My work employs anthropological linguistics to document and analyze Amazonian Quichua/Shuar traditions on the social relation to nature. In particular I examine how songs and other forms of speech are used to heighten empathy with plant and animals species. I am also interested in how this heightened affinity with the local land and species mediates relations between human relatives. I have secondary interests in Amazonian Linguistics and Tropical Ecology. My family moved to Pastaza Province Ecuador in 1961 where my father was a missionary doctor at the Hospital Voz Andes in the town of Shell. After graduating from highschool in Quito I earned a BA in Linguistics at the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Chicago. I am married to Josefina Andi Aguinda and together we have 4 children: Elizabeth, Santiago, Miriam and Josue. I teach courses on North and South American Indian religious traditions at Arizona State University. In the summer I direct the Andes and Amazon Field School http://andes-fieldschool.org in Napo Province, Ecuador. Address: Tempe, Arizona, United States
The Napo River basin, which is situated within the Upper Amazon archaeological region, is one of ... more The Napo River basin, which is situated within the Upper Amazon archaeological region, is one of the most speciose forests in Greater Amazonia. Standard thinking in scholarship and science holds that these forests are essentially pristine because any Indigenous impacts in the past would have been minimal, seedbanks would have been nearby, and natural forests would have reappeared after the humans left, died out, or dispersed. Inventory research in 2019 on three ridgetop forests in Waorani territory inside the Curaray basin (which drains to the right margin of the Napo River) and a comparable inventory on one control site forest along the Nushiño River (also in the Curaray basin) show human impacts from about the late nineteenth century to about 1960; they occurred during the period of wartime among Waorani themselves and between Wao people and outsiders. The human impacts resulted in the high basal-area presence of two long-lived species with important Waorani cultural uses: cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) and ungurahua palm (Oenocarpus bataua Mart.). These species have high frequency and dominance values and do not occur in the control site, which is comparable in terms of elevation above the flood zone of the rivers in the sample. These findings mean that alpha diversity in the right margin sector (or south) of the Napo River basin cannot a priori be explained by reference to traditionally, biologically accepted patterns of ecological succession but may require knowledge of historical patterns of Indigenous land use and secondary landscape transformation over time due to human (specifically Waorani) impacts of the past.
Mundos Plurales - Revista Latinoamericana de Políticas y Acción Pública
Entre marzo – agosto de 2020, hubo un contagio muy generalizado de covid-19 en las comunidades in... more Entre marzo – agosto de 2020, hubo un contagio muy generalizado de covid-19 en las comunidades indígenas Kichwa en la Amazonía ecuatoriana. Mostramos que el pico de contagio ya ha pasado y la mortalidad total ha sido notablemente baja. El pueblo Kichwa identifica su éxito en resistir la pandemia al uso generalizado de plantas medicinales.
This chapter covers the extraordinary Indigenous linguistic diversity of the Amazon region, inclu... more This chapter covers the extraordinary Indigenous linguistic diversity of the Amazon region, including its different dimensions: the existence of a relatively large number of languages in the region; how these languages are related to each other, representing an impressive genealogical diversity; geographical distribution over different Amazonian subregions; the effects of language contact that have resulted in several linguistic areas; different levels of endangerment and the social circumstances that contribute to it; and, finally, what is lost when languages disappear.
ABSTRACT For decades, outbreaks of insect herbivores in tropical forests were considered unusual ... more ABSTRACT For decades, outbreaks of insect herbivores in tropical forests were considered unusual or rare events primarily because of high plant diversity and the top-down impact of enemies. An alternative explanation is that these outbreaks are common but occur on sparsely distributed hosts high in the canopy and at scales of one or a few individual trees. Here, we report an outbreak of a saturniid in the genus Citioica Travassos & Noronha near the Amazon Basin of Ecuador on a single tree of Inga edulis Mart. The outbreak caused near complete defoliation (>90% leaf loss) and did not occur on nearby conspecifics. This is only the twenty-third documented case of a saturniid outbreak, of which more than 60% occurred in tropical habitats. This is the first report of an outbreak on a single tree. Members of the local indigenous communities are well aware of these Citioica outbreaks and collect these caterpillars for food whenever outbreaks are detected, suggesting that these isolated outbreaks are fairly common. Further research is required to explore the possibility that insect outbreaks in tropical forests may be more common than previously suspected but occur over very small spatial scales undetected high in the forest canopy.
