One-day Workshop

Indigenous Management of Place and Mobility in Times of Crisis:
Explorations from Latin America

Date: 9 September 2021
Place: Wivenhoe House- Groves Room, University of Essex
Conveners: Dr Giuliana Borea and Prof Andrew Canessa

This one-day workshop will explore how indigenous peoples in Latin America manage their place and mobility in times of crisis. With a focus on space politics, territorial-water rights, boundaries, mobility and place-making, this workshop aims to highlight the different strategies, claims, networks and projects that indigenous people activate to respond to extreme situations that affect their well-being, worlds and futures. How do indigenous people protect and manage their territory and mobility in times of capitalist extractivism, pandemics, violence, drug trafficking and other threats of inequality and governmental negligence? Which strategies of mobility indigenous people have undertaken in response to political, economic or environmental crisis, and which new challenges emerge in new place-making? Is crisis a constant condition for indigenous peoples and how does this impact their lives, resilience and capacity to respond? What is the ‘place’ that is affected and managed, and how do indigenous peoples communicate this reality to others? How do national and international laws engage with indigenous senses of place? How to build a future in which indigenous management of place is taken seriously and participates in the negotiation to shape nations and the world?

Programme:

Session 1
10:00-10:10 – Welcome
10:10-10:30 – Dwelling border spaces. Indigeneity, migration and urban place-making |Dr Olivia Casagrande
10:30-10:50 – The Defense of Territory through Commoning: Political-Legal Strategies to Counter Dispossession in Honduras| Dr Ainhoa Montaya
10:50-11:10 – Poetics of Resilience – Indigenous voices from Brazil in the global mobilization for climate justice | Dr Francesca Cavallo
11:10- 12:10 – Discussion  

12:10-13:00 – Lunch break

15:00 -15:20 – Coffee break

Session 3
15:20-15:40 – Transforming through words. Indigenous media in times of crisis | Prof Gemma Orobitg
15:40 –16.00 – On the interface: Amazonian Indigenous art, activism and spatial strategies in the Covid-19 crisis| Dr Giuliana Borea
16.00 – 16.45 – Discussion
16.45 – 17.00 – Closing remarks

Abstracts:

Dwelling border spaces. Indigeneity, migration and urban place-making
Dr Olivia Casagrande, University of Manchester
In contemporary Latin American cities, indigenous actors are actively re-positioning themselves through cultural and artistic productions that are becoming a powerful vehicle for political claims and for challenging existing perspectives on indigeneity and territorial belonging. While the city has historically constituted a space of exclusion and marginality for indigenous people, their growing presence in urban contexts speaks of negotiation, hybridization and active processes of reterritorialization. These dynamic processes ask for an understanding of indigenous experience beyond the boundaries of the rural communities defined by the colonial order. As claimed by the anthropologist Enrique Antileo (2008), acknowledging the violence of displacement, the scarcity of land which led to the abandonment of indigenous communities, and the subordinate conditions of indigenous people within existing socio-racial hierarchies, ultimately denies the rural-urban dichotomy. As such, indigenous urban spatialities are socially, historically and materially constructed by multiple processes of displacement and place-making, resulting in the making of indigenous subjectivities and territorial belonging within the complexities of contemporary Latin American cities. Building on these debates, my contribution to the workshop elaborates on the experiences of place-making of indigenous Mapuche youths in metropolitan Santiago (Chile). Through a close analysis of some of the artworks developed for the exhibition realised in the frame of the collaborative research project MapsUrbe, I will address place and self-making in contexts of indigenous urban migration as encompassing both rupture and creative re-appropriation, reconstituting a meaningful ‘sense of place’ in displacement.

The Defense of Territory through Commoning: Political-Legal Strategies to Counter Dispossession in Honduras
Dr Ainhoa Montaya, School of Advanced Study, UoL
The Honduran political regime that emerged following the 2009 coup has promoted its extractive development model through legislative and judicial channels. It has made an irregular use of legal mechanisms, along with repression and persecution sometimes in tandem with organised crime, to counter anti-extraction activity among peasant populations in places like Tocoa, in the Bajo Aguán Valley. This presentation explores the legal-political strategies of local environmental defenders from Tocoa—largely defensive strategies that have nonetheless sought to reveal irregularities by the state and highlight the ‘gray areas’ of politics that have enabled such irregularities. More significantly, the mobilisation of Tocoa locals has also inserted within political-legal circuits notions of nature and territory characterised by commoning logics with roots in the region’s peasant past as well as Catholic morality. Such notions could encourage the development of collective territorial rights among non-indigenous populations. In so doing, these notions, which resonate with the concept of the indigenous commons, could also potentially foster political alliances between indigenous and non-indigenous populations that are both laying claim to territory.

