Introduction Excerpt for Translating Worlds, Defending Land

Translating Worlds, Defending Land
Collaborations for Indigenous Rights and Environmental Politics in Amazonia
Casey High

INTRODUCTION

SHARING UNCOMMON GROUND

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I made a brief trip to Toñampari, a Waorani village in the Ecuadorian Amazon where I began fieldwork in the late 1990s. One evening during my stay I listened to Amowa, one of the people I know best there, speak about his family and their sporadic contact with outsiders in the 1950s. Amowa, his wife Ñai, and their ten children, many now adults with families of their own, have been my host family during much of my fieldwork. Since Amowa and Ñai, as elders, are well known for telling stories of the adventures, comedic follies, and tragic fates of ancestors and mythic characters, I was already familiar with some of the stories I heard that night. But this time was different. On this occasion, Amowa’s adult son Uboye carefully orchestrated the scene around his father, setting the stage to make a video recording. This involved using candles to improve the lighting for the camera, which was attached to a tripod standing on the dirt floor of the house, and setting up microphones in the appropriate positions as Amowa sat patiently in his hammock.

Once the story began, interactions around the house followed a familiar pattern. The many children and grandchildren sat silently, focusing their attention on Amowa as he voiced and gestured the sounds, movements, and actions of ancestors who came across oil workers, missionaries, and other outsiders at a time when relations between Waorani and other Ecuadorians were fraught with mistrust, fear, and violence. Those in the audience only occasionally broke their silence with laughter, making the sound ooo! to affirm events in the story, or to ask questions like emonano (who was it?) or eyemono (where?) about the people and places Amowa described. Whether it was due to the camera, his son’s interest in making the recording, or simply his pleasure in telling stories, Amowa spoke for more than three hours, pausing only to respond briefly to these interjections and for Uboye to change the tape in the camera.

Uboye’s recording of an everyday context with his family, and his thinking about it, reflects what I think is an increasingly familiar scene of ethnographic fieldwork. Whether in remote corners of Amazonia or in no less exotic scientific research labs, we must recognize and engage with the imaginative horizons our interlocutors find in new technical expertise and knowledge. In some cases, like that which I describe in this book, such expertise is not entirely separable from ethnographic description and analysis—much less politics. As people like Uboye become ethnographers in their own right, we must reconsider not only who is representing what, but also what is at stake in these encounters beyond writing texts or methods of participant observation. They engage creatively not only with the ideas of “culture” around them, but also the differences, shared interests, and potential solidarity they find in collaborations with people and projects that extend well beyond their home communities.

Uboye’s recording was part of one such collaboration: research to document his native language, Wao-terero. For me, this project—involving a linguist, an anthropologist (me) and speakers like Uboye and his parents—was an opportunity to engage in research in which Waorani people would have a stake in the results. But this work does not simply reveal shared interests or meanings—the common ground often implicit in the very idea of collaboration. As our interlocutors find new languages, practices, and technologies for reflecting on their lives in this work, their purposes are often different from conventional anthropologists. Their epistemological and political commitments require thinking about the value of collaboration beyond addressing preconceived problems or writing ethnography. Rather than erasing these differences—much less overcoming the inequalities in which academic research in Amazonia is embedded—Waorani researchers find in this work new ways of engaging conflicts with outsiders and within their own communities.

As our interlocutors become researchers, they bring distinct purposes and understandings to these projects, often leading to unanticipated consequences. While Uboye’s interest in recording his father suited the goal of documenting an “endangered language,” he also came to see in the words of his elders a particular power, a “truth” he contrasts to the speech of younger Waorani political leaders. For him, video became not just a tool for documenting language and culture, but to hold politicians to account for what they said. I was both fascinated and horrified when, two years after making the recording of his father, Uboye received threats from his neighbors while recording a meeting in which the Waorani political leadership was hotly contested. As he and other Waorani researchers had their own purposes in this work, it revealed a distinct ethics and politics that, at times, exposed them to real risks.

These engagements, and especially the skills and technologies they involve, do not exist in a vacuum. They take unanticipated directions, becoming part of ever-more translocal relationships and political projects. In 2019, I met with Uboye in Puyo, a frontier city in Amazonian Ecuador, where he recorded what became the most successful protest against the Ecuadorian government’s selling of contracts to exploit oil on Waorani lands. By then he had acquired his own professional camera, which rested on his shoulder as he filmed other Waorani people marching alongside international environmentalists and Indigenous rights activists. Now married and with small children of his own, Uboye walked alongside his wife, Marci—also a Waorani language researcher—who carried their infant daughter in her arms. After the march snaked through the city streets, he joined a crowd of journalists in recording the speech of Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani language researcher who was now becoming an internationally renowned environmental leader. Uboye too was becoming an anti-oil activist, working with an international network that led to him becoming delegate at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26).

