Abstract This ar ticle exp lores the issues of land use and te rr itoriality in Amazon-ian societies un dergoing culture chan ge. During the last decades, discussions onindigenous peoples’ land rights in Amazonia have focused on the relationsbetween traditional societies and their environments, emphasizing aspects of environmen tal conservation and neglecting the value of their respon ses to socialchange and market production. This article argues that these responses areessential for advancing viable land tenure and development policies in indigen-
ous territories. In particular, this article documents the strategies developed bythe Piaroa, a peop le of the Middle Orinoco, in transition.Keywords culture change development land rights land use LowlandSouth America Middle Orinoco Piaroa territoriality Venezuela
In 1999, Venezuela approved a new Constitution that recognized the landand cultural rights of indigenous peop les for th e first time in th e coun tr y’shistory. Article 119,1 in particular, related to land tenure in indigenousterritories, touched on a historic concern among the indigenous peoplesof the country, who have increasingly thrust this aspect onto researchers’
agendas. It was an important shift in the government’s attitude towardsindigenous peoples, considering th at on ly three years earlier Venezuela wasregarded as one of the hard-line anti-indigenist governments in UnitedNations (UN) working groups on indigenous rights (Gray, 1997: 94). Un til1999, as in most Latin American countries, Ven ezuela’s government alwayssaw the recognition of indigenous peoples’ territories as a threat tonational sovereignty.
As discussions on Ar ticle 119 developed, however , a ser ies of problemsrelated to the notion of ‘traditional territory’ among indigenous peopleswas unveiled. According to the new law, the state should acknowledge therights of indigenous peoples over the habitats and ‘lands that they haveancestrally and trad itionally occupied and which are necessar y to d evelopand guarantee their ways of life’ (Venezuela, 2000 [1999]: 102). However,
there is no consensus on what the ‘traditional territories’ of the indigen-ous groups of the countr y are, and whether they would match their actualland requirements in order to ‘develop and guarantee’ their current life-
styles. ‘Traditional’ is a very ambiguous term, which introduces manyproblems to the definition of indigenous land rights, yet it is commonlyused at national and international levels.2
During the last decades, discussions on indigenous traditional terri-tories in Amazonia have been bound up with aspects of environmentalconservation, partly due to a strategic alliance between indigenous move-ments and environmentalist groups (Davis and Wali, 1994). In 1990, theCoordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica(COICA) organized the First Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Environ-mentalists in Iquitos (Peru), where several indigenous and environmental-ist organizations signed an agreement of alliance for environmental andsocial struggles in the Amazon region (Chirif et al., 1991). The relevanceof these associations became obvious in later international agreements,such as the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity, where internationalconser vationist movements recognized:
. . . the close and traditional dependence of many ind igenous and localcommun ities embodying traditional lifestyles on biological resources, and thedesirability of sharing equitably benefits arising from the use of traditionalknowledge, inn ovations and practices relevant to the conservation of biological
diversity and the sustainable use of its componen ts . . . (United Nations, 1992)
During the last two decades, indigenous peoples have appropriatedthis discourse as the basis for most of their territorial claims. This associ-ation is debatable, and it has undermined the genuine rights of indigen-ous peoples over their ter ritories based on prior occupation and regardlessof their ecological dimension. Nevertheless, their land rights based onpr ior occupation imply aspects of inalienability that n ation-states generallyconsider their exclusive right. The environmental agenda, for its part,meets the indigenous reality in that indigenous peoples depend on the
conservation and management of their environments for their survival,even if their views on conservation and management are frequently diver-gent from those of environmentalist groups (cf. Redford and Stearman,1993). Moreover, the environmental concern developed in Western societyin recent years has provided a unique opportunity to make their views onland tenure and development heard. Hence, indigenous peoples havereadily adopted the conservationist argument in the negotiation anddefence of their rights.
This line of argumentation, however, has called into question th e rightsof indigenous peoples undergoing culture change, who have moved toareas outside their ‘traditional’ territory. Social and cultural change aregenerally seen as diminishing the capacity of their productive systems torespond to their current necessities, ignoring the potential of their
strategies and sometimes even threatening their land rights. Wild general-izations on the processes accompanying social change are incorporated apriori into developmen t and land tenure p lans, which often rep resent real
threats to their productive systems by ignoring environmental, social orcultural specificities. Cattle-rearing programmes, subsidized agricultureand Western-defined land titles are some of the common points of mostdevelopment programmes in these areas (e.g. CODESUR, 1970;PRODESUR, 1996). Little attention has been paid to the indigenousstrategies to cope with market prod uction and environmental chan ge. Thisar ticle argues that these strategies offer impor tant clues for th e creation of viable developmen t and land tenure models in indigenous territories.
