Paper short abstract:

By focusing on Matses children of Amazonia, this paper considers hesitation and fear as central to their experiences of urban spaces. Hesitation in the city reveals children’s bodily insecurity and displacement, and is part of a physical and emotional process of learning in an unfamiliar environment.

Paper long abstract:

The Matses, a native people of Peruvian Amazonia, spend most of their lives in rainforest villages and rarely visit urban settings. Matses people are skilled, dynamic and agile when carrying out everyday activities in their forest environments. However, when walking on the city streets they are clumsy, insecure and ungraceful. Their confidence as skilled hunters and fishermen in the rainforest transforms into fear and hesitation in urban environments. By using creative methodologies such as drawing and photography, this paper specifically addresses Matses children and their experiences in the city. I explore children's movement and bodily engagement in public urban spaces, suggesting how these are characterised by clumsiness and hesitation as opposed to their confidence in forest dwellings. Hesitation is here understood as a moment of bodily awareness in and before a world that is unfamiliar and has to be discovered. Hesitating becomes a moment of suspension before a foreign environment, which reveals bodily uncertainty in a world that requires different attitudes and skills in order to move and fit in. Being hesitant is thus part of a process of situated learning, in this case learning how to move in an unexplored world of concrete, non-Indian people (chotac), cars, street markets and artificial lights. Hesitation-in-the-city, as Matses children explain, is significantly intertwined with fear (dacuëden) and characterises their experience of urban spaces. Therefore, I address how hesitation and fear are part of a bodily and emotional engagement through which Matses people encounter and physically experience the city.