How the “ecoprimitivist” tourism boom of the early 1990s reshaped the lives of young Kichwa men

We Are Important People Now illuminates the trajectories and life experiences of young Napo Kichwa men who have worked as tour guides in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon, in the wake of the “ecoprimitivist” tourism boom of the early 1990s. Anthropologist Ernesto J. Benitez analyzes the socioeconomic situation of these men and the motivations and desires that drive them to seek service-based employment. Benitez discusses how the tour guides go through complex processes of transition and adjustment navigating tourists’ expectations, familial obligations, and desires for socioeconomic mobility. The opportunities for self-transformation are at once attractive and fraught with contradictions. They now see their indigeneity as an asset, but their urban lifestyles, pursuits of intimate relationships with foreign tourists, and sometimes-dismissive attitudes toward Kichwa people in rural Ecuador distance them socially from the broader Kichwa population. 

Importantly, the book interrogates the possibilities and limitations that produce—and are produced by—such emergent forms of identity formation, situating the current period within a broader analysis of the colonial and postcolonial history of the area. It pays special attention to how different processes of interaction with and incorporation into colonial and state productive and biopolitical regimes have impacted the historical production and performance of Kichwa ethnic and gendered identities in the Upper Amazon region. A wide swath of anthropologists, Latin Americanists, and gender and Indigenous studies specialists will be edified by this timely and accessible narrative.
 

Ernesto J. Benitez is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia.