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Peter Gow [1]

The priests tell us not to drink cane alcohol. They say that this is how the mixed blood people exploit the native people.
But who is native, and who is mixed blood? This arm and leg of mine are of mixed blood, while this other arm and leg are native. And this [pointing to his head], is pure priest!
Yaminahua man, 1982

This paper addresses the imagery of race and gender used in the Bajo Urubamba area of Peruvian Amazonia. At first sight, this imagery is a variant of wider Peruvian and international images of race, but I argue that locally, this imagery provides a switchpoint between distinct but coordinated social logics: the first is that of the dominant elite, the second that of the majority indigenous population. These distinct but coordinated social logics refer to two positions within the local economy, such that imagery of race and gender both stand for and instantiate different class positions. The distinctive feature of class relations within the Bajo Urubamba area is that the workers have always had, and largely retain, full ownership (in the sense both of effective control and currently legal title) over the primary means of production,

In comparison to other areas of the Americas, there are very few anthropological studies of race in Amazonia. Undoubtedly this is due to way in which race in Amazonia is habitually ‘culturalised’. That is, race in Amazonia is thought to be founded on cultural differences far more than on natural differences, even although these latter are operant. The culturalising of race in Amazonia is a feature both of imagery local to the region, and has been widely taken on by ethnographers. This has had the unfortunate effect that ethnographers have become complicit with local imagery of race, and failed to note how taking key social differences as given renders the underlying modes of social differentiation invisible.

My contention here is that race is a way of talking about the organisation of social differences within the structure of the Amazonian economy. I take economy here to mean the basic modes of making a living, and hence propose that the economy must be understood primarily as a lived system. My account is therefore a Marxist analysis of race in the Bajo Urubamba area. Given this perspective, terms like race and gender are logically of a very different order, within the present analysis, to the term class. My concern here is to show how race sets up the key modes of difference in the local economy,

The Bajo Urubamba area

My account here refers specifically to the Bajo Urubamba area, in the District of Colonel Portillo, Department of Ucayali, in Eastern Peru. With the exception of two small towns, Atalaya and Sepahua, the majority of the local population live in villages along the banks of the Urubamba rivers and its larger tributaries. At least six languages are spoken in area, with Ucayali Spanish as the lingua franca. The major local economic activities in the early 1980’s were subsistence agriculture, fishing and hunting combined with a cash economy largely based on tropical hardwood extraction. Cattle ranching and other forms of commercial agriculture were of minor importance due to the remoteness of suitable markets. My account refers to the period up to the mid-1980’s, before the massive increase in coca production and the violence of the civil war in this area, and the subsequent rise of powerful indigenous political organisations in the 1990’s. Much of my account, however, would correspond to conditions during my latest period of fieldwork in 1999.

The local economy has two main sectors. Firstly, the majority of the local population is primarily engaged in subsistence production, combining shifting cultivation and fishing and hunting. Secondly, there is a sector devoted to the extraction and export of natural resources, using labour released temporarily from the subsistence sector, and organised by agents who devote themselves exclusively to this activity, and to the corresponding import sector.

Ownership of the means of production is distributed in a manner common in Amazonia, but unusual outside of it. The people who engage in subsistence production are largely in effective possession of the key forest and riverine resources, which may or may not coincide with state recognition. The people who engage in the commercial sector are seldom owners of productive resources other than technical equipment, and almost never own forest resources. Their ability to control the local economy derives from their access to capital flows from outside the area: their key resource is their access to lenders of capital in the city of  Pucallpa, far to the north. 

These features of the local economy are linked to a capitalist class system of distinctive type. The rich people dominate and control the external workings of the local economy in general, through their access to external capital for local extractive activities. The poor own the means of subsistence production, but are temporarily forced into the commercial sector by need for key commodities. The mechanism by which labour is extracted from the poor is through debt. The bosses extend credit for commodity purchases to poor people, who thus become their indebted workers. When capital for extractive activities is available, the bosses can call on their workers by calling in debts. There is considerable resistance, on the part of both bosses and workers to wage labour: the bosses dislike it because it requires paying for the workers' subsistence, while the workers dislike it because it constrains subsistence production. Debt relations between bosses and workers replicate the debt relations between the bosses and their own sources of credit, such that the entire commercial economy of the region becomes a system of debt cancellation. This system, known as habilitación in Peruvian Amazonia, has a long history: I discuss the local evolution of the system below.  

