Shuar People's Healing Practices in the Ecuadorian Amazon as a Guide to State Interculturality

331 Pages·2017·4.53 MB·English

Shuar People’s Healing Practices in the Ecuadorian Amazon as a
Guide to State Interculturality: An Epistemic Case for Indigenous
Institutions

Christian Tym

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
University of Sydney

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy at the University of Sydney

22 December 2016
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STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY

I certify that this thesis submitted to The University of Sydney for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy contains no material presented for the award of any other degree or diploma
in another university or institution. This dissertation is my original work and contains no
material previously published by another person, except where due contributions by
others are explicitly acknowledged. The interviews done for this thesis were performed
under the approval of the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of Sydney.

Christian Tym
22 December 2016

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks go first and foremost to Vek Lewis, my thesis supervisor, for your phenomenal
talents as a sounding board and seemingly infinite offerings of new intellectual threads for
me to take up. I often feel that you understand what drives my research better than I do.
Thanks for being with this project intensively when it has been humming along and for
welcoming me back into the fold every time I drifted off into one side project or crisis of
motivation or another. Thanks especially for all the times you assured the various
university review committees that wonderfully insightful writing was bound to spring
forth from my pen any day now. I hope you feel satisfied and a little bit vindicated in seeing
this work come together as a coherent whole.
This project would never have got off the ground without the support and direction of the
presidents of the two Shuar federations with a presence in Zamora-Chinchipe. Thanks too
to all the Shuar people who spoke on my behalf at ‘Centro’ and ‘Asociación’ meetings, to
those who shared their stories of sickness and healing with me, and most of all to those
who welcomed me into their homes and treated me as family. When I arrived in Shuar
country, I was entirely unaware of the fraught connotations of association with a white
man. Contemplating it now, I am astounded and overwhelmed by the dauntlessness and
faith in humanity these individuals demonstrated in their willingness to trust and help me.
Even so, with a mind to the risk they took, I will avoid thanking any of them by name and
leave the rest of that story for another time.
On that note, thanks also to my former partner Tiffany. It must have been hard for anyone
in Ecuador to think the worst of me when I was accompanied by someone as gracious and
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beautiful as yourself. Thanks also to Andrés for your coffee, for Salinas and for the
constant good vibes; and to Austin, Aliya, Roberto and Vanessa for unknowingly keeping
me on my feet.
Big thanks to Claude and Chloe. I’m not sure what I did to deserve such selfless friends.
Thanks also to Sebastian Grant for your incredible artistry (see Figure 1) and to all the
friends who are still willing to take me back now that this incredibly time-consuming
document has been brought to the finish.
Thanks particularly to Mum & Dad, for always standing for doing the work that you love,
and to Carolyn, Jane and Michael for your support and your wise words when you stepped
in back in 2009. To Sophie, Hamish and Mitchell: thanks for always being around and
having something completely unrelated to anthropology on your mind to talk about.
Lastly, thanks to Viv, Vin, Boy & Kat, Liz & Nat, Pettit, Ibu, Charlie’s Angels and everyone
else at the Metro Theatre and all the other crazies slaving hard at bars and cafés to make
space for your music, painting, acting and merry-making. Keep Sydney open and keep
dreaming big.

