Mapping reeds and reading maps: the politics of representation in Lake Titicaca

This article examines a common sort of conflict, one between peasants and the state, in an uncommon setting, the beds of reeds (quite productive in ecological and economic terms) that occupy hundreds of square kilometers in Lake Titicaca, high in the Peruvian Andes. To summarize this conflict as briefly as possible, in 1978 the Peruvian government declared these reed beds to be an ecological reserve and attempted to regulate and limit their harvest. The peasants, who had customary use rights of long standing, opposed this reserve, and they succeeded in their efforts to retain control of the reed beds. By the mid-i 980s, the dispute had calmed down; the state retained weak authority in one corner of one section of the reserve, and none elsewhere. The case might seem to have some bearing on conventionally posed questions of political economy, since it suggests that one class, in many instances a weak one, gained an unusual victory over a powerful opponent. This article, however, takes a different direction, the incorporation of questions of interpretation into political economy, by studying the conflict through a set of maps that were drawn between 1977 and 1984, some by peasants and some by government officials. A careful examination of these visual representations of portions of the lake and its shores shows a surprising lack of communication between the peasants and the state. Each side views itself as being in control of the reeds, and it sees the other as accepting, rather than contesting, its position. (The peasants' and officials' oral narrative descriptions of the conflict contain similarly divergent views of its outcome.) The absence of a shared understanding of the outcome is as striking a feature of the conflict as is its having been won by a subordinate class. This article focuses on this puzzling feature of the conflict: how can two parties, both of whom made frequent use of bureaucratic channels of communication, hold such different understandings of a situation in which they are both involved? It is as if the case suggests a violation of a hitherto unstated anthropological analogue to the principle of the impenetrability of matter. Widely accepted in physics since Newton's time, the principle states that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In this instance, two social bodies, peasants and government officials, believe not only that they each have a legitimate claim to this space, but also that they are effectively exercising these claims and that other parties acknowledge the legitimacy of their claims and accept their control of the territory. A dispute between government ministries and peasant communities over control of the reed beds in Lake Titicaca, Peru, in the 1970s led to a state of irresolution, with each side believing that the conflict had been resolved in its favor. In this article, maps drawn by both sides are examined in order to analyze the understandings that each side had of the conflict and to discuss the lack of resolution. The article elaborates a framework for the analysis of maps and other representations, and discusses other theories about the role of representations in political encounters. [communication, maps, peasants, Peru, politics, representations, the state]