Ecotourism and Cultural Production

An Anthropology of Indigenous Spaces in Ecuador

V. Davidov

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137355386
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Ecotourism is a unique facet of globalization, promising the possibility of reconciling the juggernaut of development with ecological/cultural conservation. Davidov offers a comparative analysis of the issue using a case study of indigenous Kichwa people of Ecuador and their interactions with globalization and transnational systems.

C H A P T E R 1

HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS AND CONTEMPORARY DIMENSIONS OF KICHWA ECOTOURISM

Lowland Kichwa are an Amazonian indigenous group in Ecuador. The Runa (meaning “human beings”), as they refer to themselves, are divided into cultural subgroups, with the two main ones in the Amazonian provinces being Canelos Kichwa (in the Pastaza province) and Napo Kichwa, sometimes referred to as Quijos, living in the province of Napo, along the river of the same name. Although they share their language with the highland (Andean) Kichwa, their cultural practices are primarily Amazonian. The lowland Kichwa, as an ethnic group, emerged through a process of ethnogenesis (Whitten, 1978), and are currently the largest Amazonian indigenous group in Ecuador. Unlike indigenous groups like the Waorani, who live further in the Amazonian interior and who encountered a rapid onset of contact with outsiders in the face of missionaries and oil companies in the 1960s and the 1970s, Kichwa inhabit the region that (especially in contemporary ecotourism parlance) is referred to as “gateway to the Amazon”—an area where the Amazonian basin meets the foothills of the Andes, as Hutchins (2007: 78) describes it, a “transitional zone between high mountain and forest basin [that] has long been culturally and economically fluid” and historically involved in highland–lowland linkages of long-distance trade-related and political relationships and arrangements (Salomon, 1986; Uzendoski, 2005).

Uzendoski, following Whitten’s account of the ethnogenesis of the Runa, describes the key feature of Amazonian Kichwa social forms as “transculturation”—a process that he defines as a shift in ethnic identity through intermarriage and is grounded in the fluid dynamics of Andean and Amazonian cultures. Like Hutchins, Uzendoski stresses the role of fluid boundaries and transitional spaces through and across which identities are formed. Overall, all scholars who have studied Kichwa have noted their cultural propensity for incorporating and integrating that which they encounter—through intermarriage, through trade, through cosmology and language (which integrate the nonhuman forces and actors of nature as part of Kichwa social realities), through thoughtful engagement with Christian missionization, through the inherent fluidities of cultural formation in a border zone that Whitten (1985: 19) described as the pan-Andean-Amazonian sociocultural complex that blends Andean and Amazonian social and cosmological currents. The processes described in this book—Kichwa involvement with ecotourism, the oil industry, and indigenous politics in the national and transnational arena – build on the history of that cultural fluidity, the ability to integrate multiple elements and reconfigure them into an ever-changing, yet internally consistent and meaningful cultural identity.