In this book I explore how Waorani people engage in a changing sociopolitical world, whether as researchers and videographers or through campaigns to defend their lands and combat climate change. Their collaborations, both with academic researchers and international environmental activists, bring about new problems and possibilities for those involved. The book is at once an ethnography of these engagements and a critical reflection on how collaboration is conceptualized in anthropology and beyond. Rather than accepting this term as a generic buzzword or a coherent sociopolitical imperative, I describe the possibilities and limits of anthropological collaboration and what our interlocutors find when they become enmeshed in it. In this way, I approach collaboration as both an open-ended method and a complex ethnographic object through which we can better understand novel conceptual horizons emerging in Amazonia and elsewhere.

MAP 0.1: Map of Ecuador. Source: High 2015a, 4.

Translation is an integral part of the collaborations I describe in this Amazonian contemporary. Whether facilitating relationships across social worlds or highlighting their differences, translations have consequences for Amazonian people—and their allies—well beyond questions of anthropological theory. In a context premised as much on solidarity between Indigenous people and environmentalists as ideas of difference, translating Indigenous concepts into the language of nature, culture, and conservation allows some young Waorani leaders to engage a social and political scale beyond their home villages, Ecuador, or South America. The process of translating across worlds, whether in language documentation or environment politics, highlights the possibilities for collaboration in Amazonia today. It at once challenges the tendency to imagine Amazonia as a place of natural isolation or essential difference and defies conventional ideas of tradition and modernity that accompany such imagination. Waorani collaborations in this contemporary also offer specific ways of rethinking the methods, purposes, and possibilities of academic research.

MAP 0.2: The Waorani Ethnic Reserve and Yasuní National Park in Amazonian Ecuador. Source: High 2015a, 5.

Conceptualizing Collaboration Anthropologically

While questions of collaboration have long been central to anthropology, conventional methodological and ethical commitments fall well short of recent calls for more deliberately collaborative practices.1 As we embrace diverse sites, methods, and social dynamics in fieldwork today, most anthropologists still depend on long-term relationships with the people they write about—and sometimes with. As a result our work relies, more than in other fields, on collaborations that go beyond the age-old trope of participating in and observing the lives of others. Today anthropologists grapple with difficult questions about collaboration in research and writing: What does it entail and what is the point? How can anthropology be more collaborative, and with whom? Who stands to benefit and who does it belong to? What does it mean to people with different understandings and priorities? What are its limits?

These are some of the questions that come with Waorani involvement in academic research and other collaborations. For people like Uboye, what is the point, if any, of documenting an “endangered language”? What knowledge and skills do they derive from recording and transcribing language videos, and how might these technologies figure in other contexts? In what ways do they present new ways of reflecting on what it means to be Waorani and speak their language? How are their priorities and ethical commitments different from academics? What novelty, opportunity, and risk do they find in these collaborations? These are some of the questions I consider as I try to make sense of what language documentation and environmental politics mean to Waorani researchers, leaders, and their communities. In asking these questions, my interest is not in collaboration as a form of applied anthropology or even the material outcomes of such projects, but as a context for understanding a contemporary Waorani world as it unfolds.

My exploration of this process points to how, whether in Amazonia or Europe, “at home” or abroad, anthropologists today encounter new expectations, accountabilities, and possibilities in fieldwork and writing. Questions of collaboration will have different implications everywhere. But I want to highlight their particular salience to an academic community that, broadly speaking, is as engaged with ideas of difference as it is committed to various forms of solidarity. Whether in critiques of claims to scientific authority in ethnographic writing (Clifford and Marcus 1986), including critical feminist approaches (di Leonardo 1991), calls for decolonizing anthropology (Harrison 1997), or the emphasis on coauthorship (Lassiter 2005), the purposes, methods, and ethical commitments of an engaged anthropology increasingly depend on what kind of engagement in the world we understand anthropology to be (Beck and Maida 2013; Low and Merry 2010).

