The Shuar writing boom: cultural experts and the creation of a "scholarly tradition"

In dialogue with Stephen Hugh-Jones’s work on Tukanoan writing, this article analyzes the boom in patrimonial writing among Chicham (Jivaroan)-speaking Shuar people. Patrimonial writing foregrounds collective identity and understandings of culture as group property common to the Tukanoan speakers of the Upper Rio Negro but foreign to the pre-missionized Shuar. We argue that the Shuar interest in patrimonial writing can be explained through the history of missionization and the recent shift to intercultural exchange within the plurinational project of state-building spearheaded by the indigenous movement. By analyzing the wider context of knowledge production and the forms of knowledge Shuar scholars mobilize to represent culture in the collective mode, we demonstrate how, for the first time in Shuar society, a group of specialists can make a profession out of reproducing heterogeneous forms of knowledge as unitary, uniformly shared collective patrimony. The comparison between the Shuar and Tukanoan appropriation of writing reveals important differences in the way Lowland Amerindians understand patrimony and the centrality of schooling in shaping a new “scholarly tradition.

Snail tecnologies and cultures in the age of mobility: mobile communication and identities in the Shuar time/space

In mobile ontology and in the Shuar dynamic, cyclic, one-dimensional worldview, time and space flow simultaneously (de Salvador y Martínez, 2015b; Martínez, & de Salvador, 2015; Martínez et al., 2015). Authors such as Ling and Haddon emphasised the influence of mobile phones on human movement patterns, pointing out that they offer “freedom of contact”, given their nomadic nature, and the possibility to free ourselves from the spatial context and enter a space of communicative flows, where only time exists. The Where - as a Shuar would say - that is, Space, marches on together with time, in a global spatial-temporal dimension. Since mobile phones draw us closer to a nomadic life, turning us into snails (Fortunati, 2005) that carry a whole network of relationships in the back, an analysis of the uses of mobile phones (from this point of view) by a nomadic people such as the Shuar seems particularly interesting. The endlessly spiralling snail metaphor, which the Shuar use to describe their worldview, and the characterisation of nature resemble today’s mobile technology we all carry about. This essay is intended to emphasise the worldviews of the Mobile Age and the Indigenous, Shuar Age so as to analyse the similarities and differences in the spatial-temporal conception, as well as its impacts on identity

Group selection theories are now more sophisticated, but are they more predictive?

Human beings are unique among species in their ability to cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals, and in this book, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis attempt to account for the origins of this ability. The authors specialize in the use of formal models and agent-based simulations in order to precisely specify their theories of cooperation, and they often draw on studies conducted in hunter gatherer societies and in experimental economic laboratories for evidence that they find relevant to evaluating these theories. The book is a valuable review of these anthropological and economic literatures, and a thorough showcase of the authors’ expert formal theorizing about how cooperation may have evolved. However, I often found myself disagreeing with the authors’ focus on group selection as an explanation for human cooperation, and with their views on how well the empirical findings provide support for group selectionist theories

The Conceptual and Jurisprudential Aspects of Property in the Context of the Fundamental Rights of Indigenous People: The Case of the Shuar of Ecuador

This article draws attention to several problems relating to indigenous ownership of both real and intellectual property, and their related impact upon the well-being and essential dignity of indigenous peoples. Part II of this article introduces the concept of indigenous ownership of real and intellectual property. Part III digs deeper into challenges to indigenous ownership of land, using the Shuar people of Ecuador as a case study. Part IV examines the problem of bioprospecting, as well as some of its implications, and discusses how the problem has affected the Shuar. It additionally summarizes a few steps toward developing an effective strategy to confront the problem of bioprospecting as it applies to the Shuar. Finally, Part V concludes with an analysis of possible strategies to either stem or combat the effects of appropriation of indigenous peoples\u27 land and knowledge

Homo Æqualis: A Cross-Society Experimental Analysis of Three Bargaining Games

Data from three bargaining games-the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punishment Game-played in 15 societies are presented. The societies range from USundergraduates to Amazonian, Arctic, and African hunter-gatherers. Behaviour within the games varies markedly across societies. The paper investigates whether this behavioural diversity can be explained solely by variations in inequality aversion. Combining a single parameter utility function with the notion of subgame perfection generates a number of testable predictions. While most of these are supported, there are some telling divergences between theory and data: uncertainty and preferences relating to acts of vengeance may have influenced play in the Ultimatum and Third- Party Punishment Games; and a few subjects used the games as an opportunity to engage in costly signalling.Bargaining Games, cross-cultural experiments, inequality aversion

Homo Æqualis: A Cross-Society Experimental Analysis of Three Bargaining Games

Data from three bargaining games-the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punishment Game-played in 15 societies are presented. The societies range from US undergraduates to Amazonian, Arctic, and African hunter-gatherers. Behaviour within the games varies markedly across societies. The paper investigates whether this behavioural diversity can be explained solely by variations in inequality aversion. Combining a single parameter utility function with the notion of subgame perfection generates a number of testable predictions. While most of these are supported, there are some telling divergences between theory and data: uncertainty and preferences relating to acts of vengeance may have influenced play in the Ultimatum and Third-Party Punishment Games; and a few subjects used the games as an opportunity to engage in costly signalling.

