Runa realism: Upper Amazonian attitudes to nature knowing

Abstract

Stories about the forest recounted in a Quichua-speaking Runa village in Ecuador's Upper Amazon point to an element of ecological understandings that is rarely studied; these are primarily about capturing and sharing the experience of the process of knowing rather than trafficking in stabilized tokens of ecological knowledge. Runa understanding of nature is achieved through a poetic language rich in what philosopher Charles S. Peirce terms iconic and indexical signs. This way of talking about forest experience is advantageous because these forms of representation can capture qualities and events in the world in ways that what Peirce terms symbols cannot. Iconic and indexical signs mediate the world in distinctive ways. Accordingly, this article suggests some implications that iconically and indexically rich modes of communicating experience have for engaging with the nonhuman realm, acquiring knowledge of the world, and establishing a certain kind of interpersonal social intimacy.

Keywords:

• Amazonia
• ecological knowledge
• hunting stories
• Quichua
• semiotics

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Maxi Ajón and the late Luis Ajón. Luis was a very kind person and very generous with me. He died tragically during the period of my dissertation research in Ávila. Field research was supported by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, and grants from the Fulbright-Hays Commision, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I wish to acknowledge a School of American Research predoctoral fellowship, and a Woodrow Wilson Foundation postdoctoral fellowship for supporting writing. I thank Anne-Christine Taylor for her invitation to participate in the panel ‘Mind, Affect, and the Image of the Self in American Indian Societies’ at the 49th International Congress of Americanists in Quito where I presented a preliminary draft of this article. I also thank Terry Turner for his encouraging comments following a presentation of a subsequent draft at the ‘Indigenous Amazonia at the Millennium’ conference at Tulane University. I also thank Dominic Boyer, Chris Garces, Rob Hamrick, Frank Salomon, and Kimbra Smith, as well as Don Kulick and two anonymous Ethnos reviewers for comments on drafts of this article. I also wish to thank Janis Nuckolls for several productive exchanges. Finally, I thank Terry Deacon for many illuminating conversations about the material I have discussed.

Notes

1. See Kohn (2002) for a more detailed discussion of the Ávila Runa and their ecological understandings and engagements.

2. I follow here the established form of citation for Peirce scholars. CP stands for the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce 1931). Numbers before the decimal point refer to sections and those after the decimal refer to paragraphs.

3. Ávila Quichua, like many other dialects of Quechua (see Mannheim 1986) does not have an elaborate metalanguage; one result of this is that it has no labels for speech genres.

4. I have adopted from Orr and Wrisley (1981) a practical orthography based on Spanish. The following elements are adapted from Tedlock (1983:20). Line breaks indicate a short pause - usually not as long as a breath. Maxi usually pauses for a breath when Luis interjects. Longer pauses, of at least two seconds, are indicated by a dot (•). Ávila speakers often suppress suffixes or other word portions. A dash (-) indicates that word parts are missing. Stress in Quichua is usually on the penultimate syllable. In cases where this differs, stress is marked by an accent (′). This often happens when word portions are suppressed. Under these circumstances, the stress remains as if the entire word were being pronounced. I use an en dash (-) to indicate where the vowels of a word have been drawn out. I use a 2-en dash (--) to indicate an even greater elongation. Such elongation is done for poetic effect and is rarely the standard way of pronouncing the word. An apostrophe (') indicates an exaggerated stop for poetic effect. When possible and appropriate, I try to give a sense of how such stops, vowel elongations, and suppressed word parts affect speech style by incorporating them in the English version as well. I leave untranslated phatic interjections such as ye or ya, from yanga, similar to ‘no way,’ and hm or mhm, similar to the English equivalents.

5. I knew Maxi and Luis quite well, having stayed for extended periods with their families on several occasions. They felt quite comfortable with me and my tape recorder and my presence that evening was acknowledged but not particularly salient in the conversation. In Erving Goffman's terms my participation status was that of a ‘bystander’ (1983:132).

6. Unfortunately, I was unable to record this (cf. Kilian-Hatz 2001:157 for an example of a similar phenomenon in a hunting story in the Baka language).

7. There are other ways of creating social intimacy through storytelling. Don Kulick (1992:236) writes of how the Gapun of Papua New Guinea immediately repeat back to the narrator stories they have heard. This too is a form of creating intimacy through iconicity.

8. In keeping with Amazonian interest in perspectivism, many Nature Stories in Ávila are also concerned with imagining the world from the points of view of animals (see Kohn 2002 for several examples).