Poetics of Resilience – Indigenous voices from Brazil in the global mobilization for climate justice
Dr Francesca Cavallo, University of Kent 
Resilience, a word typical of preparedness programmes, international cooperation, and disaster recovery propaganda, loosely refers in physics to “the ability of a substance to return to its usual shape after being bent, stretched, or pressed.” As communities worldwide are ‘bent’ by increasing anthropogenic risks and supposed natural disasters, Indigenous people have become the embodiment of post-apocalyptic survival in light of years and generations of interdependence between people, animals and things. The paper will reflect on the role of the artist/educator in indigenous communities in Brazil ( and their understanding of art) to rethink how the arts can be mobilised for climate justice and defend resilience in an increasingly endangered world. It will do so by looking back at Naine Terena, Yawar and Uýra Sodoma’s contributions to Brazil Footprint 0.0, the online festival I curated at the Barbican Centre in July 2021, as a part of the cultural initiatives in the UK in the lead up to the UN Convention for Climate Change.

Keeping our history alive: when clinging to cultural identity becomes the only possible strategy of resistance to forced migration in indigenous territories
Dr Iokiñe Rodríguez, University of East Anglia
The Pemon indigenous peoples from la Gran Sabana (Canaima National Park, Venezuela) have a long history of conflict in their ancestral territories with the Venezuelan State, due to the imposition of development and conservation policies in their homelands. However, up until recently, the possibility of displacement from their ancestral territories was only a fear, based on their memories of a not so distant violent colonial past. With the government’s recent mining policy aimed at opening 12% of the national territory to mining, this fear has become real, and many members of Pemon communities that oppose such plans are starting to be forced out of their traditional homelands. Such is the case of the village of Kumarakapay, where about 900 people have recently migrated to Brazil after violent confrontations with the armed forces and guerrillas.  In this situation of increasing violence and criminalization for opposing the government mining plans, one strategy to cope with displacement has been to reaffirm identity in exile, by reviving a historical reconstruction project carried out between 1999 and 2010. In this presentation, I will be providing insights into this cultural reaffirmation process and its role in helping the Pemon cope with forced migration from their traditional homelands, but also in keeping them tided to it. 

Order and disorder of the saints (and life). Incorporating Our Lady of Montserrat in San Juan Sacatepéquez (Guatemala)
Dr Gemma Celigueta, University of Barcelona
I intend to describe the transformations of a religious image that arrived in the town of San Juan Sacatepéquez (Guatemala) after the 1976 earthquake. Our Lady of Montserrat arrived accompanying the humanitarian aid sent from Barcelona and remained in the hands of the indigenous mayor. San Juan, a Mayan-Kaqchikel village near the capital, was one of the most affected by the disastrous earthquake. More than 1,500 people died and 90% of the buildings collapsed. As if that were not enough, the catastrophe was linked to the violent political context of Guatemala in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a period marked by internal warfare between guerrillas and military governments that has been described as one of the most terrifying in the country. In this context, the process of incorporation of the religious image allows us to unravel local meanings of disasters (political violence and earthquakes), to learn about local politics and to explore the relationships established by the Sanjuaneros with their saints.  In short, accompanying the incorporation of Our lady of Montserrat into San Juan Sacatepéquez underlines the capacity of indigenous people to incorporate external practices and beliefs. An example of this is this foreign image that, in some way, ended up behaving like a saint of San Juan, a saint that emerges as being highly adaptable. 