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ABSTRACT

What do we understand by the principle of state interculturality? What would be the full
implications of making Latin American states culturally representative, rather than agents
of modernisation on the European model? Could the state reflect the distinctive local
cultures within the various particular regions of its sovereign territory? This project takes
the example of state healthcare in Ecuador, an ‘intercultural state’ according to its 2008
constitution, as a point of entry to answering these questions.
By presenting an epistemological critique of biomedicine as culturally specific and
historically contingent, it argues for intercultural health as a break with taking western
knowledge systems as the universal arbiters for social policy. Instead, it proposes that the
health-seeking preferences of indigenous minority groups–working with the example of
the Shuar nationality in the south-eastern Amazonian province of Zamora-Chinchipe–
become the basis for culturally representative state healthcare within their territory. I
argue that this is a question of indigenous justice, in light of the evident dramatic
disconnects in meaning and disappointed expectations of many Shuar people in their
engagement with clinical healthcare. However for non-indigenous society, too,
intercultural health would lead to the further development of health practices founded on
distinct epistemological and ontological assumptions from those of western biomedicine,
thereby bringing a new diversity of approaches with which intercultural societies could
address universal social problems.
Yet the effort to put forward a medical ethnographic representation of Shuar culture
understood as a set of present-day practices and preferences, rather than a body of
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essentialised tradition, raises the question of how meaningful it is today to speak of
cultural groups, when these are inevitably cross-cut by transnational economic, religious
and political-discursive forces to different extents in different locations. The thesis thus
concludes with a suggestion for what we mean when we say we value cultural diversity.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: ‘El Ecuador es un Estado […] intercultural’ 14
Interculturality, the Geopolitics of Knowledge and Decolonisation 18
The Politics of Epistemology in Traditional Medicine 35
Bioprospecting and the Encounter between Knowledge Systems 39
Shuar Healing and Traditional Medicine Debates 44
De Facto Interculturality in the Borderlands of the Ecuadorian State 49

Chapter 2: Why Interculturalise? Pluralising the Epistemology of Medicine 56
Multi-Sited Ethnography and the Field of Research 58
Border Thinking and Coloniality 68
Interculturality, Critical Epistemology and the Non-Indigenous Anthropologist 73
Pharmaceutical Bioprospecting and the Epistemological Encounter 79
Culture, Knowledge and the Ontological Turn 88

Chapter 3: Shuar People’s Healing Practices in Zamora-Chinchipe, Ecuador
The Shuar ‘Centros’ in Historical Context 93
Quantitative Analysis of Interviewees’ Health-Seeking Preferences 104
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The Discourse of Indigeneity in Interviewee Responses 117
Health-Seeking Practices of Shuar Evangelicals 125
Geographic Isolation and Traditional Ontology in Shuar Healing 132
Mining and Materialism in Healthcare in the Quimi River Valley 142

Chapter 4: Traditional Ontology in the Sickness and Health of Twenty-First Century
Shuar 148
‘Maldad’, Sickness and Power in Alto Nangaritza 152
A Mother’s ‘Maldad’ 157
The Shamanic Diagnosis of Sorcery 160
Visionary Experience in Shuar People’s Lives 165
Power Vibrating on other Frequencies 171
Sorcery as Diversion 175
Health/Sickness, Power/Marginalisation 180

Chapter 5: Medicinal Plants and Evangelicals’ Denatured Spirituality 186
Healing and Conversion: Illness as a Crisis of Ontological Commitments 187
‘False Miracles’: Evangelism as a Moral Epistemology? 194
Medicinal Plants, Materialism and the Disowning of Spiritual Agency 199
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One Vector Amongst Many 203

Chapter 6: Mining, Materialism and the Indigenous Amazonian Working-Class
Ethnography on the Quimi River: Shuar Life ‘On-the-Grid’ 208
Perceptions of Shamanic Healing among Miners and Anthropologists 214
First-Hand Accounts of Shamanic Healing:
i) Ximena Charip 218
ii) Matilde Yankuam 221
iii) Alma Tunki 222
The Mechanics of Disbelief in the Quimi River Valley 224
Distancing Oneself from Vision 228
Land, Plant Knowledge and the Predicament of Young Waged Labourers 234
The Development and Rationalisation of Shuar Communities? 242
Prospects for Interculturality on the Quimi 245

Chapter 7: Medicine and Indigeneity–Rewriting the Multivalent Discourse of Indigenous
Culture 248
Indigeneity as an Idiom of Resistance 252
Indigeneity as ‘Culture’: Class, Politics and Institutions 262
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The Distinct Deployments and Rejections of Indigeneity by Shuar People 271
Culture as a History of Cumulatively Developed Conceptual Complexity 279

Chapter 8: Final Thoughts
The Difference between Valuing Culture and Valuing Knowledge 285
The Culture of the State in Ecuador and Beyond 292
Critiquing Liberal Multiculturalism Post-2016 295

References 298

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