Presentation

The peoples of lowland South America today confront ever more diverse and complex forms of bureaucracy: from the receipt of ID documents to participation in elections, struggles to obtain formal recognition of land rights, involvement in formal legal proceedings, and filling in forms for the receipt of social benefits. How do they use and interpret such documents, bureaucracies and procedures? Do these represent new forms of technology, modes of action, or techniques for exerting influence? How can this shed light on processes of social and political change now taking place in the South American lowlands? This meeting of anthropologists specialising in the region will seek to analyse Amerindian peoples' engagements with forms of bureaucracy that, far from being merely tools of state domination, often appear to represent new modes of influencing or compelling their interlocutors.

Programme

THURSDAY 28^th OF FEBRUARY

9h30-13h

Opening
Jean-Pierre ÉTIENVRE
Directeur de la Casa de Velázquez

Introduction

Olivier ALLARD
Université de Picardie Jules Verne

Harry WALKER
London School of Economics and Political Science

RITUAL ACTION AND BUREAUCRATIC TECHNOLOGIES

President
Capucine BOIDIN
Université Paris III

Harry WALKER
London School of Economics and Political Science
The pen and the dart: dark arts of Amazonian lawfare

Chloé NAHUM-CLAUDEL
University of Cambridge
The to and fro of documents, vying for a conquest of perspective in Enawene-nawe dealings with the Brazilian state

Olivier ALLARD
Université de Picardie Jules Verne
Efficacité bureaucratique et efficacité rituelle : les usages de la nomination chez les Warao du Venezuela

15h-18h

DOCUMENTS AT THE HEART OF POLITICAL CHANGE

President
Jean-Frédéric SCHAUB
École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris)

Catherine ALÈS
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (Paris)
« Le papier, nous, on ne sait même pas ce que c'est ». Nomination, identité et transformations politiques en Amazonie vénézuélienne

Aline IUBEL y Piero LEIRNER
Universidade Federal de São Carlos
«Burocracia» e o movimento indígena no Alto Rio Negro

Maria GUZMAN-GALLEGOS
Rainforest Foundation Norway
Legal texts and indigenous renegotiation of state space in Ecuadorian Amazonia

FRIDAY 1^st OF MARCH

9h30-13h

BUREAUCRACY AND SOCIAL WELL-BEING

President
Véronique BOYER
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (Paris)

Johanna GONÇALVES
University of Cambridge
Writing as a medical technology in a Yanomami health post: on censuses, epidemiological registries, referral letters and others papers

Amy PENFIELD
London School of Economics and Political Science
Passage with papers: how documents enable mobility among the Sanema of Venezuelan Amazonia

Juan Álvaro ECHEVERRI
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
La sal de la vida: de la fecundidad amerindia y las cuestiones burocráticas

General debate

Free entrance