Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 16:227–248, 2009

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 online
DOI: 10.1080/10702890902739436

The Myth of the Gringo Chief: Amazonian Messiahs

and the Power of Immediacy

Michael L. Cepek
Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at San Antonio,
San Antonio, Texas, USA

In this article, I investigate the sociocultural grounding and sociopolitical position

of Randy Borman, the “gringo chief” of the indigenous Cofán people of Amazonian
Ecuador. Born to North American missionary-linguists, Borman grew up in Cofán
communities, attended school in urban Ecuador and the United States, and devel-
oped into the most important Cofán activist on the global stage. I consider him
alongside other ethnically ambiguous leaders of Amazonian political movements,
whom anthropologists have described as “messianic” figures. The historians and
ethnographers who write about Amazonian messianism debate the relationship
between myth and reason in indigenous political action. Using their discussion as
a starting point, I propose the concept of “mythical politics,” a type of transforma-
tive action that concentrates enabling forms of socio-temporal mediation in the
shape of individual actors and instantaneous events. I develop my approach
through a discussion of the work of Georges Sorel, Georg Lukács, and Antonio
Gramsci, three theorists who debate the role of myth in political mobilization. By
applying their insights to the case of Borman, I explore the relationship between
myth, mediation, and rationality in Cofán politics and political movements more
generally.

Key Words: Amazonia, political movements, myth, mediation

In 1992, four Cofán men traveled from their territory along Ecuador’s
Amazonian border with Peru and Colombia to Quito, where they
hoped to plead their case to the national government and the interna-
tional media. During the previous year, transnational corporations
began an illegal search for oil near Zábalo, their home community.
Shortly thereafter, the state prevented them from obtaining a land
title by declaring their territory a wildlife reserve. In preparation for a
meeting with activist, media, and state representatives, three of the
men put on their Cofán finery: Bixa orellana face paint, long feather
crowns, and immaculate cotton tunics. The fourth hesitated. After a
brief discussion, however, his companions convinced him to dress as
they did—publicly marked Cofán people. He was, after all, their ethnic
compatriot and their political leader.
227
228 M. L. Cepek

The man’s name was Randy Borman. He paused before donning his
Cofán regalia because he expected a confused reaction to his most striking
characteristic: genealogically and phenotypically, he is Euro-American—a
gringo chief. Blue-eyed and white-skinned, Borman was born to a cou-
ple affiliated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible
Translators. He spent much of his childhood in the Cofán community
of Doreno, and he grew up speaking A’ingae (the Cofán language) and
sharing the experiences of his Cofán age-mates. Later, he began to
make departures from Cofán territory to attend missionary schools
and North American and Ecuadorian universities. In his late twenties,
he led a small group of Cofán people to found Zábalo, where he hunts,
fishes, gardens, and shares a house with his Cofán wife and their
three children, who, like Borman, are trilingual in English, Spanish,
and A’ingae.
For more than thirty years, Borman has used his multilingual and
multicultural skills to help Ecuador’s 1,000 Cofán citizens confront a
cascade of political, economic, and ecological crises.1 As the most
prominent Cofán leader, his activism is global in scope. He now moves
between Cofán communities and Quito, where he directs two non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) and serves as an elected officer of
the Cofán ethnic federation. He enjoys a reputation for innovation and
effectiveness in scientific, environmentalist, and indigenous activist
circles. He has succeeded in attracting millions of dollars for conserva-
tion-related projects in Cofán territory, and his allies include the
MacArthur Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, and the Field Museum
of Natural History.
As a global activist, Borman calls to a number of concerns in aca-
demic discussions of indigenous peoples and politics. Remarking upon
his unique ethno-racial positioning, Alison Brysk places Borman
alongside Rigoberta Menchú and Subcomandante Marcos as an icon of
the conjuncture between the “global village” and the “tribal village”
(Brysk 2000: 4). In other articles, I examine Borman in relation to the
literatures on indigenous identity politics and Amazonian social and
cosmological structures (Cepek 2008a, 2008b). In this article, I provide
an ethnographic account of Borman’s position to engage a different
topic, which joins a long-term concern of Amazonianist ethnography to
a more general question of political theory.
The concept of “myth” plays a key role in anthropological discus-
sions of Amazonian peoples’ historical struggles. Investigating the
relationship between myth and politics, a number of analysts suggest
that many Amazonians are “messianically” inclined, given their tradi-
tion of mobilizing around non-native leaders who allegedly appear to
them as native divinities (Brown 1991; Veber 2003). Perhaps the most
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 229

FIGURE 1 Randy Borman in Zábalo (photo by Michael Cepek).

noteworthy examples are the Arawakan inhabitants of Peru’s Selva

Central, where rebellions against state and private powers revolved
around an assortment of ethno-racial and purportedly mythical others,
including a native Andean catechist, a German evangelical missionary,
230 M. L. Cepek

and an Afro-Peruvian leftist guerrilla (Brown and Fernández 1995;

Veber 2003).
Given his ethno-racial origins and far-reaching political visions,
Borman bears a resemblance to Amazonia’s reputed messiahs. Noting
this resemblance, I analyze his position to propose a unique theoretical
approach to the role of myth in political action. Anthropologists who
write about Amazonian messianism debate the kind of rationality that
guides indigenous actors, who appear to rely on social others and cos-
mological schemes to work for change. I argue that Cofán people’s
political projects place Borman in a mythical position, which depends
on his extraordinary capacity to mediate a series of sociocultural and
sociopolitical divides.
Rather than base my account on myth’s more common meanings as
a discursive genre, an epistemological status, or an ontological domain
(i.e., the supernatural), I turn to the political thought of the early
twentieth-century socialists Georges Sorel, Georg Lukács, and Antonio
Gramsci. These Marxist scholars place the idea of mediation at the
center of their philosophical projects, and they identify mythical con-
sciousness with the commitment to immediate (i.e., unmediated)
forms of sociopolitical transformation. Synthesizing their insights,
I develop the concept of “mythical politics,” a type of transformative
action that concentrates enabling forms of socio-temporal mediation in
the shape of individual actors and instantaneous events.
I base my conclusions on approximately three years of ethnographic
research with Cofán people (1994–2007), including a year of residence
with the Borman family in Quito and a year in Zábalo (2001–2002).2
In other works, I provide detailed descriptions of Borman’s biography
and identity, in both his own and other Cofán people’s words (Cepek
2006, 2008a, 2008b). In this article, I focus instead on his political role,
and my analysis deals exclusively with the sociocultural framework
and sociopolitical dynamics of his activism on behalf of the Cofán
nation.
Borman provides an opportunity to bring a historical topic under
an ethnographic lens, and he allows us to view the current world of
global indigenous activism in relation to a long-term structure of
Amazonian practice. By using a unique theoretical tradition to inter-
pret his role in Cofán politics, I connect anthropological work on
Amazonian political movements to the larger question of how peoples
in all times and places struggle to understand and to change the
world. In this way, I hope that my investigation of Borman’s position
prompts anthropologists and other social analysts to use “myth” as a
category in the study of all types of transformative action, Amazonian
or otherwise.3
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 231

Amazonian messiahs?
For hundreds if not thousands of years, the indigenous peoples of
greater Amazonia have mobilized under the leadership of individuals
who are, in many ways, different from them. Actors with ambiguous
identities have emerged as important political figures for many
peoples, at many moments. Among the more well-known examples are
the prophet-chiefs of the Tupi-Guaraní (Clastres 1978; Pereira de
Queiroz 1969; Shapiro 1987), the “supreme shamans” (Brown 1991:
396) of the Vaupés Tukanoans and Arawakans (Hill and Wright 1988;
Hugh-Jones 1996; Wright 2002; Wright and Hill 1986, 1992), the
visionary instigators of the Canela (Carneiro da Cunha 1973: Crocker
1967), and the directors of Peru’s Arawakan rebels (Bodley 1972;
Brown and Fernández 1995; Santos Granero 1992; Santos Granero
and Barclay 1998; Varese 1973).
All of these figures worked within a politics of difference. Many of
them spoke native languages, ate native food, and wore native dress.
Nevertheless, they exhibited peculiar origins, capacities, and desti-
nies. Some emerged from within indigenous societies but advocated
ambivalent positions. For example, Tupi-Guaraní prophets identified
themselves with Christian priests and saints (Brown 1991: 391), and
the Canela prophetess Kee-khwei urged her followers to mimic
“Brazilian” actions to assume their powers (Carneiro da Cunha 1973;
Crocker 1967). Other leaders of Amazonian movements emerged from
outside of indigenous societies, making them similar to Borman in
terms of their ethno-racial origins. An interesting example is the
famous 1850s Vaupés leader Venancio Kamiko, who has been described
as a mestizo woodcutter (Hemming 1987: 321) who organized a rebellion
alongside a zambo (i.e., afro-indigenous) preacher (Wright and Hill
1986: 35).
The Asháninka people of Peru’s Selva Central are perhaps the most
interesting case. Their mid-1700s leader Juan Santos Atahualpa was
a native Andean catechist from Cuzco who traveled to Europe and
possibly Africa. While overseas, he reportedly added Latin, French,
and English to his Quechua and Spanish (Brown and Fernández 1995:
43–44). Michael Brown and Eduardo Fernández assert that Asháninka
people gathered around the Irish-American-Peruvian rubber baron
and reputed “white Indian” Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald in the late
nineteenth century and a series of European and North American
missionaries in the early and mid-twentieth century (Brown and
Fernández 1995: 62–63, 75, 145–163). In the late twentieth century,
argue Brown and Fernández, the Asháninka took as their Itomi Pavá
(Son of the Sun) Guillermo Lobatón, a Europe-educated Afro-Peruvian
232 M. L. Cepek