These issues are explored among the Piaroa, a people of the MiddleOrinoco who have gone through rapid culture change during the last 30years. These chan ges have included migrations en masse towards areas witheasy access to Western services and goods, in the periphery of theirtraditional territory. In this process, the Piaroa have had to balancetheir need for forested areas, essen tial for their agroforestal practices, andtheir need for areas with access to Creole markets and services. Theirresponses to these opposing forces show that they maintain flexible andadaptive land use patterns, which contain many clues to the paradoxes of development in Amazonia. However, the models of land-titling anddevelopmen t applied in their terr itory have not considered th ese dynamics
and, on the contrary, these have generally represented obstacles to thePiaroa’s capacities to find answers to their current problems.More dramatically, the new territorial distribution of the Piaroa has
caused territorial conflicts with Creole farmers and other indigenouspeoples, who compete with them for natural resources, particularlyforested land, in areas with booming population growth and environ-mental degradation. The state’s responses to these problems have been atbest highly inefficient; and at worst they have caused further inter-ethnicfrictions through conflicting and often corrupted land -titling p rogrammes.These have exposed the state of land insecurity in which indigenous
peoples are living in th e countr y, and the n ecessity to fin d ways to integratetheir perspectives and needs into a new land tenu re model.
The Piaroa territory
Written accounts prior to the 1970s agree in describing the Piaroa asevasive and fearful people, who avoided confrontation by moving awayfrom areas of contact (Chaffanjon, 1986[1889]; Overing, 1975; Wilbert,1958). H ence, in spite of more than 300 years since th eir first contact withJesuit missionaries, their relations with Western society were restricted tobrief and specific economic transactions until well into the 1970s. Untilthen, most Piaroa were living in small, dispersed, and very mobile
communities, located in th e secluded inland forests of the middle O rinoco.Each settlemen t was formed by one or two communal hou ses, isodæ (pl. of isode) , inhabited by a group of families intimately related , the tiki shavarwa.
Each commun ity was composed of 35 to 60 people on average, who consti-tuted an ideal economic and social en tity. In reality there was considerablecirculation of goods and people between neighbouring communities,which were related through mar riage alliances. The cluster of villages thatoccupied the same valley or sub-valley generally formed informal alliancesbased on social, trade an d religious relations (Overing, 1975; Zent, 1992).
The isode was a spectacular, palm-thatched, conic house that couldaccommodate up to 100 people and needed two to four months to build.As in most Guianese societies, the settlement was the result of individuallynegotiated relationships (Clastres, 1977; Rivière, 1984). In many ways, theleader, called isode rua or just rua, built it through th e use of his socialnetwork. His role as a political leader was inseparable from his religiousone, so h e was what could be thought of as the shaman. At a spiritual level,the rua was responsible for the well-being of his community. He was incharge of maintaining the necessar y equilibrium between the communityand the supern atural world, guarantee ing the fer tility of the land as muchas the health of his followers. The composition of the isode was highlydependen t on its political alliances, since ever y Piaroa would prefer to liveas close as possible to their political allies and to a powerful shaman
(Boglar, 1971; Overing, 1975). Hence, notions of territoriality were necess-arily flexible and easily adaptable to chan ges in the political scenario. Thatis, community boundaries were more social than material.
Accordingly, territorial boundaries were informal, fluid and flexible,constantly adapting to changes in their political alliances. The Piaroa’saversion to other peoples, and to the Creoles in particular, was an import-ant reason for moving away, avoidance being their most common answerto terr itorial conflict. For th is purpose, each h ousehold had more than onehouse at any one time, each of which was involved in the system of produc-tion th at character ized th eir settlement pattern . In th is way, in th e event of
invasion or con flict with oth er groups, the community chan ged its locationwithout severely affecting their productive capabilities.
Land use was another important factor in their territorial decisions.Settlements were generally located in the centre of gardens, and newgardens were opened further from the village as the lands around thesettlement got scarce. As this happened, provisional houses were built inthe centre of new gardens, and these were used as temporary residencesduring periods of work or during hunting and gathering treks. Eventually,one of these would become a permanent residence, and so the centre of hu man activity would be relocated aroun d it. This pattern had also impor t-ant seasonal variations. During the dry season, the isode split into severalsmaller camps, generally composed of one extended family, which tookadvantage of the more abundant hunting and fishing opportunities.
At some point in th e 1970s this pattern star ted chan ging radically as aresult of the Piaroa’s increasing dependence on Western services andgoods (Boglar and Caballero, 1982). Several decades of peaceful relations
with their neighbours, and especially with the much-feared Creole, ageographical expansion towards the inhabited borders of their traditionalland s, and the breakdown of their health/ religious system d ue to theirmore periodic relations with other peoples and the spread of Westerndiseases, were at the heart of these changes (Mansutti, 1990; Zent, 1992).Thus, from the 1960s onwards, the Piaroa started migrating en massetowards sources of Western ser vices and goods, mostly in search of medicalcare, which became essential for their survival.
The speed of these changes was such that Zent estimated that only 15years after Overing’s first visit to Piaroa land, communities living inconditions similar to those described by her and others (Boglar, 1970;Monod, 1970; Wilber t, 1958) only rep resented 5 percen t of the total popu-lation. During th is period, more than 90 percent of them h ad moved to th erim of their traditional territory (see map). The isode and the settlementpattern that it represented became a rarity of the most remote areas of theirheartland, and leadership restructured around the skills of youngcommunity leaders to deal with the Creole world, displacing traditionalleaders and th eir re ligion-based power, which collapsed together with th eirhealth / religious system. Nowadays, most Piaroa live in large com mu nities,
of more than 100 people, which resemble in many aspects the poor ruralcommunities of most of Venezuela’s countryside. Their material andsymbolic life has also changed tremendously.
