Paper short abstract:

My paper is an ethnographic study of the manifold assemblages of mobility, inequity & marginalization among indigenous communities in Peruvian Amazonia.

Paper long abstract:

My paper is an ethnographic study of the manifold assemblages of mobility, inequity and marginalization among indigenous communities in Peruvian Amazonia. Deconstructing competing localized and translocal imaginaries of movement in Amazonia reveals glocalized jurisdictions often punctuated by social strife, rather than a community of intimates. To wit, I relocate Amazonian peoples' constructs of mobility and mutuality as reflective of contemporary epistemes of autonomy and freedom associated with the florescence of the contemporary indigenous rights movement. Scarcity may be a foundation of market economics, but life itself, as Georges Bataille notes, is usually lived in excess one way or another--and it always finds nodes of expressive, performative enunciation. Rather than re-rehearsing the well-documented multiplicities of indigenous Amazonian cosmologies and moral worlds demonstrating Bataille's principle, my paper destabilizes the association of freedom of mobility associated with individual secularism and a Eurocentric derived sense of modernity. In particular, it is offered to provoke a reconfiguration of our understanding of patterns of movement in ways that consider how trans-local epistemologies and ontologies have simultaneously exacerbated the disruptive impacts of migration, rapid urbanization and national belonging, which typically characterize much of the global South.