Causáunchimi! We are LIVING! Born as the title of a museum exhibition of indigenous material culture that the authors helped curate, the message that Causáunchimi! imparts is at the heart of this text, which the Whittens present as an ethnography of empowerment. The Puyo Runa are people who live in and around Puyo, a city in Amazonia along the eastern edge of the Ecuadorian Andes. Because they are a lowland people, Andean scholars tend to see them as outside of their purview. Puyo Runa speak a version of Quichua, however, a language associated with the highland Andes, so ethnographies of the Amazon suggest they have somehow compromised their Amazonian character. Over time, these scholarly attitudes have contributed to the invisibility and disempowerment of the Puyo Runa on the national and even global level. By blending explanations of the Puyo Runa cosmology and social structure with fieldwork anecdotes and ethnohistory, the Whittens argue that the Puyo Runa are not to be taken as vestiges of Amazonian natives, but that they should be listened to and taken seriously as a contemporary, living people.
The first six chapters of the book provide the reader with background needed to understand the events described in chapters 7 and 8. The Whittens begin with how Puyo Runa notions of history and space differ from official state histories and cosmopolitan categories. Runa associate themselves not only with the space they live in but also with land miles away that is related to them genealogically, places where their ancestors walked and where they can cultivate swidden gardens. Puyo Runa infuse meaning into both locations: the household is a place organized such that male and female spirit power can flow to create a safe living space and a fertile garden, while their trekking region reconnects them to other Amazonian peoples, including blood relatives from those groups. The rainforest terrain that surrounds these places is pregnant with knowledge: certain trees mark the sites of former gardens; a river in which a powerful stone was found can invoke the memory of a shamanic experience. Male shamans who learn to travel and see with the help of hallucinogenic brews keep and expand this knowledge, as do the female master potters who inscribe rainforest imagery and symbolism on their creations. While these cultural practices are in step with other Amazonian cultures, the authors are careful to present the names for these concepts in Quichua, reminding the reader of the complex nature of Runa identity.
The material described is culturally thick, and fieldworkers know that gaining such knowledge is not a straightforward affair. Stories are partially told and repeated throughout the text; events are introduced whose significance only becomes evident later on in the book. The Whittens want the reading experience to reproduce the fieldwork experience. As such, the reading could be slow. I confess that I occasionally would set the book down in frustration with chapters that seemed disconnected and that repeated ideas. Other times, I was thankful the authors reminded me of a concept within a context that seemed unrelated from the setting in which it had initially appeared. When the authors were able to describe their concepts with rich fieldwork narratives, their writing was more vivid and cogent, as in the account in chapter 5 of a shaman’s spirit journey and the depiction in chapter 6 of the allyu festival. In contrast, their dense introduction to Runa mythology in chapter 2 reads more encyclopedic than ethnographic; in chapter 4, Dorothea Scott Whitten’s portrayal of two female master potters on a roundtrip journey from Pastaza province to the state of Illinois, was a far gentler introduction to material than that encountered in earlier chapters of the book.
All this material builds up to chapters 7 and 8, which show how the Runa communicate their imagery and knowledge to the outside world in a bid for recognition and power. Chapter 7 centers around the previously mentioned exhibition of material culture that the authors helped organize, first in Quito, and then in Puyo. While working on the Quito exhibition, the Whittens commissioned several pieces from Runa artists to complement the museum collection they were using. A group of these same artists went to Quito to view the exhibition after it opened. Their reaction was an epiphany, both on the part of the artists, in gaining a better understanding of what the exhibit set out to accomplish, and on the part of the Whittens, as the Runa artists themselves began to produce additional ceramic figures to fill the narrative gaps they now saw. Filling these gaps was particularly imp ortant to the artists as the exhibit now prepared to open in Puyo to an audience of their neighbors and peers. The authors point to this episode as an example of how the Puyo Runa present themselves “on their own terms” (198), demonstrating a reflexivity in their work that often is denied them. Rather than a simple duplication of the work of their ancestors’ ideas and experiences, Runa artwork, the Whittens suggest, is a recombination of traditional imagery in light of personal experiences. The information the Whittens have supplied in earlier chapters provides the context that the reader needs to understand this point.
The importance of having such a context is brought home in chapter 8, which describes the 1992 indigenous march known as the Caminata. Amazonian peoples, joined along the way by other indigenous people, walked several hundred miles over the mountains from Puyo and other places to control several large public spaces in Quito, in an effort to obtain land rights and greater self-determination. As they marched, the authors argue, the march took on the ritual imagery and qualities of the yumbada—a festival in which indigenous highlanders perform and celebrate the triumphant conquest of a jungle, shamanic people over the urban environment in which these highlanders live. Lowlanders who participated in the Caminata consciously assumed the personae that the yumbada ritual references, thereby invoking an imagery of power while conjuring up a festival atmosphere within the city. In doing so, the lowlanders illustrated that they could “understand the power and efficacy of symbols to overcome adversity” (229).
The book’s final chapter returns to the idea of Causáunchimi, briefly describing Ecuador’s recent political history while stressing the importance of the local in the face of globalization. Interculturality is the key term here, emphasizing the movement between cultures as people attempt to understand each other. The local, dynamic nature of interculturality contrasts with the national, static character of multiculturalism that many neoliberal governments have favored in the early twenty-first century. Ethnography’s purpose, the Whittens argue, is to illuminate the dynamic nature of local culture, to break down ahistorical categories, and to facilitate intercultural understanding of the power inherent in local imagery. In these endeavors, Puyo Runa largely succeeds.
--------
[Review length: 1130 words • Review posted on June 1, 2010]