Sensing Like a Shaman, Seeing Like a State: Guayana According to Rómulo Gallegos

Rómulo Gallegos’s 1935 novel, Canaima, which takes place in the region known as Guayana where the Orinoco and Amazon river basins overlap, became the name for Venezuela’s largest national park in 1962. Chapter 2 explores how Gallegos manipulated the pan-Indigenous shamanic concept of “kanaima” to construct Venezuelan Guayana as a special place capable of resisting the economic and epistemological homogenization happening nationwide. The chapter describes Canaima as a response to both Venezuela’s incipient oil economy as well as the standardization of the country’s geographic curriculum. The unexpected result of the alternative geography that Gallegos constructs has been the state’s appropriation of “Canaima” as a metonym for Venezuelan autochthony in the national park and beyond. This chapter draws connections among literary geography, cultural appropriation, and Indigenous deterritorialization.