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Coloquios | 2009
Des catégories et de leurs usages dans la construction sociale d’un groupe de référence : "race", "ethnie" et "communauté" aux Amériques (Mascipo) – Paris, EHESS, 13-15 décembre 2006
Nicolas Ellison

Comments on R. Araujo’s text

Myths and reality of the peasant community and the indigenous ecologist
[07/07/2009]
 | Anexo | Cita | Autor

Anexo

Introduction

Explicitly or implicitly social categories are building stones of our thinking as social scientists, and one of our challenges is to question our “common sense” categories. Indeed, though of course the social performativity of local categories has to be aknowledged, there are some serious difficulties in using local categories as academic constructs. In this sense, Araujo’s paper coincides with other authors working in the Amazon basin like Lima (1992) and Harris (2000) among others.

To think about social categories is to think about processes of identification, where the identifying done by the social scientist is just one specific modality of identification. The problem with it, is that there is a temptation, inherited from the positivistic childhood of social sciences, to objectify the observed social phenomena in rather fixed terms, like the botanist identifies plant specimens. This process of academic identification takes place in a context of previously active identifications permanently operating between different groups and it would be naïve to think that academic social categories are formulated in total objective independence from these social processes, even when the local categories are not taken for granted.

I read of Roberto Araujo’s text with the eyes of a non-specialist of the Brazilian Amazon. Though in the facts exposed by Araujo, some common dynamics may of course be recognised at the level of social and political changes, not merely common to the Latin-America but generally related with what is commonly called globalisation, one of these being the rising ecological discourse and “sustainable development” practices, it is mainly on the methodological level of dealing with the dialogue between the use of analytical social categories and local social formations and constructions of identity that comparisons with my own research in rural Mexico may be most fruitful.

Araujo’s interrogations on the rural community and ecology in the Brazilian Amazon bring to mind Mark Harris’ work on Amazon ribeirhinos of the state of Para as an obliged comparison, but I will also draw some methodological parallels with my own work on indigenous coffee producers in central eastern Mexico.

I will limit my discussion to two issues developed by Araujo as they are key questions I have also dealt with in my research on the Totonac coffee-peasants of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The first one refers to the link between relations of functional dualism (cf. Roseberry) in which the peasant populations or other subordinate groups have been caught up, on one hand, and the notion of community on the other. The second question refers to how present discourses and practices of environment protection and sustainable development contribute to shape and institutionalise the notions of ‘traditional populations’ as ‘good ecologists’ into a social category used by governmental agencies and NGO’s and eventually adopted and adapted by local actors.

I. The omnipresent image of the rural community: dichotomic or dialectic dualism?

Araujo underlines the different influences and processes at play in the categorisation of the mestizo Amazonian population of Acre into different figures of “rural communities”, from the beginning of last century with the freguesias based on the economy of rubber-tapping and its client-patron relations1, to the Comunidades Eclesiales de Base of Liberation theology down to today’s notion of community in the definition of rubber-tappers as a ‘traditional population’ with juridical implications in terms of access to land an development resources.

On the role of the state and the church in the institutionalisation of communities

I will open my comments, by raising the issue of the role of the state and of the church as a common factor between the processes described by Roberto Araujo and those I have dealt with in my own research. Araujo mentions the construction of a chapel as founding act of the freguesias where, similarly to the Mexican and Central American cargo system (and its cofradías), the celebration of the saint patron take on a role of formal communal organisation (thus defining the belonging to a territorialized local community).

In the case of Totonac village communities founded during the last 50 years, the building of a school-house parallel to that of the chapel was just as important in the affirmation of the independent status of a group of houses forming a new community to be later recognised by the state. Thus the building of a first make-shift school room on the initiative of the inhabitants of the community under creation is an act calling for the intervention of the state (to take over that school) and at the same time a call for official recognition of the status of village community (ranchería or comunidad) through the appointment by the municipal government of a judge of the peace (juez de paz).

In the Amazonian cases mentioned by Araujo, the state presence and action seems to be of less importance than in the Sierra de Puebla, rather corresponding in Mexico to situations of colonising fronts in the Lacandon forest or throughout both sides of the Mexican-Guatemalan border and the forests of the southern Yucatan peninsula where, it should be mentioned, rubber-tapping has also played an important role.

It seems that Araujo might not be giving enough importance to the relation with the state or regional authorities in the recognition of new communities during the later twentieth century; or at least this point seemed rather unclear to me as a non-specialist of the region. This raises the question of the actual role of the state in the political recognition of communities in the rural areas of Acre dominated by rubber-tappers prior to the generalisation of ecological discourses and the invention of the “traditional populations”.

