Difference Revised: Gender and Transformation among the Amazonian Runa

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I will explore how knowledge practices among the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon are informed by the specificity of local gender constructions. I will argue that while men learn to be ‘proper’ persons primarily through the ingestion of substances which penetrate inside their bodies and change them from the interior, women learn to become ‘proper’ Runa through imitating and reproducing specific movements. This difference in learning regimes, I argue, is based upon a priori conceptualisation of men and women as distinct kinds of beings. I argue that the Runa conceptualise as gender difference the way in which exteriority and interiority are played out in male and female persons. Unlike other Amazonian cases, women are understood by the Runa as ‘naturally’ predisposed to exteriority. This has important repercussions in the way cultural change is thought to affect women and men, especially in contrast to other Amazonian people.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• Amazonia
• transformation
• exteriority
• learning

Acknowledgements

Fieldwork in Pastaza was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council doctoral grant at the London School of Economics (ESI903364/1). The completion of this paper was possible thanks to a doctoral fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly, a Fyssen postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France and a Camel Trust small grant. I thank Ludovic Coupaye, Elizabeth Ewart, Martin Fortier, María Guzmán-Gallegos, Chris Hebdon, Amy Penfield, Michael Scott, Johanna Whiteley, Harry Walker, Norman Whitten and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In rural communities, participation in the market economy – for example, in trade and wage work – is limited but open to both men and women.

2 Indeed, I believe that the conversation with which I opened this paper is a typical example of ‘equivocation’, in the sense Viveiros de Castro (2004) originally put it. Despite both addressing a ‘common’ subject – gender difference – Juan and I were not talking about the same thing: whereas my own personal starting assumption was a common humanity whereby men and women, while different, share the same evolutionary trajectory and the same (ideally) juridical status, for Juan, difference between men and women was more radical and grounded in exclusive bodily substances and dispositions. Equally, Carmela might have talked about an entirely different matter from what I or her brother were talking about.

3 This paper is based upon ethnographic materials gathered during fieldwork with people from rural communities in Pastaza. Unlike their urban counterparts living in the capital city and surroundings, Runa people from this area live mostly on subsistence agriculture, fishing and hunting. Notions of gender are thus deeply informed by people's relationship to their surrounding forest ecology. Practices such as fasting, hunting charms and agricultural magic are still very widespread among young generation and thus strongly permeate the domain of gender. I do not wish to suggest that the gender concepts I describe here are unanimously shared by all Runa people today nor, on the other hand, that they are unchanging. For instance, many Runa youth born and raised in the city have no direct experience of forest environments. It is likely for these younger generations to think about unlikely gender in ways which contrast or differ from what I describe here (see High 2010 for an analysis of generational shifts in Waorani masculinities).

4 What I have outlined here might, at a first look, resemble Rival’s (2005) description of the predatory life force pii, among the Waorani. She describes pii as an attack of furious madness, to which Waorani men can sometimes succumb. The states I am describing here are not ‘institutionalised’ to the extent of being classified as a condition, like pii in the Waorani case. This male strength – which lacks any specific designation – can only be glimpsed by witnessing the informal yet usual instances in which it outbursts or, as in the case of my friend above, when it is willingly put into display.

5 With this observation, I do not wish to imply that Runa men are never involved in the reproduction of visible knowledge but rather that the process of reproducing visible forms is far more conspicuous in women's realm. For example, although men do have some paju involving a similar technique, these latter are not described as foundational for the constitution of one's knowledge and, certainly, not in the way pajus are for Runa women.

6 I thank María Guzmán-Gallegos for helping me to clarify this point.

7 Commenting on this specific episode, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, who has written extensively about Amazonian haematology, suggests that this shows that ‘what differentiates a man's blood from a woman's blood is not an immutable gender essence, but rather men and women's personal life experiences’ (2006: 135). However, from my own ethnography, it seemed that people were far more concerned about the mixing of female and male blood and the consequences this would entail on their being a woman/man, rather than acquiring the other person's specific abilities. At any rate, it was the acquiring of another gender's ability what troubled my Runa informants.

8 Conceived as a substance, a vital breath or as a life-force, samai it is often used interchangeably with ‘knowledge’ (yachai). I came to understand samai as a life strength which can be strengthened throughout life but which is also somewhat ‘fixed’, having been given at birth.

9 Here, like among the Waorani described by Laura Rival, ‘biology is culturally interpreted so as to emphasise the fact that men do not relate to their offspring in exactly the same way as women do’ (2005: 302).

10 Ownership is expressed by the Runa using the possessive adjective, ñuca before the object owned, or by using the Spanish-derived name for ‘owner’, amu.

11 Even in the case of working parties (minga), where men often serve their wives’ manioc beer to the female and male visitors, the beer ultimately belongs to the woman maker.

12 Indeed, Guzmán-Gallegos herself points to this difference when she writes that the act of hunting is fundamentally different from that of planting of manioc. See the following paragraph:

Like the relationship between manioc and its female grower, the relationship between the hunter and its prey is important, but different. Hunting is conceived as an act through which a man takes a forest animal to kill it without this entailing a process of creation of the prey. Men, unlike women, do not contribute to the growing of animals. (1997: 75, my translation)

13 See, however, Uzendoski (2004) for another perspective on manioc beer among the neighbouring Napo Runa.

14 Powerful shamans similarly possess a multiplicity of souls which they acquire throughout their lives.

15 Some women claimed that these multiple souls are then passed on to the children.

16 Interestingly, this resonates with the widespread idea in the region that female shamans are much more dangerous that male ones (cf. Guzmán-Gallegos 1997; see also Perruchon 2003 for the Shuar). Stephen Hugh-Jones has suggested that, among the Barasana, women could not be shamans because they are already so ‘by means of this contact with the exterior provided by gestation’ (Hugh-Jones in Vilaça 2002: 360).