Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how an Amazonian people playfully stage competition to tame the bureaucratic logic of the state while creatively using it to temporarily order fragile internal relations and promote increasingly important forms of internal unity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the multidimensionality and efficacy of 'competition' as a diplomatic technique in the hands of an Amazonian people situated at the interface of state and non-state lawfare. Increasingly captured in encompassing webs of economic and bureaucratic dependence, the Jivaroan Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia have developed a remarkable variety of performances in which mestizo colonists, rather than their traditional Jivaroan enemies, appear as the primary targets of symbolic predation and antagonism. Conspicuous in these performances is the display of a multiplicity of games and contests (from neo-ancestral competitions that transform embodied forms of knowledge into abstract displays of ability, to sport tournaments to beauty pageants). The performances are also characterised by an unremitting rhetorical emphasis on harmonious relationships between Jivaroan hosts and guests - traditional opponents now conjoined in festive encounters - and clamorous declarations of hostility towards an absent third party, the mestizo foreign. Re-visiting Lévi-Strauss's distinction between game and ritual, the paper shows how rules, victors and losers enable Shuar to crack the external logic of competition while turning it into a masterful diplomatic tactic through which they can temporarily evoke an internal collectivity by means of beating absent ambivalent outsiders at their own bureaucratic game.