While efforts to place anthropologists and their interlocutors on more equal footing is an important part of the current “collaborative moment” (Sillitoe 2015), in this book I also engage critically with collaboration as a concept and practice. In a world where this idea often implies an ethic of mutual benefit, social innovation, and self-realization (Riles 2015; Strathern 2012),2 I explore the creative possibilities and limits of collaborative anthropology (Konrad 2012). In moving beyond critiques of the detached academic observer of generations past, anthropologists are well positioned to appreciate the knowledge this work engenders. Though often envisioned as a more inclusive and democratic method for documenting preexisting forms, or serving goals negotiated with interlocutors, collaboration also involves much more than the common ground many of us seek. It is the tensions, conflicts, and unpredictable nature of this work that I suggest both reveals differences and evokes new imaginative possibilities for anthropologists and their “others.” The fact that such possibilities may end up challenging, distorting, or rejecting our initial epistemological and political commitments is part of what makes them important.

I draw on insights from collaborative ethnography, interdisciplinarity, decolonization, feminist anthropology, Indigenous methodologies, and other approaches that make clear the need to consider the meanings, uses, and predicaments of collaboration beyond assuming shared purposes or harmonious engagements with the communities that anthropologists study. As Faye Harrison cautions, collaboration often implies a claim to ethnographic authority (2012, 92). How, then, might we envision anthropological collaborations that do not presume a common ground between “our” and “their” conceptual, political, and practical engagements?

In some cases this requires thinking about the purposes of collaboration beyond outcomes, such as coauthored texts, that tend to be valued more in academic settings than elsewhere (Kirsch 2018). In language documentation, it quickly became clear that Waorani researchers were more interested in the videos they recorded than linguistic texts derived from them, much less ethnographic writing like this book. In communities where reading is often limited to official contexts of necessity, the videos are more accessible and have greater entertainment and political value. But this interest also reflects epistemological differences that problematize the authority of ethnographic representation. For some Waorani researchers, the words of their elders, which they associate with the “truth” of “direct” experience, stand in stark contrast to speculative claims about the thoughts and intentions of others.

What, then, might make a particular collaboration anthropological? Tim Ingold (2018) envisions anthropology as a practice of correspondence, “an imaginative stretch of attention” in which anthropologists and their hosts “reach an accord that goes beyond existing understandings” (65). Rather than juxtaposing different “worlds” outside one another or applying anthropology to solve preconceived problems, such practices of “commoning” or “togethering” ultimately lead to things that neither anthropologists nor their interlocutors initially imagined (61).3 And yet, tension, discord, and divergent interests are as central to anthropology as rapport, agreement, or “togethering.” Marisol de la Cadena (2015) contrasts collaboration toward a mutual goal from “co-laboring” in which anthropologists and their interlocutors know and make distinct—yet partially connected—worlds. Similarly, alliances between Indigenous peoples and environmentalists can involve a process of “uncommoning” where divergent notions of nature become the basis of solidarity (de la Cadena 2019). The tensions in these projects are often embedded in long-standing inequalities that anthropologists and their hosts can hardly ignore. Positioning oneself as an engaged or activist anthropologist does not simply eclipse such realities, regardless of our political convictions.

The fact that I am a white man from the United States who normally lives in Scotland is part of what constitutes my relationships with Waorani people. But questions of relative power are only part of what often makes collaboration fraught with disagreement and misunderstanding, especially when the people written about share stakes in research and come to hold specific expectations of it. Part of the challenge is in recognizing how our “epistemic partners” (Holmes and Marcus 2008) come to value and demand things that academic researchers may not anticipate. The potential of collaboration is as much a result of conflict as it is agreement,4 and this should move us to take differences seriously without taking for granted the exact nature of our collaborations, or even the content or meaning of what is transacted in them.

Rather than taking ideas of essential difference as our object—whether in the guise of culture or ontology—or assuming that all relationships are shaped by political and economic inequalities, collaborative anthropology can bring about new ways of positioning self and other in knowledge production (Heffernan et al. 2020, 7; Konrad 2012, 20). This is as much the case with interdisciplinary projects as it is work that situates anthropology’s “natives” as ethnographers and anthropologists in their own right.5 For example, Waorani language videos present a wealth of linguistic, ethnographic, and historical data. But Waorani involvement in their making and commentary about their value also reflects an epistemology that departs from the conventional purposes of documentation. Just as what they call “Waorani land” (wao öme) challenges ideas of nature, environment, and conservation in environmental politics, their analysis of these projects evokes distinct understandings of the nature of language and what constitutes “truth.”

In this way collaboration is itself a complex ethnographic object that, while already a central concern in fieldwork and writing, merits further attention as a provocative anthropological concept. As Annelise Riles (2015) suggests, it is “our problematic term” in the sense that it can “allow us to closely observe the process of persons becoming interested” (180). My central focus is precisely this process of certain Waorani people becoming interested in new things and in new ways, and what promise this holds for them.6 The practices, relationships, and imagination that constitute emergent forms of collaboration are an important part of what I call a Waorani contemporary. They highlight not just novelty, but equally, enduring ideas about the nature of knowledge, language, the body, and what it means to be a Waorani person.