Race on the Bajo Urubamba

One of the key features of the economy of the Bajo Urubamba is that it necessarily presents itself as two separate economies. On the one hand, we have a subsistence economy, wherein local resources are sufficient for sustaining local life without exterior input. On the other hand, we have a commercial economy totally dependent on exterior inputs. In the first view,  every need can be met locally. In the second view, no need can be met locally.  Obviously, between these two positions are a wide spectrum of mixed views, which see the economy as a mixture of subsistence and commerce.

In the Bajo Urubamba, raza, “race”, is an important aspect of individual and group identities. As elsewhere in the Americas, race is held to be an attribute of the body, to be recognisable on the body in a set of characteristics, and to be transmitted to children through sangre, “blood”. However, as I explain below, race and blood are closely connected to a third term, tierra, “land”, such that the bodiliness of race is always assumed to point to a land, in the sense of a place of origin.

On the Bajo Urubamba, race is ordered by two major terms, blanco, “white”, and nativo/indígena, “native/indigenous”. Here I use native for the latter category, in deference to its greater popularity in the area in the 1980’s. These two terms, white and native, would undoubtedly evoke expectations about physical appearance in local people’s minds: stereotypically, a white person would be taller, larger, lighter-skinned, with lighter more curly hair than a native, who would be correspondingly shorter, slimmer, darker-skinned, with blacker and straighter hair. Such physical differences are noted and commented upon locally, with various forms of aesthetic values placed on them (usually, but not always, with higher value given to the white attributes). However, physical appearance as such is of relatively little significance for local people, since they are generally interacting with people they already know, and whose race may well be known before they have been seen. There is therefore little need to ‘judge by appearances’ here, and no elaboration of the moral and aesthetic value of minute physiological details of the sort found in the Brazilian littoral or the American South.

Much more important to local people is the way in which race links people to “land”, to place of origin. Thus, pervasively, to be native is to be of local origin, de acá no más, “from just here”, while being white refers to foreign origin, de afuera, “from outside”. The outsideness of foreign origin refers not simply to beyond the Bajo Urubamba, but much more importantly to “outside of Peruvian Amazonia”,  to some extent coastal Peru but preferably a named non-Peruvian country like Colombia, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Poland or Lebanon. It would be unthinkable to be white on the Bajo Urubamba and unable to claim such an origin. Many native people can also claim such origins, but no white person could claim to be “from just here”.

Land can refer to place of birth, which is the most common usage among native people, but it also means the birth place of parents and grandparents. This is especially true of white people. For example one woman told me,

I am Italian, my father was born in Italy.

This woman was born in Shirintiari on the neighbouring Tambo river, but under no circumstance would she claim this as her land in front of local people. White people, even if third generation to the locality, persistently claim a land that is foreign.  

What connects people to their ancestors’ lands is sangre, “blood”. Blood is transmitted by both parents, hence connecting the child to both of their places of origin. Blood is a corporeal substance which is mixed in sexual intercourse to form a foetus, and is a substance that has an origin in the bodies of a person’s parents, and hence in the specific details of their lives and origins.

The fact that blood is transmitted by both men and women allows for the existence of a middle term between white and native: this is mestizo, “person of mixed blood”. On the Bajo Urubamba, this middle term is a race in its own right. While it is sometimes used of a child of a white parent and native parent, it is most commonly used of a person with one parent identifiable as a mixed blood person. Indeed, many people who would deny any mixed ancestry, such as Cocama, Lamista Quechua or Jebero from northern Peruvian Amazonia, are considered mixed blood people on the Bajo Urubamba.

As I noted above, race in the Bajo Urubamba is ordered around two pure terms, white and native. However, the existence of the mixed blood people renders these two terms more diffuse, for they do not clearly stand for any extent object in the local social world. Most people on the Bajo Urubamba could claim, and do claim at certain points, to be mixed blood people. The nature of such claims varies greatly. For example, white people regularly claim a sort of generic nationalist mixedness, of the sort, “We Peruvians are all the children of Inca women,” while at the same time denying any specific descent from known native women, even when such kin ties are well-known locally. Such claims and denials are very different to those of native people, who are much more likely to stress the actual mixedness of their race by reference to the races of their parents and grandparents.

Assertions of mixedness on the Bajo Urubamba resonate against local imagery of racial purity, which has some strongly negative attributes. If white people and native people represent local poles of a system predicated on mixedness, then each has its corresponding pole of racial purity. The white people have gringos, “white foreigners” as their pure equivalent, while native people have indios bravos, “wild Indians” as theirs. Both white foreigners and wild Indians are seen as lying outside the local moral universe, and are the object of various forms of fascinated horror. In both cases, their racial purity is seen to be a consequence of their failure to engage in proper social relations, and their penchant for keeping to themselves.

An important feature of race in the Bajo Urubamba is that men and women, both of whom transmit their race to their children, stand in different relations to land. Pervasively in local imagery, and also largely in local practice, it is men who migrate and women who remain in place. Men move towards women, rather than the other way around. Insofar as foreignness is a characteristic of white people and autochthony of native people, race maps the category of white onto man, and correspondingly, of native onto woman. Whiteness is more strongly associated with fathers, and nativeness is more strongly associated with mothers. And, as we have seen, just such a couple, a white father and a native mother, is the primordial couple of the mixed blood people.

The historical evolution of race

Race on the Bajo Urubamba has a history which is relatively easy to delineate. I describe the historical evolution of this system from the point of view of view of local indigenous people. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the indigenous Piro, Campa and other native people of the Bajo Urubamba river were politically and militarily independent of outside interference. They were, however, engaged in an extensive trade system, which linked them to their neighbours and to the cities of the Southern Andes and to missions and small trading entrepots downriver along the Ucayali and Amazon rivers. This trade system brought to local people those wealth items which were important to both their internal social relations and to ongoing trade relations with neighbouring peoples.

From about 1860 on, the developing international market from wild Amazonian rubber, and the consequent removal of most labour from food production in Central Amazonia, led traders to ascend the Ucayali river to trade for salted fish and domestic slaves with the local indigenous peoples, primarily the Piro and Unini river Campa. As rubber prices began to spiral, this trade became more intense, and resulted in the injection of very large quantities of wealth into the hands of local people. In the 1880's, local people began to produce rubber directly themselves, and rapidly became massively indebted to the traders-turned-rubber bosses. At the same time, violence also escalated in the area as local people, at the behest of their bosses, intensified raiding against more remote peoples, either for slaves or to expel them from rubber-rich areas. In the process, old trading linkages were destroyed, leaving local people fully dependent on the rubber bosses for the provision of wealth items. In this new found dependency, local people's treatment by the bosses worsened, a process that continued and was exacerbated by the collapse of rubber prices from 1912 onwards.

Following the collapse of the wild rubber industry during WW1, local people had little choice but to either fully retreat from all contacts with outsiders, and hence from all access to wealth objects, or to continue their dependency on those few bosses who remained in the area, and to work for them through the numerous boom-and-bust cycles of production and export of local agricultural commodities. The period from 1920 to 1940 was one of residence on the haciendas of the bosses, a period referred to by local people as the “times of slavery”. This period ended with WW2, which saw a brief return to wild rubber collection, followed by a sustained growth in tropical hardwood lumbering. The haciendas disappeared, to be replaced by independent indigenous communities (usually centred on Protestant or Catholic mission schools). Indebtedness to bosses continued, but now in the form of debt cancellation through labour in hardwood lumbering. From the mid-1970's onwards, indigenous communities were increasingly granted title to their land, a process that continues today. However, indebtedness to bosses remains key to the local economy, as I discuss further below.

From the point-of-view of local indigenous peoples, this process of historical transformation was lived out as a transformation of identities. Where, prior to the 1880's, indigenous people had been the sole and sovereign inhabitants of their territories, they came to be politically subordinated to outsiders due to indebtness through the rubber industry. It is clearly difficult to know precisely how this process was lived by local people, since few writers of the period give much detail about what indigenous people were thinking. However, it is clear that indigenous people came to experience themselves as totally dependent on their bosses, and to take on, from those bosses, certain forms of imagery of identity. In particular, while there is no evidence that indigenous people experienced the early phases of the intensification of trade with the rubber bosses-to-be as anything other than a good thing, it is certain that they retrospectively identified this period as one of enslavement.

It is necessary to say a few words on the meanings of slavery in this area. It seems likely that, prior to the rubber industry era, the primary meaning of enslavement lay with children captured or traded from other peoples who were raised by local people. As they attained adulthood, such children would then marry and be treated as kinspeople and affines by their coresidents: many Piro people are of such origins. While not especially mistreated, such children would be made conscious of their origins, and the sense that they had been “rescued”. With the later rubber period and the hacienda period, indigenous people seem to have generalised this notion of slavery to cover their collective dependence on white people, in the sense that they and their older kin had been incapable of defending themselves against the abusive treatment received from their bosses.