Following this line of the relation with wider regional and national processes, I would like to comment on Araujo’s dismissal of the dualistic models, such as the dichotomy between production for subsistence and mercantile production he sees to be at the base of complementary idealised images of “the community”. These are the mirror images of either a romantic conception of the community as a last barricade against capitalist economy (in Latin America, a generally left-wing related image) or that of rural communities as being a backward hindrance to the progress and modernity (a more dominant and often right-wing perception).

As Araujo acknowledges by quoting Carvalho Franco, both subsistence and mercantile production are effectively constitutive one of the other. This point is developed in depth by Mark Harris, another anthropologist writing on Amazonian mixed rural communities. Though Harris, as Araujo, rejects the dichotomic dualistic models, he does develop further the idea of the mutual constitution of subsistence and mercantile forms of economic relations as a dialectic relationship (see also Mintz 1989). This brings him to a step I believe Araujo might not be willing to follow. That is, to assert that this particular dialectic dynamic is creative and reproductive of what Harris chooses to call “peasantries” (the plural is an important nuance). Harris sees the dialectic processes creating these particular social formations as being very much linked to situations of marginality, where marginality is not a permanent and imposed state, but just as much a strategic positioning taken up now and than by constantly moving rural populations, almost as fluid as the Amazon river itself, as Harris would put it.

Marginality is used here not so much in a geographical sense, nor in a classical sociological sense of exclusion from the dominant society, but rather in an economic anthropological sense of the relation with capitalist economy. In my PhD research, I have also developed such an understanding of marginality from the perspective of economic anthropology (Ellison 2004). I think that social scientists are indeed in need of new conceptual approaches to understand these situations at the margins of what is commonly called globalisation, where the marginality is also one in comparison to the classical divide between traditional and modern societies at the core of modernist discourse. The populations with which Araujo, Harris and many of us have worked, just do not fit any easy classification, which probably merely reveals the inadequacy of our categories (or of the act of categorising as such). It therefore seems particularly productive to consider marginality as a ‘positioning strategy’ more than as anchored in an a priori defined position. A positioning process which has just as much social and cultural implications as it has economic and political ones. The notion of ‘culture of marginality’ developed by Anath Ariel de Vidas about the Teneek of Veracruz (Ariel de Vidas 2002) seems to be an obliged reference here.

So when Araujo (p.6) rightly underlines that the “dichotomy, perceived as inherent to the social formations that arose from the conquest, is sometimes due to a “naturalising” vision…”2; I am compelled to ask whether this illusion isn’t partly nourished by the fact that since the outset of early modernity particular processes have indeed been, and are still, taking place at the margins, processes that create some kind of “communal morality” as Harris states it (Harris 2000: 23 but see also Taussig, Scott).

I am therefore tempted to assert that the “imaginary sociology” Araujo identifies as underlying the official institution of “traditional populations” on the base of rubber-tapping activities, might not be entirely imaginary. I mean hereby that it partly refers to an existing distinctive social formation, one that, in the case of the ribeirhinos does manifest a certain communal ethos as Harris has shown. Whether this can also be asserted regarding the seringueiros is a question I cannot answer but which I would like to put to the consideration of the author.

After using such a strongly connoted notion as “communal morality”, I find very useful to nuance it by invoking the distinction Harris makes between resistance and resilience. When authors have written in terms of community, especially in terms of peasant community, these communities have often been reified as collective social subjects resisting external processes, thus reproducing the type of dual models Araujo rejects. But to think in terms of communal morality, rather than of a community as a clearly defined and delineated social unit, allows us to look at the relation between these social formations and national and international political and economic processes in terms of resilience instead of resistance (Harris, op.cit.: 25). Thus, with the idea of resilience, the issue isn’t any more how a specific social unit defined as a community, resists outside processes, but rather how a social formation, permanently under construction and redefinition that could be vaguely called peasantry for want of a better term, is resilient precisely because of its participation in the wider processes transforming it. Or, more precisely because of the participation of individuals to these processes. I would therefore make a point, for the purpose of analysis, of the usefulness to privilege the concept of social formation over that of social category, thus emphasising process over fixity. This allows a better grasp of individual trajectories moving to and through the complexity of activities characterising these ‘marginal’ populations, including pendular movements not only between different activities and between the rural areas and the urban centres but also of alternating adhesion to and distantiation from communal morality.

Seen under this perspective, Araujo’s critique of the official social categorisation in terms of “traditional populations” can take on an additional argument. Which is, that by the very act of institutionalisation of a community (defined as a “traditional population”) such policy undermines the fluidity of the individual and collective strategic positioning characteristic of modern situations of marginality at the core of that communal morality the state’s “imaginary sociology” builds on. This might well be a reason for which such projects might end up in frequent failures such as these mentioned by Araujo3.

