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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

Changing Bodies in Toxic Landscapes:Environmental degradation and intersecting knowledges in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia

Alternative title: Changing Bodies in Toxic Landscapes:Environmental degradation and intersecting knowledges in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia

Awarded: NOK 3.6 mill.

This comparative post-doc project has explored the intersections of personhood, environmental change and degradation, economic relations and state formation in Northern Peruvian and Southern Ecuadorian Amazonia. Based on fieldwork in Kichwa communities of the Upper Tigre River in Peru and with Shuar communities in Ecuador, this study shows the importance personhood has for the ways people relate to oil and gold extraction and to environmental transformations. Personhood refers, in this research project, to notions and practices related to the constitution of gendered persons and bodies, and to the ways this constitution is linked to various relations people establish between themselves, plants and animals. This study shows that drawing on widespread understandings and practices regarding these relations, Kichwa and Shuar villagers conceive of oil and gold as life-giving and death-bringing entities, that is, not barely natural resources to be extracted. Seeking to account for these understandings and practices about persons, bodies, oil and gold, this study underlines the importance of holding in tension two description registers. These registers show how notions and practices interlink with, overlap while exceeding each other. I hold that only by giving these registers equal analytical importance it is possible to fully understand how people cope with extractive activities and their effects in these Amazonian extracting sites. Some of the concepts developed to hold these registers together are owning, harm, and open collectives. These concepts and a systematic changing of registers organize the presentation of some of my main findings. Owning refers to an essential condition of being in the world. This is not conceived of as an exclusively human condition. The Kichwa and Shuar villagers seek to enter into relations with other persons, with plants and animals as owners. Being owner allows a person to create relations that make life worth of living. Likewise, they propose the possibility that plants, animals and also minerals enter into relations as owners. Owning is however not the same as ownership, as the latter presupposes a clear distinction between the subject that owns and the object owned. Owning, on the contrary, presupposes that the owned may also be an owner. Oil and gold are conceived of as owners that can take hold on a person's life, transforming her body and even killing her. This is one register. The other, which is equally important, has to do with being owners in the assemblages of gold and oil extraction. As the materialities of oil and gold are distinct, however, the Kichwa strive to control and own the ruins left by oil extraction while the Shuar aim to ensure their possibilities of owning gold by owning land, mining concessions and practicing artisanal and mechanized extraction. Harm describe the acts, relations and effects that make a person sick. For both the Kichwa and the Shuar villagers, being sick entails a situation of indeterminacy. This indeterminacy is related to notions that underline the intrinsically transformative condition of all bodies. A person's body can be transformed by the ill-will of another person. This results in the immediate deterioration of a person's health and even in death. To heal and recover always imply to identify and disentangle the persons, the things, the relations that are making a person sick. In the other register, the indeterminacy of diseases has to do with the lack of material possibilities and technical instruments to establish a bio-medical diagnosis. Diagnosis of bio-medical diseases are always unstable and treatment palliative. People experience this instability as bio-medicine's impossibility of healing, that is, bio-medicine's impossibility of disentangling the relations that make a person sick. Harm and being harmed denote also environmental destruction caused by current extraction practices. This study demonstrates that counting and measuring of pollutants in soil, water and human and non-human fluids and tissues serve to establish the existence of contamination due to hydrocarbons and heavy metals. While measuring make people?s ailments visible, their ailments do not matter. Affected human bodies are constituted not as sick bodies but rather as environmental indicators. Open collectivities refers to the fluid nature of territorial occupation. Communities are relocated and villagers move within extensive areas. This fluidity is negated in currentlegal mechanisms communities have for negotiating their inclusion. Following knowledge practices through which contamination is constituted together with state control practices of extracting activities, this study shows how exclusion is enacted through the constitution of closed, polluted spaces that also negate the spatial and temporal fluidity of pollution.

I samarbeid med lokalbefolkning og en lærerorganisasjon en skolebok på Kichwa, det lokale språket, ble publisert. Boka handler om historien til lokalsamfunnene i Alto Tigre i Peru og om oljeutvinning. Den brukes som lesetekst og er ment til å styrke barnas leseferdigheter på eget språk og samtidig øke bevissthet om miljøproblemer. I samarbeid med et lokal universitet og med Shuar landsbybeboere kartla vi forekomst av tungmetaller i fiskevev. Dette ble utgangpunkt for lokal læring om bio-akkumulering og fiskefangst. Prosjektet bidrar til økt forståelse av miljøeffektene. Det viser menns og kvinners ulike deltakelse i utvinningen, og deres ujevne eksponering til forurensning. Fokus på indiansk samfunn som deltar i utvinning, samt vektlegging av kunnskapsproduksjon om forurensing og statens kontrollpraksiser, kompliserer forestillinger om urfolks motstand og om homogene statsapparater. Folks oppfatninger av olje og gull, av sykdom og skade, og av lokalsamfunns organisering vises.

This comparative project seeks to explore the intersections of personhood, environmental change and degradation, economic relations and state formation in Southern Ecuadorian and Northern Peruvian Amazonia. Ecuador´s and Peru´s national economies have experienced sustained economic growth since the beginning of this century, due to the expansion of extractive industries; a trend favored also by the rise in international prices of crude oil and metals (ECLA 2012).Most of extraction activities influence rural and indigenous livelihoods since oil and mineral concessions overlap with their land and with water resources and drainage basins. Poor environmental management has led to extensive contamination of water sources and soils. Social movements in both countries question economic and environmental policies linking issues of social and ethnic exclusion, citizenship and state formation with the uneven distribution of environmental hazards and with claims of environmental justice. Aiming to produce fine-grained ethnographic knowledge, this study focuses on people's perceptions and daily experiences of environmental degradation due to extractive activities, and on people's coping strategies. It examines the connections different groups of people establish between their gendered bodies and the bodies and materialities of particularly valued non-human species in contaminated sites. The project proposes to link these perceptions and practices to knowledge production and to the politics through which culturally diverse communities frame contamination -especially its toxicity-, contest state projects and, at the same time, negotiate their inclusion. Eight months fieldwork will be conducted in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazonia, in three localities, that although ethnically different, share cultural notions, perceptions and practices in relation to the non-human environment. These communities have longstanding experiences with extractive activities.

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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam