Despite considerable differences between the above-mentioned studies, one can find common ground in both viewpoints concerning land in the Andes. This common ground can be found even in those approaches, which make significant attempts to get closer to indigenous perspectives. It is present even as concerns the understanding of an Andean 'logic' or 'rationality' (cf. Golte 1987 [1980]), whether in analyses of the 'kingdoms' or pre-Columbian political entities (Murra 2002) or in studies of *comunidades campesinas* (Fonseca Martel and Mayer 1988; Golte 1987 [1980]; Urrutia 1992). It goes without saying that those studies dealing with agrarian reforms or mining disputes in the Andes usually leave unproblematised a certain understanding of what constitutes the land. In fact, few of the studies mentioned above question the appositeness of the elemental terminology of their basic conceptual tools—that is, a specific relation between a subject (whether a human person or a mixed collective such as the '*ayllu*' or the 'community') and an object (whether that be as a continuous extension of land or as a discontinuous whole divided into 'ecologic floors'). Indeed, even in the intelligent proposal of Murra's 'vertical archipelago', there is not much hint of a debate on anything that might be considered more fundamental than an 'ideal of complementarity' enabling the control of a maximum number of ecologic 'floors'. This fundamental level that I refer to, in the case of the Amerindian Andes, is the existence (or not) of a relationship that can be considered similar or translatable to the 'ownership' of the land.

Recently, Salas Carreño proposed that 'humans must be understood as products of sustained relationships with places. Humans emerge as persons—in a material, as well as moral, sense—through this web of social interactions with named places' (2016: 833); 'the relations among humans and the places where they live are built upon exactly the same notions through which [Quechua] human social relations are constructed' (2016: 815). Although Salas Carreño does not make explicit the issue of ownership nor if what he means by 'places' would include things such as buildings—but see the quick mention of a 'house' (2016: 828)—he highlights an important feature of Andean socio-natural worlds: 'places themselves … emerge as intentional agents' (2016: 821) which are members of collectives entangling humans and nonhumans. The code, one could say, used with these agents is food; in fact, as the vast ethnography about this topic shows, food production, circulation and destruction are constantly used not only as part of good will offerings but also of straightforward threats (Rivera Andía 2000). In this chapter, I will expand this suggestion into places that are constructed by humans, while I specify the mode of human social relationship that emerges in the case of the land in the Cañaris area. In this specific relationship, feeding intervenes but in a reversed direction, as proposed by Salas Carreño (2016: 825–827), from places to humans.

As mentioned above, the questions that this chapter raises around the 'ownership' of land in an extractivist context permit the visibility of a nonhuman entity that has a tenuous relationship with the subject at hand: a Catholic temple called *Iglisya*.

The Cañaris Catholic temple, whilst a nonhuman entity attributed with agency, may appear, at least, slightly 'peculiar' in the general context of the nonhuman entities described by studies of indigenous cosmologies of the Andes.

This invisibility in the Andean ethnography of buildings such as the *Iglisya*, which have been erected and used by indigenous peoples for centuries, seems to stem from being both Catholic and constructed. On the one hand, the *Iglisya* is something that is an emblematic part of the 'Christian' cult, in contrast to the nostalgic reconstructions proposed by those studies in search of 'Andean thinking' as something opposed to (or hidden beneath) something that is imagined to be completely 'western' or 'modern'. An ethnography of a Christian temple would allow us to question the subtle persistence (sometimes countered, other times avoided) of that image of the native or indigenous (inherited from the romantic Indigenism of the first half of the twentieth century), in the contemporary anthropology of the Andes.

On the other hand, the *Iglisya* constitutes an entity that is clearly 'artificial'. That is, it consists of something that is obviously man made, in contrast to the ideal of the 'untouched' which usually awakens notions of the 'natural'. The *Iglisya* then differs from other entities, which are usually (more) directly connected to the earth and are considered to be a constituent part of the environment (for a remarkable exception, see Tomasi 2015). Past and current ethnographies of the Andes usually speak of the mountains—under the name of *apus*, *awkillos*, or *wamanis*—of the lakes called *encantos* (Larco 2008)—of the water itself (cf. Stensrud, this volume) or even directly of entities that seem to completely overlap with 'nature', such as the *Pachamama* or *Pachatierra* (Gow and Condori 1976). I have alluded elsewhere (Rivera Andía 2015b) to the anthropological perspectives of Tim Ingold on mounds and buildings. It suffices here, therefore, to recall the problems associated with the distinction between that which is made by human hands and that which has grown in the environment: 'Do we not rather have to conclude of things made or built, as much as of things grown, that they are originating all the time' (Ingold 2013: 81)? It would be rather more useful to analyse the reasons behind the frequency or persistence of 'natural' (or nonartificial) features in the nonhuman entities highlighted by the studies regarding the cosmologies of the Andes.

The *Iglisya,* however, quite apart from being Christian and artificial, has a third characteristic that accentuates its outlandishness or peculiarity. This building is also a political entity to the extent to which it constitutes an alternative to one of the key assertions of extractivism concerning the ontology of land and the relationships extractivism establishes with it. The relationship with the land as a natural object is, silently but constantly, provoked by the spectre of extractivism in Cañaris: it could be said that the mining project and its governmental allies *need* that type of land (i.e., as natural object) to exist heedless of how troublesome its emergence might be (Blaser and de la Cadena 2017: 186). It is indeed this situation that converts a temple into a device for political intervention. How does the temple interfere, interrupt, or disturb the extractivist relationship with the land-object? As I show, the temple not only allocates and controls access to the land (which I refer to below as its *administrative* quality) but also emphasises those qualities of the relationship with the land that I would describe as those that sustain 'the living' or what Gan et al. call 'livability' (2017: G9). The *Iglisya* does so from two sides: by its generative or lifegiving dimensions (which I call the *condensing* aspect of the temple) and by its quality as a living entity dependent on human care (which I designate as its *obedient* quality).

Nevertheless, although it is involved in the local political game, the temple of Incahuasi remains invisible (Rivera Andía 2013, 2015b) or 'non-existent' (Escobar 2016) not only in the relationship between Cañarenses and *La Minera* (*The Mining*, as it is called by the people of Cañaris) but also in the subtle ethnographic explorations that try to distort or broaden the elements usually allowed within their scope (de la Cadena 2014; Schavelzon 2016: 118–119). Some of the causes of the scant visibility or existence of nonhuman entities, such as the *Iglisya*, can probably be linked to what I have pointed out: the temple is obviously artificial and explicitly Christian.

The political role of the *Iglisya*, moreover, involves neither its direct and explicit intervention nor overt demands on the public platforms that promote negotiations to resolve 'social conflicts' between the indigenous authorities in Cañaris and *La Minera* (or the government agencies that back it). In spite of its political importance, the participation of the *Iglisya* in these negotiations is neither invoked by the indigenous inhabitants of Cañaris nor authorised by their non-indigenous counterparts. Accordingly, the *Iglisya* does not enter into the public arena as part of a political discourse related to the ethical substance of indigeneity (as in the case described by Fabricant and Postero, this volume); nor is this building alluded to by political activists linked to international environmental networks (as is analysed by Li and Peñafiel, this volume). What remains of the political then in the emergence of this nonhuman entity?

In order to answer this question, the *Iglisya* requires us to make a rather serious conceptual revision of the terms in which one addresses these negotiations. Such is the intention of this chapter, which broaches an analysis of the *Iglisya* as a device for the ontological constitution of the land (one of the key elements of the social conflicts associated with mining in the Andes). Further definition may still be necessary.

The force that drives this chapter is not entirely similar to the one behind those studies dedicated to indigenous conceptions of 'landscape', 'space', or 'places' (Pérez Galán 2004; Salvia 2014; Robin 2010; Rivera Andía 2005), where it is more or less accepted that an indigenous society is representing (and living in or with) the same ('natural') spaces differently. That is to say, this chapter does not require us to affirm or deny the existence of a world 'out there' that humans interpret or know in varying ways (according to their 'cultures', 'epistemologies', or 'intellectual frameworks'). It is enough to consider the *Iglisya* as 'a set of embodied skills and subjectivities … a set of practices that array—and enact—a particular kind of person' (Law and Lien 2012: 4; see also Latour 2014a) and a particular kind of land. Without 'grounding the possibility of political difference in a prior story of how the world(s) must work' (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: 54), the *Iglisya* as a child constitutes a type of land that is not fully encompassed, either by the mining operations' land or by the conservationists' land.

What I work to comprehend, instead, is a type of relationship with the land that implies a mutual constitution between it, humans (gathered together in this case in the *comunidad campesina*), and other nonhuman entities that, like the *Iglisya*, may or may not be part of the publicised negotiations around 'social conflicts' (Arellano-Yanguas 2011; Panfichi 2011; Tanaka 2012; Meléndez 2004). This emphasis on alternative ontologies of the human-land relationship (whether revealed in the public arena of social conflicts or not) is inspired by the contemporary debates around the 'systems of ownership' in the South American lowlands (Di Giminiani 2015; Brightman et al. 2016), some of which are, in turn, part of wider discussions around the dynamics of 'familiarisation' (Fausto 2012 [2001]), the composition of worlds (Descola 2014a), and the 'ontogenic' processes (Ingold in Descola and Ingold 2014) among indigenous groups.

### Extractivist Contingencies: A Spectre Haunts Cañaris

I have described in previous studies some of the distinctive characteristics of the indigenous group that inhabits the Cañaris area (Rivera Andía 2013, 2014a, 2015b; Rivera Andía et al. 2017) and the vicissitudes of the 'spectre of mining' in the mountains of the province of Ferreñafe (in the Peruvian department of Lambayeque) (Rivera Andía and Snowdon 2013).

It is enough here to recall some aspects linked to the 'spectral' nature of the mining industry and the 'invisible' nature of the inhabitants of the Cañaris area. I start with this latter point. On the one hand, it could be said that the people of Cañaris have remained invisible, not only because of the usual subordination of modern-day indigenous constituent groups in the Peruvian public sphere but also because of the monopoly on 'indigeneity' that their southern counterparts (centred around an image of an 'imperial Cuzco') hold in the country's popular imagination. However, this 'invisibilisation' or 'actively produced non-existence' (Escobar 2016) has another aspect which, rather than being about pure negation, is more about disguise. In the same way that they are negated, the people of Cañaris are also affirmed. In serious circumstances, such as the brutal repression suffered during protests in 2013, they are treated as 'terrorists', a frequently used term in Peru's recent history (cf. González 2012). In situations of 'slow violence' (Nixon 2013), which is less dramatic but more persistent, the catch-all term used to label the existence of the people of Cañaris is 'poverty' (Eversole et al. 2005). In fact, one of the most frequent narratives recurring in the extractivist context in Cañaris is the description of the people of Cañaris as 'poor' (Rivera Andía 2014a). The label 'poverty' in the current national official discourse is used to describe living conditions characteristic of the predominant way of life in the Cañaris region and other parts of the Peruvian highlands, conditions which are usually considered indicative of need. In the context of the national and academic 'invisibility' that affects Cañaris, one of the ways in which its inhabitants have occasionally become more visible has been precisely through the label of poverty. Used as a form of stigma, this label is, above all, yet another way of continuing to ignore the rights of the Cañaris people as an indigenous group (De Echave et al. 2009; Merino 2012; Hallazi Méndez 2013; High 2015: 115, 179). The strategies by which the people of Cañaris criticise the external imposition of the label of poverty are dynamic and constantly changing. Nevertheless, these strategies are usually linked to some extent to religious practices, which have churches such as the *Iglisya* as their centre. In these cases, the ownership of land and agricultural work are reasserted as sources of wealth through renowned religious rituals in which only landowners may participate and where multiple expressions of life- and wealth-generative capacities of land unfold. In previous work, I have considered these as a collective, critical, and nonverbal reflection (Geertz 1973) of external attempts at stigmatisation (Rivera Andía 2014a).

The 'ghostly extractivism' to which I refer relates to an open-pit mining project generically known as 'Cañariaco' that has been owned by the Canadian mining company Candente Copper since at least the first decade of this century (Candente Copper Corp 2011). Through my use of the term 'spectral extractivism', I hope to highlight the situation in which 'disaster would seem to start with the hopes and expectations that people entertain some time before, or independently of, the start of commercial oil extraction' (Weszkalnys 2016: 230). Nevertheless, ghostly extractivism differs from what other scholars have called 'the temporal politics of a disaster yet to come' in one key respect: The Cañaris area anticipation is much more tainted by anxiety and much less supplied with large-scale prevention devices than other cases shadowed by the 'resource curse' (Weszkalnys 2016: 228). The lack of anticipation is unfortunately also a function of the lack of information about mining operations that affects the Cañarenses.

