Ungrateful predators:1 capture

and the creation of Cofán

violence
Michael Cepek University of Texas at San Antonio

In this article, I explore the history, logic, and practice of capture among the Cofán people of
Amazonian Ecuador. Rather than acting as the subjects of capture, Cofán people have primarily been
its objects. Centuries of pre-Conquest, colonial, and postcolonial violence have exposed Cofán
communities to repeated seizures by indigenous and non-indigenous aggressors. Although capture by
enemy others is a feared prospect that typically brings disaster, it also serves as the Cofán nation’s
central means of acquiring violent powers, which are essential to its defence. By investigating the
uncertainties of capture as a productive process, I question dominant representations of native
Amazonians as wilful participants in a cosmos of generalized predation, and I issue a plea for openness
when considering the diversity of the region’s peoples.

In a marvellous article published in Society against the State, Pierre Clastres . . . asked: what do Indians
laugh about? By analogy, I wish to ask: what are Indians afraid of? The response is, in principle (and
only ever in principle . . . ), simple: they laugh at and fear the same things, the same ones indicated
by Clastres: things such as jaguars, shamans, whites and spirits – that is, beings defined by their
radical alterity. And they are afraid because alterity is the object of an equally radical desire on the
part of the Self. This is a form of fear that, far from demanding the exclusion or disappearance of
the other in order for the peace of self-identity to be recuperated, necessarily implies the inclusion or
incorporation of the other or by the other (by also in the sense of ‘through’), as a form of perpetuation
of the becoming-other that is the process of desire in Amazonian socialities.
Viveiros de Castro 2012: 29

In this article, I explore the history, logic, and practice of capture among Ecuador’s
indigenous Cofán people. In doing so, I question the portrait of Amazonian desire
sketched by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and echoed by regional specialists. The Cofán,
similar to many peoples of lowland South America, attribute immense power to their
socio-cosmological others. Rather than striving to seize this power through intentional
acts predicated on a cannibalistic logic, the Cofán hope to avoid it entirely. For them,
radical alterity is synonymous with the threat of physical and metaphysical capture, a
deeply feared, typically disastrous, and ever-present possibility.
Becoming an object of capture, though, offers a complicated hope. Against the
odds, some Cofán people survive the experience and acquire their captors’ capacities,

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thereby becoming violent agents themselves. The ability to engage others with
aggressiveness, fearlessness, and force – the very meaning of Cofán violence – has
been an essential weapon against the Cofán nation’s historical antagonists, including
Amazonian raiders, Spanish soldiers, Capuchin priests, and Colombian armed factions.
Despite its instrumental value, however, the violent agency acquired via capture is
unwilled, destructive, and ultimately unwanted. Even when capture does not result in
the death or disappearance of the individuals who undergo it, it endows them with a
capacity that most Cofán conceptualize as a painful means rather than a desired end.
When pondering capture as an abstract structural logic, it is tempting to view it
as a desirable and dependable mechanism. When viewed more immediately as an
unintended and unpredictable experience, a more complete picture of the practice
emerges. In July 2012, I witnessed capture’s affective power in a near-disastrous event.
On the day I arrived at my main fieldsite to begin a study of the Cofán nation’s
park guard programme, my most important collaborator disappeared. That morning,
four masked, armed men stormed the park guard headquarters and kidnapped Felipe
Borman,2 the programme’s co-ordinator and son of well-known Cofán leader Randy
Borman (Cepek 2012). Terrifying uncertainty overcame everyone. No one knew where
Felipe was, who had taken him, whether he was alive or dead, and whether the threat
was specific or general. Rumours quickly identified the motive as vengeance. Recently,
Felipe had overseen the burning of illegal gold-mining camps. In their native language
of A’ingae, people affirmed the certainty of miner retaliation: ‘Antteyambi’ (They will
not relent).
Luckily, the story ended without tragedy. Felipe escaped after forty days of captivity
in Colombian forest camps. The event was profoundly unsettling, but when I saw
Felipe the following year, he appeared remarkably untroubled. I met him in Lago
Agrio, the site of his kidnapping, to buy supplies together for a trip to his home
community of Zábalo. Although he had cut his hair to become less recognizable, he
walked openly through the city’s public spaces. When we arrived at Zábalo, I saw three
shotguns inside his house, propped next to the doors. I asked if he was at risk in the
village, which is only ten kilometres from Colombia at its northern limit. He smiled
and proclaimed, ‘No, we have too many guns here’. Most Cofán express amazement at
Felipe’s fortitude. No one knows the ultimate consequences of his capture, but in the eyes
of many Cofán people, he now has a special aura. Perhaps he will emerge as the Cofán
nation’s most effective defensive weapon. Given the terror he endured, however, the
primary attitude towards him is sympathy. No Cofán person wants to undergo a similar
experience.
In the remainder of this article, I flesh out my investigation of Cofán capture by
exploring the dynamics of such trials as Felipe’s. By doing so, I aim to question the
representation of native Amazonians as wilful participants in a world of ‘generalized
predation’ (Viveiros de Castro 2002: 164). According to this idea, predation is the
‘unique and somewhat transcendental scheme governing all major aspects of social life’
in Amazonia (Taylor 2001: 46), from gardening, hunting, and shamanism to ‘kinship,
gender relations, eschatology, [and] onomastics’ (Costa & Fausto 2010: 97). These
practices, according to many Amazonianists, involve strategic moves in a ‘symbolic
economy of alterity’ (Viveiros de Castro 1996: 190), a system in which all beings,
human or otherwise, are predators that can only produce themselves by capturing and
incorporating the powers of others. The idea of generalized predation is essential to
nearly all synthetic models of Amazonian life- and thought-ways, from ‘perspectivism’

