MICHAEL L.
CEPEK
There might be blood:
Oil, humility, and the cosmopolitics of a Cofán petro-being
A B S T R A C T
A central directive of recent writings on
cosmopolitics and ontology is that critically minded
anthropologists should “humble” themselves and
view their subjects’ statements as propositions that
disclose multiple real worlds. An exploration of
Cofán people’s uncertainty regarding the idea that
oil is the blood of a sacred mythological being—a
position that romanticizing Westerners repeatedly
attribute to them—calls into question the
implications of the call for anthropological humility.
Cofán discussions of oil’s sanguinary nature
demonstrate that the best way to comprehend the
intellectual agency of our collaborators is to
acknowledge, rather than ignore, the social,
pragmatic, and epistemological contours of their
discourse, cosmological or otherwise. [cosmopolitics,
ontology, oil, indigeneity, Cofán, Ecuador, Amazonia]
Una directriz central de escritos recientes sobre
cosmopolı́tica y ontologı́a es que los antropólogos
con espı́ritu crı́tico deberı́an “humillarse” y tomar las
afirmaciones de sus sujetos de estudio como
proposiciones que revelan múltiples mundos reales.
Explorar la indecisión que tienen los cofán acerca de
la idea de que el petróleo es la sangre de un sagrado
ser mitológico —posición que les atribuyen
constantemente los occidentales románticos—
cuestiona las implicaciones de esta llamada a la
humildad. Las discusiones entre los cofán acerca de
la naturaleza sanguinaria del petróleo nos muestran
que la mejor manera de comprender la capacidad
intelectual de nuestros colaboradores es reconocer,
en vez de ignorar, los contornos sociales,
pragmáticos y epistemológicos de su discurso, sea
este cosmológico o no. [cosmopolı́tica, ontologı́a,
petróleo, indigeneidad, Cofán, Ecuador, Amazonia]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 623–635, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12379
University of Texas at San Antonio
any Westerners are familiar with the indigenous Cofán peo-
M
ple of eastern Ecuador for two reasons: they are well-known
witnesses to oil companies’ destruction of the Amazonian
environment, and they are implementing celebrated pro-
grams to protect that environment. In the spring of 2010,
I received a brief flurry of media attention concerning both issues. In a
two-week span, two high-profile journalists approached me as an outside
expert on Cofán culture and politics. The first was reporter Juan Forero,
who produced a pair of stories about the challenges of Cofán conserva-
tion. One appeared in the Washington Post (Forero 2010a) and the other on
National Public Radio (Forero 2010b). Although both were largely accurate,
the former misquoted me in a tremendously embarrassing way. While de-
tailing the historical challenges Cofán people had experienced—especially
the crises associated with the entrance of petroleum companies onto their
land in the 1960s—I told Forero that, because of epidemic disease, they
had a very small population in the first half of the 20th century. In print, he
rendered my statement as “They were small, monolingual.” With the slip of
a pen, I became the anthropologist of the diminutive Cofán—literally little
people battling big oil.
The other conversation never made it to print. Naomi Klein (2008,
2014)—author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything—
directed a research assistant to me with an inquiry about indigenous peo-
ples who view “oil as the blood of the earth.” Apparently, Klein had read the
widely circulating stories about what Cofán people identify in their native
language, A’ingae, as coancoan, supposedly sacred subterranean beings
that are in danger because of petroleum extraction. For the Cofán, report-
edly, oil is the coancoans’ blood, and removing it kills them and threatens
access to essential, coancoan-controlled game animals. Stories of Cofán
people’s concern about the coancoan appear across the Internet: on the
website of an Ecuadorian NGO, in a video clip about Cofán anti-oil ac-
tivism, in the title of an Ecuadorian art opening, and even as the name of a
full-length documentary, The Blood of Kouan Kouan (Avgeropoulos 2008).
Although oil-related dispossession, contamination, and sickness are the
main foci of media accounts concerning the Cofán, the idea that petroleum
companies are exterminating their underworld gods attracts an especially
sympathetic form of romanticizing attention.