There has been very widespread contagion of covid-19 in Kichwa indigenous communities in Ecuadori... more There has been very widespread contagion of covid-19 in Kichwa indigenous communities in Ecuadorian Amazonia, but the peak of contagion has already passed, and total mortality has been remarkably low. The Kichwa people themselves typically attribute this to the widespread use of medicinal plants.
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2019
Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism(Oakland: Universi... more Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism(Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 272 pp., $29.38 (pbk), ISBN: 978-0520285-73-6.
Este capítulo presenta las dimensiones que hacen de la región amazónica un lugar de extraordinari... more Este capítulo presenta las dimensiones que hacen de la región amazónica un lugar de extraordinaria diversidad lingüística. Los primeros informes de colonizadores, misioneros, viajeros, aventureros y científicos europeos mencionan la notable multitud de lenguas habladas por los diversos pueblos de la región. También destacaron el hecho de que estas lenguas parecían ser radicalmente diferentes entre sí.
This article explores how traditional Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon experience and pract... more This article explores how traditional Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon experience and practice emotional life. In particular, we focus on the centrality accorded to acts intended to elicit compassion in others (llakichina) and on the role these acts play in holding communities together. We argue that the importance given to the eliciting of compassion is tied to the Kichwa construal of the self as inherently relational and, for this reason, precarious. Further, we show how the emotional life of relatedness encompasses relationships with land and other species (particularly birds) in multi-layered ways. Drawing on interviews, songs, and narratives, we show how an understanding of other species as transformed humans informs affective connections with the land and how these in turn mediate emotional relations.
This article explores how emotional life is experienced, and practiced by traditional Kichwa peop... more This article explores how emotional life is experienced, and practiced by traditional Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In particular, we focus on the centrality accorded to acts intended to elicit compassion in others (llakichina), and on the role these acts play in holding communities together. We argue that the importance given to the eliciting of compassion is tied to the Kichwa construal of the self as inherently relational and for this reason precarious. Further, we show how the emotional life of relatedness encompasses relationships with land and other species (particularly birds) in multi-layered ways. Drawing on interviews songs, and narratives, we show how an understanding of other species as transformed humans informs affective connections with the land and how these in turn mediate emotional relations. "When the sun is going down a toucan sings, 'Han, han, han!' You have heard it right? That is because somewhere a woman is singing to cause sadness/love. Her singing makes us hear (the toucan) and we feel sad."
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. (Durh... more Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. (Durham: Duke University Press 2020) xi + 252 pp., $26.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9781478008484.
This article offers an account of Quichua thinking about beauty in the Ecuadorian Amazon: how it ... more This article offers an account of Quichua thinking about beauty in the Ecuadorian Amazon: how it is grounded in a philosophical tradition that conceives the world and the self in “perspectivist” and relational terms, and how experiences of beauty play specific roles and attain a particular kind of sense within that context. In particular, we show how indigenous Quichua ideas about beauty inform a range of everyday practices and are intimately connected to distinct ideas about what it means to live a good or mature life. This maturity involves cultivating the self as a body shared with the land, taking on its styles, and responding empathetically to it. But it also means leaving space for others, respecting the boundaries of privacy that emerge through the differentiation of species and the formation of distinct aesthetic communities within particular territories.
This Special Topics is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It h... more This Special Topics is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please
Tena Quichua (ISO 639-3: quw) belongs to the Quechuan language family, as part of the peripheral ... more Tena Quichua (ISO 639-3: quw) belongs to the Quechuan language family, as part of the peripheral variety Quechua IIB (Torero 1964, Cerr ⁄ on-Palomino 1987, Gordon 2005). It is spoken in the Eastern Amazonian region of Ecuador on the Napo River above the mouth of the Rio Coca, primarily on three tributaries: the Misahualli, the Arajuno, and the Ansuc. Tena Quichua is bounded on the North and East by Napo Quichua and on the South by Pastaza Quichua. Previous research on the division of Ecuadorian dialects is summarized by Carpenter (1984: 3–4). Although it is beyond the scope of this Illustration, we hope that our description of Tena Quichua will prove useful in future work on the relations between these three Amazonian dialects of Ecuadorian Quichua. Below, a brief summary of Tena dialect identification and formation is given, followed by a description of present-day bilingualism in the region and data collection procedures. The Tena dialect was first identified when the Wycliffe Bib...