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(Viveiros de Castro 1998) to ‘potential affinity’ (Viveiros de Castro 2001) to ‘the political
economy of life’ (Santos-Granero 2009).
The Cofán do inhabit a predatory world, but they do not conceptualize themselves,
their actions, or their means of reproduction as predatory in nature. Insofar as
the label applies at all, they are profoundly ungrateful predators. For the Cofán,
predatory agency is an unexpected, unrequested, and painfully secured ‘gift’ from
others. Capture’s onset, form, and consequences are beyond Cofán initiative, control,
and comprehension. Unlike Viveiros de Castro’s ‘Indians’, the Cofán do not desire and
strategically incorporate the difference they fear. Instead, they hope for its evasion
and destruction. Paradoxically, only capture can produce beings powerful enough to
accomplish this task. At most, such agents occupy a contingent and minority position
in Cofán society, which profits solely from their defensive abilities. Returned captives
make no positive contributions to the substance of Cofán souls or bodies.
I situate Cofán capture within the literature’s dominant trends and marginal currents.
Cofán people’s acceptance of cultural powers from colonial violence makes them
similar to the Wari’ (Vilaça 2010), the Piro (Gow 1991; 2001), and the inhabitants
of the Colombian Putumayo (Taussig 1987). Their idea of themselves as beings who
occupy the bottom, rather than the top, of predatory food chains is shared by the
Huaorani (Rival 1998), the Kanamari (Costa 2009), the Paumari (Bonilla 2009), and
the Urarina (Walker 2012). Their inward-looking preference for peacefulness supports
Joanna Overing’s thesis on Amazonian ‘conviviality’ (Overing & Passes 2000), and
their outward-looking awareness of historical victimization echoes Magnus Course’s
account of Mapuche failures to maintain a ‘controlled engagement with difference’
(2013: 774). Clearly, the Cofán stance towards capture exhibits commonalities with the
understandings of other lowland South Americans. A broader objective of this article,
however, is to argue for openness when contemplating the cultural specificities of the
region’s peoples.
I begin by reviewing the synthetic work on Amazonian predation. In the next section,
I outline the history of Cofán capture from pre-Conquest times through contemporary
political-economic circumstances. I then explore capture’s basic logic, which I uncover
via an analysis of Cofán mythology, shamanism, and oral history. I conclude with a
set of reflections on the ethnological and theoretical implications of the Cofán case,
which highlights the promises and pitfalls of the assumptions at work in contemporary
representations of Amazonian peoples.

Amazonian predation
In a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago, one of my dissertation advisers,
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, paraphrased and appended Marshall Sahlins’s famous
line from Waiting for Foucault, still (2002) to quip: ‘In the end, not only are we all
dead, we are all wrong. Lévi-Strauss is the only one who lived long enough to be right
again’. Although he is no longer with us, Lévi-Strauss continues to exert a dominating
influence on Amazonianist anthropology. In a foreword to a volume on Amazonian
historicities, Carneiro da Cunha writes:

[Lévi-Strauss proposed the idea of the] Amerindian ‘openness to the Other’, which translates into
the regimentation of alterity for the production of identity, assimilating one’s enemy as a mode of
reproduction. While the logic of the West lies in the primacy of distinctions, Amazonian logic lies
on the primacy of appropriation, of encompassment, cannibalism being one of its manifestations.

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Predation, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1992 [1986]) has eloquently shown, is the basic, given,
relational mode (Carneiro da Cunha 2007: xii).

The idea that a multiplicity of indigenous cultures are transformations of a single

regional logic is developed most profoundly in Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques, which
begins with The raw and the cooked (1983 [1964]). Amazonianists, though, typically cite
The story of Lynx (1995 [1991]) as his most relevant statement on the Amerindian
‘openness to the Other’. The concept is related to Philippe Erikson’s notion of
‘constitutive alterity’ (1986), and scholars such as Aparecida Vilaça mobilize it in
hemispheric representations such as: ‘For Amerindians, difference is structural and
needs to be maintained’ (2010: 309).
Perhaps more than specialists of any other region, Amazonianists recognize the utility
of Lévi-Strauss’s synthetic framework for making sense of their ethnographic data. Peter
Gow writes, ‘It is increasingly obvious that, at some level, the socio-cosmological systems
of all indigenous Amazonian peoples are topological transformations of each other in
ways that are neither trivial nor over-generalized’ (2001: 300). From this perspective, one
can never grasp the true logic of one’s ethnographic material by looking at it in isolation,
or even through the eyes of one’s research consultants. Rather, it is but one variation
on a deeper conceptual system, which forms the ultimate object of anthropological
investigation. Summarizing both Gow and Lévi-Strauss, Luiz Costa and Carlos Fausto
assert, ‘[I]n their diversity, Amerindian cultures and societies are transformations of
an underlying logic that does not reveal itself in the ethnography of any given group,
but which is partially and differentially manifest in all of them’ (2010: 91). Accordingly,
ethnography and ethnology are especially intertwined operations in studies of lowland
South America.
For many Amazonianists, predation and the connected ideas of potential affinity
and perspectivism are component concepts of a ‘grand unifying theory’ of Amazonian
sociality (Viveiros de Castro 2001: 19). Predation has been called many things: for
Anne-Christine Taylor, it is a ‘stance’ (2007: 158) and a ‘hyper-relation’ (2001: 54);
for Carlos Fausto, it is a ‘schema’ (2007: 500), an ‘all-encompassing cosmological
operator’ (Costa & Fausto 2010: 97), and an ‘asymmetric vector of identification-
alteration’ (2008: 5); for Philippe Descola, it defines ‘predatory animism’, a widespread
Amazonian cosmology and ontology (2013 [2005]: 345). In an attempt to clarify the
term’s uses, Taylor explains that it can refer to: (1) a purely abstract, theoretical
construct, perhaps best translated as ‘incorporation’; (2) the specific symbolic
form that incorporation takes among different peoples and in different cultural
contexts; and (3) actual acts of capturing, killing, and consuming others (2001:
55).
The idea of native Amazonians as wilful participants in a cosmos of generalized
predation portrays their basic stance towards others as one of intentional capture and
incorporation. According to the anthropologists who work with them, many peoples
hold that to occupy the position of predator is to claim the status of human (Taylor
2007; Vilaça 2010). Viveiros de Castro writes that in the ‘Amerindian’ ontology of
perspectivism, subjecthood itself is defined largely in terms of a predator’s vantage-
point (1998: 470). A number of logical consequences follow from these ideas: the
predator position implies subjectivity, agency, intentionality, and possession of a soul.
In other words, to be a predator is to be a person, or at least to have an agentive, human,
‘predator part’ (Fausto 2007: 513).