In their downriver movements, the Piaroa have been confronted withother peoples and with Creole farmers. In th eir competition for spaces withaccess to Western services and goods, their margins for mobility have beenredu ced. This competition h as sparked conflicts through which the Piaroahave developed a new sense of property over the land, which responds tothe needs of their future agroforestal practices in areas where land isincreasingly scarce. Their more active par ticipation in aspects of the Creole
world has also produced changes in their attitude towards and under-standing of the ter ritor y.
Changes in the Piaroa’s attitude towards territorial conflict becameobvious to the external world in the early 1980s, when a dispute betweenseveral Piaroa com munities from the Guanay Valley and a r ich Creole cattlefarmer reached the national press. The problem started in 1976, whenHerman Zing Reverón, a representative of the most traditional Venezue-lan oligarchy, decided to open a cattle farm in the so-called tierras baldias(no-man’s lands) of Guanay, in the heart of Piaroa territory. Initially, thePiaroa d id not see any problem with th e ar rival of the farm and its workers,and it actually became a convenient source of metal tools, which theyexchan ged for food and labour. Soon after settling in, however, the Piaroawere startled at the construction of a 12 km metallic fence, which did not
allow them to access their traditional gardening, hunting and gatheringareas. When they complained, the farm workers respon ded with an escala-tion of reprisals, which ended in serious violations of human rights and in
the destruction and looting of commun al houses and gardens (Calzadilla,1982). In the early 1980s, helped by several human rights and indigenousorgan izations, the Piaroa took Zing Reverón to cour t. Ten years later, ZingReverón was evicted from the valley and the Piaroa were granted aprovisional title over the lands in d ispu te. Th is dispu te h ad a unifying effectamong Piaroa communities of the country, who organized the first pan-Piaroa congress in 1984, with the aim of taking common action againstfutu re Creole invasions (Con greso Piaroa, 1984) . Since th en , avoidance hasno longer been the primary way of dealing with conflict over land rights,which has had an obvious effect on their perception of boundaries andproperty.
During the last two decades, however, territorial conflicts like theGuanay case have become more and more common. The governmentrespon ses to these problems have been erratic and insufficient. Th e maincharacteristic of the government land tenure programmes applied in theregion so far has been their lack of connection with indigenous views andneeds.
Government land tenure programmes in indigenous areas
The government responses to land insecurity in indigenous areas havebeen of two types: the assignation of provisional land titles, and th e creationof protected areas, within which indigenous peoples are ‘allowed’ toremain so long as they do n ot harm the environment (i.e. maintaining their‘traditional styles of life’).
The first strategy was based on the application of the Agrarian Refor mLaw from 1960. This law was developed to suit the needs and conditions of poor Creole farmers in other areas of the country, and therefore was
un suitable for the Amerind ian case. However, its app lication in ind igenousterritories became of primary importance for people committed to theindigenous cause and for indigenous peoples themselves. They saw in itsapplication a pragmatic solution to the problem of land insecurity that hadhistorically affected indigenous peoples in the country. Nevertheless, theapplication of this law constituted a violation of native rights and theirunderstanding of territory, since it atomized and restricted their posses-sion, ignoring basic aspects of their land use practices such as mobility,flexibility and fluidity of boundaries. It also reduced land rights to aWestern understanding of land, not recognizing major differences betweenthe Amerindian and the Creole view of nature. But above all, the mainproblem was that the law was never properly applied, even within its ownparameters.
Ver y few commun ities on Piaroa land received titles over the land thatthey had legitimately occupied pr ior to the ap proval of the law, which wasthe main requirement for its application (Article 16 of the Agrarian
Reform Law, 1960). Moreover, the provisional status of these titles leftindigenous communities legally unprotected against changes in the orien-tation of the government.3 Also, the average area granted per communitywas about 9,000 ha, and even in the best cases these did not match theactual land use area of the community. In 1986, for instance, San Pedro, acommunity located on the right bank of the Cataniapo River, was granteda title over an area of 18,400 ha, stretch ing from th e right bank of the riverto the nor th. Th is title left about 50 percent of the actual land use area of the community, which we estimated at 31,500 ha, out of their territorialboundaries. In other cases, such as in Gavilán, in the same basin, thegovernment officers’ ignorance about the local geography, and the lack of participation of community members, produced a surreal land title whichdescribed the area bordering to the north and west as ‘no-man’s land’( tierras baldías), meaning that the land shrinks as new settlers colonize it,since its borders are tierra baldía on ly insofar as no one decides to settle inthem. But beyond these irregularities, the main p roblem of the assignationof land titles to indigenous communities was that it atomized indigenouslands, denying the continuum of possession and use throughout theirtraditional territories. In other words, community titles constituted an
expropriation of the areas surrounding the community, restricting theirland use to fixed, Western-defined portions of land, which ignored basicprinciples of shifting agriculture and foraging as legitimate economicactivities (see below).
