Transboundary Political Ecology in Amazonia: History, Culture, and Conflicts of the Borderland Ashaninka

Salisbury, David S., Lopez, Jose Borgo, Alvarado, Jorge W. Vela, Journal of Cultural Geography

International boundaries in the lowland Amazon forest were historically drawn according to the scramble for natural resources. This paper uses a case study from the Peruvian and Brazilian border and the Ucayali and Jurua watersheds to understand the political ecology of a border process from contact to 2004. Results demonstrate how global resource demand and ecological gradients drove boundary formation and the relocation of indigenous labor to the borderlands. Forgotten in the forest after the fall of rubber prices, the borderland Ashaninka emerged to challenge loggers incited by the global demand for high grade timber. The transboundary impacts of this resource boom highlight discrepancies between the Brazilian and Peruvian Ashaninka's ability to mobilize power. A transboundary political ecology framework is necessary to grasp the heterogeneity and dynamism of natural resource management along boundaries and borderlands forged and tempered by historical resource booms.

Keywords: Amazonia; borders; Brazil; indigenous; Peru; political ecology

Introduction

In the remote southwestern borderlands of Amazonia shared by Peru and Brazil dwell a formerly invisible indigenous people, the borderland Ashfininka, increasingly threatened by the global demand for high grade timber. This demand resembles the rubber boom that brought the Ashaninka to these nascent borderlands one hundred years ago. To make sense of the borderland Ashaninka's past and present this paper introduces the historical dimensions of transboundary political ecology through a case study of the history, conflicts, and peoples of an increasingly important, if little known, corner of Amazonia. Transboundary political ecology builds on the historical political ecology framework proposed by Offen (2004) as a field-informed analysis of human-environment relations in the past with significance for improving conservation and environmental/social justice today. Thus, the article's detailed results, from both archival and ethnographic methods, not only serve as documentation for the marginalized groups described within but also inform the historical and cultural ecology elements of cultural geography through the rural nature, historical approach, and indigenous focus of the article.

Fieldwork along the international boundary between the Ucayali and Jurua Rivers revealed complex cultural geographies and dynamic identities as the borderland Ashaninka people struggled against the incursions of illegal loggers. Two related and neighboring Ashaninka groups marshaled disparate amounts of power in the face of the invaders: the borderland Ashaninka in Brazil, a titled, empowered, and globally recognized people; and those in Peru, an untitled, marginalized, and invisible people. Following fieldwork, archival research traced a faint but complex trail woven into the political geography and ecology of the Amazon borderlands. This trail connects with multiple themes within this special issue: shifting cultural landscapes, hidden histories, heterogeneity, and political economy, to name a few. Before sharing this trail, the research is mapped in the literatures of cultural/political ecology, political geography, and the Ashaninka people.

Cultural and political ecology

The varied concepts and concerns loosely grouped under the label of cultural and political ecology lead scholars to increasingly see this as a vibrant and wide-ranging approach rather than a narrow subdiscipline (Zimmerer and Bassett 2003; Robbins 2004; Neumann 2005). While researchers continue to debate the approach's bias towards politics (Peet and Watts 2004; Walker 2007), ecology (Walker 2005; Waiters and Vayda 2009), or a particular scale (Brown and Purcell 2005; Neumann 2009), this research combines cultural ecology's nuanced understanding of culture-nature relationships with political ecology's focus on contextualizing resource management and its impacts within political economies at multiple scales (Hecht 2004).

Some of political ecology's earliest efforts were situated in the region of Amazonia (Hecht 1985; Schmink and Wood 1987; Chapman 1989) with particularly well-known works focused on the differential access to power (Schmink and Wood 1992) and resistance (Hecht and Cockburn 1990) of stakeholders facing land use change under authoritarian policies. More recent Amazonian political ecology scholarship also investigates the policy relationships related to land use change (Aldrich et al. 2006; Vadjunec and Rocheleau 2009; Walker et al. 2009) or territorial conflict (Little 2001; Porro 2005; Simmons et al. 2007).

Following Often (2004) this paper constructs a transboundary political ecology framework useful for investigating policy, conflict, and land-use change in a borderland context through Hecht's (2004) three historical political ecology themes: the mythic empty Amazon, the scientific Amazon, and the production of landscape. These themes encompass not only an expansive political ecology of Amazonia, but, as used here, also shed light on the complex cultural and historical geographies embedded in similarly diverse, dynamic, and distant borderland regions.

The first theme, the empty Amazon landscape or tropical tabula raca, provides an imagined blank slate or empty forest for the resource-hungry colonial powers of the past or the insatiable global marketplace of today to design the nature and future of the Amazon basin. The very political boundaries of Amazonia were carved into the basin via political struggles over natural resources in the poorly mapped Amazon interior. Interestingly, current borderland conflicts imitate these colonial clashes.

Hecht's (2004, p. 47) scientific Amazon approach refers to not only the tension between a climax "forest primeval" and the dynamic tropical forest of today, but also "that environments have an effect on peoples and societies, not in the ways understood in environmental determinism, but rather as mediated by its symbolic and cultural meanings, as well as resource possibilities." This research adopts a similar stance by mediating analysis of the environment through resource possibilities, investigating the power and importance of watershed divides and biogeographical gradients to the harvesting of natural resources, the formation of political boundaries, and the movement of peoples.

