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Keith Lindner and George Stetson

For Opacity: Nature, Differenceand Indigeneity in Amazonia

AbstrAct

This paper addresses ethical engagements with difference by articulating the notion of opaque alliance. Using the work of postcolonial theorist Édouard Glissant to analyze the relation between scholars, NGOs, alterity and indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon, it argues that the concept of opacity, that which cannot be reduced, helps counter the depoliticizing implications of current debates surrounding indigeneity and nature. We combine an explicit politicization of scholarly work—writing with, rather than about—with an explicit ethical stance or what Glissant calls “giving-on-and-with,” to help enact concrete ethical responses to the productiveness of opacity.résumé

Cet article examine des engagements éthiques qui se différencient dans leur manière d’articuler la notion d’alliance opaque. En se basant sur les travaux du théoricien du post-colonialisme Édouard Glissant, il analyse la relation entre les chercheurs, les organisations non gouvernementales, l’altérité et les peuples autochtones de l’Amazonie péruvienne, en avançant que le concept d’opacité, que l’on ne peut réduire, contribue à contrecarrer la dépolitisation implicite dans

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les débats actuels portant sur l’autochtonie et la nature. Nous combinons une politisation explicite du travail universitaire – écrire avec, plutôt qu’à propos de – à un positionnement éthique explicite, ce que Glissant appelle « donner avec », pour contribuer à formuler des réponses éthiques concrètes à la production de l’opacité.

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Indigeneity and the Question of Nature

On its floor of “contemporary art,” the Museo de la Nación in Lima, Peru, features an exhibit depicting what it calls “los nativos de nuestra selva,” the natives of our forests. The exhibit shows one of Peru’s largest Amazonian indigenous groups, the Shipibo of the Ucayali region, with elements of “traditional” Shipibo life: handicrafts with characteristic Shipibo designs, the “music of the forest” complete with wooden drums and flutes and a boy fishing from a wooden canoe. Perhaps the dominant feature of the exhibit is the distinctive Shipibo artistry, seen on clothing, decorative weavings and pottery. The exhibit shares a fundamental feature of widely divergent representations of nature and indigenous people in Peru and beyond, which has arguably become one of the most defining elements of contemporary portrayals of indigenous peoples across the globe: indigeneity is forcefully, though complexly and sometimes contradictorily, tied to nature.

This is no insignificant matter. The exhibit and countless other representations help solidify conceptions of indigeneity, difference and nature; indigenous identity is seen as existing “naturally” and in which this identity is (naturally) tied to “nature.” Such images and the broader discourses they are embedded often work against and depoliticize indigenous peoples. Tying indigeneity to nature can have the effect of erasing (indigenous) people altogether, or merely collapsing them into the category of nature itself—indigenous peoples become just as natural as the forest (Braun 2002). When indigenous peoples fall on the nature side of the nature-culture divide, they are effectively stripped of the ability to speak and act, authorizing others to do so on their behalf. Cultural and biological diversity can be grouped together, with both becoming an object of calculation, protection and exploitation for outsiders (Chapin 2004).

For Peru’s National Museum, indigenous groups unproblematically belong to “our forest,” where they fish, make pottery, play music and otherwise live harmoniously with the natural landscape. The exhibit’s representations effectively erase any indigenous claims to ownership of the landscapes they inhabit; the forest is unproblematically claimed for the nation as “ours.” It also erases agency: looking at the exhibit, one has no sense that the people and culture depicted are actually alive today, actively negotiating modernity. Indigenous peoples are safely consigned to, and confined in, the past. Importantly, no urban indigenous people are included, only those living in nature. Presumably, leaving the forested landscape

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and “traditional” ways behind constitutes an erasure of identity as indigenous; one would lose any “indigenous” essence and become simply “Peruvian.” The colonial logic of the exhibit is palpable: it was constructed to help urban, mestizo Limeños, along with foreign tourists, learn about the patrimony and diversity of the nation—the natives of our forests—who otherwise go unseen and unheard in modern Peru. The Shipibo of Peru’s National Museum are objects to be looked at, caught in an ethno-colonial gaze that wishes to render them transparent, knowable and controllable. Objectified as the (colonial) property of the Peruvian nation-state, Shipibo peoples may then be cast as an anachronistic remnant of the past, historical curiosity or problem to be overcome on the road to national modernity and development. Images like those in the exhibit work to freeze indigeneity: to say that this is what it is to be indigenous in Peru. Linkages between indigeneity and nature, therefore, carry an always present danger of (post)colonial domination.

Interrogating (the Natures of) Indigenous Discourse

Multiple meanings of nature are at play in this discussion of indigeneity and nature: nature as an essence or inherent part of something, as a normative quality and as the non-human world (Williams 1983). In thinking about how nature matters with respect to indigenous peoples, we find it necessary to keep these multiple meanings in productive tension with one another. The essence (nature) of indigenous peoples as closer to the non-human world (nature) is either how they should remain (naturally)—traditional and primitive curiosities—or the primary obstacle to developing indigenous peoples so that they may join modernity. The essentializations of nature-arguments, long deployed by colonial and postcolonial regimes, still function as enactments of power. Yet at least two things complicate the above analysis. First, indigenous peoples themselves appear to increasingly deploy discourses based upon the essentializations of nature-arguments. To take one example, a Shipibo intellectual describes indigenous communities as inseparable from nature, making the defence of nature the defence of the Shipibo. While Western visions seek to exploit nature for material gains, “indigenous cosmovision is different. It is to get rich from nature spiritually, not materially.... The vision of the West, what is it like? I help myself by destroying others around me. This is unintelligible for the Shipibo.”1 These remarks, which appear to be increasingly common among indigenous leaders worldwide, seem to reinscribe the same nature-arguments that have historically depoliticized indigenous peoples, working to produce them—because of their very naturalness—as outside of history, unable to exert agency, backward, traditional and otherwise unfit for modern, technological society and culture. Should we understand these words as an appropriation of one particular technology of power, strategically reworking arguments long used for control and domination to affect emancipatory ends? Or

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perhaps as dangerous and misguided, fraught with contradictions and bound to enact further violence?