The second strategy adopted by the Venezuelan government was thecreation of protected areas (ABRAE – Áreas Bajo Régimen de Adminis-tración Especial), which included nat ional parks, reser voirs, natu ral mon u-ments and biosphere reserves. These areas were established as a result of pressures from and negotiations with environmentalist movements.However, thanks to the alliance between environmentalist groups and
indigenous organizations, and also because of the development of scien-tific research that unveiled the relations between tropical forests and theirnative inhabitan ts (e .g. Den evan et al., 1984; Posey, 1982; Posey and Baleé,1989), this type of strategy increasingly involved indigenous peoples asactive agents in the conservation and development of environmentallyfragile areas.
The most recently created of these areas was the Upper Orinoco-Casiquiare Biosphere Reserve, in 1991, which is the largest in the world of th is type, and is almost ent irely in Yanomami ter ritor y. Until present times,the reser ve area has been colonized by small gold miners (garimpeiros) , whohave been accused of numerous ecological and human right abuses bothin Brazil and Venezuela (Kopenawa, 1994; Ramos, 1991). The creation of the Biosphere Reserve had an obvious conservationist orientation,
although th ere were u nsuccessful attempts to integrate th e Yanomami intothe design of the regulations and demarcation of the reserve. In allABRAEs, indigenous peoples were assured of the ir right to use an d man age
their traditional lands, although they were not given any legal documentor status to guarantee their possession in the future. In these protectedareas, Creole colonizations are not allowed, so that indigenous landproblems were supposed to be solved without the need to legalize theirpossession.
In spite of constituting areas that generally satisfy the land require-ments of indigenous peoples, the ABRAE presen ts a series of problems thatthreatens indigenous peoples’ future land rights. In the first place, theABRAEs are ter ritor ies of the state, where indigen ous peoples are ‘allowed’to stay, which leaves them unprotected in the event of change in thegovernment policies towards the environment. The unpredictability of thegovernment’s decisions in this sense has been witnessed more than once,as in 1996, when the government of Rafael Caldera proposed to revoke twoprevious presidential decrees, Nos. 269 and 2552, which proh ibited miningand logging in Venezuela’s Amazonia. This proposal was the result of stron g pressures by mining compan ies, who intended to h ave access to goldsources in the southern ter ritories. This project was on ly stopped th anks topressures by environmentalist groups, indigenous organizations and aformal complaint by the European Commission, which h ad granted about
US$8 million for the project of regulation and control of the BiosphereReser ve in the same state. Moreover, th e state does not generally have th eper sonnel and the funds to exercise effective con trol over the vast areas of land that are categorized as ABRAE in the country. Therefore, regardlessof the appropriateness of the extension of certain ABRAEs for the landnecessities of indigenous people, they constitute a permanent threat totheir land rights.
One of the obvious problems of both strategies has been the absenceof the ind igenous perspective in their design and implemen tation. As Grayputs it, experience shows that ‘land titling is really only successful if
indigenous peoples are involved from the start an d are completely involvedin both standard setting and implementation . This is not common’ (Gray,1994: 3). Indigenous peoples, however, have been producing answers totheir new territorial reality. These go from political mobilizations indefence of their land rights, to more subtle changes in their land usepattern s and n otions of terr itorial borders. In th e following pages I shouldlike to develop these last two aspects. It is my view that the strength thatindigenous organizations have shown during the last decades in thedefence of their land rights at national and international levels, such asduring the discussion of Articles 119–26 of the Venezuelan Constitution,has only been possible as a result of important changes at the level of thelocal communities; most significantly in their notions of territoriality andland use.
Land use change and territoriality among the Piaroa
The Piaroa identify themselves very strongly with the forest. The expres-
sion dearuæ (pl.) is used to describe themselves as ‘masters’ or ‘owners’ of the forest (Anduze, 1974; Overing, 1988), implying that they hold theknowledge to control or manage its elements. They associate the forest(dea) with th eir gen eral well-being, and their exten sive use an d knowledgeof its elements contrasts with their poor perception of non-forestedenvironments, such as savann ahs (mehiña) and rocky outcrops ( inawa), thatare foun d scattered throughout their land . Agroforestry is the ir predomi-nant econ omic activity, and it is still accompan ied by hun ting, fishing andgathering th roughout th e en tire ter ritor y, which makes them relatively self-sufficient in terms of food (cf. Hidalgo, 1998; Melnyk, 1995).
The Piaroa depend on Western society for many other aspects of theireveryday life though, especially for the acquisition of metal tools andmedical care. Access to sources of these services and goods has become amajor driving force in their spatial reorganization (Zent, 1993). Creoleinfrastructure, however, has been built without much ecological consider-ation and mostly on savannahs and open landscapes, simply because it iseasier to build there. Thus, the Piaroa have been forced to move to theperiphery of their traditional territories, in search of areas that provideboth access to abundan t forest resources and a source of Creole goods and
services. This process has also affected other indigenous peoples andCreole farmers in the coun tr y, with th e obvious result of transpor ting landuse patterns to areas not always consistent with those for which they weredeveloped (cf. Fölster, 1995).
In accordance with their traditions and land use patterns, most Piaroacommunities remain within forested areas when approaching sources of Western goods and ser vices. Therefore , un like recen tly arr ived groups andCreole farmers, their communities are almost invariably located at a cer taindistance from the side of the road (see Plate 1) , which gives them strategicaccess to areas suitable for their agricultural and extractive p ractices. Th is
location, and the inland orientation of their agricultural expansion, allowsthem to keep the levels of productivity withou t a drastic reduction of yieldsduring the fallow period. Besides this, their land use strategies tend toneutralize the greater stress to which the surrounding lands of their largeseden tar y communities are exposed.
