Alessio Thomasberger

The Gustav Schübeck Scholarship of the DAAD-Stiftung allowed me to make my long-standing dream come true, to conduct anthropological research in cooperation with the local population of the Amazon region. The doctoral project is dedicated to examining an international nature conservation programme that was developed further by indigenous organisations from the Amazon region and is now being realised as a pilot project.

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The tropical rainforest and Alessio Thomasberger harvesting bananas

The Gustav Schübeck Scholarship of the DAAD-Stiftung allowed me to make my long-standing dream come true, to conduct anthropological research in cooperation with the local population of the Amazon region. The doctoral project is dedicated to examining an international nature conservation programme that was developed further by indigenous organisations from the Amazon region and is now being realised as a pilot project.

My stay in Peru that was funded via the Gustav Schübeck Scholarship started in the city of Cusco in the Andes. The scholarship from the DAAD-Stiftung enabled me to first take part in a language class, and this proved to be a great choice. The ‘Acupari’ language school was an amazing stepping stone into the country’s cultural life and for getting a sense of economic coexistence there.

It takes just a brief, attentive observation of the centrally located square Plaza de Armas to understand the role the informal sector plays for the livelihood of many Peruvians.

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A water channel for panning for gold

The traders are impressively creative: using a rapid sequence of grips and grasps and a stapler, a plain A4 sheet is quickly turned into a sun hat that protects the visitors of the city centre that lies 3,400 metres above the sea and allows the traders to earn a few cents. When I arrived, some owners of small shops were still upset about the protest marches that had taken place a few weeks earlier.

Following a long period of suffering owing to Covid-19, they claimed that Peruvians were now causing their own problems by shutting down their city centres, once more causing tourists to stay away.

The German-Peruvian language school Acupari in Cusco accepted me as a Spanish student, despite the political unrest, and the school’s wonderful teachers kept drawing my attention to cultural customs and events.

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A gold mining area

One example of this is drinking the hot, almost slimy and very comforting breakfast drinks (made from quinoa, for example) that are consumed on the go in the cold morning hours, at the side of the street. They also told me about theatre productions, and I was thus introduced to the vibrant theatre scene that explores the good and the not so good sides of the Peruvian past and present in impressive ways.

Several times a week, I would go to the theatres hidden in the alleys and backstreets. My last week of language learning included the Easter weekend, when Cusco turned into a pilgrimage centre. Alleys, squares, churches and the cathedral were engulfed in incense, which sometimes obscured the view, so that the sermons held in Quechua (the indigenous language of the Andean region) and Spanish could only be heard.

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Alessio Thomasberger on a ride with an indigenous person

It soon became obvious that Christianity has not merely been imposed on the Andean population, but that it has made it its own. One night during the Easter weekend I visited seven churches in a row, which was a first for me. This is considered a good virtue and is reminiscent of Jesus Christ’s seven falls on his way towards being crucified.

It was only after I had completed the language class that I went on to the Madre de Dios Amazon region that is located some 3,000 metres lower and its capital Puerto Maldonado, where I was to discuss my research project with indigenous organisations.

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A boat on the Rio Madre de Dios

My cooperation with the indigenous organisations in the regional capital, which I performed with supervision from the long-established anthropologist Thomas Moore, became a firm part of my research work. I found the indigenous organisations to be a hub for researchers from various regions around the world. During my period of research, I was part of an interdisciplinary and international research team of young scientists from Spain, the USA, Argentina and Germany.

In addition to a number of smaller projects that we organised and realised, we held an event at a conference in Leticia in Colombia, and this was the highlight of our cooperation that continues to this day.

Our greatest achievement was to travel to the event with four indigenous research collaborators, and to realise the event with them. From Puerto Maldonado the multi-sited ethnography approach took me to the indigenous communities of the Reserva Comunal Amarakaeri, and among other places to the gold mines that are located around the reservation.

