Interethnic relations

Discover the winning 2024 project ‘Interethnic relations, social organization and value on an extractive front in the Peruvian Amazon' from the Louis Dumont Fund, which supports research in social anthropology.

This research aims to show how the inhabitants of San José, an indigenous Arakmbut community in the Peruvian Amazon, have become involved in an extractive economy based on alluvial gold mining. Through a multi-sited ethnography, in the community's mining camps and the mining town of Delta Uno, Luis Vargas Helm studies the set of economic and kinship relationships that the Arakmbuts have established with the players on this extractive front - gold miners who have come from the Andes in successive waves of migration - and which form the basis of a singular configuration of production, exchange and consumption. After fifty years of development of this extractive front, it also looks at how these relationships have impacted on Arakmbut principles of social organization, such as marriage, residence and gender relations. Finally, Luis Vargas Helm gives an account of the values and desires that motivate the Arakmbuts' actions in this economy, and how they represent their role within it, in an increasingly adverse context where gold signifies the condition of subsistence and, at the same time, a constant threat of territorial destruction.