There was, I think, another process at work here too. Local people also transferred the older relations between chiefs and their followers onto the relations between bosses and their workers. The bosses did what the chiefs had done before them: organising the collective lives of their followers/workers (in collective work, trading, ritual and war), and redistributed the wealth flowing in from outside. The traders became bosses precisely through this mechanism whereby they progressively usurped the functions of chiefs.

Obviously, the bosses at the height of the rubber boom did not act towards their workers as indigenous Amazonian chiefs are expected to act towards their followers: they were violent, they issued orders, and they kept most of what they obtained through their workers' efforts for themselves. It was here, I think, that the retrospective conflation of the statuses of “follower” and “slave” rendered the changes meaningful to indigenous people: while the latter had entered into the relationship with the bosses as “followers”, the manifest disparities between the behaviour of a chief and a boss made them see their new situation as “slaves” who had violently been torn from their original social nexus, rather than as free “followers”.

This had certain other profound consequences. For example, from the point of view of the Piro, before the rubber industry, they had been yine, “humans”, in full and exclusive control of both their lives and their territory. Outsiders, kajine, had been peripheral others, however important, visited to trade for their remarkable wealth items. During and after the rubber industry, humans became a subordinated, enslaved population in their own territory, which was now controlled by the kajine. It seems likely to me that it was at this time that the possessive form of yine, gayinerute, “someone’s human”, developed the meaning, “his/her slave, his/her worker”. Certainly, it was in this period that Piro people began to take seriously kajine's own views of the world. For the kajine saw themselves as blancos, “white people”, and the Piro and other indigenous peoples as indios, “Indians”. The word yine, “human”, came to be equated with indio, while kajitu, “outsider”, came to be equated with blanco, “white man”. Indigenous imagery of identity and alterity thus became conflated with imagery of race through the hierarchical relations between bosses and their workers.

Crucial to this process must have been another group of people.  These were indigenous peoples from the missions of northern Peruvian Amazonia. Native speakers of languages such as Amazonian Quechua (the mission lingua franca), Cocama, Jebero, etc., these people were, before the rubber era, identified as indios cristianos, “Christian Indians”, to distinguish them from the indios paganos, “pagan Indians”, who refused mission life, or who resisted the missionaries resident among them. It is likely that these “Christian Indians” self-identified as such at the time, and distinguished themselves both from the “pagans” and from the Spanish missionaries and other followers: in Quechua, the terms would be “alli runa”, “humans”, awka “wild people” and wirakucha, “foreigners”. These “Christian Indians” were critical to the development of the rubber industry, since they were the key workers of the initial traders, and subsequently, the “men of confidence” of the rubber bosses. The destruction of the mission system of Peruvian Amazonia was a precondition of the development of the new economic system, and a continuous feature of the local political scene.

As the “Christian Indians” were drawn into the rubber industry, and as peoples like the Piro became identified and to identify themselves as indios, the former were increasingly identified as mestizos, “mixed blood people”. The racialisation of local imagery of identity and alterity forced onto these “Christian Indians” an intermediate position reflecting their mediatory role in the local economy, that of mestizo.  Here economic and social mediation was conflated with being the product of racial miscegenation, while the two extremes of the social hierarchy, the bosses and the enslaved workers, became conflated with racial purity. As a consequence, the racial imagery of this region was never able to stabilise on phenotypic traits, since a Cocama mestizo would likely be more-or-less indistinguishable from a Piro indio on phenotypic grounds alone. This meant that, as I noted above, that racial imagery on the Bajo Urubamba never elaborated the kind of fine categorisation of phenotypic traits that characterise the northern Brazilian littoral, the Caribbean or the American South, and instead depends more fully on the categorisation of bodily-exterior forms of distinction, in modes of livelihood, clothing, and forms of body decoration.

The unproletarianised

Throughout their long and vicious history of relations with capitalism, the native people of the Bajo Urubamba have never lost their access to, nor their control over, the primary means of production. They have always effectively owned the means of production. As such, they have never been proletarianised, a fact which I believe to be of immense significance for local understandings of race.

