State Evocations, Affect and Indigenous Organizations in Contemporary Peruvian Amazonia

Abstract

In this article, I offer an ethnographic and historical analysis of an alternative governmental project emerging in Ampiyacu basin, a highly biodiverse tropical area in Peruvian Amazonia. By considering the ways in which the Bora and Huitoto communities produce and deal with procedures and documentation that evoke the traditional structures of the State bureaucracy, I seek to understand the complex means by which these communities relate to the State’s forms of authority in their attempts to self-regulate logging activities within their claimed territories. I argue that the governmental project advanced by these communities is interwoven in a dialectical relationship between authoritative claims formulated through State evocations and the contingency of everyday affects. While any form of regulation ultimately depends on the uncoordinated actions and partial agreements achieved among indigenous dwellers, such regulations continuously produce innovative ways of interpreting the State’s forms of authority and experimenting (with) liberal democratic institutions. I show how different forms of biopolitical production take place in this process, and how this alternative governmental project is not reducible to either State’s forms of authority or to the commonalities of affective immaterial labour. Rather, I seek to draw attention on the ways in which State authority is evoked, appropriated, transformed and disputed in the contingent flow of life in common in Ampiyacu basin.