The Coming of Cars, Cellphones and COVID: Elastic notions of space in a Bolivian hamlet
Prof. Andrew Canessa, University of Essex
This paper explores the ways perceptions of distance are transformed through technologies and events as what was far becomes near and what used to be near is deemed far in the Aymara speaking village of Wila Kjarka (Bolivia).  The construction of roads in the middle of the twentieth century which bypassed the village of Wila Kjarka transformed a community which had been on a major route between the Andes and the Amazon for at least a thousand years into a remote backwater where very few outsiders ever visited and migrants had difficulty returning.  The arrival of a road in 2008 transformed it once again: trucks could take products to market, more school teachers were willing to come, house constructions changed radically, and space collapsed to the point that many young people willingly returned, temporarily or permanently.  The potato fields high up the mountain surrounding Inka and pre Inka settlements which have been cultivated for centuries suddenly became abandoned because they were ‘too far’ to get to.  The arrival of COVID, however, has transformed a sense of space once again as the village’s relative isolation becomes a virtue and something to be celebrated. This research is based on decades of face to face and Facetime ethnographic research.

Transforming through words. Indigenous media in times of crisis
Prof. Gemma Orobitg, University of Barcelona
The starting point of this presentation is the word as a means to act on the world. In times of crisis, the indigenous word makes its power to transform the world more evident. What does this transforming word look like? How does it act on the world? How does it produce alternatives in the face of crisis situations? To develop these questions, I will focus on indigenous experiences of media in times of climate, health, economic, and political crises. I will advance the hypothesis that the value and status of speech in indigenous cultures determines their uses of communication technologies. In particular, the word transmitted in indigenous media acts on the world, connecting people in heterogeneous communities – local and/or planetary – that transform sociability – and the world in general – in the very exercise of communication.

On the interface: Amazonian Indigenous art, activism and spatial strategies in the Covid-19 crisis
Dr Giuliana Borea, University of Essex
Amazonian indigenous art and artists have become key political actors across local, national and global stages mobilising indigenous worldviews and agendas on pressing issues that affect the artists, their communities and futures. While their rising urban and transnational experience is impacting their artistic practice, enlarging their networks and performative tools, their work and voices are questioning various structure of power and providing ways of imagining alternatives futures. In times of local and global crisis indigenous Amazonian artist have demonstrated that their art practice and its circulation can open paths to express their claims and anxieties, to explore and share local community responses, and to channel aid and transformation. Based on the exhibition ‘Ite, Neno, Here: Responses to Covid-19’ which I curated with the indigenous artist Rember Yahuarcani, this paper explores how Amazonian indigenous art and artists became crucial agents in providing first-hand, real time information of the impact of Covid-19 at Amazonian urban and rural settings, and offered an indigenous visualization of Covid-19 and its local understandings, management and responses. Analysing artists’ works and practices, I will focus on issues of indigenous and state strategies of border re-making; networks of aids across communities and worlds; and practices of returning and rediscovering. It is my contention to show how their works act as visible political aesthetical devices that capture larger visibility to local responses and demands, and to advance my argument that indigenous contemporary artist play a vigorous role as ‘agents of interface’, especially in times of crisis. 

About the participants:

Giuliana Borea is a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex and a Lecturer in Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Her current research concerns the global circulation of Amazonian indigenous art and the development of new curatorial narratives through a collaborative methodology with indigenous artists. She has been Peru’s Director of Museums and Cultural Heritage, Coordinator of the Lima Contemporary Art Museum, curator of indigenous art exhibitions and is currently an executive member of the LASA Visual Culture Section. She is the author of Configuring the New Lima Art Scene: An Anthropological Analysis of Contemporary Art in Latin America (Routledge, 2021).  

Andrew Canessa is a social anthropologist who has been working with Aymara speakers of highland Bolivia since 1989.  His work has looked at how intimate issues such as gender, sexuality, and indigenous identity are not only intersectional but are produced and reproduced in very specific historical and political contexts: if the personal is political then it is also true that the political is very personal.  Even indigenous communities which are ‘isolated’ are deeply impacted by processes and structures in the world around them.  An indicative publication of this work is his 2012 monograph Intimate Indigeneities: Exploring Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life (Duke University Press).  If much of his work has looked at how the state has impacted on indigenous lives his more recent work looks at how indigenous lives – real and imagined – impact on the state and how elites imagine the nation state to be.  This work has resulted in a book with political scientist, Manuela Picq currently under review with Duke, entitled Savages, Citizens, and Sodomites: Indigenous People and the Nation State from Thomas Hobbes to Evo Morales.