Marxist who led them into a whirlpool of counterinsurgency cam-

paigns and napalmed villages. Although this last episode did not end
well, the Asháninka did better under other outsiders. Juan Santos
Atahualpa, for example, facilitated a process of armed insurrection
that kept the Spanish crown out of the Selva Central for more than a
century.
Although it would be unwise to equate these figures and episodes as
the eruptions of a pan-Amazonian political logic, Michael Brown has
produced a fruitful comparative account of their “messianic” character,
on which many Amazonianists agree (1991; Veber 2003). For Brown,
Amazonian messianism consists of a disposition to engage in struggles
that are directed by individuals who exhibit an otherworldly origin, a
divine status, and extraordinary powers. Brown further qualifies low-
land South American messianic movements as “millenarian” in nature.
As such, their participants aim for a radical redistribution of status,
power, and wealth, which they pursue through processes of rebellion,
avoidance, self-vindication, or repudiation of external obligations (Brown
1991: 389, 405).
A number of anthropologists critique the notion of Amazonian
messianism for the mythical mindset that it attributes to indigenous
people. Hanne Veber problematizes the idea of Amazonian messian-
ism, which she describes as an ethnographic “black hole” (2003). Parts
of her argument proceed along the lines laid out by Gananath Obeyesek-
ere (1992) and Marshall Sahlins (1995), who debate whether native
Hawaiians understood powerful Westerners as indigenous gods or all-
too-human enemies. Veber suggests that scholars who impute a messiah
complex to indigenous Amazonians are projecting a colonial fantasy and
a Judeo-Christian cosmology onto complex indigenous logics, thereby
occluding the dynamics of local struggles and portraying indigenes as
irrational fanatics and naïve dupes.
Many of the anthropologists who responded to Veber’s critique
accused her of siding with Obeyesekere’s argument for a universal
practical rationality. In response to Veber’s assertion that what the
Asháninka “need and know how to exploit is not perceived mythic
messengers but real resource persons—sources of knowledge and
access to economic and political resources” (Veber 2003: 199), Carlos
Fausto writes that anthropologists should not abandon “cosmological
thought” or separate the “real” from the “mythic” (2003: 202). In
Sahlins’s words, such a choice would reproduce “classic Occidental
dualisms of logos and mythos, empirical reason and mental illusion”
(Sahlins 1995: 6). Veber’s critics suggest that indigenous Amazonians
might indeed see such figures as Borman in a divine light—as fantastic
agents capable of cutting bonds of poverty and oppression through
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 233

supernatural action. Who are we, they ask, to deny the work of culture
in constituting political means and political ends?
The concept of myth, with its oft-stated opposition to the real,
the rational, and the here-and-now, lies at the heart of the debate on
Amazonian messianism. By describing historical Amazonian struggles
as a kind of mythical politics, anthropologists risk contrasting them
with a more conscious, critical, proactive, and productive mode of
transformative action. Indeed, the notion of myth calls forth Lévi-
Strauss’s old binaries: image and concept, bricoleur and engineer,
“cold” and “hot” (1966). At the broadest level, attributions of mythical
motivations cast doubt on the basic rationality of Amazonian peoples
and politics. In their inevitable return to messianic figures, indige-
nous actors appear to be less than fully capable of forging a critical
understanding of their cultural orientations, their political-economic
situations, and the necessary means for moving from a problematic
present to a liberated future.
Despite a justified discomfort with the notion of a generalized
Amazonian union of myth and politics, I retain the notion of myth in
my analysis of Cofán transformative action. Nevertheless, I use an
understanding of myth that is distinct from that of the literature on
Amazonian messianism. Borman is not mythical in common senses of
the word: He does not find resonance in Cofán mythical discourse; he
does not occupy the position of a supernatural culture hero; and Cofán
people do not doubt his basic humanity. The Cofán do, however, real-
ize that he possesses extraordinary powers of mediation, which they
value but do not understand.
From the Cofán perspective, Borman’s mythical status is a function
of his central role in a concrete process of transformative action, and
the relevant ethnographic questions revolve around the relation
between mediation, agency, and identity in Cofán culture and politics.
Before descending into the ethnographic details, however, I need to
describe my approach to the concepts of mythical consciousness and
mythical action, which I locate in a strategic debate of socialist politics
rather than a theoretical tradition of cultural anthropology.

Mythical politics
Although no one has suggested that Borman appears to Cofán people as
a divine savior, he does occasion the question of how rationality struc-
tures the form and the content of contemporary and historical
Amazonian struggles. From the Cofán perspective, Borman’s abili-
ties depend on his distance and difference, and he enjoys an almost
miraculous level of agency. How should we interpret Cofán people’s
234 M. L. Cepek

politics, given that their most ambitious projects revolve around a

gringo chief whose power remains a mystery?
I ground my analysis of Borman’s position in a theoretical tradi-
tion that is not cited in the debate on Amazonian messianism: the
early twentieth century socialism of Georges Sorel (1941), Georg
Lukács (1972), and Antonio Gramsci (1971). These action-oriented
scholars use the concept of myth to describe political processes that
promise immediate transformations of self and society. I argue that
their understanding of the role of myth in social movements can
help us to produce a suitable account of Borman’s sociopolitical
function and, by extension, the play of myth and mediation in other
political struggles.
Georges Sorel was a French engineer and philosopher. His work
preceded that of Lukács and Gramsci, who responded critically to his
advocacy for a mythical form of political action. In his 1906 opus
Reflections on Violence (1941), Sorel argues that the living heart of
socialism is contained in the “myth of the general strike.” Borrowing
Nietzsche’s idea of tragic myth as the intuition and enactment of a
Dionysian state (Nietzsche 1992a), Sorel identifies a mythical con-
sciousness in Europe’s early anarcho-syndicalists, who rejected the
collective mediation and processual nature of structural change.
Inspired by the strikers, Sorel rails against concrete plans for reform.
He advocates a vision of socialist action as an individualist revolt
against bourgeois order, which for him represents the disappearance
of will from society. As an instantaneous, catastrophic, and anarchic
upheaval—a true millenarian project—the mythical action of the
general strike precludes the mediation of leaders, movements, and
language itself, which Sorel, like Nietzsche, distrusts as a deceptive
medium that masks the ultimate equivalence of will, power, and
action (Nietzsche 1992b).
For Sorel, myth’s power to incite, which stems from its identifica-
tion of individual action and total rupture, is its greatest strength. He
writes that the myth of the general strike is an “image” that provides
an “intuition of Socialism which language cannot give us with perfect
clearness—and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously”
(Sorel 1941: 137). Sorel’s key terms describe his political prescriptions:
intuition (rather than reason); image (rather than discourse); individ-
uality (rather than collectivity); catastrophe (rather than reform); and
instant (rather than process). In short, Sorel favors a mythical politics
of immediacy. Liberation is an individualist accomplishment, he
argues, and it can be achieved in the lightning flash of proletarian vio-
lence. For Sorel, the strike is not a rational means to social-structural
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 235

change. Rather, it is the actualization of will in a performance that

needs no other justification.
Sorel’s work was one of the most important influences on the intel-
lectual development of the Hungarian literary critic and party official
Georg Lukács (Congdon 1983: 134). In many ways, Lukács’ “Reifica-
tion and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1972) can be read as a
response to Sorel’s advocacy for mythical politics. Lukács structures
his essay as a critique of capitalist reification, which he defines as the
“refusal to understand reality as a whole and as existence” (Lukács
1972: 120). For reified man, explains Lukács, reality appears apart
from its foundation in two sets of mediations: those that compose the
world as a totality of integrated processes and those that join the sub-
ject to the world in a relation of active co-production.
Against Sorel, Lukács argues that consciousness restricted to
immediacy is an impediment, rather than a catalyst, for effective
political action. Accordingly, he offers a negative definition of myth as
“the reproduction in imagination of the problem in its insolubility”
(Lukács 1972: 194, emphasis in original). Lukács suggests that when
actors cannot understand the world as a set of processes in which they
participate, reality becomes distant, ossified, and impervious to trans-
formative action. Consequently, people do not identify with the social,
practical, and temporal mediations that could change the world and
their relationship to it. Instead, they project the power of their forgot-
ten agency into hope for a divine savior or commitment to irrational
acts of structurally inconsequential spectacle. Lukács asserts that the
fantasies of messianic salvation and instantaneous transformation are
“closer” to alienated subjects than their collective powers, which can
only operate through a chain of socio-temporal mediations.
As with Lukács, the Italian theorist and party official Antonio
Gramsci offers substantial critiques of the “Sorelian myth” (Gramsci
1971: 126). Gramsci, however, sees a certain space for myth in politi-
cal movements. He dedicates the first section of “The Modern Prince”
(1971) to a discussion of Sorel’s strike and Machiavelli’s condottiere.
As a version of the latter, he offers the socialist political party, which
he advises to use “messianic myths” (Gramsci 1971: 150) in its efforts
to arouse the passion of its followers. Unlike Sorel, Gramsci does not
believe that all socialists should act equally and independently in rev-
olutionary action. Unlike Lukács, he does not hold that proletarian
actors must pierce through immediacy to understand the mediations
that can lead them to liberation.
For Gramsci, the will behind effective political action can only be
collective. As a social agent with a division of intellectual and affective
labor, the party joins the rational deliberation of enlightened leaders
236 M. L. Cepek

to the impassioned mythos of a mass element. In this way, asserts

Gramsci, emotional drive acquires the constancy and direction that
enable intentional social transformation. In its ability to inspire
immediate demands and millennial hopes among the masses, the
party is a mythical being. In its leaders’ power to channel a movement
toward the creation of novel political structures, however, the party is
a social agent. A successful party, in other words, is a collective organ-
ism that pursues social-structural change by the manipulation of
mythical consciousness among its members.
Sorel, Lukács, and Gramsci do not agree on the political advisability of
myth. Nevertheless, they share a basic understanding of its function
in political action, and it is at this level that we can apply their ideas
to the case of Borman. From their perspective, actors immersed in
mythical politics do not pursue change by envisioning and enacting
the mediations that stand between a problematic present and a pref-
erable future. Rather, they believe in the power of immediacy, which
prevents their conscious participation in concrete acts of mediation.
They assume that liberation is perennially available, regardless of
socio-historical conditions. They desire instantaneous and total trans-
formation. They deny that they are positioned subjects who must
participate in a planned process of structural change. They are, in
other words, committed to a fantastic form of action that sees mythical
agency (and mythical agents) as the only mediation between a prob-
lem and its overcoming.

Identity and power in Cofán society

Although the work of Sorel, Lukács, and Gramsci does not figure in
the debate on Amazonian messianism, Terence Turner provides a con-
ceptual bridge between their conclusions and the central ethnographic
issue. In his discussion of indigenous South American perspectives
on the past (1988), Turner equates mythical consciousness with the
misrecognition of agency, which everyday actors deny for themselves
but grant to mythical others, who possess the fantastic ability to
maintain, transform, or transcend social structure. Combining Turner’s
insight with the conclusions of Sorel, Lukács, and Gramsci, we can
understand Borman as a mythical agent facilitating a mythical
politics. His mythical status is based on his ability to sustain and
transform Cofán society by mediating a series of divides: sameness
and difference, community and world, present and future, and subju-
gation and empowerment. To understand the sociocultural grounding
of Borman’s agency, we need to situate his position in the logic of
Cofán identity.
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 237

