The spear as measure: Rage, revenge spear-killing and the transformation of indigenous citizenship in Ecuador

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes its ethnographic point of departure revenge killing among the Huaorani and Tagaeri-Taromenane (a group in voluntary isolation) living in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It describes an accelerating inter-household conflict, and especially its relation to a heated public debate, fuelling the proliferation of the initial conflict. By thinking with a cultural artefact, the spear, the article shows how the public debate became characterized by competing sense-making projects that scaled revenge killing differently. As an effect, the process entailed a change of change (escalation) occasioned by the intersection of competing, but incomensurable scales. This ended up transforming the relation between the Huaorani and State.