Shifting agriculture is still the main productive technique across theirterritory, although it has experienced some transformations as a result of their more permanent settlement pattern. As in most lowland SouthAmerica, their agroforestal practices are composed of a series of phasesaimed at allowing the recovery of the woody vegetation of the forest, whilemanipulating its vegetal composition in favour of socially valued species(Carneiro, 1961; Clay, 1996; Denevan and Padoch, 1987; Posey and Balée,1989) . This is mainly don e th rough the management of plant species that,
Plate 1 Views of the Cataniapo road, showing Creole colonizations directly colonization at about 1.3 km from the road (right). This location gives the Piaroa eagricultureSource: Landsat TM (1998: bands 2, 3 and 4).
due to th eir ability to compete for the resources made available by clearingthe forest, exercise a natural con trol over th e growth of undesired species.The basis of this plant management corresponds to the classical
maize–cassava– palmae sequence ( Staver, 1989).The Piaroa distinguish between the cultivation phase of a garden,
patha, characterized by the pre-eminence of cassava, ire, and a series of fallow phases, resabæ (pl.) , when palms and other slow-growing cultigensare p redominan t. The first lasts between 3 to 5 years, and the fallow ph asesabout 12. Thus, fields are used for about 15 years before they are clearedagain and re-planted. However, in areas where land is increasingly scarcethere is a ten dency to clear younger fallows if there is no more land avail-able around the community, or if the lands located at shorter distancesshow a healthy growth of the secondary vegetation in a shorter period of time.
The selection of an area for clearing and establishing a garden is basedon social, ecological and symbolic criteria. In border areas, where severalfamily groups or factions cohabit in large commun ities, each faction h as itsown gardens and occupies the lands of their community of origin; that is,the lands and secondary forests of their isode. These territories generallycorrespond to a valley or a sub-valley located at a walking distance fromtheir present community (see Plate 2). New gardens are generally openedin the surroundings of their old gardens, so that they tend to keep them
within the valley or along the same stream and its ramifications. As newgardens are opened further and further away, the areas closer to thecommunities are managed as fallows, allowing the recovery of secondaryforest to the point of re-gardening. Gardens and fallows are then concen-trically arranged around the new large communities. Therefore, shiftingcultivation takes place in circles representing different stages of develop-men t that expand from cen tre to per ipher y, and they start again when thesecondar y vegetation of the first garden s shows a healthy recover y and cansupport new gardening.
The incorporation of new members into a community also implies
their incorporation into this territorial and land use system. Since newmembers will nor mally become so by means of mar riage alliances, they willgenerally help in the work of a family or faction’s land. The general rulefor the incorporation of new members to a commu nity’s productive systemis that a new couple should work in the gardens or the territory of theparents of the wife, so th at women can work with their own relatives. Never-theless, if the wife is from another commun ity, the n ewcomers work in thegardens or lands of the husband’s relatives.
Because the Piaroa never entirely abandon a field as a resource zoneonce it has been cleared, th eir claims over a por tion of land d o n ot ceasewith the lifespan of the garden phase. Secondary harvesting, hunting andcollection of wild species continue until the secondary forest is clearedfor fur ther cropp ing. Thus, ever y settlement has vast areas of fallow
surrounding the commun al house ( isode) or commun ity. In fact, the Piaroaprefer secondary forests for opening new clearings or building newcommunities. When asked, they argue that secondary forest is easier toclear, and the fact that it has been used before is a good indicator of soilfer tility. The imp or tance of secondar y forests and fallows for the Piaroa canbe appreciated in the complexity of the plant management techniquesassociated to them. In Cataniapo, 54 out of the 65 plants my informantsrecognized as food, in a non-exhaustive ethnobotanical listing, werepresent in these environments (Freire, 2002). Zent found that the
361
Freire: Land Use among th e Piaroa
Plate 2 Factions’ distribution of land around San Pedro, in the upperCataniapoSource: Landsat TM (1998).
complexity of the fallows increases as they get older. He found 59 taxa of wild plants in the ear lier succession and 260 taxa of wild p lants in the oldersuccession (Zent, 1995: 79). Nowadays, these environments are also the
source of most marketable crops, and therefore the main source of theirincomes in cash (Freire, n .d.) . Remote family lands are u sed to gain accessto forest products that are exhausted in the new sedentary communities.In others, it seems to be a practice mainly oriented to maintain ownershipover the ancestral territory.