Deixis is a universal category in the world’s languages, found in forms that shift their referenc... more Deixis is a universal category in the world’s languages, found in forms that shift their reference to time, space, and person. Examples of deictic forms include pronouns, demonstratives, tense and evidential categories (Nuckolls 2012), discourse markers (Fraser 1999), and honorific forms (Irvine 1998). Following Peirce (1955), Roman Jakobson (1971) considered deictic forms to be shifters that combine both conventionally symbolic as well as indexical modes of meaning. For example, if we encounter in discourse a personal pronoun such as ‘I’, we understand that it both refers by a conventional rule, as well as points to a context-specific speaking subject of the speech event or of a narrated speech event. If we expand our consideration of deixis to such discourse entities as contextualization cues, especially rising or falling intonation, and the kinds of expressive performances involving analogical gestures that occur in ideophonic simulations (Nuckolls 1996), however, we are forced t...
It is argued in this chapter, on the basis of evidence from grammar, discourse, and verbal art, t... more It is argued in this chapter, on the basis of evidence from grammar, discourse, and verbal art, that for Amazonian Quichua speakers, there is a cultural preference for expressing uncertainty, which is linked with animistic perspectivism. Animistic perspectivism endows nonhumans with subjectivity and implies that there is an infinite multiplicity of perspectives, thereby making a single, totalizing truth impossible. Respectable uncertainty is also apparent in the system of evidentiality, in speech reports, echo questions, and verbal art, all of which emphasize perspective over certainty. A type of certainty that Runa do value, however, and which would not be valid within a rational framework of inquiry, is that of emotional truth, involving feelings of empathy for others, including nonhumans. Emotional truth, then, provides an exception to the preference for uncertainty, and may lead people to confidently reason about ethical matters.
The Napo River basin, which is situated within the Upper Amazon archaeological region, is one of ... more The Napo River basin, which is situated within the Upper Amazon archaeological region, is one of the most speciose forests in Greater Amazonia. Standard thinking in scholarship and science holds that these forests are essentially pristine because any Indigenous impacts in the past would have been minimal, seedbanks would have been nearby, and natural forests would have reappeared after the humans left, died out, or dispersed. Inventory research in 2019 on three ridgetop forests in Waorani territory inside the Curaray basin (which drains to the right margin of the Napo River) and a comparable inventory on one control site forest along the Nushiño River (also in the Curaray basin) show human impacts from about the late nineteenth century to about 1960; they occurred during the period of wartime among Waorani themselves and between Wao people and outsiders. The human impacts resulted in the high basal-area presence of two long-lived species with important Waorani cultural uses: cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) and ungurahua palm (Oenocarpus bataua Mart.). These species have high frequency and dominance values and do not occur in the control site, which is comparable in terms of elevation above the flood zone of the rivers in the sample. These findings mean that alpha diversity in the right margin sector (or south) of the Napo River basin cannot a priori be explained by reference to traditionally, biologically accepted patterns of ecological succession but may require knowledge of historical patterns of Indigenous land use and secondary landscape transformation over time due to human (specifically Waorani) impacts of the past.
Mundos Plurales - Revista Latinoamericana de Políticas y Acción Pública
Entre marzo – agosto de 2020, hubo un contagio muy generalizado de covid-19 en las comunidades in... more Entre marzo – agosto de 2020, hubo un contagio muy generalizado de covid-19 en las comunidades indígenas Kichwa en la Amazonía ecuatoriana. Mostramos que el pico de contagio ya ha pasado y la mortalidad total ha sido notablemente baja. El pueblo Kichwa identifica su éxito en resistir la pandemia al uso generalizado de plantas medicinales.
This chapter covers the extraordinary Indigenous linguistic diversity of the Amazon region, inclu... more This chapter covers the extraordinary Indigenous linguistic diversity of the Amazon region, including its different dimensions: the existence of a relatively large number of languages in the region; how these languages are related to each other, representing an impressive genealogical diversity; geographical distribution over different Amazonian subregions; the effects of language contact that have resulted in several linguistic areas; different levels of endangerment and the social circumstances that contribute to it; and, finally, what is lost when languages disappear.
