A modern accumulation? The intricacies of enclosure,dispossession and cultural production in Venezuela’s Gran Sabana

Introduction

The Gran Sabana (Great Savannah), in Southern Venezuela, is Pemon territory, and still today the majority of settlements in this region are indigenous (Pemon) communities. Canaima National Park, one of the largest protected areas in the world and an important tourist destination, partly overlaps this territory. Market activities and capitalist relations have expanded remarkably in this region over the past two decades (Angosto-Ferrandez, 2013, forthcoming 2021), and land enclosures have become prominent markers of this transformation. Fences have appeared around newly founded tourist camps, which have mushroomed in parts of this region. Even camps that had been open to visitors for decades were fenced for the first time during these years. In parallel, the owners of these camps started to charge fees for visitors to gain access to the enclosed waterfalls, rapids and other river stretches besides which the tourist camps are located.

These new tourist camps are owned and run by local Pemon, and have been established upon lands that were until recently treated as a ‘common pool’ resource (Acheson, 2015: 29): access to land was available to, and regulated by, a recognised group of people (in this case, locally and regionally identified groups of kin within the Pemon ethnic group). Enclosures dislocate indigenous conceptions of land ownership and the rights that underpinned the pre-existing property regime. In that regime, the possibility of making permanent ownership claims over demarcated land, whether by individuals or families, was as inconceivable as the possibility of accessing land through market mechanisms. In contrast, enclosures entail permanent ownership claims and open ground to the transformation of land into a commodity.

In this article I will examine these transformations through a discussion of the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ and its current usages. The process I examine generates social transformations comparable to the ones that Marx (1990 [1867]: 874) associated with primitive accumulation: it leads to the transformation of land into capital, and contributes to the accentuation of conditions that have been leading to the proletarianisation of a part of the Pemon population. But this process also reflects a different configuration of forces than those that Marx (1990 [1867]: 873–876) associated with primitive accumulation: through an ethnographically informed analysis of an episode of enclosure, I will show that the subjects who are enclosing land do not necessarily require capital (in its monetary form) or violent extra-economic means to realise dispossession.

Enclosures are facilitated by the particular socio-ecological conditions of the territory where the enclosures are realised, including access to land treated as a common pool resource and a degree of fuzziness pervading the indigenous property regime. Beyond those singular elements, I will draw attention to the contours of the conjuncture that the Pemon of Gran Sabana are currently in: growing territorial encroachment, threats of violent land dispossession by non-indigenous actors and a narrowing of economic alternatives mark this conjuncture. In addition, I will explore two identifiable discursive articulations that accompany these enclosures: on the one hand, a defetishising discursive move through which Gran Sabana is presented as a social product that is permanently inscribed with collective labour; on the other hand, a discursive association of property rights over Gran Sabana’s territory with a capacity for conserving it. I will argue that this discursive production contributes to provide the Pemon with a layer of protection against ongoing threats of land dispossession led by non-indigenous actors, while at the same time it disguises the fact that enclosures entail a fundamental social transformation: some Pemon people are dispossessed of land and resources that were part of their common pool, and capital as a social relation expands in Gran Sabana.

This combination of characteristics underpins a form of accumulation and dispossession that I will call ‘modern accumulation’. I propose this term because it evokes the conceptual similarities it shares with ‘primitive accumulation’, while in parallel it flags a stark differentiation with the latter. The adjective in ‘modern accumulation’ primarily seeks to express in terminological terms its conceptual contrasts with ‘primitive accumulation’; it does not seek to invoke the temporal/political load carried by the term ‘modernity’. For clarity, let us recall that the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ solidified in scholarly and political circles as a term whose adjective could have nevertheless been different in its English formulation: ‘original’, ‘initial’ or ‘previous’ are semantically closer to the adjective that Marx used in his German texts (‘ursprünglich’) when engaging the discussion of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’ (Perelman, 2000: 25); any of those adjectives would have also done a better job than ‘primitive’ in continuing the theorisations of ‘previous’ accumulation that scholars such as Adam Smith had developed in order to explain the emergence of capitalist production. But semantic rigour did not determine the nominal form that ‘primitive accumulation’ took on as an analytical concept. It is in relation to this nominal form—in the sense of a categorical definition, that distinguishes it from other forms of accumulation without getting at its underlying structure—that I propose ‘modern accumulation’.

I will ground my conceptualisation of ‘modern accumulation’ in three intertwined exercises. First, I review debates on and current applications of the ‘primitive accumulation’ concept. Second, I examine ethnographically an episode of enclosure in Gran Sabana, contextualised through a depiction of the complex conjuncture that currently shapes and constrains the lives of the Pemon and other people in this region. This depiction contributes to dispel potential interpretations of enclosures in Gran Sabana as a result of natural human inclinations, in whichever permutation of the mystifying ideological preconceptions that associate private property with human nature. It will become clear that there is nothing natural about the conditions that shape the lives of the inhabitants of this southern Venezuelan region: for the Pemon, a narrowing of options that previously enabled a degree of economic autonomy converges with growing territorial encroachment and renewed threats of land dispossession. I include an overview of indigenous conceptions of land ownership and their practical articulations, which facilitate the identification of the social transformations that enclosures entail. Third, I present a discussion of the relations between enclosures, the discursive moves that accompany their realisation in Gran Sabana, and processes of rent-capture within contemporary capitalism, drawing attention to the intricate mechanisms that this form of accumulation articulates. The conclusion summarises my conceptualisation of ‘modern accumulation’ in relation to these enclosures and discusses potential applications of this concept in analyses of contemporary capitalism.

