Making an act of absence. Political representation from an Amazonian perspective: the case of the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampis Nation (Peru, Aent Chicham).
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/1678-9857.ra.213464Keywords:
Peruvian Amazon, Wampis, Representation, assembly, political unityAbstract
In 2015, 300 Wampis leaders, belonging to the Aent Chicham linguistic group and living in the northwestern Peruvian Amazon, proclaimed the creation of the Territorial Autonomous Government of the Wampis Nation (GTANW) to claim their international right to self-determination as an indigenous people and to protect their territory from extractive industries. By analysing the phenomenon of the absences of elected representatives from each Wampis village in the GTANW parliament, where the policies of the Wampis Nation are decided, this article proposes to understand how the state political representation that inspired the structure of this Amazonian government has been re-appropriated and transformed by local values and practices of assembly and collective decision-making. These political innovations are an example of how political unity and governance can be conceptualised in the lowlands, a region where groups are best known in the ethnographic literature for their perpetual dynamics of social fragmentation and for being "against the state".
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