The second complication seems to run directly counter to the first: critical scholarship that works to denaturalize and de-essentialize such nature-arguments, precisely because of the exclusionary and potentially violent implications of essentialized thinking, can at the same time depoliticize. Following arguments within cultural studies about the articulation of identities (Hall 1990), critical social scientists have been increasingly wary of a link between indigeneity and nature, pointing out both the ways naturalizing arguments have been used against indigenous peoples as part of (post)colonial projects of domination (as in the example used to open this paper), as well as the problematic assumptions involved in treating any identity as static or essential (Braun 2002; Conklin 1997; Conklin and Graham 1995; Rogers 1996; Valdivia 2005a). Li, following Hall (1996), argues that framings linking indigenous peoples with nature, as “in harmony with nature” or as “natural conservationists,” are strategic essentialisms: not natural, but articulated and historically contingent. Even simple identification as “indigenous” cannot be taken for granted: “a group’s self-identification as tribal or indigenous is not natural or inevitable, but … is, rather, a positioning … an accomplishment, a contingent outcome of the cultural and political work of articulation” (Li 2000: 151, 163).

Such arguments, however, run the risk of undermining claims of indigenous peoples to territorial and other rights: if the category “indigenous” is articulated, this might become grounds for discrediting claims made by indigenous peoples that posit them as different from other inhabitants of a nation-state. Accounts of indigeneity as articulated or strategic essentialism risk working to uncover indigenous authenticity, to show indigenous peoples, stripped of their indigenous garments, as “corrupt posers” or “fake” Indians, which in turn can undermine indigenous claims when appropriated by state elites (Conklin 1997). Such arguments can be detrimental in a political context where reflexivity is not reciprocated; countering the essentialized representations of elites often involves employing “language that is no less simplistic or essentializing” (Dove 1999: 236).

How might one negotiate such complex and contested terrain? Conceptualizations of indigeneity that take an essentialist tactic—many official definitions, museums and National Geographic, among other common sources in popular culture—risk reinforcing the sort of nature-based arguments that can function to freeze indigeneity on the nature side of the nature-society divide. Yet indigenous peoples themselves have begun to appropriate such arguments to capture public opinion and press claims against states (Smyth 2000; Valdivia 2005b). Further, a deconstructionist reading of indigeneity, far more common in academia, risks robbing indigenous peoples of an important political resource by positing indigeneity as fundamentally similar to all other identities: “a contingent outcome of ... articulation” (Li 2000: 163).

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This paper seeks a partial way out of this impasse by approaching questions of indigeneity and nature in the context of an ethical engagement with difference. Combining an explicit politicization of scholarly work—working to write with, rather than about—with an explicit ethical stance, one that refuses to decisively delineate what indigenous identity really is, might begin to work against the potential harmful affects of both essentialist and deconstructionist readings of indigeneity and nature. To do so, we seek to initiate a shift away from conceptualizing alterity—human and non-human—as an effect or articulation of power, toward alterity as an opacity that is itself productive of effects that demand ethical response. We read our recent involvements with the alternative development NGO Village Earth through the work of the postcolonial theorist, novelist and poet Édouard Glissant. Drawing on Glissant’s concept of opacity, we argue that a move away from questions of identity and a commitment to foregrounding opacity can produce an ethical mode of relation between scholars and the Others they study—what we call opaque alliance. Our central argument is that an ethical response to alterity means foregrounding, rather than submerging, opacity. We turn to Glissant not because he is the first to mobilize these theoretical ideas,2 but because we have found his work to be underutilized in our disciplinary homes of geography and political science, yet useful as we negotiate the difficulties of fieldwork and think about how to engage ethically with alterity. Further, “nature” figures prominently in Glissant’s work, par-ticularly his literary and poetic work, in complex ways.

We take as primary two seemingly simple suggestions from Glissant that have far-reaching implications: first, he urges us to “give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures” (Glissant 1997: 190). Second, he argues that we should instead “[l]et our understanding prefer the gesture of giving-on-and-with that opens finally on totality” (192). More than simply writing with the Other, Glissant helps to cultivate an ethics for engaging in collective projects. We focus on our ethnographic and political engagements with Shipibo indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon, but also gesture toward the ways ithat our arguments about ethical engagement might be taken up in relation to non-human nature via a detour through Glissant’s literary work. The productivity of opacity demands response in concrete contexts, and this paper attempts to provide several examples where Glissant’s twin suggestions help to do so ethically.

transparency/Opacity/Encounter

In addition to the complex terrain of indigeneity and nature described above, numerous indigenous intellectuals have articulated critiques of the objectifying and colonizing effects of Western epistemology and what might be called the ethno-colonial gaze (Deloria 1988; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Vizenor 1999; Vizenor and Lee 2003). The oppression produced by the gaze of the colonizer or master “is repeated in that of historically later types of ‘discoverer,’ such as the ethnologist