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Meticulous descriptive ethnographers produce much of the comparative scholarship

on Amazonia, and they typically qualify their conclusions with caveats, provisos, and
clarifications. Carlos Fausto admits that some peoples have ‘less predatory ideologies’
than others (2007: 498). Fernando Santos-Granero divides the anthropologists of
Amazonia into a ‘hawk camp’ and a ‘dove camp’, with the former arguing that the
predatory scheme is much more widespread than the latter are willing to admit
(2000: 269). Philippe Descola rejects Santos-Granero’s grouping of him with the hawks,
claiming, ‘For my part, I have never suggested that predation is the only way of treating
“others” in Amazonia’ (2013 [2005]: 425). In the same book, however, he writes,

There are now so many rich and detailed ethnographical works that interpret the logic behind the
actions of this or that ethnic group in the lowlands of South America according to the schema of
generalized predation that the case of the Jivaros [with whom he did his own research] no longer
seems exceptional (2013 [2005]: 345).

Despite his recognition of multiple ethnographic camps, Viveiros de Castro suggests

that all Amazonian peoples accept predation and affinity as ‘givens’ and conviviality and
consanguinity as ‘constructs’. He argues that even the most peaceful, inward-looking
peoples stress the endpoint of difference’s incorporation without denying alterity’s
primary constitutive role (2001: 37-8).
Many specialists offer important modifications of the idea of Amazonian predation.
Fausto, for example, proposes the model of ‘familiarizing predation’ (1999). This
concept highlights many predatory acts’ dependence on more ‘peaceful’ moments of
adoptive filiation. In his meditations on practices as diverse as Tupinambá cannibalism,
Jivaroan and Mundurucú head hunting, and Parakanã dreaming, singing, and naming
rites, Fausto argues that indigenous Amazonians capture and domesticate human and
nonhuman others – often conceptualized as pets or children – before affirming and
incorporating their threatening agency, often through literal or figurative execution.
The acts create new names, statuses, and capacities across the killer’s group (Fausto
1999: 947-8). The movement of familiarizing predation involves ‘a recurring opposition
between enmity, ferocity, and self-consciousness on one hand, and familiarization,
taming, and alienation on the other’ (Fausto 1999: 941).
While Fausto argues that processes productive of Amazonian selves are
simultaneously predatory and familiarizing, Santos-Granero proposes a different
modification of the idea of generalized predation. In Vital enemies (2009), he analyses
six tropical American societies whose lives revolved around captive slavery, which
involved continuous seizures of people who were incapable of symmetrical retaliation.
In some cases, individuals taken from neighbouring groups composed as much as
40 per cent of the capturing society’s population (Santos-Granero 2009: 227). This
extraordinary number recalls Lévi-Strauss’s report from a Caduveo group, who claimed
to despise biological reproduction and to rely mainly on captured children to produce
new generations (2012 [1955]: 181). Santos-Granero’s cases, though, are outliers: these
peoples were constantly at war; they occupied the apex of regional interethnic systems;
and they were developing supra-local forms of authority, which were by no means
Native American universals. None the less, Santos-Granero uses his examples to propose
a general representation of Amerindian peoples as ‘capturing societies’ (2009: 14). The
material he examines, however, describes how many tropical Americans experienced
capture as objects rather than subjects. Some of them, apparently, belonged to captured
rather than capturing societies, at least in interethnic terms.

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A third modification of the notion of generalized predation comes from

Amazonianists who work with peoples who recognize ‘submission as a specific form
of indigenous agency’ (Fausto 2013: 171). According to Costa, Kanamari people attempt
to transform the relationship between predator and prey into one between master and
pet, with themselves occupying the pet position and non-indigenous bosses acting
as provisioning masters. A successful transformation ‘allows the predatory alterity of
dangerous others to be attenuated by voluntary submission of prey’ (Costa 2009: 176-
7). Similarly, Oiara Bonilla (2009) and Harry Walker (2012) explore the perspectives of
peoples who hope to avoid predation by subordinating themselves to others, thereby
eliciting pity and ‘paternalistic benevolence’ (Walker 2012: 142). Fausto expands these
ideas to include the possibility of willed capture, writing, ‘From the perspective of
whoever is adopted-captured, being or placing oneself in the position of an orphan or
a wild pet is more than just a negative and inescapable injunction: it may also be . . .
a positive way of eliciting attention and generosity’ (2008: 5). For peoples who desire
such a position, being a human is not reducible to being a predator, even if predators
are sought for the symbolic and material resources they represent.
A fourth modification to the scheme of generalized predation comes from Laura
Rival (2002), who works with the Huaorani people of Amazonian Ecuador. Rival’s
ethnography paints a picture of Huaorani sociality that is strikingly similar to the Cofán
ideal. The Huaorani, like the Cofán, envision themselves as prey rather than predators.
Both peoples would prefer to evade or destroy, rather than sustain and incorporate,
enemy powers. Neither group willingly subjects itself to dominant peoples, which makes
them distinct from the cases analysed by Bonilla, Costa, and Walker. In a passage that
summarizes the Huaorani position, Rival writes:
The Huaorani do not imagine themselves as achieving their true humanity by becoming immortal,
divine predators. On the contrary, they see themselves as the victims of predators, as prey constantly
on the run, fleeing persecution, death, and being eaten. Huaorani people do not seek transcendental
immortality; rather, they consider earthly life really worth living, even if it means living in constant
danger of being killed and eaten up. The good life they aspire to requires that they secure complete
cultural and political autonomy and that they reproduce without the intervention of external creators
(1998: 62).

The similarity between Huaorani and Cofán stances is ironic, however. The Cofán
know of the Huaorani, whom they fear for their violence, and the Huaorani appear in
Cofán mythology as enemy others. Not only are the Huaorani infamous for spearing
invaders of their territory; they also have one of the ethnographic record’s highest rates
of death by intra-tribal raiding (Beckerman et al. 2009), and they practise intra-ethnic
bride capture, too (Erickson 2008). Despite these paradoxes, anthropologists should
take seriously the radical nature of Rival’s claim. Although the shift from predator to
prey might appear to be a simple structural inversion of the accepted Amazonian logic,
Rival’s argument is more profound. According to her, Huaorani people do not rely upon
the incorporation of alterity for their socio-symbolic reproduction. They are neither
generalized predators nor members of a capturing society nor pets, prey, or orphans
who augment their agency by wilfully subjecting themselves to others. In short, they do
not recognize the substantive contribution of difference to their lives.
Reviewing the literature on Amazonian predation, it is clear that the model is a
tremendously useful tool for understanding the perspectives and practices of many
South American peoples. Nevertheless, its modifications and limitations are equally
important. Predation often overlaps with familiarization. In violent interethnic systems,

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it describes the actions of some, but not all, social groups. It is a force that many peoples
attempt to co-opt and control via acts of wilful submission. And, for at least a few
peoples, it is an existential threat to be avoided or extinguished, if possible. Below, I
examine the Cofán case to determine the ways in which it does and does not correspond
to the main tenets and multiple modifications of the generalized predation framework.

