Results by title

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.
 

Examining the expansive nature of Indigenous gender representations in history, literature, and film

Within Native American and Indigenous studies, the rise of Indigenous masculinities has engendered both productive conversations and critiques. Lisa Tatonetti intervenes in this conversation with Written by the Body by centering how female, queer, and/or Two-Spirit Indigenous people take up or refute masculinity, and, in the process, offer more expansive understandings of gender. 

Written by the Body moves from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archive to turn-of-the-century and late-twentieth-century fiction to documentaries, HIV/AIDS activism, and, finally, recent experimental film and literature. Across it all, Tatonetti shows how Indigenous gender expansiveness, and particularly queer and non-cis gender articulations, moves between and among Native peoples to forge kinship, offer protection, and make change. She charts how the body functions as a somatic archive of Indigenous knowledge in Native histories, literatures, and activisms—exploring representations of Idle No More in the documentary Trick or Treaty, the all-female wildland firefighting crew depicted in Apache 8, Chief Theresa Spence, activist Carole laFavor, S. Alice Callahan, Thirza Cuthand, Joshua Whitehead, Carrie House, and more.

In response to criticisms of Indigenous masculinity studies, Written by the Body de-sutures masculinity from the cis-gendered body and investigates the ways in which female, trans, and otherwise nonconforming masculinities carry the traces of Two-Spirit histories and exceed the limitations of settler colonial imaginings of gender.