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for whom the colonized people are merely visible objects of knowledge” (Britton 1999: 23). Glissant critiques such a gaze in his discussion of transparency:

[i]f we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you ... I have to reduce. (Glissant 1997: 189-90)

Understanding, by striving to render all things transparent, aims at “grasping,” where “the verb to grasp contains the movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to themselves. A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation” (191-92). The seemingly innocuous exercise of understanding, for Glissant, represents an act of violence laid bare under the gaze of Western science and other knowledge-producing practices as the Other is rendered perfectly transparent, knowable and therefore controllable—created afresh within the conceptual schema of the observer. Certainly, Peru’s National Museum functions in this way.

Many ethnographers have taken steps to address these issues (Dove 1999; Jackson 1999; Katz 1996; Nast 1994; Pratt 2000; Sparke 1996), and feminist and postcolonial scholars have provided helpful critiques of transparency (Yeglenoglu 1998; Young 1990). Glissant echoes these scholars in making a critical point: “understanding” can be a disempowering act for the object of ethnographic scrutiny. Glissant does not argue against all forms of understanding or knowledge about the Other. Rather, he stridently opposes knowledge that reduces, generalizes or subsumes to a universal. The overarching concept of Glissant’s work is what he calls the poetics of relation, in which all identities are “extended through a relationship with the Other” (Glissant 1997: 11). Relation—“latent, open, multi-lingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible” (32)—is made up “of shared knowledge” rather than unknowns (8). But it resists any monolingual intent, colonizing root or totalitarian universal, and “proceeds from no absolute” (28).

We find in Glissant the beginnings of a non-colonizing knowledge, one that enables difference to remain different without reduction to “the same.” In relation, one must strive to know what Glissant calls the totality of the world, yet also know simultaneously that this is impossible: one approaches totality, but can never fully describe or generalize it. The open multiplicity that results from contact among cultures can never be defined, but it can be imagined. Such an imaginary “encounters new spaces and does not transform them into either depths or conquests” (199). Unlike Peru’s National Museum, it rejects any “final underlying transparency” (62) and “discards the universal—this generalizing edict that summarized the world as something obvious and transparent, claiming for it one presupposed sense and one destiny”(20). Perceiving the multiplicitous totality of the world, this knowledge “renounces any claim to sum it up or possess it” (21).

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The violence of transparency can be averted once one knows it is impossible to reduce the multiplicities and opacities of the world to one’s own universal; such generalization brings all identities and peoples into equivalency and hierarchical order (62). It is against the reduction of generalization and transparency that Glissant calls for a right to opacity: “[w]e clamor for a right to opacity for everyone” (194).

“The opaque,” Glissant writes, “is not the obscure,” but “is that which cannot be reduced” (191). It is that which always escapes. Glissant describes opacity as an irreducible density that evades comprehension and control—of both Self and Other. Opacity produces movements that open new and unforeseen configurations of difference (30). It is a warning from Glissant that there are limits to Truth: opacity disrupts universalist and totalitarian presumptions. Glissant writes, “The thought of opacity distracts me from absolute truths whose guardian I might believe myself to be … [and] saves me from unequivocal courses and irreversible choices” (192).

Foregrounding opacity forces an ethical mode of relation between Self and Other. The understanding brought about by opacity, upon which relation is built, rejects the reduction of the generalizing universal. In her introduction to Poetics of Relation, translator Betsy Wing describes this as the “generosity of perception” implied by the verb “to give,” in the “sense of yielding, as a tree might ‘give’ in a storm in order to remain standing” (xiv). This process of yielding becomes necessary after the acknowledgement of the impossibility of perfectly delineating the Other within one’s own universal. But we want to think of yielding less as a universal ethical code that privileges the ability of the Self to benevolently encounter and somehow accept difference, and more as a set of concrete responses to the productive effects of opacity (Nealon 1998). Opacity can be one way of conceptualizing difference as not simply a fully transparent essence, on the one hand, or an effect or articulation, on the other, but as something that produces effects in ways that are not predetermined or always easily understandable. The productiveness of opacity evades complete comprehension and control; we must continuously reconsider what we thought we had pinned down.

We suggest that both the essentializations of nature-arguments and accounts of identities as effects or articulations enact a sort of violence by circumscribing alterity. Peru’s National Museum, through its ethno-colonial gaze, recognizes difference, but within its own realm of intelligibility. Deconstructionist readings achieve a similar result by reducing identity to an empty signifier. Treating indigeneity as an articulation or effect can still serve to render alterity transparent, fully explainable and understandable. Saying that articulations or positionings have material effects is insufficient, because the articulation itself remains transparently rendered and unproblematic. The productiveness of opacity, by contrast, forces a yielding; a privileging of opacity that allows one to encounter difference ethically because it

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necessitates a recognition, in concrete contexts, that one can never pin the Other down. One can never quite get to the bottom of natures, or reduce someone to a singular truth—one’s own. Identities are surely produced, yet opacity produces new effects and unforeseen convergences. One is forced to change course, to admit one’s truths are partial and incomplete, to yield.