Primitive accumulation: Basic tenets and current usages

In volume One of Capital, Marx (1990 [1867]: 873–876) recast the concept of primitive accumulation in order to engage the debates on the emergence of capitalist production as a historically situated form. In his time, anyone seeking to understand such a historical form had to clarify how mass quantities of capital and labour-power had become available to producers. The economists who set the liberal cannon tackled that question by highlighting factors such as individual industriousness and frugality as facilitators of that previous accumulation. In contrast, Marx sketched a substantially different historicising analysis: primitive accumulation was transformed into a concept that named (often violent) processes that separated producers from their means of production. Those processes entailed two key social transformations: land and means of production were turned into capital, and immediate producers into wage labourers.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the concept of primitive accumulation was fruitfully used within the social sciences that maintained a dialogue with Marxism. In anthropology, it served to explore how non-capitalist modes of production transitioned into, or became structurally subordinated within, the capitalist world economy (e.g. Godelier, 1974; Hindess and Hirst, 1975: 287–307; Kahn and Llobera, 1980; Meillassoux, 1981; Wessman, 1981: 242–244; see also Patterson, 2009: 119–138). However, this type of enquiry, and more generally the dialogue between anthropology and Marxism, was gradually displaced with the consolidation of the so-called culturalist turn of the 1980s (Gregory, 2009: 286–288; Nugent, 2007). That shift brought new priorities and epistemological paradigms into research agendas, withdrawing attention from social transformations such as the ones Marx associated with primitive accumulation. But those transformations are still ongoing, and have actually intensified over the past three decades: the ranks of wage labourers have continued to grow worldwide, and ever more lands are brought into the cycles of capital (Breman, 2007; Bryceson et al., 2000; Li, 2014; West, 2016). This partly explains the renewed interest in the concept, which has been revitalised in a wide range of studies of contemporary capitalism.

Current approaches to the concept of primitive accumulation generally share some or all of three basic tenets. First, the concept is used to address continuing processes of capitalist expansion and re-adjustment, rather than an initial stage, already overcome, in the emergence of capitalistic production (De Angelis, 2001; Perelman, 2000; Von Werlhof, 2000). Second, there is a tendency to bridge divergent perspectives on the mechanisms that sustain primitive accumulation: both extra-economic and market-dependent mechanisms are often considered as intertwined in the processes leading to dispossession and proletarianisation (Webber, 2008). Third, some authors use the concept of primitive accumulation to explore the linkages between forms of collective action against reproduction of capital in the so-called Global North and mobilisations against dispossession in the so-called Global South. Both forms of collective action are in this light interpreted as expressions of the antagonisms that capitalism establishes between social classes (Glassman, 2006; Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008; Sites, 2000). From this angle, union-based mobilisation in Wisconsin (USA) has been read as an organised reaction against the precarisation of workers’ lives at the core of the world economy (Collins, 2011), in a way that could be linked, for example, to struggles against the privatisation of water supplies in Bolivia a decade earlier (Assies, 2003).

Studies based on these tenets successfully shed light on some dynamics and consequences of accumulation and dispossession in contemporary capitalism. Yet these studies are on occasion constrained by a tendency to conceptualise primitive accumulation as a disembodied expression of the logic of capital (Hall, 2012; Hart, 2006). This tendency can result in the withdrawal of empirical attention from the subjects and mechanisms that articulate dispossessing accumulation in locations in which power differentials among those who dispossess and those who are dispossessed are not immediately apparent or are not mediated by overt usage of violence.

Moving on from the review of current usages of the primitive accumulation concept, it is worth noting that a comparable tendency is identifiable in several studies supported by Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’ concept (2005), which has made crucial contributions to the study of contemporary forms of capital expansion and reproduction. Within the scope of this article I can only provide a brief overview of Harvey’s conceptualisation, so I will limit myself to note why some of its analytical usages can lead to a withdrawal of empirical attention from forms of dispossession such as the one I examine in this article.

Harvey drew from Rosa Luxemburg’s (2003) contributions to the study of capitalist accumulation, which invigorated the study of the role played by pre-capitalist systems in the process of capitalist emergence and consolidation. Luxemburg’s work was also crucially influential in shaping analyses of imperialism as a mechanism of capitalist expansion. Harvey’s interest in developing the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ shared Luxemburg’s concerns with analysing the role of dispossession within the logics of contemporary capitalist accumulation: the concept was formulated to facilitate the theorisation of how capital operates through ‘spatial-temporal fixes’ when problems of overaccumulation emerge (2005:115–124). Those fixes, which can be read as expressions of ‘new imperialism’, depend on violent extra-economic means for their realisation.

In studies with such macro-level focus, the abstracted force of capital is the dominant analytical pivot, and this pivot often rests on the assumption that capital holders, pre-existing dominant classes and/or the state as a monolithic entity of class representation, articulate the impetus of accumulation and dispossession. Mechanical reproductions of those assumptions might obscure our understanding of some current forms of dispossession, and therefore of the unequal relations of power that capitalist accumulation expands and relies on. Dispossession can also be articulated by subjects who in principle do not appear as conventional power holders and who, furthermore, are themselves exposed to ongoing threats of dispossession. That is for instance the case in Gran Sabana, where I have conducted extended fieldwork. ¹

The enclosures taking place in Gran Sabana compare to an extent with what some authors denominate ‘enclosures from below’ or ‘intimate exclusions’ and, more generally, relate to those forms of dispossession that result from the reproduction of capitalist relations and class differentiation among the poor in culturally variable social contexts (Campbell, 2014; Davis, 2006; DeVore, 2018; Greene, 2004; Hall et al., 2011; Li, 2010). With my conceptualisation of what I call ‘modern accumulation’ I aim to enrich these latter perspectives on the study of contemporary capitalist accumulation and its effects. The following section discusses an episode of enclosure that sets the background to my theorisation.

An episode of enclosure

Tourists were rare in Tuauken before 2008, as indeed was even casual talk about the tourist business. Once or twice a year, a tour guide based in Santa Elena who specialised in trekking brought small parties of people to stay overnight in the community, leaving the next day. However, every time I visited Tuauken after 2008 I came across different people discussing the possibilities of potential tourist attractions in the vicinity (generally, waterfalls). By then, tourist activities and enclosures in Gran Sabana were expanding rapidly. It was a period characterised by an exponential increase of visitors to the region, partly linked to extraordinary economic growth in Venezuela (GDP average annual growth was 13.5% between late 2003 and early 2009) but also associated with a growing perception of encroachment among the Pemon. Opportunities for touristic ventures started to be considered even in peripheral areas of the regional tourist circuit.

In 2008, a local family from Tuauken established the foundations for a tourist camp beside a nearby waterfall (Angosto-Ferrandez, 2016). That initiative evinced the growing importance of tourism as an economic activity in the area, but also revealed substantive changes in the realm of social relations. Rights over the land where the tourist camp was being planned were not fully pre-defined, due to the degree of fuzziness that accompanies the indigenous property regime (discussed further in the next sections).