Violence and the history of Cofán capture

The central A’ingae word for ‘capture’ is indiye. It is the main term for catching the
offspring of forest animals to raise as pets – a common Amazonian practice. It also refers
to the point when a snake’s bite incapacitates a person after a successful envenomation.
When tobacco or hallucinogens induce transformative inebriation, people say that they
have indi (past tense) the consumer. When people are sick, a shaman often determines
that their canse’pa (life-force) has been indi by a malevolent supernatural agent. In
order to cure the person, the shaman dreams or takes hallucinogenic drugs, enters the
violent being’s house, and convinces it to free the canse’pa, which appears as a pet parrot
or macaw. People sometimes speak of birth as the indiye of infants. Elders tell children
that a vajo agreed to part with the baby. ‘Vajo’ refers to a class of dangerous beings who
act as game owners and sometimes appear as monstrous versions of colonial priests. My
oldest collaborators spoke of mestizo traders who indi Cofán children, brought them
to faraway towns, and returned them as adults. Finally, indiye is the main word for
kidnapping by criminals and imprisonment by soldiers or police.
Capture continues to be an everyday occurrence and a historical memory for
Ecuador’s 1,200 Cofán citizens, who live in the northern province of Sucumbı́os, along
the Colombian border. (Cofán people also live on the other side of the border.) Although
hunting, fishing, gardening, and gathering continue to be important activities, Cofán
people now earn money by selling crops and working as schoolteachers, canoe makers,
oil company employees, wilderness guides, and park guards. Two main organizations
mediate Cofán relations with encompassing political-economic forces: the Indigenous
Federation of the Cofán Nationality of Ecuador, the Cofán nation’s central political
institution; and the Foundation for the Survival of the Cofán People, a Cofán-
controlled nongovernmental organization that negotiates funding and legal support
for conservation initiatives.
Cofán territory ranges from Andean mountaintops to Amazonian lowlands, and
it contains some of the world’s most biologically diverse spaces. Eastern Ecuador,
however, is subject to intense environmental threats. Since the 1990s, it has exhibited
one of the highest deforestation rates in South America (Butler 2013; Little 1992). Large-
scale environmental transformations began with the commencement of oil extraction
in the 1960s (Kimerling 1991; Vickers 2003). After the Texaco corporation discovered
substantial reserves under Cofán territory, the area changed radically: roads sliced
through forests; pipelines dissected landscapes; oil wastes spilled and burned; and
colonists cut down vegetation for farms and ranches, dispossessing Cofán people in the
process.
Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s current president, has struggled to retake control of the
country’s oil industry from private corporations (Arsel 2012; Swartz & Alvaro 2010).
None the less, he is committed to increasing resource extraction at almost any cost. In
recent years, Chinese corporations have emerged as the main actors willing to deal with
Correa’s policies and to take on indigenous Ecuadorians’ opposition to oil, mining,
and hydroelectric ventures (Schipani 2013). In 2007, Correa imprisoned indigenous

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Amazonians who resisted oil extraction and labelled them ‘terrorists’ (Becker 2011: 57-8).
In 2009, the government arrested, beat, and shot anti-mining protesters (Latin American
Weekly Report 2009). Correa has threatened to expel international environmental NGOs,
whom he accuses of manipulating the country’s indigenous movement (Webber 2010).
Government repression creates unease in Sucumbı́os. The fear is compounded by
the political situation in Colombia’s neighbouring department of Putumayo, which has
suffered decades of civil war and sent tens of thousands of refugees into Ecuador (Hylton
2003; Ramı́rez 2012). Currently, the border is marked by poverty, lack of infrastructure,
trafficking of arms and drugs, heightened criminal activity (including kidnapping),
and de facto control by militant groups, especially the leftist Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC) (Walcott 2008). In her study of Ecuadorian border politics,
Maiah Jaskowski (2012) notes the lack of police presence as well as a debilitating policy
contradiction: to prevent Colombian armed actors from entering Ecuadorian territory
while avoiding conflict with them at all costs.
The Cofán homeland, in short, is an intensely violent space. Unfortunately, the
violence is nothing new. Before Europeans arrived, the Cofán fought off Inca incursions
(R. Borman 2009: 223; Robinson 1979: 24). Soon after the Spanish reached western
South America, they encountered the Cofán in the eastern Andean foothills. Soldiers
descended the mountains, battled Cofán warriors, and captured Cofán prisoners,
whom they kept as slaves (Friede 1952: 203; Newson 1995: 332). For many years,
the Cofán remained unconquered, and they responded to intrusions by destroying
colonial outposts. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Jesuit priests
made inroads into Cofán territory. They described the inhabitants as ‘bellicose’. In the
seventeenth-century Spanish imaginary, the Cofán were associated with the limits of
control and an impinging, dangerous wildness (Kohn 2002: 552-3).
By the middle of the eighteenth century, after being ravaged by violence and disease,
the Cofán had ceased to be a concern, and they disappeared from colonial records. At
the end of the nineteenth century, rubber workers and Capuchin missionaries took
a new interest in their territory. Although the area never saw the extreme violence
analysed by Michael Taussig (1987), it served as a battleground between priests who
coveted Cofán souls and traders who desired Cofán labour (Friede 1952; Wasserstrom
2014). The Capuchins made numerous trips across Cofán territory. They established
towns to ‘reduce’ the Cofán and put their children in school. The traders ‘attracted’ the
Cofán with cloth, steel tools, and firearms. At radically unfair rates, exchange for the
goods left many individuals in debt, which they paid by harvesting forest products. In
archival records and Cofán oral history, the relations of force are difficult to discern.
None the less, Cofán people repeatedly found themselves in rubber camps and mission
sites, where epidemics killed many of them. By the late 1920s, most Cofán had fled as
far as possible from the intruders (Friede 1952: 208-9; Wasserstrom 2014: 533-4).
The Colombian historian Juan Friede reports that when he did fieldwork in the
1940s, almost all Cofán ran into the forest whenever a ‘white’ approached (1952: 214).
Few offered information for fear that they would be ensnared in exploitative work
relations once again (Friede 1952: 205). Most of my older research consultants remember
the period well. They recounted the myth that Capuchin priests had tricked Cofán
people into building giant churches, then lured them inside and massacred them with
machetes. In the 1940s, North Americans began to arrive as researchers, missionaries,
and oil workers. Elders cautioned the young to flee from them, as the Gringondeccu
were reputed cannibals. In 2013, one older woman told me that her mother warned her