C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016
I told Klein’s assistant what I will argue here: I am not
sure if oil is the blood of the coancoan, and neither are
Cofán people. This uncertainty not only calls into question
the romantic notions of journalists and environmental ac-
tivists but also highlights the methodological and political
implications of recent anthropological work on ontology
and “cosmopolitics” (Adamson 2012; de la Cadena 2010;
Latour 2004; Stengers 2005; Watson 2011, 2013), which
is guided by a similar understanding of how to approach
the discourse of the Other. I began to question the central
arguments of this literature after reading Marisol de la
Cadena’s (2010) article on the political involvements of
Andean “earth-beings,” a collection of other-than-human
actors that seem very similar to the coancoan. The appear-
ance of these entities in indigenous struggles, de la Cadena
argues, troubles the ontological distinction between hu-
mans and nature on which modern politics rests. Building
on the works of Bruno Latour (2004), Jacques Rancière
(1999), Carl Schmitt (1996), and Isabelle Stengers (2005),
de la Cadena describes the clashes in which earth-beings
participate as “adversarial relations among worlds,” or
battles to compose a cosmos broad enough to include
nonhuman political actors (de la Cadena 2010, 360). In
such a cosmos, other-than-human agents would be real
participants rather than mere cultural representations—
the slot into which modernist logic, anthropological
orthodoxy, and multicultural politics typically place
them.
The idea that different peoples inhabit different, con-
flicting realities is central to what has come to be known
as anthropology’s ontological turn, led by scholars such as
Mario Blaser (2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2013), Martin Holbraad
(Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Holbraad 2007, 2010,
2012; Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014),
Morten Axel Pedersen (2007, 2011, 2012), and Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2003, 2004, 2013, 2015). Many an-
thropologists working within this intellectual movement ar-
gue that to take seriously what our research participants say,
we must accept their views as statements affirming the ex-
istence of multiple, equally real worlds rather than as sub-
jective representations of a single, universal nature, which
only Western science can disclose with truth and precision.
In other words, we should forgo our modernist assurances
and become more “humble” (Holbraad 2012, 259–63) in the
face of our collaborators’ discourse, which we should view
literally rather than figuratively (de la Cadena 2010, 336,
361–62). From this standpoint, anthropologists should en-
tertain the reality of alterity-affirming statements, such as
Cofán people’s pronouncements concerning the coancoan.
By doing so, ontologically oriented analysts argue, we can
revise our own understandings of such concepts as “oil” and
“blood,” as well as our underlying notions of materiality and
animacy, to see the truth of the alleged Cofán proposition
regarding petroleum and the coancoan.
624
Figure 1. Houses in the Cofán community of Dureno, Ecuador, with oil-well
flares glowing in the background, February 2016. (Bear Guerra)
Although it aims to create a more inclusive politi-
cal practice, scholarship that accepts the cosmopolitical
and ontological injunction—that is, to humble ourselves by
taking our interlocutors’ statements seriously as declara-
tions of multiple real worlds—tends to suffer from serious
methodological problems. Investigations of this kind often
focus on the bare content of abstract propositions while
paying little attention to their pragmatic function, episte-
mological stance, affective tone, and position in a division
of linguistic and conceptual labor (Putnam 1975, 227–28).
Ignoring these factors has little to do with anthropological
humility. Rather, it amounts to a failure to relate to our sub-
jects as critical intellectual agents whose analytic capaci-
ties are just as powerful, vexed, and complex as our own.
Even though ontologically inclined anthropologists are
committed to the “permanent decolonization of thought”
(Viveiros de Castro 2014, 40; see also Hage 2012; Holbraad,
Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014; and Viveiros de
Castro 2003, 2011), their work reflects more accurately
the abstraction, antihumanism, and interpretive excess
of such theoretical traditions as structuralism. Their ap-
proach maintains no necessary relationship to accurate
ethnography, ethical methodology, or liberatory politics.
In my field site of Dureno, a community that lies
in the epicenter of Ecuadorian petroleum extraction (see
Figure 1), people do and do not take the coancoan seri-
ously. The beings appear in myths, jokes, and conversa-
tions with ethnic others. For most Cofán people, they are
not revered or sacred entities. Few if any Dureno residents
worry about what oil is doing to the coancoan or their
blood. Some of them doubt the beings exist, and others
imagine they inhabit a realm that is completely separate
from human affairs, including oil drilling. Nonetheless, the
coancoan are caught in a web of semantic associations and
sociopolitical dynamics that might give the idea of their
petro-nature a heightened “accent of reality” (Berger and

Luckmann 1966, 143). Rendering their blood according to
“ontographic” techniques (Holbraad 2012, 256), however,
would yield little more than a poorly constructed artifact
(Latour 2013, 159). The result would certainly not reflect
the coancoans’ place in Cofán experience. Even more trou-
blingly, it could be used to ground a cosmopolitical project
that conflicts with the aspirations of Cofán people, who are
struggling for survival in an oil-saturated world.