Here we must return to the problem of slavery. Esclavitud, “slavery”, has powerful meanings in liberal imagery. These meanings have been mobilised on the Bajo Urubamba by at least three sets of powerful outsiders, the SIL, the Dominicans and SINAMOS, the land reform agency of the revolutionary leftwing military dictatorship of Juan Velasco Alvarado. Such meanings have been potently emancipatory, and linked to land ownership and legal definition of native people’s rights over land. However, if we look at native people’s understandings of slavery, things are rather different. For them, slavery always meant inegalitarian dependence on people with control over exchange media, those with privileged access to wealth. It never carried any meaning of alienation from home, nor from the land on which such homes where made. Native people never seem to have experienced themselves as alienated from their means of production.

All native people are heavily dependent on subsistence production for their livelihood. Native people have a marked preference for what they call comida legítima, “real food”, food produced through gardening, fishing and hunting, over the kinds of foods that circulate in commercial spheres, such as store bought foods. Real food is crucial to the constitution of native people, and to it they attribute their force and endurance in work. White people eat relatively little real food, and emphasise commercially circulated foods such as rice, beef, sugar and coffee in their diets.

Native people's preference for real food must not be read as a product of their lack of money to buy store-bought food: it is a genuine preference with important consequences. Firstly, real food is loaded with the meanings of kinship. Each day, women distribute their husbands' catches of fish to other women in the village along ties of kinship and affinity. The fish is cooked along with plantains or manioc, which are products of gardens that were collectively cleared by gangs of men related as kin or affines. Secondly, eating real food allows native people to mobilise their primary subsistence security outside of the commercial economy, and hence to greatly restrict their need to engage in unpleasant commercial labour forms. From the perspective of white people, the native subsistence economy makes native people's labour much cheaper than it would otherwise be, while at the same time rendering access to that labour much more difficult. Long term debt relations between white bosses and native workers are the primary means by which white people maintain intermittent access to the native work force.

Within the native subsistence economy, production can only take place through marriage and other affinal relations. All subsistence production is production by a woman for her husband, or by a man for his wife: even collective production, such as garden clearing, always refers to a specific marital relationship. As I have discussed at length elsewhere, it is the specifically non-kin relation of demand between men and women that originates production. Once produced, the food or other items will be redistributed to kinspeople, such as the couples' children and other kin and affines in the village. Even the physical form of the village instantiates the marital relationship, for all houses are built by men for their wives.

Marital relations are the product of prior affinal relation. It is young men who generate the first affinal relations, by beginning to designate other young men as brothers-in-law, and hence to indicate these men's sisters are their potential wives. It is through their brothers-in-law, so designated, that the young men find first lovers, then when the relationship is stabilized, wives. A marriage is formed when the girl's parents recognize one of the girl's lovers as her husband, thereby setting up the key relationship of parents-in-law to son-in-law. The relationship of son-in-law to parents-in-law is marked by extreme respect, and is crucial to the establishment of marriages, and to enduring relations of cooperation as the young man and young woman embark on their new careers as full adult producers.

That affinity precedes marriage may seem odd from a Western perspective, but it will come as no surprise to those familiar with indigenous Amazonian peoples. Not only is this precedence of affinity over kinship given within the Dravidian-type kinship systems of the area, it has recently been argued by Viveiros de Castro that the relation to the potential affine, that person who is potentially but not yet in an affinal relation through an actual marriage, is the site on which indigenous Amazonian socialities are constituted in general. Kin ties, rather than being primordial and the origin of affinity, in this world are posited as the product of a prior affinity. It is affinity that becomes primordial

If affinity is posited by native people as the origin of kinship, then it is possible to interpret race on the Bajo Urubamba in a very different way to that in which it might normally be considered. The primordial differences between races such as white people and native people can be understood as potential affinity. That is, the fact that in the past there were two different races is interpreted not as a contingent fact of history, but as the potential for contemporary relations to come into being.

From the point of view of native people, race and the importance of mixedness, takes on a new significance. Here, race and mixedness renders affinity in one generation as bodily attributes of the next generation. That is, the marital and other affinal relations of any given generation are rendered as the mixed identities of their children, and marked as bodily attributes of the child. Sexual intercourse and conception are imaged as repeated acts of pounding together the bloods (female menstrual blood and male semen) to form a foetus. The child is therefore the transformation of affinity into a singular entity. The child's origin in this affinal relation is marked by a series of pre- post-partum prohibitions on the actions of the parents, which only cease as the child demonstrates autonomous control of its bodily functions.

