LA SELVA INSTABILE. INTERPRETAZIONI INDIGENE E USI LOCALI DELLA SCIENZA GENETICA NELL¿ALTA AMAZZONIA PERUVIANA.

The purpuse of my thesis is to identify the ways in which genetic studies (Sandoval et al., 2016, Barbieri et.al 2017) can relate with social, political and cultural life of the indigenous Kichwa people of San Martín district, in the Amazon forest. When geneticists return the results of their investigations to indigenous populations, they interact with traditional pre‐existing interpretative schemes. So these studies can become part of some political arenas, confirming or rejecting the origins of myths. In San Martín, biomolecular investigations generated an interesting debate: the results, produced through the analysis of mtDNA and Y chromosome, refuted the traditional Kichwa myth. The goal of my ethnographic study is, therefore, to investigate the interaction between Kichwa people and geneticists: this specific ethnographical exemple can remark how some considerations on the constitution of corporeity, human beings, memory and history can be observed starting from a new point of view: the encounter between two different ways of conceiving the human being. First of all, my study wants to define deoxyribonucleic acid as a “tool” capable of shaping the symbolic world of the human being, not as a predetermined natural element. Kichwa indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon Forest have been facing, for several years, a territorial conflict due to the establishment of a Regional Conservation Area on their homelands. In order to question the legitimacy of native claims, the Regional Government of San Martín puts forward the hypothesis of the Andean kichwa migration. On the other hand, several NGOs hope to help this native people, using biomolecular investigations that scientifically certify its Amazonian origins and, consequently, its ancestral relationship with the surrounding territories. However, the natives seem lukewarm to the uncritical acquisition of a strategic discourse based on the rhetoric of ‘temporal primacy’ and continue to consider their own territorial claims using a "relational model" of the environment (Ingold, 2000). Thus, despite having assimilated an ancestral-genetic discourse, they reshape it in light of a native conception of territory. The latter, far from being considered an inheritance transmitted from one generation to the other, is seen as a complex network of present and active relationships between the living, the dead and medical plants. This ethnographic case highlights a big misunderstanding about the concepts of "ancestry" and "territory" whose meaning, in the native sphere, overcomes limits imposed by national jurisdiction and legal terminology. Kichwa population, far from uncritically importing the western category of "genetic inheritance", demonstrates great creativity reshaping and relating it to the indigenous conception of “territory” and “history”. The myth about Kichwa andean origin and biomolecular studies represent, for any Western reader, two opposite alternatives. But, for a part of Kichwa population, these two different narratives of the past are not mutually exclusive. The last goal of this research is there to identify elements of indigenous ethnophysiology, which allow them to accept the coexistence of two self-excluding representations of the past.