Predatory Economies: The Sanema and the Socialist State in Contemporary Amazonia

By Amy Penfield

A study of the modes of predation used by and against the Sanema people of Venezuela.

Predation is central to the cosmology and lifeways of the Sanema-speaking Indigenous people of Venezuelan Amazonia, but it also marks their experience of modernity under the socialist “Bolivarian” regime and its immense oil wealth. Yet predation is not simply violence and plunder. For Sanema people, it means a great deal more: enticement, seduction, persuasion. It suggests an imminent threat but also opportunity and even sanctuary.

Amy Penfield spent two and a half years in the field, living with and learning from Sanema communities. She discovered that while predation is what we think it is—invading enemies, incursions by gold miners, and unscrupulous state interventions—Sanema are not merely prey. Predation, or appropriation without reciprocity, is essential to their own activities. They use predatory techniques of trickery in hunting and shamanism activities, while at the same time, they employ tactics of manipulation to obtain resources from neighbors and from the state. A richly detailed ethnography, Predatory Economies looks beyond well-worn tropes of activism and resistance to tell a new story of agency from an Indigenous perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781477327104

Book preview

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

Predatory Economies

The Sanema and the Socialist State in Contemporary Amazonia

Amy Penfield

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2023

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All photographs courtesy of the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Penfield, Amy, author.

Title: Predatory economies : the Sanema and the socialist state in contemporary

Amazonia / Amy Penfield.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

LCCN 2022034869

ISBN 978-1-4773-2707-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2708-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2709-8 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2710-4 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Guaharibo Indians—Venezuela—Economic conditions. | Guaharibo Indians—Venezuela—Social conditions. | Guaharibo Indians—Venezuela—Social life and customs. | Guaharibo Indians—Political activity—Venezuela. | Predation (Biology)—Economic aspects—Venezuela. | Predation (Biology)—Social aspects—Venezuela. | Natural resources—Social aspects—Venezuela.

Classification: LCC F2520.1.G68 P46 2023 | DDC 305.898087—dc23/eng/20220823

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034869

doi:10.7560/327074

For Na’ai and Japa

Contents

Key Characters

INTRODUCTION. Locating Predators and Prey

CHAPTER 1. Predation, Then and Now

CHAPTER 2. Extracting Good Things

CHAPTER 3. Horizons of the Unknown

CHAPTER 4. Subterranean Forces

CHAPTER 5. Invoking the State

CHAPTER 6. Forest Papers

EPILOGUE. Predatory Economies in Amazonia and Beyond

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Key Characters

NOTE: All names are pseudonyms.

Anita is Marco’s mother and my host mother in my main research community, Maduaña. She is also mother to four other household heads in Maduaña as well as grandmother and great-grandmother to many of the younger generation residing there. At the time of research, Anita was approximately seventy years old. She is one of the founders of Maduaña and a matriarch figure in the community.

Feliciano was one of my research assistants who lived a city-oriented life. He was educated to high school level in the non-Indigenous town of Calamonte and later served in the Venezuelan army. He spends most of his time in Calamonte.

Héctor was my main research assistant who helped me with my interviews, translations, and transcriptions in Maduaña. At the time, Héctor was in his mid-twenties. He was educated in the missionary-run school in the previously inhabited upstream mission community Sakuniña, and he speaks fluent Spanish. Unlike Sanema youths who spent time attending high school in Calamonte, Héctor married young and spends most of his time providing for his family in Maduaña through hunting, fishing, and occasional stints of paid labor in Calamonte.

Ignacio is Marco’s brother-in-law and was the Sanema’s salaried representative in the local offices of the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples attending to all Sanema communities in the municipality. To carry out his role, he was based in Calamonte but undertook regular trips to Maduaña and other Sanema communities, particularly to lead meetings related to state initiatives.

Marco was the chief (kaikana) of Maduaña and is one of Anita’s sons. He was educated in the cities in the north of Venezuela when fostered by a missionary family as a child. He speaks fluent Spanish, was the former teacher of Maduaña, and has held roles as a Sanema representative in the municipal government and the regional Ministry of Education. As a self-professed aspiring politician, Marco spends most of his time in Calamonte, where he built a house made from breeze blocks covered by a tin roof.

Nelly is Anita’s eldest daughter and Marco’s sister. She is also Héctor’s mother. Nelly was one of my closest female confidants, and we worked together almost every day in the gardens.

