Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Risks and Tenables among Native Amazonians in Northeastern Ecuador

Abstract

Throughout Amazonia, indigenous communities contend with colonization, urbanization, extractive industries, agribusiness, and the environmental degradation that results, including widespread contamination, loss of biodiversity, changed systems of land tenure, and increasing levels of integration with the market. However, the perspectives of most Native Amazonians—the disparate ways that people perceive both risks and resources—have not been interpreted as demonstrative of sociocultural, economic, and demographic diversity. Drawing upon two datasets in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon, we first present a cross-cultural analysis of how seven different Amazonian communities of four ethnic groups perceive risk. Second, we make the methodological point that risk mapping should be paired with a method we call tenables mapping in order to provide a much more comprehensive understanding of the above-mentioned diversity. Finally, we describe a pilot tenables mapping study conducted among Waorani and Cofán youth in four communities of varying degrees of integration into the market. Taken together, these two methods convey the commonalities and differences of hardship and risk as well as indicators of cultural resilience.

keywords:

• risk mapping
• tenables mapping
• Ecuador
• Amazon