As is the case in the form of accumulation described by Marx in his depiction of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, this episode was part of a process that is transforming Gran Sabana land into capital, dispossessing people from resources that were previously part of their common pool. Yet this episode did not involve overt violence or coercion, revealing that the hierarchies and asymmetries that translate into differential ‘extra-economic’ powers among the Pemon do not fully determine who can (and who dares to) enclose.

My interlocutors in Tuauken remarked that ‘the idea’ to start a tourist business near that particular waterfall had initially been circulated in public by members of one local family, but those who actually gained rights over the place were members of another local family. They gained those rights by building a thatched roof hut there as the first step in founding a tourist camp, using their own labour and local materials for the construction. The initiative was taken without formal consultations with other families in the community.

The intra-community position of the family that built the hut by that waterfall is much weaker than the position held by members of the family that had originally circulated ‘the idea’ of founding the camp in that site. The latter are part of the community’s central extended family, closely related to the pata esak (community leader); this family was nevertheless cut short from the realisation of their ‘idea’ to build a tourist camp in near that waterfall location––another family realised that ‘idea’ first.

This episode thus evinced that there is considerable room for tactical manoeuvring around the process of enclosure in Gran Sabana, a manoeuvring that reveals key elements of the socio-economic structures in which it is articulated. Within the territory of a given community, some families might have preferential rights over land that it is not in productive use, as I explain in the next sections, but land does not have ‘proprietors’ (understood as permanent holders of private property rights over land). Pemon-led enclosures occur in this relatively open political scenario, not fully determined by pre-existing differentials of extra-economic powers among members of the community but, in parallel, shrouded in risks for anyone who might undertake enclosure, as I explain below.

Next, I shed ethnographic light on the social position of the family that established foundations for a tourist camp near Tuauken. These ethnographic insights explore why this particular family decided to establish those foundations, but I am not contending that every Pemon family that encloses land in Gran Sabana for the establishment of tourist ventures shares this or any other very specific social profile. This ethnographic material illustrates the fact that the socio-ecological conditions in which enclosures take place in Gran Sabana enable families with different levels of intra-community powers to consider the (risky) option of enclosing land.

The family who started the foundations of the tourist camp near Tuauken had spent long periods of time outside the community in recent years, specifically in a community near Santa Elena, where a brother of the family’s head had moved as a young man (following the uxorilocal pattern of settlement after marriage). This already existing degree of separation from Tuauken may contribute to explaining why that particular family would be predisposed to face the social consequences that their manoeuvre might entail––consequences that could include ostracism, exposure to the still feared sorcery attacks, or an increasingly uncertain position in the face of community fission. Although other families had started to discuss tourist projects in the area, as I had noticed in my visits to the community, concern with those consequences is a part of the process of enclosure.

In Gran Sabana I often hear people speaking about the envy that their activities attract, particularly productive activities that imply extraction of land from the common pool in tandem with accumulation of wealth. These activities have included things as different as establishing a restaurant next to the only paved road that crosses Gran Sabana, or raising cattle. These comments express a concern with the forces of sorcery (kanaimö) that envy may liberate (Angosto-Ferrandez, 2009: 22–24; Butt Colson, 1956), and index the social tensions that enclosures generate. Concerns with sorcery can thus be read in this context as manifestation of an indigenous moral code that becomes destabilised by the crystallisations of social difference that capitalist production generates (Taussig, 1980).

But it is evident that those concerns do not totally determine decision-making: Pemon families in different parts of Gran Sabana have indeed been enclosing land and thereby exposing themselves to sorcery attacks or other potential sanctions. I argue that this fact needs to be explained by taking into consideration the conjuncture that the Pemon of Gran Sabana are currently in. For the Pemon, this conjuncture is marked by several factors: a narrowing of options that previously enabled a degree of economic autonomy; the will to avoid migration; a growing perception of territorial encroachment; and renewed threats of violent land dispossession by external (i.e. non-Pemon) actors. The Pemon are keen to affirm land rights in this scenario, and enclosures appear in that respect as a form of protection against the threat of external dispossession that, in parallel, enables the possibility of creating a local source of income though the tourism industry. And, on the other hand, that widespread perception of external threat of dispossession contributes to explain why social sanctions against those who enclose are not occurring (or are not severe) for the time being: that perception, which as I will show next is well grounded, reduces the likelihood, or at least the immediacy, of those sanctions against enclosures.

The following section identifies key factors shaping the conjuncture in which enclosures have been taking place in Gran Sabana, initially with a focus on how these factors affect an indigenous community like Tuauken.

Contours of the conjuncture: Narrowing of economic options and encroachment

In Tuauken, all families continue to avail themselves of access to community land and other common pool resources. This enables them to produce a significant share of the food they consume on a regular basis. Manioc is the staple, complemented by other tubers and fruits cultivated in the family gardens. Protein is scarce, usually obtained through fishing in the Apanwoao river and small tributaries in the area; hunt meat is seldom obtained in the vicinity these days. Foraging activities are also used to complement the diet (Angosto-Ferrandez, 2006: 83–89; 2013; 2016).

The capacity to produce and obtain food autonomously for sustenance is highly valued, but people in the community are concerned by its limitations. The value granted to autonomous capacity for the production of food is best understood in relation to the hardships that people in the community associate with visits to criollo (i.e. non-indigenous) towns: since they generally have very little or no cash at all, buying food outside the community becomes nearly impossible. ‘Enduring hunger’, a signifier that beyond its literal meaning also encapsulates notions of hardship and detachment from social network, features frequently in stories about trips to criollo towns. But nonetheless the concern with the limitations of local production are also permanent, and evinced among other things by the fact that, when cash is available, commercial foods (e.g. canned fish, rice, flour) are bought in Pemon communities where there are shops or in Santa Elena; in Tuauken there is no shop, nor does anyone sell food.

There are limited options for people in Tuauken to obtain cash, necessary for commercial purchases besides food (including basic inputs for production). One way to obtain cash is to sell the occasional agricultural surplus in neighbouring Pemon communities that have lost their capacity to produce food, and which largely depend on market mechanisms for their subsistence. The sale of this surplus, ranging from bananas to manioc (processed into cassava bread) or chilli peppers (processed into chilli sauce), is complicated for the seller, and not very profitable: it requires very long walks carrying heavy loads, and the cash obtained only affords the purchase of relatively small quantities of basic commodities (salt, matches, soap, candles, etc.) or, more rarely, some food.