Contested Identities: Urbanisation and Indigenous Identity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This thesis is a study of indigenous urbanisation and ethnic identity in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Taking as its focus Shuar urban residents of the rainforest city Sucúa, it argues that urban indigenous residents feel simultaneously more and less ‘indigenous’ than their more ‘rural’ counterparts. On the one hand, the experience of living in a multiethnic city, on the ‘boundary’ of the Shuar ethnic group (Barth 1969), increases urban Shuar residents’ awareness of their ethnic identity, as Shuar and as ‘indigenous’. Furthermore, they want to identify as indigenous, as they are aware of the value that is placed on this identity by, for example, international organisations, NGOs, environmental activists, eco-tourism agencies, and indigenous political leaders. On the other hand, indigenous identity in urban areas is formed via a ‘play of mirrors’ (Novaes 1997) as a result of which urban Shuar are exposed to a variety of contradictory perspectives on what it means to be ‘indigenous’. These tend towards romanticisation and exoticisation of indigenous peoples as ‘ecologically noble savages’ (Redford 1993), creating the image of a ‘hyperreal Indian’ (Ramos 1992) that urban Shuar cannot hope to emulate. This leads many urban Shuar residents to feel that they are ‘not indigenous enough’. Nevertheless, with increased international migration and rising levels of education and professional achievement, a new urban indigenous middle class is acquiring the economic, cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1984) to throw off the ‘burden of heritage’ (Olwig 1999) and determine for themselves what it means to be ‘indigenous’. Finally, I argue in this thesis for an anthropology of Amazonia that addresses the significant changes which are taking place in Amazonian peoples’ lives. If we continue to depict Amazonian groups as isolated, small-scale societies existing in an eternal ‘ethnographic present’ (Rubenstein 2002) we risk ignoring or misrepresenting the very real challenges and transformations that are increasingly facing our informants

Shuar People’s Healing Practices in the Ecuadorian Amazon as a Guide to State Interculturality: An Epistemic Case for Indigenous Institutions

What do we understand by the principle of state interculturality? What would be the full implications of making Latin American states culturally representative, rather than agents of modernisation on the European model? Could the state reflect the distinctive local cultures within the various particular regions of its sovereign territory? This project takes the example of state healthcare in Ecuador, an ‘intercultural state’ according to its 2008 constitution, as a point of entry to answering these questions. By presenting an epistemological critique of biomedicine as culturally specific and historically contingent, it argues for intercultural health as a break with taking western knowledge systems as the universal arbiters for social policy. Instead, it proposes that the health-seeking preferences of indigenous minority groups–working with the example of the Shuar nationality in the south-eastern Amazonian province of Zamora-Chinchipe–become the basis for culturally representative state healthcare within their territory. I argue that this is a question of indigenous justice, in light of the evident dramatic disconnects in meaning and disappointed expectations of many Shuar people in their engagement with clinical healthcare. However for non-indigenous society, too, intercultural health would lead to the further development of health practices founded on distinct epistemological and ontological assumptions from those of western biomedicine, thereby bringing a new diversity of approaches with which intercultural societies could address universal social problems. Yet the effort to put forward a medical ethnographic representation of Shuar culture understood as a set of present-day practices and preferences, rather than a body of essentialised tradition, raises the question of how meaningful it is today to speak of cultural groups, when these are inevitably cross-cut by transnational economic, religious and political-discursive forces to different extents in different locations. The thesis thus concludes with a suggestion for what we mean when we say we value cultural diversity

Shuar architecture as a model of sustainability

[EN] In recent decades modern architecture has focused excessively on the search for new construction techniques to facilitate and improve the construction process in cities. This has reduced the application  of local construction techniques and materials, leading to the neglect of cultural heritage and architectural landscape.As vernacular architecture relates to historical inhabitance of the territory with no theoretical or aesthetic pretences it is a viable model of sustainability. At no point do poverty and nostalgia for the past correspond to the way in which this type of architecture was conceived. The ways of thinking and life of indigenous cultures open a viable path towards the conservation of their architecture. Although today  there is an inclination to build following the new tradition of modern materials and typologies, and leaving aside the close connection between the forms of inhabiting and their surroundings, it is necessary to create a heritage awareness of place, where its architecture can be adapted to a new way of conceiving architecture and its spaces to fulfil the needs of a modern society.Morocho Jaramillo, DE. (2022). Shuar architecture as a model of sustainability. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 499-506. https://doi.org/10.4995/HERITAGE2022.2022.1502949950