That fluidity does not necessarily come across for the tourists who come from Europe and the United States to visit Kichwa villages, though—the tourists, who are the other part of the story I am about to tell in this book. I want to provide a short illustrative vignette here. About halfway through my research, I was asked by a tourist—a man in his mid-forties from Sacramento, California—to take a photograph of him with two Kichwa villagers he was chatting up during the “free time” on the tour, while most of the tourists were perusing the pottery laid out for sale. The man positioned himself between his two interlocutors, with all three of them facing the camera—to his left was a Kichwa elder in his 60s, undressed from the waist up, with his face painted, and holding a traditional blowgun. To his right was the elder’s youngest son, in jeans and white t-shirt, with nothing on his person “marking” him as a lowland Kichwa—he was living in Puyo at the moment, but had driven over that day to help out with some maintenance. Although I never formally interviewed the father or the son, I had chatted with both of them during the previous day. The father had been raised and schooled on a mission, and appreciatively remembered the missionaries who had made him an “educated man” (he was also very interested in whether or not I was Christian, or baptized, and he emphasized that he was devout and never missed church on a Sunday). Later, he had been a wage laborer in the oil fields further east for a number of years. The son had served in the army, but subsequently became interested in conservation, and was studying management of ecologically sustainable microenterprises. He explained that sustainable enterprises were a way of honoring Kichwa traditions in the “modern” world and was quite passionate about indigenous politics, having participated two years prior in the mobilization and protest march against the Free Trades Agreement of the Americas in Quito, organized by CONAIE, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador. After I took the photo, my new Californian acquaintance thanked me and, as I returned the camera to him, wondered out loud how long Kichwa culture would continue to exist, once the “real Kichwa” (“like the dad”) were gone. In a way, this ethnographic moment, which lasted maybe 30 seconds at the most, encompassed the multiple dimensions and dynamics imagined, negotiated, and integrated in ecoturismo spaces. Out of the two men, the older one was certainly the one who had adopted the positionality of what had been the “modern Indian” identity prescribed and rewarded by the Ecuadorian state for much of the twentieth century; he had received his “cultural capital” by way of missionary education, and made his living as a worker within the industry branch that had neoliberalized and transformed Ecuadorian (and indigenous) nature more so than any other one. His son, who was wearing a “regular” outfit and not working with tourists that winter because of school obligations, was quite involved in cultural revival and indigenous activism activities that often articulated and mobilized a hypertraditionalist discourse. The father and the son, in the synchronic moment when the photograph was taken, unintentionally simultaneously met the tourist’s expectations (a “traditional” older man, a “modern” young man), and reinforced his sense that he was a part of the privileged group that would get a chance to see the last generation of the “real” Kichwa. At the same time, the diachronic life histories of the father and the son showed the marks of the succession of “modernities” encountered by Kichwa—a history that underlies and informs ecoturismo, yet is largely occluded in its narratives and in the performances it demands of its subjects. The tourist from Sacramento, who had come for “authenticity,” wanted to see the face paint and the blowgun, not hear appreciative childhood memories of a Christian mission, while the son’s “modern” outfit disqualified him as a “real” Kichwa in the tourist’s eyes, even though it was the younger son who participated in the types of activities that promoted what tourists understand as “cultural survival”—with both men integrating and embodying the multiple and relational facets that have always characterized Kichwa identities.

The types of articulations that exist between indigenous peoples around the world, the ethnic and cultural minorities incorporated into nation-states and exogenous agents like the encompassing state, Christian missions, NGOs, extractive industries, and now increasingly conservation and ecotourism interests simultaneously bring into existence a globally relevant field of study (that draws researchers from across the disciplines), and form a collection of unique ethnohistories. For centuries, Ecuadorian Kichwa (both in the highlands and the lowlands) were affected by the efforts of the state and the missionaries to transform “Indians” into “modern” subjects of the state—efforts focused on the erasure of Kichwa cultural practices. In the second half of the twentieth century, oil extraction entered Ecuador’s Eastern provinces as another force of change. In the last two decades, the ecotourism industry brought a neo-Romantic (or arguably neo-colonial) in spirit but politically and economically important support for and interest in the same “traditional” cultural forms and human–nature relations—that the other forces and agencies had been systematically undermining. One of the central ironies and engines of ecoturismo in Ecuador and analogous forms of ethnographic tourism around the world is the increasing cultural synergy between cultural (or, as Renato Rosaldo would say “imperialist”) nostalgias of the “developed” world and certain political and cultural interests of marginalized indigenous groups. Each instance of such synergies has its own historical and institutional specificity, of course, and this book is grounded in the specific circumstances that shaped ecoturismo for lowland Kichwa, as I endeavor to analyze the commodification of Kichwa culture as a process that bridges the legacy of colonialism with the symbolic economy of globalization. I want to emphasize that my interest was not limited to the cultural politics exemplified in the images and representations of Kichwa culture, although they are, of course, quite important to my study. But what is also central to this analysis are the new cultural spaces, corresponding to changes in cultural consciousness, cosmologies, and forms of meaning-making that have emerged as a result of the social and political forces affecting the Ecuadorian lowlands. These spaces include degree-granting tour guide training schools in which young Kichwa men and women are taught “their culture” in a standardized way as a part of the professionalization process that will enable them to work in the ecoturismo industry where the “radical alterity” of exotic cosmology and “wild” nature is highly valued. They include villages where older people, who grew up with cultural practices and forms now reified into “culture” and commodified as tourist attractions live side by side with their children and grandchildren who have embraced the discourses and practices of the post-1950s iteration of modernization where Indian cultures were supposed to be supplanted by more “modern” and “rational” identities. These discourses and practices are in many ways foundational to the post-1990s politicization of indigenous culture and the accompanying “retraditionalism,” through which Kichwa now negotiate involvement with the “modern” and “rational” (and potentially lucrative) industry of ecoturismo where “traditional” culture is itself the main attraction.

