Dr Natalia Buitron

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.  

Research interests 

Village formation; autonomy; social form and complexity; institutional creativity; morality and justice; intentional opacity; indigenous writing; childhood and intercultural schooling