Walking in the footsteps of the forefathers. The concept of “ancestry” between political use of molecular biology and indigenous territory, understood as a relationship between the living and the dead

Abstract

Kichwa indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon Forest have been facing, for several years, a territorial conflict due to the establishment of a natural park on their homelands. In order to question the legitimacy of native claims, the Regional Government puts forward the hypothesis of the Andean kichwa migration. On the other hand, several NGOs hope to help this native people, using some biomolecular investigations that “scientifically certify” its Amazonian origins and its ancestral relationship with the surrounding territories. However, the natives seem lukewarm to the uncritical acquisition of a strategic discourse based on the rhetoric of “temporal primacy”. Thus, despite having assimilated an ancestral-genetic discourse, they reshape it in light of a more relational conception of territory. The latter, far from being considered an inheritance transmitted from one generation to the other, is seen as a peculiar space of conservation and generation of memory, in which the living constantly interweave present and active relationships with the dead.