Shuar People’s Healing Practices in the Ecuadorian Amazon as a Guide to State Interculturality: An Epistemic Case for Indigenous Institutions Christian Tym Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences University of Sydney A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney 22 December 2016 1 STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY I certify that this thesis submitted to The University of Sydney for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy contains no material presented for the award of any other degree or diploma in another university or institution. This dissertation is my original work and contains no material previously published by another person, except where due contributions by others are explicitly acknowledged. The interviews done for this thesis were performed under the approval of the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of Sydney. Christian Tym 22 December 2016 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks go first and foremost to Vek Lewis, my thesis supervisor, for your phenomenal talents as a sounding board and seemingly infinite offerings of new intellectual threads for me to take up. I often feel that you understand what drives my research better than I do. Thanks for being with this project intensively when it has been humming along and for welcoming me back into the fold every time I drifted off into one side project or crisis of motivation or another. Thanks especially for all the times you assured the various university review committees that wonderfully insightful writing was bound to spring forth from my pen any day now. I hope you feel satisfied and a little bit vindicated in seeing this work come together as a coherent whole. This project would never have got off the ground without the support and direction of the presidents of the two Shuar federations with a presence in Zamora-Chinchipe. Thanks too to all the Shuar people who spoke on my behalf at ‘Centro’ and ‘Asociación’ meetings, to those who shared their stories of sickness and healing with me, and most of all to those who welcomed me into their homes and treated me as family. When I arrived in Shuar country, I was entirely unaware of the fraught connotations of association with a white man. Contemplating it now, I am astounded and overwhelmed by the dauntlessness and faith in humanity these individuals demonstrated in their willingness to trust and help me. Even so, with a mind to the risk they took, I will avoid thanking any of them by name and leave the rest of that story for another time. On that note, thanks also to my former partner Tiffany. It must have been hard for anyone in Ecuador to think the worst of me when I was accompanied by someone as gracious and 3 beautiful as yourself. Thanks also to Andrés for your coffee, for Salinas and for the constant good vibes; and to Austin, Aliya, Roberto and Vanessa for unknowingly keeping me on my feet. Big thanks to Claude and Chloe. I’m not sure what I did to deserve such selfless friends. Thanks also to Sebastian Grant for your incredible artistry (see Figure 1) and to all the friends who are still willing to take me back now that this incredibly time-consuming document has been brought to the finish. Thanks particularly to Mum & Dad, for always standing for doing the work that you love, and to Carolyn, Jane and Michael for your support and your wise words when you stepped in back in 2009. To Sophie, Hamish and Mitchell: thanks for always being around and having something completely unrelated to anthropology on your mind to talk about. Lastly, thanks to Viv, Vin, Boy & Kat, Liz & Nat, Pettit, Ibu, Charlie’s Angels and everyone else at the Metro Theatre and all the other crazies slaving hard at bars and cafés to make space for your music, painting, acting and merry-making. Keep Sydney open and keep dreaming big. 4 ABSTRACT 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 5 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. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: ‘El Ecuador es un Estado […] intercultural’ 14 Interculturality, the Geopolitics of Knowledge and Decolonisation 18 The Politics of Epistemology in Traditional Medicine 35 Bioprospecting and the Encounter between Knowledge Systems 39 Shuar Healing and Traditional Medicine Debates 44 De Facto Interculturality in the Borderlands of the Ecuadorian State 49 Chapter 2: Why Interculturalise? Pluralising the Epistemology of Medicine 56 Multi-Sited Ethnography and the Field of Research 58 Border Thinking and Coloniality 68 Interculturality, Critical Epistemology and the Non-Indigenous Anthropologist 73 Pharmaceutical Bioprospecting and the Epistemological Encounter 79 Culture, Knowledge and the Ontological Turn 88 Chapter 3: Shuar People’s Healing Practices in Zamora-Chinchipe, Ecuador The Shuar ‘Centros’ in Historical Context 93 Quantitative Analysis of Interviewees’ Health-Seeking Preferences 104 7 The Discourse of Indigeneity in Interviewee Responses 117 Health-Seeking Practices of Shuar Evangelicals 125 Geographic Isolation and Traditional Ontology in Shuar Healing 132 Mining and Materialism in Healthcare in the Quimi River Valley 142 Chapter 4: Traditional Ontology in the Sickness and Health of Twenty-First Century Shuar 148 ‘Maldad’, Sickness and Power in Alto Nangaritza 152 A Mother’s ‘Maldad’ 157 The Shamanic Diagnosis of Sorcery 160 Visionary Experience in Shuar People’s Lives 165 Power Vibrating on other Frequencies 171 Sorcery as Diversion 175 Health/Sickness, Power/Marginalisation 180 Chapter 5: Medicinal Plants and Evangelicals’ Denatured Spirituality 186 Healing and Conversion: Illness as a Crisis of Ontological Commitments 187 ‘False Miracles’: Evangelism as a Moral Epistemology? 194 Medicinal Plants, Materialism and the Disowning of Spiritual Agency 199 8 One Vector Amongst Many 203 Chapter 6: Mining, Materialism and the Indigenous Amazonian Working-Class Ethnography on the Quimi River: Shuar Life ‘On-the-Grid’ 208 Perceptions of Shamanic Healing among Miners and Anthropologists 214 First-Hand Accounts of Shamanic Healing: i) Ximena Charip 218 ii) Matilde Yankuam 221 iii) Alma Tunki 222 The Mechanics of Disbelief in the Quimi River Valley 224 Distancing Oneself from Vision 228 Land, Plant Knowledge and the Predicament of Young Waged Labourers 234 The Development and Rationalisation of Shuar Communities? 242 Prospects for Interculturality on the Quimi 245 Chapter 7: Medicine and Indigeneity–Rewriting the Multivalent Discourse of Indigenous Culture 248 Indigeneity as an Idiom of Resistance 252 Indigeneity as ‘Culture’: Class, Politics and Institutions 262 9 The Distinct Deployments and Rejections of Indigeneity by Shuar People 271 Culture as a History of Cumulatively Developed Conceptual Complexity 279 Chapter 8: Final Thoughts The Difference between Valuing Culture and Valuing Knowledge 285 The Culture of the State in Ecuador and Beyond 292 Critiquing Liberal Multiculturalism Post-2016 295 References 298 10 FIGURES Chapter 2 Figure 1: Iconographic map of the Ecuadorian province of Zamora-Chinchipe 63 Chapter 3 Figure 2: The Shuar ‘centro’ Kiim in 2013, seen from across the Yacuambi River, with its chapel in the centre 100 Figure 3: Disputed land in the Upper Quimi River Valley 103 Figure 4: Nangaritza Shuar travelling to a pre-election Pachakutik rally in 2014 119 Chapter 4 Figure 5: Nangaritza man with hunting-dogs 150 Figure 6: Shaime and the Nangaritza River from above, looking south 152 Figure 7: The Nangaritza River near Shaime 173 Chapter 6 Figure 8: Newly constructed bridge on the road to Yanua and Churubia 210 Figure 9: