HVOR BOR DE VILDE? Erindringer om identitet og politik i Amazonas

Resumé

Søren Hvalkof: Where are the Savages?

Memories of Identity and Politics in the

Amazon

The author’s personal experience with a

conventional study tour to the Peruvian

Andes that metamorphosed into an ethnographic

joumey of the Amazon, highlights

the central importance of the ethnographic

field work as anthropology’s phenomenological

soul. The case of the Asheninka of

the Peruvian Amazon is used to show why

the ethnographic description is crucial to the

realization of the political potentials inherent

in non-Westem societies. Using classificatory

models of ethnic and social identity

developed by Dr. Niels Fock and rethinking

them in the context of power, the

epistemological contrast between the

developmentalist and essentialist monolith

of Western thinking and the indigenous, nonessentialist,

multicentric and particularistic

universe is demonstrated. The recent

political success of the latter is related to the

potentials released through the growing

process of globalization. An anecdote from

the field epitomizes the choices made by the

Asheninka.