Waorani Collaborations

This book draws on my fieldwork with Waorani communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon with whom I have been involved for the past twenty-five years. These communities have experienced extraordinary changes in recent decades since coming into regular contact with nonindigenous people in the late 1950s. In the wake of Christian missionization, the settlement of highly mobile groups into more permanent villages, and the devastating effects of oil drilling on their lands, Waorani people have come to understand their place as Amazonian “Indians” and “warriors” under dramatic conditions. Anthropologists and other researchers, like the missionaries who preceded them, have become part of a kowori (non-Waorani) world that defines them as one Indigenous culture or nationality among others. The conditions under which these sociopolitical identities have taken shape point to striking and sometimes painful generational differences.

It is a generation of young adults, mostly in their late twenties and thirties, who are the focus of this book. It is less about “Waorani people”—if such a generalization is useful at all—than people like Uboye, a man who became involved in our collaborative work more than a decade after I first came to live with his family. Starting in 2009, he and I were part of a three-and-a-half-year multidisciplinary project funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), then based in the University of London, to document the Waorani language (Wao-terero). The project emerged from years of discussion with parents, schoolteachers, and political leaders about the possibility of incorporating Waorani language materials into their local schools. Until recently, village schools were conducted almost exclusively in Spanish, with kowori teachers adopting a national curriculum that devalued and undermined local social and economic life (High 2015b; Rival 2002).

The project also came about through my previous discussions with linguists interested in documenting endangered languages. Wao-terero is a clear example of such a language, spoken by only around 4,000 people in a context where Spanish, the national language, dominates most official contexts. The central premise of the project was that of documentation. It involved video-recording Waorani speakers and subsequently transcribing and translating the videos, resulting in a growing body of linguistic texts to be made available in an archive. I was initially uneasy with the idea of documenting an “endangered language” as a form of Indigenous knowledge, as it smacked of anthropology’s long-abandoned tradition of salvage ethnography (Clifford 1989). However, the project was also premised on extensive collaboration with a linguist and Waorani language consultants who, in addition to being recorded as speakers and receiving training in linguistic research methods, became key protagonists in deciding what to record.

FIGURE 0.1: Waorani researcher Uboye Gaba travels by canoe to his home village on the Curaray River. Photo by author.

Up to this point, my work as an anthropologist was of little if any consequence to the Waorani families who had generously welcomed me into their lives for years. This is why the idea of their priorities being central to language research, along with the new skills they would acquire through it, was of particular interest to me. The elders I approached were happy to have their stories recorded and were supportive of the project. But it was younger, bilingual Waorani adults who became the primary researchers. Having studied at village schools, they were open to living in the city for extended periods and working long hours in front of computer screens. Some embraced language research as a rare opportunity to secure income and free room and board in the city. For some it was an alternative to working for oil companies—a key source of employment for men. Young Waorani women, who until recently had less presence in urban areas, also participated, sometimes bringing their small children with them to live temporarily in the city.

Language documentation research is often tedious and boring, especially for those not accustomed to the routines of wage labor or repetitive work on computers. It involved hours of listening carefully—and repeatedly—to recordings of people speaking, and using a keyboard to transcribe them into an alphabet established at the start of the project, eventually to be translated into Spanish. Perhaps not surprisingly, Waorani researchers were often more interested in traveling to remote locations to make language videos. They sometimes visited specific villages for the first time for this purpose, or sought to record relatives living in distant places. After receiving training in video and sound recording, they made their own choices about who—and what themes—to record. These decisions led to videos of diverse contexts, both in Waorani villages and outside their territory.

FIGURE 0.2: Durani öko: A traditional Waorani house. Photo by author.

The language research laid bare different understandings of collaboration, ethics, and what constitutes knowledge. Importantly, it offered young Waorani adults something more than its material outcomes. Without diminishing the value of language videos and texts as a form of documented knowledge, the processes by which they became researchers and experts in their own right became an unanticipated focus of my ethnography. Perhaps by necessity, I came to see my previous “informants”—including my host family—in a new light. This is not the first or only context in which people like Uboye and his family have worked closely with kowori people like me. Not entirely unlike their work with the early missionaries, or hosting schoolteachers and anthropologists, language research situates them in new ways and reflects changes in their lived world. It is precisely these changes—particularly the new possibilities and problems that come with them—that are the focus of this book.

