Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which social order is fabricated through provision of collective property rights. It focuses on the labor regimes and land-use practices of indigenous peoples in Venezuela's Andean highlands on the western frontier.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which social order is fabricated through the provision of collective property. Taking as its object the struggle for indigenous land rights in the sierra of Perijá, a mountainous frontier in western Venezuela, it investigates the co-production of ethnicity and sovereignty as well as how the efforts of Venezuela’s government to settle longstanding land claims and provide development aid to indigenous communities have resulted in a re-demarcation of the ethnic and territorial boundaries of the nation. In step with Article 119 of the Venezuelan constitution, which recognizes the right of indigenous peoples to traditional forms of land tenure, the Ministry of Agriculture has returned portions of former ancestral range to Andean indigenous communities. It has also provided technical assistance targeted at increasing agricultural productivity and preserving biodiversity in a national park which is Venezuela’s only UNESCO world heritage site. But while Venezuelan leaders laud indigenous peoples as a force for revitalizing the nation and its ecologies, my fieldwork in Perijá shows that their interventions negate the sovereignty of indigenous peoples over land and that the modes of labour which emerge alongside official cultural recognition inadvertently produce new forms of social exclusion and environmental degradation.