Between care and conflict: relations of resource extraction in the Peruvian Amazon

The article examines the ‘contradiction’ between indigenous Amazonian people’s opposition to hydrocarbon extraction and their participation in different scales of logging. It considers the literature on conflicts over resource extraction from the experiences of Joel Bardales, an Ashéninka man who leads both logging ventures and protests against hydrocarbon extraction. While scholarly debates emphasise collective responses, the article emphasises individual experiences as they motivate different strate- gies vis-à-vis resource extraction. Joel’s statements, stemming from a context of a relational moral economy, reveal a position that does not reject resource extraction, but its refusal to engage in reciprocal relationships of care.


Three Readings of Conflicts over Resource Extraction
Resource extraction has produced and reinforced patterns of inequality in Latin America, undermined social trust, fragmented social organisation, and largely failed to comply with indigenous rights recognised in international agreements (Schilling-Vacaflor and Flemmer, 2015;Leifsen, Guzman-Gallegos and Schilling-Vacaflor, 2017). Peru, with a resource export-oriented economy, is illustrative of this context (Bury, 2005;Bebbington and Hinojosa Valencia, 2011). Advocates of extractive development celebrate Peru's poverty reduction, from 60 percent of the population living below the poverty line in 2003 to 21.8 percent in 2015, as proof of its effectiveness (World Bank, n.d.). The expansion of hydrocarbon, mining and timber concessions is a continuation of an extractive development agenda justified as a pathway to progress in the wake of Peru's internal war (Sarmiento Barletti, 2021). In Atalaya, progreso (progress) is discussed as plans to connect it to Lima by road, as well as building roads and sidewalks in town, a larger plaza and airport, astroturf football pitches and swimming pools, and buildings to host tourists who rarely arrive (see Harvey, 2010 on development as concrete infrastructure in Peru). 'Progress' is to be funded by the expansion of timber and hydrocarbon extraction in the province, the jobs and business they will bring, and the royalties paid by hydrocarbon companies.
Peru is also the site of dozens of conflicts over natural resource extraction. The Ombudsman's Office reported 139 conflicts during 2011-2016, with 50 deaths and over 750 injuries (La República, 2016). Protests in Atalaya have included marches, the invasion of hydrocarbon sites and river blockades to disrupt supplies to extraction bases. There are three main scholarly positions on why these conflicts take place. For the first -the most common in Peru -conflicts are the result of governance failures such as poor conflict management and prevention, deficient redistribution of royalties from resource extraction and a lack of participatory spaces for the communities affected by extraction (Damonte, 2012;Tanaka, 2012). The solution is discussed as policy reforms to improve the governance of extractive activities through more effective and equitable redistribution policies, extending more effective participation to indigenous and local peoples, more transparent national and subnational investment of royalties, and improved regulation and enforcement of environmental standards (Merino, 2014). Yet, the emphasis on governance and policy reform carries little critical consideration for the development trajectory on which resource extraction and related policies are formed and implemented (Merino, 2018). Furthermore, it does not consider the structures and power asymmetries between the stakeholders in resource extraction and how these inequalities play out at the local level.
The second reading, political ecology, addresses these analytical shortcomings by engaging with clashes over resource extraction as 'ecological distribution conflicts' (Martinez-Alier and O'Connor, 1996) in which local men and women defend -against the state or the market -their access to and/or control over the resources extracted and/or affected by extractive processes (Martinez-Alier, 2002;Li, 2015). On this reading, also discussed as the 'environmentalism of the poor' (Guha and Martínez-Alier, 1997), indigenous and local peoples are not driven into conflicts over resource extraction by environmentalism but by their experience of the environment as a source of their livelihoods. These conflicts are understood analytically as environmental justice struggles, caused by the structural inequalities that drive formal and informal land and resource dispossession, and the unequal burden of pollution and/or forest degradation experienced by communities in the vicinity of extractive ventures (e.g. mines, hydrocarbon sites, timber concessions) and/or related activities (e.g. smelters, pipelines, sawmills). However, the focus on resources as part of indigenous and local people's livelihoods may gloss over their cultural understandings of conflicts.
