Emmanuelle Ricaud Oneto (CSGA, Dijon). "Our children? Sold to the State. They will come back in cans of tuna”: Analysis of a rumor on social policies in the Peruvian Amazon
| Dates: | 27 October 2025 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Emmanuelle Ricaud Oneto |
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This presentation suggests taking seriously a rumor circulating among the Maijuna, a Western Tukanoan indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon, regarding social policies such as cash transfers, school food, and old age pensions implemented since 2012. Based on a long ethnographic investigation among the Maijuna, it examines how this rumor constitutes a complex political expression of the socio-political and environmental tensions at play in their relationship with the State. Circulating particularly among Maijuna mothers, the rumor conveys the idea that the State is purchasing their children through cash transfers, and that one day, the State would abduct the children, kill them, and condition their flesh into cans of tuna. This paper aims to explore the heuristic potential of the rumor by conducting analyses on: the provision of exogenous and industrial foods to children in connection with local food fears, particularly regarding canned goods; family allowances and the multitude of controls they imply; local concerns about schooling and youth migration to cities; conservation policies and threats on their territories and resources; and the centrality of the relational schema of predation in this group. Through a contextualized ethnography, this paper will apprehend the rumor as a revealing indicator of the Maijuna’s distrust towards contradictory state policies in the Peruvian Amazon.
Emmanuelle RICAUD ONETO is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institut Agro Dijon, France, and at the Centre for Taste and Feeding Behavior (CSGA). She is an Associate Researcher at the Laboratory of Political Anthropology (LAP, CNRS-EHESS), Paris. She received her PhD in Anthropology in 2022 at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. The thesis focused on the complex reception of a National School Food Program in Peru among two Amazonian indigenous peoples, Maijuna and Napuruna. Her expertise focuses on human-environment interactions through the study of food systems and sensory perceptions, particularly in the lowland Amazon, where she investigates their dynamics using ethnobiology, food anthropology, and political anthropology, with an emphasis on political issues between the State and Indigenous peoples.
Her publications include the chapter ‘School Food Politics, Identity, and Indigeneity in the Peruvian Amazon’ in the award-winning book from the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS): Transforming School Food Politics Around the World, 2024, edited by Robert S. and Gaddis J., MIT University Press; ‘Repas scolaires, cogestion et peuples autochtones: L’illusion d’un pouvoir infranational au Pérou’. Lien social et Politiques, 2023; and the forthcoming paper « L'alimentation scolaire au nom de la pauvreté : confronter les problématiques alimentaires en contexte autochtone », Anthropology of food.
Speaker
Emmanuelle Ricaud Oneto
Organisation: Centre des Sciences du Goût et de l'Alimentation
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Boardroom (2.016-17)
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
