News from Kitepámpani

I arrived in Sepahua yesterday for two days of rest, catching up with friends, and doing internet-related work. Tomorrow I head back to Kitepámpani for approximately three and a half more weeks of fieldwork on Caquinte, during which I plan to continue dissertation-related elicitation (in Caquinte), the translation of a collection of traditional narratives that is now over 400 pages in length, and activities related to my Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) project, e.g., the creation of audio and video recordings of the language. I will return to Sepahua around August 20, depending on when flights to Pucallpa are available. On August 23 I head to Iquitos for a visit to San Joaquín de Omaguas, where I carried out fieldwork on Omagua, a Tupí-Guaraní language, in 2010, 2011, and 2013.

This year I have been housed in a room in Kitepámpani's community center, which has 24-hour access to electricity, with 16 solar panels that charge 16 dry batteries since the building was finished in August 2016! Since the beginning of this month, however, there has been a problem with the circuit controlling the outlets, and I have relied on a 19-volt solar panel and my own battery for charging electronic equipment, which, fortunately, has been more than plenty. (Problems with the circuitry was the cause of my return to Sepahua on July 6 in search of a replacement laptop computer charger.)

New garden clearing in Kitepámpani (July 2017)

The community has changed substantially since I was last there in September 2016. Repsol, the Spanish oil and natural gas corporation that is operative along 5.9 kilometers of titled Kitepámpani territory, began and finished the construction of 6 new wooden houses (all painted in the locally fashionable bright neon green!) for families that still lived in traditional dwellings. Some families appear to have requested these new houses, while for others their construction was simply a given, as certain groups of residents attempt to "develop" (their use of Spanish desarrollar) the community in its final stages (i.e., first a school, then cement houses, a running water system, and finally a community center).

A new Repsol house with traditional houses and kitchen (July 2017)

In addition, there are currently four active construction crews residing in different parts of the village, which are responsible for more labor-intensive construction projects focused around the construction of cement homes. All of this is made possible due to S/.2,000,000.00 (two million Nuevos Soles, a little less than $700,000.00) that has been give to the community since my last visit in compensation for the construction of a natural gas pipeline along the 5.9 kilometers in the eastern section of Kitepámpani. I have written about this project previously on this blog -- it is part of much broader efforts on the part of Repsol to explore and exploit subsoil resources in "Lote 57", the government-granted concession that spans left-bank tributaries of the lower Urubamba river, stretching over the hills to the west into the Junín region.

Construction of a new cement home (Kitepámpani, July 2017)

Repsol's activities since 2006 have been responsible for an enormous amount of personal, social, cultural, and material change among the Caquinte and Matsigenka families that live in Kitepámpani, and divisions between them, as some families become increasingly dependent on a Western economy in which they are at the margins. To oversimplify somewhat, the degree of independence and self-reliance prior to 2006 was incredibly high, as families largely provided themselves with their own foodstuffs and material goods. There is a strong degree of being at the center of one's own universe, to paraphrase Andrés Salanova in his dissertation, when this sort of situation holds. And it is still physically palpable as one ascends the Mipaya River -- one very much gets the sense of entering Caquinte territory. As dependence on cash increases, however, I cannot help but observe a growing number of individuals who seem trapped between two worlds -- smart, capable, sophisticated people who seem not quite at home in all of the trappings of traditional Caquinte life that are still widely valued in the community (house building, gardening, fishing, hunting, the manufacture of material goods, sorts of interactional and interpersonal styles, etc.), but who may be linguistically very dominant in Caquinte and/or Matsigenka, and who, as a result (among other reasons), cannot participate as naturally and effectively as they would like in the life ways of someone who, for example, might live in Sepahua, Atalaya, or Pucallpa (each a larger regional center). This is not to say that Kitepámpani residents have not productively constructed their own hybrid forms of the many new objects, people, and ideas with which they have come into contact in recent decades! Quite the opposite is true. But the psychological distress in some families is evident, especially as alcohol plays an increasingly unhealthy role in the community, money in large amounts is near to running out (forever, for all intents and purposes), and friction between some families grows. I feel comfortable saying that some simply do not see the need for so many goods, so many outsiders...some clearly want to be left to themselves, as can be seen by everything from where they locate their houses to when and how they visit to whether they attend (technically speaking, mandatory) community meetings. I recommend Allen Johnson's Families of the Forest, an ethnography of Matsigenkas, to anyone interested in the sort of sociocultural practices that would lead to these tensions. I believe they are somewhat unique among the Kampan Arawak peoples of the region, at least in a Peruvian context.

Ageni River at Kitepámpani, aka my bathing spot (July 2017)

The pipeline that runs from the headwaters of the Huitiricaya River to Nuevo Mundo on the Urubamba is now completed, which means that Repsol is now responsible to Kitepámpani community members only in the form of its servidumbre, essentially the annual rent paid to pipe natural gas through the pipeline over the 5.9 kilometers through which it enters their territory. Caquintes want S/.10,000,000.00 per year for this (over $3,000,000.00). Repsol, in an official letter dated May 12, 2017, has agreed to offer S/.134,984.00 (less than $50,000.00) annually -- all for the course of the 27 years that they project the wells to be operative. Since October 2016, Repsol has attempted to obtain authorization from Kitepámpani for the development of an estudio de valorización, which requires representatives of a firm, Grupo Palomares S.A.C., to enter the community's territory to evaluate the economic cost of piping natural gas through it. They never obtained that authorization, but as of July 2017 such a study had been (recently) miraculously produced. In short, the relevant information seemst to have either been lifted from a separate firm's 2015 Estudio de Impacto Ambiental (Environmental Impact Study), done in secret by entering Kitepámpani along the access road that now accompanies the pipeline from Nuevo Mundo, or by making the necessary evaluations in territory controlled by neighboring Porotobango and extended to be true of Kitepámpani. Regardless, none of this bodes well for the community's wellbeing, internal to itself or in relation to outsiders, Repsol representatives chief among them.

Repsol's Campo Sagari, Lote 57 (photo courtesy of Jesús Gregorio Sergio)

It appears that Repsol may have violated certain environmental protections by which they are legally required to abide during the construction phase of the project, in particular the width of the forest clearing (not to exceed 25 meters), soil contamination during activities such as soldering, and improper blockage of streams that crisscross the access road, resulting in the lack of migration of certain species and death of others (e.g., shrimp), among other problems. Affected communities like Kitepámpani are legally entitled to have a designated community member serve as an environmental watchdog, who is currently active and participating alongside Repsol representatives. We will see what comes of these new efforts.