Within the final theme, the production of landscapes, Hecht (2004) underscores the importance of hidden social histories, landscapes, and development impacts. This paper shows, for example, how the borderland Ashaninka of Peru both arrive in and emerge from an unmapped and "empty" borderscape, through the ebb and flow of past and present resource booms.

Political geography

Robbins (2003) argues for the theoretical potential of melding political geography with political ecology to produce conceptually advanced explanations of complex human-environment interactions. Rather than attempt to join these broad approaches in their entirety, this research bridges political geography's expertise on boundaries and borderlands with the Amazonian political ecology described above. In linking political ecology and political geography through borderland study, this research addresses three key topics identified by boundary scholars: a more detailed multi-scalar examination of the transboundary environment (Newman and Paasi 1998), a need to analyze borders as dynamic processes (Newman 2006), and more border analysis that incorporates the local scale (Newman 2006).

As applied to the Amazon borderlands, these boundary topics fit within Hecht's (2004) three themes and Offen's (2004) historical political ecology framework for the following three reasons: (1) multi-scalar examination, and particularly local analysis, are critical to uncovering the hidden cultural geographies, political ecologies, and social histories of these Amazon borderlands and the Ashaninka people; (2) historical analysis makes it possible to trace the dynamic political ecology of border/borderland processes from contact to the 21st century; and (3) the tropical tabularasa can only be accurately described with the pointillist approach of local scale analysis. Despite the synergy between these boundary topics and political ecology themes, a complex borderland setting provides new challenges for political ecology.

Borderlands share many territorial meanings (House 1982), but can be loosely defined as the territorial regions surrounding state boundaries where livelihoods are frequently affected by the border (Newman 2006). Borderlands rely on a boundary line axis: an artificial, mutable, and humanly constructed razor's edge dividing diverse cultures, political systems, and economies (Barth 1969). The understudied Amazonian borderlands have historically contained some of the most invisible of Amazonians: in this case the borderland Ashaninka.

Ashaninka

The Ashaninka or Asheninka, constitute one of the largest Arawakan indigenous groups, and include at least six subgroups (Veber 2003). These people now cover a fragmented territory that once spanned approximately 100,000 [km.sup.2] in the selva central (1) region of the eastern slopes of the Andes (Figure 1) (Veber 2003; Benavides 2006). Historically called Campain Peru and Kampa in Brazil, today the more modern and inclusive term of Ashaninka is used to refer to all subgroups. The Ashaninka are known for their ability, in the face of repeated aggression, to maintain both their ethnic identity and a high degree of elasticity in their social organization (Varese 1968). One hundred years ago, these qualities were put to the test as rubber tappers and other resource collecting patrones (2), or rubber bosses, captured and enslaved Ashaninka before dislocating them to work in distant areas (Varese 1968). Today, Ashaninka adaptability and identity continues to be tried by labor recruiters who tangle them in debt peonage. This research investigates the forgotten migration of the most invisible of the Ashaninka, those borderland populations now living hundreds of kilometers from their ancestral homeland. (3)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Methods

Following Offen's (2004) historical political ecology framework, this paper relies both on library-based archival research and Amazon fieldwork. Fieldwork consisted of 10 months of research in the borderlands shared by Brazil and Peru. The specific inductive approach began with grounded local level fieldwork (Butzer 1989) investigating indigenous resource use in 2004. A research team traveled seven days upriver from the Peruvian town of Pucallpa to spend three months conducting participatory methods, ethnography, and semi-structured interviews to understand and map the resource use and resource conflicts of the borderland Ashaninka. Following this, progressive contextualization (Walters and Vayda 2009) led to interviews with Ashaninka relatives in Brazil and other key informants in both countries, while Global Positioning System waypoints of borderland resource management, transboundary invasions, and road building were analyzed using geographical information systems and remote sensing in both Peru and the United States.

On returning to the United States, archival research helped to clarify the historical processes underpinning the oral interviews conducted in the field. Archives provided detailed historical information on the Brazil-Bolivia borderlands, but less on the Tamaya and Jurua Rivers. However, missionary accounts, indigenista writings, and other archival materials helped illuminate the historical political ecology of the region. Of particular utility were the joint commission reports of the bi-national reconnaissance of the Jurua and Purus basins. The Brazilian side of the commission was led by two Brazilians of note. Euclides da Cunha, the famous writer, engineer, and proto-political ecologist (Hecht forthcoming), explored the Purus River (Comision Mixta 1906; da Cunha 1967) before becoming one of the …

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Publication information: Article title: Transboundary Political Ecology in Amazonia: History, Culture, and Conflicts of the Borderland Ashaninka. Contributors: Salisbury, David S. - Author, Lopez, Jose Borgo - Author, Alvarado, Jorge W. Vela - Author. Journal title: Journal of Cultural Geography. Volume: 28. Issue: 1 Publication date: February 2011. Page number: 147+. © 2008 JCG Press. COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale Group.

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