The third reading, political ontology, engages with these understandings to argue that conflicts are about the defence of the relations that people have with the non-human entities they share their territories with (Escobar, 2016). From this perspective, conflicts are not about poorly designed and/or implemented policies or about the defence of livelihoods but are struggles over different assumptions about what exists -including 'nature' (De la Cadena, 2015). Understanding nature as part of a wider decolonial project, these scholars propose that plants, animals, forests and mountains are not simply resources over which conflicts are enacted, but they are active participants in the struggle against extractive activity as they are also 'threatened by the neoliberal wedding of capital and the state' (De la Cadena, 2010;Blaser, 2013). This reading has been criticised for generalising and essentialising a wide range of indigenous people's experiences and engagements with nature and natural resources, as well as historical trajectories (Ramos, 2012;Bessire and Bond, 2014).
Although the three readings have shortcomings, they reveal different aspects that may be at play in conflicts. However, they all emphasise collective responses (e.g. communities, social movements and networks), an emphasis that homogenises the individual experiences and strategies that mediate people's desires and strategies regarding extractive activities. In what follows, I argue that individual perspectives like Joel's give us a deeper understanding of the different strategies through which indigenous and local peoples engage with different kinds of resource extraction. This focus is important given that resource extraction governance encourages individual strategies in rural communities to escape economic poverty (Arellano-Yanguas, 2011;Bebbington and Hinojosa Valencia, 2011).

Noshire and Reciprocal Relationships of Care
In 2009, 47.6 percent of children under five years old in Atalaya were chronically malnourished (Díaz, 2010). At the time, my Asháninka/Ashéninka interlocutors discussed food scarcity as the result of different kinds and scales of extractive activity, which reduced the amount of food they could fish, hunt and grow. This forced them to rely on cash incomes to buy food, most commonly by working in logging ventures and/or planting cash crops. Like other Asháninka/Ashéninka areas, households in the Bajo Urubamba 'are integrated and knowledgeable participants in a wider capitalist economy' (Killick, 2008;Peralta and Kainer, 2008).
For some of my interlocutors, addressing game and land productivity shortages by rebuilding their relationships with aipatsite (our earth) and the ashitarori (owners/masters of animals) was central to ensuring food and land productivity (Sarmiento Barletti, 2021). As I was told repeatedly, these non-human beings will only interact positively with those who hold their end of a reciprocal relationship of care. For example, aipatsite, the physical earth and a non-human being that allows people to grow food, will withdraw its productivity, and thus people's ability to grow food, if the land is not worked in a socially constructive manner or if people log too many trees. Similarly, the ashitarori will release animals for hunters only if they do not overhunt them and stay away from their homes. Many of my interlocutors explained shortages as these non-human beings rejecting extractive activity and refusing to engage with people, share their productivity, and release their animals for people to hunt and fish (Sarmiento Barletti, 2016). In one interview I asked Joel about the impact of logging and cacao and coffee gardens in comunidades on the non-human forest beings that he had assured me existed. Joel agreed on the importance of rebuilding relationships with non-human beings. He said it was obvious that kiatsi, the ashitarori of fish, was releasing less fish because Pluspetrol's boat traffic angered it. He continued: I don't know what we could do. Some people say [non-human beings] will return if [Pluspetrol leaves], that we have to show aipatsite we can work together and live well. But you've seen how hard it is to hunt and fish. We have to work timber if we want to live well because there is nothing else we can do. And we will have to grow more cacao and coffee because there is not enough food for everyone, so we have to buy food or get funds for a fish farm.
[ … ] Yes, [non-humans] will not like it, but what can we do! There is no choice. If plants don't grow as they used to [because aipatsite has stopped sharing its productivity], we'll have to use fertiliser so that they do, we'll have to learn.
[ … ] It makes me sad, but what are we going to do? How are we going to feed our children or buy them notebooks so that they go to school and progress? How will we buy medicines when they're sick? [Hydrocarbon companies] won't share with us to make up for what they are doing so we need to find a way around it. ( … ) It isn't like when my grandparents lived and there was game and fish for everyone to share. (Joel Bardales, 2008) Joel is proposing a strategy through which self-sufficiency and autonomy is being pursued at the expense of relations with non-humans, a necessary yet difficult sacrifice in a context of food scarcity. For my Asháninka/Ashéninka interlocutors, those who hold reciprocal relationships of care recognise each other's noshire (my heart/soul), the seat of a person's ability to feel, remember and make choices (Weiss, 1975). 'Knowing' how to feel sorrow for the suffering of others, love, and happiness are emotions which are central to how my interlocutors understand everyday relations of care; these emotions are counterpoised to anger, sadness and envy, all described as destructive to everyday relations (see Overing and Passes, 2000 for similar cases in Amazonia). Furthermore, as noted for other indigenous Amazonian groups (Belaunde, 2001), those who hold reciprocal relationships of care share the products of their work (e.g. food and money) and are open to receiving from others when offered the same treatment, thus mutually recognising their noshire. Yet, as Joel explained in a separate conversation, people prefer to share their work through mingas (collective work parties) as there is not enough food to share as in the past.