Cosmopolitics, ontology, and humility
According to de la Cadena, two prime examples of po-
litically active Andean earth-beings are Pachamama, the
“Earth Mother” or “Source of Life” that appeared in
Ecuador’s 2008 constitution, and Ausangate, a mountain-
being that plays an important part in Peruvian anti-
mining activism. De la Cadena critiques any interpretation
that would position these beings as “excessive, residual or
infantile” beliefs about a universal material world (2010,
336). Noting that their political movements often recruit
other-than-human actors, de la Cadena argues that “Latin
American Indians . . . are not a usual ‘enemy’ or ‘adver-
sary’” (347) because their politics “may exceed politics as
we know them” (335). Insisting on the legitimate political
role of Pachamama, Ausangate, and other earth-beings, de
la Cadena asserts that, in Latour’s words, indigenous peo-
ples’ struggles are cosmopolitical “wars of the worlds, be-
cause it’s now the makeup of the cosmos that is at stake”
(Latour 2004, 455).
To move beyond dominant conceptual approaches and
acknowledge other-than-human actors’ political interven-
tions, de la Cadena recommends that we follow Isabelle
Stengers’s example of the “idiot” (2005, 336), which Stengers
borrows from Fyodor Dostoyevsky via Gilles Deleuze. The
idiot does not aim to assert “what is” but only to “‘slow
down’ reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a
slightly different awareness of the problems and situations
mobilizing us” (Stengers 2005, 944–45; see also Watson
2013, 89–90). The hesitation to assert “what is” tellingly
reflects the ontological turn’s embrace of humility as a
guiding concept. The principle advises three interrelated
moves: (1) to transform the anthropologist’s own cate-
gories through “recursive” (Holbraad 2012, 263) or “reflex-
ive” (Pedersen 2012; see also Hage 2012, 297) analyses rather
than to produce empirically exhaustive accounts of non-
Western societies; (2) to commit to serving as an intellec-
tual “underlaborer” (Bhaskar 1989, 1) for the conceptual
self-determination of the West’s Others (Holbraad, Peder-
sen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014; Viveiros de Castro 2003,
4; 2015, 11); and (3) to “take seriously” what the subjects
of ethnographic research say rather than to interpret their
words as absurd or mistaken representations of a world
they do not know (Candea 2010, 175; de la Cadena 2010,
336, 361–62; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 10, 13;
There might be blood  American Ethnologist
Pedersen 2012; Venkatesan 2010, 154; Viveiros de Castro
2015, 14; for a critical assessment, see Heywood 2012, 143,
144; Laidlaw 2012).
In Truth in Motion, whose epilogue is titled “On Hu-
mility,” Holbraad writes, “You may wish to credit people
with common sense . . . but I would rather credit them
with what they actually say” (2012, 248). For Holbraad
and similarly minded anthropologists, taking people’s
discourse seriously requires downplaying its pragmatic,
affective, and epistemological dimensions. This aspect of
the ontological turn has been questioned by many scholars
(Heywood 2012; Keane 2009; Killick 2014; Laidlaw 2012;
Lowrey 2011). Lucas Bessire and David Bond provide the
most incisive indictment: “The only way [multinatural
ontology] can often be sustained is by a targeted erasure of
ethnographic evidence and an artificial standardization of
alterity itself” (2014, 443). Their criticism amounts to one
point: ontologists often construct a single, homogenized,
and exoticized conceptual perspective for “nonmodern”
peoples by ignoring or deforming much of the mate-
rial available for ethnographic analysis. In other words,
ontologically oriented anthropologists can maintain an
extreme and simplified opposition between nonmodern
multinaturalism and modern multiculturalism only by
steamrolling the subtleties of their data. With much of the
empirical diversity and complexity out of the way, ethnog-
raphy in this vein does little more than recapitulate a given
set of philosophical arguments, most notably Deleuze’s
notion of “radical constructivism” (Henare, Holbraad, and
Wastell 2007, 13; emphasis in original) and his “multiple
conception of the real” (Hage 2012, 300).