In 2013, the first protest by the inhabitants of this region was brutally suppressed (La República 2013) when community members tried to block the access road to the mining camp (both of which are located on their lands) from which the explorations and measurements of the extractable minerals are carried out. To a certain extent, this was a protest against a spectre, against an entity of rather huge proportions, ambiguous, and tentacular, whose various components had for some time incessantly and drastically interfered in local politics, the economy, and landscape. This phantom—called, as mentioned above, *La Minera*—emerges fundamentally from the intersection of three factors: the international price of certain metals (in particular: gold, silver, and copper), the legal and illegal subterfuges of the organisations that benefit from the mineral extraction (Gudynas 2011, 2018), and, finally, the invisibility to which the greater part of the indigenous world of Cañaris is subjected.

Like all spectres, the presence of *La Minera* generates a considerable amount of 'anxiety' (Bessire 2014), likely due in part to *La Minera*'s pursuit of the measureable, be it in the richness of the deposits or in the demarcation of the lands in which the mine will operate (just as Marc Brightman, this volume, points out in the Surinamese case). However, this anxiety is related likewise to the magnitude of the mining concessions made by the Peruvian government to *La Minera*, concessions that imply loss of land and contamination and scarcity of irrigation water (as Astrid Stensrud, this volume, describes regarding another Peruvian case), and have led to the physical destruction of the town, including the main square and the church (Silva Santisteban 2013). Indeed, the scope of the planned open-pit mine, processing plant, and deposits of tailings and waste rock leave little room for doubt about the radical changes to the environment and, consequently, the way of life for the people of Cañaris (as is the case in other parts of the world where sustainability is reduced to an oxymoron and development programme agents are transformed into collaborators; see Rajak 2011; Rajak and Gilberthorpe 2016; Connell and Howitt 1991).

Whatever their reaction to the spectre of *La Minera*, for the people of Cañaris, it brings the inevitability of transformation, drastic or gentle, of the land and rural life in the Cañaris area.

In addition to contrasting attitudes to the mining project among and within the *comunidades campesinas* of the Cañaris area, there are different degrees of unease according to how drastic the transformations are expected to be. I give three examples of adjoining *comunidades campesinas* in the area. At one extreme is the *comunidad campesina* of Cañaris, which has the camp for the mining project inside its communal lands: the tension here is at its highest. At the other extreme stands the *comunidad campesina* of Penachí, whose lands are not affected, so far, by the project: attitudes here border on indifference. The intermediate case can be illustrated by the *comunidad campesina* of Incahuasi: the road that has been built to access the mining camp passes very close by the principal town but is not within their boundaries. In short, the inhabitants of Incahuasi show both enthusiasm and fear but in a way that is neither as moderate as it is among the people of Penachí nor as pronounced as among the inhabitants of Cañaris.

To describe the established relationships with the land in the Cañaris area, I look to the case of Incahuasi, which is relatively nearby those who would be directly affected by *La Minera*: the members of the *comunidad campesina* of Cañaris. The reason for choosing Incahuasi is not only because it has most of the distinguishing characteristics of the Cañaris area nor that some of its organisations support the claims and protests against *La Minera* but is based on something more historically profound: Incahuasi is a direct product of the indigenous battle waged by those who are now its neighbours. The town was founded in 1747 by the 'Indians' of Penachí and Cañaris who built the *Iglisya* as an open act of defiance against the large-scale landowners who then controlled those lands. Its establishment was part of a series of actions carried out by the 'Indians' of Cañaris and Penachí to take over the land using all the legal methods at their disposal as well as some practices that were distinctly outside the law. Almost 300 years after its construction, their temple, the *Iglisya*, has finally become the principal nucleus of a political unit whose small towns and villages are today precisely those locations from which powerful others tried to gain control of the people of Cañaris.

There is, however, another even more crucial reason for us to centre our gaze on Incahuasi: the presence of a device constructed explicitly for such a struggle for the land. I am referring to an entity that is still somehow unusual in the context of Amerindian studies: a Catholic temple. Indeed, all the ethnographic and historical investigations (my own fieldwork included) into the control of land in the Cañaris area has led to this architectural complex. Its synchronic and diachronic analysis will help us understand not only the development but also the actual configuration of the relationships that humans establish with their lands in this region of the Andes.

### A Multiple Artefact: The *Iglisya*

The few studies into religious buildings in Northern Peru have benefitted from various recent publications.2 Absent from these valuable contributions, however, is the place of a Catholic temple like the *Iglisya* in an environment where personhood reaches far beyond the world of the human (Rivera Andía 2008). Indeed, if in numerous Amerindian cases 'an object is nothing more than a subject that is incompletely understood' (Coelho de Souza 2016: 183), there arises the problem of how to understand objects which, like the adobe temple, have not only personhood but life.

*The main issue at stake was the conceptualization of artefacts in a world in which the subject-object distinction is by definition fuzzy (and even inapplicable). What is the place of artefacts in a universe where personhood extends far beyond the human?* (Brightman et al. 2016: 11)

I address this question in the following three discussions on the multiplicity of the church.

This extraordinary piece of architecture in the Cañaris area, the *Iglisya*, is an historical product of the indigenous struggle for the land throughout this entire region (Rivera Andía et al. 2017; Rivera Andía 2015a). Indeed, the building emerged out of the strategies of the indigenous people for the control and defence of their lands, constructed clandestinely in the middle of the eighteenth century during the final years of the viceroyalty of Peru (Huertas 1996). As such, the *Iglisya* is an historic milestone that crystallises indigenous control (to the detriment of the large-scale local landowners) of a set of lands that form the basis of what today is the *comunidad campesina*.

During my fieldwork (carried out between 2009 and 2013), at least three fundamental aspects of this building, the *Iglisya*, stood out: the *administrative*—expressed in its prerogatives over the distribution and control of land (Rivera Andía 2015b); the *condensing*—related to those aspects of it that are life-generating; and the *obedient*—related to the Amerindian perception of things as dependent or 'fully subjected' (Brightman et al. 2016: 12) (Fig. 7.1).

**Fig. 7.1** The *Iglisya* of Incahuasi

#### *An* **Iglisya***-Land: Emergence and Functions of a Material Device*

The *Iglisya* functions as an administrative device in two respects. The first involves distribution. The thatched roof (made of *jarava ichu*) is divided into sections where ritual maintenance (carried out every five to ten years) is overseen by kinship groups (*ayllus*) or small villages that comprise the owners of the lands of Incahuasi. The distribution of the roof surface between these kinship groups is explicitly analogous to the distribution of the lands of Incahuasi between the same groups—and the division into two groups established by the ridge of the roof is analogous to the division established by the river that crosses the valley (Carrasco 2018).

The second aspect of this administration is expressed in the control of the access to land through the heads of kinship groups (*cabezarios*).3 The management of the *Iglisya*'s main contents (namely, the Catholic statues) corresponds directly to the appropriation of the benefits derived from working the parcels of land corresponding to those statues. For example, only the kinship group of the *cabezario* charged with observing the ritual honours of *Santa Rosa de Lima* have access to the lands belonging to her and the products of those lands. Carrasco's (2014: 27–30) study of the Incahuasi contemporary archives confirms how the annual celebrations by the brotherhoods around the temple statues function as a legitimisation ritual (Rappaport 1999) of the ownership of the land. Today, more than half a century after the formal recognition of the indigenous community of Incahuasi by the Republic of Peru in 1963—and, thereby, of their collective lands—community members continue to affirm that their lands 'belong' to the statues that live in the *Iglisya* (Vreeland 1993; Shaver 1992: 236).

Even if I were to end our considerations of the relationship between the temple and the land at this point, I could, perhaps, still affirm that this architectural object is actually a church land in the sense that it not only 'represents' the relationship that the inhabitants of the Cañaris area have with the land but embodies and constitutes that relationship (see Bloch 1998). On the one hand, the two sets of rituals performed in the Cañaris area (the *fiestas patronales* financed by the *cabezarios* and the collective renovation of the roof of the *Iglisya*) celebrate, legitimate, and constitute control over the land. On the other hand, the *Iglisya*, which serves as both the focal point and the refuge for the rituals, is the historical result of the struggle for that control over the land. Both types of exploration, the ethnographic and the historical, are strengthened by a common assertion over the mutual constitution (or ontological composition) of people and lands in the Cañaris area (Rivera Andía 2015b). The land as constituted by the *Iglisya* is not merely an historically disputed object (previously, between 'Indians' and landowners, nowadays, between farmers and mining companies). The land here is also part of a collective where it co-emerges (de la Cadena 2015: 102, 143; see also Canessa 2017: 549–550) with the people of Cañaris. In this way, the division of the lands and the kinship groups that tend them are mutually constituted through the rituals sheltered by the *Iglisya* and the material being of its own architecture. This mutual constitution can be thought of as a type of cartography in the sense that the church land not only represents but incessantly produces its surroundings in such a way that the boundaries between the different ontologies or resulting worlds are constantly realigning themselves (Blaser 2009: 16). In short, although I do not linger on this variant of 'ontological anthropology'—which tries to state something about what there actually is in the world (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: 46–54)— it may be correct to assert that the temple *is* the relationship between humans and the land (Mol 1999; Blaser 2009; de la Cadena 2014). We could go so far as to say that the *Iglisya* (as an indigenous tool for the access to land ownership) could have a greater significance than the land itself: 'the weight appears to lie less in things … and more on the conditions of the relationships by which knowledge becomes possible—less, therefore, on property, but more on the technologies or modes of transformation that allow access to the field of relationships' (Cesarino 2016: 202).

#### *An Alive and Generating-Life* **Iglisya**

In the second fundamental aspect of the temple, *condensing,* the *Iglisya* participates in the ritual and cosmological dynamic in Incahuasi, like an assemblage of the livability or life-giving properties attributed to the land—or, as Salas Carreño puts it, 'named places' (2016: 833). Through the statues that it houses and the altars that line its walls, the people of Incahuasi foster the fertility of their lands and the reproduction of the cattle that graze on those lands. The *Iglisya* condenses, in this way, the vitality of the land. Herein lies its living aspect: fertiliser or producer of life, the aspect that matters most in farming communities.

I am not going to linger here on the familiar topics of contemporary Andean indigenous ethnography—as, for instance, cattle branding rites (Rivera Andía 2003)—nor on the more recent perspectives on the components of living usually labelled 'anthropology of life' (Arnold 2017). However, I would like to highlight two tendencies: on the one hand, a definition of 'ontology' alludes to how a particular world is composed what its different components are—in accordance with the general disposition specified for each form of identification, as, for example, proposed by Philippe Descola (2014b: 437). An ontology, here, is based on something 'more elemental' (Descola 2014a: 239) than a cosmology. Rather, it is founded on 'systems of properties that humans ascribe to beings' (Descola 2006: 139), on 'generative patterns of inferences and actions, ways of composing the world and uses that follow analogous principles and that, for that reason, can be propagated in very similar forms and in very diverse historical contexts' (Descola 2014a: 112 and 236–237). In short, although Descola is conscious of the role played by 'historical contexts', the composition of a world is for him, above all, a matter of perception, of actualisation and of detection (or of omission) of the qualities of our environment and the relationships that are established in it (Descola in Descola and Ingold 2014: 30). On the other hand, some authors, such as Tim Ingold, have emphasised the procedural aspect of this notion of a world's composition, conceiving of it as 'a continuous process … [a] perpetual development…. To compose a world is not to represent life as though it existed beforehand, but to make life emerge as it grows' (Ingold in Descola and Ingold 2014: 37–38, author's translation). My intention here is not to discuss the differences between two authors who are so complex and prolific. I content myself with highlighting two possible emphases of the so-called composition of the worlds: one which is considered a form of perception, actualisation, and detection of certain qualities and the other which is thought of more as a construction, a development, or a type of instigation for life to grow (Hallam and Ingold 2014). This contrast highlights a relationship between the emphasis on the development of those elements that compose a world and the emphasis on the 'living' aspects that they have. Both facets seem to be underlined by the relationship between the people and the land in the Cañaris area: the *Iglisya* is not just an historically constituted device but also a 'living' component of the world. This process of mutual constitution recalls what Ingold has called—in his critique of the concept of ontology—an 'ontogeny' (*ontogénie*) in his emphasis on the inevitable temporality of continuous human evolution (Ingold in Descola and Ingold 2014: 37). The relevance of the study of 'temporalities' in the study of the systems of land ownership in South America has been highlighted by Viegas (2016: 252): '[T]emporalities should be considered a key perspective in the understanding of the lived experience of possession, namely in the history of entanglements in the possession of land.' I now move on to discuss the third fundamental aspect of the *Iglisya*, the *obedient*. To my knowledge, this aspect has not been addressed previously in Andean ethnographies of indigenous buildings or artefacts.