Cultivating opacity—giving-on-and-with—while relenting from the effort to get to the bottom of natures, offers a way for scholars to produce more ethical engagements with difference. Such an ethical-political move permits an explicit politicization of knowledge production, coupled with an ethics of encounter. We call this mode of relation opaque alliance: it enables one to write with an Other rather than simply writing about, while also suffusing this relation with the ethical sensibilities of yielding. These two features allow us to work towards Glissant’s two suggestions—to relent from the search to discover what lies at the bottom of natures, and to instead let our understanding prefer to give-on-and-with, to yield. Turning to opacity enables us to think about how Otherness remains both irreducible and productive in concrete contexts, as much for non-human nature as for indigenous identity, and links between indigeneity and nature. In the next section, we highlight the productiveness of opacity by describing our recent experiences with Village Earth (VE), a development NGO based in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Shipibo communities in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon, as an opaque alliance. We then return to the multiple meanings of nature invoked above to underscore the productiveness of opacity and the ways in which Glissant helps us to negotiate ethical responses.

Village Earth/shipibo: Opaque Alliance

Village Earth is a small NGO (approximately ten employees) that is closely re-lated to Colorado State University. Both authors have volunteered with Village Earth.3 Involved in a range of activities, Village Earth’s main objective is to foster “bottom up” or “participatory” development. The opposite of many well-funded Washington-based NGOs that support development projects in the so-called Third World, Village Earth operates with little financing, relying mainly on small contributions from individuals. The defining feature of Village Earth is its critical stance vis-à-vis mainstream development and, to some extent, the entire idea of development itself.4 This critical posture has helped Village Earth to engage in a different type of relation with the Shipibo, based on political alliance and explicit recognition of indigenous peoples’ right to opacity. We offer three ways in which the productiveness of opacity structures VE-Shipibo relation: shifting power relations, production of new affinities and a sort of messiness that works in multiple directions.

First, opaque alliance helps shift the traditional power relations inherent in development projects between First World NGOs and Third World indigenous

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peoples. Village Earth has made a conscientious move away from “project man-agement,” which guides much mainstream development thinking, toward alliance-building and deliberate politicization of “development.” Development-as-project management produces an objectification of the Other, as communities become objects to be studied, diagnosed and, through well-specified development models, fixed or improved (Chambers 1994). Often goals are predetermined and donor-driven. An outside group “manages” a community, providing local capacity and delivering expertise and resources. To manage effectively and efficiently, it is necessary to generate transparency about the object-community: levels of poverty, health indicators, physical layout, local resources, cultural knowledge. Development objectives, progress and results must be precisely measured, quantified and communicated (Hirschmann 2002). Project management, like certain conceptualizations of indigeneity and nature, can work to disempower indigenous peoples through objectification, paternalism and predetermined de-velopment narratives. Project management may debilitate indigenous peoples’ capacity to deal with their own political and social reality as much as it might help because indigenous peoples themselves do not control the process.

Village Earth attempts to turn away from the search to discover what lies at the bottom of natures, Glissant’s first suggestion. Village Earth is not interested in “the Other”—to learn about them, manage them or development them—but instead focuses on alliance. Unequal power relations cannot be eliminated: Village Earth remains a northern NGO with disproportionate resources and the ability to travel to—and leave—the Amazon, while Shipibo peoples remain marginalized within a Third World nation-state (cf. Katz 1996). But alliance suggests that both parties willingly engage in the partnership, bring something to the table, have an agenda and have strengths and weaknesses. Both are empowered subjects and active agents, contribute something to the alliance, participate in deciding the terms of the alliance and can leave the alliance. Village Earth attempts to strategically use its geopolitical position to acquire resources, advocate for, and collaborate with people on ongoing projects, ideas and creations. This does not mean that Village Earth is not involved in local development projects like those involving water, health or schools, but that their involvement is dictated by the shared goals generated from the alliance rather than the stipulations of fixed development narratives. Objectives are open, negotiable and emerge from strategic discussion with the Shipibo. Benefits and costs are also unequal: the Shipibo gain strategic political allies from the alliance—political partners rather than agents of development, for which they have expressed a desire. Village Earth furthers its mission of doing development differently. As researchers and activists, we use academic positions to contribute to Shipibo political objectives—by researching petroleum development in the Peruvian Amazon and providing this information to indigenous communities, for example—and thereby also benefit professionally through research and publication. We attempt to write with, rather than about

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(Dove 1999; Routledge 2002), directing critical attention away from processes of identity formation and toward, for example, processes of marginalization and exclusion. Clearly, the stakes of alliance are higher for the Shipibo, yet we feel that more benefits flow to Shipibo communities than in traditional project management.

Beyond the move to alliance, Village Earth attempts to enact an explicitly ethical mode of relation that foregrounds opacity, Glissant’s second suggestion. An ethical relation means yielding to the possibility that detailed information about, or a profound understanding of, the Other is not required to enter into relation. This sensibility is not rigid or based on preconceived notions, but gives-on-and-with. Furthermore, while project management dictates a hierarchical, vertical relationship, an opaque alliance requires horizontality; the objectives of development are determined by a political relation to which each part contributes. An opaque alliance replaces paternalistic or managerial orientations, foregoing these controlling moves for ethical relations in which indigenous peoples might gain some measure of control over the processes that shape their lives and communities.