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never to shake the hand of a mestizo. The outsiders were known to turn this friendly
gesture on its head. They could grab the child’s hand and pull him or her into their
boat, thus ensuring a life of servitude in a distant city.
Capture, in short, has been a feared possibility throughout Cofán history. The
Spanish enslaved the Cofán. Missionaries took Cofán children from their families
and placed them in schools. Rubber traders lured Cofán people into exploitative
work relations. Ecuadorian soldiers conscripted Cofán individuals as porters and
boatmen. Guerrillas, paramilitaries, and coca traffickers employed Colombian Cofán,
often under the threat of violence. (Some Cofán have been jailed or killed for such
involvements.) More broadly, the entire Colombian situation has devolved into a state of
figurative captivity. Armed factions and common criminals threaten and invade Cofán
communities. Ecuadorian Cofán assert that their Colombian kin have succumbed to
the siege, becoming fittipa (killers) themselves. Finally, given Correa’s crackdown on
indigenous activism, many Cofán fear that if they protest against state plans, they will
end up in prison. Already, some have been jailed for carrying shotgun shells, which,
although used solely for hunting, are interpreted by police as threats to civil order.
Despite the onslaught, the Cofán no longer believe that all outsiders are captors.
Young Cofán feel increasingly comfortable in provincial towns, and many have non-
Cofán friends and jobs in non-Cofán settings. None the less, the majority of Cofán
people continue to define their ideal life as peaceful sociality among themselves. They
oppose their mode of living to the violence they attribute to nearly all other peoples,
indigenous or otherwise. Most Cofán conceptualize a preferable existence as one in
which they are distant from and untroubled by enemy others (Cepek 2012: 79-99).
They describe an ideal life with the metaphor of game animals residing in unhunted
forests. For them, a desirable existence is one of free, curious, healthy, and productive
movement in a landscape devoid of predatory difference. Their social ideal, in other
words, appears to be a direct denial of constitutive alterity, the idea that ‘the inside and
identity are equated with a lack of fertility and movement in such a way that the overall
reproduction of society is symbolically dependent on relations with the outside and
otherness’ (Fausto 1999: 934).
Although the Cofán use goods and powers that originate outside their communities,
they do not identify with the supposed Amazonian commitment to generalized
predation. Instead, their whole ethos suggests that they would more effectively
reproduce themselves if their socio-cosmological others would maintain their distance,
cease their attacks, and leave Cofán people alone. In apparent disagreement with the
Huaorani (Rival 1998), however, the Cofán do recognize that at least one useful capacity
– defensive violence – can only come from external enemies. Attaining this ability,
though, necessitates capture: an unwilled, unwanted, and typically disastrous process
that is initiated and managed by others.

The logic of Cofán capture

Most Cofán do not remember stories about battling colonial forces. Nearly all,
however, know a myth that describes their extermination of neighbouring native
peoples, including the Tetete (unclothed Western Tukanoans, or ‘savages’), the Ai’pa
(periodically hostile Western Tukanoans), and the Avushiri (warring people whom the
Cofán associate with the Huaorani). The myth highlights two important ethnographic
facts: it depicts the exploits of Erición, the only named Cofán culture hero; and it
describes Erición’s capture at the hands of enemy others. Usually, people call the myth

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Tetete Coen’cho (The Child Who Was Raised by Savages). Here, I present a version that
includes only the essential elements, although it is formally complete:
Long ago, while her husband was drinking manioc beer, a woman took her young son to harvest
plantains. The child’s name was Erición. A Tetete raiding party was hiding in her garden. As the
woman approached, the Tetete shouted, terrifying her. They captured her and her son and jabbed
spears into the plantain plants so that the Cofán would think she had been killed. The next day,
her husband woke and wondered where she was. ‘Where did my wife go?’ he asked the others. They
told him that she crossed the river for plantains. The Cofán searched for her, but they returned after
concluding that she and Erición had been killed. The woman’s husband ceased to think about it.
When Erición became an adolescent, the Tetete began his training. They boiled different plants in
a large pot. A Tetete shaman commanded Erición to drink the emetic brew. He vomited a lot. They
made bamboo spears and stood them up in the ground. Then, they commanded Erición to climb
a tall tree. His mother watched and thought, ‘Now my son is going to die’. But Erición said, ‘Watch
without fear – I won’t die’. From the treetop, he threw himself onto the spears. They left only small
scratches on his skin. The Tetete shaman said, ‘He still isn’t done. Continue to drink the emetic brew’.
When the training was finished, they stood up the spears again and commanded Erición to jump.
This time, he wasn’t even scratched. ‘Now he’s done’, said the shaman.
For five days, the Tetete made spears. When they finished, the shaman said, ‘Let’s go kill the Cofán’.
Erición’s mother remembered who she was, but Erición didn’t. She said, ‘Don’t kill them. Your father
lives there. These are Tetete who live here’. Erición understood.
The next day, the Tetete shaman commanded Erición, ‘Go and count the houses of the Cofán’.
Erición snuck close to the Cofán village and sat beside a trail. A man who had been drinking manioc
beer approached. Erición said, ‘I have come’. ‘What people are you from?’ asked the man. ‘The Tetete
captured me and my mother, and now that I’m grown I’ve returned’, he replied. ‘All right, come with
me’, said the man. They entered a house. The people asked, ‘Why have you come?’ Erición replied,
‘The Tetete are planning to kill you. Now listen: I will come back with the Tetete. I’ll wear a palm-leaf
headband so you can recognize me. The Tetete will wear crowns of toucan feathers’. ‘All right’, they
replied, and Erición left.
The next day, the Tetete came to kill the Cofán. Erición was in front, and he arrived first. He entered
his father’s house and put on a tunic and beads and became a Cofán. He said to his people, ‘Don’t
go outside. The Tetete will kill you. Stay in the house. I will kill the Tetete myself’. He went outside.
The Tetete tried to spear him, but they couldn’t. His body was impenetrable. He caught the spears
and piled them up. Then, he used them to kill the Tetete. He killed almost all of them, but two fled
into the forest. ‘It’s our shaman-trained Cofán who is killing us’, they said. Erición chased and killed
them. Then he arrived at their village and killed all the women and children. He found his mother
and brought her back.
Erición slept until dawn, and then he went in search of another Tetete village. He killed them, too.
The next day he went to the Deer Ai’pa village. He killed them, too. Then he went to kill all the Oriole
Ai’pa. Then he went to kill all the Avushiri. But one of them fled with a small girl across the Napo
River. Erición returned home, where he died as an old man. The two Avushiri survived and multiplied
on the other side of the Napo. Some people say they are the Huaorani. They are the only Tetete left.3