#### *A Church-Child: On Obedient Entities in the Andes*

This third fundamental aspect of the *Iglisya* becomes evident when the building is, symbolically and tacitly as well as concretely and explicitly, conceived of and treated as an obedient entity. During the periodic renovation of its roof—through a ritual called *Iglisya qatay*, which has been far less documented by ethnography than, for example, the roofing rituals of newly built family houses (Gose 1991)—the temple is treated like a child and is given a ritual haircutting (*rutu chikuy*, or as it is called locally, *landa*) (Rivera Andía 2015b). Indeed, the *Iglisya qatay* follows the same sequence as the well-known pre-Columbian ritual still found throughout the Andes during which a child has its first haircut in exchange for ribbon tassels and donations, progressively integrating the infant into the human world. During the *Iglisya qatay*, the roof of the church is treated in the same way as a child's hair during the *landa* ceremony; both rituals have the same protagonists, songs, elements, and sequences (Rivera Andía 2015b). The building appears, then, not just as a living being but more specifically as a human child. More precisely still, it is treated as a certain kind of child: one that is being put through the first phases of its gradual incorporation into the society of upright and honest humans (*runa*), in the way that this is understood in the Andes (Ortiz Rescaniere 1999).

Let's return to the above-mentioned feeding relationship between (Quechua) humans and places in the Peruvian Southern Andes. As we have seen, among the Cañarenses or Quechua of Cañaris, humans treat their lands as do their children. If this is a correct interpretation, then the anomaly that Salas Carreño could not help but detect in Cuzco would be resolved. He observes that '[t]he relations between human parents and their children are slightly different from those between places and humans. While children do not feed their human parents, humans must continually feed places' (Salas Carreño 2016: 828). What happens then when humans leave the role of the child who is nurtured by the land and take instead the role of those who nurture the land as one would a child? I suggest that this view allows us to explain the apparent incongruity of the statement above: the land is fed by humans *because* they are meant to do so, as they do with their children. This is, of course, a case in which humans are not permanently obliged to respect or fear powerful nonhumans. In this regard, the Cañaris ethnography and other examples (Rivera Andía 2000) recant the 'strong hierarchical relationship, with humans dependent on the places' goodwill' depicted in Cuzco (Salas Carreño 2016: 829). The *Iglisya* shows that a place (if not the land as well) can certainly be dependent on human goodwill. Therefore, rather than a 'strong asymmetry of power', in the case of land ownership in Cañaris, I see a symmetric confrontation or fight between humans and nonhumans.4

This ritual treatment of the *Iglisya* as a child establishes a close relationship between the control of the land and the 'nurturing' values and practices of the people of Cañaris. In this way, it personifies an indigenous form of conceiving of and putting into practice the ownership, not just of buildings but, above all, of the land. This analogy between childhood and the device for control of the land that is the *Iglisya* suggests a central role in the exercising of ownership and of care and nurture, whether it be of nonhuman entities or of human beings as children: 'care and nurture play a central role in the ownership of places' (Brightman et al. 2016: 24). The relevance for this Andean case, as well as of the perspectives of the authors gathered in this collection dedicated to 'ownership' and 'nurture' in the Amazon, will become ever more evident from this point on.

What I wish to highlight in this chapter are the logical consequences of this analogy between the *Iglisya-*land and human childhood: both are treated and understood as being under the care of human kinship groups that comprise the *comunidad campesina*:

*[A]ppropriating and nurturing acts of "domestication" are often necessary to maintain their [the object's] status*…*. As Erikson (*2009*: 188) suggests, in Amazonia "things", rather than being conceived as independent subjects, seem to be considered as semi-autonomous subordinates. In other words, "things" seem to be less perceived as full subjects than as fully subjected* … *submitted to an "overt life" of dependency as "obedient things" in much the same way as children, captives, clients and pets are*. (Brightman et al. 2016: 12)

The ritual treatment of the *Iglisya* as a child implies that it is not a complete subject as such but rather a subordinate or dependent entity. Therefore, there is more than a building (made *for* and *by* the 'Indians') as a milestone in the historical process of the constitution of their actual communal lands. Additionally, the 'creativity' exalted in its clandestine foundation and unusual architecture seems to be closely connected to a process of care or 'familiarisation' of these lands:

*The ownership of nonhuman persons is part of the process of place-making. Creativity begets ownership, and the making of artefacts may create new persons* … *who may be in turn become owners themselves. Such processes of creative appropriation are* … *very close to the familiarizing processes of nurture*. (Brightman et al. 2016: 11)

The comparative possibilities between 'Andean' and 'Amazonian' cases are obviously outside the remit of this chapter. Leaving such a theme for future studies, I return here to our ethnographic case from the Peruvian Sierra in order to concentrate on its own specific characteristics. In sum, two findings (one hierarchical association and another symmetrical one) allow us to develop a hypothesis concerning the type of relationship that humans establish with the land in the Cañaris area. A hierarchical relationship, as noted above, is established between humans and the *Iglisya*, which places it in the category of *obedient* entities identified in the ethnography of the South American lowlands with children, captives, clients, or pets. What appears to emerge here, then, is the configuration of an *Iglisya*-child.

There is a symmetrical relationship, as established above, between the *Iglisya* and the land. Whether the *Iglisya* is an historical product of the land or an ethnographic artefact for the distribution and control of it, this relationship calls attention to the emergence of an *Iglisya*-land. It is worth remembering, in passing, that the building in question is literally constructed of two things extracted from the land: earth (the principal material of the sun-dried adobe bricks that form its walls) and the plants that grow on the thatched roof (Carrasco et al. 2016).

The hypothesis then, is as follows: if the relationship that humans have with the land materialises in the *Iglisya* (or is represented by it, or simply *is* it), and if the *Iglisya* is treated as and conceived of as an obedient entity, is the relationship between these people and this land then *analogous* to the one that they have with children? Is the land here included among the still not completely human entities, which need to be fed and cared for? Is the relationship that the people have with the land understood and staged in the terms used to care for an obedient subject that is in the process (always incomplete) of becoming human?

#### Final Considerations

This chapter offers an ethnography that seeks to overcome the invisibility and asymmetry to which indigenous groups such as the Cañarenses have historically been subjected and to provide an empirical basis for an argument about mining's role in the reproduction of social and environmental inequality in the Andes. This is particularly the case nowadays as increasing numbers of mining corporations' projects threaten ways of life—while state agencies simultaneously commoditise an essentialised culture of the area (as is currently being done [cf. Martínez 2017]). The simultaneity of these processes should not be surprising if we remember that both '[S]tate agencies and mining corporations are usually much better positioned to commission and direct ethnographic research or to exploit ethnographic knowledge' (Ballard and Banks 2003: 306).

In the Cañaris area, collectives are extended to include not only *runas* and *santos patrones* and places like the mountains and the lakes (as described by Andean ethnography and by both Ødegaard and Stensrud, this volume; see also Salas Carreño 2016) but also other nonhuman entities that have been historically constituted by humans, like the *Iglisya*. Its relevance emerges from what Latour considers 'the crucial political task': 'to *distribute* agency as far and in as *differentiated* a way as possible' (Latour 2014a: 15). Although rather different from a 'sacred' entity that must be 'respected' (Cepek 2016) and is part of or identifies itself with 'nature', the significance of this indigenous artefact for the Cañarenses largely exceeds the categories of 'religion', 'culture', or 'patrimony'. Far from presupposing any kind of 'non-modern ontological bases' (Schavelzon 2016: 132), the *Iglisya*'s existence stands only on 'relational contrasts produced in acts of comparing one set of purported commonalities with another' (Salmond in Boellstorff 2016: 402). But even if considered as nothing more than a mining-activated provisional 'quasi-object' (Cepek 2016), the politics of the *Iglisya* (and of the relationships it embodies) is as crucial as that which involves the historic struggle for control of the land. At the same time, the *Iglisya* is an entity under human care, as is the land itself. Both are interwoven in many ways: the land provides the raw materials used to build the *Iglisya*; the *Iglisya*, in turn, distributes, organises, and periodically produces the land. Both *Iglisya* and land constitute the de facto Cañaris collective. How do we make 'operational' or recognisable, de jure, the 'Cosmopolitic' (Stengers 1996; see also Blaser and de la Cadena 2017:186; Schavelzon 2016: 123) of this collective in the face of the real-existing post-neoliberal regime that imbues the Cañaris area (Arsel et al. 2016; Bury 2005)? Is it appropriate to revisit the omnipresent denomination *comunidad campesina* when it comes to recognising the politically and economically relevant groups in this region of the world, which has been profoundly saturated with resource extraction? What then would constitute 'communal lands' in a situation where the land is part of a relationship such as that embodied by the *Iglisya*? How would our ethnographic understanding of the *comunidad campesina* be affected if ownership of the land were based on such radically different principles and if the exclusively human collectives were not those relevant in the political sphere? Is it possible, finally, to make the legal aspect of this relationship operational in the national sphere, above all in a situation such as the current one, marked by the struggles that have arisen as a result of the Latin American 'extractivist imperative' (Arsel et al. 2016)?

If the hypothesis that I am formulating holds, then yet another threat could be added to the already long list associated with spectral extractivism in the Cañaris area. I am referring to the suppression of a specific form of relationship that, until now, would have been crucial for the existence of the community of humans and nonhumans such as the one found in this part of the Andes. To threaten this relationship would be to eliminate a group, a world, and a way of life that specifically and probably precedes (Brightman et al. 2016: 3) those trying to replace it.

In the case that concerns us here, that of architecture and ownership of the land, *La Minera* also plays a role analogous to that of those external agents who are either trying to demolish the *Iglisya* in order to build a church of concrete (the mayors with their life-projects focused on the urban Spanish-speaking world on the north coast of Peru) or to neglect it until it falls into a ruin (the members of the religious groups created by the Summer Institute of Linguistics).

In a situation as persistently intimidating as this one, it seems difficult to envisage the relationships that are materialised in the *Iglisya* as a 'threat' to modernity—in the sense that Mario Blaser (2009) uses this term when describing the *Yrmo* of the Yshiro in Paraguay—or as a predatory aspect of the alternative world the *Iglisya* constitutes (Brightman et al. 2016: 3). Indeed, the practices materialised by the *Iglisya* and the ones corresponding to spectral extractivism might be rather 'kept in a field of equivocations because they do not severely interrupt each other or irremediably disrupt the commoning work' (Blaser and de la Cadena 2017: 190). I would, therefore, be content to glimpse in the *Iglisya* a fighting implement (always available although not continuously used) in the 'war' of worlds that some authors have recently described (Latour 2009, 2014a: 5, b, 2015; Viveiros de Castro 1999, 2015a, b; Schavelzon 2016: 126). The relevance of the *Iglisya* as a device in the struggle for the land certainly relies does not rely on its visibility neither in the public sphere nor scholarly literature—where earth-beings are usually described in terms of respect or resistance (cf. Merino 2015: 86; Rénique 2009). It does not figure in public speeches nor is it invoked by activists involved in resistance against *La Minera* (which increasingly receives public attention in the forms described by Li and Paredes Peñafiel, this volume). Nor do we find southern earth-beings as *apus*—also described by Stensrud and Ødegaard, this volume—invoked explicitly in indigenous organised protests. It is possible, however, that the prevalence of the material, collective, and nonverbal aspects of the relationships woven into the *Iglisya* can be considered as part of 'a cosmopolitical economy of persons both human and nonhuman' (Brightman et al. 2016: 24) that might configure a 'Cosmopolitics' (Stengers 1996) if our current conceptualisations about 'whom, precisely, is one "taking seriously"' and 'how "other" the otherwise can be' (Candea 2014) are expanded.