Beyond agricultural production, there are few other alternatives for generating cash. Occasional opportunities emerge in peak tourist seasons, when both women and men (entire families on occasion) move to nearby communities where tourists arrive in large numbers. There they sell handicrafts or do petty jobs, while staying with relatives. Many Tuauken residents continued to travel to those neighbouring communities in peak seasons even after 2013, when the national economic crisis greatly reduced the number of tourists in the region, ² an indication of the importance granted to this source of cash.

Leaving those options aside, people in Tuauken need to engage in waged work. These engagements are generally temporary and short- or medium-term, but they imply moving outside the community––and often outside Gran Sabana. Men commonly resort to mining somewhere in the region, or alternatively to construction or unskilled manual work in places like Santa Elena, the municipal capital. Women rarely undertake temporary migration for wage work: those who migrate do so long-term or permanently, and primarily work in poorly paid cleaning jobs or as ‘in-residence’ domestic assistants in the homes of upper-middle class families. This type of job is generally extremely exploitative for the domestic worker and reproduces structural patterns of abuse and discrimination against indigenous women (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs, 2000: 332–335).

Long-term migration is not taken lightly. Those who have experienced these migrations generally present them as times of hardship and personal crisis. Most of them return to their native community after a few years and, if the conversation comes up, they make explicit their preference for life in their home community––even acknowledging the lack of comforts. Many describe working away as times of life crisis and personal degradation. For instance, men who worked in mining areas north of Gran Sabana or in construction often recount episodes of alcohol abuse, relations with prostitutes and/or episodes of hunger as part of their experience.

In addition to those already existing associations with life crises, mining has recently become even less appealing for those Pemon who previously took on this activity on temporary basis. Gran Sabana harbours significant reserves of gold and diamonds, and mining in this region is primarily undertaken through ‘artisanal’, non-capital-intensive methods, since the mineral can be extracted with relatively simple equipment (see Angosto-Ferrandez, 2015: 220–229, 2019: 202–205). Because of this factor and through active organisation in defence of territory, Pemon people have been able to control all or significant shares of the mining business in their communities, as owners and managers of the ventures or as the de facto licence providers for other miners.

The Pemon who travel to work in mines located in indigenous communities and controlled by indigenous people often do so with the support of networks of kin, which mitigate the conditions of social alienation and exploitation that underpin the life crises associated with mining. At present, those mitigating factors lose importance in face of the overwhelming increase of violence that pervades life in these mining spots.

Amidst the national economic crisis that has afflicted the country since 2013, sustained strong prices of gold and diamonds converged with the erosion of other sectors of the economy. People from all over the country have travelled to areas where ‘artisanal’ mining takes place, in search of employment opportunities. This has exacerbated violent competition over access to and control of mineral extraction. Outside Gran Sabana, this competition involves criollo (non-indigenous) armed organisations, called sindicatos, that regulate and have de facto control over extraction. In response to increased pressures from those organisations, in indigenous communities in Gran Sabana where mining takes place, such as Ikabaru, Pemon miners have developed forms of armed policing to defend their land and their extractive rights. An episode of open violence that took place in November 2019 illustrates the ongoing tensions: eight people, including local Pemon and non-indigenous residents, were killed in a shooting related to these disputes in the Ikabaru area.

The will to avoid the crisis and violence associated with migration and/or mining is thus a strong motivation for people in many Pemon communities to seek new, local sources of money, and tapping into tourism-related businesses has become a central goal even as the number of tourists declines. This is true particularly since other existing opportunities that help to prevent migration, such as selling agricultural surplus, have narrowed dramatically.

Indeed, in communities like Tuaken, the sale of agricultural surplus for cash used to buy market goods became nearly impossible after 2013. Inflation in Venezuela rose to exorbitant levels: above 56% in 2013, and over 180% by 2015. The prices of most goods increased in proportional terms far more than the agricultural products that people from Tuauken could sell in neighbouring communities. The dimension of this mismatch was soon abysmal: the price of the cheapest soap bar in Santa Elena’s market in 2015 was equivalent to what Tuauken people could get by selling four cassava breads in the neighbouring community of San Rafael; a kilo of corn flour was equivalent to ten cassava breads. After 2015, this scenario worsened, with inflation (technically hyperinflation by 2017) reaching new heights: 274% in 2016, 863% of in 2017, and over 130,000% in 2018 (Banco Central de Venezuela, 2019).

With agricultural production no longer an avenue to obtain cash, interest in the tourist business increased, seen by locals as the best option without resorting to migration (associated with crisis) or mining (associated with violence), even as the number of visitors to the region declined. For instance, during fieldwork in 2015, and while completing trekking routes organised for tourists, I kept on finding Pemon guides speaking of ‘opening up’ (abrir) new routes near their communities of origin (or where they had close kin), and people from Tuauken speaking of spots with potential in the vicinity. In addition, people from Tauken have kept on travelling to tourist spots in peak seasons to sell crafts in recent years, even with the aggravated conditions of the economic crisis (personal communications, in 2018, from an informant originally from Tuauken and who now lives near Santa Elena).

The narrowing of economic alternatives for the Pemon has converged with the growing perception that outsiders are encroaching on their lands, creating a conjuncture in which enclosures of land related to tourism appear as both a last resource to create (violence-free) sources of income and as protection against the threat of external dispossession.

The perception of encroachment among the Pemon has been caused by multiple factors beyond the threats experienced in mining communities that were described above. Importantly, the Pemon perceive that encroachment against the background of a very fragile position in terms of their land rights, since state-based juridical mechanisms are not currently functional to protect them. Demarcation and collective titling of indigenous territories in Venezuela has been very limited, despite the rights guaranteed for indigenous peoples in the 1999 constitution (Angosto-Ferrandez, 2017; Caballero, 2007; Sletto, 2009). ³ And that position of juridical vulnerability is experienced in tandem with the drastic increase of human movement in the region over the past two decades. This movement included a huge spike in population in the municipal capital, increased––if fluctuating––numbers of tourists (fewer after the economic decline starting in 2013, but still visiting the region in peak tourist season), and intensified militarisation. Adding to these factors, recent waves of Venezuelan migrants in transit towards Brazil reinforce the Pemon’s perception of pressures upon land and territory.

