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Keith Lindner and George Stetson

For Opacity: Nature, Difference

and Indigeneity in Amazonia
Abstract

This paper addresses ethical engagements with difference by articulating the

notion of opaque alliance. Using the work of postcolonial theorist douard
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 workwriting with, rather than aboutwith an explicit ethical
stance or what Glissant calls giving-on-and-with, to help enact concrete ethical
responses to the productiveness of opacity.
Rsum

Cet article examine des engagements thiques qui se diffrencient dans leur
manire darticuler la notion dalliance opaque. En se basant sur les travaux du
thoricien du post-colonialisme douard Glissant, il analyse la relation entre
les chercheurs, les organisations non gouvernementales, laltrit et les peuples
autochtones de lAmazonie pruvienne, en avanant que le concept dopacit,
que lon ne peut rduire, contribue contrecarrer la dpolitisation implicite dans

les dbats actuels portant sur lautochtonie et la nature. Nous combinons une
politisation explicite du travail universitaire crire avec, plutt qu propos de
un positionnement thique explicite, ce que Glissant appelle donner avec, pour
contribuer formuler des rponses thiques concrtes la production de lopacit.

Indigeneity and the Question of Nature

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On its floor of contemporary art, the Museo de la Nacin 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 Perus 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 itselfindigenous 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 Perus 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 exhibits 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

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 Limeos,
along with foreign tourists, learn about the patrimony and diversity of the
nationthe natives of our forestswho otherwise go unseen and unheard in
modern Peru. The Shipibo of Perus 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

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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 curiositiesor 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 thembecause of their very naturalnessas 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?

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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 groups
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 tacticmany official definitions, museums
and National Geographic, among other common sources in popular culturerisk
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).

We take as primary two seemingly simple suggestions from Glissant that have farreaching 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 Glissants literary work. The productivity of opacity demands
response in concrete contexts, and this paper attempts to provide several examples
where Glissants 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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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 workworking to write with,
rather than aboutwith 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
alterityhuman and non-humanas 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 douard
Glissant. Drawing on Glissants 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 studywhat 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 Glissants work, particularly his literary and poetic work, in complex ways.

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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 controllablecreated afresh within the
conceptual schema of the observer. Certainly, Perus National Museum functions
in this way.

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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 Glissants work is what
he calls the poetics of relation, in which all identities are extended through a
relationship with the Other (Glissant 1997: 11). Relationlatent, open, multilingual 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 Perus National Museum, it rejects any final
underlying transparency (62) and discards the universalthis 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).

The violence of transparency can be averted once one knows it is impossible to

reduce the multiplicities and opacities of the world to ones 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 controlof 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).

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.
Perus 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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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 ones 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.

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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 truthones own. Identities are surely produced, yet opacity produces
new effects and unforeseen convergences. One is forced to change course, to admit
ones truths are partial and incomplete, to yield.

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Cultivating opacitygiving-on-and-withwhile 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 Glissants
two suggestionsto 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 related to Colorado State University. Both authors have volunteered with Village
Earth.3 Involved in a range of activities, Village Earths 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--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

peoples. Village Earth has made a conscientious move away from project management, which guides much mainstream development thinking, toward alliancebuilding 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 donordriven. 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 development 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.
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Village Earth attempts to turn away from the search to discover what lies at the
bottom of natures, Glissants first suggestion. Village Earth is not interested in
the Otherto learn about them, manage them or development thembut
instead focuses on alliance. Unequal power relations cannot be eliminated: Village
Earth remains a northern NGO with disproportionate resources and the ability to
travel toand leavethe 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 alliancepolitical 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 objectivesby researching
petroleum development in the Peruvian Amazon and providing this information
to indigenous communities, for exampleand 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, Glissants 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-andwith. 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.
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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 ethicopolitical 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 identitywho the Shipibo areand the objectives
of developmentwhat the Shipibo should doare productive opacities for Village
Earth. But the transnational flows of power and resources that constitute oil production 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 onehe
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

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.

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 womens 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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Village Earth has discussed translation extensively and members feel that it is
important not to translate and understand everything that the Shipibo say. In
Glissants 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 Shipibopower relations are shiftedbecause 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 theynot the
researcherhave the ability to go between two languages (Rappaport 2005).

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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.

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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 Glissants
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

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

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

TOPIA 21

In juxtaposing multiple narratives, Children of the Anaconda represents the productive 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 Earths unwillingness to work according to a funding agencys agenda or
timeline if these do not match the alliances 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.

53

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.

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54

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 Lpez 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 developmentbased upon a project management
that elides political engagementsidesteps 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

of an opaque alliance, structured around Village Earths 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 Glissants 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

The productiveness of opacity applies to non-human alterity as much as human,

which can be seen throughout Glissants literary and poetic writing in particular.
In Glissants novels, non-human naturerivers, trees, beaches, landscapesare
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 Glissants poetry does not connote meaning in any straightforward or

TOPIA 21

Nature figures prominently and complexly in Glissants work, in ways that

dovetail with multiple meanings of natureas essence, norm and non-human.
We want to take a brief detour through Glissants literary writing and its relation
to these multiple meanings to highlight the ways in which Glissants 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(ones) nature, and warning us not to attempt
such a (potentially violent) task, Glissant is fully insistent upon the materiality,
density or effectivity of naturethere 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 existthings 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.

55

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 relationa 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 relationa constant relocation in an indeterminate milieu (Dash 2001:
107), living and thinking withreplaces the certainties of nature.

TOPIA 21
56

In novels like La Lzard (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 Lzard is named for a
river; another novel, Mahagony (1987), is named for a tree. The sustained relationships 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 Glissants 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, Glissants 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.

Glissant embraces the ambiguity and uncertainty of natureits opacityas 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

While many recognize the importance and benefits of engaging in a political

alliance with the Otherof producing knowledge that does political work, or
writing with rather than about, or giving back to ones research community
Glissant brings a more explicitly ethical dimension to the notion of alliance.
His twin suggestionsto give up the search to discover what lies at the bottom
of natures, and to instead let our understanding give-on-and-withpush 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,

TOPIA 21

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 ones 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 Glissants two suggestions
applies to non-human nature as well. The world does not exist to be reduced to a
text or idea, and Glissants 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.

57

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.
Notes

TOPIA 21
58

We 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 KrackeBerndorff 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
Anzalda (2007), Bhabha (1994), Gilroy (2005), McClintock (1995), Minh-ha (1991)
and Vizenor (1999). On issues of Self and Other and ethical engagement with difference, 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 conversations 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 altruistic project of (self-)betterment than Eurocentric concept locating the West at the
pinnacle of an evolutionary development spectrum. Many involved with Village Earth
echo Escobars (1995) critique that development and poverty are produced through
a Western neocolonial discourse, through which diverse global populations become backward, 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

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. Organizacin para la Defensa y Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indgenas de la Amazona de Per.
7. Perus state licensing agency, PerPetro, releases limited information on oil and gas
operations at http://www.perupetro.com/pe.
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