Natural Engagements and Ecological Aesthetics

NATURAL ENGAGEMENTS AND ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS AMONG THE ÁVILA RUNA OF AMAZONIAN ECUADOR by Eduardo O. Kohn A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2002 © Copyright by Eduardo O. Kohn 2002 All Rights Reserved i Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Map vi Introduction 1 Chapter One 26 The Aesthetic of the Immediate Chapter Two 74 The Leaf That Grows Out Of Itself Chapter Three 108 The Perspectival Aesthetic Chapter Four 142 Ecosemiotics and Metaphoric Ecology Chapter Five 172 How Dogs Dream: Ecological Empathy and The Dangers of Cosmological Autism Chapter Six 219 The World of the Game Masters Chapter Seven 265 Wearing Whiteness: An Amazonian Strategy for Harnessing Power Chapter Eight 316 Historical Process: Co-construction, Maintenance, and Change in Ecological Cosmology Chapter Nine 336 Strategies of Access: Tapping the Wealth of the Forest ii Conclusions 391 Appendix One 411 Collected Plants Appendix Two 435 Collected Fungi Appendix Three 436 Collected Invertebrates Appendix Four 447 Collected Fishes Appendix Five 449 Collected Herpetofauna Appendix Six 453 Collected Mammals Endnotes 455 Bibliography 471 iii Acknowledgements My field research was made possible through a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, a Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Pre-Doctoral Grant, and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Grant. Preliminary field research was supported by a Fulbright Grant for Graduate Study and Research Abroad as well as a University of Wisconsin- Madison Latin American and Iberian Studies Field Research Grant. Write-up was supported by a UW-Madison Academic Year University Fellowship and a School of American Research Weatherhead Resident Scholar Fellowship. I would like to thank all of these institutions for their generous support. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to have spent a year at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This institution has provided an unequaled environment for writing. I wish to thank all the staff members for making my stay so enjoyable and productive. I especially wish to thank Nancy Owen Lewis, Director of Academic Programs. I also wish to thank Cynthia Welch for her helping me format the final draft. I also wish to thank the other SAR 2001-2002 Resident Scholars and their families for their friendship and support: Brian Klopotek and Shadiin Garcia, David and Weisu Nugent, Steve and Carolyn Plog, Katie Stewart, and Dennis and Barbara Tedlock. I would especially like to express my gratitude to Katie for her willingness to thoughtfully engage with my work and for encourag- ing me to develop my ideas about engagement, to Dennis for his constant curiosity about the Quichua language and Runa nature knowing and for generously reviewing most of the sound recordings and transcriptions of the speech I analyze in this dissertation, to Barbara for commenting on an early draft of Chapter Five, and to David for many stimulating discussions regarding how to improve the argumentation of the dissertation. I am also indebted to Steve and David for all of the professional guidance that they have given me. Finally, I am very grateful to Barbara and Dennis for having me stay with them in their Santa Fe house during the final phase of revisions. iv I wish to thank the Graduate Coordinator Peg Erdman and the Department Administrator Maggie Brandenburg of the Department of Anthropology at UW-Madison for their tireless and efficient support throughout my graduate career. In Madison it has always been reassuring to be able to count on Melania Alvarez and Alejandro Adem. I thank them. I wish to thank my dissertation committee members: Paul Nadasday, Frank Salomon, Steve Stern, Neil Whitehead, and Karl Zimmerer. Each member provided thoughtful and extremely constructive commentary on my dissertation. I am especially indebted to Neil Whitehead for a series of very productive exchanges, both in Santa Fe and in Madison, that have helped me to clarify my argument substantially. Few students have the good fortune to have an advisor like Frank Salomon. Writing this dissertation with the knowledge that Frank would creatively and critically engage with it has been both liberating and motivating. I cannot think of a better interlocutor. His intellectual breadth, depth, and continual sense of wonder about the world will always serve as inspiration. I would also like to thank Chris Garces for commenting on a draft of the first chapter. In Quito I wish to thank the members of the Comisión Fulbright, especially the former Executive Director Gonzalo Cartagenova and Helena Saona, as well as the current Executive Director Susana Cabeza de Vaca. I also would like to thank David Neill, Curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden and a long time affiliate of the Herbario Nacional del Ecuador for his careful revision of my botanical collections. I