Sharing one's work and being open to receive that of others in relationships that are renewed through mingas has become central to the Asháninka/Ashéninka moral economy at a time when people cannot produce, share and receive food as they expected to do in the past. Families organise mingas and invite their male kin and friends to help them complete work-intensive tasks such as clearing forest to burn a new garden, plant and harvest cash crops, extract timber or build a house. By participating in mingas people renew bonds of friendship and reciprocity with others in their comunidad, as they attend the mingas of those who attend theirs to repay their work. Although attendance is voluntary, people gossip about those that fail to reciprocate. Attendance is generally understood as a desire to share one's work, but also of the host couple's openness to share with their guests by feeding them a special meal (usually roasted chicken or chicken soup with spaghetti and potatoes) and manioc beer. Although mingas are about work, they are usually fun for participants who normally work on their own or with their wives and children, or sons-in-law if they have them. Participants expect that when they organise a minga the organisers of the mingas they have attended will renew the relationship by participating.
Joel's neighbours described him as a productive member of his comunidad because he had acquired his material possessions by working together with his family as well as organising large mingas for his coffee and cacao gardens. Joel was admired for attending all the mingas he was invited to or sending someone from his household when he was unable to participate. At mingas he would start to work before everyone else and joked with and teased other participants to keep the group's morale up. In his own mingas he made sure everyone had enough manioc beer to drink and food to eat. His behaviour was described as encompassing the reciprocal relationships of care expected of people who recognise each other's noshire. These reciprocal relationships of care are present in how Joel recounts his interactions with actors in timber extraction.

Timber Relations in Atalaya
Most Asháninka/Ashéninka men I know have worked timber since their teens; logging is so common in the area that it has become central to discourses of masculinity. My interlocutors described their engagement in logging as instructional, as they improved their Spanish, learned how to drink cane alcohol, smoke cigarettes and interact with mestizos.
There are three main ways in which indigenous men in the Bajo Urubamba valley participated in timber extraction (see Killick, 2007Killick, , 2008 for similar experiences in Ucayali River Ashéninka comunidades). In the first and most common, timber is extracted from concessions or comunidades in less populated tributaries as few comunidades in the Bajo Urubamba have precious hardwoods (cedar and mahogany) after decades of logging. Companies hire indigenous men and transport them to camps where they work 12-hour shifts in teams of 2-3 dozen workers to fell trees with chainsaws, cut them into logs, clear paths in the forest to roll the logs to rivers, and travel with the timber downriver to sawmills in Atalaya. These operations use tractors to move logs within the forest but also to open roads in the forest to move timber faster, and less visibly, than by river. In 2019, Atalaya province had 295 km of informal roads built in the vicinity of comunidades; almost one quarter of all new roads in the Peruvian Amazon that year (MINAM, 2020). Most indigenous men work for patrones for 1-6 months every year and make between GB£100-150 per month (when Peru's minimum wage is just under GB£250). The relatively small numbers of women who work in timber camps as cooks are paid around GB£80-100. They are commonly married women who join their husbands or young unmarried women. I know of many who became pregnant with the children of mestizo men and returned with them to their comunidades where in at least a dozen of those cases the men were later elected as headmen (Hewlett, 2017).
The second option is carried out to cover seasonal expenses like those associated with schooling. Commonly, groups of 5-10 men -a couple of older men and their sons, sons-in-law, or nephews -fall 1-2 trees without conferring with their comunidad's leaders. As the permits required by Peru's forestry service for timber extraction and sale are difficult and expensive to get (Monterroso and Larson, 2018), men sell the logs at a cut price to patrones who launder them with logs they extract from concessions (Salisbury, López and Vela Alvarado, 2011). Patrones are keen for these arrangements for cheap timber -in 2009 a cubic foot (ft 3 ) of mahogany was worth GPB£3 in the legal market in Atalaya, but Joel and his workgroup received GPB£0.60/ft 3 . This practice is risky as the forestry service fines comunidades when they catch people selling timber without the required paperwork rather than fining violators. A 2018 protest led by Joel that paralysed Atalaya for a week demanded the cancellation of hundreds of fines owed by comunidades to the government, and the relaxation of requirements for the permits needed for comunidades to extract and sell timber.
