The Hill at the End of the World: Cosmopolitics and State Effects in the Bolivian Amazon

ABSTRACT

This article compares versions of the Search for the Sacred Hill – a millenarian movement seeking an enchanted terrestrial paradise for indigenous communities in the marshes of North-Eastern Bolivia. Some versions cast the movement as a precursor to real indigenous political action, while others cast it as a trial of faith. I argue that disagreements about the nature of this movement are not errors or distortions. Rather, they enable the production of different effects (different arrangements of bodies and space) depending on the ontological frame of reference through which they are evaluated. This comparison brings together literature on ‘state effects’ (the epistemological tools for managing people and space which place the state in a position of authority) and literature on ‘cosmopolitics’ (the relationships and interconnections between multiple worlds), both of which have at their heart a concern with the relationship between epistemological authority and the arrangement of bodies and space.

KEYWORDS:

• Political anthropology
• cosmopolitics
• state effects
• indigenous politics
• Bolivia
• Amazon

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the people in San Ignacio, Trinidad, San Pedro, and Simay, with whom it was a privilege to speak. I would also like to thank Trevor Stack, Maggie Bolton, Annabel Pinker, James Jones, Zulema Lehm, Mandy Muise, Nancy Postero, and Ismael Guzman, whose help has been invaluable. Lastly, Juergen Riester's work as a scholar and an activist has been essential to the processes I have described here, and to my own thinking about them. We will all miss him.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 While I do not explore them here, there are differences between how each of these communities has been involved in the Search for the Sacred Hill.

2 CIPCA was initially founded by a group of Jesuit priests to support campesinos and indigenous people all over Bolivia. It has supported the indigenous movement since its early days and continues to play a critical role in helping Moxeños secure title to their territories.

3 I borrow the habit of distinguishing between indigenous and other ‘worlds’ from these scholars. I us the term ‘state-centred’ (as opposed to, for instance, ‘modern’) to describe one of those worlds in order to emphasise the institutions through which the epistemological claims of that world are produced, mediated, evaluated, and enacted.

4 The Yshiro term Blaser uses is ‘wozosh’, which he glosses as ‘kind of potency immanent to the generative principle of the yrmo [i.e. the Yshiro world] and can be visualised as the tilt in the continuum between distinction and indistinction’ (p.27).

5 On this point, see also (Taylor & Chau 1983; Goodman 1978; Overing 1990; Mol 2002; Holbraad 2009).

6 They do not. Dozens of authors have explored how the state's claims to a monologic modernity disintegrate when examined closely (Taussig 1992, 1997; Lund 2001; Aretxaga 2003; Hull 2003; Das 2004; Nuijten 2004; Poole 2004; Harvey 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2007; Pinker & Harvey 2015).

7 Bessire and Bond (2014) note that ontological anthropology itself constitutes such a utopian project, offering a messianic redemption from the catastrophe of modernist univocal epistemology. See also Graeber (2015).

8 Much of the literature on the Search for the Sacred Hill treats it as a Moxeño phenomenon with equal application to all Moxeño indigenous communities. Just as different persons at different times have responded in their own way to narratives of the Sacred Hill, there are material differences in terms of what actions narratives of the Sacred Hill instigated in Moxeño communities. These differences lie beyond the scope of this paper, though.

9 See also, Brown (1996), who recounts a millenarian revolutionary movement in Peru led by a Marxist guerilla leader named Guillermo Lobatón and an Asháninka shaman named Ernesto Andrés: ‘when violence failed to produce the immediate world transformation that Andrés and Lobatón had predicted, the Indians turned on them both. In doing so, Asháninkas enacted another dimension of resistance – that is, internal opposition to the leadership of their own shamans. An Asháninka man put it this way: “There is always someone who doubts”’ (p.731).

10 Though this story of trickery and loss is not unique to Ignacianos, it is far more common in Ignaciano than Trinitario versions of the story. For Ignacianos, this narrative is part of a broader story about whites taking Ignaciano wealth and land through their various kinds of trickery.

11 Ignacianos often attribute quasi-magical powers of fortitude and mystical knowledge of the forests to Chimanes.

12 Letter from José María del Carpio, Minister of the Government, to R.P. Gumercindo Gómez de Arteche, cited in Arteche, G. G. d. (1989 [1887]). Misión de los Padres Astrain, Manzanedo y Arteche. CIDDEBENI. Trinidad.

13 Shortly after this transcription was published, Fabricano would play a key role in the 1990 March for Territory and Dignity.

14 Literally, ‘abbess’. Within the Cabildo system, abadesas are respected women who maintain and adorn the facilities of the church and the icons associated with it.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Society for Latin American Studies; Aberdeen University Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society, and Rule of Law; Aberdeen University; Santander Foundation.