Review by Choice Review
Muratorio (University of British Columbia) adds significantly to knowledge of the Quichua of Ecuador's Oriente in this somewhat unusual combination of ethnography and history. The "life story" of an elder of the Napo Quichua, Grandfather Alonso, is interwoven with the history of interactions between indios and blancos in the Oriente. Muratorio collected Alonso's life story on tape in the early 1980s and spent the rest of the decade compiling the accompanying "life history" from archival sources. The result is an in-sequence series of portraits of the Quichua of the Tena-Archidona area that is better than either anthropology or history alone could have produced. The oncoming government agents, missionaries, gold miners, rubber and oil magnates, and cattle grandees are seen through Grandfather Alonso's eyes as well as those of the "civilizers" and of the author. Some of the scenes are dramatic indeed: blancos, especially the Josephine nuns sent in to help the Jesuits make conversions, being hauled over the High Andes on the indios' backs; cattle and mining interests "reducing" the indios still more by "commodity peonage" at the company store; Shell Oil becoming enmeshed in the resulting "precapitalist system" by buying labor from local bigwigs; above all, the Quichua, whose "cultural bases of resistance" give the lie to Native American passivity, turning the Christ of the Jesuits and, later, of the Evangelicals into one of their shamanist-spirits (yachaj). The Quichua spiritual resistance embodied in Grandfather Alonso's life story has by now collapsed; the Quichua young have become modern and will no longer listen to him. Upper-division undergraduates and above. T. J. Knight; Colorado State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