I consider how Waorani people engage in and translate a changing sociopolitical world as speakers, researchers, and political actors. As I set out to study these engagements, new and more visible forms of collaboration were coming into view. By 2019, three Waorani language researchers had become key figures in environmental politics, working closely with international organizations to stop further oil drilling on their lands. It was apparent that these collaborations, whether with academics or foreign environmental activists, were bringing about new concerns and aspirations. Some Waorani researchers came to see the words of the elders they recorded as a resource for defending their land and engaging with outsiders. Others found alliances with environmentalists to be a platform to challenge oil and other threats to their livelihoods.

It is the goals, challenges, conflicts, and contradictions emerging from these processes that reveal both ontological differences and Waorani people working and speaking across them. These collaborations and the translations they entail are central to understanding Amazonia as a distinct contemporary context. As an increasingly visible part of social and political life in much of Amazonia today, anthropologists can ill afford to ignore the new imaginative horizons they present. By focusing on Amazonian people as epistemic partners, and the ways in which they translate and engage across different “worlds” (Hanks and Severi 2014), I describe the unanticipated consequences of such projects. Waorani engagements in them requires thinking about their changing relations with each other and outsiders in new ways.

In Amazonian Ecuador, going to school, migrating temporarily to frontier cities, and engaging in Indigenous politics are all part of how young Waorani adults experience the demands of their cultural specificity and citizenship. None of this exists outside of a wider politics of recognition that, in settler colonial contexts, often defines Indigenous people through essentialist measures of authenticity based on imagined spatial and cultural continuities.7 Language research is not independent from these processes, nor does participation in it somehow liberate Waorani people from the inequalities in which their lives are embedded. But it does render language a cultural object in ways that challenge reductive understandings of indigeneity within a dominant multiculturalist framework. As videographers and linguists, they produce a form of Indigenous media that reaches beyond the remit of documenting an “endangered language” or “culture.” Video has become a powerful technology by which they reflect on their lives, language, and communities.8

For some Waorani, documenting language has become a technology for learning new things, whether about ancestors, key places in their territory, or techniques for making things. It has led some to think about specific features of their language itself as something that distinguishes them from other people. For others, the words of elders in the videos are a source of power, political inspiration, or even prophecy. And still for others, making recordings involves risky political engagements across Waorani communities, particularly in efforts to hold their own leaders to account. Recently, Waorani language researchers have turned their cameras toward challenging the government’s selling of oil concessions on their lands. Here they employ video as a tool for documenting their protests, demanding the state’s accountability, and forging alliances with lawyers, environmentalists, and Indigenous rights activists. Beyond recording protests in Ecuador, this engagement has placed some Waorani adults on a global stage of international meetings and media coverage.

In this way deliberately collaborative work can challenge age-old stereotypes about culture with which anthropologists have often been complicit. Rather than just generate new knowledge for academic debate, the Waorani people who engage in it mobilize alternative forms of knowledge, experience, and critique as researchers and activists. This work does not simply serve to document, preserve, or revive preexisting forms of Indigenous knowledge; it makes something new. Such creative potential can make these collaborations risky or undesirable to some people in contexts of social transformation and political conflict.

FIGURE 0.3: Witnessing: Uboye films a Waorani protest against oil in 2019. Photo by author.

Rather than present a wholesale solution to the methodological and ethical problems of contemporary anthropology, the collaborations I describe in this book complicate things. They reconfigure relationships and audiences in ways that are difficult to foresee. When the language documentation project began, I had no idea that Waorani researchers would later become prominent environmental leaders, with one leader featured in Time magazine and receiving a prestigious international prize for her activism, and another speaking in front of world leaders at COP26. Nor did I anticipate the challenges they would face, such as criticism from other Waorani suspicious of their close links to outsiders, or kowori people questioning their authenticity as Amazonian people simply for using a state-of-the-art video camera.

This illustrates how, in ceding control of certain aspects of research, and in so doing appreciating alternative purposes in it, the uncontained nature of collaboration reveals unanticipated risks for everyone involved. Our interlocutors often risk much more than we do in this work. But it still may be well worth it to them. Becoming researchers and environmental activists offers some Waorani new ways of thinking about social transformation beyond essentialist measures of cultural authenticity. In this way conceptualizing collaboration anthropologically complements debates about ethnographic authority, coauthorship, fieldwork ethics, and the possibilities of an engaged anthropology. It also presents a key method for understanding what constitutes a distinctly Waorani contemporary.

