Policy of survival: the organizations of indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

​In this paper the process of emergence of various indigenous organizations in the Amazon area -in the last two decades- is analyzed, and an attempt is made to find the axis common to both of them and the overall society which endoses them. Ethnic elements are thus conceived in a dynamic way, enrolled with the various influences of a historical, economic, and political process to which they already belong, but, at the same time, they try to maintain a space through which their continuity and their claims may be channeled. As the reader will see, these are not Indian ghettoes built over an ethno-populist discourse, or an ethnic one, but rather a relative adjustment to contemporary circumstances, one not exempt from contradictions and empty spaces, and which, according to the author, exhibit the socio-cultural and political vitality of the jungle ethnic groups. Kinship, ecology, and legal data, are all part of this dynamic which flows over the background of the Peruvian economic system.