DE TEJIDO CONJUNTIVO SUBEPITELIAL

Besides the houses located within the ‘residential area’ there were a number of conspicuous places in Cañón that could be referred to as ‘public’, in the sense that they were not the property of individuals or families (as were the houses and surrounding patios) but of the community as a whole. The most central was the school compound, which functioned as the

social, administrative, but also in a sense as the spiritual centre of the community.113 Its main function was the teaching of children, which was done by six teachers only one of whom lived in Cañón (and that only during semesters). The school was, however, also used for holdingasambleas or workshops, which tended to be called by sounding the school bell; for special events other than the fiestas organised by individual people (such as the event described in the Introduction); for communal projects such as the pottery project discussed in Chapter 9; for ‘friendlies’ with the football teams of neighbouring communities; and for attending the infamous church services of Padre Pío, who came to hold a mass in Cañón once a month.114

The school also housed a cistern and a water tank, where people could fetch water whenever the water supply to their houses got cut off. Further, there was a communal kitchen, which was also occasionally used to house guests (such as the ‘interns’ of the INSPOC institute, a school for bilingual teachers in Camiri, who regularly did placements in Cañón and other

comunidades), and which also functioned as a storage room (for example, for pottery produced by the women; see Chapter 9). The video room next to it was often used for film presentations (mostly of martial arts b-movies with Spanish subtitles) at night, and occasionally for doctors’ visits. Next to the school, there was a playground for children with a climbing rack, slide, and swings.

Above the school was the ‘health centre’ (posta sanitaria), which was where doctors’ and nurses’ visits usually took place, and where I was living during my stay in Cañón. I occupied the smaller of the two rooms in the building, which had been constructed for a ‘live-in’ nurse (who had then, however, been moved somewhere else), and used the larger one as a kitchen. Since the community’s medicine supply and a few instruments were still stored in there from the days when it was used as a consultancy room, I had to remove all my personal things whenever a nurse or NGO doctor came for a check-up. Thepostaalso had the only ‘modern’

113 _{Cf. Gow (1995: 230) on the centrality of schools for the status of comunidades nativas in the Bajo} Urubamba.

114_{‘Padre Pío’ was an Italian priest based in Camiri who was in charge of delivering church services to the} surroundingcomunidades, and who came to Cañón every first Saturday of the month. He had a rather curious relationship with the comunarios that involved a lot of shouting and attempts at ‘blackmailing’ them into becoming better Christians, while thecomunarios’conduct towards him was marked by a lot of polite smiling. Unfortunately, I do not have the space here to discuss this relationship any further.

working toilet/shower in the entire community (which, however, didn’t resist the frequent use by the schoolchildren for very long).

Further inside the forest, there was a huge concrete water tank, which was where the

comunarios got their tap water from. Before the installation of this tank, they used to use a water pump inside a well, which also still existed but had fallen out of use. Even this pump, however, had been a huge improvement from not having any water supply at all, which had been the case when the comunarios had first moved to the place, and people tended to remember that time as one of particular hardship. What was still missing, however, was an irrigation system for the chacos which would make people less dependent on the rainy season.

Apart from the chacos, the comunidad’s ‘productive units’ included the cattle corral where the cows of the community’s joint cattle project were kept, and two enclosures with beehives. The beehives consisted of wooden boxes on stilts inside a fence to keep children and animals out. According to Carol, an agrarian engineer from Spain working with CIPCA, the bee project worked best in Cañón of all the communities she had seen, but the beekeepers had constant trouble keeping their bees alive or from migrating elsewhere due to the lack of flowering plants in the area. There were only a fewcomunariosinvolved in the production of honey, which was then sold in Camiri.

There was a cemetery not far from the main tank, which was still rather small due to the fact that the community had only existed for some 14 years when I got there. Graves were mostly humble and only marked by iron crosses, and were decorated with the usual coronas (lit.: ‘crowns’; wreaths of coloured plastic flowers that are renewed on the graves on All Saints’ Day every year). There was another cemetery in Itakua, which thecomunarios visited on All Saints to pray by the graves, exchange masitas (maize flour biscuits and sweet bread made only for this occasion), and leave newcoronason the graves. Some fewcomunarioswho had been able to afford it had transferred their dead from Itakua to the new cemetery, but most of them had remained where they had been buried.

These public places as structures were more or less fixtures, but many had, nonetheless, a high ‘internal’ mobility, as exemplified by the constant oscillation of purposes, and the resulting flux of objects and people, of the posta sanitariaand the school. What first alerted me to thecomunidad’s high internal mobility was when on one incidence in the early stages of my fieldwork I went looking for doña Estefanía’s house and, failing to remember the way, asked another woman about its location. ‘It’s just down the road and to the left’, she replied. ‘Where they sell bread.’ Bread was about the only food product in Cañón that was both produced by the women and regularly sold to other comunarios. Houses where bread could be bought were marked with a stick with a white rag or plastic bag wrapped around the top, which could be propped up or stuck in the ground next to the road outside the house. These markers were removed again as soon as the bread had run out. ‘Where they sell bread’ was thus an indicator that could only be used as long as the selling of a particular batch of bread was ongoing, rather than a permanent marker of location. In order to understand this kind of directions, you thus had to either know who of the women had recently been making bread, or physically go out looking for the stick with the plastic bag. This kind of mobility was even more conspicuous when it came to the organisation of particular houses.