The population of the Gran Sabana municipal unit tripled in the 10 years between 2001 and 2011 (INE, 2011), far above the average growth in the state of Bolívar (16.3%). Most of that population concentrated in Santa Elena, the municipal capital, where thousands of people from other parts of Venezuela and abroad (Colombia and Brazil primarily) moved in search of job or business opportunities. Commercial activities in Santa Elena had thrived since 2004, spurred by the internal demand of the increasingly larger local population, the growth of tourist visitors and, as discussed above, by the intensification of mining in neighbouring areas––before the renewed interest in mining that accompanied economic crisis in 2013, miners had been attracted by the high price of gold, which had trebled between 2005–2010.

The local economy was further stimulated by the increase in public employment and the continuing flow of government transfers received in Santa Elena and in Pemon communities, through both Communal Councils and a variety of state-funded development schemes. From 2004–2007, social expenditure in Venezuela (including spending on education, social security, health services and housing) reached historical heights, remaining very high at least until 2009 (Aponte Blank, 2010).

Additionally, Santa Elena’s frontier location has maintained the town’s appeal for non-indigenous economic migrants even in light of Venezuela’s current economic contraction. The petty smuggling of gasoline, which is heavily subsidised in Venezuela, into Brazil or the mining areas (where quotas apply) is a very profitable business, and some non-indigenous migrants initially make a living this way. The devaluation of the Venezuelan Bolívar relative to the Brazilian Real also strengthened commercial activity in Santa Elena, at least until 2015. At that time, the official exchange rate was 2.19 Bs to 1 Real, but in Santa Elena the unofficial exchange traders offered was 50 Bs for 1 Real. As a result, Brazilians from as far away as Boa Vista––three hours away––came to Santa Elena to shop. Furthermore, as mining regained prominence during the current economic crisis, Santa Elena has maintained its pivotal position as a logistical support centre for miners in neighbouring areas.

In this scenario, indigenous communities around Santa Elena have been increasingly exposed to small-scale land grabs by outsiders migrating to the area who look for places to build their homes and businesses. Around 20 relatively small land grabs occurred around Santa Elena over the past two decades, sparking open conflict several times: the indigenous population, with or without the support of police, has forcefully expelled groups of unauthorised land occupiers.

Militarisation is an additional aspect of this process of encroachment. Military presence in this region is not new, but it has increased in recent years. Venezuelan governments grant high strategic importance to Gran Sabana, a frontier region with low population density (0.93 inhabitants/square kilometre in the municipal unit, most of them concentrated in the capital). It borders with Guyana to the East and Brazil to the South. The frontier with Guyana is particularly contentious: Venezuela does not recognise Guyanese sovereignty over the territory west of the Essequibo River (Márquez, 2002). In 2008, the military fortress in Luepa became one of the two land-support bases for the Simón Bolívar satellite launched by the Venezuelan government, further augmenting the strategic importance granted to the region. In addition, campaigns associated with mining regulation in the region have recurrently mobilised members of the military across Gran Sabana in the past decade.

Finally, along with these factors, a new phenomenon increased the perception of encroachment for the Pemon in the region. The road that crosses Gran Sabana, the Troncal 10, carries a large flow of Venezuelan economic migrants leaving the country. Migration reached mass scale in the past five years; between November 2018 and June 2019 one million people left the country (UNHCR, 2019). A sizable fraction went to Brazil: by 2019, over 168,000 Venezuelans were officially registered there as settled migrants. Yet, the category of ‘settled migrants’ does not include Venezuelans who entered Brazil via Santa Elena and then travelled to another country, nor does it count those Venezuelans who entered Brazil undocumented through the ‘trochas’ (paths that enable crossing the international border at non-policed points).

With few exceptions, all these documented and non-documented migrants travelled to Brazil by land (some of them actually on foot) via Gran Sabana. And all of them made at least temporary stops at Santa Elena (the only legal entry-point by road into Brazil) and at indigenous Pemon communities along the way. Some of these migrants must have spent lengthy periods in or around Santa Elena awaiting bureaucratic stamps on documents or opportunities to cross the border.

In sum, perceptions of encroachment by outsiders and threats of dispossession set the background of the life of the Pemon of Gran Sabana, and continue to be a reality even under the current scenario of economic crisis and relative decline in the number of tourist visitors. These exceptional factors among the Pemon contribute to appeasing the tensions that result from Pemon-led enclosures, which helps explain why the latter are not generating overtly hostile responses and social sanctions: in this context, those enclosures appear as a form of protection against dispossession by non-Pemon.

However, these exceptional circumstances do not alter the fact that enclosures generate substantive social transformations among the Pemon. To understand how these enclosures transform Pemon life and social relations, the next section presents an overview of the property regime that Gran Sabana enclosures are dislocating.

Transformations in the property regime and in the concept of land ownership

Land enclosures entail a form of ownership claims and social relations that dislocates the indigenous property regime in Gran Sabana and its normative frame. In this frame, only membership in a recognised kin group guarantees legitimate access to land. Permanent ownership claims over demarcated land were inconceivable.

Preferential rights over certain lands are acknowledged for families, local groups and larger aggregates such as river groups (Butt Colson, 2009: 270–273), but neither the boundaries of local groups nor the areas of preferential rights of families within such groups were ever defined with cartographic precision––partly because the Pemon historically maintained a semi-nomadic pattern of settlement, adjusting to the availability of local resources as well as to politically motivated fissions and fusions.

The Pemon of Gran Sabana have traditionally sustained themselves primarily through swidden agriculture and a division of labour along gender and age lines. Complemented by fishing and some hunting and foraging activities, this system guaranteed that food and other material requirements were locally produced or obtained through inter-ethnic trade networks (Butt Colson, 1973; Thomas, 1972). These trade networks gradually vanished in the late twentieth century, in parallel to the increased availability of commercial goods in Santa Elena and in the Capuchin missions that were established in the territory. But the capacity to produce significant shares of food for basic sustenance has been maintained until very recently in many communities––excepting those adjacent to the Troncal 10, the municipal capital (Santa Elena) and some mining communities, where only a small fraction of the diet can be produced due to depletion of resources and/or land degradation (see Angosto-Ferrandez, 2013).

The cultivation and maintenance of the gardens that provided the bulk of the diet for the Pemon always involved several members of a nuclear or extended family, who also share the cultivated products. The person who leads the forest clearing is nominally presented as the ‘owner’ of that garden, ⁴ but gardens are abandoned once their productive cycle (approximately three years) is exhausted. Forms of connection are acknowledged between previously cultivated land and the family that cultivated it: the Pemon term moapöta precisely names an abandoned garden where bush and secondary forest grows. But this acknowledgement does not translate into permanent exclusive rights over a particular area. Claims of exclusive ownership over land are complicated by the cognatic concentration of kin in most Pemon communities: every family within the community shares common ancestry, and the latter is used to reinforce legitimacy of access to local resources.

The extent to which enclosure and permanent (privatised) ownership claims over land imply a social transformation is well illustrated linguistically. The Pemon language has no accurate equivalent to the English term ‘owner’ (in its meaning of someone who holds private property rights over something like land). The term esak can be translated as owner, but with crucial conceptual caveats: esak is used in the Pemon mythical narrative to refer to the master of a kind of thing/resource (plants, animals, etc.), a person/force who has responsibility and ascendancy over that kind. This term acquires political connotations too in some of its articulations: the head of an extended-family settlement was also considered its esak (pata esak), both leader and protector of the place and settlement as a collective unit. Esak is also used to refer to possession of (and command over) immaterial things such as certain forms of knowledge: ‘taren esak’ can be translated as holder of taren (a ritual word invocation). In another cases, esak connotes possession of something material but inanimate; in these cases, conjugations of the verb ‘to have’ support more adequately a translation into English: ‘prata esak’ is used to refer to someone ‘wealthy’ (someone who ‘has money’).

It is thus evident that enclosures are an index of a consequential transformation among the Pemon in the region. I suggest that in order to understand why Pemon-led enclosures of land associated with tourist ventures multiplied in the past two decades and may keep on occurring even though tourism has declined, one must consider the conjuncture in which the Pemon currently live. As described in the previous section, this is a complex and conflictive conjuncture strongly shaped by constraints over semi-subsistence economies and by intensified territorial encroachment.

The following section focuses on an additional factor that increases the appeal of Gran Sabana for migrants and temporary visitors alike and that nevertheless sets background to both the process of encroachment and the process of enclosures taking place in the region. Somewhat ironically in light of current transformations in the region, this factor is ‘tranquillity’ [tranquilidad].

Conservation, the defetishisation of nature, and rent-capture in the tourism industry

‘Tranquillity’ is (or was) frequently mentioned as an appreciated local quality by new arrivals of non-indigenous migrants into Santa Elena. This quality is treasured in Venezuela, where a high and growing degree of personal insecurity is common among people throughout the country. The perception of tranquillity for the inhabitants of Santa Elena and surrounding communities has changed with the abrupt social transformations experienced over the past two decades, but, even at present, for many people the place retains the appeal of a ‘tranquil’ place in a ‘tranquil’ region.

Beyond the tangible elements of life in a relatively small provincial town, tranquillity in Santa Elena has for many decades been magnified by a well-established exoticising narrative that transformed the whole region of Gran Sabana into a topos: more than a region, it is also a ‘space without place’, demarcated by systems of knowledge as much as by physical or cartographic boundaries (Bangstad and Bertelsen, 2010; Fabian, 2000: 238; Said, 2003). The systems of knowledge and the cultural imaginaries that demarcate a topos are produced discursively through most diverse sources, but in all cases generate the same outcome: they condition the way in which a region and its people are perceived. The discursive narrative projected upon the Gran Sabana construed and maintains it as a ‘lost world’ outside the rhythms of modernity (Angosto-Ferrandez, 2013), which appeals both to outsiders in search of alternative models of life and to a niche within the tourist market.

The transformation of this region into a topos is indeed a fundamental pillar of the tourist business in the region. In the competitive international tourism economy, the rents that may be obtained by landowners and some service providers in destinations like Gran Sabana are as dependent on discourse as they are on the specific characteristics and qualities of the place. This situation presents parallels with certain forms of monopoly rents as discussed by David Harvey (2002): in attempts at capturing and maintaining such rents, claims about uniqueness, speciality and authenticity are crucial, and also a terrain of struggle where rent-seekers must manoeuvre discursively, since they cannot solely rely on the material characteristics of their products. Harvey (2002: 103–104) discussed cities such as Paris, Athens, New York and Rio de Janeiro as examples of built socio-cultural environments that have advantage over other competing destinations thanks to the ‘collective symbolic capital’ that particular names and places accumulate. This perspective can be fruitfully applied to shed light on the position of natural/cultural environments like Gran Sabana in a globalised economy.

The discursive representations of Gran Sabana as a unique place are a potential source of differential rents for service providers and landowners. Central to the tourist industry is the construction of imaginaries based on symbolic capital (Salazar, 2010), and the symbolic capital contained in these imaginaries is produced discursively. In the case of Gran Sabana, that discursive production that construed it as a topos has been developed for over a century and a half through cultural fields as diverse as popular science, literature, cinema and the tourist industry itself.

Milestones were marked in the late nineteenth century by the reports of renowned explorers such as the Schomburgk brothers and Everard im Thurn, ⁵ and in the early 20th century by those of Koch-Grünberg. Beyond scientific circles, such reports impacted strongly on various fields of cultural production, particularly in European societies that were then adjusting to the wide-ranging social transformation sparked by processes of industrialisation. Members of affluent social classes were eager to consume alterity and exoticism, and to their satisfaction the adventurous tones contained in the explorers’ publications were soon complemented and magnified in cultural fields such as literature (Pels, 2017).

Arthur Conan Doyle’s renowned The Lost World (1912) was actually inspired by expeditions to Mount Roraima (Dalziell, 2002), precisely one of the principal attractions in Gran Sabana today. Four decades later, Alejo Carpentier had in mind his own visit to this region when writing The Lost Steps (Los Pasos Perdidos, 1953), a novel of sceptical hero who, amidst a life crisis, finds meaning for his life in a remote region of natural exuberance outside the rhythms of modernity. Carpentier referred to Gran Sabana in his memoirs as ‘that world that continues to be, with extremely superficial novelties, the one which the first conquerors could have found’ (2005: 30 [my translation]).

