Journal Articles by Natalia Buitron
Terrain, 2023
How does an Amazonian population living at the margins of the globalized economy envision its i... more How does an Amazonian population living at the margins of the globalized economy envision its involvement in the capitalist market? In this article, we examine the entrepreneurial perspectives expressed by leaders of the Ecuadorian Shuar of Transkutukú. Leaders place their hope in the pursuit of entrepreneurialism as a way to guarantee domestic and ethnic self-determination. This reflexive process is encapsulated by the local formula of “inculturating the market”, which promotes production, profit, and personal accumulation. Sorcery, motivated by envy, is identified by the villagers as the main obstacle to the desired economic progress.
Terrain, 2023
Comment une population amazonienne vivant en marge de l’économie mondialisée envisage-t-elle son ... more Comment une population amazonienne vivant en marge de l’économie mondialisée envisage-t-elle son implication dans le marché capitaliste ? Dans cet article, nous examinons les perspectives entrepreneuriales exprimées par les leaders des Shuars équatoriens du Transkutukú. Les leaders placent leur espoir dans la poursuite de l’entrepreneuriat comme moyen de garantir l’autodétermination domestique et ethnique. Ce processus réflexif est encapsulé dans la formule d’« inculturation du marché » qui promeut la production, le profit, et l’accumulation personnelle. La sorcellerie, motivée par l’envie, est désignée par les villageois comme le principal obstacle entravant le progrès économique tant souhaité.
Cet article est une traduction abrégé https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25065de :
“Inculturating the Market” - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25280 [en]
Social Analysis, 2023
This article explores competition as a technique of social transformation in Amazonia. In recent ... more This article explores competition as a technique of social transformation in Amazonia. In recent years, the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia have begun staging festivals to celebrate the unity and autonomy of their new sedentary communities. Festivals include sporting games and beauty pageants that create a positive spirit of competition through dramatization and ranking. In these competitions, the drama and ranking take place within a 'play-frame'-a frame that separates the festival from everyday life, but also re-enacts new practices of commensuration that have become part of daily life via schooling, markets, and electoral politics. If commensuration works against Shuar autonomy, the play-frame of the festival creates future possibilities for autonomy and mutuality.
Religion and Society: Advances in Research, 2021
In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the 'original political society... more In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the 'original political society' as a society where supposedly 'egalitarian' relations between humans are subordinated to the government of metahuman beings. He argues that this government is 'a state' , but what kind of state does he mean? Even if metahumans are hierarchically organized and have power over human beings, they lack two capacities commonly attributed to political states: systematic means to make populations legible and coercive means to identity the intentions of others. The nascent forms of state legibility and public mind reading that are present in Sahlins's original political society are not unified and tied to particular agents. A discussion of the limitations of state and mind legibility points to the fundamental correlations between those two forms of legibility and their co-implication in whatever might be called 'the state' .
Ethnos, 2021
The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone els... more The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone else. Yet humans continually attempt to ‘read’ the mental states of others and throughout history have created institutions that attempt to do so by managing intentions and thus addressing the opacity of other minds. The contributors of this special issue argue that the form in which we meet the fundamental challenge of the opacity of mind is decisive for the kinds of government we are able to imagine. Our introduction provides the framework for the exploration of the correlations between the management of opacity and the forms of government humans create. We draw attention to different ways of creating legibility, and corresponding practices of accountability, thus linking particular forms of intention management with particular ways of doing and imagining politics.
Ethnos, 2021
Faced with the opacity of other minds, we can either confirm the impossibility of knowing or try ... more Faced with the opacity of other minds, we can either confirm the impossibility of knowing or try to make other minds transparent. Among the Amazonian Shuar, two opposed regimes of intention management embody these two options. One is associated with the predatory agency of arútam, the spirit of prominent elders; the other one with the pacifying agency of the Christian God. Secret vision quests and dialogic duels generate an instability of perspectives and a rule of self, premised on the opacity of persons. By contrast, projects of state legibility, the omniscient Christian God, and the public character of biblical revelations create the conditions for the rule of law, that is, a regime of intentions in which persons are transparent and people are held accountable in public. The novelty of this mode of governing opacity bears emphasis on and contrasts with the arguments stressing continuity in Amazonian engagements with alterity.
L'Homme, 2020
If human collectives live in freedom and autonomy, know nothing of command and obedience, and val... more If human collectives live in freedom and autonomy, know nothing of command and obedience, and value spontaneous sharing and flexible mutuality-can we call such collectives 'egalitarian'? Even when there are no states, no legislations and no social sanctions that would make everyone equal, can we identify egalitarianism avant la lettre, that is, as a lived social practice in places where no notion of 'egalitarianism' exists? Real-existing egalitarianism of this kind has been central to the anthropological imagination and hunter-gatherer societies are commonly described by anthropologists as 'egalitarian societies'. This themed section engages critically with the concept of egalitarianism in anthropology, emphasising how this concept misrepresents particular forms of sociality from an external point of view. It suggests that anthropologists should be wary of using the term to describe the perceived freedoms and shared welfare-that is, the autonomy and mutuality-of small-scale, decentralised societies.
