Paper short abstract:

I explore the everyday pursuit of wellbeing as a return to normality among Ashaninka people in the Amazon, in the context of their experience of a continuum of war started by Peru's civil war (1980-2000) followed by the extractive agenda set by the state as its backbone to post-war reconstruction.

Paper long abstract:

Ashaninka people, members of an indigenous Amazonian society, had a horrendous experience of the Peruvian civil war (1980-2000), which was followed by the Peruvian state's violently extractive reconstruction agenda. Upon their return to the territories they fled during war, survivors found that a large part of their legally titled communities has been granted in concessions to multinational oil and gas companies, or invaded by coca growers (for cocaine production). More recently, the state had imposed plans to build mega hydroelectric dams in their valleys.

In this paper I explore what the everyday looks like in a context described to me by an Ashaninka leader as a 'past that won't pass', a context in which war and extractivism have merged into one continuum of violence.

How is normality or a return to sociality in the everyday sought within this continuum of violence? How are 'normal' social and socio-natural relations remade within this continuum? What does wellbeing look like in this continuum and how is it pursued?

Based on nine years of ethnographic fieldwork in Ashaninka villages, I will explore these questions through my collaborators' notions of 'living well together', being 'real people', their approaches to fixing the relations with the socio-natural world that have been undone by violence, and their desire to make money to pay for new necessities. In this context, the everyday becomes dedicated to pursuing an approach to collective wellbeing based on an idea of collectivity that includes both their human and other-than-human neighbours.