The territorial autonomy of the Amazonian original nations: the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampís Nation.
Amazons, Indigenous Peoples, Wampis, Autonomies, Conflicts.
The central problem of this research is to understand the transformations that have occurred
in the northwestern Amazon region of Peru, especially the historical development of the
Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampís Nation (GTANW). The main objective is
to analyze the socio-spatial dynamics given the multiple factors of their ordering, different
scales of agency in this new stage of expansion of capitalism, which promotes the
contradictory encounter of diverse societal forms. Such regions are historically subordinated
in the structure of the modern-colonial world system, which hierarchizes global power blocs,
countries and, within these, their regions. From the characterization of these conflicts in the
present time, the forms of reinvention and reconstruction of territorial autonomy of the
original Amazonian nations are analyzed, among other cases throughout Latin America, in the
face of the hegemonic dynamics of global capitalism. These conflicts operate on different
scales, mainly due to legal and illegal mining industries, energy matrix, deforestation and
forest fires, agribusiness, and other extractive activities that threaten native nations
throughout the Amazon. Autonomy is approached from different methodologies in dialogue
with the practices and knowledge of the Wampís Nation, their cosmologies, and the
community communications that take place in their integral territory. Theoretical-political
references from different spaces and times are mobilized: Peruvian Amazonian ethnohistory
and anthropology; official historiographical literature, archival documents and various
literatures; their oppositions; sensitive theories and experiences on "indigenous" autonomies;
debates on development and extractivism; the problematization of state science, especially
national censuses; and finally Latin American critical theories of communication. The center
of contact with the Wampís' way of thinking and acting according to the Wampís' ethics was
precisely in the shared work of community communication with the GTANW and the Wampís
Nation. The present research does not intend to exhaust this set of complex agendas, but
rather to be an opening to themes, literatures, methodologies and practices that have not yet
matured or been consolidated in the Brazilian social sciences or done in Brazil. This
characteristic presents itself as a challenge and a horizon of permanent elaboration and
exchange in the material and intangible territories of the Wampís Nation.