This takes me to the second issue, that of the consequences of official categorisations on rural development schemes in the context of the development regime and the international discourses on ecology.

II. The good primitive and environmentalism.

Araujo describes how, during the 1990s in the state of Acre, the authoritarian state control was replaced by an emerging “developmentalist configuration” (Araujo takes the expression from De Sardan). The author further explains that the development configuration of the region is inspired by an original “socio-environmental model”, a notion once academically formalised by Ignacy Sachs under the concept of “eco-development”. In the Amazon region, according to Araujo, this ‘model’ would congregate a particular register of development propositions, sponsored by local populations and NGOs and where academics also play a significant role. Araujo considers that this configuration has arisen mainly due to local political factors, notably because environmentalism appeared as a viable alternative to the official development discourse for legitimising political opposition. Of course, as Auraujo points out, the international character of ecologic discourse and alternative development practice strengthens the political bargaining position of local populations through their alliance with the NGOs (but also different churches) and their international networks.

In this sense the situation described by Araujo shares many common points with ‘developmentalist configurations’ and the related discourses and practices throughout Latin-America. In the case of Mexico this public arena of alternative developmentalism has been more specifically focused on agriculture amongst peasant communities and is most commonly hallmarked as ‘agro-ecological model’, Victor Manuel Toledo being one of its principal academic defenders. Though social scientists have often observed how the performative effects4 of these alliances with NGOs and of the inscription into the international environmentalist arena have empowered local peasant and/or indigenous populations, this doesn’t necessarily promote community cohesion, contrary to the implicit assumption in the discourse of the promoters of socio-environmentalism or agro-ecology, as Araujo makes the point for the case of the Acre region.

This can be exemplified in Mexico with the cases of alternative models of coffee production, where the agro-ecological development model has been implemented in terms of certified organic coffee production amongst indigenous petty producers, mainly in the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, in connection with fair trade international commercialisation promoted under the Max Havelaar label (Renard 1999, Beaucage 2000).

As Neil Harvey has shown for the case of the ISMAM coffee organisation in the indigenous Mam region of Chiapas, only in such exceptional cases where specialisation on coffee-production was already strong and the new organisations replaced weakened communal forms5, do these initiatives give rise to a collective identity, and not exactly on a community base but rather on a regional one. It could be argued though, that in these specific cases a new social formation emerges, or rather a new very specific configuration of a general social formation including the different types of peasantries.

Coming back to Araujo’s rubber-tappers, it is somewhat unclear, probably because further research is necessary, whether such a collective identity based on a specific economic activity and a new form of social organisation within an institutionalised framework such as the ‘traditional population’ status, could give rise to a similar type of collective identity as the one developed among members of the ISMAM in Chiapas. Araujo does mention a process of ‘recomposition identitaire’ (reshuffling of identity), but one is left to wonder to what extent he is not just describing a reshuffling or rather a reformulation of identity discourses in a performative sense.

In a seminal article Odile Hoffmann has underlined how the processes of political and economic change since the 1980s in Latin-America have promoted a ‘return to the Indian’ as she formulates it (Hoffmann 2002), where the previously central category in the public arena of rural development, the peasant, has been replaced by the Indian. This has led many groups to redefine themselves from the one to the other. This is particularly evident in Mexico, where many indigenous groups first publicly erased their cultural identity by adopting the revolutionary discourse on peasantry during the period of agricultural development and agrarian reform implemented by the post-revolutionary state and than took up the re-ethnicising discourse during the 1990s in resonance both with the post-zapatist indigenous rights movement and the multiculturalism discourse of the international community replicated by the Mexican government, partly as a strategy to downplay more radical demands6. As Hoffmann underlines, this change in the focus of rural development was a direct consequence of the neoliberal reforms. In consequence, indigenist policies in Mexico took the form of a minimalist interpretation of indigenous rights and multicultural development quite distinct from the autonomy demands of the indigenous rights movement.

The shift in public policies from agrarian reform towards ecological issues is concomitant of this change from the peasant to the Indian and, for better or for worse, is part of the disengagement of the state from agricultural development. This correlation of political and economic changes common to most Latin-American countries is certainly also present in the change of focus towards ecology that Araujo describes. In this perspective the category of ‘traditional populations’ clearly appears as a substitute to the indigenous as a default category to be applied to the peasantries or marginal populations which do not fit well into restrictive definitions of indigenous populations. Ecology, or more precisely a romanticised image of the ‘good ecologist’ (a refraction of Rousseau’s ‘bon sauvage’) becomes the element of synthesis of these two categories (of the indigenous and of the ‘traditional populations’). It is significant in this sense that the National Centre for the Development of Traditional Peoples is associated to the Brazilian Environment Institute, thus annexing these populations to the environment as was traditionally done with indigenous populations.

