Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Shane Greene is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University.

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Customizing Indigeneity

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations....................................................................................ixList of Acronyms.........................................................................................xiAcknowledgments..........................................................................................xvA Path In ...............................................................................................11 Customizing Indigeneity................................................................................9... A Path Between ......................................................................................392 Paths, Rivers, and Strong Men..........................................................................453 A How-to Manual for Visionary Warriors.................................................................71... Another Path Between ................................................................................974 From Schools of War to Schools at War: Bilingual Education and Becoming Indigenous.....................1015 Paths, Roads, and Borders: The Fragmentary Logic of the Native Community...............................1356 Warriors of Pen and Paper: The Customization of Organizational Encounters..............................165... A Path Out...........................................................................................199Epilogue: Field Notes on Customizing Anthropology........................................................205Notes....................................................................................................217References...............................................................................................227Index....................................................................................................237

Chapter One

Arrival at Site I: On Ethnographic Arrivals

The opening section, "A Path In ...," is easily recognizable as an ethnographic arrival story. It deploys some fiercely criticized anthropological tropes that range from the dangerous intercultural encounter in the jungle to an implicit desire to establish anthropological authority over the natives. Yet the "writing culture" critique of the canonical ethnographic entre is itself so canonical by now that it has reached the point of clich. Rather than focus solely on my purported proposal for old-style ethnography, this Path In also entails a dizzying array of institutional acronyms, phones, radios, and fax machines, all of which are being administered by natives in and outside the jungle. Whatever authority I invoke is surely less interesting under the lens of this well-known scholarly critique than that of the indigenous activists in the story who have their own postcolonial critique to offer.

My Path In is only one of many possible points of ethnographic entry. So, why did I choose this one? Where does this particular path lead? I chose this path because it directs our attention to a dialogic encounter between two notable men. They sit on schoolhouse tree stumps, eye-to-eye, face-to-face, engaged in an aggressive debate. And they deliberate the past, present, and future of Aguarunia and the politicized layers of indigeneity found there.

At first glance these two notable men appear to represent two opposite extremes. Pijuch, the visionary warrior, represents the past of indigenous custom. Juep, the bilingual indigenous organizer, symbolizes the inevitable approach of Euro-American modernity. If my Path In were interpreted in this way, it would also mark the entrenched conceptual divide between culture and history and, as a matter of course, the disciplinary boundaries between the fields of anthropology and history. There is some kind of before and after implied in Juep's statement. Perhaps he means to suggest that global modernity, symbolized by the act of "talking to paper," inevitably replaces indigenous custom, symbolized in the act of "going down the path." That would also imply that Juep, in the very act of talking to Pijuch, is in the act of displacing him: that Juep's past represents Pijuch's future.

There is an element of truth to this interpretation that can't be denied. The post-World War II investment in Third World development and all that came before it-colonial officials called it civilization; mid-twentieth-century social scientists renamed it modernization-has clearly had an impact throughout Aguarunia. But I interpret the before and after of Juep's statement as indexing something considerably more complex than simply his false consciousness of a customary modernization narrative-a master narrative that announces the historical arrival of a global capitalist modernity as the inevitable defeat of local customs. After all, if Juep gave in entirely to the old ideology of modernization, he would ultimately also have to give up on the idea of being Aguaruna. Indeed, he would have to trade in Aguarunia's multiple converging and diverging paths for the single, unilinear path ending in an imagined telos called modernity.

In fact, this dialogic invocation of paper and paths is intended to connote something substantially less unilinear than the single path proposed by modernization. Notice that Pijuch self-consciously acts as he acts within the bounds of a native community. This is the land-tenure institution, crafted for indigenous Amazonians by the Peruvian state in the 1970s, that frames the conflict I experienced in Cachiyacu. The fact that in 2001 Pijuch decided to relocate his house within the territory demarcated by the state as Cachiyacu to avoid further boundary tensions with Achu is evidence enough that he, too, talks to paper even though he doesn't know how to read. Notice, too, that Adolfo Juep does more than promote educational advancement and indigenous organization building. He also dreams like an Aguaruna warrior. In fact, on a separate occasion, in reference to his long career in indigenous organizing, Juep once told me matter-of-factly: "In my mind I am still a warrior, just of a different kind."

What is one to make of these distinct paths that simultaneously intersect and diverge from the single path leading toward the homogeneous time and space of global modernity? And what does trying to follow such paths-while trying to avoid making too many enemies or, at least, trying to make a few crucial allies en route-demand of an anthropologist writing in the new century? This is a problem I address by considering Aguaruna activists' ethnic politics in Peru as projects to customize indigeneity. Specifically, I seek to understand the experience of these notable men who have been absolutely central in building Peru's pan-Amazonian movement over the last half century. The book analyzes how these men struggle to represent-if only partially-the experiences found in Aguarunia. They do so working both within and well beyond Peru and in the face of considerable historical constraints. Over the long haul the book became my own personal vision quest of sorts. In that quest I follow diverse paths of thought to arrive at distinct sites of analysis. The objective of the journey is to attempt a reconciliation of anthropological representations with contemporary indigenous realities and representations of indigeneity with the contemporary realities of anthropological practice....