The lives of machines and screens: modern technical artefacts among the Yagua people in northwestern Amazonia

Thesis

This thesis explores how modern technical artefacts alter the wider relational ecology of the Yagua people in northwestern Amazonia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023 in different Yaguan communities along the Orosa and Atacuari Rivers in Peru, it provides a detailed examination of the provenance, meanings, and ramifications of modern technical artefacts among the Yagua people. The thesis highlights in particular how modern technical artefacts are creatively integrated into Yaguan mythologies, ontologies, and everyday lives and shows that machines and screens – like other beings – are among the Yagua animated by plural, complex, and potentially ubiquitous life forces. It constitutes the first major anthropological study of the Yagua in the twenty-first century.

With modern technical artefacts proliferating at a rapid pace across Amazonia, it offers a pertinent contribution to the wider anthropological literature on the political economy and developmental trajectory of lowland South America. As the thesis shows, machines and screens self-perpetuate through the transformation of human needs, hopes, and desires, and their spread fosters structures of dependency, reinforces an exploitative capitalist system, and disrupts existing relational ecologies comprising human and non-human beings. The thesis concludes by suggesting that the Yaguan adoption of modern technical artefacts parallels their domestication of wild animals.

Authors: Borrmann, T

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gapex9dpy
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: materialism; Amazonia; ecology; Yagua people; artefacts; life
• Subjects: Anthropology