Translating beyond Language

As anthropologists often observe, acts of translation take us well beyond questions of language alone. Much more than their elders, young Waorani adults are ever more involved in the work of translating across differences in language, cosmology, and power. For some, this has involved years of engaging in Spanish at school or dealing with shopkeepers, jungle pilots, and provincial authorities during visits to the city. For others, translation is part of Indigenous politics, including negotiations with oil companies, the state, and international organizations. And for those young adults who have worked as language researchers, the process of recording, transcribing, and translating Wao-terero has become a professional skill at the same time as it positions them to reflect in new ways on what it means to speak their language.

While the primary goals of documenting an endangered language are aligned with linguistics (Haig et al. 2011), my conceptual and methodological focus is not language, or linguistic anthropology’s rich tradition of studying socially situated discourse as culture (Sherzer and Urban 1986; Urban 1991). I explore what Waorani collaborations in language documentation and environmental politics reveal about the power of speaking Wao-terero.9 While my interlocutors envision speaking their language as an ability that is seemingly inseparable from the body, language research renders speech visible and translatable in new ways. In presenting Wao-terero as a particular kind of acoustic and visual object, the videos offer them new opportunities to consider what makes their language—and specific ways of speaking it—distinct.

This is especially the case with videos of elders and the gestures they often use in tandem with expressions that are difficult to translate. And yet, an increasing number of young adults are becoming skilled translators. Whether in language research, environmental politics, or elsewhere, their translations create new understandings and potential alliances (Gal 2015; Tsing 2005), sometimes bringing things into being (Di Giminiani and Haines 2020). But these contexts, which often involve working closely with outsiders, also show how Amazonian people are not confined to a single language ideology (Ahearn 2012) or ontological commitment (Hage 2015). I suggest that the ability to operate across what academics often see as incommensurable differences is a key feature of Indigenous life in contemporary Amazonia. It involves living with what de la Cadena (2015) describes as “partially translated connections” where the languages and practices of multiple worlds “constantly overlap and exceed each other” (4–5).

The ways in which Amazonian people translate between their native languages and the national languages of the countries where they live are but one example of this. Most Indigenous Amazonian people are, to at least some extent, bilingual. As Indigenous citizens, learning national languages in school presents both a burden and an opportunity to engage wider publics. Whether in political speeches, at school, or in everyday interactions with outsiders, speaking Spanish involves constant acts of translation.10 But Waorani efforts at translating their own words, concepts, and struggles into Spanish and the language of environmental politics both highlight and at times elide differences between kowori and Waorani ideas in significant ways.11

Documenting Wao-terero has involved many hours focused on specific technical aspects of the language and their translation. In this book, however, I step outside the texts to explore how my interlocutors communicate across different ideas about their land and way of life. As de la Cadena observes, “translating implies a movement from one world to a different one” that separates certain things or beings from their representation (2015, 30). But it is in part through translations that a new generation of Waorani leaders communicates across different linguistic and ideological frameworks. This process sometimes appears relatively unreflexive or even automatic; in others, translations are precise, strategic, or identified by Waorani speakers as problematic. In this way translation, more than simply “rendering in one language that which is expressed in another” (Hanks 2014, 18), is an epistemological space that enables “passage from one context of communication to another” (Hanks and Severi 2014, 8). This process of translating worlds is an increasingly important facet of Waorani collaborations.

Translations are thus a concern not just for linguists and philosophers, but also for anthropology. They serve different purposes and are inevitably tied to relations of power, authority, and legitimacy that extend beyond questions of language (Asad 1986; Blaser 2010; Maranhão and Streck 2003). These purposes are diverse and overlapping: translators may seek as technically accurate or literal a translation as possible, or to render it more accessible to speakers of another language. Others, not unlike ethnographers, focus on fidelity to the source language and its cultural context, sometimes emphasizing the impossibility of accurately translating across languages, cultures, or worlds. All of these purposes figure in the myriad contexts in which my Waorani interlocutors engage and communicate across differences.

The idea of allowing one’s own language to be affected by others (Benjamin 1923), or a “foreignizing translation,” is an apt description of what anthropologists often seek (Rubel and Rosman 2003, 7; Venuti 2000). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) describes how in Amazonia the “multinaturalism” of Amerindian thought implies a method of translation (as differentiation) that is distinct from the Western tendency to draw equivalences in translation. Leaving aside the problem of generalized regional models, these approaches illustrate how translation can evoke—or conflate—different worlds (Blaser 2010; de la Cadena 2015; A. Escobar 2018).