Comparable representations of the region as a ‘lost world’ are continuously renewed, now through mass cultural industries. For instance, the animated film Up (by Pete Docter), awarded two Oscars in 2009, narrates the adventures of an old man whose dream as a youngster had been to reach ‘paradise waterfalls, a land lost in time’. In a moment of life crisis, the protagonist embarks on an adventure in pursuit of his dream, eventually arriving in the region of these ‘paradise waterfalls’ to find, among other things, animals outside the chain of evolution. In the film, the images of the waterfalls and adjacent lands are digitalised cartoon representations of the real Gran Sabana. Up’s co-director, Bob Peterson, personally visited the region in preparation for the film and, in promotional interviews, described it by saying that ‘you really do feel like you’re on another planet when you’re there’ ⁶ ––a paradigmatic contribution to the discursive narrative that construes the region as a ‘lost world’.

The tourist industry, particularly one that specialises in natural spaces and adventure, is supported by, and dependent on this type of narrative for constructing Gran Sabana as a tourist destination. Indeed, ‘lost world’ has successfully become a key term in the promotion of this region. Some tourist operators market trekking expeditions to Mount Roraima as visiting the ‘lost world’, and tourists interpret treks as ‘other-worldliness’ and an escape from the rhythms of modernity. During my visit to Roraima in 2015 I regularly heard tourists describing the region saying ‘I wish I was there again, it is another world’ or ‘it is like going back in time’.

This narrative has construed the region as a ‘lost world’ with unique qualities and projects onto its landscapes mystified meanings that can be consumed as part of the tourist experience. Those who nowadays enclose land in Gran Sabana for tourist activities both benefit from and reproduce this discursive narrative of singularity. While the reproduction of the core elements of that construction is crucial for any agent with stakes in the regional tourism industry, for the Pemon in particular it is also a tool that, by reinforcing their position as the legitimate holders of ownership rights over these lands, can contribute to preventing dispossession.

In reproducing that construction, the Pemon grant themselves an irreplaceable role in Gran Sabana: they are both creators and conservers of this region. In relation to their creational role, Gran Sabana’s environment is discursively presented as an outcome of the collective action of their Pemon ancestry. Indeed, Pemon etiological myths provide explanations for the current shape of the region: in the time of the beginning of things (pia daktai), the Makunaima trickster brothers imprinted the region with still identifiable marks (mountains, water courses, hills, etc.). When visiting attractions such as some of the region’s waterfalls, one can hear adapted recreations of the cultural genealogy of the place in the descriptions of guides and tourist camp owners, or find written indications of it in the promotional materials circulated by some tourism operators. Tourists’ blogs also reproduce and adapt some of these stories.

Such appeal to the creational role of the Pemon in Gran Sabana is also important as a discursive tool in relation to ownership claims and the struggle against external dispossession: it works as a discursive negation of the neoclassical macroeconomics principle that natural resources do not have a cost of production. This discourse is thus a form of defetishisation: the environment of Gran Sabana is presented as permanently inscribed with labour. The type of labour that is unconcealed in this defetishising move can be conceptualised as ‘cultural labour’ (Angosto-Ferrandez, 2016: 124–125): it is presented as collective labour, and more specifically as the outcome of a human group defined in terms of cultural identity (in this case, the Pemon).

Through discursive appeals to cultural labour, Gran Sabana appears as a produced space that permanently embodies a collective person, the Pemon people. This constitutes a discursive subversion of that phenomenon that Marx (1990 [1867]: 163–177) identified as a pillar of capitalist ideology through his theorisation of ‘commodity fetishism’: that is, the mystified detachment of the products of labour (commodities) from the social relations that underpin their production. Appeals to cultural labour are in that sense a tool for ideological struggle, a challenge to the type of consciousness that capitalist production fosters. By turning upside down the principle of concealment that pervades the phenomenon Marx characterised as commodity fetishism, those appeals discursively preclude that Gran Sabana gains autonomy as a conventional ‘natural’ environment that could be objectified in separation from the ethnically defined collective body that has created it.

The Pemon complement this discursive appeal to the creational character of their cultural labour (captured by etiological myth) with appeals to another dimension of such labour: the labour of conservation. This dimension of cultural labour is articulated around the argument that the current (nature-rich) state of Gran Sabana has been made possible thanks to the practices and knowledge of the Pemon people––in general, by what is presented as indigenous ways of life. This argument is consonant with the position assigned to indigenous peoples in the globalised discourse that links them with environmental conservation, which remains strong in public debate despite the questions that have been raised about the conceptual substance and practical implications of such association (Dove, 2006; Fisher, 1994; Nadasdy, 2005). Indeed, that position continues to be a political pillar of prominent international organisations such as a Survival International or the Forest Peoples Programme. ⁷

One of the arguments that Pemon camp owners in Gran Sabana are currently using to justify charging fees to visitors who want to access them is the need to protect the sites from littering and degradation. A commitment to conservation thus becomes a justification for enclosure, in a micro-scale mirroring of the paradigm of ecotourism and/or neoliberal conservation that has become a mechanism of capital accumulation (Baird, 2011; Brockington and Duffy, 2010; Büscher, 2009; Carrier and Macleod, 2005; Igoe, 2010; Kelly, 2011; Ojeda, 2012; West and Carrier, 2004). Under this paradigm, substantive transformations in property relations, including enclosure and privatisation of common pool resources, are mystified by appeals to conservationist goals.

In this light, as articulated in Gran Sabana, appeals to cultural labour (as labour of conservation) constitute a form of reification of indigeneity that, as is the case with other forms of strategic essentialisms (Canessa, 2017; Pulido, 1996), can both contribute to reproduce social inequalities and recast power differentials and social inequality in favour of the subaltern. The association of indigenous peoples with conservation may contribute to setting obstacles to external dispossession, as I have noted. But, as a discursive tool that also runs parallel to a process of enclosure (and internal dispossession), the conservationist dimension in appeals to cultural labour facilitates the complete insertion of Pemon communities in the metabolism of capitalist expansion, thus exacerbating class differentiation among this indigenous people and consolidating the conditions for the proletarianisation of larger shares of its population.

