Present absences: Doing the sovereign territoriality through indigenous isolation and initial contact in the Peruvian Amazon

Keywords: Indigeneity, sovereignty, new materialism, State, territoriality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 16

Abstract

Academic production concerning ‘isolated’ and ‘initial contact’ indigenous peoples in Latin America has focused mostly on the discussion of national policies for the protection of their rights, highlighting tense dynamics between the State and economic sectors. More nuanced analyses speak to the socio-political effects of the imposition of these human categories, along with the manufacturing of imaginaries of an hyperreality of alterity, extreme vulnerability and subalternity. Some others have examined these categories as last remnants of pre-modern innocence and ecological harmony, proposing decolonial, anti-paternalistic and non-fetishized ways of thinking about histories of resistance, agency and different ways of relationality. This paper takes a different, and so far little explored tack, asking how does the notions of ‘isolation’ and ‘initial contact’ affect the ways the State exercises biopolitical power and territorial sovereignty. The question hinges on what, in principle appears, as a conundrum. Biopolitical power and territorial sovereignty usually imply contiguity -and even intimacy- between the sovereign and that which constitutes components of its territory, including human and non-human bodies however, notions of isolation and initial contact attributed to indigenous peoples mark the latter, as well as what exists in Reserves created for them, as very peculiar bodies that are present to state action mostly through their absence. The paper seeks to enter into the discussion of biopolitics and territorial sovereignty through the analysis of a new materialism of present absences in order to ask to what extent these might be performing transformations and providing glimpses of alternative territorial orders.