Transparency has a place in the VE-Shipibo relation. We want to underscore that the question of what should and should not be rendered transparent is an ethico-political question that must be addressed in particular contexts. Differences and hierarchies exist within Shipibo communities, and transparency may be required when dealing with these. Opaque alliance does not pre-empt critical discussion about such inequalities or power dynamics, which in part is enabled by the kind of relation we have cultivated: we are allies, not managers on the one hand or passive subordinates on the other. We enter relations with political commitments that shape our engagements, including commitments to social and environmental justice, democratic communities and opposition to exploitation and domination. Opacity does mean, however, that we will not impose our norms upon the Shipibo. If necessary, our choice is to leave the alliance rather than (re)produce relations of control. Indigenous identity—who the Shipibo are—and the objectives of development—what the Shipibo should do—are productive opacities for Village Earth. But the transnational flows of power and resources that constitute oil pro-duction in the Peruvian Amazon, for example, should be rendered transparent to the extent that the opaque alliance requires. Glissant recognizes that a demand for opacity should not mean an end to the gaze, but rather a reoriented one—he wonders when the colonized will get their chance at seeing (Britton 1999: 23). The co-production of knowledge is a major facet of the VE-Shipibo relation, helping to shift power relations by rendering transparent the political and cultural economies that marginalize indigenous communities.

At a concrete level, issues of language and translation help to structure the relationship. Translating between English, Spanish and Shipibo is laborious, but opacity lies less in translation than in what is not translated. The Shipibo language

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is the first language for many Shipibo, producing a language barrier between Shipibo individuals (most of whom speak Shipibo and Spanish) and Village Earth staff (most of whom speak English and Spanish). Whereas Spanish serves as a common language between Village Earth and the Shipibo, many Shipibo are most comfortable speaking their own language, often leading to long conversations among Shipibo that Village Earth members cannot understand.

Village Earth has discussed translation extensively and members feel that it is important not to translate and understand everything that the Shipibo say. In Glissant’s language, Village Earth made a decision to give-on-and-with by refusing the demands of perfect transparency. Not translating everything is empowering for the Shipibo—power relations are shifted—because the Shipibo can make transparent only what they want to be transparent. Spanish is often interspersed with Shipibo, so that individuals can switch in and out of a common languagethus in and out of transparency. In contrast to experiences Shipibo communities have had with NGOs where Spanish has been required at all times in order to produce transparent conversation for the benefit of NGO personnel, the ability to speak freely without being heard allows the Shipibo themselves to set the terms of debate and engagement. Power relations are shifted precisely because of the power that accrues to indigenous peoples when they—not the researcher—have the ability to go between two languages (Rappaport 2005).

A second way opacity is productive is through the proliferation of new affinities and multiple paths of action. Response to the irreducible density of the Other has led to a more open, latent and unpredictable mode of interaction that eschews the preconceived notions and fixed paths of development models or project management scripts. By choosing alliance over the donor-driven, predetermined paths of development projects, the VE-Shipibo relation has multiplied into manifold projects and interactions, often small scale and directed at everyday issues that the Shipibo face. Since 2006, Village Earth has been helping to title indigenous lands; in 2007, Village Earth facilitated a small grant from Aid to Artisans to help strengthen women’s craft cooperatives; in 2007 Village Earth helped to partner a Shipibo village with Engineers Without Borders for water and land demarcation projects; VE has been working with Project Tupa, a group from Berkeley, California, to help set up a Shipibo-controlled radio station; and in 2008, a Shipibo leader and intellectual visited Fort Collins, Colorado, to take part in participatory methodology workshops and speak to students and community members about his work.

These interactions are not necessarily out of step with mainstream development initiatives. However, Village Earth structures its objectives on the stipulations of alliance, rather than on the objectives of development. Nor is the point that these actions are somehow novel or transformative. The more significant point is that a tiny NGO with few financial resources has been able to partner with Shipibo

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communities on a wide array of initiatives, a flexibility that stems from opaque alliance. This mode of relation has provided a freedom from models that has permitted the VE-Shipibo alliance to expand in multiple directions and explore multiple possibilities. All projects emerge from strategic discussions with Shipibo communities, rather than externally imposed, singular development scripts that already know what the Shipibo need. Opacity produces new movements and fluid relations, a flexibility not available in project management approaches based on transparency and the truths of development.

Finally, the productiveness of opacity has meant that a messiness or complexity has characterized the VE-Shipibo relation. If opacity is productive, as we have argued, relations based upon foregrounding opacity will not always be predictable. Sometimes the multiplicity of opacity has produced a productive tension, but at other times it has been disruptive or risky. One of the primary examples of the way in which opacity helps to structure the VE-Shipibo alliance is found in Village Earth methodology for creating collective community visions, which provides a way to bring disparate visions and ideas together. This methodology, which focuses on what Glissant would call the “texture of the weave” rather than “the nature of its components” (Glissant 1997: 190), provides an example of how the messiness of opacity produces a productive tension. Relation in Glissant’s writing, among other things, is a principle of narration that focuses on what is relayed from one person to another, forming a chain or network of narratives. This “relayed language” works as a strategy of diversity that resists the “oppressively singular narrative,” producing a plurality of text made up of different contributions, preventing one person or idea from controlling the story (Britton 1999: 164).

For Village Earth the creation of community visions is not based on a singular narrative that is designed to illicit detailed information, produce perfect consensus or create a fixed, transparent, “correct” statement. The challenge is to weave different ideas, visions and concerns together in ways that produce positive effects. In the process, these ideas can change through relation. Opacity is not an obstacle to relating or acting in confluence; in fact it guarantees difference in relation (Glissant 1997: 194). Multiplicity should be embraced, not streamlined. The value lies in the texture, in how ideas are woven together, not in correctness or precision or perfect consensus. Collective visioning workshops, in this sense, are a fundamental part of the way that Village Earth structures its interactions with communities.