The third option is through agreements that comunidades hold with patrones to extract timber from their forests. All comunidades in the Bajo Urubamba were titled at the time of research, thereby being granted a degree of control over logging ventures (for logging relations in other land regimes, see Salisbury, López and Vela Alvarado, 2011;Feather, 2011). Patrones obtain all the necessary permits and sign agreements with comunidades, negotiating with their leaders how much timber will be extracted and at what price, and will later deduct extraction expenses from the comunidad's profits. Patrones commonly employ local men (as labourers) and women (as cooks), who receive individual wages, while the profits from the agreement are divided between all of the comunidad's households. The deals may also include material goods like small hydroelectric engines or outboard engines to be shared by comunidad members. One of the dangers with these arrangements is that, following Peruvian law, jefes (headpeople) can sign legally binding agreements for comunidades. The accounts that patrones presented to comunidades that I have reviewed held evidence of patrones giving money to jefes, buying them food and alcohol in Atalaya, covering their expenses at hostels, or giving them gallons of petrol throughout the year; adding up to thousands of GB£ in a single year. Patrones book these expenses as loans to the comunidad and demand payment later, in an updated version of enganche relations where indigenous men were paid in advance for their work with industrially made products (Garcia Hierro, Hvalkof and Gray, 1998). The system was based on indigenous workers never knowing how much their work was worth in relation to the materials they received, and being unable to pay their debts as the enganche renewed every time they received more goods. Today, comunidades are the debtors and pay back their loans in timber, yet they keep signing these agreements as they are the easiest way for them to profit from their forests, with less effort involved than cultivating cash crops. However, most timber income, either from work for patrones or the funds that families receive from comunidad deals with patrones, is controlled by men. My female interlocutors noted this excluded them from accessing market products or making decisions about household expenditure, despite the extra pressure on them to feed their children during the months their partners are away working timber. The challenges to the participation of indigenous women in the governance of their communities and resources is common throughout the Peruvian Amazon (Sarmiento Barletti et al., 2020). Typically, men travel to urban centres to sell cash crops and control the income that comes from work in gardens by both men and women. Over the years I have witnessed more women travelling with men to Atalaya when they receive their pay in order to keep part of it for food-related expenses. Notably, government cash transfer programmes for economically-poor families like Programa Juntos are paid to women.
Despite rights abuses throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Garcia Hierro, Hvalkof and Gray, 1998), the accounts I recorded of life in the villages created around patrones were positive. These accounts emphasise that understanding the different dimensions of conflicts across the extractive frontier requires an awareness of the ways in which both the past and present are imagined and mobilised around resource extraction (Himley, 2014). Like Gow's (1991) indigenous Yine interlocutors in the Bajo Urubamba, Asháninka/Ashéninka people described this period as a process in which they learned to live together in villages, stopped fighting, and underwent a creative process in terms of social relations. In this recounting of the past, small kin-based groups moved to live in villages set around large farms or timber and rubber camps where they intermarried and created compadrazgo relationships with other people, producing new kinship networks that included patrones (and sometimes their wives) and their foremen as fathers, compadres/comadres and godfathers/ godmothers. Varese (1968) described these processes as evidence that Asháninka/Ashéninka people are fully aware of the power of non-indigenous actors and react to it in their own terms. For example, Chevalier (1982), on the basis of work conducted elsewhere in Asháninka/Ashéninka territory, described compadrazgo as 'a means of concrete resistance to the most immediate threats of exploitation and poverty'. In similar vein, for Killick (2008) both Asháninka/Ashéninka groups and patrones attempt to control their interactions by deploying cultural institutions including compadrazgo relationships and related idioms of support and care. As Joel explained: We log a few trees when we need to buy clothes for our children or pots for our wives. I've worked timber! My father worked timber too. Who hasn't worked timber? [ … ] Some people go to work for patrones, others go to the forest with their brothers and nephews and fell one, two, three trees and sell them to people they know in Atalaya to make ends meet. You can go to Atalaya and talk nicely [to patrones] and get a fair price. Sometimes they'll give you loans when you need cash for your family and will let you pay them back in timber. (Joel Bardales, 2007) Within this context, Joel described his father's patrón in a positive light: [He] was my godfather and used to give me gifts when I was a boy. If you worked hard, they were fine. I sell my timber to the son of my father's patrón and he is always fair and sometimes will pay a bit extra when I really need the money. He knows how to feel sorrow [sabe tener pena]. He even supported me when I was campaigning for mayor and when I had legal problems over my house in Atalaya. He felt sorrow for me and wanted to help. (Joel Bardales, 2007) Joel portrayed his father's patrón, who became his godfather and thus his father's compadre, and his godfather's son as people who 'know how to feel sorrow', framing their interactions in idioms of support and care. From Joel's perspective, the relationships built and nurtured in timber extraction present a pathway to self-sufficiency. His interactions with Pluspetrol, as I discuss below, do not.