Finally, we should perhaps remember the relevance of an 'ontography' (Holbraad 2009, 2014, 2017) compromised by the description of those worlds that interrupt 'the one-world story' (Escobar 2016: 22). If anything were to suggest itself as salvageable from the rivers of ink that have unleashed the current discussions about the 'ontological turn', perhaps it would be the obsessive methodological emphasis on the 'reflectivity' of our own concepts around ethnographic contingencies (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). Through this chapter, I hope to contribute to the accompaniment of just such a conceptual reflectivity with its preoccupation for the frictions, inequalities, and hierarchies that make the world of Cañaris something 'actively produced as non-existent' (Escobar 2016: 15).

**Acknowledgements** The author would like to thank Margaux Majewska, Marieka Sax, Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard, Marc Brightman and Katharine Wheeler for their critical readings and constructive suggestions for revisions of the initial manuscript. I also wish to thank the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) for its support during the writing of this chapter. A good deal of the motivation to write this chapter comes from the huge and wide-ranging impacts mining has had in both my personal history and that of my family, natives of the Peruvian Central highlands and workers of some the many sections of Centromín Peru surrounding La Oroya refinery and Cerro de Pasco open pit mine.

#### Notes

#### References

———. 2018. Instrumentos musicales y danzas en Incahuasi. In *Cañaris. Etnografías y documentos de la sierra de Lambayeque (Perú)*, ed. Juan Javier Rivera Andía. Buenos Aires: Colección Ethnographica, Rumbo Sur.

*Planet*, ed. A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, and N. Bubandt. Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2014b. Another Way to Compose the Common World. *HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory* 4 (1): 301–307.

———. 2015. Los Modernos, Según la Antropología, Ñ. Revista de Cultura (Clarín)*.* http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/ideas/Bruno-Latour-modernosantropologia\_0\_1295270475.html. Accessed 19 Mar 2016.

———. 2015. The Politics of Extractive Governance: Indigenous Peoples and Socio-Environmental Conflicts. *The Extractive Industries and Society* 2: 85–92.

Mol, Annemarie. 1999. Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions. *The Sociological Review* 47 (S1): 74–89.

———. 2003. *La fiesta del Ganado en el Valle del Chancay*. Lima: PUCP.

———. 2005. Territorio e identidad en los Andes. Concepciones populares en torno a las zonas ecológicas altas en la sierra de Lima. *Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares* 40 (2): 55–76.

———. 2008. Apuntes sobre la alteridad constituyente en los Andes. Ambivalencias rituales y lingüísticas sobre un espacio imaginario. *Revista española de antropología americana* 38 (1): 191–215.

———. 2013. Un Patrimonio cultural ignorado y en riesgo en los Andes septentrionales del Perú. Apuntes etnográficos sobre dos instrumentos musicales endémicos de la sierra de Lambayeque. In *Wege im Garten der Ethnologie. Zwischen dort und hier. Festschrift für María Susana Cipolletti* (Collectanea Instituti Anthropos, 46), eds. Hanna Heinrich and Harald Grauer. Sankt Augustin: Anthropos Institut.

———. 2014a. Fears and Rituals in Contemporary Peruvian Andes. In *The Anthropology of Fear. Cultures Beyond Emotions*, ed. A. Boscoboinik and H. Horáková. Berlin: LIT Verlag.

———. 2014b. Fuentes para el estudio de una región 'invisible' de los Andes Peruanos: Contribución para una bibliografía exhaustiva sobre la sociedad y la naturaleza en la sierra de Lambayeque, Perú. *Anuario Americanista Europeo* 12: 47–77.

———. 2015a. Amerindian Misfortunes: Ethnographies of South American Rituals and Cosmologies on Danger, Illness, and Evil. *Indiana* 32: 9–22.

———. 2015b. La iglesia de incahuasi. Notas sobre antropología simétrica, arquitectura e historia en los Andes peruanos septentrionales (ferreñafe, lambayeque). *Revista española de antropología americana* 45 (2): 551–568.

———. 2016. Nuevos estudios sobre la peculiar iglesia virreinal de Incahuasi y la historia de una región postergada de los Andes (área Cañaris, Lambayeque, Perú). *Indiana* 33 (2): 145–160.

———. 2015b. Who Is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf? Some Comments on an Ongoing Anthropological Debate. *The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology* 33 (1): 2–17.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Carbon and Biodiversity Conservation as Resource Extraction: Enacting REDD+ Across Cultures of Ownership in Amazonia

# *Marc Brightman*

#### Introduction

Forest carbon and biodiversity are increasingly measured and quantified with a view to improving their management as valuable resources, often with a view to engaging market mechanisms to improve cost-efficiency. If such resources are being 'marketised', in what ways does this process differ from conventional resource extraction such as logging or mining? Indigenous peoples, especially those for whom the forest is a home and 'biodiversity' is an abstract substitute for a world of everyday relations, can offer important insight into this question.

M. Brightman (\*)

University College London, London, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
This chapter is a revised and updated version of texts previously published in French in *Ethnographiques* (Brightman 2014), and in Portuguese, in *RURIS* (Brightman 2016a). It is based primarily on research carried out during 2010–12 thanks to a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2019 195

C. Vindal Ødegaard, J. J. Rivera Andía (eds.), *Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism*, Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93435-8\_8

The concept of biodiversity emerged at the historical interface between the biological sciences and politics (Maris 2010). It is of particular interest to examine the politics of biodiversity in a country such as Suriname, which is part of the highly biodiverse Guayanan ecoregion (Olson and Dinerstein 1998), and has exceptionally extensive forest cover (90 per cent [FAO 2010]). Perhaps precisely because of this great abundance, the concept of biodiversity has little interest for most Surinamese people and is certainly not an electoral issue. Members of the majority urban, coastal population, if they express an opinion about the forest at all, tend to say there is too much of it, and their attitude towards people who live there tends to be of fear, contempt, or a mixture of both. There is a strong correlation between ethnic identity and habitat: descendents of freed slaves (Creoles) and indentured labourers (Hindustanis, Javanese, and others) are concentrated in the capital city of Paramaribo and on the narrow coastal strip that has been developed for agriculture and industry, whereas the inhabitants of the vast forested interior of the country are mostly Maroons and Amerindians. The former are descendents of runaway slaves who escaped Dutch plantations in the seventeenth century to form new tribal societies (Price 2011: 10). The Amerindians, the original inhabitants of the region, include a number of Carib and Arawak groups. For most Maroons and Amerindians, 'biodiversity' is not a meaningful category, but the variety and wealth of game animals, and useful plants, trees, and other species that are found in the forest play a fundamental part in their lives, not only in terms of subsistence but also as sources of meaning; what urban people call 'nature' is for them the theatre in which what we might call 'culture' is played out.

Some of the same things can be said about the other 'natural' or 'primary' resources of Suriname: goods such as gold, bauxite, or timber are found in the 'wild' interior (*binnenland*), and they are similarly coveted by international interests. The quantity of such resources is uncertain because of the limited amount of surveying that has been carried out, and this uncertainty can suggest a hitherto unexploited abundance. Extractive activities, therefore, rarely excite anxieties over resource scarcity, whether in the case of artisanal placer mining, of industrial timber or mining concessions, or of the thriving informal trade in bushmeat. Like mineral resources, it is widely assumed that the sources of tasty *paca* (*Agouti paca*), *aimara* (*Hoplias aimara*), or *caiman* (*Caiman crocodilus*) meat will long continue to provide their bounty. The perception of the forest's abundance, even excess, makes it hard to imagine otherwise. And the technical specialists (generally staff of conservation NGOs with training in conservation biology or geography appropriate for biodiversity surveying) who attempt to quantify new resources like forest carbon and biodiversity find that it is an even more difficult and complicated task than the quantification of conventional ones like gold or bauxite.1

Widespread indifference does not prevent the forest from having substantial political importance in Suriname, which arises from two quarters, both of which have significant international dimensions: these are, firstly, the increasingly close ties between development aid and concern for environmental sustainability, as a result of growing institutional recognition of global ecological crisis (Adams 1990; Sachs 2015) and, secondly, the rise to political prominence of the indigenous peoples' movement. This should be seen against the background of Suriname's recent history. Following independence from Holland, in 1975, the political situation rapidly declined, and the 'interior' was neglected until a military coup took place in 1980, of which one of the instigators, Desi Bouterse, quickly rose to prominence and became President two years later. The new regime began to institute a development programme for the interior, but this was short lived, because an Ndjuka Maroon,2 Ronnie Brunswijk, who had been a member of Bouterse' personal guard, began to form his own military unit in the east of the country, and a series of raids and reprisals led to a descent into full-scale civil war. As a consequence of this 'war of the interior', the interior of Suriname, especially the Maroni River basin in the east where the majority of the Maroon population lives, was neglected to the extent that some have described it as a 'stateless zone' (Jolivet 2007; Kruijt and Hoogbergen 2005). When the fighting ended with a peace agreement, a coalition government agreed to an International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programme in 1991 and tried to attract foreign investment in the forestry and mineral sectors. But the postwar stability was short lived: the opposition party won the 1996 elections bringing Bouterse to power again, and the economy fell into decline together with diplomatic relations with Holland—the main aid donor and former colonial power (Kambel and Mackay 1999: 13). The state meanwhile granted concessions in the interior (while some areas have been exploited outside its control, notably for gold), giving rise to conflict over land rights with wide-ranging implications, as I shall discuss in greater detail below (see also Price 2011).

In November 2011, I interviewed the Minister of Physical Planning, Land, and Forest Management of Suriname, together with his immediate entourage, about the changing stakes in the relationship between the government and the country's indigenous peoples in relation to land. One official with several decades of experience emphasised two things. The first was the fact that, the Amerindians ('Indianen'), who are becoming increasingly well organised politically, are putting pressure on the government to recognise their rights to land, making claims apparently in tension with evidence that some Amerindian communities are overexploiting their forest resources to sell garden produce for cash, in order to build large houses and purchase consumer goods. The second was that in the southern part of Suriname, where there are no roads and scarcely any other infrastructure, Suriname's genetic resources are, according to him, being plundered. He gave the example of the dyeing dart frog, *Dendrobates tinctorius*, which, he claimed, existed at first in Suriname alone, and which is now 'spread out' around the world due to clandestine trading. The Amerindians are being paid disproportionately small sums of money for these creatures, which command much higher prices abroad. But the most serious problem, he argued, is that Suriname loses its sovereignty over the genetic resources that are synthetically altered in foreign countries and then patented.

My own field research confirms that the Trio, a Carib-speaking people who live on the Sipiliwini Savannah on Suriname's southern border with Brazil, do trade in a number of species of live animals (including species of *Dendrobates*), for which they are paid small amounts in relation to international prices.3 In this border region, it is unlikely that many species are unique to Suriname, and the *Dendrobates tinctorius* can, in fact, be found in other parts of the Guiana shield region. I am not sure how serious a problem foreign gene patenting really is for Suriname. But what strikes me here is the way in which the government officials spontaneously and emphatically linked the matters of land rights, biodiversity, and national sovereignty. In this chapter, I show that the value of land for a native Amazonian people is also linked to biodiversity and sovereignty but in different ways: rather than conceiving land separately from its nonhuman inhabitants, the Trio value land in terms of the relations between the living actors that dwell there.