ABSTRACT For decades, outbreaks of insect herbivores in tropical forests were considered unusual ... more ABSTRACT For decades, outbreaks of insect herbivores in tropical forests were considered unusual or rare events primarily because of high plant diversity and the top-down impact of enemies. An alternative explanation is that these outbreaks are common but occur on sparsely distributed hosts high in the canopy and at scales of one or a few individual trees. Here, we report an outbreak of a saturniid in the genus Citioica Travassos & Noronha near the Amazon Basin of Ecuador on a single tree of Inga edulis Mart. The outbreak caused near complete defoliation (>90% leaf loss) and did not occur on nearby conspecifics. This is only the twenty-third documented case of a saturniid outbreak, of which more than 60% occurred in tropical habitats. This is the first report of an outbreak on a single tree. Members of the local indigenous communities are well aware of these Citioica outbreaks and collect these caterpillars for food whenever outbreaks are detected, suggesting that these isolated outbreaks are fairly common. Further research is required to explore the possibility that insect outbreaks in tropical forests may be more common than previously suspected but occur over very small spatial scales undetected high in the forest canopy.
There has been very widespread contagion of covid-19 in Kichwa indigenous communities in Ecuadori... more There has been very widespread contagion of covid-19 in Kichwa indigenous communities in Ecuadorian Amazonia, but the peak of contagion has already passed, and total mortality has been remarkably low. The Kichwa people themselves typically attribute this to the widespread use of medicinal plants.
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2019
Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism(Oakland: Universi... more Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism(Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 272 pp., $29.38 (pbk), ISBN: 978-0520285-73-6.
Este capítulo presenta las dimensiones que hacen de la región amazónica un lugar de extraordinari... more Este capítulo presenta las dimensiones que hacen de la región amazónica un lugar de extraordinaria diversidad lingüística. Los primeros informes de colonizadores, misioneros, viajeros, aventureros y científicos europeos mencionan la notable multitud de lenguas habladas por los diversos pueblos de la región. También destacaron el hecho de que estas lenguas parecían ser radicalmente diferentes entre sí.
This article explores how traditional Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon experience and pract... more This article explores how traditional Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon experience and practice emotional life. In particular, we focus on the centrality accorded to acts intended to elicit compassion in others (llakichina) and on the role these acts play in holding communities together. We argue that the importance given to the eliciting of compassion is tied to the Kichwa construal of the self as inherently relational and, for this reason, precarious. Further, we show how the emotional life of relatedness encompasses relationships with land and other species (particularly birds) in multi-layered ways. Drawing on interviews, songs, and narratives, we show how an understanding of other species as transformed humans informs affective connections with the land and how these in turn mediate emotional relations.
This article explores how emotional life is experienced, and practiced by traditional Kichwa peop... more This article explores how emotional life is experienced, and practiced by traditional Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In particular, we focus on the centrality accorded to acts intended to elicit compassion in others (llakichina), and on the role these acts play in holding communities together. We argue that the importance given to the eliciting of compassion is tied to the Kichwa construal of the self as inherently relational and for this reason precarious. Further, we show how the emotional life of relatedness encompasses relationships with land and other species (particularly birds) in multi-layered ways. Drawing on interviews songs, and narratives, we show how an understanding of other species as transformed humans informs affective connections with the land and how these in turn mediate emotional relations. "When the sun is going down a toucan sings, 'Han, han, han!' You have heard it right? That is because somewhere a woman is singing to cause sadness/love. Her singing makes us hear (the toucan) and we feel sad."
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. (Durh... more Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. (Durham: Duke University Press 2020) xi + 252 pp., $26.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9781478008484.
This article offers an account of Quichua thinking about beauty in the Ecuadorian Amazon: how it ... more This article offers an account of Quichua thinking about beauty in the Ecuadorian Amazon: how it is grounded in a philosophical tradition that conceives the world and the self in “perspectivist” and relational terms, and how experiences of beauty play specific roles and attain a particular kind of sense within that context. In particular, we show how indigenous Quichua ideas about beauty inform a range of everyday practices and are intimately connected to distinct ideas about what it means to live a good or mature life. This maturity involves cultivating the self as a body shared with the land, taking on its styles, and responding empathetically to it. But it also means leaving space for others, respecting the boundaries of privacy that emerge through the differentiation of species and the formation of distinct aesthetic communities within particular territories.