Although most non-indigenous actors are surprised by Borman’s role

as a Cofán leader, he is not without precedent. Throughout the twenti-
eth century (and before), the most important Cofán na’su (chiefs or lead-
ers) were ethnically ambiguous individuals whose identities overlapped
with those of other indigenous and non-indigenous people. Aniseto
Quenamá, a powerful Cofán headman who presided over much of the
Aguarico River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
was born to neighboring Tukanoan people. After his family was killed in
a raid, priests brought him to highland Ecuador, where he learned
Spanish and the ways of whites. He returned to Cofán territory and
acted as the main mediator between state authorities and the native
population, who viewed him as their na’su. Along the San Miguel River,
the most important na’su of the mid-twentieth century was Pacho
Quintero, a Cofán fluent in Spanish whose father was a mestizo rubber
tapper. Today, the Cofán continue the tradition of ethnically ambiguous
leadership. The current president of their ethnic federation, for exam-
ple, is completely mestizo in genealogical terms. He married a Cofán
woman and identifies with the Cofán nation, which benefits from his
familiarity with other-language and other-knowledge.
Cofán identity is capable of incorporating many kinds of ethnic
others. Cofán people refer to themselves as a’i, a word that can mean
“human being” or “indigenous human being” but more often identifies
a member of the Cofán ethnie. For the Cofán, such practical matters as
language, dress, and diet are important constituents of a’i identity.
Neither racially essentialized nor individually constructed, Cofán-ness
is a mode of personhood that depends on the performance and recogni-
tion of linguistic, psychological, and practical capacities.
Anyone who can practice the main constituents of the Cofán way of
life can claim Cofán-ness. Although all Cofán people identify the pres-
ence of mestizo, black, or other indigenous people in their genealogies,
most Cofán are secure in their own and their co-residents’ identities.
Normally, ethnic mixing is an unremarked matter of history and biog-
raphy. If a person disrupts the calm, reciprocal relations that form the
ideal social state of a Cofán community, however, others critique the
violator for his or her anger and selfishness, which they equate with
unsuccessfully socialized ethnic difference.
Borman’s white skin and English language point to his ethno-racial
otherness. Nevertheless, most Cofán people consider him to be Cofán
because of his mastery of A’ingae, his impressive competence in a forest-
based way of life, and his full immersion in the set of consanguineal,
affinal, and ritual relations that compose social life in Zábalo. In one
Zábalo man’s words, “Randy is a’i. He is knowledgeable about a’i
customs. He knows the a’i life.” In this sense, Borman is Cofán.
238 M. L. Cepek

FIGURE 2 Borman (far right) at a Cofán community meeting (photo by

Michael Cepek).

Borman, however, is not simply a Cofán villager. He is also the

leader of a community and a broader social movement.
Cofán na’su must master the shifting boundaries between Cofán
sociality and that which encompasses it. Intimately familiar with dis-
tance and difference, leaders pursue an ambivalent vocation. Cofán
society revolves around a basic division, which sets an interior calm of
community-life against the deadly difference of surrounding otherness,
whether ethnic or supernatural in kind. To keep violence at bay while
extracting the goods that outside domains offer, na’su must incorporate
the knowledge and norms that govern external social contexts.
Historically, community na’su were responsible for interacting with
the commercial, religious, and government agents that entered Cofán
territory. They tended to be the boldest and most aggressive members
of their villages as well as the most conversant in Spanish. Leaders
also managed problematic relations with neighboring indigenous
peoples. They were often the most ethnically mixed members of their
communities as well as the most fluent in Tukanoan and other indige-
nous languages. Their negotiation of sociopolitical landscapes both
presupposed and produced their ethnic ambivalence.
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 239

Currently, community and federation na’su follow the tradition of

ethnic mixing, boldness toward outsiders, and multilingualism.
In their efforts to defend Cofán territory while acquiring cash, com-
modities, and power from external agents, leaders mobilize their
interculturality to interact effectively with ethnic others, whether in
government ministries, company headquarters, or international con-
ferences. The majority of Cofán people value the mediating work of
their na’su. Nevertheless, they invariably distrust their leaders, who
appear to be only partially oriented by the norms that structure life in
Cofán communities.
The association of power with ethnic ambiguity and moral
ambivalence—two sides of the same coin, from the Cofán perspective—
also characterizes the basic qualities of Cofán shamans, who histori-
cally acted as political leaders. Shamans, like na’su, are inherently
intercultural creatures. Many are conversant in more than one indige-
nous language. All have engaged in mutual exchange and instruction
with the ritual experts of neighboring peoples. In addition to negotiat-
ing this-worldly interethnic relations, shamans mobilize their inter-
culturality in supernatural realms. With the aid of yaje (Banisteriopsis
caapi), va’u (Brugmansia suaveolensis), and tobacco, shamans travel
above, below, and on the ground to distant sites populated by cocoya
(malevolent supernatural agents), who often appear as horrific versions
of Afro-Ecuadorians, mestizos, and Caucasians.
In the tsa’o (houses) maintained by powerful supernatural others,
Cofán shamans acquire the clothing of jaguars and an arsenal com-
posed of rock and glass projectiles, spears, rifles, shotguns, and automatic
weapons, which they use to defend themselves and their communities
against supernatural attack. Shamans also travel to the distant
abodes of vajo (game masters), some of whom wear the black robes of
colonial priests (Kohn 2002). Through a ritualized process of dialogue
and exchange, shamans convince the masters to part with white-lipped
peccary, tapir, deer, and fish, which are freed for human harvesting.
Cofán people identify this form of acquisition as the ñoñañe (making)
of meat.
Alluding to the shamanic mode of production, contemporary adults
report that their parents expected them to enter missionary schools
and acquire the ability to ñoñañe other objects, such as airplanes and
helicopters. Whether industrial machine or fatty tapir, Cofán people
believe that many desired goods originate in sites that are beyond the
reach of normal humans. As agents capable of entering and exiting
far-off places of transformation, shamans are called di’sha’cho (one who
has emerged). Accordingly, the key A’ingae lexeme for the creation of
any object is somboeñe (to make emerge or to force to depart).
240 M. L. Cepek