#### Land Rights

Indigenous claims to land rights are often perceived as being in conflict with state sovereignty. But the nature of legal rights is such that the opposite may be argued: '"the right to land" in most cases … [entails the right to] a certain territorial area embedded within a state. This condition renders many of indigenous peoples' rights conditional upon the wider national entity wherein they reside, plus the status of the latter within the international community' (Westra 2008: 23). It is to a significant extent due to its postcolonial history of war and corruption that Suriname has become the only country in South America never to have passed any kind of land reforms in favour of its indigenous peoples (whose situation is generally considered alongside the larger Maroon groups legally categorised as 'tribal peoples'). In recent years, it has come under increasing pressure to do so. This pressure comes from the internationalisation of campaigns for indigenous and tribal rights, through initiatives coming from both within and outside Suriname. Two of these appear especially significant. The first is the successful campaign of the Saramaka Maroons for compensation over environmental damage and the displacement of communities due to the construction of the Afobaka Dam in their territory. This led to the landmark ruling (*Saramaka v. Suriname* judgement) of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of 28 November 2007, which declared that Suriname had violated the rights of the Saramaka People. The ruling declared that Suriname must seek the Saramaka's prior and informed consent for any intervention that might threaten their sexistence as a tribal people, highlighting that 'land is more than merely a source of subsistence; it is also a necessary source for the continuation of the life and cultural identity of the Saramaka people' (para 82) (Orellana 2008: 842). The Court thus puts Suriname under pressure to accept and adopt its interpretation of customary international law, based on an understanding of culture as land, which envisions a communal conception of property (Engle 2010: 167).4

The second initiative is REDD+ (Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in developing countries), the emerging UN-sponsored mechanism for 'reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation "plus" conservation, sustainable development of forests, and improvement of carbon stocks' (IUCN 2012), for which the Surinamese state has been in the process of preparing since 2009. This programme can be understood as a giant system of payments for ecosystem services, similar to the carbon offsetting that constitutes most of the existing 'voluntary' market in forest carbon.5 Its founding principle is that countries that preserve or increase their forest cover should be paid for the opportunity costs6 of doing so. It involves a set of 'safeguards', including provisions for the protection of forest peoples from abuses such as land grabs (these provisions' effectiveness is a contentious subject). In March 2013, Suriname's 'readiness preparation proposal' (R-PP) for REDD+ was approved by the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, allowing Suriname to receive USD 3.8 million for technical preparations for joining the REDD+ mechanism, scheduled to come into force in 2020. The R-PP was severely criticised by Suriname's indigenous and tribal representatives and by the international indigenous rights advocacy organisation, Forest People's Programme (FPP), for making disingenuous claims about the consultation process and about guarantees to address and protect indigenous and tribal land tenure (FPP 2013).

The 'readiness' process in preparation for REDD+, taking place shortly after the Saramaka ruling, provided the context for short-lived land rights negotiations between the government of Suriname and its indigenous and tribal peoples. When I visited the secretariat of the VIDS (*Vereniging van Inheemse Dorpshoofden* in Suriname) indigenous leaders' organisation in the summer of 2011, its members were excitedly preparing for a longawaited government conference on land rights for Amerindians and Maroons. When this took place in October 2011, the VIDS representative gave an opening speech, which set out the organisation's demands for full recognition of indigenous rights to land. President Desi Bouterse, the former military dictator who had returned to power by popular vote in 2010, reacted by summarily closing the conference on the grounds that the agreed protocol for discussion had not been observed. Further negotiations have been promised but have not so far taken place even following a landmark ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2015 on the case of the Kali'na and Lokono of the lower Maroni River, whose livelihoods were severely affected by a bauxite concession granted in 1958 (Namati 2015).

REDD+ takes on different characteristics according to the actors who are imagining it. For politicians, it represents a further opportunity to capture international funding, ostensibly for the nation, but often (as history shows) for personal gain. For Amerindian and Maroon leaders and other individuals sufficiently aware of the issues, it is at best a doubleedged sword and something to be treated with extreme caution: while it may offer an opportunity to increase the pressure for state recognition of customary land rights and seems to invite further international scrutiny of the practices of national institutions, it may also create perverse incentives for outsiders to attempt to disenfranchise them still further. For conservation NGOs, there seems little doubt: the prospect of REDD+ reinforces their role as technical and research specialists in the field of forest governance.

#### Ownership in Amazonian Societies

Indigenous leaders are likely to be correct in thinking that the prospect of REDD+ makes it still more urgent for them to secure their land titles; indeed, speculation over the potential value of forest for carbon sequestration has already led to land grabs in other parts of Amazonia (FPP 2012). At the same time, the conditions of REDD+ place governments under pressure to recognise these rights (Sommerville 2011). But indigenous land rights debates nearly always take place in terms quite foreign to indigenous systems of property relations. Until recently, the idea of property was even absent or confined to footnotes in most Amazonian ethnography. In the last few years, along with a handful of colleagues, I have been trying to explore native Amazonian forms of ownership (Brightman et al. 2016; Costa 2010; cf. Guzmán-Gallegos this volume). Contrary to received wisdom, the concept of ownership is present in many, if not all, aspects of native Amazonian cosmologies (Brightman 2010). Fausto compares Kuikuro ownership to Marilyn Strathern's idea of the magnified person, according to which the single entity represents and encompasses the group category: in this sense, leaders personify their villages as well as being their 'owners', and the spirit masters of game animals are the personifications and 'owners' of the species (Fausto 2008).7 Among the Kanamari, the concepts of owner and body are conflated, and Luiz Costa traces the owner-body-chief concept through a nested hierarchy 'from living bodies, to village chiefs, to the chiefs of river basins' (2012). In my own work, I have emphasised the processual nature of ownership in Amazonia (Brightman 2010, 2016a, b).8 Objects become property by virtue of having been transformed or made by their owners. The clearest and most important example of this is the swidden, which is appropriated from the forest to become the property of the gardener; after a swidden is abandoned, it gradually reverts to being the property of nobody in particular as it is reclaimed by the forest.

The processual nature of kinship has received a great deal of attention in Amazonian ethnography, and it is through it that the two perspectives on property described above, emphasising mastery and transformative processes, respectively, meet. Fausto's discussion of ownership builds on his analysis of familiarising predation, that is, the process by which outsiders can be adopted by turning them into asymmetric consanguines in the form of children or pets. Similarly, in her ethnography of the Trio, Vanessa Grotti has described the nurturing or feeding processes involved in domesticating enemy groups—this can be seen as the 'work' of appropriation in the sphere of kinship (Grotti 2007; cf. the 'care' described by Rivera, this volume). The transformation of forest into garden, similarly, is a process of domestication. As has been widely documented in Amazonia, garden plants are nurtured and cared for as kin. Similarly, pet animals, which are called by kinship terms and fed human food (especially manioc bread) are frequently game animals and are often juvenile offspring of animals that are taken in the hunt. Ownership and appropriation of nonhumans occur in the idiom of kinship; the appropriation of forest, and thus the revaluation of 'land', occurs through the cultivation of domesticated plants—it is an act of domestication in itself, as the domestication of place.9

The vectors of ownership and appropriation do not always overlap. In an article which successfully blurs Philippe Descola's distinction between Amazonian societies that relate to nonhumans through predation and through reciprocity (1992), Peter Rivière notes that the Trio do not simply regard all animals, or even all game animals, as having spirit masters (2001). He contrasts three Trio myths in which a shaman encounters nonhuman animals. In the first two, which involve a spider monkey and a tapir, respectively, the shaman only meets the animals themselves, not the spirit master of the species in question. They do not communicate successfully, their relationship is characterised by mistrust, and the humans and animals end by predating upon each other. In the third myth, the shaman meets the master of white-lipped peccary, and they enter into a ceremonial dialogue. The peccary master agrees to release peccary for humans to hunt, although he warns that the peccary will steal from the humans' gardens. As Rivière notes, the Trio regard peccary as a more sociable species than tapir or spider monkey. They are related to in a human way through their spirit master, and a relationship of reciprocity ensues. It seems to me that a similar logic applies to land. The Trio relate to different places in a more sociable, or reciprocal way, or a more predatory way, according to the level of sociability, or humanity, of those places.

#### Trio Property Relations

The Trio are composed of a number of different groups, which came to live in mission stations in the mid-twentieth century and began to intermarry. Little more than 2000 in number, they live on both sides of the international border between Suriname and Brazil. They live mainly from swidden horticulture—their main crop being bitter manioc—as well as hunting, fishing, and gathering, but some Trio have paid employment and others trade forest products. As a result, they are increasingly part of the cash economy.

The Trio distinguish two basic categories of land: first, there is the cleared space of the village, *pata*, or garden, *tëpitë*. Second, there is the forest, *itu*. The way of being in each spatial category is differentiated linguistically through the use of two different postpositions: *-po*, and *-tao*. Although both of these postpositions could be translated as 'in', *pata-po* ('in the village'), or *tëpitë-po* ('in the garden'), both draw attention to the fact of being in a humanised, culturally transformed place, while *ituhtao* ('in the forest') suggests being located within a physical medium or environment. It is significant that the postposition -*tao* is also used for water, or the river—'in the water or river' is *tunahtao*. The aquatic realm is the quintessential domain of spirits and other mythical beings and is even more plainly associated with alterity than the forest. The distinction between these two kinds of space mirrors property relations. Swiddens, *tëpitë*, are owned by individual families; *itu*, 'forest', is not owned by human persons, and neither is the water. A village is owned by its leader, who is also literally referred to (among other things) as *pata entu*, village owner.

However, seen through time, the distinction between these kinds of space and their status in terms of ownership is not so clear. New swiddens tend to be cut in places where the forest has reclaimed abandoned swiddens over time. The same applies to villages: when a new village is created, the best places for building are said to be those in which people dwelt in the past. In fact, the two processes are connected: when new villages are created, they begin as a garden with a house in it, and it is partly because gardens tend to be relocated more frequently than villages that the two categories, garden and village, become separated, as new gardens are cut further away from the houses.

Trio people do not consider old gardens and old villages to be the property of particular families. They are recognised as 'appropriable', as potential spaces for human habitation and cultivation because they bear the marks of human action. The markers of previous domestication include domestic plant species—manioc, fruit trees, and so forth—as well as other signs such as petroglyphs and rocks marked by grooves where they were used for sharpening tools. They are places which were transformed by humans in the past and thus appropriated, but the traces of individual identity have disappeared. A process of *forgetting* thus ensures that such places are not monopolised by particular families. Anne-Christine Taylor has already drawn our attention to the importance of forgetting the dead in Amazonian societies (1993). But what I want to underline is that such places are not entirely 'wild'—the marks of human habitation and exploitation identify them as generically *human* places. If the process of transforming land for cultivation is an act of appropriation, it is highly significant that it is not permanent. Yet this should be seen in the context of a notion of territory, in which Trio people regard themselves as free to cultivate, hunt, and fish and to manage their own affairs independently—as such, they have sovereignty in this territory.

#### Valuing Relations

David Graeber proposed creating a theory of value 'starting from the assumption that what is ultimately being evaluated are not things, but actions' (Graeber 2001: 49). It seems to me that the Trio, when they 'value land', do not value a thing but sets of actions and relations. As I have tried to show, the value of land for the Trio is explicitly relational. The anthropology of property has tended to define property as relations between persons with respect to things (Hann 1998). But, here, it seems that property relations are relations between persons, full stop. The mastery or ownership relation structures the status of a garden as property of its creator in the same way as a leader is master-owner of his village and as a spirit master is owner of an animal or plant species. As the myths of the peccary, the tapir, and the spider monkey suggest, the appropriation of resources from the environment is a matter of interpersonal predation or reciprocity. The preparation of meat for consumption entails the return of the prey animal's soul matter to the forest, and the gardens are left open to encourage nonhuman animals, including game animals, to feed on the crops. There is no objective value of a given piece of land because its value changes through time. Its value is also created through time as the product of the nurturing processes of previous gardeners.

Meanwhile, value, ownership, and the act of appropriation do not necessarily map neatly onto one another. Certain wild species of plant are gathered, and they are certainly valued, although they are not 'owned' by humans; in such cases, it is not always obvious whether the appropriation of the products of these plants constitutes an act of predation or is involved in a relationship of reciprocity—this seems to vary from one species to another. As authors such as William Balée, Darrell Posey, and Laura Rival have shown (Posey and Balée 1989; Rival 2002), the distinction between wild and domestic species is often far from clear. But this matters little in practice because property is not treated as thoroughly exclusive—stealing from somebody's garden is not a serious offence, and in their ordinary lives, the Trio have little use for hard forms of 'property rights'10 to decide who can appropriate which resources at what time.

#### Regimes of Value

Despite their remote location in southern Suriname, far from roads and deep rivers, the Trio are not entirely isolated from the effects of state attempts to control resources and territory, international markets, or the politics of rainforest conservation. Considerable changes took place in their way of relating to the forest in the early 1960s as a result of the cutting of airstrips by the Surinamese army for the creation of mission stations, in parallel with an equivalent process on the Brazilian side of the border. Encouraged by the missionaries and attracted by the prospect of direct access to white people's trade objects (bypassing their Maroon trading partners), most Trio moved to live at these mission stations over a period of a few years. In fact, there were a number of different groups, such as the Okomojana, the Aramiso, the Pïropï, and the Pïrëujana, whose identities became submerged through this process of sedentarisation as they adopted the common language of *Tarëno*—literally, 'the people here'.

