Thinking the End: Desiring Death and the Undead in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that imagining the end of ends through narratives about the end of the world and the undead may be mobilised to address a crisis of ends and means. Specifically, I analyze jokes and fantasies that my indigenous Shuar interlocutors from the Ecuadorian Amazon shared with me in the context of protests in favour of the construction of a road on their territory. What brings them together is the operation they perform on previously existing material, systematically inverting them to make of death and extermination an object of desire. Furthermore, I show that fantasising the extermination of all Shuar or joking about having sex with the undead means imagining the end of kinship as desirable and makes it possible to perceive more clearly the failure of indigenous politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Death
• indigenous politics
• Amazonia
• myth
• the end
• instrumental reason

Acknowledgements

My research would not be possible without the patience of my interlocutors, in particular the ones named Emilia and Juan in this article, as well as Efren Najamdey. Conversations with Clint Montgomery and others from the Platypus Affiliated Society profoundly shaped my understanding of critical theory. My colleagues and students at Aarhus University as well as the organisers and participants in the ‘Indigenous Futures’ panel at the 2019 SALSA conference in Vienna have also helped me revise and refine the argument presented here. Olivier Allard, Noa Vaisman, Mads Daugbjerg, Nils Bubandt and the three anonymous reviewers deserve particular praise for their advice during this process. Mistakes and shortcomings are therefore only my responsibility.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 The Shuar belong, alongside the Achuar, Shiwiar, Huampis, and Awajun, to the Chicham Aents linguistic family which bridges both sides of the Ecuador-Peru border in the upper Amazon. There are currently over 100’000 Shuar people in the Morona Santiago Province of Ecuador where they constitute around half of the total population (INEC 2010).

2 I have mostly carried out fieldwork in Macuma, the mission town that is at the heart of the evangelical-dominated part of Shuar territory (10 months), as well as in Macas, the settler-dominated capital of the Morona-Santiago Province (10 months) between 2011 and 2017.

3 The anthropology of capitalism has usually been an anthropology of economics and economic agents, set up against a Foucaldian anthropology of the State (see Benson & Kirsch 2010 for an excellent, concise summary). The approach I follow here takes capitalism to be the crisis of bourgeois society under the industrial mode of production. In that sense, it is a crisis of political economy, that is, of both politics and economics (see Marx 2019), manifest emblematically in the ‘farce’ of Bonapartism. Moreover, it is also a crisis of theory itself which, after the apparent failure of the German and Russian revolutions, was to be investigated by a critical theory (Adorno & Horkheimer 2016; Horkheimer 2018). For the Frankfurt School, taking inspiration from Kracauer (1995) and Lukacs (1972) aesthetic objects (music, cinema, novels) also manifested the crisis in sometimes clearer ways than political.

4 Freud’s work on jokes (1989) and dreams (2015) is foundational to the approach I take here, even though I make no claim to shedding light on my interlocutor’s unconscious.

5 Other forms of anthropology, of course, have given up on this project for various political or epistemological reasons – but have they not given up on the anthropological project in the process?

6 Importantly, I do not argue that the joke is ‘about’ road construction, but that it appears in a context saturated by discussions about the crisis of indigenous politics and that its comic effect relies on an inversion of means and ends of the desirability of death over life which also characterises this crisis. As in Dove (1996), analysis of the joke helps to understand ‘how social recognition of [a foredoomed future] arises’ (33). Unlike Dove and especially Taussig (2010: 96) the joke does not illuminate ‘a culture’s self-consciousness of the threat posed to its integrity’ but points rather to the failure or perhaps rather to the disintegration of reason and self-consciousness in capitalism.

7 Although spear-headed at first by missionaries, indigenism on a national scale was largely an outgrowth of Marxist parties and movements, particularly of a Maoist bent. The notion of autonomy thus promoted was as dubious as the concept of ‘socialism in one country’. Over time, the idiom of indigeneity has eclipsed the other forms of social and political contradictions that exist in the province, such as class or gender. See Becker (2008).

8 Anne-Christine Taylor, personal communication.

9 Importantly in this context, the Iwianch are not anthropophagous, but it is rather the Shuar who cook and eat them.

10 See Descola (2000) as well as Kohn (2013).

11 I discuss the ambivalent effects of capitalism on Shuar gender and sexuality in Cova (2018).

12 We may here note that for Marx it was precisely because Napoleon III’s coup in 1851 appeared as a farce that it contained immanently the potential for an overcoming of capitalism.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Det Frie Forskningsråd: [Grant Number 5050-00189B].