An example is a documentary co-produced, co-directed and co-facilitated by Village Earth and the Shipibo in January 2006, The Children of the Anaconda. The documentary emerged from a collective visioning workshop with the goals of attracting external funding and helping indigenous mobilization efforts within Peru. Like other participatory filmmaking, workshop participants, with little training or planning, were given cameras and control over the script. Unlike mainstream

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development, where the narrative is controlled, the film is a collection of stories, in a sense, relayed from one community to another, consisting of multiple ideas, visions and projects. The film weaves together disparate ideas such as building fish farms, supporting artisan-based projects, creating botanical gardens for medical purposes and a critique of the destructive practices of transnational companies operating in the region.5

In juxtaposing multiple narratives, Children of the Anaconda represents the pro-ductive tension that opacity can produce as a cacophony of voices come together in a multivocal relation. But our examples are not meant to suggest that opacity is productive at every level, in every instance; at times opacity can be problematic or disruptive. Given the complex political, social and economic terrain on which any development NGO must operate, there is clearly no guarantee that the consequences of opacity are always positive or straightforward. Attracting funding is an ongoing difficulty for Village Earth, but even more so because of opacity. Maintaining an opaque alliance means finding donors who are willing to fund an opaque relationship without the benefit of detailed data on recipient communities. Village Earth’s unwillingness to work according to a funding agency’s agenda or timeline if these do not match the alliance’s agenda, makes finding and securing funding quite difficult. With tight financial resources for Children of the Anaconda, Village Earth relinquished control over the making of the film and over the stories it tells, with no guarantee of success or any straightforward return for funding agencies.

A degree of risk comes with responding to opacity by moving away from conventional development scripts and towards political alliance. In 2007, Village Earth was involved in the creation of a regional indigenous organization, the Organization for the Defense and Development of the Indigenous Peoples of the Peruvian Amazon (ODDPIAP).6 More than fifty-five village leaders from throughout the Ucayali region of the central Amazon came together for a tribunal over concern for issues that included the increasing threat of petroleum development by multinational companies on indigenous territories. The organization was created in part because of the productiveness of opacity in the VE-Shipibo relation. Contra development initiatives where the NGO or development agency is in charge of planning, organization and implementation, Village Earth was invited by Shipibo organizers to co-facilitate the event. Village Earth assisted in a supportive role, framed by the organizers as “strategic allies in the Shipibo quest for self-determination.” The tribunal and creation of ODDPIAP were products of opaque alliance, in that they would not have been possible without relation based on opacity or both parties contributing. Village Earth contributed with small financial support, information on conflicts between oil companies and indigenous communities elsewhere in Peru and Ecuador and facilitation of a collective visioning session for the new organization. The initial idea for the organization first came out of a 2006 visioning workshop facilitated by Village Earth; opaque

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alliance enabled Village Earth to participate in an event that directly confronted the marginalizing social, economic and political processes perceived by Shipibo communities. It is difficult to imagine such an event emerging from within the confines and hierarchies of project management.

ODDPIAP was created in the midst of an unprecedented campaign by the Peruvian state to promote oil and gas development. In 2004, approximately 13 per cent of the Peruvian Amazon was zoned for oil and gas operations, but by 2007 that number had grown to 70 per cent, amounting to nearly 5 million hectares of rainforest land under the control of private companies (La Torre López et al. 2007). In 2009, that figure is approximately 80 per cent.7 ODDPIAP is undoubtedly an important organization for the socio-economic, cultural and political interests of Shipibo communities as they attempt to mobilize against the encroachment of oil companies on indigenous territories. Yet there are also uncertainties. Indigenous peoples in Peru are highly diverse and indigenous politics are highly complex. Multiple organizations exist at local, regional and national scales to represent the interests of indigenous peoples (Garcia and Lucero 2006; Greene 2006; Yashar 2005). Multinational oil companies, who must legally receive the consent of indigenous peoples before operating on indigenous lands, have developed myriad strategies for producing consent. Manipulation of indigenous communities, bribes and gifts, threats against dissenting groups and pitting opposing factions of indigenous peoples against one another have been documented in Ecuador (Sawyer 2004) and Peru (La Torre Lopez 1999; Urteaga-Crovetto 2005). The risk that any new organization could contribute to the fragmentation of indigenous resistance to oil development across the Peruvian Amazon by complicating an already complicated context or precipitating indigenous rivalries, is real.

By foregoing the transparencies and relative certainties of project management and entering the uncertainties of opaque alliance, Village Earth stepped into complex and contradictory political terrain, with no guarantee of success. Neither Village Earth nor the indigenous peoples in Peru with whom we have talked about the issue feel that ODDPIAP is contributing in any way to weakening or fragmenting the indigenous movement in Peru. Rather, all maintain that ODDPIAP is a regional base of strength for the movement that is working in concert with other organizations for shared goals. Nevertheless, a risk remains. A more conventional approach to development—based upon a project management that elides political engagement—sidesteps such risks, while Village Earth places itself squarely in the middle of complicated ethical and political terrain with potentially far-reaching consequences for indigenous peoples, and there are no guarantees.

