The spear as measure: Rage, revenge spear-killing and the transformation of indigenous citizenship in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This article takes its ethnographic point of departure revenge killing among the Huaorani and Tagaeri-Taromenane (a group in voluntary isolation) living in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It describes an accelerating inter-household conflict, and especially its relation to a heated public debate, fuelling the proliferation of the initial conflict. By thinking with a cultural artefact, the spear, the article shows how the public debate became characterized by competing sense-making projects that scaled revenge killing differently. As an effect, the process entailed a change of change (escalation) occasioned by the intersection of competing, but incomensurable scales. This ended up transforming the relation between the Huaorani and State.

KEYWORDS:

• Amazonia
• revenge killing
• escalation
• citizenship

Acknowledgements

I thank Laura Rival, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Martin Holbraad, Helene Risør, Lars Højer and members of the escalation research group as well as colleagues at University of Copenhagen for comments on previous versions of this article. The research for this article has been made possible thanks to the Danish Council for Independent Research grant numbers 1321-00025B and 4001-00223.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 These groups are often referred to as ‘non-contacted.’ The international community has adopted the term ‘indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation.’ Neither term are politically neutral or historically precise, and one may challenge how voluntary this survival strategy really is.

2 This refers to the Yasuní ITT-Initiative in 2007, which aimed at leaving the equivalent of 846 million barrels of crude oil in the ground under what is considered to be one of the most biodiverse forests in the world, but only against monetary compensation from donors and international society (Rival 2010).

3 Apart from Ompore and Buganey, who became public figures after their tragic death, all persons appearing in this article have been anonymized. Other Huarorani communities, besides from the village of Yarentaro described in this section, have also been anonymized due to the luring conflict and pending court case.

4 See: https://www.larepublica.ec/blog/politica/2013/04/06/correa-dice-que-conflicto-indigena-es-una-pelea-entre-clanes/

5 See: https://lalineadefuego.info/2013/04/19/los-huaorani-y-los-taromenane-no-son-hermanos-se-tienen-miedo-entrevista-con-migual-angel-cabodevilla/

6 Viveiros de Castro calls this an ‘uncontrolled equivocation’. Anthropologists have historically been guilty of conducting uncontrolled equivocations when ‘translating’ indigenous realities into their own conceptual language, being unaware of the referential alterity that exists. In this case an uncontrolled equivocation emerges around the nature of the event (referenced by the spear and/or shotgun which scale differently).

7 Constitutional Court statement: http://www.justicia.gob.ec/corte-constitucional-emitio-fallo-en-el-caso-huaorani/

8 https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/crimen-mujerwaorani-herida-fiscalia-yasuni.html

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research | Culture and Communication.