Ecoturismo is a paradoxical mode of subsistence in that it enables continuation, or, in some aspects, a “rediscovery” of “traditional” Kichwa practices not at the expense of, but as a way of participating in the modern globalized economy. The paradox, of course, is not somehow inherent to Kichwa culture, but, rather, lies in the economy of expectations that structures ecotourism itself. For Kichwa themselves there is no paradox—ecotourism is yet another form of modernity among the many they have engaged with, and been shaped by. They do not regard ecotourism as a way to preserve an unbroken tradition; they are very aware of the multiple ruptures and syncretic forms within the history of their culture. If anything, many Kichwa connect ecotourism with the nuanced existential concept of pachacutic, which means “the transformation out of an unhealthy present to a healthy future reminiscent of, but certainly not identical with, a one-time healthy past” (Whitten, 2003: 71) and at least enter into ecotourism with the sense that it can be helpful for their self-determination. Yet the ecotourism narrative imagines a pure untransformed culture that is simultaneously accessible as a living past exhibit, and is in danger of disappearing, unless conservation initiatives (including ecotourism itself) protect it from this fate.

One of the things I want to accomplish in this chapter is to stress that in order to understand how Kichwa came to this somewhat paradoxical position, of drawing on the fantasies of alterity to assert political, environmental, and economic sovereignty, it is important to look back at the historical progression from colonial primitivism to contemporary ecoprimitivism, which I define throughout this book as an uncritical reification of preindustrial modes of subsistence and the social forms associated with them—and link that history to the particular circumstances of indigenous peoples in Ecuador. In this chapter, I take a close look at how historical European construction of the indigenous colonial subject in South America informs tourist fantasies and narratives of the postcolonial indigenous “touree” (van der Berghe and Keyes. 1984). Thus, I want to briefly focus on colonial-era perspectives by Europeans on indigenous natives and lay a foundation for the discussion about the link between the ethnocentric tropes recurrent in these discourses and the contemporary tropes of ecoprimitivism underlying the industry of ecotourism in South America, fueled by Western tourists’ fantasies about the natives they will encounter on the jungle tours. The specific trope that I outline here and continue to explore in the rest of the book concerns the cultural othering and exoticization of South American natives through creating a duality between civilization and nature, and identifying the indigenous subject exclusively with the latter.

Of course, these fantasies and dynamics do not exist in the bubble of ecotourism, and they are entangled not only with colonial and early postcolonial histories, but also with contemporary issues of transnationalism, global identity, and circa-millennial indigenous politics in Ecuador, which in turn are inseparable from issues of oil extraction, neoliberal conservation, and different facets of state governance of Amazonian territories.

Although much of the book engages with the issues of negotiating authenticity and cultural production, the ecotourism practices explored in these pages are situated across intersecting political fields that shape the plural discourses and meanings of indigeneity and nature—two constituent components of ecoturismo—in Ecuador. One such field is the arc of the wax and the (arguable) wane of neoliberalism in Ecuador—a governance regime that in some ways was concluding as I was concluding my fieldwork (the ousting of President Gutierrez lay the foundation for Ecuador’s “left turn” that took place the same year as my fieldwork came to an end). Although, as I note in the afterword, many practices implemented under the neoliberal regime, especially with regard to resource-driven development continued, reframed as populist endeavors, in Rafael Correa’s post-IMF Ecuador, despite current pronature rhetoric that draws heavily on indigenous cosmopolitics in the 2008 constitution. Another is the engagement between the Ecuadorian state and social movements, in particular, the negotiation of identity politics through and around the medium of nature. In that endeavor, I aim to be in dialog with an established body of work that makes politics visible through an anthropological consideration of the relationships between people and nature in Latin America and specifically focuses on political mobilizations of nature, especially in the context of global and state incorporation (or appropriation) of indigenous environmental politics and tensions between neoliberal mobilizations and valuations of nature, and within the putatively postneoliberal paradigms that draw on indigenous concepts like sumak kawsay and buen vivir—concepts that, at least in Ecuador come out of earlier cosmopolitical articulations by indigenous organizations, like CONAIE’s framework of “integral humanism.” This is an ever-growing body of work, as over the last decade scholarship on nature and Latin America has increasingly explored the political relationship between the states and their citizens. Through an analysis of the links between the politics of land and natural resources with struggles for political recognition (De La Cadena, 2010; Gledhill, 2008; Postero, 2007; Yashar, 2005; Sawyer, 2004) anthropologists have explored how citizen positionality, especially indigenous citizen positionality is negotiated around the medium of nature with the state; ecotourism, and the claims to nature made through the rhetoric and practices of ecotourism, by indigenous and state actors, are an important aspect of ecotourism’s political significance for its practitioners.