René was Anita’s husband and the oldest member of the community. He was a revered shaman who frequently sang to his spirit allies to ward off evil forces or to cure community members of illness. René was beyond ninety years old at the time of my fieldwork and told me many stories of his strength, abilities, and fearlessness as a young man.

Santiago is Marco’s younger brother and a teacher in Maduaña’s state school. When Santiago is not teaching in Maduaña, he travels to the non-Indigenous port town of Calamonte to engage in state-initiated projects or to search for gasoline.

Valentín is the schoolteacher in Ulinuwiña, a remote Sanema community in Amazonas state. Valentín spoke little Spanish yet was the community resident most familiar with life beyond Ulinuwiña. At the time of my fieldwork he was just beginning to learn about state projects and bureaucracy.

INTRODUCTION

Locating Predators and Prey

THE HOUSE WAS FINALLY CALM. Most of its inhabitants lay asleep and silent, oblivious to the droning backdrop of rowdy nocturnal insects. The fire in the hearth had dwindled to an amber glow, and only an occasional muted crackle betrayed its sluggish burn. Bundles of bodies, barely visible in the dim light, sagged heavily in nearby hammocks. I knew that some were probably sleeping badly because they had told me they were afraid. Earlier that day, rumors blazed through the community claiming that angry non-Indigenous state officials or miners were coming. They were furious with the Sanema and perhaps even homicidal. The ominous rumor brought a palpable atmosphere of foreboding to which few were immune.

No one knew where these rumors had surfaced from, and no one admitted to originating the reports. In fact, no one seemed to know much at all, except for Anita, my sagacious Sanema host mother, who had listened attentively to the rumors before providing her own testimony. It is true, she declared, gesturing toward the nearby trees. Last night I heard a noise far away in the forest over there. It was a spirit screaming. Rather than raising further questions for its inconsistency with the original rumor, this comment seemed to confirm to those present that there were fearsome adversaries nearby or harmful events afoot. The timing of the rumors was no coincidence. Simmering anxieties had been intensifying for some time, and conversations bristled with whisperings of suspicious deaths in more distant Sanema communities, or trepidation surrounding an influx of unknown people in the area partaking in a recent gold rush.

As I lay in my hammock unable to sleep, pondering the unusual and contradictory conversations swirling around that day, my host father, René, began chanting softly in the neighboring hammock. His rhythmic singing started gently, but as night drew on it grew in amplitude, becoming an intense, enveloping sonority. As a shaman (sapili) to his community, René was compelled to perform his chanting at dead of night while others lay asleep in their hammocks, especially when sickness and anxiety were rife in his community—a pair of afflictions that invariably arrived simultaneously. By dint of shamanic invocation, René solicited the assistance of his hikula spirit allies, who would oblige by striking down the evil external forces that caused sickness and misfortune. I wondered that evening if he was chanting to avert the rumored encroachment of dangerous others, until eventually the rhythmic cadence swelled to become one with my approaching dreams.

By morning the atmosphere in the house had returned to normal; my host family seemed less perturbed, chatting jovially as they rekindled the dying embers of the hearth fire. I decided to ask René if his hikula had succeeded in warding off the hostile forces that had so troubled them the day before. Yeees! came his hoarse voice from beneath the cloudy mosquito net overhanging his hammock. He paused to erupt with a hacking cough, and after a long and languorous inhale, he added, "I have lots of songs, that’s why. That is how I call my hikula to me, that is how I tame them and make them do what I say." It was evident that he was proud of his adeptness in forfending unwanted forces, but he also seemed to take pleasure in the manner by which he achieved this skill. He chuckled when describing how he lured his spirit allies to his chest, where they now reside, and how he manipulates their powers through his beautiful songs. One could say that he was seducing them, capturing them by wiles as subtle and artistic as the songs themselves.

There are two reasons I chose to begin this book by recounting this particular event. First, it provides the reader with a snapshot of life among the Sanema, a group of Indigenous peoples who live in the forests of Venezuelan Amazonia and on whom this book is centered.¹ But second, I present this vignette for another, far more important reason. Condensed to its common elements, the story is suffused with predators and prey; it is, in a word, all about predation. Let me explain. Predation is in its primary sense an act of taking without permission, typically in forceful or violent ways. The biological definition states that predation is the killing of one living organism by another for food. One might immediately think of large carnivorous animals stalking their prey at close range as the literal, paradigmatic example of predation. But one can think about predation in more general terms too, not just hunting for food and not just undertaken by carnivorous nonhuman animals. Among humans, predation takes the form of nonreciprocal acts of attacking or plundering to seize resources for oneself. At yet another remove in the range of conceptualization, it is possible to abstract the core concept of predation further to describe it as an appropriation of value in its broadest sense. Value can include objects but also souls, loyalties, attentions, and energies. What is more, the value appropriated can sometimes be seized by force, but in many cases it can also be willingly handed over without undue coercion through ingenious gestures of manipulation. It is necessary to provide a wider definition of predation in this way to introduce the idea that it encompasses far more than undifferentiated forms of raw aggression.

The impending threat of violence on the day of the rumors was rooted in a notion of predation. Sanema-speaking people historically viewed invaders as predatory strangers resolved to despoil their community by snatching items or abducting women. Plundering is typically a way to circumvent reciprocal exchange, and as far as the Sanema are concerned, raiders always take things without providing anything in return. My Sanema hosts believed that the rumored intruders of that day were no different, seeking to aggressively snatch objects or lives away from their community. But in the story recounted, there was another form of predation taking place, one based not on violence but rather on seduction. René described his hikula spirits, who were enlisted to keep malevolent forces at bay, as being tamed so that they might do his bidding. In his account, he had lured the spirits to him with his songs and trapped them in his chest to thereafter work for him. This is likewise an appropriation of value while giving little in return, even by René’s own admission. Both the threat of invading others and the seduction of hikula spirits are forms of unidirectional seizure, of appropriation without reciprocity. Predation thus entails seduction as much as violence or persuasion as much as threat.

This book is about predators and prey, but I seek to untie the concept of predation from its moorings in fierceness, cruelty, and violence, accommodating within its conceptual range nonaggressive schemas of empathy, emulation, and manipulation. My central concern is to show that predation is not always a desire to harm or enact gratuitous violence but a strategy for negotiating selfhood and sociality in a volatile world, a way of conceptualizing what is accepted as much as what is yet to be fully understood. During my time living with Sanema people I observed how they often cast encounters and interactions around predator-prey relations, a framing that was used as readily in the context of forests as it was in the context of cities. Fast becoming a central preoccupation among Sanema people, new intercultural encounters with non-Indigenous people were regarded as baffling and unnerving as much as they were exciting and desired. In this work I attend to these contemporary encounters by exploring how the Sanema deploy and fall prey to predatory strategies in daily economic pursuits of production, exchange, and consumption. This is a story about Indigenous Amazonians, but it is also a story about market economies, socialist revolutions, and neoliberal ideologies. Indeed, the wider economic backdrop hovering at the fringes of Sanema worlds reveals just as much about the modality of predation as do forest cosmologies. One may say that nonreciprocal appropriation is fast becoming the prevailing lived experience of the modern world.

Predation Today

Undoubtedly, predation can be interpreted in many ways and applied in many different contexts, so that attempting to pin it down to one particular form is therefore not without its difficulties. Above, I sketched a broad definition of predation as the act of appropriating value, typically but not always by force, while offering little or nothing in return. By virtue of its central concern with value, predation is by and large a schema associated with political and economic life at all scales. Another story from my field site illustrates this idea. During the early days of my research in 2009, while in the regional capital Ciudad Bolívar stocking up on supplies, I sat chatting with my friend Evelio of the Indigenous Ye’kwana people, who inhabit the same territory as the Sanema. Evelio lived in the city, working as an Indigenous guide for tourists wishing to partake in an authentic Amazon adventure. We were in the lounge area of my hostel discussing the most contentious yet ubiquitous topic in Venezuela: the socialist state.

Evelio grew animated, as most Venezuelans do when they discuss this topic, and stated that the section on Indigenous rights in the new constitution made no difference on the ground. He pointed to his computer, its screensaver a profusion of stars continually rushing forward, and said, It’s as though I showed you these stars and said, ‘Here, you can have these.’ He reached toward the laptop in mock temptation and continued, ‘Oh, those are beautiful!’ you think, but then you realize they are not real. It’s just a dream, an ideal. I mumbled in agreement, which prompted him to continue his train of thought. Our president Chávez has a lot of bait, but he never actually lets you have any of it. It’s like saying to a child ‘I have a lollipop for you’ and showing it to them, making them dance for it but never actually giving it to them.² In that moment I was struck by Evelio’s insightful analogies, which illustrated how those in power cunningly yet deceptively beguile the masses with bait. The state, from Evelio’s perspective at least, is a predatory entity in the sense that it entices citizens to invest in its political agenda with the promise of rewards that ultimately never materialize. His description, rich in its images of citizens akin to snared animals, shrewdly identifies the common element of predation as an economic strategy centered on unidirectional control and appropriation.