For the Pemon there is an additional risk involved in this process of enclosure. This risk affects even those who are actively fostering this process by enclosing land, becoming landowners and providers of tourist services in Gran Sabana. By transforming land into capital and establishing the foundations for its commodification, they are in parallel establishing conditions for capitalist competition over land ownership in Gran Sabana, and therefore opening ground to the forms of dispossession that expanded reproduction of capital can generate under the laws of free markets. If in the future the prospects of rent-capture in the region were to be so high as to attract capitalist investors (for example, through a strong reactivation of tourism, or through the development of real estate businesses), land that can be bought and sold may start to reach prices that would eventually displace current owners as proprietors, unless their activities in the tourist business enabled them to amass significant amounts of capital. In a free market for land, their position relative to big capital investors would obviously be weak. The social relations and ownership rights that enclosures start to crystallise are the foundational conditions for a hypothetical scenario like the one I have described. Against that possible background, the appeals to cultural labour, which play a key role in positioning Gran Sabana as a singular natural/cultural destination within the tourist industry, would be powerless to protect the Pemon (even the owners of land) from dispossession.

Conclusion

This article described ways in which some Pemon in Gran Sabana have been enclosing land that was previously treated as a common pool resource. This has been occurring in a conjuncture marked increasingly by territorial encroachment and by a reduction of economic options for those living in communities that previously were relatively autonomous economically. Enclosures appear in this scenario as potential sources of locally-generated income that might bring an end to labour migration––at least for some people in these Pemon communities. They also serve as a mechanism that affirms ownership claims over land that is under increasing pressures.

However, in the pursuit of those goals within a capitalist market economy, the same transformations that Marx associated with ‘primitive accumulation’ are taking place in Gran Sabana: land is transformed into capital, part of the Pemon population is dispossessed of resources over which they held rights, and the conditions that have been leading to the proletarianisation of the regional population are thus intensified.

Beyond these similarities with the process of ‘primitive accumulation’, the way in which enclosures are taking shape in Gran Sabana presents characteristics that are not commonly associated with the concept in its current usages. These enclosures are undertaken by people who, due to a combination of factors, activate dispossessing accumulation without initial capital or the use of violent extra-economic means. Enclosures nonetheless destabilise the moral and political order inscribed in the indigenous property regime, and those who enclose expose themselves to hostile responses stemming from those who are being dispossessed of common pool resources. The fact that for the time being those hostile responses are not materialising is a phenomenon that I have tried to explain in this article. I argued that the intensified threat of violent dispossession by external (i.e. non-Pemon) actors serves to alleviate the internal tensions that Pemon-led enclosures generate. These enclosures constitute a form of ‘ethnic’ affirmation of ownership claims. I also argued that the degree of fuzziness surrounding the property regime, the relative abundance of land (implying an abundance of places with potential for tourist activities), and generalised aversion towards potential escalations of internal conflict in Pemon communities also work in favour of those who manoeuvre to undertake enclosures.

However, none of these alleviating elements does away with the rupture of a moral and normative order that enclosures entail, and overtly hostile reactions against this ‘internal’ form of dispossession might increase rapidly within Pemon communities in the future. These enclosures exacerbate individualising processes of production and consolidate structures for the (unequal) accumulation of wealth that open the way to the inscription of class-based antagonisms within Pemon communities.

I also drew attention to the fact that these enclosures are accompanied by a discursive production that facilitates differential rent-capture for Gran Sabana as a tourist destination. Actors with stakes in the tourist industry, including the Pemon, re-produce old narratives that construed this region as a topos. The Pemon contribute to this construction with discursive moves that reinforce their ownership claims over these areas, which are increasingly under threat of potential land grabs. This move has the effect of defetishising the environment of Gran Sabana, because this region is presented as permanently inscribed with collective (Pemon) labour: the Pemon appear as creators and conservers of the region. While this indeed contributes to reinforce collective ownership claims over Gran Sabana, those Pemon who own tourist businesses are in practice the direct beneficiaries from that labour, which is nevertheless presented as inalienably collective. In turn, by converting common pool resources into privately owned units of property, the transmutation of land into a commodity is underway. The extent to which these enclosed units of land will be subjected to the laws of exchange in market capitalism is still uncertain––it will depend on a combination of political and economic factors, as is always the case. But it is nonetheless evident that enclosures are establishing the foundations for new threats of future forms of dispossession: market-based forms of dispossession can be added to the list of threats of land grabs and encroachment that currently affect the Pemon.

Given the characteristics of the process of enclosure that is unfolding in Gran Sabana, I suggest that it can be conceptualised as an instance of ‘modern accumulation’. I propose this concept because it draws attention to distinctive conditions and mechanisms in a form of accumulation that generates the same outcomes that Marx associated with so-called primitive accumulation. But the concept of ‘modern accumulation’ presents at least two additional contributions for the analyses of current forms of capitalist accumulation, justifying its divorce from ‘primitiveness’. First, the concept helps to highlight that the subjects currently undertaking dispossessing accumulation in Gran Sabana are not the type of social subject commonly associated with ‘primitive accumulation’. Indeed, those who are enclosing in this region belong to a group whose social identity is (partially) defined by historical exposure to processes of dispossession and proletarianisation: an ‘indigenous people’. The concept of ‘modern accumulation’ can thus draw attention to forms of (dispossessing) accumulation that do not fit preconceptions about the subjects who lead it. This provides yet another opportunity to re-calibrate the current reach of capital as a social relation, by reminding us that, where the social forces that collectively organise in defence or promotion of economic alternatives are lacking, resisting dispossession does not necessarily equate to resisting capitalist expansion and its mechanisms of accumulation. Indeed, as the case of Gran Sabana illustrates, the enclosure of common pool resources in the region is a form of resisting dispossession that reinforces conditions for capitalist accumulation.

Second, the contrast between ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ that the concept of ‘modern accumulation’ flags may be useful to highlight the current prominence of non-productive forms of value appropriation, which, as a variety of scholars are arguing, have increased in the past decades at the expense of other forms of value production (Harvey, 2002). The enclosures taking place in Gran Sabana can be read as localised expressions of that shift, with agents involved in tourist industries in this region providing an example of how processes of rent-capture are articulated and socially shaped by people on the periphery of global capitalism.