From the Cofán perspective, it is difficult to draw a line between

political and supernatural power. The defensive and acquisitive func-
tions of shamans and leaders overlap. The essential foundation of
Cofán power continues to be the ability to transcend spatial, intercul-
tural, and ontological boundaries to mediate an interior realm of
Cofán sociality and a surrounding world of violent otherness, which
represents a threat to Cofán being as well as the source of desired
goods. In large part, Cofán people understand socio-cosmological
boundaries in ethnic terms, an interpretation that explains the cen-
tral role of interculturality and ethnic ambiguity in both shamanism
and political leadership. As an especially effective na’su, Borman fits
well within this tradition, which, paradoxically, ensures that he can
never be purely or simply Cofán.
In short, Cofán people identify with Borman, but they also associate
him with the qualities of distance and difference—as well as the power
that enables him to negotiate these dimensions through political
action. This conclusion matches my general ethnographic observations
as well as Cofán individuals’ specific statements. One middle-aged
Zábalo man cited Borman’s knowledge and ability as the reasons for
his special status (and ambivalent Cofán-ness), explaining, “Randy
knows how to do everything. How to secure land to live on. He has
that kind of experience. A’i aren’t like that.” Voicing a similar perspec-
tive, a younger Cofán person noted the general dependence on
Borman’s powers: “We alone can’t handle the community, where to go,
how things must be done. We can’t do that. . . . Randy knows. Randy
thinks more about how we must go further.” Using the starkest terms,
a number of my consultants stated simply, Vendi pa’nija, ma’caen ingi
canse’faya? (If Randy dies, how will we live?). Clearly, Cofán people
feel that they depend on Borman’s extraordinary abilities to maintain
their lives in troubling times.

Randy Borman and the power of immediacy

Cofán culture and politics might appear to be an entirely different
business than the socialist mobilization theorized by Sorel, Lukács,
and Gramsci. Nevertheless, both involve the key issue of political
immediacy, or the degree to which subjects intend and attempt change
while denying or delegating the concrete work of mediation. For the
theorists of proletarian action, the question of immediacy involves
abstracting political struggle from issues of historical condition, social
structure, processual moment, and, in general, collective rational
management. From their perspective, people who pursue transforma-
tion apart from a conscious negotiation of such issues dwell in the
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 241

immediacy of myth, and their mythical politics can take a number of

forms, from individualist revolt to passionate party devotion.
With regard to his position in Cofán political struggle, Borman also
represents a form of immediacy. Nevertheless, his function is different
from that of the general strike and the mythical party. He does not
inspire drives for total and instantaneous transformation. Nor does he
provoke a messianic fervor among his followers. He does, however, act to
concentrate the forms of mediation that compose Cofán people’s struggle
against the forces that plague them. All Cofán people want to move from
subjugation and insecurity to empowerment and stability, but few under-
stand the ways in which they can bring about such a transformation.
Most of them, however, believe that Borman represents a bridge past the
present era of contamination, dispossession, and violence.
The oil industry began to devastate the natural environments of
Cofán territory in the 1960s. Over the next four decades, thousands of
settlers cleared millions of acres of forest. Beginning in the 1990s, an
expanding wave of violence from Colombia’s drug trade and civil war
cloaked the region in a paralyzing anxiety. Borman was instrumental
in confronting each of these problems. He helped to secure a land title
for Doreno in the 1970s, and he worked to stop oil exploration in the
community in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he led Zábalo’s campaign
against the petroleum industry, which capitulated to Cofán demands
and abandoned the area. In 2001, he organized the struggle to declare
a Cofán-controlled ecological reserve along the Colombian border,
thereby providing a base for Ecuador’s most vulnerable Cofán villages.
Cofán people elected Borman as a community leader in Doreno and
Zábalo. He has served multiple terms as an elected officer—including
president—of the Indigenous Federation of the Cofán Nationality of
Ecuador (FEINCE). Currently, he acts as the federation’s Director of
Territory and Director of Ecotourism and Commerce. In response to
the difficulty of legalizing FEINCE, which acquired its papers in 2001,
Borman created the Foundation for the Survival of the Cofán People
(FSC) in 1998. He continues to serve as its executive director. More
recently, he founded the Institute for Environmental Conservation
and Training (ICCA), an NGO that teaches Cofán conservation tech-
niques to other indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.
Practically, much of Borman’s political work consists of typical
NGO-related activities: writing grants, attending meetings, and nego-
tiating matters of legal and economic significance with state and non-
state actors. At particularly important junctures, he mobilizes large
contingents of Cofán people to face off colonists or to create media
events. For the most part, however, Borman’s activism is of a much
more quiet and individual nature. His most important work occurs in
242 M. L. Cepek

