Tsunki Only See the Fish as Their Hens in Certain Rivers: Situating the Politics of Shuar Ontology in the Ecuadorian Intercultural State

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe ontological turn in anthropology has triggered harsh criticism on political and epistemic grounds in recent years, channeling the disciplinary orthodoxy encapsulated in the Barbados Declaration and Writing Culture. Drawing from ethnographic material on ontologically based preferences between ancestral health‐seeking practices and state health care on Shuar territory in southeastern Ecuador, I point out that the appreciation and articulation of ontological alterity is central to certain contemporary indigenous political struggles for state interculturality, before discussing the value of interviewing and research across multiple sites within any given indigenous territory so as to develop a degree of scope that complements participant observation by contextualizing representations of ancestral ontologies. [Shuar, Amazonia, intercultural state, interculturality, ontological anthropology, perspectivism, politics of representation]