Our examples demonstrate the productiveness of opacity as an ontological condition and active force: an irreducible density that cannot be pinned down, a positivity that produces effects and new convergences. They show the productivities

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of an opaque alliance, structured around Village Earth’s concrete responses to the materialities of opacity. If opacity is an ontological condition, as Glissant argues, it will produce effects. Ethics is the process of responding to these effects in concrete contexts (Nealon 1998). The question is, what form will such response take? Village Earth responds by following Glissant’s two suggestions: relenting from the search for the bottom of natures, and instead yielding to the opacities of relation. In the next section, we turn to multiple meanings of nature and return to debates over indigeneity, again foregrounding the productivity of opacity and the ethical question of response.

Natures of Opacity/Opacities of Nature

Nature figures prominently and complexly in Glissant’s work, in ways that dovetail with multiple meanings of nature—as essence, norm and non-human. We want to take a brief detour through Glissant’s literary writing and its relation to these multiple meanings to highlight the ways in which Glissant’s work and the strategies of Village Earth to respond to opacity might be deployed in different contexts. On the question of nature, Glissant steers a complex and somewhat paradoxical course. First, he tells us that the opacities of alterity disrupt any and all attempts at final delineation: we cannot discover the truths of alterity or the Other, we cannot get to the bottom of natures (Glissant 1997: 192). Second, however, he tells us to not even ask the question in the first place: to give up the search for Truths, as it opens the door for the potentially violent appropriations of understanding. Yet part of what makes Glissant so useful is that he is ultimately ambivalent on the question of nature, a stance we find helpful in engaging with both human and non-human alterity. After telling us that we cannot hope to ever find the definitive truths of any(one’s) nature, and warning us not to attempt such a (potentially violent) task, Glissant is fully insistent upon the materiality, density or effectivity of nature—there are natures that matter, despite our inability to fully discover or uncover or understand them. That is, Glissant simultaneously blurs any truths or certainties about nature while remaining insistent that nature as such does in fact exist—things have (opaque) essences. The opacity of nature produces concrete effects that we must respond to; we must turn to questions of relation. Glissant rejects essentializations of nature while simultaneously insisting on its materiality and productiveness.

The productiveness of opacity applies to non-human alterity as much as human, which can be seen throughout Glissant’s literary and poetic writing in particular. In Glissant’s novels, non-human nature—rivers, trees, beaches, landscapes—are as much active agents as humans. “Describing the landscape is not enough,” he writes. “The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process” (Glissant 1989: 105-106). Nature in Glissant’s poetry does not connote meaning in any straightforward or

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even legible way. He focuses on teeming estuaries, raging oceans, shifting beaches, the vibrating earth; these “convey a sense of uncharted profusion rather than fixed symmetries,” but a profusion that is nonetheless thickly in relation—a rooted errantry (Dash 1995: 11). Normative and political programs cannot be read directly from non-human nature, as so many Caribbean writers before Glissant attempted (Dash 2001). Modernist urges to control and order nature are hopeless; the opacity of nature disrupts. Rather, “men and women live and think with the forces of nature, not against them” (Glissant et al. 2005: xvi); the more mundane work of relation—a constant relocation in an indeterminate milieu (Dash 2001: 107), living and thinking with—replaces the certainties of nature.

In novels like La Lézard (Glissant 1958), the line between human characters and non-human nature is blurred to the extent that it becomes impossible to disentangle these two domains of life from their mutually constitutive networks and unpredictable intersections (Dash 1995: 76-80). La Lézard is named for a river; another novel, Mahagony (1987), is named for a tree. The sustained rela-tionships between people, creatures, things and plants render physical nature inseparable from culture and history (Glissant 1989: 131, 150). But it is opacity and its productiveness that matters in these encounters. What can be seen here is in part the productive opacity of a non-human nature that not only resists domestication, but interweaves with and partially forms Caribbean worlds. For Glissant, neither the incessant, swirling relation of cultures nor the ever-shifting chaos of landscape exist to be reduced to a single text, theory or idea (Dash 1995: 25). The opacities of relation take centre stage over the natures (essences) of being. In Glissant’s texts, the productiveness of opacity means that the non-human world cannot ever be pinned down either, so one must give up the search and concentrate on relation.

To return to debates over indigeneity, Glissant’s stance is productive because both the essentializations of nature arguments and the anti-essentialist treatments of identity found in cultural studies can work to depoliticize indigenous communities. Essentializing accounts that tie indigeneity to nature not only strip indigenous peoples of agency and the ability to speak; they also demand that indigenous peoples perform authentically (Braun 2002). Arguments about indigeneity as articulated or strategic essentialism, conversely, perform a different type of depoliticizing work: depoliticizing indigenous identity makes indigenous peoples just like everyone else, which in turn tends to undermine indigenous claims to territorial and other rights (Conklin 1997; Dove 1999). By turning to Glissant, we hope to bypass this debate and actively work against depoliticizations in ethical ways. We respond to the opacities of alterity by relenting from the search to get to the bottom of natures, and instead foreground opacity in an alliance that does political work.