Kevin O’Neill notes that predation is a root experience of the contemporary because governance in the modern era is a process of exploitation but specifically by way of capture, containment, and control (2019, ix). Although Evelio was referring to a socialist and rather illusory state doctrine in Venezuela, his lollipop metaphor bears out the view that the underlying political and economic configurations he witnesses conform to these predatory procedures of capture, containment, and control. But when O’Neill talks of predation in contemporary economic life, he is referring more specifically to global capitalism, which is a form of predation characterized by acts of appropriation, sometimes aggressive but also oblique and insidious, for the purposes of profit accumulation. Accumulation is the key term here; capitalism is, by its very nature, the accrual of capital that is usually reinvested to produce yet more capital. This is a global economy defined above all else by growth. In his book Less Is More, Jason Hickel points out that capitalism works according to a simple, straightforward formula: take more—from nature and from labor—than you give back (2020, 40), and it is this uncompensated appropriation of nature and labor that growth relies on.

Practices of capture and accumulation actually promoted capitalism’s emergence in the first place. During mercantilism and colonialism, Europeans seized enormous volumes of resources, from gold and land to timber and rubber, frequently exploiting enslaved labor to this end such that the appropriation of materials relied on the appropriation of workers and their labor. Even the term capture, in its ordinary semantic field meaning to take or seize, has roots in the mid-sixteenth century with the emergence of English commercialism backed by the slave trade, aggressive resource expropriation, and the emerging biopolitical control of populations and bodies. Seizure and capture occupied a central place in ideological and legal frameworks during this era. The Law of Capture adopted in Britain and the United States of America, for instance, secured private claims to subterranean assets in the nineteenth century (Degani, Chalfin, and Cross 2020). To this very day, the process continues unabated; wherever one turns, value is being seized and appropriated, whether in the form of minerals, labor, consumption, votes, personal data, or financial speculation, to list but a few examples. In short, unidirectional capture allows the accumulation of surplus that in turn leads to expansion. This economic model, which Hickel terms growthism, is pure extraction; pure theft (2020, 75), so deep-rooted that without it the economy collapses into recession.³

Predation is moreover a lived experience as much as an economic strategy, and the everyday arrangements that formalize and implement appropriation have long been realities for people all over the world. This is where anthropological insights come to the fore. In the 1990s, an awareness of the long reach of predatory economies triggered a disciplinary shift to what Ortner (2016) describes as dark anthropology. Some scholars began to turn their attention to declining livelihoods wrought by the liberalization of trade and industry, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the privatization of state-owned industries that define late capitalism, otherwise known as neoliberalism. Others started to look more closely at how the new market values of individualism, competition, and personal accountability ultimately smothered whatever vestiges of social solidarity remained. Overall, neoliberalism was regarded as a predatory economy writ large.⁴

In more recent anthropological work, the language of predation has emerged more frequently in researchers’ field sites, often marked with the vocabulary of captivity, exploitation, and deception (O’Neill and Dua 2017). These expressions may emerge from very real zones of incarceration, where detainees become lucrative resources for profit-making actors (Andersson 2018; Buck 2017; O’Neill 2018), or from the victims of profit-making policies (Bear 2015; K-Y Taylor 2019). But these narratives sometimes take the form of mystifying tales of alien abduction or conspiracy theories that index economic exclusion and powerlessness (Crockford 2021; Lepselter 2016) or from the barely detectible yet omnipresent algorithmic traps that permeate the apparently autonomous will of internet users the world over (Seaver 2019). In all such instances, value is appropriated, profit is extracted, and the captured remain interminably confined.

To be sure, economies that lure and capture are by no means new; they are strategies that unquestionably define economies of feudalism, commerce, empire, and industrialization. But the striking thing about contemporary predatory economies is that this modality of captivity defines people’s experiences within an era espousing freedom as its cardinal norm. Hegemonic ideologies of late capitalism paint a utopian picture of autonomous individuals who flourish when free to manage their own destinies and who enact their liberty predominantly in a field of ostensibly unfettered markets. Yet behind this eternally dogmatic trope lie myriad attempts to manage and endure not freedom but rather captivity in its many forms. Scholars who apply the heuristic of predation do so in contradistinction to earlier analytical frames wherein capitalism was articulated as a regime of abandonment and disconnection (Povinelli 2011; Tsing 2015).