Thus, to make this chapter into a solid theoretical foundation for the ethnographic analyses that follows, I also want to situate ecoturismo in the context of three concepts central to its ontogenesis and role in Ecuadorian Amazon—the notion of authenticity, the framework of neoliberalism, and the histories and practices of social mobilizations and the negotiations over rights and identities between indigenous social movements and the various incarnations of the Ecuadorian state.

THE EXOTIC, THE WILD, AND THE “AUTHENTIC”

As Peter Mason writes in Infelicities, “The exotic . . . is not something that exists prior to its ‘discovery.’ It is the very act of discovery which produces the exotic as such and it produces it in varying degrees of wildness and domestication. In other words, the exotic is the product of the process of exoticization” (Mason, 1998: 1–2).

For the colonial perspective of yesterday and the tourist perspective of today, exotic is often synonymous with wild (in the enduring fantasy sense of being untouched by civilization). In fact, the concept of wildness is historically recurrent in the colonial discourses of American Indianness (Abercrombie, 1998a; 1998b; Troutman and Parezo, 1998), illuminating the extent of colonial preoccupation with the categories of culture and civilization and the anxieties about the fluidity of inclusion and exclusion that underlies such distinctions. In his pivotal work on the subject, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Michael Taussig (1987: 127) wrote about “otherness in the primeval jungle” (of Colombia) and noted that “it must not be overlooked that the colonially constructed image of the wild Indian was a powerfully ambiguous image, a seesawing, bifocalized and hazy composite of the animal and the human . . . In their human or humanlike form, the wild Indians could all the better reflect back to the colonists vast and baroque projections of human wildness.”

Historically enmeshed in power relations between colonial regimes and indigenous subjects, wildness has remained a loaded, polarized signifier, which today is still shaped by the lingering legacy of colonial discourses of racism and imperialism. This persisting influence is visible in the packaging and the presentation of indigenous tourism today. Tourist literature frequently represents “wild” indigenous peoples as existing in static, “primitive” cultures, outside technologies, social relationships and systems characteristic of “modernity” (Morgan and Pritchard, 1998; Mansvelt, 2005).

THE ORIGINS OF PRIMITIVISM

The historical framework of locating “wildness” and “savagery” in particular sites in nature has been written about extensively (Ellingson, 2001; Young, 1995; Todorov, 1993; White, 1978). Historical analysis places the invention of the noble savage as a concept at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and its popularization as a myth in the 1850s (Ellingson, 2001: 45).¹ The notion dates back to Romantic primitivism and circulates through the portrayal of indigenous peoples in colonial-era travel-ethnographic literature. Smith (1985) offers a detailed analysis of the various positive and negative qualities Europeans projected onto their colonized subjects, distinguishing between “hard” primitivism, which imagined the primitive subject as courageous and brave in the face of the hardships inherent in their wild lifestyle, and “soft” primitivism, which saw them as languid and sensual, harmonious and identified with their natural surroundings....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Two Museums
• 1  Historical Foundations and Contemporary Dimensions of Kichwa Ecotoursim
• 2  Ecotourism: Nature, Culture, and Ethnocentrism
• 3  Ecoturismo in Ecuador: An Ethnohistorical Account of Rainforests, Indians, and Oil
• 4  Consuming and (Re)Producing Alterity: Snapshots, Stories, and Souvenirs
• 5  In Their Own Words: Ecotourism in Lowland Kichwa Communities
• 6  Shamans and “Shams”
• 7  Curating Culture: The Case of the Ethnographic Museum at Chichico Rumi
• Discussion and Conclusion
• Appendix I: Notes on Methods and Sample Interview Questions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index