Camisea and the Refusal of Reciprocal Relationships of Care
When Camisea became active in 2004, Atalaya province (in Ucayali Region) was not to benefit from the Fondo de Desarrollo Socioeconómico de Camisea (FOCAM, Camisea Fund for Socioeconomic Development) because the site is in Cusco Region, on the upper Bajo Urubamba. FOCAM is a government scheme to transfer funds from natural gas royalties to subnational jurisdictions, which was required by the Inter-American Development Bank, who financed Camisea, after pressure from indigenous organisations and their NGO allies so that comunidades would benefit from the extractive venture (Corral, Henderson and Miranda, 2016;see Ross, 2009 on the civil society pressure). Following a process that included input from the indigenous Matsigenka comunidades adjacent to Camisea and their organisations, it was decided that the funds would prioritise work in the comunidades in the project's area of impact; however, these elements were not respected in FOCAM's implementation. Nueva Esperanza and the other seventeen comunidades on the Atalaya side of the river were not initially compensated by Pluspetrol for its impact either because no extraction takes place on that side or because no pipelines transporting gas cross it. However, Atalaya province is downriver from Camisea and is thus affected by liquified gas spills on the Bajo Urubamba as the pipeline leaked five times during 2005-2006 and there have been more spills since (Mongabay, 2006). Atalaya is also the logistical centre for all extractive and exploratory hydrocarbon activity in the area, which has led to a significant rise in large boats transporting supplies to different sites. Boat traffic creates waves that turn over the canoes used locally for fishing and transport and has also led to reduced fishing yields.
In 2004, as Atalaya's demands for a share of FOCAM were getting nowhere, Joel was a councillor in the Provincial Municipality of Atalaya yet soon thereafter became interim mayor when the incumbent resigned. Joel told me that at the time he saw himself as a representative of indigenous peoples rather than of the people of Atalaya as a whole. His greatest worry was Camisea's impact on comunidades, and so he decided to concentrate his efforts on FOCAM and investing it in comunidades, because Atalaya was profiting from the business brought by the demand for services from the companies with concessions in the area. In his first move as mayor, Joel travelled to Lima to negotiate for a share of FOCAM: I showed up [at the Ministry of Economics and Finance] and told the receptionist that I was the Mayor of Atalaya Province in Ucayali Region and showed her my credentials. She told me to wait. I was prepared to wait for days. We've been abandoned by the government since I can remember, it has never felt sorrow for us. [ … ] [A] man, all dressed up, came and invited me to an office. He told me he was an adviser to one of the Vice Ministers [ … ] I was very angry [that Atalaya's share of FOCAM had not been approved] but I controlled myself.
[ … ] I told him that we indigenous people were worried and had not been listened to by the government. I told him about our right [to free, prior and informed consent recognised in the International Labour Organization's Convention 169] that the government had not respected [ … ] that we suffer because of Camisea, and that they were doing nothing to help us. (Joel Bardales, 2007) He continued: He told me, 'you must understand that neither the gas nor the [pipeline] come from Atalaya'. He said that there was no pollution, that [Camisea] was safe. I told him that wasn't true, that fish tastes and smells different, that there is less fish because of all the boats but he didn't want to listen to me.