As would be expected of an Amazonian violent capture myth, Erición’s story centres

on the acquisition of predatory agency from enemy others. From the Cofán perspective,
however, the movement works in reverse. A peaceful people who harvest plantains
and drink manioc beer, the Cofán are targets of Tetete aggression. Ill equipped to
defend themselves, they rely on their others for arms. The Tetete provide them with
an impenetrable body, a warrior disposition, and the instruments of battle. At the
final moment, Erición recalls his Cofán-ness and unleashes the power of otherness on
otherness itself. His killings generate no new names or capacities in the wider Cofán
nation, and his warfare ends violence rather than perpetuates it. In short, he does not
sustain difference, he destroys it, and he returns to a life of peace after he concludes his
‘work’. From my perspective, it makes most sense to interpret the myth as the seductive
dream of a persecuted people, who hope to extinguish the condition of enmity itself. The

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last thing they want is to inhabit and generalize the predator position, which produces
no positive content for their lives.
When my research consultants proclaim Cofán peacefulness, I ask them about
Erición. They typically reply that he was only one man, and that he learned to kill from
Tetete. Sometimes, I press the matter, reciting stories about violent Cofán shamans, who
killed ‘with spirit projectiles’ rather than ‘with their hands’. Yes, they say, but the great
shamans of the past have tisepanaccu guerraemba pa’fa (made war among themselves
and died). The association of the Spanish word guerra (war) with shamanism is telling.
Even in Erición’s story, the linkage of shamanic training and violent capacities is clear.
Today, the main Cofán individuals whom other Cofán fear are shamans. Although they
are predators, their practice is deeply intertwined with the condition of captivity.
Many Cofán people drink yaje (Banisteriopsis caapi) and other vision-producing
substances (Fig. 1). Some possess invisible stones and glass shards, projectiles that can
be used to cure and kill. A few have spirit darts, which they acquired from neighbouring
Napo Runa shamans. The great majority of Cofán people, however, are opa (ingenuous
and devoid of shamanic power) (Cepek 2012: 79-99). They depend on shamans for
defence and healing, but they distrust all individuals who enthusiastically approach and
battle others. Consequently, they view shamans with deep ambivalence, even when they
are friends or family members.
Shamanism requires intense will. It seems counterintuitive to view it as a state of
captivity, in which the absence of agency is life’s defining quality (Santos-Granero
2009: 195). Upon closer examination, however, the paradox unravels. The attainment
of shamanic power is not as volitional as it appears. Many of its subjects are children
with limited freedom. Often, people begin drinking hallucinogens at the age of 7 or
8, typically at the insistence of older individuals. People sometimes send children to
train with feared experts in other communities, Cofán or otherwise. (In some cases,
the experts actively request the students, and many parents are too afraid to refuse.)
Apprenticeship is the most asymmetrical relationship in Cofán society. For a year or
more, apprentices live apart from all who would offer succour. Masters command
them to prepare hallucinogens, to abide by complex taboos, and to transcend their
fears of death through excessive, incapacitating inebriation. Disobedience is rare, as
shamans can easily kill students by supernatural means. In many ways, the structure of
apprenticeship parallels the structure of Erición’s captivity, as described in the story of
Tetete Coen’cho.
The language of shamanic training emphasizes the novice’s passivity. A’ingae has
a causative verbal suffix (-an), which inverts the typical agency relations of actions.
An apprentice does not simply ‘drink’, ‘become inebriated’, ‘see’, ‘taboo’, ‘suffer’,
and ‘learn’; he is cui’ñan (made to drink), ccúsian (made to become inebriated),
attian (made to see), asettian (made to taboo), vanaen (made to suffer), and
atesian (made to learn). Masters and plant-based drugs are the true subjects. As
learning proceeds, the student’s life becomes intensely structured. A host of objects,
actions, and individuals become sources of contamination. The apprentice inhabits
an increasingly confined and isolated space. His life is restricted to the yaje house,
where everyday sociality is prohibited. The hallucinogens make his body an alien,
uncontrollable object. Under their influence, he is reduced to crying and crawling,
and he vomits, urinates, and defecates all over himself. If he pushes through the
terrifying helplessness, he encounters the myriad agents of Cofán cosmology. By learning
their language, he can acquire their weapons and clothing. Eventually, he can gain

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Figure 1. Cofán shaman preparing to drink yaje.

control of their houses, where he can lock them up, thus curing the illnesses they
cause.
The theme of transformative containment pervades the process of shamanic training.
Unlike the porous, soft, fertile, and well-nourished body of the opa person, a shaman’s
body is ta’etssi (hard) and sometimes sterile. Similarly to Erición, young people who
desire strength drink an emetic called ishoa quini’cco. The plant causes stones to enter
their limbs. Supernatural weapons and ornaments, too, implant themselves in the
learners’ flesh. If aspiring shamans break the prohibitions by, for example, drinking from
a bowl touched by a pregnant person – who is marked by the stench of reproductive

