Shuar warriors
Posted by Adam Jadhav | Filed under ecuador
Warrior pose
During the three weeks I volunteered in the Ecuadorian Amazon, or “en la selva,” I lived in a Shuar community caught between traditional practices and modernization. Meet our volunteer director, Enrique Vargas, a 23-year-old who is studied in traditional ways, drips machismo and wants, in male Shuar fashion, multiple wives.
The villagers also live in poverty, by modern standards. They have cell phones and sturdy homes, but no vehicles and few other modern conveniences. They largely live off their manual labor and the fees paid by volunteers.
This is of course a relative standard of poverty. Any significant purchase or modern medical treatment remains mostly out of reach, but old Shuar traditions are less monetarily intensive. It’s the limbo between existing entirely off la selva and the consumer culture of modern society where the Shuar people in Arutam live.
Enrique was loads of fun and was generally an enjoyable leader if sometimes a bit of a show-off, particularly when the ladies were around. He also had lots of stories, some outlandish, some insightful. His English was OK but more often then not we’d speak in slow Spanish.
This photos comes from one of my first afternoons, when we were practicing throwing “la lanca,” which is made from hard palm wood. The volunteers played with a shorter lance, used for hunting and battle, while Enrique was the only one allowed to touch the longer, sharper, for deadly weapon he holds above.
These three weeks, which will offer many more photos and a few stories in the coming days, were a fantastic time.
Tags: arutam, culture, ecuador, en la selva, enrique, photography, poverty, shenanigans, shuar, volunteering
