A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

then he goes off. The young hunter, returning home, comes across an
enormous snake sleeping on the road, which – without thinking – he
hits with a branch until he realises that chicha is coming from one of its
wounds. When he gets home, his wife notices a strange attitude in her
husband and intuits that something has happened with her father; she
takes her daughter in her arms and runs into the jungle. There she finds
the lifeless body of her father, the machakuy runa. Sobbing, she takes
him to the ukuy ants’ house. Soon her husband arrives and demolishes
the ants’ house in an attempt to take her home, although his wife repeatedly
implores him not to do it because they are her family. The
young hunter, who loves his wife very much, persists in demolishing
the ants’ house as he tries to get her back, but does not achieve his aim:
his wife turns into a ukuy ant and disappears, together with his daughter,
into the depths of the labyrinth that is the ants’ house. The hunter returns
home, inconsolable, without his wife and without his daughter.
What might this story have to tell us about the collective imagination of
the Amazon peoples in a historical time marked by the advent of oil exploration
and growing environmental concerns?
Without attempting a detailed interpretation, it can be taken as a possible
way into understanding a different collective way of life. Thus, the
first thing that stands out is a symbiosis between spheres that the West
defines as nature and the social world; that is, not only in the sense that
nature is where social life is reproduced but that it is a continuum that
includes nature as an integral part of social life.
In effect, the young creature who appears on the road is an ant (ukuy)
who becomes a woman in order to live with the young hunter. 148 The
relationship that unfolds in the human sphere lasts by virtue of respect
for the norms of the relationship with nature. In this sense, the story
also embodies a normative universe, not just in the sense of a simple
system of rules, but fundamentally as the world in which the rules live
148 Here we make use of the concept of becoming without further elaboration; for a
theorisation of this concept it is important to refer to Deleuze y Guatari. Mil Mesetas
(Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2002).
298