L'Homme , 2020
Les collectifs humains vivant de manière libre et autonome, ignorant tout du commandement et de l... more Les collectifs humains vivant de manière libre et autonome, ignorant tout du commandement et de l’obéissance, et valorisant le partage spontané et la mutualité peuvent-ils être qualifiés d’« égalitaires » ? Là où il n’y a pas d’État, de législation ou de sanctions sociales pour garantir l’égalité entre tous, peut-on parler d’« égalitarisme » comme pratique sociale vécue sachant, qu’en ces lieux, cette notion n’existe pas ? La réalité de ce type d’égalitarisme a été au cœur de l’imagination anthropologique, et les sociétés de chasseurs-cueilleurs ont souvent été décrites par les anthropologues comme des « sociétés égalitaires ». Ce dossier thématique apportera un éclairage critique sur ce concept en anthropologie, montrant comment un point de vue extérieur peut déformer certaines formes de socialité. Il servira à mettre en garde les anthropologues contre l’utilisation de ce terme pour qualifier les libertés et le bien-être commun – c’est-à-dire l’autonomie et la mutualité – qu’ils observent dans les petites sociétés décentralisées.
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2019
Inspired by Stephen Hugh-Jones’s suggestion of a fit between Tukanoan writing genres and their so... more Inspired by Stephen Hugh-Jones’s suggestion of a fit between Tukanoan writing genres and their sociocultural systems, in this article we explore Shuar autobiographical writings in light of Chicham (Jivaroan) individualism. By exploring first-person—non patrimonial—texts that have received much less attention in the regional literature, the article contributes to theorizing a different way of transmitting tradition: one focused on individual praxis rather than on collective patrimony. Through the analysis of three autobiographical texts, we show how their authors appropriate writing to construct singularity, or distinct “paths of individuation”: the personal story of resistance of a school teacher, the exemplary life course of a visionary leader, and the claim to sainthood of an exceptional shaman.
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2019
In dialogue with Stephen Hugh-Jones’s work on Tukanoan writing, this article analyzes the boom in... more In dialogue with Stephen Hugh-Jones’s work on Tukanoan writing, this article analyzes the boom in patrimonial writing among Chicham (Jivaroan)-speaking Shuar people. Patrimonial writing foregrounds collective identity and understandings of culture as group property common to the Tukanoan speakers of the Upper Rio Negro but foreign to the pre-missionized Shuar. We argue that the Shuar interest in patrimonial writing can be explained through the history of missionization and the recent shift to intercultural exchange within the plurinational project of state-building spearheaded by the indigenous movement. By analyzing the wider context of knowledge production and the forms of knowledge Shuar scholars mobilize to represent culture in the collective mode, we demonstrate how, for the first time in Shuar society, a group of specialists can make a profession out of reproducing heterogeneous forms of knowledge as unitary, uniformly shared collective patrimony. The comparison between the Shuar and Tukanoan appropriation of writing reveals important differences in the way Lowland Amerindians understand patrimony and the centrality of schooling in shaping a new “scholarly tradition.”
Anthropology of this Century, 2019
a small Shuar settlement in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Four anthropologists from the London School of E... more a small Shuar settlement in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Four anthropologists from the London School of Economics are sponsoring a public event for the whole community.
In this paper, we give an account of what came to be known as El primer evento internacional de intercambio de saberes y antropología (The first international event of exchange of knowledges and anthropology). This story should be of interest to anthropologists for a number of reasons.
First, because we describe how the people we work with engage with anthropology: with what we do and the knowledge we create. Wherever they decide to conduct fieldwork, most anthropologists will strive to make their extended presence acceptable to those they live with. To do this, they establish relationships that make sense to their hosts; this might entail turning themselves into their hosts’ friends, fictive kin, godparents, colleagues, traders, or whatever else. But what we describe here goes beyond this process of insertion into the lives of those who are generous and tolerant enough to let us work with them. What we describe is a more challenging process of engagement which involves coming out into the open – out of the closet, as it were – to explain to the people we work with what exactly it is that we do as anthropologists when we study them. This process not only requires taking responsibility for explaining our craft and how our knowledge is produced, but also for responding to the various ways in which our interlocutors might then decide to engage with what we do and what we produce.