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The sunset on the Rio Madre de Dios

The indigenous community Shintuya became the most important part of my research work, alongside my work with the institutions in the regional capital. Shintuya is a wonderful place with wonderful people, thermal springs and a fantastic flora and fauna.

Being accepted by the locals was key to my goal to realise a nature conversation project and to explore the community members’ views of the project as a researcher relying on qualitative methods. By taking part in their everyday life and conducting many informal and semi-structured interviews, I was able to directly link the locals’ activities to statements made in interviews, and to compare these.

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The view on the way towards Shintuya

To come closer to achieving this, I joined the household of a young family and took part in their everyday activities. This included participation in rather adventurous activities such as harvesting bananas in the pouring rain and joining the locals as they went hunting and fishing. Towards the end of my period of research, I increasingly took part in commercial activities of other households that were involved in the nature conversation programme.

Owing to the fact that my research is taking place in a real-life context rather than a laboratory, qualitative research and the related observations are characterised by the particular challenge for the researcher to decide, when to step away from everyday life to work on notes and theoretical aspects of the research work.

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The rain over the rainforest

Things that are relevant to the research project are happening every day, after all. This made is all the more important to take some time every day to prepare notes, questionnaires and interim analyses that will be vital to the final analysis of the collected data.

Gold mining is an extractive activity that has had a strong impact on the region and its population over the past few decades. People have been coming to the Harakmbut territory to mine for gold since the 1970s, with a second boom taking place in the 2000s. The small motors that were used for manual extraction in the past, have been replaced with state-of-the-art diggers that dig up the forest, turning it into a desert-like landscape.

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A mural in Cusco

Only a few palm trees in a rocky quarry landscape remain where there was once the lush, green rainforest. Some indigenous communities were affected so strongly by this invasion, they could not withstand the gold rush.

Gold mining by internal migrants who have settled in the region is in stark contrast to the cultural heritage of the Harakmbut that includes respectful coexistence with non-human beings and where identity is defined by territory.

The REDD+ Indigena Amzonico nature conservation project that is a key research object, was an attempt of the Harakmbut to overcome the tension between extractive commercial activities and sustainable business projects in a creative way.

The indigenous organisations have drawn up an alternative to the international REDD+ nature conservation initiative that is based on Harakmbut cosmology and their origin myth Wanamey. Wanamey was a tree that grew in the landscape in times of flooding and fires and served as a place of refuge for both the Harakmbut and animals. Wanamey did not only save them but it also taught them about respectful coexistence of human and non-human beings.

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A bend in the Rio Madre de Dios

It was incredibly valuable for my research to find out, where the implementation of the socially-oriented nature conversation project was successful in the collaboration of indigenous organisations with their communities, NGOs and state players and where there were difficulties.

In other words, I learned through my research how the Harakmbut are asserting their autonomy through the alternative proposal for the nature conservation initiative, which is based on fundamentally different axioms, and which mechanisms of global interdependence have an impact on implementation of this alternative proposal.

Due to the fact that the Harakmbut’s suggestions with regard to solution approaches in the context of climate change are relevant not only to themselves but to the world at large, my research results are speaking in favour of a stronger involvement of indigenous people in the climate change debate. The goal of my work is to introduce the research results to the scientific discourse. The next step is to put them into writing.

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A rainbow over the sports field of the indigenous community of Palotoa

Following my empirical data collection / field research, this is a bit of a challenge. During my first few weeks back in Germany, I had to get used to life here again and get my everyday life back on track. My senses felt sharpened in this time, as I had returned to my familiar environment after a long time away.

The people around me in Madre de Dios and in Germany are facing very different everyday problems. Nevertheless, if there is one thing I learned on this research trip, it’s that the world is much more closely interlinked than you may realise in everyday life in Germany.

I got the impression that the indigenous communities are much more aware of these interconnections. This shows in knowing about the latest football results, as well as with regard to serious topics such as gold mining for the global market, the visibility of drug cartels with European purchasers, or climate change where the local population is hardly at fault but experiencing the consequences much more tangibly.