Hiwi People in Bolivarian Venezuela

ResearchOnline@JCU This file is part of the following reference: Scott, Emma Louise (2016) Decolonisation, interculturality, and multiple epistemologies: Hiwi people in Bolivarian Venezuela. PhD thesis, James Cook University. Access to this file is available from: http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/49417/ The author has certified to JCU that they have made a reasonable effort to gain permission and acknowledge the owner of any third party copyright material included in this document. If you believe that this is not the case, please contact [email protected] and quote http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/49417/ DECOLONISATION, INTERCULTURALITY, AND MULTIPLE EPISTEMOLOGIES: HIWI PEOPLE IN BOLIVARIAN VENEZUELA BY EMMA LOUISE SCOTT, BACHELOR OF LIBERAL STUDIES WITH HONOURS IN ANTHROPOLOGY (SUMMA CUM LAUDE) Supervised by Dr. Robin Rodd and Prof. Alexandra Aikhenvald This thesis was submitted to the College of Arts, Society, and Education (CASE) at James Cook University, Townsville in April 2016, in fulfilment of the requirements for a Doctorate of Philosophy in Anthropology Plate 1. A mural of Chávez welcomes travellers at the Puerto Ayacucho bus terminal. i Acknowledgements This thesis would have been impossible without the generosity, hospitality, and friendship of my main Hiwi participants, Clemente and Pedro and their families. These community leaders welcomed my partner and I into their communities with goodwill and laughter, incorporating us into their lives and introducing me to their wealth of experience and knowledge. I will be forever grateful for the kindness of all the Hiwi people living in Santo Rosario and Shalom for sharing their beautiful culture and extensive knowledge with me. To my friends and colleagues in Venezuela I must offer my sincere gratitude. I am extremely grateful to the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC), for allowing me the use of their library and resources. My special thanks goes to Dr Stanford and Dr Eglee Zent for their guidance and assistance during my first forays into fieldwork. I owe my deep appreciation to the hardworking members of Amazonian Centre for Scientific Research of Tropical Diseases (CAICET) for allowing me access to their library and resources. In particular, I grateful to my colleagues Daniela Vargas, Magda Magris, and CAICET Director America Perdona. I would like to thank Maike and Neil Ávila for facilitating my many travels in Venezuela and supporting me on my first forays into the field. For their advice and insightful comments on my thesis, I would also like to thank Jonathon Hill, Tania Granadillo, and Christian Español. For their thoughtful comments on several conference papers I presented based on my thesis, I wish to thank Glenn Shepard, Jean Jackson, Sally Babidge, Bibiana Huggins, Morgan Harrington, Deth Hatton, and Renato Athias. ii In Australia, I owe my most heartfelt thanks to my supervisors Dr. Robin Rodd and Prof. Alexandra Aikenvald for their thoughtful insights, warm encouragement, and tireless work throughout my project. Without their guidance and belief in me, this thesis would not have been possible. I am forever indebted to my post-graduate colleagues at JCU for their helpful remarks, unshakeable collegial solidarity, and for sharing in the highs and lows of undertaking such a project. I owe you everything: Tania Honey, Belinda Duke, Rhian Morgan, David O’Shaughnessy and his partner Lydia Lambrusco, Molly Hoey, Michelle Dyer, Kate Cameron, Imelda Ambelye, Nicole Crowe, Christine Pam, Rohan Lloyd, and Pat Hodgson. I am also grateful to the staff at the Graduate Research School and the College of Arts, Social Science and Education at James Cook University (JCU) for supporting my studies. I owe my utmost gratitude to my amazing partner Mat Loftus, who not only accompanied me on fieldwork trips, fed me, and supported me unfailingly through every stage of my thesis. You are everything to me and I’ll never be able to repay your lasting faith in me—but I’ll certainly try! I wish to thank my parents, Trisha and John Scott, for telling me I could achieve whatever I wanted, wholeheartedly supporting me to do just that, and putting up with the consequences of me believing that. To my late grandparents, Matt and Mary Scott, you inspired me from an early age with your strength, courage, and passion for learning. My gratitude also to my close friends, Amber Webster and Sean Leneghan, for their encouragement and excellent counsel over the years. iii Statement of Originality This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the dissertation itself. iv Statement of the Contribution of Others My partner Mathew Loftus accompanied me for the entirety of fieldwork as a research assistant. I received an APA scholarship from the Australian Government for the first three and a half years of this project. I am grateful to Deth Hatton and Mat Loftus for proofreading the final draft of this thesis and providing editorial and formatting advice. v Abstract Under the Bolivarian government, Venezuela has undergone extensive changes in political, economic, and social policies designed to decolonise liberal conceptions of politics and economics to construct a direct democracy and a socially just economy. This project involves the recognition that indigenous peoples, such as the Hiwi people I work with, inhabit an intercultural space and that the State needs to address the inherent pluriethnicity of Venezuelan society. The opening up of a discursive and practical space for the creation of new socio-political imaginaries draws upon indigenous peoples’ history of resistance and their diverse forms of political-economic organisation. Simultaneously, the government has committed to the promotion of indigenous self- determination, territorial demarcation, and the preservation of cultural knowledge, medicine, language and social organisation. My primary aim in this thesis is to provide a detailed ethnographic description of Hiwi people living in several communities in Amazonas State, based on fourteen months of participant observation and informal interviews with participants in Venezuela. Through my ethnographic analysis of the contemporary social reality and epistemology of Hiwi people, I explore the effects, contradictions, and possibilities of the State’s indigenous policies. The first three chapters focus on Hiwi forms of political, economic, and social organisation, which are positioned in relation to the State’s discourse and practices around indigenous self-determination. Chapters Five to Seven constitute an investigation of Hiwi medical beliefs and practices, convivial morality, and epistemology. These forms of knowledge are grounded in particular assumptions about the world and the fundamental elements of Hiwi thought that radically differ from and vi are drawn out through intercultural comparison with dominant Western systems of knowledge. I argue that Hiwi people negotiate plural systems of meaning in their everyday lives, drawing simultaneously on Hiwi symbols, meanings, and traditions, as well as the mainstream currents in Venezuelan society. In this way, my participants maintain their Hiwi identity while managing to survive and thrive in a society based on vastly different principles. This thesis demonstrates how Hiwi social life is predicated on flexibility, cultural adaptability, autonomy, complementarity, and conviviality, a confluence of principles that I call the paradigm of pluralism and difference. This paradigm allows individuals to select among Hiwi and criollo meanings that structure their lifeworld in the twenty-first century. I consider how the Hiwi intercultural reality contains the seeds of a possible decolonisation of Western ways of being and knowing, which may precede a more practical decolonisation of political and economic theories and practices. I conclude that decolonisation and indigenous self-determination requires a radical intercultural exchange in which indigenous voices are heard and their political, economic, and cultural systems are respected and maintained in their own right. vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... ii Statement of Originality .............................................................................................. iv Statement of the Contribution of Others ........................................................................v Abstract ....................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ...................................................................................................... viii List of Acronyms ........................................................................................................ xii List of Figures ............................................................................................................xvi List of Plates ............................................................................................................ xvii 1. Introduction: Hiwi People, Amazonas, and Intercultural Worlds ............................1 1.1. Amazonas State and Hiwi People ....................................................................5 1.2. Finding my Field Site: Methodology between the Town

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