Migration, ethnogenesis and rural-urban dynamics in southeastern Peru: a multi-sited comparative approach (Daniela Peluso)
Principal Investigator: Daniela Peluso
Project dates: 2007-2008
Funding: British Academy
This research examines the emergence of indigenous urban communities and elucidates how notions of self and place both shape and are shaped by the novel ecological and social relations that urbanization entails. The popular conception of Amazonia as a place inhabited by forest peoples is outdated: most people today live in urban and peri-urban environments. In recent years, the long, inexorable trend towards urbanization has involved an increasing number of indigenous peoples. Urban settlement models have been incorporated in the communities, while migration and relocation to towns has also increased. Throughout the last century at least, indigenous peoples have continuously repositioned themselves, physically, socio-politically and ecologically, within a changing rural and urban landscape, to the extent that migration and mobility are inextricably linked to their history. Now, many urbanized indigenous folk keep multiple dwellings and most maintain strong social and economic ties with their rural community, as part of a diversified subsistence strategy that links them to the forest through agriculture, extractivism and more recently through conservation development activities.
This study problematises simple links between identity and place, as these often rest on ideas of unitary cultures with spatially bounded ‘localities’ or territories. It seeks to focus on the production of difference within common, shared and connected spaces and how these differences are produced and maintained in a field of power relations that are spatially interconnected. It examines the social dynamics of urban dwellings and documents the frequency of travel, between rural and urban communities for commercial, social or other purposes. The research elucidates how ideas about territory, community, gender relations, ritual and language- precisely the features of identity transformed in these urban migrations- are re-defined, and the tensions and contradictions that inevitably follow.
See the special-themed edition on Indigenous Urbanization guest edited by Daniela Peluso:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jlca.2015.20.issue-1/issuetoc
Peluso, D.M. (2015). Indigenous Urbanization: the circulation of peoples between rural and urban Amazonian spaces Peluso, D. M. ed. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology [Online] 20:1-229.
Alexiades, M. and Peluso, D.M. (2015). Introduction: Indigenous Urbanization in Lowland South America. Indigenous Urbanization: the circulation of peoples between rural and urban Amazonian spaces [Online] 20:1-12.
Peluso, D.M. (2015). Circulating between Rural and Urban Communities: Multi-sited dwellings in Amazonian frontiers. Indigenous Urbanization: the circulation of peoples between rural and urban Amazonian spaces [Online] 20:57-79.