Quito, where a small group of Cofán and non-Cofán people support his
efforts on behalf of FSC, FEINCE, and ICCA.
A number of young Cofán leaders are becoming versed in the logic
and discourse of nation-state politics, NGO-based activism, and collab-
oration with pro-indigenous and pro-environment outsiders. Their
grasp of contemporary political challenges, however, does not match
that of Borman, whose degree of formal education, multilingualism,
and familiarity with scientists, advocates, and politicians far exceeds
that of his Cofán peers. With the aid of more than thirty years of expe-
rience at the community, nation-state, and global levels, Borman
directs his efforts toward the creation of environment-based relations
between the Cofán nation and the Ecuadorian and foreign actors who
work to protect Amazonian ecosystems.
Borman’s overarching objective is to bring Cofán people the political
and educational resources that will allow them to replace the parties
who dominate the investigation, conservation, and management of
Ecuador’s natural environments, including Cofán territory. If his
efforts are successful, the Cofán will escape their position as the unpaid,
uneducated, and uncredited objects of scientific expertise, state power,
and transnational conservation work to become their fully empowered
agents. He has convinced large segments of the Ecuadorian govern-
ment and the global conservation community to support his vision of
making the Cofán into scientifically trained and politically empowered
custodians of Amazonian landscapes. Cofán people now enjoy legal
rights to approximately one million acres of forest, more than 90 percent
of which overlaps with protected natural areas. Many of them earn a
living as park guards, tour guides, and scientific researchers. At first
glance, Borman’s objective might not appear to be millenarian in nature,
but his goal of achieving security, power, status, and wealth for the
Cofán nation implies a radical inversion of contemporary positions.
Numerous factors account for Borman’s political success. He is, first
and foremost, a fascinating cultural phenomenon to government and
non-government representatives. He strategically uses his identity to
attract attention and aid for Cofán projects. Depending on the situa-
tion, he can stress the Cofán, national Ecuadorian, or North American
sides of his identity to make himself appear both authentic and familiar
to actors who matter. He is a very charismatic person, and he inspires
trust in Cofán and non-Cofán people alike.
Even more important—especially from the Cofán perspective—is
Borman’s ability to deal creatively, critically, and effectively with a
multicultural political landscape. His English, Spanish, and A’ingae
are perfect. He has the intellectual capacity to understand, critique,
and produce essential textual forms, including scientific papers, grant
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 243

proposals, political speeches, and legal documents. Moreover, he pos-

sesses the constancy of character to devote years of his life to a kind of
urban activism that is neither easy nor pleasurable, especially for
someone who would rather be hunting tapir in Zábalo.
From the perspective of Westerners who are familiar with the organi-
zational accomplishments and global fascination that Borman repre-
sents, his leadership may look competent and unique, but it does not
appear mythical. From the Cofán perspective, however, he is a different
kind of figure. As with other na’su and shamans, Borman works for the
welfare of Cofán people by negotiating impinging threats, which take the
form of social and cosmological difference. The more he engages in politi-
cal struggle, the more he mediates spatio-temporal, intercultural, and
ontological divides, and the more he sets himself apart from the people
who follow him. Although his whiteness does not complicate his Cofán-
ness, his capacity for mediation does. One Zábalo resident explained the
connection, asserting that Borman is not a gringo (Euro-American) who
became a’i, but an a’i who is becoming gringo: “Randy is a’i, but now he’s
also gringo. He went away [to do political work in Quito] and now he’s in
the process of becoming gringo.”
By immersing himself in gringo and cocama (mestizo) centers of
power, Borman acquires the mediating abilities that give him a myth-
ical status. His facility with other languages, contexts, and skills—
from his fantastic globe-spanning travels to his prosaic expertise with
pen, paper, and computer—makes him “more” than a regular Cofán
person. Of course, Cofán people have always maintained a friendly
intimacy with mythical agents of various degrees. Shamans who bear
jaguar teeth, chant in cosmic tongues, and cocoyave di’shaye (trans-
form into demons) have spouses, children, and friends who normally
relate to them as everyday humans. Political leaders who speak multiple
languages, travel through far-off lands, and confront powerful enemies
maintain typical lives in Cofán villages. From the Cofán perspective,
imperceptible realms exist alongside visible life, and agents who
traverse socio-cosmological distances are much closer to everyday people
than common meanings of “myth” suggest.
In short, Cofán people confront their political-economic entangle-
ments through the immediacy of Borman’s persona. They live under
constant threat from the oil industry, the Colombian civil war and
drug trade, an expanding colonization front, and an untrustworthy
Ecuadorian state. In his command over violent and productive differ-
ence, Borman articulates the movement toward a future in which they
will control the political and territorial space that will enable them to lead
more satisfying and secure lives. Rather than make their own agency the
bridge between their current situation and a changed position, they
244 M. L. Cepek

