and labor bosses in a “culture of terror” and “space of death” corresponding to the atrocities associated with unbridled frontier economies, such as the rubber “boom” (Taussig 1991; see also Brown and Fernandez 1991: 99; Maybury-Lewis 1997: 5-6). By serving as part of a larger rhetoric of control and domination, European myths about indigenous savagery have traditionally played an important role in the formation of the Upper Amazon's “culture of terror.” But in­stead of evaluating the significance of European elaborations of the “natural” sav­agery of native peoples, this paper explores indigenous narratives associated with the mobilization of a “culture of terror.” After outlining the historical record of debt­peonage, enslavement and violence perpetuated against the Urarina, I scrutinize pa- tronazgo tales as instances of indigenous leaders making sense of their presence in a broader network of labor and market relations. Yet this essay goes beyond interpret­ing Urarina narratives simply in terms of the creation of localized cultural meanings. I show how Urarina headmen recount myths to substantiate their own claims to power, which I argue are couched in terms of appeals to fear, and threats of retalia­tory violence.