Indigenous bodies, indigenous minds? Towards an understanding of indigeneity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract

This article explores how perceptions about bodies and interpersonal exchanges contribute to the production of indigenous subjectivities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on feminist methodologies and experiences with Cofán, Quichua and Secoya peoples in the province of Sucumbíos, I reflect on how bodies and their ‘grammar’ can become analytical spaces through which to understand indigeneity. Specifically, I look at the body as object and subject of imaginaries of difference with the goal to examine how moments and interactions through which people commonly identify as ‘indigenous’ construct, contest and/or maintain indigenous subjectivities. I conclude with a discussion on the possibilities of thinking about and with bodies to further a post-colonial questioning of indigeneity.

Este artículo explora cómo las percepciones de los cuerpos y los intercambios interpersonales contribuyen a la producción de las subjetividades indígenas en el Amazonas ecuatoriano. Basándome en metodologías feministas y experiencias con pueblos Cofán, Quichua y Secoya en la provincia de Sucumbíos, considero cómo los cuerpos y su ‘gramática’ pueden volverse espacios analíticos a través de los cuales se puede entender la indigenidad. En particular, analizo al cuerpo como objeto y sujeto de imaginarios de la diferencia, con el objetivo de analizar cómo los momentos e interacciones a través de las cuales las personas se identifican comúnmente como ‘indígena’, construyen, disputan y/o mantienen las subjetividades indígenas. Concluyo con una discusión sobre las posibilidades de pensar en y con los cuerpos para avanzar un cuestionamiento poscolonial de la indigenidad.

Keywords:

• indigeneity
• Orientalisms
• intersectionality
• the body
• Amazon-Ecuador

Keywords:

• indigenidad
• Orientalismos
• interseccionalidad
• el cuerpo
• Ecuador-Amazonas

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the institutional support provided by the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment and the Life Sciences, the Department of Geography and the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota and the MacArthur Interdisciplinary Program on Global Change, Sustainability and Justice. I also benefited from the critical human geography reading group at UNC, Chapel Hill. My thanks also go to Kate Swanson and Annette Watson for their helpful comments on initial versions of this project and to the three anonymous reviewers and Robyn Longhurst whose constructive and detailed suggestions significantly improved this article. My deepest thanks go to the Amazonian men and women who shared their time, thoughts, friendship and shelter with me. While their contributions are immense and invaluable to this article, all errors of interpretation remain mine.

Notes

1. Identity and self-representation are vital to such struggles. Scholars have examined how ‘indigeneity’ has been ‘possessed’ or ‘appropriated’ by people (see Brysk 2000; Graham 2002; Jackson 1995), ‘projected’ onto a group of people (see Nelson 2001; Radcliffe and Westwood 1996) or ‘performed’ for staking claims (see Gupta 1998; Li 2000; Povinelli 2002). For a debate on the role of anthropologists in producing and contesting indigenous representation, see Conklin 2003; Field 2003; Kuper 2003; Rosengren 2002; Vargas-Cetina 2003, and a discussion on indigeneity in Social Anthropology (2006).

2. The research also involved interviews with regional and national level indigenous representatives in Quito.

3. Marriages between people of different communities with different cultural backgrounds are not uncommon. Quichua women and men, in particular, have married into Cofán and Secoya families. Marriages between Cofán and Secoya are also common. Mestizos marrying into indigenous families is less common and often implies the couple will not live in the community.

4. CODENPE is a ‘hybrid’ institution – part state, part civil society – dedicated to strengthening political participation and sustainable development of all indigenous nationalities and pueblos in Ecuador.

5. Borman (1996) corroborates this account through his description of how a number of Cofán women engaged in sexual relations or were sexually abused by oil workers in the 1970s. While some women remained in the community to raise the children resulting from these encounters, others went back to the camps ‘to work’. For these, prostitution provided access to commodities and relationships not available in their communities, where they were perceived as ‘tainted’ through sexual violence (Robinson 1996).

6. At the time of this study, women's participation in political affairs was strong among the Quichua, who have a longer history of political activism. The Secoya had a small women's organization, though it did not have many participants and some men doubted its significance. The Cofán did not have a women's organization.

7. The focus groups I conducted were often seen as a ‘political affair’ because of the themes discussed, but perhaps also because I requested them through ‘official’ channels of political representation, such as OINCE (Cofán), OISE (Secoya) and FOKISE (Quichua).

8. Mora is a pseudonym.

9. While these thoughts express a sentiment of loss, they also produce a homogeneous representation of ‘community life’ that may contain silences about community politics. Drawing on their own views about how younger generations are different from their own, their interactions with me as a ‘social scientist’, as well as past and present voices of Ecuadorian society and beyond, these memories are as much about remembering as they are about forgetting and repressing other ways of life (see Muratorio 1998).