A theme that operates in the background of almost all ethnographies of Kichwa-speaking (Runa) communities occupying the Ecuadorian Amazon is the complex and dynamic history of interrelations with other ethnolinguistic groups occupying the region. Despite its relative ubiquity, however, rarely has this facet come to the forefront in any of the major monographs on the region, and never has it been so core a focus as it is in Mary Elizabeth Reeve’s Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River: Kinship and History of the Western Amazon. Reeve dedicates the bulk of her text to an expansive investigation of how kinship, intermarriage, exchange, and conflict shape the dynamics of identity along generational and geographical axes. These dynamics, she argues, inform more than the complex and multilayered identities of modern Runa llactas and ayllus, but also the political histories of intergroup alliances and federations seeking to represent the interests of indigenous peoples spanning across linguistic or cultural distinctions, a major facet of regional and national Ecuadorian dynamics from the end of the twentieth century well into the twenty-first.
Reeve begins by introducing the community of San José de Curaray, from which her ethnographic observations are drawn. She then moves to cement the trajectory and focus of the text that follows, establishing the goal of demonstrating how regional societies emerge in and among the web of tributaries that extend throughout northwestern Amazonia. Reeve poses two questions to anchor this goal: “How is an Amazonian regional society maintained—by what social relationships? How is the landscape conceptualized and used within such a regional society?” The chapters that follow establish baseline modes of conviviality and social structure—ayllu and llacta—within and between Runa and non-Runa communities. In her focus on Runa kinship structures Reeves elaborates on how mapping intergenerational shifts in identity through intermarriage and the adoption of linguistic and cultural customs reveals the malleability and transcendent characteristics of Indigenous ethnic identities along the major tributary systems that crisscross the Ecuadorian Amazon. Tracing ancestral identities reveals shifts in not only how kin and affines may affiliate with different groups, but also how those affiliations in turn serve to establish identities that are complex, giving rise to regional identities that hold in themselves histories of intercommunal exchange. Here the text turns to describe the role played by festival (jista) as community performance and ritual, framing the emergence and maintenance of regional connections within localized nodes supplied by the ritual jista cycle and its sharing of critical substances like chicha (aswa) and meat, which form a critical exchange within households and communities, as well as between them.
Reeve then proceeds to describe the multi-day practice of trekking which grounds and reinforces connections between distant Runa or non-Runa communities and extended kinship networks, alongside the exchange of medicinal and culinary plants. The journey and the exchange of substances intended for internalization—consumption, medication—operates not as a symbol of shared experiences but as their substantive foundation. Trekking is a way of knowing the land and its peoples set against histories of conflict, exchange, and alliance all intertwined and bundled together. The transmission of medicinal knowledge and substances that accompanies these treks provides yet another key inroad into making and maintaining webs of regional connections. This too emerges in shamanic practice, which is the focus of Reeve’s penultimate chapter, with shamans’ capacities to “call” on different geolocalized sources of power and knowledge, cementing their prowess and prestige within and between communities. Shamanic songs, techniques, familiarity with this and that sacha, and the potential for expanding relationships across geospatial boundaries serve as gateways for a broader discussion of transcendent identities and the Runa conceptualization of boundaries between peoples and species as porous, given the right circumstances and the right actions. Here the roots of regional society turn toward the philosophical and the ontological with reference to shamanic praxis as well as Runa origin stories thatcharacterize a world that is continuously in transformation and its various peoples likewise co-emerging in complex and dynamic identities, each its own revelation as well as an index to the mythic and historical past. There lies here a deeper question of the ontological—what processes give rise to the boundaries between different species, and different peoples? And what processes might allow these boundaries to be transcended? The revelation of familiarity in both the shamanic/ritual context and in the context of regional identities operates on the premise that people and plants and animals are not revealed by their essence but in their relationships and connections to others.
Regional society is a persistent, if dynamic, feature of Indigenous identity practice in the Amazon, Reeve concludes. With urban life and multi-sited habitation increasingly becoming dominant trends in even relatively rural areas, the complex of relationships, kinship networks, and exchange are reflected in the emergence of new educational and vocational opportunities and institutions. The rise of Indigenous federations as political entities at the end of the twentieth century continues to encourage dialog between communities as new political challenges emerge giving further rise to new structures that reinforce and elaborate upon the shared interests of regional society. As Reeve draws to a close, she reflects on archaeological evidence and written records from the early colonial period that demonstrate that then, as now, regional interconnections and flows of people, ideas, words, and materials shaped the northwestern Amazon and the people’s lives within it.
This text is of clear merit for any scholar of South America and in particular the Amazon, but its value extends broadly into the fields of cultural anthropology and folklore as it demonstrates that key practices of ethnogenesis can be at once localized and translocal. Reeve’s prose centers on observations drawn out from years of research among the Runa of the Curaray region with ample use of ethnographic vignettes to illustrate key points and arguments throughout the text. Her use of photography, though in some chapters sparse, amplifies her prose which is crafted on the page to both contextualize and illuminate the images. There is a great deal of value too in the text’s core pursuit, which draws intense focus on regional interconnectivity and identity that is here presented as the core ethnographic concern and in turn carefully examined with each turn in the book finding a new route to understanding the complex of processes and relationships that give rise to regional-level identities and movements.
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[Review length: 1058 words • Review posted on April 9, 2025]