The seringueiros are thus included in the discourse of the ‘indigenous ecologist’ (Araujo, p. 10). Of course neither these peasantries redefined as traditional groups, nor the indigenous people are per se ecologists, sometimes quite the contrary. But there may be some reality within the myth, else the image would not be so powerful. Bruce Albert (2004) has underlined that indigenous discourses resonating the international environmentalist trends are not always a simple pasting of imported western notions but may well build on vernacular conceptions of relation with the environment. A similar point can be made about the discourse of Totonac leaders in the Sierra de Puebla where changes in agricultural practices and agro-ecological development projects have not only produced a Totonac environmentalist discourse. They also induced a local interpretation of what it means to be an ecologist and at the same time a reformulation of local representations of the environment. This local reinterpretation of ecological representations is based on the translation and understanding of ecological discourse through vernacular cosmological references grounded in daily practices and thus reaches well beyond the leader’s discourses (Ellison 2004).

There might well be a part of truth in the image of the ‘good ecologist’ in the sense that the marginal positioning of these populations in terms of their relation with dominant economic relations also has an expression in terms of distinct modes of relation with the environment or ‘modes of use of natural resources’ (Gadgil and Guha 1992). But this doesn’t mean, as Araujo rightly underlines, that these populations are necessarily or automatically protectors of the environment.

I would therefore agree with him, in a concluding word on policies, that the most correct understanding of ‘traditional’ in this context can only refer to an operational classification or a contractual partnership with public authorities or NGOs, equivalent to the rules set out for certification processes like those implemented for other activities such as organic food production. If there are any ‘communities’ in the case of these projects, then they are communities arising from the creation of new collectives, based on the participation to these projects, and not the other way around, that these projects would automatically work because of being based on some imaginary pre-existing community characterised by an inherent propensity to protect the environment. But, is there any need to invent the category of “traditional population” to support this kind of environmental management?

Albert, B. 2004 in L’Homme Nr 169.

Ariel de Vidas, A. 2002, Le Tonnerre n’habite plus ici. Culture de la marginalité chez les Indiens teneek (Mexique), Éditions Ehess, Paris.

Beaucage, P. 2000, « Fragmentation et recomposition des identités autochtones dans quatre communautés des régions caféicoles du Mexique », in Recherches amérindiennes au Mexique, Vol 31 (1) : pp. 9-19.

Bourdieu, P. 2001, Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Seuil, Paris.

Burkhalter, B. et Murphy, R. 1989, ‘Tappers and Sappers : Rubber, Gold and Money among the Munducuru’, in American Ethnologist, Vol. 16, No.1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 100-116.

Ellison, N. 2004a, « Une écologie symbolique totonaque, le municipe de Huehuetla (Mexique) », Journal de la Société des Américanistes, pp. 35-62, Tome 90-2.

Ellison, N. 2004b, « Discours performatifs et constructions politiques de l’identité ethnique : restructuration des rapports entre minorités et pouvoirs publics au Mexique, le cas totonaque » in Nuevo Mundo,Mundos nuevos, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/document766.html, 2004, N°4.

Gadgil, M. and Guha, R. 1992, This fissured Land. An Ecological History of India. University of California Press, Berkeley - 274 pages.

Harris, M. 2000, Life on the Amazon. The anthropology of a Brazilian peasant village. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Hoffmann, O. 2002, « De paysans à Indiens, les représentations de la paysannerie latino-américaine, de 1970 à 2000 », pp. 9-19 in C.M.H.L.B. Caravelle, n°79, 2002.

Kearney, M. 1996, Reconceptualizing the peasantry.Anthropology in global perspective. Westview Press

Lima, D. 1992 The social category caboclo:history, social organisation and outsiders’ classification of the rural population of an Amazonian region. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.

Mintz, S. 1989 Carribean Transformations. New York: Columbia University Press.

1996 Enduring substances, trying theories: the Carribean region as Oikoumenê. JRIA June (2): 289-312.

Renard, M.-C. 1999,Los intersticios de la globalización. Un label (Max Havelaar) para los pequeños productores de café. Mexico: CEMCA, Embajada del Reino de los Países Bajos, ISMAM, CEPCO, PIDRCAFE.

Para citar este artículo

Referencia electrónica

Nicolas Ellison, « Comments on R. Araujo’s text », Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, Coloquios, 2009, [En línea], Puesto en línea el 07 juillet 2009. URL : http://nuevomundo.revues.org/index56724.html. Consultado el 28 novembre 2009.

Autor

Nicolas Ellison

Cerma-EHESS and U. of Aberdeen
nicolas.ellison@ehess.fr

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