Parillada (Spanish-speaking Amazonia)

Parillada_(Spanish-speaking_Amazonia)[[1]]

Parillada 🇵🇪 🇻🇪 🇨🇴 🇧🇴 🇪🇨
Location: Spanish-speaking Amazonia, Lowland South America, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia
Definition: Lit. ‘a mixed grill of meats, barbecue’, often used as a euphemism for corruption when someone is bribing through the enticement of food
Keywords: South America – Amazonia – Peru – Colombia – Bolivia – Ecuador – Venezuela – Food – Informal economy – Bribe – NGOs
Clusters: Resistance – Moral ambivalence
Author: Daniela Peluso
Affiliation: School of Anthropology & Conservation, University of Kent
Website: https://www.kent.ac.uk/anthropology-conservation/people/551/peluso-daniela

By Daniela Peluso, School of Anthropology & Conservation, University of Kent

The term parillada refers to a form of bribery and corruption in Lowland South America. It is used among Indigenous Peoples mostly to refer to outsiders, particularly NGO workers, tourism entrepreneurs, oil companies, and other local entrepreneurs who specifically aim to enlist Indigenous community members to sign an agreement that, in turn, would allow these outside agents to gain access to or rights in the community. Such rights of access could include the building of a lodge, creating a development project, agreeing to an oil concession and so forth. The legal bribe itself operates as part of the informal economy that lays the groundwork, or underbelly for the typically exploitative formal economy that it will serve (Peluso 2018). When indigenous community members are coaxed into making a hasty decision through temptation or when they speak of others being coaxed through enticement or distraction, they say that they have experienced a parillada. Although it literally means barbecue – something that smells and looks delicious and is a special much-desired treat, especially for people who live in a hand-to-mouth economy - it is best translated here as a distracting bribe.

Indigenous Peoples’ use of parillada captures the manner in which other people sometimes try to bribe them. The term is most often used in reference to the NGOs who arrive in the communities and attempt to persuade Indigenous Peoples to approve the NGO’s projects, persuaded by the NGO’s offering them a range of goods and services. NGOs routinely position themselves as generous potential upon the early stages of meeting an Indigenous community, endeavouring to create obligations towards themselves while they ask locals to ‘cooperate’ with their projects. I have witnessed several of these parilladas, but the largest was when an adventure ecotourism company hosted such an event and had the community sign an agreement with them while the pigs were roasting on a spit. They presented it as an ultimatum: “We have been here many times now and if you do not agree we will leave right now and not be returning. If you sign, we can go ahead and celebrate with a parillada.” The result is that the NGO currently has a world-renowned tourist lodge inside an indigenous community and are often written about for their exceptional relationship with local peoples. The NGO was adroit in its legal use of bribery, and soon after imposed restrictions and expectations on community members that have curtailed their extractive activities. People often joke: ‘we gave up tapir for a mestizo’s pig!’, this refers to the well-prized meet of a tapir that is acquired through indigenous hunting skills and the meat of domesticated pigs which is typically viewed as being unhealthy. In such self-evaluations, individuals are acknowledging their own short-sightedness in the face of inequality while referencing the forfeiture of their own ontologically based economics (Peluso and Alexiades 2005). In this case, a tapir which is a valued ‘non-human other’ is procured as a source of nourishment on one’s own terms for a momentary temptation of inferior meat belonging to people whom they strongly associated with exploitation. The joke serves as a reminder of their improvident exchange.

On a larger scale, parillada is used as a euphemism that is inserted into indigenous language to explain the exploitative actions of others toward them. Indigenous Amazonians tend to follow a diverse range of economic practices to ensure their livelihoods as they circulate between rural and urban centres (Alexiades and Peluso 2015, 2016; Peluso 2015). To varying degrees, Indigenous Peoples have long been integrated into extractive economies in lowland South America that have rested upon their local knowledge and labour without including their participation in the revenue or benefits share of any overall profits earned. This extractive history precedes the rubber boom becoming particularly punctuated in the 17th Century via strong colonial trade networks in animal skins, timber, vanilla, cacao and later quinine, rubber and other commodities that propelled personal business pursuits (Alexiades 2009; Peluso 2014, 2016). However, the most acute extractive period was during and immediately following the first rubber boom of 1879-1912 (Cleary 2001). While the prized commodities of extractive economies have changed over time they still rest upon the same formula, the exchange of labour and debt with credit and access to the indigenous forests.

Economically unequal exchanges are reflected in Amazonian colloquial idioms, expressions and euphemisms concerning corruption, such as parillada or aumento, and the respective indigenous moral economies that define what is legitimate and what is not (Webb et al. 2009, Peluso 2018, 2020). The language of corruption certainly frames communications and rhetoric (Muir 2016; Tidey 2016; Muir and Gupta 2018), while the local and often intimate vernacular (Ledeneva 1998, 2014; Goldstein and Drybread 2018) and normalizes it. Parillada, as a vernacular idiom, indicates how integrated corruption has become in Amazonian societies and people’s everyday lives and how it reflects the larger nation-state (Gupta 1995; Makovicky and Henig 2018a, 2018b) in how people as subjects are often led in particular directions via short-lived benefits and promises.

References

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