-
7. Ethnological Coda: Shamanizing the State in Venezuela
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
7 Ethnological Coda: Shamanizing the State in Venezuela The narrative about Temedawí, the magical city of the Yópinai, spirits of the forest, rivers, and air, serves as a historical metaphor for the sociopolitical transformations unfolding at local, regional, and national levels in Venezuela at the time of my fieldwork in June through December 1998. The sociopolitical circumstances of indigenous peoples in the Venezuelan Amazon had dramatically changed since my fieldwork in the 1980s. In large part, these changes reflected the fact that in July 1992, the Venezuelan congress had voted to transform Amazonas from a federal territory into the twentysecond state of Venezuela. In the wake of this change, a legislative assembly was elected and charged with elaborating a new Law of Political-Territorial Division, and a protracted political struggle between indigenous peoples and the assembly developed between 1995 and 1998 over how to define and implement this new law. Indigenous peoples, who constituted 44 percent of the state’s population in 1996, organized themselves into an umbrella organization called ORPIA (Organización Regional de Pueblos Indígenas de Amazonas), and their cause received powerful support at the national level from several rulings of the Supreme Court. The Legislative Assembly reacted to the Court’s mandate by delaying and otherwise obstructing the formulation and implementation of a new Law of Division that would protect three categories of legal rights: (1) the right to a “regime of exception” for indigenous communities, (2) the requirement that all constituents of the state’s population be consulted and allowed to participate in the development of new municipios, and (3) the land rights of indigenous communities. The first of these rights, or the regime of exception, is particularly interesting and important since the Supreme Court argued that the 1994 law had created municipios based on urban criteria and had failed to consider “la especifidad indígena,” the cosmovision and sociocultural organization of the ethnic groups. In its counterargument, the Legislative Assembly portrayed the regime of exception as an unconstitutional law that would force indigenous communities to live in “political and territorial divisions separated from the rest of the country’s population, or under organizational forms distinct from those of the nonindigenous population of Venezuela” (Corte Suprema de Justicia 1996:19, my translation). The Supreme Court rejected these arguments and in addition ordered the Legislative Assembly to abstain from interfering with or distorting the Court’s decision. Subsequent events revealed a sustained effort by the Legislative Assembly to do everything possible to subvert or interfere with the Court’s decision. The assembly’s call for a referendum was a deliberate attempt to limit indigenous participation, since it would have reflected the public opinion in Puerto Ayacucho and other areas where most of the nonindigenous population resides. There is also solid evidence that the members of the Legislative Assembly had full knowledge of the Supreme Court’s order against carrying out the referendum when it voted to reject the indigenous project on the Law of Division and to publicize the Law of Partial Reform in December 1997 (Informe Annual 1998:61). This brief overview of the regional setting of my 1998 fieldwork in the Venezuelan Amazon is sufficient to demonstrate that the national context of indigenous histories cannot be understood apart from the dynamics of shifting power relations at the state level.1 And there are certain parallels between the Supreme Court’s vision of the new Law of Political-Territorial Division as a means for greater inclusion of indigenous peoples and the more poeticized imagery of a magical state developed in the narrative about Temedaw í. The Supreme Court’s ruling contemplated the possibility of a new political landscape in which indigenous peoples’ cultural differences and land rights would become protected by law and indigenous peoples themselves would have a voice in defining the state through voting and other forms of democratic participation in the development of new political institutions. The narrative of Temedawí outlines a view of the state as a political entity that appropriates the magical healing powers of indigenous shamans but that, in doing so, also comes to define itself as a projection, or amplification, of those shamanic ritual powers. Both nationalism and shamanism rely on symbolic transformations of human , social inventions into natural species or objects. As processes of natural148 THE WORLD OPENS UP [3.88.60.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:17 GMT) izing social being, both nationalism and shamanism are dynamic historical journeys, or pilgrimages, between the here...