Timber industry, cosmopolitics, and ontology of trees in Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

Since they were first contacted in the early 1960s, the Yaminawa people of Comunidad Nativa de Raya (Mapuya River, Peruvian Amazon) have been involved in the timber exploitation industry. Over the following decades, most of the Raya men were recruited to locate, cut, and transport valuable timber resources in the forest and even to become minor bosses within the habilitación system. This seems, in some way, contradictory with their sociocosmology that shares perspectival features with those of other Amerindians. Certain animals and plants have agency, desires, and habits analogous to humans and play a central role in the process of the social fabrication of persons. I focus here on some species of large trees and their ontology. Their relationship with human beings should be characterized as ambivalent. On the one hand, they have an intense predatory agency; on the other, they are the source of shamanic power. On the basis of this conception of the vegetal world, I explore the transformation of ideas about the agency of trees in recent decades, which occurred in interaction with the cosmology of the regional society, and enquire about how the Yaminawa people articulate the existence of these predatory human-like tree entities with their, also predatory, involvement in the timber industry