Anthropologists and their interlocutors engage in translating not just language and meaning but “worlds” in the sense of “orientated contexts for the apprehension of reality” (Hanks and Severi 2014, 8). It is this process that interests me, whether in Waorani language research or environmental activism against the oil industry. These collaborations, like the “co-laboring” practices through which de la Cadena seeks to destabilize conventional ethnographic expertise, require “inhabiting the partial connection between both worlds” (2015, 14). In contexts like these, Waorani people translate not just words or concepts, but sometimes very different ideas about what constitutes Waorani and kowori worlds. This is why we must think beyond the Spanish terms—such as naturaleza (nature), cultura (culture) and buen vivir (good living)—that often frame environmental politics in Ecuador and beyond.

From Language Documentation to Environmental Politics

The Waorani researchers who have become environmental activists illustrate the growing stakes of translating worlds. Their collaborations highlight not only Amazonian environmental knowledge but also an ability to speak and work across different understandings of their land and life. The global visibility of their work shows the consequences of translation beyond a specific Waorani theory of language. If transcribing and translating hours of video evokes for them the agency of speaking Wao-terero, environmental politics involves talking about their ancestral lands as “nature” or a bounded “Indigenous territory” in need of conservation. They describe the land on which they live, wao öme (“Waorani land”),12 not as a passive background “environment” of natural resources for human economic activity, but a dynamic socionatural world in which Waorani and numerous nonhuman beings interact and communicate. The animals, plants, forests, and waterways of wao öme are as social as they are natural, even as relations between humans and other beings can be dangerous and confrontational. Engaging successfully in these relations, whether in shamanism, gardening, hunting, or interpreting the language of specific birds, is closely connected to what Waorani people describe as “living well” (Bravo Díaz 2023; High 2020).

The differences between wao öme and Western ideas of “nature” will not surprise readers familiar with Amazonian ethnography, which is best known for challenging ideas about nature, culture, and relationships with nonhuman beings.13 Such differences are important for understanding what wao öme and “living well” mean to Waorani people. However, beyond engaging in translation as a form of anthropological analysis, I am interested specifically in how Waorani activists communicate and effectively work across what they call, in Spanish, different mundos (“worlds”). Environmental politics is a key context for this, but it is one where translation can distort or erase differences, especially when adopting the dominant language is an urgent political necessity.

In these contexts, the practice of drawing equivalences between different concepts is an important skill. It is part of a wider sociopolitical context that situates Amazonians—and Indigenous peoples elsewhere—as “environmental citizens” whose territorial sovereignty is closely connected to conservation.14 As Paige West (2006) observes, conservation does not simply protect the environment; it can undermine local practices and threaten to dispossess communities of their territorial sovereignty. In Ecuador, a global regime of environmentality has taken many forms, including international funding for conservation partnerships and projects to demarcate and map Indigenous territories. But becoming environmental citizens does not simply remake the identities, values, and beliefs of Indigenous people who work across different understandings of conservation and the governance of their territories (Cepek 2011, 502; West 2006; Zanotti 2016). In some cases, they challenge the political and economic forces that threaten their lands and dominant notions of conservation.

FIGURE 0.4: Wao öme: Waorani territory extends across three provinces in Amazonian Ecuador. Photo by author.

Much of the second half of this book focuses on how Waorani environmental leaders talk about their struggle to defend land in terms of nature, culture, and conservation. This does not reflect a younger generation simply dismissing the knowledge of their elders, much less embracing Western environmentalism. Rather, adopting this language allows them to engage with a range of outsiders who have very different ideas about their land and way of life. In this way translation is fundamental to both the translocal alliances and misunderstandings that constitute contemporary Amazonian environmental politics. Here translating worlds not only points to how translation exceeds language but also how such practices involve thinking and operating in different contexts (Hanks and Severi 2014, 10).

While many scholars challenge the idea that people inhabit distinct or incommensurable realities,15 I follow what my interlocutors describe as distinctly Waorani and kowori worlds and how they work across different languages and concepts in contexts they have come to share with kowori outsiders. Rather than envisioning people confined to different worlds, whether Western or Amazonian, I am interested in how they engage across differences. This is especially important in postcolonial contexts like the Americas, where for centuries Indigenous people have experienced racism, violence, and dispossession from their lands. In most contexts, they have had little choice but to live between different modes of existence.16

The multilingualism of places like Amazonia makes these processes all the more open to creative possibilities. The ability to speak confidently in Spanish to outsiders about the need to protect wao öme as “nature,” or Waorani elders as emblematic of “culture,” indicates more than simply a hegemonic understanding. In environmental activism it has proven to be a valuable tool for resisting oil extraction on Waorani lands. Some young Waorani adults today express pride in their ability to speak and work successfully with such differences, sometimes in contrast to their local peers. When I asked one young man where he was currently living, he responded that he lives in “many places” and in “two worlds,” referring to his regular travel between Waorani villages for language research and to Ecuadorian cities to attend meetings with environmental organizations.