This Special Topics is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It h... more This Special Topics is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please
Tena Quichua (ISO 639-3: quw) belongs to the Quechuan language family, as part of the peripheral ... more Tena Quichua (ISO 639-3: quw) belongs to the Quechuan language family, as part of the peripheral variety Quechua IIB (Torero 1964, Cerr ⁄ on-Palomino 1987, Gordon 2005). It is spoken in the Eastern Amazonian region of Ecuador on the Napo River above the mouth of the Rio Coca, primarily on three tributaries: the Misahualli, the Arajuno, and the Ansuc. Tena Quichua is bounded on the North and East by Napo Quichua and on the South by Pastaza Quichua. Previous research on the division of Ecuadorian dialects is summarized by Carpenter (1984: 3–4). Although it is beyond the scope of this Illustration, we hope that our description of Tena Quichua will prove useful in future work on the relations between these three Amazonian dialects of Ecuadorian Quichua. Below, a brief summary of Tena dialect identification and formation is given, followed by a description of present-day bilingualism in the region and data collection procedures. The Tena dialect was first identified when the Wycliffe Bib...
Deixis is a universal category in the world’s languages, found in forms that shift their referenc... more Deixis is a universal category in the world’s languages, found in forms that shift their reference to time, space, and person. Examples of deictic forms include pronouns, demonstratives, tense and evidential categories (Nuckolls 2012), discourse markers (Fraser 1999), and honorific forms (Irvine 1998). Following Peirce (1955), Roman Jakobson (1971) considered deictic forms to be shifters that combine both conventionally symbolic as well as indexical modes of meaning. For example, if we encounter in discourse a personal pronoun such as ‘I’, we understand that it both refers by a conventional rule, as well as points to a context-specific speaking subject of the speech event or of a narrated speech event. If we expand our consideration of deixis to such discourse entities as contextualization cues, especially rising or falling intonation, and the kinds of expressive performances involving analogical gestures that occur in ideophonic simulations (Nuckolls 1996), however, we are forced t...
It is argued in this chapter, on the basis of evidence from grammar, discourse, and verbal art, t... more It is argued in this chapter, on the basis of evidence from grammar, discourse, and verbal art, that for Amazonian Quichua speakers, there is a cultural preference for expressing uncertainty, which is linked with animistic perspectivism. Animistic perspectivism endows nonhumans with subjectivity and implies that there is an infinite multiplicity of perspectives, thereby making a single, totalizing truth impossible. Respectable uncertainty is also apparent in the system of evidentiality, in speech reports, echo questions, and verbal art, all of which emphasize perspective over certainty. A type of certainty that Runa do value, however, and which would not be valid within a rational framework of inquiry, is that of emotional truth, involving feelings of empathy for others, including nonhumans. Emotional truth, then, provides an exception to the preference for uncertainty, and may lead people to confidently reason about ethical matters.
This chapter presents the dimensions that make the Amazon region a place of extraordinary linguis... more This chapter presents the dimensions that make the Amazon region a place of extraordinary linguistic diversity. The first reports by European colonizers, missionaries, travelers, adventurers, and scientists mentioned the remarkable multitude of languages spoken by the various peoples of the region. They also highlighted the fact that these languages seemed to be radically different from each other. The number of languages that were spoken at that time far exceeds the over 300 languages that are counted today. These remaining languages are classified in around 50 language families and isolates, resembling a patchwork quilt. Linguistic research has increasingly refined our understanding of this diversity, not only with respect to genealogical classification, traces of contact, and typological characteristics. Languages also differ due to historical, social, and cultural factors. Furthermore, at the present juncture, languages differ conspicuously with regard to levels of vitality. While some languages enjoy a high degree of vitality and may have the support of national and local language policies, others are at serious risk of extinction. Nevertheless, all Amazonian languages can be considered in some degree of danger, due to the pressures of national and global societies. The ongoing loss of linguistic diversity involves the disappearance of Indigenous knowledge systems concerning environment and social organization, and parallels biodiversity loss.
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the pressures of national and global societies. The ongoing loss of linguistic diversity involves the disappearance of Indigenous knowledge systems concerning environment and social organization, and parallels biodiversity loss.