Dr Natalia Buitron

Jesus College crest
Jesus College
  • Jessica Sainsbury Associate Professor in Anthropology of Amazonia
  • Fellow and Director of Studies, Jesus College
  • PhD pre-field Course Director
  • Co-editor, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
  • Office hours: appointment by email
Dr Natalia Buitron

Contact

About

I am a socio-political anthropologist exploring institutional creativity, political subjectivity, and indigeneity. I have done long-term fieldwork with the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia and am interested in Latin America. The main objective of my research is to understand how humans create institutions but in a way that takes seriously indigenous political projects. This work centres on exploring how a variety of indigenous social movements reinvent Latin American multicultural governance from the bottom up.

I am the co-convenor of a new Indigenous Studies Group at Oxford University and am deeply interested in critical and collaborative pedagogy and conversations about symmetric anthropology.

Research

Research interests

  • Village formation
  • Autonomy
  • Social form and complexity
  • Institutional creativity
  • Morality and justice
  • Intentional opacity
  • Indigenous writing
  • Childhood and intercultural schooling

The main objective of my research is to understand how humans create institutions. I explore this question in my ethnographic work in Amazonia, as well as in comparative anthropology, focusing on three major themes: autonomy, justice, and sovereignty. 

My doctoral research (LSE, 2017) involved extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuadorian Amazonia focusing on village formation and collective selfhood as ways to explore indigenous perceptions of change and their political creativity more generally. Focused on the challenges faced by the Shuar after their relocation in sedentary villages and their appropriation of government offices, schools and development projects, my book project, ‘The Attraction of Unity: Autonomy and Government in Western Amazonia’, explores the dilemma of pursuing political independence through state formation. Closely examining the local production of ‘a new culture of government’, I focus on the micro-pragmatics of institutional creativity to better understand the oft-cited Amazonian openness to alterity. 

Whilst contributing to the political changes brought about by sedentism, schooling, and development, theoretically the book and a range of associated publications tackle ordinary dilemmas such as the extent to which formality can lead to innovation, how to balance hierarchy and equality, and whether political values can be reconfigured in one generation.  

The second theme of my research has to do with the problem of justice, specifically from an Amazonian perspective. Concretely, this means, how are local values, such as autonomy and mutuality, put in relation to wider and more abstract scales of social life? The effects can be seen specifically in practices of care, models of cooperation, and attributions of responsibility. This interest has resulted in two major co-edited contributions: ‘Governing opacity’, recently published with Ethnos which brings into conversation recent debates about ‘opacity of mind’ with longstanding topics of anthropological enquiry such as egalitarianism and state formation. Here I explore the correlations between different forms of government and regimes of legibility and intention management. The second collection on ‘The Ends of Egalitarianism’ re-examines the concept and suggests conceptual alternatives in dialogue with debates on so-called small-scale societies.  

Third, my research is profoundly concerned with sovereignty. In this field, I problematise the state form and the notion of ‘the political’.  Empirically, this is based on explorations of interethnic politics in Ecuadorian Amazonia, focusing on the Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement, one of South America’s oldest and most influential social movements. My aim is to flesh out the theoretical implications of taking indigenous politics seriously in re-thinking normative models of sovereignty, development, and wellbeing. I am particularly keen to explore how a variety of indigenous social movements (invested in forms of cosmopraxis) reinvent Latin American multicultural governance from the bottom up.  

I am deeply interested in critical/collaborative pedagogy and conversations about symmetric anthropology, and have participated in the development of Indigenous-led educational programmes and knowledge exchange projects in Latin America and Europe. I am the co-convenor of a new Indigenous Studies Group at Oxford University. 

 

 

Publications

Journal Special Issues

Peer Reviewed Articles

  • 2026. Nightmare Egalitarianism: Commensuration, Autonomy, and Imagination. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 32(1) 7-27. [Special Issue Introduction]; co-authored with Florian Mühlfried and Hans Steinmüller. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.70062
  • 2026. Egalitarians Despite Themselves: Envy and Leadership in Ecuadorian Amazonia. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 32(1) 28-48; co-authored with Grégory Deshoullière. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.70063
  • 2025. Autonomy Through Collaboration: Memory and Media in Indigenous Print and Editorial Projects. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 30(3) 1-8. [Special Issue Introduction]; co-authored with Patrick O’Hare. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.70029
  • 2023a. Governing Opacity: Regimes of Intention Management and Tools of Legibility. Ethnos 88(4):677-701. [Special Issue Introduction]; co-authored with Hans Steinmüller. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2007154
  • 2023b. Rule of Self and Rule of Law: Governing Opacity Among the Shuar of Amazonia. Ethnos 88(4):749-773. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.1965641
  • 2023c. Competing for the future: Play, Drama, and Rank in Amazonia. Social Analysis 66(4):26-47. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660402
  • 2023d. Inculturating the Market. Entrepreneurial Perspectives on Capitalist Predation among the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia. Terrain [Online only], 78; co-authored with Grégory Deshoullière. https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/25280
  • 2023e. « Inculturer le marché » Prédations capitalistes parmi les Shuar de l’Amazonie équatorienne. Terrain 78 :26-45; co-authored with Grégory Deshoullière. [The French article differs from the English version above, which includes a more substantive discussion of the literature and is available only online.] https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.25065
  • 2021 State and Mind Legibility in the Original political Society. Religion and Society, 12:39-55; co-authored with Hans Steinmüller. https://doi.org/10.3167/arrs.2021.120104
  • 2021. Thinking with Decoloniality: Authorship and Collaborations in Neoliberal Times. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute [Virtual Issue]; co-authored with Grégory Deshoullière, Jorge Nuñez and Maka Suarez. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-9655.decolonising
  • 2020a. ‘Les fins de l'égalitarisme’, translated by Arianne Dorval, L’Homme 236, 5-44; published in English as ‘The Ends of Egalitarianism’, L’homme 236, i-xxxvi [Special Issue Introduction]; co-authored with Hans Steinmüller https://shs.cairn.info/journal-l-homme-2020-3-page-5?lang=en
  • 2020b. Autonomy, Productiveness and Community: The Rise of Inequality in an Amazonian Society, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 26(1): 48-66. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13180
  • 2019a. The Shuar Writing Boom: Cultural Experts and the Creation of a Scholarly Tradition, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 16(2):175-194; co-authored with Grégory Deshoullière. https://doi.org/10.70845/2572-3626.1276
  • 2019b. Singularity on the Margins: Autobiographical Writings among the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia’, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 16(2):195-214. https://doi.org/10.70845/2572-3626.1330

Book Chapters

  • 2025. Ciudades de la selva: urbanización y desafío entre los Shuar de la Amazonía ecuatoriana. En: F. Santos-Granero y E. Fabiano (Eds.), Imaginarios urbanos en la Amazonía indígena: historias de alteridad, poder y desafío, pp. 187-228. Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica (CAAAP)/Ediciones Abya Yala/ Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI): Lima/Quito. [Spanish translation of 2023 book chapter]
  • 2023f. ‘Cities of the Forest: Urbanization and Defiance Among the Shuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia’. In Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia: Tales of Alterity, Power and Defiance (eds) F. Santos-Granero and E. Fabiano. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 123-152. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.2990359.7
  • 2023g. Cognitive Science. In Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Ethics. (ed) J. Laidlaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 177-204; co-authored with Harry Walker. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249
  • 2016. ‘Paths to the Unfamiliar: Journeying with Children in Ecuadorian Amazonia’. In Children: Anthropological Encounters, Catherine Allerton (ed.), London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 45-58. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474258210.ch-003  
  • 2014. ‘“La pedagogía del Arutam” o Notas Etnográficas sobre la producción académica Shuar en torno a la “cultura”’ [‘The Pedagogy of Arutam or Ethnographic Notes on Shuar Academic Production on “Culture”’]. In On documents, Cristina Burneo Salazar (ed.), Quito: Universidad San Francisco de Quito, pp. 181-194.

Comments, Reviews and Online Contributions

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate supervision

Research supervision

I welcome applications from students interested in political praxis and creativity, indigeneity, social change and clashing ethico-political regimes at varied scales of social life in Amazonia and beyond.