Laura Rival - Trekking Through History: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador

Trekking Through History

THE HISTORICAL ECOLOGY SERIES

THE HISTORICAL ECOLOGY SERIES

William Bale and Carole L. Crumley, Editors

This series explores the complex links between people and landscapes. Individuals and societies impact and change their environments, and they are in turn changed by their surroundings. Drawing on scientific and humanistic scholarship, books in the series focus on environmental understanding and on temporal and spatial change. The series explores issues and develops concepts that help to preserve ecological experiences and hopes to derive lessons for today from other places and times.

The Historical Ecology Series

William Bale, Editor,

Advances in Historical Ecology

David L. Lentz, Editor,

Imperfect Balance: Landscape Transformations in the Pre-Columbian Americas

Roderick J. McIntosh, Joseph A. Tainter, and Susan Keech McIntosh, Editors,

The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action

Laura M. Rival

Trekking Through History

THE HUAORANI OF AMAZONIAN ECUADOR

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

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Copyright 2002 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-50622-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rival, Laura M.

Trekking through history : the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador / Laura M. Rival.

p. cm.(The historical ecology series)

Incluces bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0231118449 (cloth)ISBN 0231118457 (pbk.)

1. Huao IndiansMigrations. 2. Huao Indians-History. 3. Huao IndiansSocial life and customs. 4. NomadsEcuadorHistory. I. Title. II. Series.

F3722.1.H83 R58 2002

986.600498-dc21

2001042394

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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Designed by Lisa Hamm

To La, my little daughter

On connait mieux la pense des socits que leur corps.

ANDR LEROI-GOURHAN

Contents

Maps

Figures

Photographs

Tables

T his monographic study on the Huaorani intends to situate them ethnographically within Amazonian anthropology. It focuses on the description and interpretation of their trekking way of life, approached from the perspective of concepts about the person, death, predation, incorporation, and growth. Concerned with the fact that Amazonian anthropology has been split between studies of human adaptation to their natural environments and studies of the ways in which nature is used symbolically and ritually to signify society or transcend human finitude or both, I have tried to grasp the Huaoranis contemporary ethnographic reality and historical agency by articulating history and cosmology, ritual and ethnicity, and symbolic and political economy analysis.

This book is an attempt to present ethnographic data on a small-scale society characterized by a high degree of mobility and disengagement from horticulture and to offer generalizations valid for other highly mobile societies of the Northwest Amazon. The theme of natural abundance, a cultural category in terms of which the Huaorani organize their own experience of the ongoing relationship they sustain with the forest in the course of provisioning their society, is central to understanding their mode of trekking. Mobility is not primarily determined by economic or ecological factors but represents the historical development of a distinct mode of life that the notions of archaism and agricultural regression cannot explain satisfactorily.

While a number of anthropologists influenced by postmodern thinking consider the monograph an entirely obsolete form of scholarship linked to early twentieth-century colonialism and ways of thinking, I can see no better way of conveying a nonindustrial culture in all its difference, integrity, and unique aesthetic, moral, and political response to the human condition. This is especially true for the Huaorani who, from their tragic encounter with North American missionaries in 1956 to this day, have held a special place in sensationalistic journalism and popular imagination as Ecuadors last savages. I will never forget that the first talk I was asked to give in Ecuador as part of my research cooperation commitments with the Ministry of Culture and Education did not concern their culture or social organization (of which they were assumed to be lacking, either because of their extreme savagery or because of their advanced state of acculturation by Quichua neighbors) but the various media discourses about them.

Norman Whitten wrote in 1978 that more than any other native people of the Oriente [Ecuadors Amazon region], the contemporary Huaorani exist not only as a people facing new cataclysmic changes in their territory, but also as a people known primarily by false and distorted myths which present their culture through the eyes of those seeking to convert it and subvert it. I hope this study will convince the reader that despite the civilizing efforts of missionaries and schoolteachers, the Huaorani have largely retained their distinctive way of apprehending the world.

Approximately fourteen hundred, today, with 55 percent of the population under sixteen (compared to a population of under six hundred when first surveyed in the early 1960s), Huaorani people have lived as forest trekkers in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon for hundreds of years (see

Like much of Western Amazonian rain forest, Huaorani land has no marked seasons. Annual precipitation, averaging 3,500 mm (120 in.), is evenly distributed throughout the year. Atmospheric humidity (80 to 90 percent) is constant, and soils, renowned as the least fertile in Ecuador, permanently damp. During fieldwork, I found the contrast between JuneJulysupposedly the wettest months of the yearand NovemberDecembersupposedly the driesthardly noticeable, and, given the relatively high rainfall averages, seasons almost nonexistent. What was striking, however, was the sharp fall in temperature after heavy rains, when it felt as cold as during the coldest nights (around 13C). And so was the dramatic transformation, after a heavy downpour, of the riverine landscape into a vast, desolate marshland. On the western side of Huaorani land, numerous streams and creeks cut across rugged terrain featuring sizable hills to form the Curarays headwater. On the eastern side, rivers meander through marshy lowlands. Game is abundant and biodiversity exceptionally high. Both the density of palms and bamboo groves and the frequency of potsherds and stone axes suggest that large tracks of forest are anthropogenic, that is, transformed by past human activities.

In 1969, a decade after having pacified the Huaorani, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) was authorized to create a 66,570-hectare [169,088-acre] protection zone (the Protectorate) around its mission. By the early 1980s, five-sixths of the population was living in the Protectorate, which represented one-tenth of the traditional territory. Since the creation of primary schools, which has accelerated the process of sedentarization and riverine adaptation, the population has gathered into twenty communities, almost all located within the boundaries of the former Protectorate (see ). In April 1990 the Huaorani were granted the largest indigenous territory in Ecuador (679,130 hectares, or 1,098,000 acres). It includes the former Protectorate and adjoins Yasun National Park (982,300 hectares, or 2,495,000 acres).