A romance in (and with) the Amazon: constructing nature and Indigenous masculinities in Napo, Ecuador

ABSTRACT

The Ecuadorian Amazon attracts thousands of Western tourists yearly with promises of access to pristine rainforests and traditional Indigenous cultures. Visiting the Amazon is also billed as an opportunity to achieve spiritual transcendence by shedding the burdens of modern life and (re)connecting with a timeless essence that Westerners are presumed to have lost. In contrast, this essence and the Edenic landscapes connected to it are often imagined as integral to Indigenous cultures. While scholars have convincingly argued that these ecoprimitivist ideas reflect Western anxieties regarding the alienating forces of modernity, insufficient attention has been paid to the diverse ways in which Western visitors convert these ideas into embodied practice. Specifically, I analyze how ecoprimitivist ideas about Amazonia shaped the experiences of Western women who established intimate relationships with Indigenous Kichwa men in Napo, Ecuador.

KEYWORDS:

• Amazonia
• Ecuador
• Indigeneity
• masculinities
• ecotourism
• Kichwa

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the dozens of generous individuals from the Kichwa Indigenous nation in Napo, Ecuador, for their time and support. I would also like to thank Western visitors and residents of Tena for their openness in sharing their perspectives and experiences on sometimes controversial and uncomfortable topics. I am also profoundly grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers at LACES, who patiently read and reviewed several drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Mestizo(a)’ referred initially to individuals of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry. Nowadays, it refers to any individual who does not identify as Indigenous or Afro descendant.

2. All the names and nicknames of research participants have been changed to protect their privacy and anonymity.

3. It is important to note here that I am using Euro-American systems of racial identification, which does not necessarily correspond to how Kichwa people, or Ecuadorians in general, might identify these individuals.

4. This word is more commonly heard in the Andes, which roughly means ‘Mother Earth’

5. It is important to note that while long hair is not prevalent among Amazonian Kichwa men (although it is among Indigenous men from the highlands), it is also not a practice that Kichwa tour guides started.

6. According to the 2022 Census, 45.7% of the urban population of Tena identifies as Indigenous (INEC 2023)

7. Sacha speaks Brittany’s language with intermediate fluency, which is why he could understand her conversations with people back home.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a dissertation grant from the American Ethnological Society (AES) and two Doctoral Evidence Acquisition (DEA) Fellowships from Florida International University. Kichwa language training was funded by three Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships from the U.S. Department of Education.

Notes on contributors

Ernesto J. Benitez

Ernesto J. Benitez is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He holds a PhD in Global and Sociocultural Studies from Florida International University (FIU) with a focus in Cultural Anthropology. His work has been published in American Anthropologist, and one of his more recent articles will soon be published in Critique of Anthropology. He has presented at conferences and given guest lectures in the United States, Canada, Austria and Ecuador.