Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River: Kinship and History in the Western Amazon

Abstract

Studies of contemporary Amazonian societies have always been in dialogue with the theoretical concerns of the anthropology of the day. Whether these themes are environmentally, philosophically, or politically founded (or, less often, economically founded), their sharpest focus is a single village. Rarely have anthropologists deliberately aimed to provide regional-level studies, incorporating people and societies that have related to each other, and continue to do so, over long periods of time. The connections across a region include marriage, friendship and ritual relations, and political alliances, as well as raiding, fighting, and enslavement. The success of this book is to have provided such a study in the Ecuadorean Amazon, for Pastaza Province, encompassing the Kichwa ethnolinguistic group of Sápara, Canelos Runa, Achuar, Napo Runa, Gaes, and Andoas peoples and, more recently, some Waorani kindreds.The main part addresses the kinship relations and the qualities of the memorized landscape of contemporary regional society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The six chapters cover various perspectives concerning how regional society is made and remembered. Indigenous concepts of kinship are key: the llacta (the residential cluster), the ayllu (the extended kin group covering different environments), and the runa (self-identified collectivity). Mary-Elizabeth Reeve builds on the proposal that kinship is practically based in the sense that living and working together forms closeness. To maintain long-distance ties between kin means visiting regularly, exchanging food and knowledge, and participating in festivals, all of which creates a “mutuality of being,” following Marshall Sahlins (p. 147). These relations are reinforced with more formal ones of ritual alliance and friendship, such as godparenthood, and more recently shared political ambitions across ethnic groupings. Movement and travel along rivers and forest paths through settlements and towns (called purina in Kichwa) are continuous elements of each chapter. These social relations are supported by regionally shared forms of healing by shamans and women's skills concerning the making of ceramic pots and the quality of their designs. The attachment to the landscape, and territory, is constituted by stories and myths, which circulate among kinsfolk on a regional level.While each chapter is clearly part of a whole, each could stand on its own in terms of topic and treatment. The writing mixes concise theoretical contextualization and regional comparison with vignettes, particular episodes that took place during the author's fieldwork experience. These vignettes effectively deepen the argument and provide a fine-grain word picture of individuals and their lives. This change of focus makes for compelling and attractive reading and will ensure that the book appeals to a variety of audiences. It also matches a core notion at work in this volume—namely, scale and the levels at which regional society works.Scale is essentially a spatial concept from geography and has been used by social theorists to refer to the way that actors assemble and organize sociopolitical relations across spaces. The analytical significance of scale is to provide flexibility in spatial and temporal terms for the configuration of these relations. Here, kinship is the most important of these scales as it enables Reeve to look at the micro level and scale out to the regional level. Also considered from this perspective in the concluding chapter are Indigenous political organizations in Ecuador and the ways in which their alliances have moved from the regional to the national level. Furthermore, what scale lends the argument in this book is temporal depth. Based on historical understanding of regional society over the last 400 years, Reeve knows that the reach and power of regional society is in flux. Today the dynamics of regional society have been curtailed by the border closure with Peru in the 1940s and incursions by non-Indigenous people, but in the past Amazonian Kichwa societies were larger and stronger, supported by ethnogenesis after colonial-era epidemics. Yet Reeve was only able to understand how this historical regional society was internally made by doing fieldwork in Pastaza and observing the way in which kinship connected people across the region. This fieldwork started in the early 1980s and has intermittently continued to the present day, providing a remarkable series of ethnographic insights that have been enriched by archival documentation (analysis of which Reeve has published elsewhere). This historically informed ethnography is a major achievement. It is hoped that the book will stimulate further such approaches in the future.