He didn't know how to feel sorrow for us, he didn't think of me as someone with noshire. We suffer from hunger and sadness yet the government and [Pluspetrol] make so much money. I told him that I didn't throw my rubbish in his house, so why did he let [Pluspetrol] throw its rubbish in mine! [ … ] I told him he didn't know how we live, that he should come visit us. (Joel Bardales, 2007) In Joel's experience, the civil servant did not recognise him as someone worthy of reciprocal relationships of care. Joel returned to Atalaya and led hundreds of protesters in cutting access to Camisea by blocking the Bajo Urubamba and Atalaya's airstrip. Protesters demanded compensation from Pluspetrol, as they perceived its activities led to diminished fishing and hunting. The government and Pluspetrol became desperate as the protest moved into the dry season, because the river would be too shallow for the company's larger boats to go upriver, and called for negotiations. Joel explained: [W]e were invited to negotiate, to meet the Vice Minister [of Economics and Finance] and talk.
[ … ] The Vice Minister was a good guy, and he wanted to help us. He came to visit us and learn how we live.
[ … ] We met in Atalaya, and he drank manioc beer and ate fish with us. Some people brought him a [traditional tunic] and he wore it [ … ] he wore a [headdress] too. He was so happy! [ … ] Politicians never do that; he wanted to help us because he had seen how we live and had felt sorrow for us. He talked to us and listened to us and saw our sadness and felt sorrow for us. He knew that we have noshire. He even gave me his [mobile] number and told me to call him next time I was in Lima as he would receive me in his office and put me in a hotel. (Joel Bardales, 2007) In contrast to his visit to the Ministry, Joel recounted that the Vice Minister had come to listen and negotiate rather than impose his own ideas and had been open to reciprocate what he received, which Joel understood as recognition of his noshire. For Joel, regardless of what his intentions may have actually been, the Vice Minister played a key part in Atalaya's achievement of FOCAM funds. Atalaya Province received 1.5 percent (around GB£3 million) of FOCAM's annual budget and was exempted from having to pay sales tax for a decade. FOCAM funds are commonly spent on roads, pavements and municipal buildings in the town of Atalaya. Exceptions are made in election years when the mayor or vice mayor runs for office and funds are commonly used to purchase gifts for comunidades to sway their inhabitants' votes. The protest also led to comunidades receiving compensation payments from Pluspetrol for disturbios fluviales (fluvial disturbances), an acceptance by the company of the impact of the boat traffic supplying Camisea. These payments are received with complaints about their meagreness as the company is rich but its payments do not offset the impact and the cost of the food they purchase due to fish scarcity. For example, Joel's comunidad received GB£3,000 for the 2009-2012 period to be shared between 65 families. Pluspetrol refused to recognise any impact from gas spills on the comunidades in the Atalaya side of the valley, arguing that they were too far away from Camisea for any serious impact.
Joel ran for re-election in 2006 and lost to a member of a powerful timber family, who promised to invest FOCAM funds on the town, reproducing urban Atalaya's ideals of 'progress'. Joel explained: . But those guys just want the best for their own patrones and nothing for the people who are hungry because of their projects. They don't know how to feel sorrow for us [ … ] They treat us as if we had no noshire. They have so much but they won't share, they don't know how to share. And they won't even drink manioc beer or eat with us. They don't even want to give us jobs, we just have to wait for their propinas. (Joel Bardales, 2008) Joel's take on Pluspetrol's community officers is in stark contrast to his experience with the Vice Minister, another actor he related to resource extraction. In my encounters with Pluspetrol's community officers in the Bajo Urubamba, all were non-indigenous Peruvians and monolingual in Spanish. They travel in large metal boats with outboard engines (a stark contrast to local wooden canoes), wear uniforms (long-sleeved denim shirts with the company's logo on it, jeans and boots), eat their own packed meals, sleep in their own tents and refuse to drink manioc beer. When I have asked them why, their replies have included not being able to drink on the job, that they may get sick from drinking manioc beer (because it is made with untreated water), or that they found it disgusting as its base is chewed manioc and sweet potatoes.
Joel experienced their reluctance to drink and eat with people in the comunidades they visit as a refusal to participate in a reciprocal relationship. This refusal is confirmed by how community officers run their meetings. Despite demands for greater discussion and compensation, Pluspetrol's interventions in villages are swift and based around telling people what the company is doing and how much money they will receive over the next period. Indigenous people's requests for work are turned down for reasons including the high-tech nature of the extraction process or that most indigenous men do not have identity cards or secondary school certificates. In most of the meetings between comunidad inhabitants and Pluspetrol's community officers in which I have participated, the latter responded to demands for better compensation by arguing that Pluspetrol was already paying royalties to the government and gave money to the regional indigenous organisation (GB£26,000 annually), such that villagers should be directing their complaints to the government and their own organisation's leaders. By contrast with Joel's experience with the Vice Minister, Pluspetrol does not negotiate -the comunidad must either take the money or leave it. For Joel, this confirms Pluspetrol's refusal to create reciprocal relationships with Asháninka/Ashéninka people or to recognise them as having noshire. They refuse to share even though the large amount of cargo that goes upriver to Camisea daily testifies to their wealth. The money Pluspetrol compensates comunidades with -the 'little gifts' Joel referred to earlier -does not reflect a desire to share or feel sorrow for others despite their obvious suffering.
The demands that Joel makes of Pluspetrol in those same meetings and in larger forums are sometimes discomforting to watch as they are violent, emotional and differ from how Asháninka/Ashéninka men engage with others in everyday interactions. He speaks loudly, rocking his body back and forth as he points at community officers with his left arm and slaps his right thigh with his right arm, rhythmically. He tells them that they are rich yet stingy, that they do not care about making people suffer and that they should feel ashamed of profiting from people's misery. He tells them that if he owned the company he would employ everyone who needed a job to share his profits, and reminds them that they are only able to work in the area because so many Asháninka/Ashéninka people died fighting Sendero Luminoso. His performance resembles the ritual demands that my interlocutors described unsatisfied ayompari (exchange partners) in the past as making in cases of unreciprocated trades (see Weiss, 1975). An ayompari would try to publicly shame his partner, showing everyone else that although he had given plenty and had not been reciprocated adequately, he was still able to live well. Joel positions himself in the same way in the verbal exchanges over Pluspetrol's behaviour towards his comunidad and the impact of its work on the river and forest, taking the moral high ground in relation to the exchange that has been refused. In recognising the immorality of hydrocarbon companies, both rich and stingy, these demands are made in full knowledge that they will not be reciprocated. But they are also made to show the company that people are still striving to have dignified lives despite their suffering. As he told me: [Hydrocarbon] companies are greedy and don't know how to feel sorrow for others [ … ] would they ever give us a loan or a job? Never! Pluspetrol won't leave even if we have told them to, and the government will bring more [hydrocarbon] companies, so we need to look to our own development, use our money from timber to buy what we need, and open larger gardens to plant coffee and cacao and live well. (Joel Bardales, 2009) Joel's point about Pluspetrol not knowing how to share is not just about redistribution, but about the refusal to enter into reciprocal relationships of care between actors who recognise each other's noshire. The issue that Joel brings up concerns the impossibility of creating reciprocal relationships of care that have happened with timber extraction and those who participate in it. Despite its impacts, it supports the reproduction of life in comunidades as individuals pursue self-sufficiency and autonomy.

Conclusion
Earlier I referred to three frameworks through which scholars examine the conflicts over resource extraction in Latin America. It may be that conflicts over resource extraction are the product of defective governance, or are ecological distribution conflicts, or are ontological conflicts over what 'nature' really is. These readings are helpful as they show the multiplicity of issues at different levels that are feeding conflicts over resource extraction in Peru and beyond. In trying to understand the motivations of individuals on the ground, whose lives are intertwined with extractive activities in different ways, I proposed a fourth reading of conflicts in terms of the reproduction and refusal of reciprocal relations of care -and thus the conditions for the reproduction of life -between indigenous communities and actors related to different natural resource extraction ventures.
Examining Joel's experiences through a relational moral economy enables us to obtain a better understanding of the micropolitics of engagement strategies with different kinds of resource extraction, including conflicts. This sheds light on how individuals attempt to engage with resource extraction ventures through their moral economies and the social relations underlining them.
Joel's current strategy emphasises the reproduction of human relationships of care that support self-sufficiency and autonomy. This has been possible with actors involved in timber extraction but has not happened with those involved in natural gas extraction at Camisea. His statements seem to indicate a possible future where reciprocal relationships of care between people are upheld at the expense of relations with non-human beings. However, given the male dominance of timber extraction practices, women may be worse off in this possible future as they lose influence in deciding how communities and households spend funds, which is critical at a time of food scarcity. Finally, examining individual strategies like Joel's will become more important as the extractive frontier continues to expand in the Amazon and Latin America as part of the reconstruction effort after the COVID-19 pandemic, given that governance mechanisms for extractive activities have encouraged individual strategies to escape economic poverty at the local level (Arellano-Yanguas, 2011;Bebbington and Hinojosa Valencia, 2011).