In multilingual contexts, the ways in which translation can at least partially bring “incommensurable cultural worlds” into alignment (Hanks 2014, 30–31; Gal 2015) has important bearing on contemporary Waorani politics. While translation is a feature of everyday life, especially for bilingual speakers, it becomes explicit in environmental activism, where even seemingly failed translations do not always get in the way of communication and political alliance. In this process Waorani leaders insist on the difference in living as Waorani people on their ancestral lands and also align their struggle with global discourses of indigeneity, conservation, and even climate change. Their skill is in communicating urgent concerns to powerful outsiders in a common language of environmentalism and Indigenous rights.

Relationships between Amazonian people and a diverse community of environmental allies are less distant and more tangible than ever before. In contrast to the 1980s, when Indigenous people became a symbol of conservation for Western activists hoping to save the Amazon rainforest from the onslaught of economic development (Conklin and Graham 1995), some Amazonian leaders today have themselves become experienced activists on a global stage. This involves close working relationships with NGOs, academics, and state institutions concerned with territorial rights and conservation. They also encounter other Indigenous groups with similar experiences of extractive industries and hostile state policies. Even as anthropologists highlight differences between “Western” and “Amerindian” cosmologies, some Indigenous people are becoming adept at working across such differences (Bodenhorn 2012; Cepek 2012; Oakdale 2022). The global connections reflected in these collaborations in no way guarantees their success in defending lands and livelihoods. But the new possibilities (and risks) Amazonian people are finding in them—and the work of translation they entail—are part of contemporary political life.

Notes

1. Some prominent examples include Boyer and Marcus (2021); Fleuhr-Lobban (2008); Holmes and Marcus (2008); Lassiter (2005); and Rappaport (2008).

2. This emphasis stands in contrast to collaboration’s “darker” definition as an immoral appeal, betrayal, or submission to power.

3. Ingold’s proposal has parallels with feminist anthropologists who suggest that research is as much about cultivating relationships as it is describing, documenting, or translating them (di Leonardo 1991; Ginsburg 1998; Riles 2015, 175).

4. Such an “agonistic” approach to collaboration (Heffernan et al. 2020) resonates with what has been described as the “agonistic-antagonistic” mode of interdisciplinarity (Barry and Born 2013).

5. Examples of this work include Kirsch (2006); Rappaport (2008); Strathern (1991); Viveiros de Castro (2002); and Wagner (1981).

6. Several anthropologists address questions of possibility, whether specifically in Amazonian environmental politics (Cepek 2012), or anthropology more broadly (Graeber 2004; Pandian 2019).

7. Examples of critical writing on the politics of recognition include Bessire (2014); Clifford (1988, 2013); Coulthard (2014); Graham (2005); Povinelli (2002); and C. Taylor (1992).

8. Video is an emergent “technology of imagination” (Sneath et al. 2009, 19) that, for Waorani researchers, brings about indeterminate effects in social life.

9. In linguistic anthropology the study of language ideology explores how such beliefs about language affect the ways people speak (Kroskrity 2000; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994).

10. Acts of interpreting, reporting, paraphrasing, and explaining the words of other people—“intracultural translation”—have a constitutive role in social life, even when not explicitly comparative (Hanks 2014, 18).

11. Such translations are as likely to create equivalences and connections as they are to produce disjuncture, inequality, and incommensurability (Gal 2015, 226).

12. Unlike typical Western ideas of “land,” Waorani people do not generally understand öme as a form of alienable property (Rival 2016).

13. Examples include Descola (1994); Viveiros de Castro (1998); Cormier (2003); and Kohn (2013).

14. For examples of environmental citizenship linked to territorial sovereignty in Amazonia and elsewhere, see Agrawal (2005); Erazo (2013); and West (2006, 2016).

15. Critics argue that the idea of multiple worlds flattens the complexity of social life in order to theorize radical differences (Erazo and Jarret 2018; Nadasday 2021; Vigh and Sausdal 2014), ignores shifting understandings and multiple engagements (Cepek 2016, Graeber 2015), and ultimately presents Amazonian people as an exotic contrast to modernity (Bessire and Bond 2014; Ramos 2012). While some promote such ontological approaches as integral to decolonizing thought (Viveiros de Castro 2014), others see them as reflecting a colonial practice that fails to acknowledge—and lays claim to—what Indigenous people have long known (Todd 2016).

16. For examples of how Indigenous peoples negotiate such multiplicity, see De la Cadena (2010, 2015); High and Oakley (2020); and Kopenawa and Albert (2013).

Back to Excerpts + more