Indigenous Activism, Territorialization and Ethnicity in the Middle Rio Negro

Abstract This paper addresses the processes of territorialization, formation of indigenous associations and ethnogenesis in the Middle Rio Negro that have led to the most recent struggles for official recognition of indigenous lands. The central focus of description and analysis is the antagonism between the aviamento regime and the “community” as modalities of natural resource consumption and strategies for social reproduction. In the Upper Rio Negro, in the mid-1980s, at the heart of a process of inversion of ethnic stigma, crisis of missionary tutelage and developmentalist militarization; the community became the territorial base for political codification of the emerging formation of associations. At the beginning of the 21st century, indigenous associations gained new life in the Middle Rio Negro, clashing with the aviamento regime and intensifying the fight for territorial rights.