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The Shuar Writing Boom: Cultural Experts And The Creation Of A "Scholarly Tradition", Natalia Buitron, Grégory Deshoulliere

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

In dialogue with Stephen Hugh-Jones’s work on Tukanoan writing, this article analyzes the boom in patrimonial writing among Chicham (Jivaroan)-speaking Shuar people. Patrimonial writing foregrounds collective identity and understandings of culture as group property common to the Tukanoan speakers of the Upper Rio Negro but foreign to the pre-missionized Shuar. We argue that the Shuar interest in patrimonial writing can be explained through the history of missionization and the recent shift to intercultural exchange within the plurinational project of state-building spearheaded by the indigenous movement. By analyzing the wider context of knowledge production and the forms of knowledge Shuar scholars …