Olivia Casagrande My research focus on place-making, memory and imagination. My interests centre on indigenous lived experience, epistemologies, and politics, particularly in Chile, exploring the interplay between affectivity, narratives and spatial and political performances. During the last three years, I have been Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Manchester and at the Instituto de Estudios Urbanos at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile) with the project ‘MapsUrbe – The Invisible City: Mapuche Mapping of Santiago de Chile’ (2017-2020). Through this project, I explored performance, theatre and art as practice-based and collaborative ethnographic methodologies. I am currently finalising the writing of a book co-authored with the research participants, under contract with Manchester University Press.

Francesca Laura Cavallo is an art historian, curator, and researcher from the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies at the University of Kent. Her work combines research and practice to explore how the arts can be mobilised to transform public perceptions and attitudes towards risk, ecology, health, and sustainability. Francesca’s most recent work engages with Brazilian contemporary artists of Indigenous or Afro-Brazilian origin to cultivate awareness and hope for climate justice through educational and artistic initiatives. In July 2021, she curated the online festival Brazil Footprint 0.0 at the Barbican Centre in London. Previously Francesca has curated exhibitions, festivals and public programmes at Turner Contemporary, Margate; Manifesta 11, Zurich; Cabinet, NY; the ICA, London; 98weeks, Beirut and the Andersen Museum in Rome, among others. She has also worked in community development and art-related projects in the UK, US, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Lebanon and Uruguay.

Gemma Celigueta holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is interested in topics such as ethnicity, gender, collective intellectual property of Mayan textiles, indigenous media and peace building. Her research is focused on Mayan peoples of Guatemala. Since 2010, she is a lecturer of anthropology at the University of Barcelona (UB) and member of the research group CINAF (Indigenous and Afro-American Cultures) of the same University. She is the author, among others, of “¿Textiles mediáticos? Investigar sobre activismo indígena en Panamá, Guatemala y el espacio Web 2.0.” (with Mónica Martínez Mauri, 2020); “¿Unas elecciones de verdad? Autenticidad, representación y conflicto en los concursos de Reinas Indígenas de Guatemala” (2017); “¿Mayanización, indigeneidad o mestizaje? Clasificaciones étnicas y diversidad en Guatemala” (2015); Modernidad indígena, indigeneidad e innovación social desde la perspectiva del género (coord., with Gemma Orobitg and Pedro Pitarch, 2014).

Ainhoa Montoya is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of The Violence of Democracy: Political Life in Post-War El Salvador (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is currently working on a British Academy-funded project which explores the political-legal strategies of environmental and human rights defenders who oppose mineral extraction in Central America and Mexico, focusing specifically on the moralities, ontologies and forms of knowledge that they bring to these strategies.

Gemma Orobitg is Doctor in Anthropology and Ethnology from the École des Hautes Études and Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona since 2003. She is founder and director of the Indigenous and Afro-American Cultures (CINAF) Study Group, and principal investigator in two projects on indigenous and African-American media. She is the author of numerous publications: ‘La vie des maracas. Réflexions autour d’un instrument rituel chez les indiens pumé (Venezuela)’ (Revista de Antropologia, Universidade de Sao Paulo, 2016), ‘Los laberintos del sueño. Nuevas posibles vías para una antropología del sueño amerindio’ (Entrediversidades, 2017) ‘Mujeres en el origen. Una distribución pumé de los seres del cosmos’ (AIBR. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 2018), ‘The cultural logics of indigenous communication in Latin America: an introduction’ (Indigenous media. Theories and experiences of indigenous communication in America Latina, 2020).

Sarah Radcliffe (Geography, Cambridge) is interested in exploring the tense dynamics between development, citizenship and political geographies in Andean Latin America. In conversation with Latin American colleagues, she pursues decolonial agendas in the discipline of geography. Current research focuses on Indigenous agendas’ negotiations and frictions under buen vivir technopolitics across three Ecuadorian municipalities. Recent publications include Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous women and the limitations of postcolonial development policy (Duke, 2015), and reviews on indigeneity, coloniality and knowledge (Progress in Human Geography 2017-2020).

Iokiñe Rodríguez is a senior lecturer and researcher at the School of International Development in UEA. She specializes on local environmental knowledge and conflict transformation in Latin America using participatory action-research.  Her work on environmental conflict transformation focuses on issues of local history, local knowledge, power, environmental justice, equity and intercultural dialogue.

*Cover image: Harry Pinedo/Inin Metsa, Cantagallo on Fire, 2016, acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist
*Picture: Linderaje, Choco-Cusco, 2007, photo by Giuliana Borea.