Dr. Natalia Buitron

Biography

I am a socio-political anthropologist exploring institutional creativity, political subjectivity, and indigeneity through long-term fieldwork in the Shuar Ecuadorian Amazonia, with a strong interest in Latin America. My main objective is to understand how humans create institutions in ways that seriously engage with indigenous political projects. My focus centers on exploring the variety of indigenous social movements that reinvent Latin American multicultural governance. As co-convenor of the new Indigenous Studies Group at Oxford University, I am deeply committed to critical collaborative pedagogy and fostering conversations around symmetric anthropology. My doctoral research at the London School of Economics, completed in 2017, involved extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuadorian Amazonia, particularly examining village formation and collective selfhood and how indigenous perceptions influence political creativity. I am engaged in analyzing the challenges faced by the Shuar during their relocation to sedentary villages and the appropriation of government offices, schools, and development projects. My book project, ‘The Attraction of Unity: Autonomy and Government in Western Amazonia,’ critically explores the balance between political independence and state formation while considering the local production of a new culture of governance. I have co-edited several contributions to major publications that address the complexity of governance and the reconfiguration of political values within the context of indigenous movements.

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