“Here No Poop”: The Dangers and Prospects of Intersubjective Relations in Amerindian Political Economies of Life

Summary

Amerindian political economies revolve around life perceived as being the scarcest resource. All living beings compete among themselves to accumulate as much vitality as possible. Generalized predation is countered, however, by an ethic of self-regulation that ensures a certain balance between species. Through the analysis of personal anecdotes with the Yanesha of Central Peru, I propose that such precarious balance is based on ambiguous intersubjective relations permanently oscillating between predation and friendship as well as between acts of ex-corporation and in-corporation.