Garden–fallow dynamics are the basis of the Piaroa’s notion of landrights. This is par ticularly eviden t in border areas, where suitable lands foragriculture in the vicinity of large comm un ities are increasingly scarce. Thecontinuous extraction and manipulation of species from fallows are themain prerequisites for ter ritorial claims. This custom makes migrant Piaroafrom distant regions engage in long trips oriented to hunt and gatherproducts from the old secondary forests of their isode of origin. In somecases, commuting to their family lands can take several days, but fewfamilies give up their rights over these territories, even if they are ‘econ-omically unprofitable’. This is borne out by the great attention paid byPiaroa to land-use marks, which contrasts with their minimal interest ingenealogies. They can easily iden tify secon dar y forests and th eir owners, ortheir land genealogy, even if they cannot detail the family lines that linkthe land with its owner. In the upper Cataniapo, several informan ts claimed
their property rights over fallows used by their ‘ancestors’ as early as the1920s (see Appendix). These areas are generally associated with the oldestmembers of the community that have a direct relation with the originalsettlement of the area, or to the community as a whole if no particularperson is making use of the forest. These lands are called tabotihaminaresaba, old gardens of the ancestors.
The only land dispute among neighbouring Piaroa communities thatI observed during my fieldwork was based on arguments such as these. Thedispute started in 1984, when a faction living in the community of SanPedro, in the upper Cataniapo basin, decided to split and create a new
commun ity on the opposite riverbank. Since th ey were mostly immigran tsfrom the more remote area of the Cuao basin, th ey had no claims over th esecondar y forest sur round ing San Pedro, and instead th ey cleared primar yforest around th eir new commun ity. As friction between the two communi-ties grew, however, th e p eople from the n ewly founded commun ity of SanPablo decided to move further down the river, at about 50 minutes bycanoe from San Pedro, leaving behind the gardens and fallows they had just open ed. Th ese gardens were aban doned for over a decade. It wasbecause these fallows were so close to San Pedro that their owners decidednot to return to them.
At the beginning, no one made too much of a fuss about the fallows.In 1999, however, as the people from San Pablo star ted applying for a landtitle to the National Agrarian In stitute ( IAN), the possession of these lands
became of primar y impor tance for both communities, because they deter -mined their boundary. The people of San Pablo claimed that they hadcleared the forest and gardened there, so th at those lands should be within
their community boundaries. However, San Pedro’s leaders argued thatthey had never made use of those lands after moving down the river, andfurther that they were not original inhabitants of the upper Cataniapobasin, so they did n ot have rights over th e land. The San Pedro commun ityagreed with their leaders’ argument as a whole but, nevertheless,considered it extremely rude when one of their most forthright leadersdecided to open a new garden on the land in dispute; ‘He is looking fortrouble, as usual’, community members told me. The government officersdecided th at they would n ot grant p roper ty titles to either of the commun i-ties until the dispute was settled among themselves. For the governmentofficers, this dispute seemed irrelevant, since neither of the communitieshad actually paid much attention to the lands for over a decade. For thecommun ities, to clarify the r ights of one or the o ther over these fallows wasa prerequ isite for r eaching an agreemen t. In th e past, this sor t of disputewould have been sorted out through migration. However, the new settle-ment patterns and land requirements of most contemporary Piaroa maketheir traditional ways of handling territorial conflict impracticable. To myknowledge, this dispute is still going on.
Therefore, in spite of being one of the most important grounds for
territorial claims, the relation between land use and territoriality is notalways unambiguous. As land use changes, land rights change, and theseare redefined according to the context in which th ey are d iscussed. In thesame way, it is difficult to generalize about the construction of territorialboun daries amon g the Piaroa, except for the fact that the primar y relationbetween the Piaroa and the land is one of use.
Regarding the area used for hunting, gathering and fishing, Zent hasestimated th at the more traditional Piaroa from the upper Cuao, who livein conditions similar to those described in pre-1970s’ ethnographies, huntin a 10 km radius from the community, and even during camping trips
rarely go further. In the peripheral communities of Cataniapo, where Icollected similar data, there h as been a small expansion of the area coveredin hunting and gathering, although it has not been proportional to thelevels of population growth and sedentarism. In San Pedro, a communityof 116 inhabitants with abundant wild forest in the vicinity, most huntingtrips extended between 7 and 11 km. In Gavilán, with 210 inhabitants andon the main road connecting the basin with the state’s capital, somehu nting and gathering trips extended between 12 km an d 14 km. However,most of the collection of wild species also took place within an area similarto that described by Zent for upper Cuao commun ities. Longer d istanceswere only covered for the collection of species with a known specificlocation outside the area generally used by the comm un ity, such as for thecollection of seje ( Jessenia bataua) , abund ant in savann ahs located at about
50 km to the nor th. For th ese trips they generally use public transpor t. Thetendency in the upper Cataniapo is to make hunting and gathering tripsthat do not include camping in the forest. Most of the trips that took us
further than a day’s walk were made by canoe or by car.Finally, most of the Piaroa’s market strategies are also focused on the
exploitation of primary and secondary forest ecosystems, mainly throughthe commercialization of non-timber forest produ cts. For th is pu rpose, thecomposition of fallows is manipulated to privilege the growth of certainmarketable plants that are, nevertheless, intercropped with moretraditional ones. Fallow and forest environments provide more than 80percen t of th e variety of products sold by Piaroa families in Creole markets.These h ave better market value th an garden crops, such as cassava, and theydemand very little labour investment, since weeding is practically unnec-essary during the fallow phase and there is almost no processing for mostof these products. In fact, many studies have shown that this strategy mayactually be the most suitable form of market exploitation for Amazonianenvironments (Hecht, 1992; Mendelsohn and Balick, 1995; Peters et al.,1989; Posey, 1992; Zent, 2001). But above all, the focus on commercializ-ing fallow products has the advantage of allowing longer periods of produc-tion in fixed portions of land without harming the forest’s capacity torecover. In this way, the bases of shifting cultivation are preserved in spiteof the p roblems caused by increasing par ticipation in the market and the
land scarcity produced by their current settlement patterns. Accordingly,in Cataniapo p opu lation growth has been accompan ied by an en largemen tof the fallows aroun d th e commun ities, rather than by an expansion of thegardening areas.
