Paper short abstract:

The paper unravels the frustrated attempts at collaborating across difference following from the spear-killing of a Huaorani man in the Yasuní national park in Ecuador, analyzing an interlocutor’s headache from “thinking different worlds at the same time.”

Paper long abstract:

The paper unravels the events and escalating conflicts following from the spear-killing of a Huaorani man by a group of indigenous people living in voluntary isolation in the Yasuni national park in Ecuador. Within a month the man's kin retaliated his death, killed an entire family group of approximately 30 persons, filmed the events, and abducted two young girls. The events produced an outcry in the Ecuadorian media drawing indigenous organisations, lawyers and anthropologists, the Catholic Church, the Ecuadorian president and the Inter-American Human Rights Commission into the maelstrom of rumours, explanations and demands for action. Building on Anna Tsing's concept of friction as the unequal, unstable and creative quality of interconnections across difference, the paper explores the frustrated attempts at collaborating across difference and the radically different worlds that seem to have emerged in the wake of this. Zooming in on a meeting between constitutional court lawyers and local Huaorani leaders, the paper analyses an interlocutor's headache from "thinking different worlds at the same time," and his collaboration with other beings (namely shaman-jaguars) to make their world prevail.