More recently, the Trio have been involved with two conservation NGOs, Conservation International (CI) and Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). The former has been involved in the region for many years and indeed dominates conservation in both Suriname and neighbouring Guyana (Chapin 2004). ACT was created by ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin when he left CI to pursue his own projects, giving greater emphasis to traditional knowledge and livelihoods, and grew out of his own field research in Suriname (Plotkin 1994). The main emphasis of CI has tended to be upon documenting biodiversity, while ACT takes a social entrepreneurship approach to promoting 'sustainable development' through markets and preserving traditional knowledge. Both have been involved in mapping projects. Using what are known as 'participatory methods', ACT has produced maps of traditional resource use, with the explicit purpose of providing evidence upon which to base land rights claims. This is highly significant in Suriname, which has so far not recognised or demarcated any indigenous or tribal territories (Kambel and Mackay 1999; Price 2011). Meanwhile, CI received a government mandate to produce a forest inventory map for the whole of Suriname, which they did using satellite technology (Gwendolyn Smith pers. comm. 2011). Also, near the largest Trio village of Kwamalasamutu, CI collaborated with the Trio to create two protected areas. One of these is based around *wërepai*, a petroglyph site which was discovered only recently, but which the Trio recognise as having been made by their ancestors. CI describes this as a 'sacred site' and claims that for this reason, the Trio agreed to impose hunting restrictions around it. The other area was created following an interesting exchange between the village leader Asonko (who is also the Trio Granman, or 'tribal' chief, a title conferred by the state [see Brightman 2016b]) and CI: according to the CI director, Asonko asked her for help to create a farm for game animals because the village had grown so large that overhunting had become a problem. She told him that it was impossible, but that, instead, she could help him make a restricted area for hunting to allow the animals to breed. The project went ahead and CI's monitoring suggests that it has been successful in preserving stocks of game animals.

The whole interior of Suriname is officially state property. The state does not recognise indigenous forms of ownership (cf. Guzmán-Gallegos, this volume) or even the capacity of Amerindians to manage their own protected areas. The only official conservation areas that exist are state managed with some responsibility delegated to NGOs. Although traditional swidden cultivation and hunting are allowed in these areas, swidden horticulture is officially regarded as a form of forest degradation and this misconception forms part of the rationale for refusing to recognise indigenous peoples' forest management capability.

When President Bouterse returned to power, in 2010, he announced that a memorandum of understanding had been set up with China for the construction of a road to the Brazilian frontier, and plans are underway to build a hydroelectric dam, which would flood some Trio, Wayana, and Maroon villages. It is for the purposes of preparing for REDD+ that the Surinamese government commissioned a forest inventory map from CI. The infrastructure projects of a road and dam would, of course, cause massive deforestation, which is highly significant for REDD+, because the payments that the government would receive under REDD+ are to be calculated in terms of opportunity costs, on the basis of alternative future development scenarios. In other words, the infrastructure plan, which, if executed, would cause deforestation and significantly increased carbon emissions, serves to manipulate the baseline for calculating REDD+ payments in terms of avoided emissions. As a result of all of this, the political situation between the government and forest peoples remains tense. Surinamese indigenous and Maroon organisations recognise that they must campaign for their land rights before consenting to any involvement in REDD+. The government also claims to accept that it will have to recognise indigenous land rights in order to qualify for REDD+ funding. The NGOs, CI, and ACT are playing the role of mediators and brokers, helping the government with technical procedures while trying to encourage it to recognise indigenous practices and at the same time trying to explain the REDD+ mechanism to both indigenous peoples and government staff.

#### Value and Markets

REDD+ is catalysing the emergence of a new marketable commodity: forest carbon. Unlike previously existing carbon markets, which are based on emissions trading, forest carbon is based on the estimated value of the carbon emissions deemed to be avoided through conservation. One aspect of the 'plus' element of REDD+ is a biodiversity value. Without entering into debates about the competing definitions or criteria for measuring biodiversity, discussions of REDD+ emphasise the latter's instrumental value as potentially commodifiable intellectual property and as a necessary component of ecosystem functioning. Such 'ecosystem service' values shadow the value of conventional natural resources—especially timber and minerals—as opportunity costs. This reflects the prevailing neoclassical assumption that markets will stabilise a 'correct' price for commodities (carbon, biodiversity)—a view that is contested by scholars who show how value in new markets is the product of a range of social interactions and the development of market infrastructures (Barman 2015; Callon 2009; Callon and Muniesa 2005).

These market calculations can only be made on the basis of accurate measurements of the resources and services in question: it is for this reason that the government has recruited a Dutch company to carry out a full survey for the proposed hydroelectric dam project, and that it commissioned CI to produce a national forest inventory. Indeed, while it is a standard practice to carry out surveys in advance of corporate mining or logging activities (leaving aside the important informal sector), the large-scale measurement of carbon and biodiversity stocks is something relatively new. Consequently, an important part of Suriname's REDD+ programme, as with other countries, is what is known as MRV—monitoring, reporting, and verification. Against the baseline of the forest inventory, national governments are responsible for putting in place technical capacity to monitor forest conservation, to report any deforestation or degradation, and to verify the government's official data. These activities are sometimes known for short as 'carbon accounting', and their importance is such that forest carbon (and similarly biodiversity) must be continually audited in order for them to have any kind of sustained and recognisable existence, and thus to have any political and economic effect.

It is worth noting here that the extraction of value from forests in the form of biodiversity and carbon depends upon the work of measurement and accounting in much the same way that the extraction of other resources depends upon the physical work of removal. But these are, of course, very different kinds of 'work', and it is debatable to what extent the marketisation of forest carbon and biodiversity amount to 'extraction' at all.

#### Paths and Maps

The use of measurement and quantification techniques to value resources seems foreign to the Trio's relational mode of land use. Two different temporal modes are also at play here: for the Trio, a certain focus on the present is crucial for the forgetting of past ownership relations and for the cycle of abandonment and regeneration of garden sites to continue without causing tension. This is expressed in Trio kinship, which does not trace ancestry or genealogies, and does not even distinguish between consanguines and affines beyond two generations. In contrast, forest accounting requires accurate time measurement, for environmental services are meaningless without reference to their sustained provision through time.11

At this point, it may be worth distinguishing two forms of mapping activity: on the one hand, there is the documenting of traditional resource use through cartography for the purposes of land claims and the eventual demarcation of indigenous territories. On the other hand, there are various scientific surveying activities to quantify resources: forest carbon, biodiversity, game animals, timber, and subsoil mineral resources. The Trio themselves see these as virtually identical cultural processes of measurement and quantification. However, they do relate to them in different ways. ACT's map-making activities have been requested by Trio leaders themselves, and Trio individuals have participated in them in return for a small salary. CI's biodiversity surveys have always been CI's own initiatives, although they do also sometimes employ Trio people and solicit their input. CI's work has sometimes been regarded with suspicion by Trio, particularly biodiversity surveys that were carried out recently in the area likely to be affected by the planned hydroelectric dam. Some Trio people suspected CI of preparing to expropriate their land and working for the government to measure the resources that could be extracted before the dam would be built (in fact, it seems that CI was compiling evidence of the conservation risks of building the dam).

Some Trio are also wary of ACT's work, wondering what their interest is—does Mark Plotkin, ACT's charismatic leader, plan to take the resources for himself? ACT's activities are also the cause of some tension because they are felt by some to be ungenerous since they pay small salaries and only recruit a handful of individuals. Not only do these individuals benefit from a small but not insignificant income but also their knowledge is privileged when maps of resource use are created. If ACT's maps are as inadequate as the Forest Peoples' Programme (FPP 2013) and VIDS suggest (a judgement not entirely free from political motivations), then these are likely to be among the underlying reasons.12

Valuation surveys for the purposes of land claims and REDD+ involve a complex and often tense set of interactions between technicians and Amerindians. At the end of these interactions, it seems that both parties remain with their assumptions and worldviews more or less intact. Yet the solutions that emerge and the nature of the activities in which they collaborate often do not meet the expectations of either party. When Asonko suggested creating a farm, he may have imagined himself becoming a kind of supreme master of animals, an image likely to have been inspired by missionary teaching which has encouraged the view that Jesus is the master of all beings and that he benevolently condones the unlimited hunting of all food species. The CI director saw the potential for a collaboration on a community-managed, restricted hunting area, an important experiment which could support her advocacy of community-managed conservation areas vis-à-vis the government.

Perhaps we should interpret this as an example of 'equivocal compatibility' (De Piña Cabral 2005) or a 'working misunderstanding' (Sahlins 1982) as Trio people become involved in conservation and mapping activities for reasons of their own, and serendipitous results emerge, sometimes to the satisfaction of all concerned, if not quite in the ways they expected. But I think that what is going on is a little more complicated. As I have mentioned, for Trio people, the process of mapping for demarcation raises suspicion because they recognise that the land is being subjected to a process of measurement for the sake of appropriation. According to the Trio's own anthropology of white people, measurement and appropriation are closely linked, and they are not far wrong (cf. Stensrud, this volume). Even though the NGO workers regard the Trio themselves as the beneficiaries of this process, there is a sense in which the process itself dispossesses them. The land becomes property under a regime foreign to the Trio, even if it is legally theirs—the legal system in question is not their own. Meanwhile, the technological removal of ambiguity in property relations ensures that there will be tension, and that the ultimate arbiter of that tension will be the state, which will thus have an opportunity to reassert its authority. This helps answer the question of whether the marketisation of carbon and biodiversity can be understood as a process of resource extraction: while it does not involve the physical extraction of resources from the environment, it does involve an act of appropriation through the imposition of different categories of knowledge and ownership: a kind of cross-cultural extraction of wealth. It is thus only in this limited sense that it contributes to the commodification of new areas of life in the form of biodiversity.

#### Conclusion

This last observation begs the question: do more formal, technical forms of knowledge and ownership (what James Leach [2016] calls 'property' as opposed to 'ownership'), therefore, always necessarily overcome or disrupt more relational modes of knowing and owning? The following example may suggest that they do: near the Tapanahoni river, there is a *tepui* mountain which has mythical associations for both the Wayana (Caribspeaking neighbours of the Trio) and for the Ndjuka Maroons.  For the Ndjuka, it is a sacred site associated with ancestral spirits. The Wayana and Ndjuka fought a war against each other in the nineteenth century, but they finally made peace, and, according to the Wayana's version of events, the leaders of the two warring groups drank each other's blood to seal their peace. Having established shared substance through this ritual gesture, they agreed to respect the limits of their respective territories. Their cohabitation was made easier by the ambiguity in the precise boundaries of these territories, such that the *tepui* in question did not become the exclusive property of either group. Now, however, both Wayana and Ndjuka territories have been mapped with a view to obtaining official state demarcation of ancestral lands. This has given rise to a dispute over who owns the sacred mountain.13

In this case, there was no great equivocation over what was going on when the mapping process was carried out. Amerindian and Maroon guides worked for ACT to produce maps of their traditional resources, including places of ritual or mythical importance. However, the value of land for the Wayana and Ndjuka was not based on its value as a commodity, and the mapping process treated cultural property as though it were just that. For this reason, the result of a fairly smooth technical collaboration was the revelation of the incompatibility of two regimes of value.

Nevertheless, the codes of ownership and knowledge that are woven by formal extractive techniques can also provide a space for dialogue once they have been given time to establish themselves as a common language. Indeed, the interactions between CI and ACT with the Trio gradually overcame some of the latter's scepticism, and in 2016 Granman Asonko finally agreed on behalf of all the Trio to cooperate with the REDD+ 'readiness' process (SurinameREDD 2016). Without presuming to judge whether or not he made the 'right' decision, the point worth noting here is that the Trio could see a mutual interest in REDD+ for themselves and the technocratic 'white' outsiders, establishing a partial connection with the latter and partially adopting their ways of knowing in a 'both and' move similar to that described by Guzmán-Gallegos (this volume). This contrasts with both forms of primary resource extraction: formal, industrial mining and logging and informal placer mining for gold. What distinguishes these from carbon and biodiversity is not only their physical (rather than virtual) mode of extraction but also the related fact that they treat the forest as a wild frontier, a resource frontier—an attitude incompatible with the Trio's cosmology and livelihood. Carbon and biodiversity valuation, on the other hand, treat the forest environment as a world of complex socioenvironmental interactions, and practitioners share this approach with the Trio despite their differing epistemology and techniques.