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blood – the implements depart, causing death. Gradually, the equipment allows for
flight and confrontations with distant enemies. But containment remains a key element
of the shaman’s experience: shields encase him, weapons possess him, and monstrous
beings lodge him in their homes, which appear as well-defended fortresses.
The alienating and semi-controlled nature of shamanic training mirrors the
ambiguous position of schooling in Cofán history. Some of the supernatural allies
that shamans accrue, after all, bear a disfigured resemblance to the priests and colonial
figures who launched expeditions in search of Cofán children, many decades ago.
People remember early twentieth-century schools as sites of exploitation and fear.
Many families fled to remote areas to avoid the Capuchins, who wanted to bring
Cofán boys and girls to Colombian missions. Later, in the mid-twentieth century,
Protestant missionaries encountered resistance to their attempts to build schools in
Cofán communities.
How, exactly, did priests and their helpers take Cofán children and place them
in schools? Frankly, I do not understand how force worked in this situation. I have
not encountered a single positive story about turn-of-the-century schools, which were
associated with sickness and subjugation. Although priests and their allies were feared
figures, people sometimes refused to follow their plans. No one, however, remembers
students who entered the schools on their own initiative. Either way, Cofán children
repeatedly found themselves under the priests’ command, far from the care of their
families.
Ultimately, it appears that a strange mix of terror, passivity, awe, and hope was in play.
Like Erición returning from the Tetete, or shamans emerging from apprenticeship, the
children were pitied for the ordeals they endured. None the less, people hoped that the
trying experiences had generated helpful new capacities, including fearlessness in the
face of enemy others. In the best-case scenarios, captivity at the mission sites produced
powerful though ambivalent agents, who were equipped to combat the forces that were
terrorizing everyone. In their own communities, Cofán people could not create such
beings by their own will, intent, and design.
The most important defenders of the Cofán nation in the ninteenth and twentieth
centuries underwent experiences of capture – some in schools, some with soldiers,
and some as shamanic apprentices of non-Cofán masters. All emerged from their
experiences as aggressive, fearless, and forceful agents, capable of countering the Cofán’s
antagonists. Probably the most important and well-remembered leader of the last 150
years was ‘Aniseto’, also called Tetete Du’shu (Child of Tetete). In the late nineteenth
century, a military patrol captured him along the Napo River after enemy indigenous
people killed his family in a raid. Priests brought him to a school in highland Ecuador,
where they taught him Spanish and outside ways. As an adult, he returned to Cofán
territory with a staff of authority and the title of gobernador, which allowed him to
manage affairs on the Aguarico River for decades.
One of Aniseto’s grandsons, Guillermo, was sent to acquire powers under the
command of Western Tukanoan shamans on the Eno River. He became the chief of the
village of Dureno. Soldiers conscripted another of Aniseto’s grandsons, Gregorio, as a
child porter. They kept him for what may have been years. Eventually, he returned to
Cofán society with a fearsome reputation and the hat of an Ecuadorian capitán, which
he wore with his earplugs and nose feathers. He became the chief of the community
of Duvuno. On the Colombian side of the border, the most efficacious Cofán leader of
the mid-twentieth century was Pacho Quintero. He was born to a Cofán mother and

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Figure 2. Cofán park guard.

a rubber tapper father. His story is murky, but he probably remained in his father’s
operation for years. Eventually, he became one of the Cofán nation’s most aggressive
defenders.
As forms of capture, native raids, shamanic apprenticeship, missionary schooling,
and military servitude exhibit varying levels of intentionality and productivity. At the
far end of the spectrum is Erición, whose brutal seizure and destructive violence are
the clearest expressions of the Cofán logic. A more wilful form of capture is shamanic
training. The learning process, however, necessitates extreme fear, strict subordination,
and total loss of agency. If successful, it always results in the capacity to kill. Mission
schooling and military conscription are more uncertain mechanisms. Both are initiated
and managed by feared, powerful others. Their products may not be as predatory as
shamans or warriors, but they can generate actors who are extremely familiar – and
even comfortable – with the violent alterity of realms beyond the socius.
Now more than ever, the Cofán nation needs agents capable of violent confrontation.
The park guard programme, which Felipe co-ordinated, is a case in point (Fig. 2).
With funds from transnational donor organizations, teams of guards travel through
Cofán territory to conduct conservation-related exercises. Intense fear colours their
work. Many guards consider themselves monolingual in A’ingae, and most are
hesitant to provoke conflict with ethnic others. Their responsibilities, however, demand
interactions with hostile strangers: settlers, loggers, miners, commercial hunters,
oil crews, and Colombian armed factions. Over time, repeated engagements with
dangerous people and places lessen some individuals’ fear. Others, however, cannot

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handle the work. After a few patrols, they realize that they are not fit for the task, and
they quit.
Park guard work also demands confidence in one’s political positioning. The
guards learn to tell people that they are not alone but working alongside state forces,
including soldiers and police. They selectively reveal their non-state associations as
well. Much of their activity occurs along the San Miguel River, where the FARC is a
dominant actor. The guerrillas view indigenous peoples as allies, and they, too, proclaim
an environmental agenda. In the depths of their territory, guards encounter FARC
comandantes, who condemn the bush meat trade, fishing with dynamite and poison,
and illegal colonization. The Cofán are deeply afraid of the combatants, who are well
armed and known for brutality. Some Cofán people, though, believe the guerrillas when
they offer militant support for conservation efforts.
FARC encounters trouble the guards, but the most violent interactions involve other
parties. One team burned a coca field planted by non-Cofán people. The leader of that
group soon quit the force, as rumours circulated that the owners put a hit on his head. At
least three teams have destroyed illegal mining camps, whose former inhabitants walk
through nearby towns trumpeting their desire for vengeance. While clearing boundary
trails, guards have been accosted numerous times by people who fear that the Cofán
nation will reclaim the region’s agricultural, logging, and mining lands. In 2013, a
man told me that every programme leader has faced death threats. Felipe’s kidnapping
proved that the danger is real. By doing so, it jeopardized the entire project. After a
month passed without word of Felipe’s whereabouts, people began to believe that they
would soon find his mutilated corpse along a forest road. The event cloaked Cofán life
in disabling fear.
Even before Felipe’s kidnapping, the work’s violent nature was its central challenge.
The conflict and danger are too much for many individuals, and the eagerness to
enact violence is a quality that no guards possess. The Cofán think of themselves as
shy and peaceful, and outsiders view them the same way. According to the implicit
logics of Cofán mythology and shamanism, only capture can generate the dispositions
needed for territorial defence. Capture’s productive potential, however, is occluded by
the fear it inspires. When they ponder today’s dangers, young men joke about acquiring
Erición’s bulletproof body, which was an unrequested and painfully secured gift from
the Tetete. When I ask them about Felipe’s kidnapping, they do not enthusiastically
recite the story of Tetete Coen’cho. They do, however, express awe at Felipe’s escape and
determination. Perhaps, in the future, he will mobilize his experience to make the park
guard programme into a powerful predatory weapon. If he fails, Cofán territory will
remain without the forceful defender it needs.

Conclusion
In this article, I have examined Cofán capture to complicate the image of Amazonian
predation. Compared to the general representation described by Carneiro da Cunha in
the passage quoted above, the Cofán stance is not a good example of the Amerindian
‘openness to the Other’. Cofán people do not seek and assimilate their enemies to
reproduce themselves. Their approach to alterity is not one of wilful incorporation,
encompassment, and cannibalism. Predation, in short, is not their basic, given,
relational mode.
From the Cofán perspective, capture is anything but a desired action. None of them
will or pursue the experience, which is fundamentally contingent and uncontrollable.

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Some Cofán people survive the seizures and acquire their captors’ abilities. They use the
resulting aggressiveness, fearlessness, and force to defend their people. Capture’s main
product, however, is a lurking sense of terror. The ‘heroes’ who return are outnumbered
by the deaths and disappearances of the victims who do not. Unfortunately, the Cofán
possess little sui generis ability to defend themselves. Instead, their main option is to
rely on capture’s uncertain gift of violent agency. For all but a few Cofán people, this
exogenous capacity contributes no positive content to their bodies, their souls, or their
identities. Even for such mythically renowned predators as Erición, violent powers are
unrequested, unwilled, and abandoned as soon as the others who provided them are
destroyed. In summary, Cofán people are not grateful for the violence that a predatory
world capriciously bestows upon them.
Undoubtedly, many Amazonianists will read this article and focus on the deeply
antagonistic quality of the Cofán cosmos. Indeed, it is a world in which predators are
legion. To view this fact as proof for the existence of a single Amazonian logic, however,
is a questionable interpretation. Surely, many subaltern peoples subjected to a similar
history of aggressions imagine the universe as an overwhelmingly hostile space. Given
the evidence, it is clear that the Cofán were once more violent. There is no way to
know, however, whether the shift began before or after the Conquest. Cofán people
suffered Inca incursions prior to the Spanish arrival. Before that, the depredations of
other Amazonian peoples may have been commonplace.
Ultimately, perhaps, recognizing the specificity of the Cofán stance depends on
one’s theoretical position. For Amazonian ethnologists, the divergence might seem
slight. Many of these scholars abide by ‘a defining element of classic structuralism: a
privileging of the order of concepts over the order of practice’ (Costa & Fausto 2010:
95). For anthropologists guided by a more pragmatist perspective, the difference of
the Cofán case should be clearer. In David Graeber’s terms (2013), Cofán predation
is an ‘infravalue’: it has a limited social valence in a delimited situational field, and it
does not compose a general, life-defining ethos. In other words, it is more means than
end – and a resented, unchosen means at that. After all, only a few Cofán individuals
become predators; they do so through no initiative of their own; their function is
primarily defensive and conjunctural; and their perspective does not orientate the
everyday actions and overarching life projects of the majority Cofán population. To
view their work as illustrative of the Cofán’s most conceptually productive position is
a defensible theoretical choice. Nevertheless, it is also an ethnographic mistake – one
that occludes Cofán people’s most basic understanding of themselves and their world,
both the ideal and the actual.

NOTES
Research for this article was supported by funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research. I presented earlier drafts at Rice University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of
Texas at San Antonio. For their feedback, I thank Andrea Ballestero, Dominic Boyer, Manuela Carneiro
da Cunha, Valentine Daniel, Clark Erickson, James Faubion, Carlos Fausto, Eugenia Georges, John
Hartigan, Heather Hindman, Cymene Howe, Paul Kockelman, Fernando Santos-Granero, Terry Turner,
Mike Uzendoski, Rob Wasserstrom, Norman E. Whitten, Jr, and Jason Yaeger. I give special thanks to my
Cofán research consultants, and I am particularly indebted to Deji Criollo, a Cofán collaborator who at first
disagreed with my argument. He claimed that no one uses indiye as a transitive verb with a hallucinogenic
drug as the subject. When we transcribed one of his interviews in 2014, however, he heard his own recorded
words: ‘Tse tsu ña’me yaje indi tisema’ (Then, yaje truly captured him [i.e., the drinker]). Upon reflection, he
reconsidered his opposition, and he helped refine the ideas presented in this article.
1 The title is an intentional play on the title of Robert Brightman’s book (1993).

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2 I choose to use Felipe’s real name because his kidnapping was widely reported in the Ecuadorian media.

The rationale of the culprits was both political and economic. Felipe’s position as head of a substantial
conservation infrastructure stimulated hopes of a ransom, and anger at his violent actions made his
kidnapping even more ‘reasonable’. At the time of writing, his captors remain at large.
3 For this article, I use a slightly edited version of the myth as told by Enrique Criollo to Marlytte Borman

(M. Borman 1991).

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Prédateurs ingrats : capture et création de la violence chez les Cofán

Résumé
L’auteur explore ici l’histoire, la logique et la pratique de la capture chez les Cofán d’Amazonie équatorienne.
Dans l’histoire, les Cofán ont le plus souvent été objets plutôt que sujets de la capture. Des siècles de violence
dans les temps précolombiens, coloniaux et postcoloniaux les ont exposés à des captures répétées par des
agresseurs autochtones et extérieurs. Bien que la capture par des ennemis « autres » soit redoutée car le
plus souvent porteuse de désastres, elle est aussi un moyen central par lequel les Cofán acquièrent des
pouvoirs violents indispensables à leur défense. En étudiant les incertitudes de la capture comme processus
productif, l’auteur remet en question les représentations dominantes des Amazoniens natifs comme des
participants consentants à un cosmos de prédation généralisée, et plaide pour davantage d’ouverture dans
l’étude de la diversité des peuples de la région.

Michael Cepek is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research
with the Cofán people of eastern Ecuador explores the relationship between socio-ecological crisis, cultural
difference, and directed change at the margins of global orders.

Department of Anthropology, One UTSA Circle, Antonio, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX
78249, USA. michael.cepek@utsa.edu

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 542-560


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015