relate to Borman as the embodier and enactor of sociopolitical transfor-

mation. In other words, they relate to him as a mythical agent in the
meaning that Sorel, Lukács, and Gramsci give to the term.
In a certain sense, Borman’s mythical function constitutes Cofán
politics as a somewhat irrational venture, at least from the perspec-
tive of the majority of Cofán people. Because they rely on Borman’s
powers of mediation, the Cofán do not have to understand the means
for extracting goods from outside arenas while maintaining a comfort-
able distance from them. Moreover, they do not have to comprehend
the planned process of structural change that aims to replace their
current situation of poverty and instability with material wealth and
political power. For the Cofán, Borman both represents and accom-
plishes these transformations, which they grasp through the immedi-
acy of his persona rather than a conscious understanding of the
mediations that compose the real process of political struggle.
Ultimately, the mythical aspects of Cofán politics may be an histor-
ical matter. Neither Borman nor other Cofán want one individual to
play such an important role in a collective struggle. Appreciating the
facts of contingency and mortality, Cofán people are committed to gen-
eralizing Borman’s powers by making their children into multicultural
and multilingual leaders. Borman shares their concerns, and he is
working to incorporate a number of young Cofán into his activities. In
addition, FSC’s “Education Project” is helping Cofán children to enter
schools in Quito and the United States, where Borman hopes that they
will build a similar capacity for global activism.
Mythical politics depends on the existence of gaps—spatio-temporal,
intercultural, and ontological—that only mythical agents can negoti-
ate. As Cofán youths develop a substantive knowledge of the sites,
actors, and processes negotiated by Borman, the work of mediation
will become a more social endeavor. With an educated and broad-
based leadership, traversing the divides between contemporary Cofán
people, the realms that encompass them, and the future that eludes
them will shed its mythical quality. If the means for transforming the
world become objects of collective Cofán calculation, Borman will lose
his mythical status, and Cofán politics will become a much more
pedestrian affair. As one Cofán elder explained, there is no other way
to ensure the security of the Cofán nation:

Truly, we only have one knowledgeable, capable person like Randy here.
Because of that, we really want a lot of people, my own children or other
people’s children, to learn and then to become the supporters, the helpers,
of this community, as well as all of Cofán land and other Cofán commu-
nities. Only with this will we exist securely.
 Myth of the Gringo Chief 245

Conclusion
Myth is the bridge that people place before themselves when they face
an impasse of understanding and action. In the pragmatic sense, it
bears a relation to the classical idea of magic as “action at a distance.”
In this article, I provided an ethnographic account of the distances
that characterize Cofán society, cosmology, and politics. I argued that
Borman is mythical because he both stands for and negotiates these
distances, which appear to Cofán people in the immediacy of his per-
sona. As a mythical agent, he sustains community-life and transforms
the geo-political position of the Cofán nation by managing two types
of mediation. On the one hand, similarly to other na’su and shamans,
he mediates spatial and ethnic domains, such as community and
world, Cofán and non-Cofán. On the other hand, and more specific to
his work as a global activist, Borman mediates two temporal and
political stages, namely, current Cofán subjugation and future Cofán
empowerment.
In contrast to common meanings, my usage of myth signifies
neither transcendent divinity nor otherworldly origin. In this sense,
I follow Sorel, Lukács, and Gramsci, who attribute a mythical status
to such events and actors as the general strike and the political party.
From their perspective, these phenomena are mythical because they
inspire people to believe in the power of immediacy—the promise of
change that demands neither understanding of nor participation in
the social, practical, and temporal mediations that stand between a
problem and its overcoming.
I intended my joint theorization of Cofán and socialist politics to
cast Amazonian subjects in a more familiar light: not as fanatical
others on the far side of the Great Divide, but as questioning people
who struggle to understand and to change the world. Sorel, Lukács,
and Gramsci use the concept of myth to debate the role of reason in a
Western form of radical politics. For the Cofán, political reason can be
questioned in similar ways. Neither an iron cage nor an individual
attribute, it exists within a social structure, a cultural logic, an histor-
ical moment, and a political position. Randy Borman is a product of
this matrix. When it changes—because of political success or political
failure—so, too, will the myth of the gringo chief.

Notes
Received 15 January 2008; accepted 9 September 2008.

Drafts of this paper profited from discussions with a number of colleagues: Hanne Veber,
Soren Hvalkof, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Evan Killick, Norman Whitten, Jay Simmelink,
246 M. L. Cepek

Jamon Halvaksz, Jill Fleuriet, Laura Levi, and four anonymous Identities reviewers.
For their financial support of my research, I thank the University of Chicago, Macalester
College, the Field Museum of Natural History, the National Science Foundation, the
Tinker Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Finally, I
express my deepest gratitude to all of my Cofán consultants—especially Randy Borman.

Address correspondence to Michael L. Cepek, Department of Anthropology, University

of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio TX 78249-0649, USA. E-mail:
michael.cepek@utsa.edu

1. The political-economic-ecological transformation of northeastern Ecuador and neigh-

boring Cofán territory in Colombia has been the topic of a number of books and articles
(e.g., Fundación Zio-A’i 2000; Kimerling 1991; Ramírez 2002; Vickers 2003).
2. Although most of my conversations with Borman occurred in English, I conducted the
majority of my fieldwork in A’ingae, which has yet to be classified in a known linguistic
family. All Cofán quotations are direct translations from A’ingae.
3. Leaders of Ecuador’s national indigenous movement also propose a concept of mythical-
millennial transformation, which they describe with the Quechua term pachakutik
(Whitten 2003). Cofán people, however, maintain a loose and sometimes antagonistic
relationship with the national indigenous movement, which they feel has placed
them in a client role. I have never heard the word pachakutik uttered by Cofán
people except in reference to representatives of the Pachakutik political party, which
campaigns throughout Ecuador.

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