Never theless, periph eral commun ities, their land use strategies and thecultural practices that sustain them are under significant pressuresnowadays as a result of the expansion of the national frontier and thecolonization of traditional lands by Creole farmers and other indigenouspeoples. A great deal of what will happen with these productive systems andthe knowledge that sustains them depends on the legalization of adequate
and prop or tional extensions of land for th e future generations. The Piaroaare fully aware of this fact and land issues form part of their daily conver-sations and anxieties. A new land ten ure model for the area necessarily hasto take into accoun t their land use strategies if the Piaroan altern atives forlocal development are to be respected. Many of their self-demarcationinitiatives of the last decades give impor tant clues in th is direction .
Piaroa self-demarcation and new territoriality
The Piaroa’s perception of the environment is not solely related to theirethnoecological knowledge and settlement patterns. Symbolic aspectsshape their land use patterns as much as ecological constraints. In their
traditional society, the success of a Piaroa as a gardener, a hunter or aleader was seen as more depen dent on his capacity to deal with th e invisibleaspects of natu re than with the physical ones. This was also d eter minant for
their productive systems, and still has a strong relevance in contemporarysociety. In their two pan-Piaroa Congresses (1984, 1994), they demandedthis aspect of territoriality be considered in delimiting their territory. In1994, for instance, several Piaroa communities decided to ban th e en tr y of tourists to the base of the Autana Mountain because it was causing unrestamon g the population of the u pper Cuao and Sipapo Rivers, who blamedthe tourists for a series of epidemics that had broken out during theprevious years. The Piaroa believe th at the base of the Autan a is inhabitedby maeri, spirits of the forest, who are responsible for most of their misfor-tunes.
Thus, there is a necessar y linkage between indigenous ethnoecologicalknowledge an d the cultural logic und er which th is knowledge is organ izedfor action. These aspects of nature form part of the Piaroan cartographyand are present in their mythology and beliefs. Almost every accident of the landscape has a symbolic meaning for the Piaroa and determines atti-tudes and actions that affect their land use patter ns. Much of this symboliccartography has survived the important changes that their material andsymbolic culture have experienced during the last decades. Appendixes 1and 2 show sketches of the upper Cataniapo basin drawn by community
leaders of San Pedro and Gavilán/ San Pablo during my fieldwork in1999–2000. In both sketches, comm un ity leaders give a careful accoun t of the Piaroa toponymy of the basin, which includes aspects of the landscapethat form essen tial parts of the ir symbolic life an d h istor y. The Iwarimo daya(Nieves Fall) , on the upper Cataniapo, for example, is a rocky formationon the top of the waterfall that represents a sloth ( iwarimo). In the past,this location was used for rituals associated with masculinity ordeals and itwas thou ght to prod uce general discomfort if a person not taking p art inthese rituals touched or was even exposed to the sight of it. Although inCataniapo these rituals have mostly been abandoned, the Iwarimo daya is
still treated with respect and avoidance, and it represents the limit of SanPedro’s upper basin occupation . These landmarks are easily recogn ized bymost Piaroa, and they constitute essential aspects of their collectivememor y. Sketches 1 and 2 (see Appendix) are examples of their attemptsto translate their territorial understanding and experience into Westernterms.
Linking aspects of ethnoecological knowledge, land use practices andsymbolic representation of the environment requires the participation of the indigenous communities them selves in the defin ition and demarcationof their lands. In this sense, indigenous communities have abundantexperience at present. During the last decades, the Piaroa have movedtowards a more material and rigid perception of their commun ity boun d-aries. A project carried out in 1997 by the Human Rights Office of Puer to
Ayacucho, together with Piaroa communities of the Cataniapo basin, givesome in teresting insights into th is process.
The project was aimed at stopping the advance of Creole new settlers
towards the few territories that have so far remained purely Piaroa in theupper Cataniapo basin, about 30 km from th e state’s capital. The basin h adbeen Piaroa territory for most of the 20th century, and it has always beenan impor tant link between inland Piaroa and th e Creole world for the tradeof Western goods in on e direction , and natural resources and food in theother. However, the economic boom of the state’s capital during the lastthree decades has made Cataniapo an important pole of attraction forCreole farmers and o ther indigenous peoples, who have mad e a living fromextractive activities and monocropping agriculture. Nevertheless, theupper basin of the river is still purely Piaroa and the abundance of naturalresources allows them to carry out their productive activities with littleproblem.
