Contemporary Shuar beliefs
Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory March 1, 2022 DOI: 10.1086/718962 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Ethnography Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Shuar people in two communities in southeastern Ecuador |
| Citations | 5 |
| Key findings | Argues that the Shuar use of "creer" and "creencia" supersedes assumptions about belief as an epistemic commitment, combining Christian conversion with an ancestral notion of knowledge as instrumental and socially meaningful rather than as truth-seeking representation. The argument is built from ethnographic comparison of two Shuar sites, one where most people claim to believe in shamanic healing and ancestral visionary practices and one where they do not. |
Abstract
The critique of belief as an analytical tool in anthropology has overshadowed belief as an ethnographic reality. This article short-circuits these debates over the politics of belief by elaborating ethnographically the indigenous use of the concept—literally the Spanish “creer” and “creencia”—in Shuar territory in post-conversion Amazonia. It shows that contemporary Shuar “belief” supersedes assumptions about belief as an epistemic commitment. The Shuar concept combines the Christian emphasis on conversion with a relatively stable ancestral notion about the meaning and social significance of knowledge, one that emphasizes its instrumentality, as opposed to the ideology of the truth-seeking cogito striving to make accurate representations of the world. These arguments are advanced by presenting ethnographic material from two distinct sites in Shuar territory in southeastern Ecuador: one in which most people claim to “believe” in shamanic healing and ancestral visionary practices, and one in which they do not.