Singing to Estranged Lovers

Abstract

This article examines Runa relations to plants in the Ecuadorian Amazon. By analyzing ritual songs to plants as well as gardening behaviour, it argues that plants are treated like dangerous lovers or difficult children. To find out why this should be the case, it then examines Quichua and Shuar language accounts of the origins of plant species. These accounts suggest that plant species evolve from a previously human state in which the plants were lovers or children who became estranged. The estrangement is triggered by a particular fault called quilla in Quichua. The meaning of this key term includes both 'laziness' and 'sexual looseness'. The resulting emotional estrangement then hardened into a physical transformation giving rise to a new species. Although the fault called quilla is overcome through the transformation, the resulting plants continue to be treated as though they were moody children or lovers prone to withdraw from the gardener. The article concludes by suggesting that treating plants as highmaintenance lovers leads to a kind of gardening that is more costly in terms of time and dedication than most women can afford under conditions of modernity.

The nature of food: indigenous Dene foodways and ontologies in the era of climate change

“…Gill 1982, Grim 2001, Holst 1997, Nabokov 2007. However, how a dependence on the environment for food affects social dynamics that include non-humans has not been addressed (with a few notable exceptions, including Crawford O'Brien 2014, Swanson 2009). Analysis through the foodways stages reveals complex social relationships between hunters, food-animals, and beings who aid in the exchange, such as ancestors and the land itself.…”

Linguistic Natures: Method, Media, and Language Reclamation in the Ecuadorian Amazon

“…Speech and sociality are intimately connected in Napo. Speakers of Upper Napo Kichwa tell stories in which humans and other species once shared an undifferentiated human state, while moral failures led to developing a new language and outward form (Swanson 2009). Ethnolinguistic groups are described by their own languages, so as a Euro‐American I am a speaker of rancia or gringu shimi , while mishu shimi is the language of Spanish‐speaking white‐mestizos.…”

Beyond orality

“…Nevertheless, in Napo Runa ways of speaking and singing, the subjectivity of plant bodies is not always obvious or explicit, and this ambiguity reveals that the moral qualities of most trees and plants do not always equal the moral qualities of humans (Lodoño Sulkin 2005;Seeger 1975;Swanson 2009;Santos Granero 2009). Some plants, however, such as visionary producing ayawaska (and adjuncts used in it), wanduk, and other medicinal plants, are considered more animate, more powerful, and more human.…”