In my previous articles published on these pages of Sicilia Libertaria, we described how structures of oppression and the sidelining of women do not correspond to a biological destiny or a supposedly immutable "human nature." On the contrary, history shows us that cultures largely impose themselves on biology, shaping, regulating, and often repressing bodies and social relations according to the political and economic interests of dominant groups. We examined this phenomenon through the mythical Greek and biblical roots of Western culture, as well as the historical role of the Catholic Church, where the female gender has been instrumentalized as a territory to be conquered, particularly visible in contexts of war. However, the Western gaze tends to naturalize its own violence by assuming it as a shared universal fact. Faced with this, anthropology forces us to decenter our gaze and, by shifting the focus to the indigenous societies of Latin America, particularly the lowland peoples, we encounter a complex reality that invites us to ask whether gender asymmetry is a human constant or whether there exist forms of organization in which culture has managed sexual difference, using the very construction of gender to avoid subordination.
To address this question, it is necessary to first examine how classical anthropology, despite its claims to objectivity, was not immune to the prejudices of its time. In studying the societies of the American lowlands, the first male ethnologists projected the model of the European bourgeois nuclear family onto indigenous peoples, reducing complex social relations to a rigid sexual division of labor based on the false premise of "men hunters and women gatherers or cultivators." In this simplistic framework, men's activities were automatically categorized as prestigious and political, while women's were downgraded to merely domestic and subsistence tasks, naturalizing an asymmetry that often did not exist in native terms. This theoretical blindness not only distorted economic functions but completely avoided the existence of other genders and fluid identities. Thus, by imposing a strictly binary matrix, anthropology ignored the fact that in many American societies, gender is not a fixed essence dictated by anatomy, but rather a culturally constructed "place," missing the opportunity to understand how these societies managed otherness without the need to hierarchize it.
This interpretative bias becomes evident when drawing an ethnographic map of the lowlands and their areas of influence. In analyzing these relationships, classical literature indeed records a paradox: a marked symmetry in everyday life that contrasts with a presumed male ritual supremacy, enacted in segregated spaces such as the "men's house" or the control of certain sacred instruments. However, a critical look from contemporary field anthropology reveals that this "supremacy" is, to a large extent, an illusion caused by the prejudices of male ethnographers themselves, who have historically remained blind to the feminine and other gender universes, failing to see the existence of a rich fabric of power, resistance, and agency operating outside the Western patriarchal gaze. An example of the strength of these alternative structures is found in the matrilineal and matrilocal character of Wayuu society (Venezuela and Colombia), where women play a central political and socially cohesive role; Similarly, within Mapuche society (Chile), the figure of the machi shaman expresses the enormous prestige and ritual power that women and gender-transient identities have historically held. This androcentric blindness has not only obscured female power, but also affective-sexual diversity. The case of the Warao (Venezuela) is paradigmatic, where male homosexuality has been systematically ignored by researchers incapable of codifying practices that did not fit into their narrow bourgeois binarism (there are, of course, exceptions).
Thus, when analyzing power relations in these contexts, it is imperative to divest ourselves of the Western assumption that reduces them to domination, force, or institutional hierarchy. In these societies, power relations are articulated through prestige, kinship management, diplomacy, and mediation with the natural world. When we apply this decolonized perspective, the ethnographic landscape fragments into complex dynamics that reveal both asymmetries and profound gender balances, coexisting on the same continent. On the one hand, we find peoples like the Yanomami (Brazil, Venezuela) or some groups of the upper Xingu (Brazil), where a more explicit "gender antagonism" is evident; in these contexts, physical violence or male ritual control operate as mechanisms of social pressure, limiting women's access to the spheres of warfare or intertribal politics. In contrast to this model, there are societies in which female autonomy is structural and firmly based on the management of horticulture and food sovereignty in the chacra or conuco (the community garden). In many Amazonian peoples, cassava is not only a biological resource, but a spiritual subject under the control of women, who decide the distribution of goods and, through matrilocality and matrilinearity (the man moves into his wife's family home and the children often belong to her clan), form the core of local politics. These realities force us to rethink the paradox of women's power: what classical anthropology mistakenly interpreted as subordination due to the absence of women in certain warrior assemblies was in reality a subtle but powerful division of spheres of influence or a power in the shadows. It seems that female power in the lowlands does not seek to replicate the hierarchical command of men, but rather operates from the management of the reproduction of life, the memory of lineage, ritual knowledge, and the management of everyday life; vital spheres that support and often completely influence men's public decisions.
These ethnographic examples dismantle the historical determinism that claims to present male domination as an inevitable evolutionary process, highlighting that oppression and binary rigidity are cultural and historical choices, not biological imperatives. This theoretical observation immediately opens a powerful window of political possibility for our libertarian and anti-capitalist struggles. By making visible that societies capable of managing sexual difference without transforming it into economic hierarchy or structural violence have existed and exist, the experience of indigenous peoples becomes a model of emancipation (without resorting to Rousseau's fantasies). It teaches us that the destruction of the Western patriarchal model does not require inventing a utopia from scratch, but rather learning to decentralize power from the logic of the state and force, restoring sovereignty to the communal reproduction of life, collective care, and the horizontal management of relationships and territory. The peoples of the forest remind us that the path to freedom involves decolonizing our bodies and radically resetting our social and emotional relationships.
Emanuele Amodio
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/maggio-2026_compressed.pdf
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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