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Glissant embraces the ambiguity and uncertainty of nature—its opacity—as a site of positivity and new affinities and relations. We can never hope to know the material opacities of cultures, identities and things, yet we can imagine the totality of their never-ending relation. It is at this point, when confronting the irreducible density of alterity forces one to yield, that opacity precipitates an ethical stance. For Village Earth, the ethical act of yielding takes the form of a sort of openness or latent multiplicity that has manifested itself in a proliferation of projects and unforeseen directions. It has also helped to affect a less hierarchical relation by shifting the terms of engagement: the role of Village Earth is not to bring “development” or “capacity”; the Shipibo are not the object of project management scripts. Of course, it also means entry into a more uncertain realm of interaction for activists or scholars, responding to the productiveness of opacity means rejecting the transparencies of universal understanding and entering a more provisional relation based upon giving-on-and-with.

conclusion: Producing Knowledge in relation

Perhaps one of the most important ways that Glissant informs our work is to bring a dose of humility to the practice of knowledge production. He challenges the entire intellectual project of searching for Truths, of making natures transparent and reducing them within one’s own image. To search for the truths of indigeneity and nature is troubling, not only because it disempowers, but because it is symptomatic of (post)colonial relationships that fix indigenous peoples within the gaze of the observer. Indigenous peoples are too often treated as objects to be made transparent, opening up the potential to know them, study them and, as many have argued, control them. The same could be said about non-human nature. While we only gesture in that direction here, we feel that our arguments about the productiveness of opacity and importance of ethical response along Glissant’s two suggestions applies to non-human nature as well. The world does not exist to be reduced to a text or idea, and Glissant’s literary work hints at what an ethical relation with the non-human might look like. Knowledge produced in relation must avoid reduction to the same, enabling difference to remain different. An ethical response to alterity means foregrounding, rather than submerging, opacity.

While many recognize the importance and benefits of engaging in a political alliance with the Other—of producing knowledge that does political work, or writing with rather than about, or giving back to one’s research community—Glissant brings a more explicitly ethical dimension to the notion of alliance. His twin suggestions—to give up the search to discover what lies at the bottom of natures, and to instead let our understanding give-on-and-with—push one to not only politicize relations with difference, but to recognize the potential violence that can exist even within alliance. For Glissant, entering into relation produces a change within both Self and Other. Yielding, or giving-on-and-with,

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precipitates something new. It is productive precisely because, by foregoing the search to discover the bottom of natures and recognizing the irreducibility of the Other, one can enter into relation, focusing on the texture of the weave and producing knowledge of an entirely different kind. The experience of Village Earth suggests that concrete ethical encounters with indigenous peoples are possible, though not guaranteed. Opaque alliance can work against the depoliticizing and disempowering effects of conceptions of indigeneity and nature that posit the two as naturally and materially linked on the one hand, or solely constructed on the other, while mobilizing the ethical sensibility of giving-on-and-with. Opacity is not a way to transcend the power relations, ambiguities and contradictions involved with activist scholarship or engagements with alterity, whether human or non-human, but it can provide resources for negotiating and politicizing these terrains more ethically.

NotesWe wish to thank all the Shipibo who have worked with us, shared their time and knowledge with us and showed great patience towards us; Dave Bartechhi, Ralf Kracke-Berndorff and Kristina Pearson for conversations that contributed to the ideas contained in this paper; Eric Ishiwata for his valuable insights and collaborations; and Emily Billo, Beatriz Bustos, John Hultgren, Kristina Pearson, Tom Perreault and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft that significantly improved the arguments. All errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the authors.1. From an interview conducted by Stetson with a Shipibo leader while working on a Village Earth participatory film project in the Ucayali region of Peru. Pucallpa, Peru. January 2006.2. For example, on varying critiques of the violence of reason and transparency, see Bhabha (1990), Foucault (1979), Said (1978), Spivak (1988), Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Yegenoglu (1998) and Young (1990). On relational identity in a postcolonial context, see Anzaldúa (2007), Bhabha (1994), Gilroy (2005), McClintock (1995), Minh-ha (1991) and Vizenor (1999). On issues of Self and Other and ethical engagement with differ-ence, see Connolly (2002), Derrida (1978), Levinas (1985), Nealon (1998) and Shapiro (1997).3. George Stetson has participated as a facilitator in community-level workshops and in organizational activities since 2003. Keith Lindner has participated since March 2007. Both participated in the 2007 tribunal described herein. We also draw from conversa-tions with Village Earth staff Dave Bartecchi, Ralf Kracke-Berndorff and Kristina Pearson.4. See http://www.villageearth.org. “Development,” for example, is seen less an altru-istic project of (self-)betterment than Eurocentric concept locating the West at the pinnacle of an evolutionary development spectrum. Many involved with Village Earth echo Escobar’s (1995) critique that “development” and “poverty” are produced through a Western neocolonial discourse, through which diverse global populations become back-ward, undeveloped, even uncivilized; and are then subjected to the neocolonial gaze of development “experts.”5. Village Earth has also used this approach to filmmaking with the Lakota people on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. To explain the distinctiveness of the Village Earth approach, the organization often juxtaposes a short video interviewing a Shipibo leader with an Adventist Development and Relief Agency-Canada (ADRA) video of

,

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a water project in a Shipibo community. Shipibo voices are in the background of the ADRA film, arrayed around the dominant ADRA narrative of providing the Shipibo technology (a new well) and knowledge (about being properly clean and hygienic). In the Village Earth film, there is no dominant narrative, only VE in the background asking questions and listening to Shipibo voices.6. Organización para la Defensa y Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas de la Amazona de Perú.7. Peru’s state licensing agency, PerúPetro, releases limited information on oil and gas operations at http://www.perupetro.com/pe.

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