am also indebted to Efraín Freire for working with my collections. For their botanical determinations I wish to thank: M. Asanza (QCNE), S. Báez (QCA), J. Clark (US), C. Dodson (MO), E. Freire (QCNE), J. P. Hedin (MO), W. Nee (NY), D. Neill (MO), W. Palacios (QCNE), and T. D. Pennington (K). I also am very grateful to Luis Coloma and Giovanni Onore and their students at the Museo de Zoología, Universidad Católica, for their help and enthusiasm regarding my project. Tropical biology is a vibrant and exciting field in Ecuador, and this is due in large part to the dedication of the faculty and students at the Universidad Católica. I wish to thank G. Onore as well as M. Ayala, E. Baus, C. Carpio, all from v QCAZ, and D. Roubick (STRI) for determining my invertebrate collections. I wish to thank L. Coloma as well as J. Guayasamín and S. Ron, from QCAZ, for determining my herpetofauna collections. I wish to thank P. Jarrín (QCAZ) for determining my mammal collections. I wish to thank Ramiro Barriga of the Escuela Polítecnica Nacional for determining my fish collections. I am also grateful to the late Fernando Ortiz Crespo for many discussions about my project, especially in its ornithological aspects. I would like to thank the anthropologists Diego Quiroga of Universidad San Francisco, Quito and Ernesto Salazar, of Universidad Católica, for their friendship and interest in my research. In Loreto I would like to thank Father Mario Perín of the Misión Josefina for his warm hospitality and for providing lodging and meals at the mission on my way in and out of Ávila. I also would like to thank the Verdezoto family, especially don Adán and doña Clelia for their friendship and help on several occasions. My greatest debt of gratitude is to the people of Ávila. I wish to thank each of them for their generosity and patience. The periods I spent in Ávila have been some of the happiest, most stimulating, and also most tranquil ones of my life and this, in no small measure, is due to them. Ashca pagarachu. Mana “lambasa” quilcarcanichu. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Anna Rosa and Joe and my sisters Emma and Alicia for their love and support. My relatives in Quito also deserve special thanks. I always found inspiration at Vera Kohn’s house. My uncle Alejandro Di Capua and his family where always there for me. Finally, I will always be indebted to my late grandfather Alberto Di Capua and my grandmother Costanza Di Capua, not only for providing me with my home in Quito but also for getting me started on this path in the first place. vi 1 Introduction The Argument This dissertation is concerned with how the Quichua (Quechua) speaking Runa of the vil- lage Ávila Viejo (Orellana Province) in Amazonian Ecuador Ðwhose lifeways are characterized by swidden agriculture, hunting, fishing, gathering, and incipient cash cropping and occasional wage laborÐ experience, engage with, and attempt to make sense of the complex neotropical rain- forest environment in which they live. I combine ethnographic, poetic, ethnobiological, and historical approaches to capture this. I also explore the implications of this process for anthropological attempts to understand human-nature relationships more broadly. I argue that Runa ecological knowledge grows out of culturally specific aesthetic orientations that arise in contexts of intimate engagement with the minutiae of biological processes. These aesthetic-based orientations are central to the ways in which the Runa grapple with funda- mental existential problems as well as with practical ecological ones. By studying these orientations and the models they inform, I attempt to trace the elaborate reticulations among meanings and the world as well as those among socio-cultural processes and environmental perception. The ways in which these elements interact in the making of local nature knowledge can best be under- stood by studying specific moments of ecological engagement as well as local poetic attempts to recreate, or reflect on, such experiences. Such a focus indicates how knowing is more than a form of representation; it is also part of a lived engagement. Natural engagements, however, can also be problematic; reflections about forest experiences are as much about knowing as they are about confronting the ways in which meaning can break down in the face of the unpredictable com- plexity of the world. The aesthetic orientations I isolate constitute an important generative element of the more abstract cosmologies that are often taken as the starting points for anthropological studies of ecological knowledge. In Amazonia such cosmologies also reflect the social milieu out of which they 2 emerge. Because Ávila has been involved in larger regional as well as state political and eco- nomic spheres for centuries, the social order visible in Runa cosmology is decidedly translocal; ecological understandings, then, are also ways of engaging with history.

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