In these endeavors to reflect on the vicissitudes of contemporary economic life, efforts to uncover a spectrum of concepts emerging from the research participants themselves can be a powerful way to facilitate a much deeper understanding of the manifold ways that economic predation is encountered, whether as seduction and deceit or as violence and exploitation. Although the story in this book is told from the perspective of an Indigenous people, I nevertheless provide a wide-ranging vocabulary of unidirectional predatory actions that could equally define the various political and economic arrangements discernible anywhere in the world. But now, with the knowledge garnered from the domain of economic predation, broadly defined, it is time to take a journey upriver to a subsistence economy in the Amazon rainforest where a different predatory economy prevails. Amazonia is by no means a stranger to predator-prey relations. Quite the contrary: predation is an archetypal Amazonian mode of relation.

Unsettling Characterizations

By the time I took my first trip to Venezuelan Amazonia in 2005 I had already heard numerous tales of a group called the Sanema. The stories intrigued me in part for their contradictory portrayals, two representations, to be precise. One was attributable to my undergraduate training; the other reflected narratives recounted by my nongovernmental organization (NGO) colleagues who had been working in the region for some years. The first account related to the broader Yanomami language family, of which the Sanema make up the northernmost branch.⁵ While an anthropology undergraduate at University College London in the late 1990s, I read Napoleon Chagnon’s provocative monograph Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968), about the southern branch of the Yanomami. I was immediately captivated by his engaging prose and compelling descriptions of lives far removed from my own. At the time, the book enjoyed wide exposure within and beyond academia and had become standard reading for anthropology undergraduates owing to its candid descriptions of the hardships of fieldwork. Nonetheless, even in those days it was heavily critiqued for its crude misrepresentations of these remote hunter-gatherer people, whom Chagnon described as violent peoples prone to outbursts of intense hostility, deadly assaults on others, and even domestic cruelty. In later work Chagnon took this prickly analysis even further, describing the imputed aggression as a valued behavioral trait that grants the most ferocious individual the highest status. Many anthropologists, unsurprisingly, found that this sensationalized trope failed to capture the complex and frequently tranquil lives of Yanomami people.

Even so, I noticed that some of those same critics, who themselves worked among Yanomami people, proclaimed that great value was placed on assertiveness and hostility, that a Yanomami man must be capable of showing himself fearless in battle and ready to publicly demonstrate the power of his determination (Albert 1985, 97), such that submission is contrary to Indian morality; it is dishonorable (Lizot 1994a, 857). Even today, one of the most celebrated exemplars of Indigenous authority and assertive political action is the award-winning activist Davi Kopenawa, a member of the Yanomami community. In his book The Falling Sky (2013), Kopenawa mentions the fierce portrayal as being falsely exaggerated (24, 357), while at the same time he repeatedly celebrates Yanomami bravery and warriorhood (21, 170).⁶

This backdrop of a fierce characterization, albeit disputed, was perhaps why the second representation of Sanema people came as such a shock to me. This alternative designation emerged from my North American and Venezuelan NGO colleagues with whom I traveled to Venezuela in 2005. I arrived as a volunteer for a small organization that offered basic health care training to the local Ye’kwana people. My NGO colleagues jarringly described Sanema people of the region as the Ye’kwana’s slaves. To my ear, this phrase came across as rather offhand, apparently merely a borrowed description, since none of my colleagues had spoken with the Sanema people firsthand to discover whether there was any truth in the representation of a slavelike relationship.

My first experience with Sanema people seemed in some ways to echo this depiction when by chance I encountered their apparent deference toward the Ye’kwana. While my companions and I were loading a boat in a frontier town for our first trip upriver, two figures materialized out of the twilight close by to help unload some canoes belonging to the Ye’kwana. Their presence was so subdued it barely registered, so stealthily did they move about in the fading light. They might even have gone entirely unnoticed were it not for their physical appearance, strikingly different from the Ye’kwana both in stature and demeanor. Unlike the communicative and confident Ye’kwana people we had met up to that point, these men hardly spoke, and when they did, it was in inaudible mumbling tones spoken with downcast eyes. Their physiques were small and lean, whereas the Ye’kwana were large and robust. Everything about these men came across as distinctly passive and apprehensive.

At one point they sat near us to take a rest, watching with curiosity as we