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Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History. Steven Rubenstein. Fourth World Rising series. Lincoln, NE, and London, UK: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xxv + 322 pp. (Cloth US$70.00; Paper US$24.95)
At a time when the pressures of colonialism in the Ecuadoran Amazon prompt some Shuar shamans to use their curative powers to kill Shuar enemies, Alejandro Tsakimp strives to remain benevolent. Anthropologist Steven Rubenstein's candid reflection on his fieldwork experience in the introductory and concluding chapters of Alejandro's edited life history shows a similar commitment to help rather than hurt. Both Alejandro and Rubenstein confront the inherently contradictory Ecuadoran colonial project by working within it. Alejandro's life history illustrates that Shuar survival depends on their engagement with the colonial institutional apparatus, notably the state and capitalism, which stresses individualism and social stratification, dividing the Shuar despite their efforts to remain egalitarian. For Rubenstein, the ethnographic encounter risks being another colonial encounter. To represent Shuar culture fairly, he aims to interview Alejandro and edit his story in a way that counters the marked inequality between Euro-Americans and Native Americans. Life history, he claims, is not only a perfect solution to this colonial conundrum, but also the best means to counteract traditional ethnography's overemphasis of social structure, an abstraction dangerously "empty of individuality" (p. 48). However, Rubenstein's exploration of a presumably more intimate medium requires close scrutiny.
Alejandro Tsakimp was born in 1944, when intertribal warfare, disease, and witchcraft accusations prevailed as Shuar resettled into centras to ward off Ecuadoran colonization. Rubenstein organizes Alejandro's life story according to conventional agegraded roles that often conflict-son, student, and worker; husband/father; and, most intriguingly, morally...