The Human Rights Office project was aimed at demarcating with mile-stones the boundaries of three Piaroa commun ities of the midd le Cataniapo(Samaría, Gavilán and Las Pavas) whose lands represent the frontierbetween the new colonizations and Piaroa territory. Community membersparticipated in all the phases of the project with the assistance of a geogra-ph er in the field. Although the demarcation d id not have any legal suppor t,the project proved to be successful in a couple of cases where the communi-
ties expelled invaders, encouraged by the presence of the milestones. Quitesimply, for the Piaroa the milestones represented the Creole’s recognitionof their proper ty rights over th eir traditional lands. The natural markers of community boundaries, such as composition of the flora and land geneal-ogy, were not easy for non-Piaroa to recognize, and the difficulties of commun icating this information, due to linguistic, knowledge and culturalgaps between the two groups, made it d ifficult for th e Piaroa to stand up fortheir rights. From a Creole perspective, the milestones put ‘objective’markers around the ‘back lands’ surrounding the communities. The mile-stones, so to speak, sorted out a problem of translatability of property rights
over the land between the Creole and the Piaroa.In fact, the problem of translatability in relation to territorial and
ethnobotanical knowledge is one of the most serious obstacles that indigen-ous communities face in relation to land rights nowadays. Developmentplanners in the region have tackled this gap in very ineffective ways so far.To start with, Venezuelan legislation never even recognized the existenceof indigenous notions of property, let alone their rights, and their terri-tories were considered tierras baldías, no-man’s lands, until 1999. Westernmyths of primitive communism and societies living in pristine forests wereat the heart of this misunderstanding. As in most of lowland SouthAmerica, a series of misconceptions about indigenous productive systemsand a lack of understanding of their folk notions of proper ty contributedto th e d ispossession of indigenous peoples.
As shown above, indigenous peoples have their own notions of property, which they express and identify in their own way. The problemis to recognize the codes that dominate their attitudes towards the land.
Property is an expression of human relations, agreements and mutualunderstandings (Hann, 1993; Shipton, 1994). In the best of cases,Creole–indigenous negotiations over land rights have been characterizedby a lack of real means of communication between the two systems of property. The new legislation on indigenous land rights presents a poten-tial solution to this problem, but its implementation will remain difficultinsofar as the predicaments of intercultural commun ication are n ot solved.
Indigenous peoples have already taken the lead in the translation of their territorial experience into Western terms. Examples of this are thespontaneous processes of self-demarcation. Th ese initiatives are par t of anongoing process of interpretation of their current reality, which includeseconomic, social and symbolic responses to the challenges of living at themargins but still within national society. These responses contain import-ant clues for ecologically and socially sound development in Amazonia. Atpresent, the main challenge for researchers, development planners andindigenous peoples is to find ways of incorporating them into an indigen-ous tenure model for the area.
Notes
I thank Peter Rivière, Stephen Nugent, Stanford Zent, Laura Rival, Paul Henley,Omar Tremont, Josep Gari and Sandra Jaeger for aid and advice generously givenon earlier drafts of this ar ticle or the thesis on which it is based (Freire, 2002) . Thisresearch was sponsored by the O RS (UK), Oxford Un iversity Overseas Bursar y andFONACIT (Venezuela). Plates 1 and 2 are based on satellite images (Landsat TM)provided by the Venezuelan Ministry of Environment in the state of Amazonas(SADA-Amazonas).
1 Ar ticle 119:
The State shall recognize the existence of indigenous peoples and of theircommunities, their social, political, economic organization, theirreligions; likewise it shall recognize their habitats and their rights overtheir ancestral lands which they have trad itionally occupied, and which arenecessary to develop and guarantee their ways of life. The NationalExecutive shall, with th e par ticipation of the indigenou s peop les, establishand guarantee their collective property rights, which shall be deemed tobe inalienable, non-expropriatable and non-transferable, according tothat which has been established herein by this law and Constitution.(Venezuela, 2000 [1999]: 102)
2 In fact, more than two years after the approval of the law ver y little has beenadvanced in relation to the demarcation of the indigenous territories in thecountry. Although indigenous communities have enthusiastically organizedthemselves for the demarcation of their lands, experience shows that there still
is a long way to go before the law can be implemented. It is precisely in thecontext of the d iscussions arising du ring th is implementation period that thisarticle aims to make a contribution.
3 Although indigenous land titles in the countr y have been divided intoprovisional and definitive titles, the truth is that neither fulfilled the adminis-trative proceedings to become definitive titles, because the institute in chargeof assigning the land (Agrarian National Institute) never received the landsfrom th e Ministr y of Agriculture – the official administrator of the lands of thenation – in indigenous areas. As a result, definitive land titles have beenrevoked and r eassigned, provoking inter-commun al frictions and instability inthe ar ea ( Arvelo-Jiménez et al., 1990) .
Appendix
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Sketch 1 Section of a map drawn by members of the community SanPedro, showing community boun daries, old garden s and symbolicallyimpor tant p laces in the up per Cataniapo basin (original 594 772 mm) ,July 2000
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Germán Freire has completed a DPhil. in social anthropology at Oxford, whichfocused on land use and social change in the middle Orinoco. He is currentlyteaching on anth ropology and the environment at Goldsmiths and is interested in
aspects of developmen t, environmental an thropology, and indigenous land rightsin lowland South America. Address: 95 Qu een s Drive, London N4 2BE, UK. [email:[email protected]]
