Q&A with Slavery and Utopia author Fernando Santos-Granero

In the first half of the twentieth century, a charismatic Peruvian Amazonian Indigenous chief played a key role in leading his people, the Ashaninka, through the chaos generated by the collapse of the rubber economy in 1910 and the subsequent pressures of colonists, missionaries, and government officials to assimilate them into the national society. In Slavery and Utopia, Fernando Santos-Granero reconstructs the life and political trajectory of the leader known as José Carlos Amaringo Chico. The people called him Tasorentsi, which is the name the Ashaninka give to the world-transforming gods and divine emissaries that come to this earth to aid the Ashaninka in times of crisis.

Santos-Granero demonstrates that, despite Tasorentsi’s constant self-reinventions, the chief never forsook his millenarian beliefs, anti-slavery discourse, or efforts to liberate his people from white-mestizo oppression. Slavery and Utopia thus convincingly refutes those who claim that the Ashaninka proclivity to messianism is an anthropological invention. We asked Fernando Santos-Granero a few questions about his book, the continued murders of Indigenous leaders in Guatemala and Brazil, and the evolution of Indigenous resistance.

More info

Describe the self-reinventions of Tasorentsi, the messianic Ashaninka leader that is the focus of your study.

José Carlos Amaringo Chico, also known as Tasorentsi, or “all-powerful blower world transformer,” lived during a tumultuous period in the history of Peruvian Amazonia, from the beginning of the rubber boom era, around 1875, to the beginning of the mass colonization of the region in the late 1950s. Throughout this period, Tasorentsi went through multiple and dramatic changes, sometimes in response to external events and sometimes as the result of an inner, moral conversion. In all these instances, he was able to reinvent himself in such a way as to maintain a leading position as either a secular chief or a divine emissary, or a combination of both.

As a young boy, he began working as a debt-peon for a local rubber extractor. During that time, he learned Spanish, became acquainted with the ways of white people, and acquired his Christian name. At around eighteen, he escaped from his boss and begun acting as an intermediary in the slave trade that was promoted and controlled by white rubber extractors and their Indigenous partners. Later on, he was directly involved in the capture of Indigenous slaves and was feared as a renowned warrior chief and shaman. In his mid-thirties, however, he experienced his first moral conversion and quit his slaving activities. Combining an anti-slavery and anti-white discourse with millenarian promises, he inspired a widespread Ashaninka movement that changed the region’s social landscape in the aftermath of the rubber era (1912–1914). 

Conibo group, Ucayali River, 1900s. Known as “Lords of the Ucayali” for the dominion they had historically exerted as pirates and raiders along the Ucayali River, the Conibo together with the Shipibo played an important role in the 1915 uprising and were harshly persecuted. Some of their leaders were captured and sent to prison in Iquitos. Source: A. Miles Moss, A Trip into the Interior of Peru (Lima: Printed by Charles F. Southwell, 1909), 106. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú.

A year later, in 1915, he expanded his influence throughout the region, becoming the paramount leader of a multiethnic uprising of the Ashaninka, Conibo, Yine, and Amahuaca, who until then had been bitter enemies. This feat was only possible through a millenarian discourse that promised liberation from white people, a deep transformation of the world, and the attainment of immortality. With the help of former Indigenous slavers, whom he convinced to join him, he managed to expel most rubber extractors from the region. In time, the government crushed the uprising and Tasorentsi had to hide, but for many years the region was free of white slavers. In the 1920s, having heard of the arrival of a “white god”—Adventist missionary Ferdinand Stahl– Tasorentsi experienced his second moral conversion, adopting an indigenized version of Adventist doctrine, abandoning violence as a means of fighting for the rights of his people, and becoming a very active “people-gatherer” on behalf of the Adventist Church. He never agreed to baptize, for this would have interfered with his shamanic activities and, particularly, with the ayahuasca séances he led to speed up Christ’s second coming.

Although the region’s white landowners pursued, imprisoned, and tortured him, Tasorentsi never stopped fighting for his people’s rights. During the remainder of his life, he promoted the nucleation of people in small settlements to await the arrival of Christ, while at the same time supporting peaceful coexistence with white people. At the same time, however, he encouraged Indigenous economic autonomy, strongly opposed debt-peonage, and endorsed formal schooling as a means of leveling the playing field with white people.

How has the field of anthropology contributed to the "historical amnesia" apparently surrounding the struggles of the Ashaninka?

On the contrary, anthropologists have been crucial in highlighting the long history of Ashaninka resistance against white oppression. Stefano Varese, Eduardo Fernández, Michael Brown, Soren Hvalkof, and Mariella Villasante, to name but a few, have written extensively on Ashaninka past and present-day struggles. Ashaninka people remember their struggles, which are often the main subject of their oral histories. For various reasons, however, in Ashaninka oral tradition there has been less focus on Tasorentsi’s struggles than on other confrontations with white people. I believe the main reason for this “historical amnesia” is that Tasorentsi was not a doctrinally pure Adventist, and the Adventist hierarchy therefore regarded him as somewhat suspect and left him out of their historical narratives; thus, many present-day Ashaninka Adventists do not remember him. This has been compounded by the fact that, for various reasons, Tasorentsi’s political activities have escaped the notice of Amazonianist anthropologists and historians. The main reason for this omission has been the fact that Franciscan missionaries, with the Jesuits, were Peruvian Amazonia’s main early historians, and they had no presence in this region at the time of Tasorentsi’s uprisings. My main objective in writing this book has been to draw attention to this remarkable individual, reintroducing him into Ashaninka historical consciousness and opening the subject to academic scrutiny.

Can you describe the immense body of original materials that you researched for this book? What were the most surprising discoveries to come out of those archival documents, oral histories, musical recordings, and visual works?

I did research in numerous archives and libraries in Peru and the United States. One of my first surprises was learning that the regional and national press had amply covered Tasorentsi’s Ashaninka movement of 1912–1914 and the 1915 multiethnic uprising. Not only that, it also brought to national attention the plight of Amazonian Indigenous peoples under the oppressive labor conditions of the rubber era, generating a heated debate about the causes of Indigenous hostilities. What surprised me was that many journalists and personalities justified Indigenous violence as being the direct result of the oppression and slaving activities of white rubber extractors. Also surprising was the amount of documentation generated by the conflicts between Adventist missionaries and their Indigenous supporters, on the one hand, and white landowners and regional authorities, on the other. The fact that Adventist missionaries were often US citizens of German ancestry meant that every time they were harassed, they informed their consulates. The latter pressured the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which, in turn, prompted regional authorities to investigate the matter. A great amount of information on Tasorentsi’s activities as an Adventist people-gatherer was preserved through this means.

Score of Tasorentsi’s song. Tasorentsi’s song does not resemble any of the known styles of Ashaninka songs, but it has some of the gravity of beshiriantsi worshipping songs. It betrays elements of both the Andean huaynos of the neighboring highland peoples of Pasco and Junín and the ancient Catholic hymns sung in Franciscan missions during colonial times. Courtesy of Bernd Brabec de Mori.

Yet another surprise was the realization that anthropologists who had worked among the Ashaninka in the 1960s and 1980s, such as John Bodley and Jeremy Narby, had collected much information about Tasorentsi’s activities and were generous enough to share it with me. Especially important was a song composed by Tasorentsi and recorded by Narby, provided by someone who had learned it when he was a child. In this song, the charismatic leader encourages his listeners to seek their Father, the solar divinity; announces that the divinity is coming, that he is near; and reveals that he awaits his people in the Sky River of Youth and will make them immortal. I never expected to obtain such a direct testimony of Tasorentsi’s millenarian discourse: one that allowed me to understand the appeal that he had for the region’s Indigenous peoples.

Equally surprising was the fact that I managed to find not one but three photographs of Tasorentsi—a remarkable feat given that they were taken in the 1920s. My greatest surprise, however, was to meet Tasorentsi’s youngest son. I knew that Tasorentsi had had many children and that his descendants lived somewhere along the Pachitea River. One day, an Ashaninka leader, Alcides Calderón, told me that he knew one of Tasorentsi’s nephews and that he was willing to accompany me to interview him. After a long boat trip, we arrived in Segundo Arroyo’s home. As it happened, he was not Tasorentsi’s nephew, but his youngest son. What he shared with me about his father’s last years and death, about which I knew little, helped me finish my book. But, more importantly, knowing him allowed me to perceive Tasorentsi, who until then had been only a historical figure to me, as a real, flesh-and-blood person with many gray areas, like any human being.

Could a figure like Tasorentsi emerge today, and how might the Peruvian authorities and transnational entities respond?

We know of many charismatic Indigenous leaders –whether Ashaninka or not—who, through a millenarian and anti-white discourse, managed to mobilize the Ashaninka against white domination. The best known of these leaders was Juan Santos Atahualpa, a man of Andean origin who, in the mid-eighteenth century, managed to unite the Ashaninka and their Amazonian neighbors to fight the Spaniards. But there were others in the 1890s, the 1910s, the 1940s, and the 1960s, and even as late as the 1970s. So it is quite possible that a figure like Tasorentsi might emerge once more. In fact, a few years ago, during a time of fast and aggressive expansion of extractive activities (oil, gas, timber, and gold) in Ashaninka territory, all kinds of rumors began to spread about how white people intended to exterminate the Ashaninka by abducting people using mysterious flying machines. This created the kind of frenzy that characterizes the early stages of Ashaninka world-transforming movements.

I imagine that if a Tasorentsi-like figure appeared today, the response of the State, extractive companies, and regional authorities would be similar to that of their peers in past ages—to wit, they would attempt to silence him or her through whatever means possible. The only advantage that such a figure would have today is that communication is so fast and widespread that it would be difficult to suppress him or her without generating national and international outrage. Yet the killing of Indigenous leaders continues in Guatemala and Brazil, to name just a few examples, and nothing much happens.

Tell us what you are working on in your role at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

At present, I am engaged in a new research project titled “The Reconquest of Chanchamayo: Frontier Expansion, Modernization, and Nation-Building in Postcolonial Peru, 1847–1891”. The reconquest of Chanchamayo, the Amazon region closest to Peru’s capital, took place in the context of the rapid expansion of internal frontiers that swept the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century. It overlapped the conquest of the West in the United States (1848–1881), the occupation of Araucania in Chile (1861–1883), the conquest of Patagonia in Argentina (1872–1884), and Brazil’s march toward the west, which began in 1864 and has not ended yet.

The reconquest of Chanchamayo—a region that was free from white presence from 1742 to 1847—was seemingly prompted by President Ramón Castilla’s vision of a more modern, civilized, and territorially integrated country. There is evidence, however, that the economic interests of Andean landowners and miners and the civilizing agenda of Franciscan missionaries may have lurked in the background, prompting the State to “reduce” the local Yanesha and Ashaninka populations and occupy their lands. The objective of this project is to disentangle the relative weight of these various social actors in achieving these goals. At the same time, it seeks to examine the position of these actors with regard to what was then called “the Indian problem,” and assess how their goals and actions shaped the evolution of Indigenous resistance. Combining archival materials with oral sources, I intend to bring back to life the voices of these diverse actors and, especially, to rescue from oblivion the will, agency, and creative thinking of the Yanesha and Ashaninka peoples.

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A with Theresa L. Miller on Multispecies Ethnography

The Indigenous Canela of Brazil inhabit a vibrant multispecies community of nearly 3,000 people and over 300 types of cultivated and wild plants living together in a biome threatened with deforestation and climate change. In the face of these environmental threats, Canela women and men work to maintain riverbank and forest gardens and care for their growing crops, whom they consider to be, literally, children. This nurturing, loving

More info

relationship between people and plants—which offers a thought-provoking model for supporting multispecies survival and well-being throughout the world—is the focus of Theresa L. Miller's new book Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil.

We asked Theresa to explain the significance of her research, which reckons with the rapid environmental and climatic changes facing sensitive ecologies as the Anthropocene epoch unfolds.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

Plant Kin is about Indigenous peoples’ environmental knowledge and their resiliency to climate change. I pose the question: How do Indigenous peoples engage with their environment in meaningful ways, even as the environment is rapidly changing in the Anthropocene? For the Indigenous Canela of the Brazilian Cerrado, they engage with their environment through affectionate, caring relationships with nonhuman kin, especially plant kin. By examining these human-plant relationships through what I call a “sensory ethnobotany” approach, Plant Kin offers a way forward for climate change resilience strategies in the Anthropocene.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I have been interested in working with Indigenous peoples since I was an undergraduate at American University making two documentary films on Aymara youth and feminist activists in Bolivia and Diné environmental activists in New Mexico. My interest in human-environment engagements and Indigenous peoples grew while I was working toward my masters degree at Oxford University and I began working in Brazil. Through a serendipitous connection with Dr. William Crocker from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, I visited the Canela village in July 2011 and was eventually adopted by my Canela family. Ever since, I have been connected to and deeply interested in understanding their life-world. Moreover, the ethnobotanical diversity that Canela gardeners manage is impressive and extremely beautiful. I was, and continue to be, drawn to the multi-sensory beauty of diverse human-plant relationships.

How do you interview a plant?

There are various strategies that scholars have offered on how to “interview” and ethnographically study plants (see Hartigan 2017; Myers 2017; among others). Plant Kin looks at this question ethnographically, through its focus on Indigenous life-worlds that have arguably the most complex and detailed ways of engaging with nonhuman kin (see TallBear 2011, 2016; Todd 2016). From an Indigenous Canela perspective, it becomes clear that people engage with plants through multi-sensory, embodied activities of naming and planting seeds and cuttings; tending, weeding, and singing ritually to growing crops; harvesting crops at the end of their life-cycles; and through specific shamanic communication with plants and their master-spirits. For my research, I participated in and observed these activities in multi-sensory and embodied ways in order to understand how Indigenous human-plant communication occurs. While the Canela do not consider themselves to be “interviewing” plants as such, there are ways that they closely engage and communicate with plants that is akin to scientific observation in the Western tradition, and that goes beyond this realm to consider plants as agentive subjects in the Canela community.

Tell us about the part of the world where your research is focused and why you chose this area.

The Brazilian Cerrado is a biome that covers nearly a quarter of Brazil’s territory and is being deforested more rapidly than the Amazon. The Cerrado has long been considered a “sacrifice zone,” as compared to the Amazon (Sawyer 2009; Oliveira and Hecht 2016), and here industrial cattle-ranching and soy and eucalyptus plantations are allowed to run rampant. This was particularly true of the Cerrado during the soy moratorium of 2006–2016 in the Amazon (Gibbs et al. 2015). The Cerrado is an extremely beautiful and diverse biome, with sweeping landscapes and brilliant red earth. I fell in love with the region and its people while living there and experiencing its seasons and ecological diversity. While the threats to the Cerrado are relatively well-understood within Brazil (and there are organizations that work exclusively on conserving this biome), worldwide much more is known about the Amazon and its threats. Plant Kin is an attempt to shed light on the plight—and also the beauty and resiliency—of the Cerrado and its socio-ecological diversity.

How do you see the Anthropocene in terms of “sensory ethnobotany”?

Sensory ethnobotany is the theoretical approach I put forward in the book to take seriously embodied, multi-sensory engagements among people and plants over time and in diverse contexts. The framework can help us understand the Anthropocene—a distinct epoch marked by human activity that has changed the “socio-economic and biophysical spheres” of the earth (Steffen et al. 2015)—in its focus on the lived realities of human-plant engagements in the past, the present, as well as by allowing for contemplations of what those realities could look like in the future. Sensory ethnobotany allows us to reconsider human-plant engagements as not purely economic or nutritional, but rather communicative, generative, caring, and sometimes grounded in kinship ties, as is the case for the Indigenous Canela. In this regard, sensory ethnobotany is a response to Natasha Myers’s (2017: 3-4) call for a “Planthroposcene” in which humans “make allies” with plants. In this way, sensory ethnobotany furthers the dialogue concerning multispecies engagements and how they can contribute to climate change resilience strategies.

In what ways can your work be read as political?

Although not explicitly stated as such, this book is deeply political in that it is grounded in understanding climate change and strategies to deal with and mitigate its effects, which unfortunately is a contested political and economic issue. As Brazil, the US, and other countries across the globe grapple with authoritarian regimes that are dismantling environmental protections and threatening Indigenous rights and livelihoods, the question becomes: how do we fight climate change in hostile political environments? I believe the answer can be found in taking seriously, working closely with, and letting Indigenous peoples lead climate resilience strategies. This is already occurring in Brazil as Indigenous peoples put themselves on the front lines to demand socio-ecological justice through protest movements, running for political office, and stopping policies that threaten Indigenous lives and the environment. Plant Kin is a call to support Indigenous resilience strategies and to make these strategies central to broader environmental decision-making and policymaking worldwide.

How does gender factor in to your research?

Gender is a key component of my research and informs the sensory ethnobotany approach and analysis of Indigenous human-plant relationships described in Plant Kin. For the Canela, as is common in Indigenous Lowland South American communities, the gender binary categories of male and female are crucial to understanding socio-economic, socio-political, socio-cultural, socio-ecological, and aesthetic aspects of the life-world. The gender binary of male/female informs Canela relationships with one another and with nonhuman kin. Yet there are important instances of both people and plants transgressing these gender binaries through third-gender or gender non-conforming identities, activities, and practices. I examine instances of genderqueer gardening in the book and elsewhere (Miller 2018), and it is an important aspect of human-plant relationships that should be explored further.

What do you hope readers, scholars, and researchers take away from your book?

The main point I hope readers take away from Plant Kin is the strength and resilience of Indigenous peoples and the environments they so carefully manage. I also hope that the multispecies embodied approach to nonhumans and especially plants is taken up at a much broader scale to inform not only scholarly discussion, but also everyday human-plant relationships and policymaking around environmental issues. I hope readers come away with a renewed respect for Indigenous worldviews and ways of being and becoming in the world, and are able to appreciate the ways that engaging with plant (and other nonhuman) kin can make the world a better, more inclusive, and more socio-ecologically just place.

Theresa L. Miller is an anthropologist working on environmental and social justice issues. She has worked at the Field Museum and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and is currently a Researcher at FrameWorks Institute in Washington, DC.

www.utexaspress.com