The spear as measure: Rage, revenge spear-killing and the transformation of indigenous citizenship in Ecuador

Associate Professor Stine Krøijer has contributed to the journal ‘History and Anthropology’ with the article ‘The spear as measure: Rage, revenge spear-killing and the transformation of indigenous citizenship in Ecuador’.

The article takes its ethnographic point of departure revenge killing among the Huaorani and Tagaeri-Taromenane (a group in voluntary isolation) living in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It describes an accelerating inter-household conflict, and especially its relation to a heated public debate, fuelling the proliferation of the initial conflict.

By thinking with a cultural artefact, the spear, the article shows how the public debate became characterised by competing sense-making projects that scaled revenge killing differently. As an effect, the process entailed a change of change (escalation) occasioned by the intersection of competing, but incommensurable scales. This ended up transforming the relation between the Huaorani and State.

Read the article (open access): The spear as measure: Rage, revenge spear-killing and the transformation of indigenous citizenship in Ecuador