A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #469 - GENDER, OTHERNESS, AND POWER. The Decolonization of Bodies Among Indigenous Peoples (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In my previous articles published on these pages of Sicilia Libertaria, 
we described how structures of oppression and the sidelining of women do 
not correspond to a biological destiny or a supposedly immutable "human 
nature." On the contrary, history shows us that cultures largely impose 
themselves on biology, shaping, regulating, and often repressing bodies 
and social relations according to the political and economic interests 
of dominant groups. We examined this phenomenon through the mythical 
Greek and biblical roots of Western culture, as well as the historical 
role of the Catholic Church, where the female gender has been 
instrumentalized as a territory to be conquered, particularly visible in 
contexts of war. However, the Western gaze tends to naturalize its own 
violence by assuming it as a shared universal fact. Faced with this, 
anthropology forces us to decenter our gaze and, by shifting the focus 
to the indigenous societies of Latin America, particularly the lowland 
peoples, we encounter a complex reality that invites us to ask whether 
gender asymmetry is a human constant or whether there exist forms of 
organization in which culture has managed sexual difference, using the 
very construction of gender to avoid subordination.

To address this question, it is necessary to first examine how classical 
anthropology, despite its claims to objectivity, was not immune to the 
prejudices of its time. In studying the societies of the American 
lowlands, the first male ethnologists projected the model of the 
European bourgeois nuclear family onto indigenous peoples, reducing 
complex social relations to a rigid sexual division of labor based on 
the false premise of "men hunters and women gatherers or cultivators." 
In this simplistic framework, men's activities were automatically 
categorized as prestigious and political, while women's were downgraded 
to merely domestic and subsistence tasks, naturalizing an asymmetry that 
often did not exist in native terms. This theoretical blindness not only 
distorted economic functions but completely avoided the existence of 
other genders and fluid identities. Thus, by imposing a strictly binary 
matrix, anthropology ignored the fact that in many American societies, 
gender is not a fixed essence dictated by anatomy, but rather a 
culturally constructed "place," missing the opportunity to understand 
how these societies managed otherness without the need to hierarchize it.

This interpretative bias becomes evident when drawing an ethnographic 
map of the lowlands and their areas of influence. In analyzing these 
relationships, classical literature indeed records a paradox: a marked 
symmetry in everyday life that contrasts with a presumed male ritual 
supremacy, enacted in segregated spaces such as the "men's house" or the 
control of certain sacred instruments. However, a critical look from 
contemporary field anthropology reveals that this "supremacy" is, to a 
large extent, an illusion caused by the prejudices of male ethnographers 
themselves, who have historically remained blind to the feminine and 
other gender universes, failing to see the existence of a rich fabric of 
power, resistance, and agency operating outside the Western patriarchal 
gaze. An example of the strength of these alternative structures is 
found in the matrilineal and matrilocal character of Wayuu society 
(Venezuela and Colombia), where women play a central political and 
socially cohesive role; Similarly, within Mapuche society (Chile), the 
figure of the machi shaman expresses the enormous prestige and ritual 
power that women and gender-transient identities have historically held. 
This androcentric blindness has not only obscured female power, but also 
affective-sexual diversity. The case of the Warao (Venezuela) is 
paradigmatic, where male homosexuality has been systematically ignored 
by researchers incapable of codifying practices that did not fit into 
their narrow bourgeois binarism (there are, of course, exceptions).

Thus, when analyzing power relations in these contexts, it is imperative 
to divest ourselves of the Western assumption that reduces them to 
domination, force, or institutional hierarchy. In these societies, power 
relations are articulated through prestige, kinship management, 
diplomacy, and mediation with the natural world. When we apply this 
decolonized perspective, the ethnographic landscape fragments into 
complex dynamics that reveal both asymmetries and profound gender 
balances, coexisting on the same continent. On the one hand, we find 
peoples like the Yanomami (Brazil, Venezuela) or some groups of the 
upper Xingu (Brazil), where a more explicit "gender antagonism" is 
evident; in these contexts, physical violence or male ritual control 
operate as mechanisms of social pressure, limiting women's access to the 
spheres of warfare or intertribal politics. In contrast to this model, 
there are societies in which female autonomy is structural and firmly 
based on the management of horticulture and food sovereignty in the 
chacra or conuco (the community garden). In many Amazonian peoples, 
cassava is not only a biological resource, but a spiritual subject under 
the control of women, who decide the distribution of goods and, through 
matrilocality and matrilinearity (the man moves into his wife's family 
home and the children often belong to her clan), form the core of local 
politics. These realities force us to rethink the paradox of women's 
power: what classical anthropology mistakenly interpreted as 
subordination due to the absence of women in certain warrior assemblies 
was in reality a subtle but powerful division of spheres of influence or 
a power in the shadows. It seems that female power in the lowlands does 
not seek to replicate the hierarchical command of men, but rather 
operates from the management of the reproduction of life, the memory of 
lineage, ritual knowledge, and the management of everyday life; vital 
spheres that support and often completely influence men's public decisions.

These ethnographic examples dismantle the historical determinism that 
claims to present male domination as an inevitable evolutionary process, 
highlighting that oppression and binary rigidity are cultural and 
historical choices, not biological imperatives. This theoretical 
observation immediately opens a powerful window of political possibility 
for our libertarian and anti-capitalist struggles. By making visible 
that societies capable of managing sexual difference without 
transforming it into economic hierarchy or structural violence have 
existed and exist, the experience of indigenous peoples becomes a model 
of emancipation (without resorting to Rousseau's fantasies). It teaches 
us that the destruction of the Western patriarchal model does not 
require inventing a utopia from scratch, but rather learning to 
decentralize power from the logic of the state and force, restoring 
sovereignty to the communal reproduction of life, collective care, and 
the horizontal management of relationships and territory. The peoples of 
the forest remind us that the path to freedom involves decolonizing our 
bodies and radically resetting our social and emotional relationships.

Emanuele Amodio

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