#### Notes

Aluku and the Paramaka (each around 2000), and the Kwinti (fewer than 500) (Price 1976: 3–4). Greatly outnumbering the Amerindian population upstream, they dominate the middle reaches of the Saramacca, Suriname, and Maroni rivers and the lower parts of the Tapanahoni and Lawa, tributaries of the Maroni.

#### References

———. 2014. Audit Sauvage: Régimes de valeur de la terre et de la biodiversité en Amazonie. *Ethnographique(s)* 27 (online journal). Available at http://www. ethnographiques.org/2013/Brightman. Accessed 15 Feb 2018.

———. 2016a. Esperança e Compatibilidade Equívoca na Governança da Floresta: REDD+ e os Direitos Sobre a Terra Indígenas e Tribais no Suriname. *RURIS* 10 (1): 219–254.

———. 2016b. *The Imbalance of Power: Leadership, Masculinity and Wealth in the Amazon*. New York: Berghahn.

———. 2012. Making Animals into Food Among the Kanamari of Western Amazonia. In *Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals and Nonhumans in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia*, ed. Marc Brightman, Vanessa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva. New York/Oxford: Berghahn.

———. 2016. Foreword. In *Ownership and Nurture: Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations*, ed. Marc Brightman, Carlos Fausto, and Vanessa Grotti. New York: Berghahn.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Indigeneity, Activism, and the Politics of Nature

# Stories of Resistance: Translating Nature, Indigeneity, and Place in Mining Activism

*Fabiana Li and Adriana Paola Paredes Peñafiel*

#### Introduction

In April 2016, Máxima Acuña, a *campesina* (peasant farmer) from the highlands of Cajamarca, Peru, was one of six people awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize,1 considered one of the most prestigious awards for grassroots environmental activists. For many who had followed her struggle against *Minera Yanacocha* (the Yanacocha Mining Company), Máxima's international recognition as an 'environmental hero' was a welcome turn of events following years of fierce opposition to the Conga mining project. Marches, roadblocks, confrontations between police and protestors, and five lives lost in the conflict ultimately led to the suspension of the project and the company's retreat. Máxima's award, the publicity that followed, and the sharing of her story in documentary films, media articles, and activist campaigns are a testament to the global reach of recent controversies over extractive activity in Latin America. Her struggle, along

F. Li (\*)

University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. P. Paredes Peñafiel

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, São Lourenço do Sul, Brazil

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2019 219

C. Vindal Ødegaard, J. J. Rivera Andía (eds.), *Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism*, Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93435-8\_9

with those of other women activists, also illustrates the way grassroots efforts are transformed by (and in turn help shape) forms of political action beyond their immediate localities.

Over the past two decades, resource extraction in Latin America has generated numerous conflicts throughout the region but perhaps nowhere as intensely as in Peru. Two factors are important for understanding the context of these emerging conflicts. The first is that the rapid expansion of mining is linked to economic reforms in the 1990s that created a favourable climate for transnational investment. This meant a dramatic increase in mineral exploration and mineral concessions, which affect more than half of Peru's *campesino* (peasant) communities. Secondly, the diversification of the global mining industry, the high price of metals, and new mining technologies made it profitable to mine very low-grade ore. Consequently, mining has expanded into areas never before used for mining activity, including areas formerly devoted to agriculture and farming.

As we have explored elsewhere, mining conflicts have brought about forms of political action that disrupt and exceed nature-culture divides (Paredes Peñafiel and Li 2017). Water, glaciers, lagoons, and sentient mountains have acquired political significance and helped shape the outcome of campaigns against transnational mining (Li 2015, 2016). In these cases, opposition to mining activity defies the dominant view of nature in which humans are the primary agents and rejects managerial and technocratic solutions embraced by mining companies and the state. These conflicts around mineral extraction do not *only* involve indigenous peoples; rather, they are about the defence of local worlds threatened by the aggressive expansion of extractive activity. As the chapters in this collection suggest, alternative world- and life-making projects are being formulated in South America that have the potential to challenge the politics of extractivism by destabilising established ideas about nature, indigeneity, and development.

In this chapter, we focus on some recent cases of resistance to mining activity in Peru's Northern Highlands, home to the country's largest gold mine. The Yanacocha mine, owned jointly by the US-based Newmont Corporation, the Peruvian company Buenaventura, and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation, has generated numerous conflicts with local communities since it began operating in 1992. In recent years, the mine's continued expansion and ongoing protests against the proposed Conga project have attracted widespread local and global attention. Grassroots opposition to mining results from a connection to local landscapes as well as linkages to national and international NGOs, solidarity activists, the media, and other actors. In some cases, environmental campaigns and media representations of mining conflicts have evoked local ways of relating to a powerful landscape. However, the ways in which other-than-human elements of the landscape come into being and emerge as important political actors involve a confluence of different factors that cannot only be explained by 'tradition' or 'local knowledge'. At times, these forms of activism invoke indigenous identity, environmentalist discourses, and global justice. More generally, they enact different ways of knowing and being, attesting to the resilience of local worlds in spite of potentially destructive forces that encroach upon them. These emergent forms of activism and identity require theoretical approaches that recognise the existence of multiple worlds without essentialising or romanticising indigenous knowledge.

In the Brazilian context, some anthropologists (Goldman 2015; dos Anjos 2006) have called attention to counter-discourses that defy dominant ideas about mestizaje and syncretism and can work as guarantees against the homogenising pressures from the nation-state. These studies show how a group's self-identification comes from forms of creative expression, inventiveness, and characteristics derived from internal debate and reflection within the group itself. In the context of Cajamarca, people involved in mining conflicts have similarly sought to resignify concepts such as 'campesino' and 'indigenous', changing the meaning that has been attached to them by mining corporations, the state, and international institutions.

Our analysis of campaigns against the Conga project sheds light on the dynamics that shape grassroots activism as the testimonies of local leaders travel through documentaries, news media, lawsuits, and activist networks. We focus primarily on three women who have become spokespersons on an international stage: Máxima, Nélida, and María, three *campesinas* who have spoken out against the abuses of mining companies and in defence of Conga's lagoons. The first two are featured in the documentary *La Hija de la Laguna* (2015) and their stories have been shared around the globe, inspiring actions locally and internationally. We also consider the impact of the Conga case on solidarity activism, specifically focusing on María's role in bringing the Peruvian case to activism against resource extraction in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. We show the international reverberations of the Conga conflict and activist efforts by focusing on these three activists, highlighting the role of women in the conflicts. As Walsh (2017) has noted, it is no coincidence that women are often leaders in struggles against extractive activity. She cites Lourdes Huanca (a Peruvian peasant leader2) who links extractivism with 'the territories of our bodies'. According to Walsh, this invasion and violation of the body is felt due to the changes that these industries produce in social relations, social structures, and community dynamics (the rise in alcoholism, the encouragement of *machismo*, the mistreatment and sexual abuse of women, etc.).

A notable aspect of the campaigns against mining is the way women describe their opposition to mining activity in terms of their relationship to the land, their connection to place, and their identity. In some cases, gender is highlighted by activists or their interlocutors, and in others, their identity as *campesinas* or indigenous people is key. These identities facilitate the translations that take place as local experiences are made globally accessible. Postero and Fabricant (this volume) suggest that indigeneity (especially when combined with representations of gender) 'provides useful cultural and ethical material on which to base political and economic contestations, because its tropes are well known and malleable'. This malleability is crucial in the performance of indigeneity, which is expressed differently by various individuals and variously portrayed in media representations of them. In some cases, the depictions rely on simplistic explanations and romanticised representations of indigenous peoples. In others, they may challenge these stereotypical portrayals and provide new ways of talking about resource extraction.

As Descola (1998) and others have noted, many activist organisations derive inspiration from indigenous peoples, turning them into symbols of a harmonious relationship with nature. Concepts like 'mother earth' or 'the sacred forest' become generic representations of indigenous wisdom, even though these terms may not be equivalent to those used by indigenous groups. Collaborations between indigenous and nonindigenous activists have their limits, especially when certain local practices do not coincide with the sensibilities of foreign activists. In the cases we examine, for example, different conceptions of justice, 'spirituality', and 'earthbeings' may destabilise the premises on which solidarity efforts are built. This is where the role of women like Máxima, Nélida, and María becomes key, as they are able to move between worlds in order to share their message with diverse audiences. In this chapter, we examine what their stories reveal, what they conceal, and their potential to challenge the logic of extractivism by proposing alternative life-making projects.

### 'Environmental Heroes', Indigeneity, and Struggles Against Mining

The Conga conflict erupted in July 2011, when the Yanacocha Mining Company officially announced its proposal to construct an open-pit copper-gold mine. The mine would be located at the head of the water basin for the provinces of Celendín, Cajamarca, and Hualgayoc and would require draining four lagoons (Perol, Azul, Mala, and Chica) to make way for the infrastructure of the mine. The company planned to construct four reservoirs to compensate for the loss of the lagoons. According to Yanacocha representatives, these reservoirs would store twice the amount of water that the lagoons regularly collect and would be distributed to communities so they could harvest one additional crop per year (de Althaus 2012). Water and lagoons have played a prominent role in campaigns against mineral extraction, and actions in their defence have sought to decelerate the aggressive expansion of extractivism in Latin America. The importance of Conga's lagoons stems from the relations that they embody, as well as *campesinos*' concerns with having access to the water that nourishes their land, crops, and families (Paredes Peñafiel 2016). These nourishing relations are sustained by *campesinos*' 'designs on the land' (Paredes Peñafiel and Li 2017), which encompass water resources such as streams and artisanal channels used for irrigation. The centrality of water in people's lives made the lagoons politically significant in struggles against the mine.

As the conflict attracted attention beyond the region, the lagoons also established connections between *campesinos* living near the project site and environmentalists, solidarity activists, international journalists, and other actors. The lagoons emphasised the dependence of local people on water resources while mobilising global concerns around biodiversity and the protection of a unique ecosystem. Within the diverse alliances that were formed to oppose the Conga project, people did not necessarily share a common stance on mining or environmental protection. As the Conga conflict gained notoriety beyond Cajamarca, various narratives incorporated the concepts of 'indigeneity' and 'nature' to express criticism towards Minera Yanacocha's operations. Drawing on the iconic images of three women (Nélida, Máxima, and María) associated with mining conflict in Cajamarca, we explore how these local actors and their national and international allies recast these discourses and practices in their struggles.

#### *La Hija de la Laguna*

Activism related to mining activity has taken an international dimension in recent years, aided by extensive solidarity networks, social media, and global environmental and indigenous rights movements. Documentary filmmaking has also been an effective way of drawing international attention to mining conflicts. Nélida was 31 years old when she was featured as the protagonist of *La Hija de la Laguna* (*The Daughter of the Lake*), a 2015 documentary about the Yanacocha mine produced by Guarango, a Peruvian association of documentary filmmakers. Guarango had previously produced three films dealing with mining issues.3

The film synopsis for *La Hija de La Laguna* reads: 'At the height of the Peruvian gold rush, Nélida, a Peruvian woman able to communicate with water spirits, uses her powers to prevent a mining corporation from destroying the body of water she considers her mother' (daughterofthelake.pe). In promotional materials, Nélida is described as a peasant farmer and environmental leader with a love for the Cajamarca countryside. She also studies law in the city of Cajamarca in order to protect her community from corporate interests. The film emphasises her relationship with water and Mother Earth,4 imbuing it with a 'spiritual' quality (as it is popularly understood in Western conceptualisations of religion and spirituality): 'Like other indigenous citizens in the Andes, her relationship with nature is sacred and respectful' (La Hija de la Laguna 2015).

In the film, Nélida serves as both narrator and subject, a guide to the majestic landscapes threatened by mining expansion, and a fighter resolute in her stance against a powerful mining company. The documentary trailer begins with Nelida addressing *Madre Agua* (Mother Water): 'When they destroy the lagoons, where will their owners live, the spirits (*duendes*) of the lakes? Do they not understand that you are a living being?' Nélida's charisma comes in part from her ability to speak passionately and directly regardless of the audience or setting. She moves with ease from her native Porcón, a hamlet near the mine, to her life as a law student in the city, and more recently, to meetings with various national and international supporters.

