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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in a Kichwa forest commons, this paper examines human–jaguar conviviality that sustains life in the forest based on mutual respect, despite ongoing discrimination of indigenous practices by conserveration actors.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines human–jaguar conviviality in a Kichwa forest commons in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on ethnographic research with Kichwa families, hunters, and forest elders, I explore how jaguars are not framed primarily as wildlife to be conserved or managed, but as powerful co-inhabitants whose presence shapes everyday practices, moral obligations, and territorial relations. Within this commons, forest life is sustained through established and continually negotiated rules of conviviality that govern hunting, movement, reciprocity, and restraint across species.

Rather than positioning jaguars as either threats to subsistence or symbols of conservation value, Kichwa engagements with jaguars articulate a mode of shared life that exceeds the conservation–use binary. Jaguars are understood as sentient beings with their own perspectives, territorial claims, and capacities for response. Encounters with them generate questions about excess, respect, and accountability, often read through signs, dreams, and changes in animal behaviour. These relations distribute stewardship beyond the human: jaguars are seen as regulators of forest life, enforcers of balance, and co-creators of the commons.

The paper situates these practices within broader contexts of ecological and political polarisation, including conservation regimes that criminalise Indigenous subsistence, and competing perspectives of wildlife management. I argue that Kichwa multispecies commoning does not seek harmony or stability but sustains shared worlds through mutual respect and pragmatic behaviour. By attending to human–jaguar conviviality as a lived practice of commoning, the paper contributes to rethinking coexistence as a fragile, relational achievement: one that offers alternative imaginaries of shared life amid intensifying ecological and political fracture.