It has not always been easy to convince the students taking my course on environmental knowledge that one is not born indigenous but becomes indigenous through living with the land intelligently. I hope that Michael Cepek's very engaging book about Cofán conservationist politics will do the trick. This unusual monograph has a brilliant story to tell: indigenous intelligence is alive and kicking, and the global ecological challenges the world faces at the dawn of the twenty-first century can be solved. They will not be solved through uni-directional harvesting of knowledge, however, but through the fostering of genuine exchanges between those who retain an understanding of the ecological and cultural specificity of their environments and researchers seeking to understand the web of relations between ecology, culture and history. The book convincingly shows that diversity should be understood in terms of ecosystemic relations and commitment to ways of life and patterns of resource use that create new standards of living, as well as new social, cultural and political forms. The indigenous intelligence developed by the Cofán people and their allies comes from knowing one's place through dwelling in it. By focusing on a unique experiment, a lifelong alliance forged by a white man with an indigenous community, the author convincingly shows that political mobilisation starts with solving problems that are close to home, and that defending indigenous political rights requires both open-ended pragmatism and essential commitment to core values.
The book presents the experimental pragmatics of Cofán political mobilisation with elegant simplicity. In three chapters, the first half of the book discusses the singular making of a nation and of its most powerful chief, Randy Borman. Like the Tetetes, a neighbouring group now extinct, the Cofán were fated to disappear in the wake of epidemics, colonial violence, land dispossession, drug wars, oil development and state-led modernisation. Borman, a North American fundamentalist Christian who was born and spent his childhood in a Cofán village, could have returned to the United States to resume the life of a ‘normal citizen’ or to prepare himself to lead the life of a proselytising Christian anywhere around the world, but instead he chose to marry Amelia Quenamá, a young Cofán woman, and to dedicate his energies to helping the Cofán defend their land and culture. The second half of the book, also comprising three chapters, describes the political project born out of this marriage. The focus shifts to the non-governmental organisation Borman created to strengthen his and his in-laws' political struggle; the ten-year scientific research collaboration between the Cofán and the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History; and the educational and scholarship programmes aimed at preparing the next generation of Cofán leaders.
In his own eyes, and in the eyes of the majority of Cofán people, Randy Borman is a'i (the word used in Cofán to define human identity). As Cepek demonstrates, Borman also has all the qualities required to be a great Cofán chief. While this double assertion violates the ontological assumptions of Westerners and Ecuadorean nationals alike, it is entirely consistent with what we know of native Amazonian conceptualisations of power and relational identity in general, and of Cofán notions of identity and political leadership in particular. In fact, Borman's life history, as reconstructed by Cepek through months of fieldwork, sheds light on processes of reciprocal incorporation (or mutual absorption?) that must have occurred many times throughout American history – North, Central and South. The author judiciously notes that Borman's ‘cofánness’ is constituted of three main aspects: a love of hunting, a reverence for jaguars, and a mastery of both Cofán language and forest subsistence skills. Moreover, his commitment to fighting strong enemies fearlessly and tirelessly on behalf of his people (pp. 51–2) and with a view to harnessing the economic, political and cultural resources they need to flourish as a nation turns him into ‘the prototype of the ideal Cofán chief in the age of global politics’ (p. 78). To understand the authenticity of the ‘gringo chief’, Cepek argues, we need to pay attention to two complementary cultural constructions. On the one hand, the Cofán are culturally willing to ‘ethnically incorporate others’, as such incorporation lies at the heart of their own identity (p. 69); one has to engage in the process of becoming a'i in order to really be a'i. On the other hand, a gap must exist between ordinary people, who aspire to a tranquil tsampi (forest) life, and the fierce individuals who, in leading them, identify – at least in part – with the violent and morally condemnable forces without which no positive power can ever be gained (p. 96). From a Cofán point of view, it is therefore entirely logical that a relative who lives on the other side of the border with Colombia, who no longer speaks Cofán, whose forested lands are severely degraded and whose family life has been wrecked by social ills is no longer a Cofán. Someone like Borman, by contrast, has the power to articulate people's desires, norms and values. Not unlike a shaman, he is more than an ordinary a'i, hence his capacity to lead the struggle.
That Borman is in fact much more unusual as a North American than as a Cofán becomes clear in the second part of the book. True to his early education, he remains a strong Christian, but he practises his evangelical faith as native Amazonians do. True to his love of nature and freedom, he is a self-made scientist; he has learnt from his own readings of the land and from the books he chose to read, outside the constraints and pitfalls of formal education. And true to his commitment to the values of biocultural diversity conservation, he has used his entrepreneurial skills and connections in the service of indigenous rights, not of business. As Cepek's ethnography makes clear, Borman's heroic waywardness constitutes the basis of the admiration and respect in which Westerners who embrace – or at least support – conservation values hold him. Ecuadoreans seem to have a much more ambivalent appreciation of his native power and encyclopaedic knowledge.
In short, the book invites us to rethink the irresistible appeal someone like Borman has across social, political and cultural boundaries. It would be easy to read his work and achievements cynically, or contemptuously. After all, isn't his self-conscious effort to create hybridity in a world where Indians can only continue to exist as neo-Indians the crux of the matter? Such readings, however, would entirely miss Cepek's argument. Borman is only one Cofán chief among others. Many Cofán men and women are, like him, engaged in the struggle to save the knowledge that the forest and the planet are alive, and to give this knowledge back to those who have lost this understanding, regardless of their ethnic identity.
This is, perhaps, where a gap in this compelling story can be detected. What, then, can be said about the complex and partial relations that bind all Cofán people together? Those who embrace conservation values and those who do not? Those who dwell in protected forest areas and those who chose to live their lives amidst the mixed-blood poor who people the peri-urban sprawls that have mushroomed along the oil frontier? And why are the fairly generic values that, according to Cepek, characterise Cofán culture not more widely shared by all Ecuadoreans and Colombians inhabiting the Amazon region? Surely, the future of this region and of its inhabitants depends on ‘de-ethnicising’ the values of biocultural diversity and its conservation. We must thank Michael Cepek for an ethnography that not only sheds light on indigenous cultural resistance, but also allows us to imagine such questions.
