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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore a specific regimen of attention that focuses on “the self as it acts in the world”. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I explore how Runa indigenous people pay attention to the world surrounding them rather than to their own inner psychological states.

Paper long abstract:

Paying attention to one’s own inner life is usually understood to be a universal human activity. While this capacity is certainly available to all humans, its manifestation is culturally specific and attention to one’s own inner life might be encouraged or not depending on the context. As a handful of philosophers, anthropologists and historians have noticed (Campbell 1987; Rosaldo 1984; Taylor 1989), the idea of the self as marked by constant reflexivity — a self that constantly pays attention to its own inner life — seems to be a peculiar product of modernity and thus dependent on specific understandings of emotions and sociality. In this paper I contrast regimens of introspection — where attention to one’s own inner life is deemed central to experience — with another type of attention, one that can be best described as focusing on the self “as it acts in the world”. Drawing on psychologist’s theories on “flow” , phenomenological work on action and my own ethnographic research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I explore how Runa indigenous people pay attention to the world which surrounds them rather than to their own inner psychological states. Local conceptions of work, as well as ecological engagements with their natural environment, encourage Runa people to constantly focus their attention on activity, avoiding mind wandering and fantasising, which are taken as serious signs of illness or malaise. I will argue that such attentional regime has stark effects on the ways in which Runa people experience what is valuable in life.