In the year following the release of the documentary, Nélida travelled the world to promote the film and speak out against mining injustice. Her interviews—whether addressing farmers in Colombia or European journalists—evoked the sentience of nature and the need to respect and reconnect with the *Pachamama*. In an interview for a Spanish newspaper during a promotion tour of the documentary, she explains:

*The mountains are sacred for us Quechua. My grandfather … taught me many things about the Andean cosmovision. What for you here might be just a mountain, for us has much meaning. An* apu *is sacred because it protects us. It protects us from the cold, it has natural medicines, it has wild animals. In order to enter a mountain, one has to ask for permission …. You have to take a fruit, or throw a little stone and ask for permission.*

While Nélida refers to the *apu* as a mountain protector, this terminology is more commonly used in the Southern Andes and only gained currency following the Quilish protests in the early 2000s, another controversial expansion project of the Yanacocha Mining Company. The emergence of Quilish as an *apu* resulted from local practices and forms of relating to the environment, together with the intervention of NGOs, the media, activists, and environmentalists (Li 2015). As this and other examples have shown, grassroots activism defies the separation of nature and culture by emphasising people's connections to an agentive landscape (de la Cadena 2015; Kohn 2016). Nélida is part of this landscape and she is connected to it, but this is a landscape that is always in the making, acquiring new uses and meanings as it is transformed through extractive and other activities. She is also connected to her grandfather, who was an influential figure in her life and, like Nélida, was linked to NGOs and political networks. In the 2016 elections, Nélida ran as a candidate for Congress for the *Frente Amplio*, a coalition of parties that emerged in part from people's dissatisfaction with current policies of extractivism. Prior to that, she was involved with the local NGO *Grufides*, the organisation dealing most directly with mining issues in Cajamarca. Guarango's press materials identify Marco Arana, former priest and founding member of Grufides, as her mentor. Mr Arana won a seat in Congress and has become a divisive figure, but before his political career, he was most well known for his role in protests against Yanacocha. His involvement in disputes with the mining company began because of his close relationship with people in Porcón, where he was a Parish Priest in the early 1990s (when Minera Yanacocha first arrived in Cajamarca).

As a Catholic priest living alongside *campesinos* in the highlands, Marco Arana sought to understand and celebrate other ways of being and living in the world, including people's relationship with a powerful landscape. This relationship exceeded the state's definition of *resources*, but it also exceeded Mr Arana's own translations into the language of environmentalism and the sacred (Li 2015). Nélida's ways of expressing human-nonhuman relations should not be seen as simply a reflection of an indigenous cosmology and part of a traditional or peasant worldview. Rather, it exemplifies the coproduction of knowledge—influenced partly by local practices, indigenous practices from other parts of the country (such as the Southern Andes), and widespread discourses on indigeneity—in response to the threat of extractive activity. Rituals to honour the lagoons or the *Pachamama* are not only part of ancestral practices; they are changing forms of engagement with a landscape that is itself in the process of transformation. They are also a form of critique and resistance to an extractivist model of development built on the destruction of livelihoods.

Yet the way that mining issues are portrayed in the media and recent documentaries sometimes rely on simplified representations of nature and people's relationship with it. Our conversations with the director of *La Hija de la Laguna*, Ernersto (Tito) Cabellos, provided some insights into how decisions are made when filming a documentary and how these decisions in turn shape public opinion. In his telling, there were a few things that made Nélida stand out. Among them was her previous experience with a documentary, *Yakumama* (*Mother Water*) (*Yakumama* 2009). Her experience with filmmaking was an advantage, but there was another key reason: what he called the 'spiritual' aspect of her relationship with the environment. As his team began filming, they also realised that the lagoons became a powerful theme. He recalled: 'What impacted me—in addition to the activist component, the political mobilisation—was the spiritual dimension. It wasn't something that we had considered in our previous documentaries.' Tito was implying that Nélida's struggle was not simply an argument about the environment or human rights; it was about the *Madre Tierra*, which has become a prominent concept in the environmentalist vernacular in Peru and internationally (shorthand for a more complex and not always harmonious set of human-nonhuman relationships). His documentary was to focus on a young protagonist who could help us see the world otherwise. Tito's role was to relay what he interpreted as Nélida's message through images that he wove into a narrative. However, something that is not made visible in his translation of Nélida's world (or in her own statements to the media) is that *duendes*, spirits that inhabit the *puquios* (water springs), are not considered benevolent beings and are generally feared by *campesinos* in Cajamarca because they are said to take away the vitality of people who venture near them.

Tito said that, on screen, Nélida displayed strength but also a kind of 'fragility'—this comes from her realisation (and the viewers') that 'the conflict is much bigger than her' (Personal Communication). While the documentary plays up the usual trope of a powerful multinational against vulnerable (but courageous) individuals, Tito tried to introduce some complexity into the narrative with two other stories told in the film which also focus on female protagonists. In addition to the Yanacocha mine, he included the story of women working in a Bolivian mining cooperative. He was interested in the idea of portraying these indigenous, poor women who are also contaminating the earth but who have to do so in order to support their families. 'Are they good or bad?' he asked rhetorically. 'They have to help their families succeed.' Tito alluded to the ambiguity and contradictions in their lives, which he also shows in the third story of a jeweller from Holland that is interwoven into the film. The jeweller is torn between her art and her need to make a living from an industry that contaminates (but she is only just realising this as she visits the places where the materials she works with are mined).

If there is something tying these stories together, it is the connection between the past, present, and future of mining. The Bolivia story is about old-style mining that has existed and polluted the earth for centuries, while the Yanacocha sequences show the current (and expanding) operation of a so-called modern mine. But according to Tito, the scenes from Bolivia also represent 'the future that Nélida fears' meaning that the pollution and environmental destruction associated with older mines would be the legacy of mineral extraction in Cajamarca. The possibility of a 'clean' gold that could be used in the jewellery industry is a view to a less polluting industry, an alternative for the future. The director's efforts to show the nuance and complexity of people's lives are offset by the tendency to depict a more heroic narrative, as is often the case in documentaries about environmental conflicts. This heroic narrative downplays the divisions within communities, including people who support the project and those who have a more ambivalent position, one that may oscillate depending on their needs and the benefits that they can acquire from the company.

The documentary's story about the Peruvian Andes (focusing on the Yanacocha and Conga mines) shows the resolute opposition to mining embodied by Nélida and the film's other key protagonist, Máxima. At the time of filming, Máxima was a Peruvian peasant woman living on the land where the Yanacocha Mining Company wanted to develop the Conga mine. Máxima fought Yanacocha in court and received the support and admiration of people around the world for her valiant fight (as well as significant hostility from her detractors). Coincidentally, Máxima has been called the 'Lady of the Blue Lagoon' (*Dama de la Laguna Azul* was the title of a newspaper article by Miranda 2012), while Nélida (who was made into the titular 'daughter of the lake') does not reside near the lagoons but is shown in the film with Máxima. Nélida's community of Porcón is located downstream from the Yanacocha mine, near the city of Cajamarca, but these geographical referents and other contextual information are absent from the film, which shows both women together, interacting with the lagoons. When asked why he did not make Máxima the protagonist of the film, Tito responded that at the time he started filming, Máxima's case was not yet well known. But he also pointed out that her struggle was different: It is about *property*. This was not, to him, as compelling as Nelida's narrative, though it was nevertheless important to show. He felt that this particular story (about property) was the one that is usually told in the mainstream media, while Nelida's perspective (the poetic and 'spiritual' dimension of her struggle to defend the lagoons) was not given sufficient attention. In other words, Nélida's story makes clear that these struggles are not only about property, but the language of property is one that people like Máxima must rely on when presenting their case to the courts, the company, and the state.

#### *Máxima's Story*

Like Nélida's story, the case of Máxima Acuña illustrates the local and global dimensions of resistance to mining. Following the approval of the Conga project, Máxima refused to move from her plot of land at the site of the proposed mine. The mining company claims that it bought land from the community in 1996. Máxima insists that she purchased the land two years earlier from her husband's uncle and never gave up her rights to it. Máxima's house is located near the Laguna Azul, one of the lagoons that risks being turned into a toxic waste deposit if the mine is built. In an interview for the Spanish *El País*, Máxima is quoted as saying: 'I am poor and illiterate, but I know that our lagoons and our mountains are our true treasure, and I will fight so that the Conga project does not destroy them' (Ramírez 2015). Máxima and the *Guardianes de las Lagunas* say they are fighting first and foremost against the destruction of their sources of water. The Guardianes are *campesinos* and *ronderos* (members of the *Rondas Campesinas* or rural patrol),5 most of them from the *centro poblado* (hamlet) El Tambo, who have set up camp to protect the lagoons from the encroachment of mining activity.

Since 2011, when the company built a road near her house, Máxima has faced a number of aggressions from company personnel. In May 2011, her small house was burnt down and her potato fields destroyed (Zárate 2015). In August, she and her family were confronted by the police and the mine's security guards, who tried to evict them and did not hesitate to use force against them. This aggression was documented with a cellular phone but denied by the company in court and in their statements to the press. To them, and to many of her enemies and detractors, Máxima was selfish and stubborn, squatting on land that did not belong to her, and preventing others from benefiting from the mining project.

The role of social media and international solidarity networks have been crucial for legitimising and raising awareness about Máxima's plight and have brought other women into the spotlight. A group of *campesinas* featured in documentaries such as *Las Damas Azules* (the Blue Ladies), by the Catalan Association of Engineers Without Borders, exposed the abuses committed against Máxima during vigils held at the San Francisco Church in the city of Cajamarca. These women also witnessed the actions taken by the company against Máxima when they accompanied her at her house in Tragadero Grande to lend their support. One of the women also acted in defence of Milton Sánchez, Secretary General of the *Plataforma Institucional Celendina* (PIC), when he was intimidated by the police during a march against the Conga project in 2014. After confronting the police, she was arrested along with some of her companions and taken to the police station in Cajamarca. When Milton Sánchez told this story, he affirmed: '*Hay Máximas aquí*' (There are [many] Máximas here). As we can see, 'Máxima' refers not to one person but became a symbol for the many women who defended their right to protest and denounced the state for not recognising this right.

Another woman who emerged as a prominent actor in Máxima's legal battles against Minera Yanacocha was Grufides lawyer Mirtha Vasquez, who became one of her closest allies. The courts initially found Máxima guilty of illegal land occupation, handing her a prison sentence of almost three years and a fine of USD 2000. Máxima appealed and in 2014, a higher court ruled in her favour and lifted the charges against her, a decision that was supported by the Supreme Court in spite of Minera Yanacocha's objections. Regardless of the court rulings, the company has continued its efforts to evict Máxima, through both intimation and force. But Máxima's struggle—often described as a battle between David and Goliath—also attracted the support of people in Peru and internationally.

An important moment in building alliances was when delegations from various countries arrived in Cajamarca for the First International Encounter of the *Guardianes de las Lagunas* in El Tambo. Held in the first week of August 2014, this event was attended by people from Colombia, Argentina, Spain (the Basque Country and Cataluña), Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the Netherlands. Particularly noteworthy was the participation of delegates from France, among them the group *Solidarité avec Cajamarca*, *Ayne-France,* associations of Peruvians in France, and the French Senator Laurence Cohen. Also present were members of the NGO Grufides and the *Plataforma Institucional Celendina*, and Hugo Blanco, a well-known political figure and leader of the *Confederación Campesina del Perú* (Campesino Confederation of Peru).

In the evening programme the documentary *The Guardians of the Lagoons* (*Los Guardianes y Guardianas de las Lagunas*) was shown, along with a preview screening of the first part of *La Hija de la Laguna*, with the presence of members of Guarango*.* The French delegates also showed a documentary that told the stories of several *campesinas* active in the campaigns against Conga (e.g., *La Ronderita Shilica*). The construction of figures like Máxima and Nélida, as well as other female leaders, was influenced by the activists' intentional focus on gender, considered to be a crucial aspect of social justice work. Though it may be the case that the mining-development discourse tends to exclude women, it is necessary to also keep in mind the risks identified by Spivak (2010) and Abu-Lughod (2002) of 'Western' women constructing an image of the 'Third World woman' as lacking agency. However, in the documentaries mentioned, activists took special care not to 'speak for' the women but to let them tell their own stories and to be the protagonists of the films.