Anthropology of this Century, 2017
That populations living at the margins of the state seem to want and repel, seek out and resist, ... more That populations living at the margins of the state seem to want and repel, seek out and resist, the state is one of those puzzling observations that has haunted many ethnographers. Indeed, during my own fieldwork among the Shuar of Ecuador, a people who live in newly sedentary communities of the Amazonian piedmont region, I found myself pondering the circumspect and consuming attraction with which my interlocutors regarded the “developmental” but nonetheless “coercive” potential of local governments. The more Shuar villagers sought to capture state resources secured by their own participation in electoral politics, the more antagonistic towards the state they grew. In the end, I concluded that Shuar participate in electoral politics and many other state-led development projects for seemingly antithetical reasons: to have more access to the state, while ensuring that they keep it at bay.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020
In Amazonian societies, autonomy is said to be a core value motivating egalitarian politics. This... more In Amazonian societies, autonomy is said to be a core value motivating egalitarian politics. This article shows how the quest for autonomy and productiveness presently sets in motion processes that encroach upon these very values. Among the Shuar of Amazonian Ecuador, the realization of autonomy and productiveness increasingly depends on the capture of state resources. Shuar interact with the local state as members of relatively recent sedentary communities and through the mediation of elected leaders. In these processes, 'community' itself is transformed: being a channel to regenerate domestic livelihoods, it also becomes an end in itself, giving rise to new economistic attitudes while legitimizing inequalities between commoners and leaders. The article suggests that the pursuit of autonomy and productiveness within a process of village formation is central to the transformation of egalitarianism that occurs when small-scale Amazonian polities engage with nation-state politics.
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Winner, Best Paper Prize 2021. Prize awarded by the Amazonia Section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Doctoral Thesis by Natalia Buitron
Book Chapters by Natalia Buitron
Bloomsbury; Children: Ethnographic Encounters, 2016
This chapter explores journeying as a privileged activity through which the author is introduced ... more This chapter explores journeying as a privileged activity through which the author is introduced to the importance of unfamiliar encounters in the lives of a group of Shuar children in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Whilst the relationships that children cultivate away from home are integral to the process of acquiring individuating experiences and forging prestigious and instrumental alliances, they also resist representation within the household. As researcher and children become partners in journeys, children more spontaneously give voice to the affective potency ensuing from empowering or transgressive friendships. The author thus examines journeying both as a means of transcending the normative domains of socialization and as a way of foregrounding children’s own narratives of alterity and growth. Relating experiential forms of learning for Shuar children and for the researcher in her own fieldwork, the author reflects upon the inarticulate zones of growth lying between childhood and adulthood and the gender-specific implications of befriending unfamiliar others.
Book Reviews by Natalia Buitron
Anthropology of this Century, 2017
Conference Presentations by Natalia Buitron
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Journal Articles by Natalia Buitron
Cet article est une traduction abrégé https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25065de :
“Inculturating the Market” - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25280 [en]
In this paper, we give an account of what came to be known as El primer evento internacional de intercambio de saberes y antropología (The first international event of exchange of knowledges and anthropology). This story should be of interest to anthropologists for a number of reasons.
First, because we describe how the people we work with engage with anthropology: with what we do and the knowledge we create. Wherever they decide to conduct fieldwork, most anthropologists will strive to make their extended presence acceptable to those they live with. To do this, they establish relationships that make sense to their hosts; this might entail turning themselves into their hosts’ friends, fictive kin, godparents, colleagues, traders, or whatever else. But what we describe here goes beyond this process of insertion into the lives of those who are generous and tolerant enough to let us work with them. What we describe is a more challenging process of engagement which involves coming out into the open – out of the closet, as it were – to explain to the people we work with what exactly it is that we do as anthropologists when we study them. This process not only requires taking responsibility for explaining our craft and how our knowledge is produced, but also for responding to the various ways in which our interlocutors might then decide to engage with what we do and what we produce.
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Winner, Best Paper Prize 2021. Prize awarded by the Amazonia Section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Doctoral Thesis by Natalia Buitron
Book Chapters by Natalia Buitron
Book Reviews by Natalia Buitron
Conference Presentations by Natalia Buitron
Cet article est une traduction abrégé https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25065de :
“Inculturating the Market” - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25280 [en]
In this paper, we give an account of what came to be known as El primer evento internacional de intercambio de saberes y antropología (The first international event of exchange of knowledges and anthropology). This story should be of interest to anthropologists for a number of reasons.
First, because we describe how the people we work with engage with anthropology: with what we do and the knowledge we create. Wherever they decide to conduct fieldwork, most anthropologists will strive to make their extended presence acceptable to those they live with. To do this, they establish relationships that make sense to their hosts; this might entail turning themselves into their hosts’ friends, fictive kin, godparents, colleagues, traders, or whatever else. But what we describe here goes beyond this process of insertion into the lives of those who are generous and tolerant enough to let us work with them. What we describe is a more challenging process of engagement which involves coming out into the open – out of the closet, as it were – to explain to the people we work with what exactly it is that we do as anthropologists when we study them. This process not only requires taking responsibility for explaining our craft and how our knowledge is produced, but also for responding to the various ways in which our interlocutors might then decide to engage with what we do and what we produce.
*
Winner, Best Paper Prize 2021. Prize awarded by the Amazonia Section of the Latin American Studies Association.