Presentation short abstract

This paper investigates the remaining and changing values of the finca (plot of land) in Quichua communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. It argues for ethnographic approaches grounded in everyday events and informal conversations as key to accessing perceptions and values.

Presentation long abstract

This paper investigates the changing values of the finca (plot of land) in Indigenous (Quichua) communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. While initial strategies based on interviews and observation proved insufficient to capture these values, new insights emerged when the Municipality proposed relocating the inhabitants of Vicente Salazar away from their fincas in exchange for electricity provision. Spontaneous, repeated conversations around this event revealed how the finca is understood as place, livelihood, and activity, and how these meanings are shifting in the face of extractivism, urbanisation, and land commodification. Comparisons with the city and nearby villages further illuminate these dynamics: the city is depicted as crowded, noisy, and a place where one must pay for everything, while the community and finca provide space, autonomy, and subsistence “for free.” Yet younger generations increasingly describe the finca as boring, aspiring instead to wage labour and urban life. These contrasts show how values of land, money, and work are intertwined with conceptions of the good life, and how ontological problems (e.g., having to pay for everything) get reframed as technical issues (e.g., lack of money). Methodologically, the paper argues for ethnographic approaches grounded in everyday events and informal conversations as key to accessing perceptions and values that are otherwise unconscious, implicit, or simply difficult to articulate.