Steven Rubenstein

Colonialism, the Shuar Federation, and the Ecuadorian State

This author suggests new avenues for thinking about the relationship between formerly stateless societies and the state. It does so through a detailed study of one particular group, the Shuar, indigenous to the Ecuadorian Amazon. Formerly an acephalous society of hunter-gardeners, the Shuar now constitute a federation with a democratically elected, hierarchical leadership and are at the forefront of indigenous movements in Latin America. The author analyzes this transformation in the context of colonialism but argues that colonialism involves far more than the movement of people from one place to another or the extension of state authority over new territory. Rather, he reveals colonialism to hinge on the transformation of sociospatial boundaries. Such transformations were critical not only to Shuar ethnogenesis but also to Ecuadorian state-building. That is, colonialism involves a dialectical reorganization both of the state and of its new subjects.

On the Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar

This essay involves a set of speculations concerning the role plant-granted visions play in the formation of the Shuar subject. It also reflects on the need for an ethnography of secrecy and the ineffable. In both these tasks I seek to engage psychoanalytic theory. Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic helps analyze the relationship between the discourse and the silence of the unconscious. His essay on the “mirror stage” is useful for thinking about bourgeois subjectivity. Nevertheless, I argue that premissionization Shuar did not go through the mirror stage. First, I argue that Shuar practices effected the colonization of the Symbolic by the Real, in contrast to bourgeois culture, in which the Symbolic colonizes the Real. Then I explore the role of desire, violence, and speech in the construction of different kinds of power. Pierre Clastres’ work helps to explore how these two cultures clash and articulate on the colonization frontier, while psychoanalytic theory adds to Clastres a theory of the subject. Ultimately, this article is an experiment in acknowledging the psychic unity of humanity—while at the same time illuminating the differences between the state and societies against the state.

Fieldwork and the Erotic Economy on the Colonial Frontier

T his essay is a personal reflection on doing participant-observation fieldwork in a colonial context, among Shuar Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In particular, I am concerned with the ways power (Foucault 1980) and desire (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) infuse relationships and constitute knowledge and its subjects. This concern is evident in Edward Said’s (1978) argument that “orientalism” is not so much a body of disinterested and objective knowledge as a discourse through which power constituted both the colonizing Occident and the subjugated Orient. This position (following critiques by other scholars, e.g., Derrida 1974) sent shock waves throughout the human and social sciences, initiating a crisis of representation. Perhaps because Said was a literary critic, the predominant response among anthropologists was an inquiry into the literary conventions operating in ethnography and the ways ethnographic texts constitute knowledge (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fisher 1986). Many argued that ethnographies could no longer be accepted as transparent representations of other cultures and began to call attention to the contradictions between ethnographic texts and the research that produces them (see Fabian 1983, xi). The result was a call for textual self-consciousness and innovation. Although the consequent explosion in experimental ethnography is laudable, I believe that the emphasis on the ways in which “authority” is an effect of certain textual conventions misses Said’s main point about