The child's growing autonomy from its parents marks the genesis of kin ties for native people. As it starts to eat real foods, i.e.. the foods eaten by adults, the child becomes the recipient of its parents' love for it, and responds by addressing the parents and other with kinship terms. This indicates its growing mind, a faculty that can only develop, native people say, in relations of caring. It is with reference to mindfulness that native people track out the actual state of their kin relations, with reference to the demonstration of mutual mindfulness or heedlessness. It is histories of caring that establish real kin ties, and it is to such histories that native people refer when faced with situations in which mindfulness constitutes a problem. Native people never appeal to blood or race in such situations, for this would mean referring to attributes of persons that are not subject to their autonomous mindfulness.

From this perspective, which is the major perspective of native people, race and blood become the traces that people carry within them of prior relations of affinity. Those affinal relations were the productive lives of their parents and grandparents, manifested in transformed form as contemporary people and their own productive capabilities. As we have seen, these productive capabilities are coordinated through new affinal relations in the subsistence economy. The subsistence economy is overtly seen as the production of life, and especially of the production of a new generation through affinity, marriage and mindfulness. Because of this, native people do not, and arguably could not, use the manifest potential of terms like blood and race to discuss their own ongoing relations.

Therefore, native people do not talk kinship in the idiom of physiological relationship, even although this is how they talk about race. They talk about kin ties in a quite separate idiom, that of mindfulness, because kin ties refer to extended security within the subsistence economy. To endure, kin ties must be both willed and acted upon in day-to-day life, rather than simply posited as a consequence of events in the past. Native people would certainly not consider a shared corporal substance to signal an important or interesting potential social relation.

The only context in which native people talk about race is, significantly, an affinal one. Young women, and to a lesser extent, young men often make disparaging comments about the race of potential lovers, whether their own or each others. Here, I think, race is marked in order to mark difference, and hence the affinal aspect of the other person. Similarly, married couples will often criticise each other in similar terms, and for the same reasons. By asserting that a potential or actual sexual partner is of another race, and has the undesirable attributes of that other race, the affinal aspect of the relationship is fully stressed, and its potential kin aspect is forcefully denied.

The unlocalised

If this is how native people think about race, is this view shared by white people? Here I must confess my ignorance, since I know relatively little about white people. My fieldwork with native people was usually treated with suspicion by white people, who thought, quite rightly, that I criticised them to native people for their exploitative and abusive behaviour. Our brief contacts tended to be restricted to economic transactions and so I know little about how they talk about their own kin and affinal relations or about such relations in general. My account of white people is therefore necessarily at secondhand, and largely based on how native people talked about them.

That said, it strikes me as unlikely that they talk about kinship in the same way as native people given that they do not engage in subsistence production to any great extent: the vast majority engage in none at all. For white people, kin and affinal relations are most important in generating business ties, and it seems likely to me that primordialist images of corporeal substances are likely to be used by them. Two features of what I do know about white people's thinking in this regard confirm this. Firstly, white people consistently deny that relations of caring constitute kin ties, and hence deny the claims of their servants to kin status, even where such idioms are used for everyday interactions.

Secondly, white people were much more likely, even in brief interactions, to tell me about their foreign origins. An example of this was given in the case of the Italian woman related above. The assertion of foreign descent constantly reiterates differences to native people and effective dislocation from the local area, in the sense of active engagement with the forest and river. As I noted above, white people avoid all manual labour, and especially any labour engaged with the local environment. Instead, they orient themselves to commerce, the exportation of local commodities, and the importation of external commodities. Their assertions of foreign origins thus dovetails with their lived concern for connections between the local area and outside.

One important feature of white people in the Bajo Urubamba is their membership in or connections to grandes familias, “great families”. Great families are those with apellidos grandes, “great surnames”, which are invariably of foreign origin. Some of these families are descended from important rubber bosses of the late 19thC, or from more recent immigrant men. Their major function, in this area, is not ownership and transmission of productive property, but rather the organisation of trust within the economy of debt. The kin and affinal ties of the great families expand out across Peruvian Amazonia and beyond, linking white people on the Bajo Urubamba to the major city of Pucallpa to the north, and to the national capital of Lima.

The commercial sector of the local economy is dominated by credit extension and debt cancellation. Therefore, working in this sector depends on confianza, “confidence”. The creditor must have confidence that the debtor will cancel the debt. Such confidence is most easily placed in a known other, one who is already known by other means and hence easy to keep track of. This, I believe, is the major function of the great families: they provide a means to map out a system of confidence through which debt can flow. Certainly, young men who are becoming success commercial operators but who are not members of the great families seek to marry into them. And, correspondingly, the great families maintain their position by taking in such potential competition.

As I stated above, I know relatively little about how white people talk about kinship. However, even my slight contacts with them made me fully aware of how they talk about race. White people see themselves as intrinsically unlocalized, not from just around here. It is native people who are local. Even the members of the great families do not emphasise their localness: they consistently stress that their real homes are in Pucallpa or Lima, where they were educated as children and to which they plan to retire. Their residence on the Bajo Urubamba is temporary, visiting rather than living, and they were very wary of too much social contact with native people. Their whiteness, like their constant emphasis on foreign origins, stands for their essential alienness in the local area, and constantly reiterates that localness is an attribute of native people.

One feature of white people’s lives that most struck me was their conviction of their physical weakness in relation to native people and the local area. I was constantly asked by them what I ate in native villages, and my assertion that I ate native people’s food was met with incredulity. Native people’s diet, I was assured, lacked vitamins, and hence was inappropriate for people with white blood. Similarly, white people expressed incredulity that I could survive the general hardships of native life, as if white people and white foreigners were physiologically unprepared for local conditions unmediated by imported commodities. This sense of their constitutional incapacity for local life, attributed to their sangre fina, “fine blood”, strikes me as a remarkable feature of white people’s intimate experience of alienness as a way of being.

White people’s lived engagement with the world therefore emphasises connections between the local area and the outside. This is true both of how they make their living, through commercial exchange between the local and beyond, and of how they represent themselves, as essentially alien to the local area both in their origins and in their life trajectories. Race marks out for them their origins beyond the Bajo Urubamba, their key contrast to native people, and the centrality of that extra-local world in their lives. While for native people, race primarily stands for affinity, for white people race primarily stands for descent.

Two perspectives

There are, therefore two major ways of talking about race on the Bajo Urubamba: the native people’s view in which race is an aspect of a person that establishes the potentiality of affinal relations, but which has a very limited role in daily life, and the white people’s view in which race is an aspect of a person which is the product of consanguinity and is central to daily life. How can these two perspectives coexist?

The two perspectives can coexist because they have different material referents, depending on the agent in question. The double perspective on race reflects a real division in the Western Amazonian economy, between import-export commercial focus and the subsistence focus. Kinship means radically different things for white people and for native people in the Bajo Urubamba: it refers to an expanded world of extralocal ties of confidence for the former, and dense network of everyday ties for the latter. It would be as materially impossible for white people to operate with the native perspective on race as it would be for native people to operate with the white perspective.

However, the two perspectives are not merely different, for, like their material referents in modes of livelihood, they are systematically coordinated within a single socioeconomic system. The subsistence economy cannot seal itself off from the commercial economy or vice versa: native people need commodities and white people need labour. My argument is that race encodes the unity of that single socioeconomic system as a product of primordial differentiation between agents. The imagery of race strikes me as a very powerful language in which to do this, since it links specific bodily attributes to specific forms of agency within the socioeconomic system and to a history of the local area that makes sense to local people.

Clearly, the historical roots of race on the Bajo Urubamba lie outside it. The core images of race were clearly imported by the rubber bosses and imposed on the local people. As we have seen, the local people had very different imagery of social differentiation. Local imagery of social differentiation lost the ideological war, and native people consequently had to coordinate their notions of difference much more strongly with the alien differences than the white people had to do. This is presumably simply because the rubber bosses were able to seize control over the global relation of local people to the outside, and to keep it.

However, in the act of seizing control over the global relation of local people to the outside, the rubber bosses were forced to accede to local people’s view of social relations, and especially to the fact of their being the potential affine to local people. They bequeathed this condition to white people, who must live it out as a condition of extreme alienation from their real lands, remote and often unvisited by them, and from the place in which they live but to which they do not belong.

Mixed blood

At the beginning of this paper I mentioned the paucity of studies of race in Amazonia, and suggested that this was due to the tendency of the region’s ethnographers to conflate local imagery of race with anthropological concepts of cultural differences. This conflation has the paradoxical effect of naturalising the local imagery of race, not in a language of physiology but a language of primordialist cultural differences. For example, it would be very easy to take the imagery of race on the Bajo Urubamba and culturalise it: the local population consists of a series of peoples (Piro, Campa-Ashaninca, Machiguenga, Amahuaca, Yaminahua) bearing distinct indigenous Amazonian cultures, plus a dominant set of incomers bearing an alien culture. This is the standard model of areas of Amazonia such as the Bajo Urubamba. The problem here is that it makes the local imagery of race look like a meta-discourse on cultural differences which are both real and of a different order.

There are three major problems with this culturalisation of race, I think. Firstly, race has a knowable and known history in the Bajo Urubamba. This imagery of race is the product of the ongoing transformation, co-ordination and conflation of different modes of social differentiation as the Bajo Urubamba was progressively drawn into tighter integration with the wider economy of capitalism. As an anthropologist, I would prefer to retain the notion of cultural differences for such modes of social differentiation before their historical transformation, and therefore not to use the term for specifying the content of terms within the current system. Doing so merely replicates the imagery of race within the apparently more objective and politically more acceptable language of culture.

Secondly, the culturalisation of Amazonian concepts of race have the curious but important feature of adding a new layer of racialisation to the analysis. I have talked here of white people on the Bajo Urubamba. My usage here is in fact unusual, since what these people are usually called in the anthropological literature, and by certain people in the local area, is mestizos (Chaumeil [1984], Chevalier [1982], d’Ans [1982], Luna [1986] Siskind [1973]). The logic of this usage can only be that the local uses of the term blanco, “white”, is illegitimate, and this must be because there are better instantiations of whiteness elsewhere. Local white people are therefore pushed into the category of mestizo, which is thereby robbed of its local meanings, and given a substantive meaning irrespective of local usage. If this technical usage of mestizo is meant to be cultural, it seems an odd term to choose.

In fact, the use of mestizo refers to a specific set of local practices. The use of the term mestizo to mean white people occurs on the Bajo Urubamba, but is the exclusive domain of government officials, missionaries and others from coastal Peru and abroad, and is used explicitly to rule out local white people’s claims to whiteness. To identify people as mestizos is both to assert their native ancestry and to point to their cultural inauthenticity: they have native blood but not native culture. This imagery restricts whiteness to actual foreigners (government officials, missionaries, etc), thus putting these in the global control position. This global view is clearly that of both the higher levels of the Peruvian state and of international agencies.

I began this paper an excellent example of this imagery of mestizos, in the quotation from a Yaminahua man, José Chorro of Huayhuashi, a suburb of Sepahua. Chorro is a member of one of the most despised and marginalized of races on the Bajo Urubamba, the Yaminahua, who are often excluded from the category of native people because they are wild Indians. However, it is clear that Chorro was able to develop an astute sense of what underlay the priest’s point. The priest obviously could not have condemned white people for exploiting native people, for he would then have stood condemned by his own mouth. But by condemning mestizos, he is forced to invoke the local sense of mixed blood, and thereby unite native and mixed blood people against himself. And of course, Chorro is able to point out the casuistry of the priest’s argument by paralleling it to his own humorous identification of his head as exterior to his body.

Chorro is Yaminahua, and the Yaminahua are divided into two exogamous moieties called “Children of the Old Chiefs” and “Children of the Foreigners”: each Yaminahua person is thus the product of mixture between the two poles of the global relation of terms in the cosmos. As I have discussed, such images of social life are general to indigenous Amazonian peoples. The convergence of Yaminahua imagery of social differentiation and Amazonian imageries of race can hardly be fortuitous, but it could not, I think, be plausibly be explained by the colonial history of the region. The only plausible explanation of this convergence is that Amazonian imageries of race are the historical product of convergence and co-ordination between imported imageries of race and indigenous Amazonian modes of social differentiation. That history remains to be investigated and written, but the Bajo Urubamba case discussed here strongly points towards the probably validity of my claim.

This raises the third and final problem of anthropologists’ culturalisation of Amazonian imagery of race. When we imagine that native people on the Bajo Urubamba are primarily constituted as a social category by their possession of a distinct culture, we do more than violence to local imagery of race and hence to the images in which native people actually come to constitute themselves. We also do violence to the potentials of indigenous Amazonian people’s ideas. The imagery of race was undoubtedly imposed on them, but that does not mean that they could not adapt it to their own ends, or to see in it potentials for novel uses. When native people on the Bajo Urubamba assert themselves to be “of mixed blood”, and to see racial differentiation as the delineation of potential affinity, they have done something remarkable and unexpected with this racial imagery. Their achievement deserves better treatment from their ethnographers.

[1] Dr. Peter Gow is lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. He is a specialist in indigenous Amazonian peoples, particularly with reference to Peru. His publications include, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (OUP, 1991).