At issue, then, is a self-imposed limitation on the
depths of empirical complexity that ethnographers can
confidently plumb. Whether they are rejecting accuracy
and comprehensiveness as paramount ethnographic goals
(Holbraad 2012, 249), defending “good enough” descrip-
tions (Viveiros de Castro 2015, 13), or hesitating to as-
sert “what is” in favor of issuing conceptual challenges
(de la Cadena 2010, 336), the ontologists enact an ethno-
graphic refusal that results in a highly instrumentalizing
stance toward their interlocutors. In their efforts to distill
alterity-affirming content from their collaborators’ state-
ments, such anthropologists risk losing sight of the complex
richness of their discourse and practice—the great prag-
matic multiplicity of what and how they say and do. Con-
sequently, the conceptual content of their collaborators’
discourse is reduced to a homogenized set of difference-
declaring propositions: for people in Cuba, divinatory pow-
der is power (Holbraad 2007); for people in Amazonia, all
beings see the world in the same cultural forms (Viveiros de
Castro 1998); and for people in the Andes, earth-beings are
other-than-human political actors (de la Cadena 2010).
Once abstracted from the flux of field experiences, such
statements require no more justification than their utility
625
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016
in intellectualized acts of conceptual play. If they help us
to slow down our reasoning and reimagine our theoreti-
cal toolkit, their correspondence to the multiple, shifting,
and uncertain understandings of our subjects is a moot
point. As Evan Killick (2014) argues, constructing such sim-
plified propositions—as well as attributing them to ac-
tual people and using them as experimental conceptual
props—amounts to a quasi-colonial exercise in representa-
tional ventriloquism. Surely, such a project is anything but
humble.1
The coancoan
Ecuador’s approximately 1,500 Cofán citizens are a diverse
social group. They live along the Aguarico and San Miguel
Rivers in the far northeast of the country. Differences of age,
gender, community affiliation, biography, and personality
weigh heavily on individual stances toward political issues
and life in general. I have tried to come to grips with the
variation over the last two decades, but most of my work
has occurred in only two communities: Zábalo and Dureno.
The former is the site of my dissertation research and first
book (Cepek 2012a), and the latter is the location of my cur-
rent project on the relationship between Cofán people and
the oil industry. Despite my close ties to the two villages, I
have interacted extensively with people from all Ecuadorian
Cofán communities. Although I return to Cofán territory ev-
ery year, my most frequent exchanges with Cofán individ-
uals now take place via Facebook. Dureno is close enough
to the provincial capital of Lago Agrio to allow the use of
smartphones. I keep abreast of everyday events through
postings, comments, and messages in the A’ingae language
(a linguistic isolate), which continues to be the primary
means of Cofán communication.
Despite the social diversity and technological change,
even young Cofán people know who the coancoan are.
Elders no longer tell myths every night, but a few leg-
endary figures maintain a strong presence in Cofán con-
sciousness. The coancoan are a case in point, but not for
their sacred nature, economic contributions, or suffering
at the hands of oil companies. Instead, they are known
for the humor they inspire. People constantly note their
most intriguing possession: giant penises. Although one
myth mentions their control of game animals, the main re-
source they offer is comedy. In everyday life, no one claims
to revere them. Instead, they figure in jokes about peo-
ple’s amorous activities. Men double over with laughter as
they describe how their own penises—like the coancoans’—
stretch to the homes of young women for covert dal-
liances. The stories are sometimes accompanied by tales
of how, as youths, the men tried to enlarge their penises
by applying grated palm wood to their loins. Unfortu-
nately, the only thing the poultice endowed them with was
a rash.
626
Knowledge of the coancoans’ subterranean home and
impressive appendages comes from two myths. One—
sometimes called the Story of Ofendyondyo (the Pleiades
People)—describes the creation of the coancoan as a sin-
gle boy. The coancoan’s mother was a Cofán woman who,
through dreams, had a sexual affair. She became pregnant
and gave birth to the coancoan. The boy appeared normal
aside from a penis as long as his arm. One day, he dipped
his organ into a river. It acted as barbasco poison, suffo-
cating many fish that he collected to eat. Another boy told
the coancoan’s mother to clean the fish especially well, be-
cause the coancoan’s penis had killed them. The boy’s re-
quest infuriated the coancoan. He acted out by tricking an-
other youth into trapping himself in a tree trunk, which led
the boy to transform into a toad. The boy’s parents were
so upset that they tried to burn the coancoan in a gar-
den of corn. By transforming himself into a fish in a pud-
dle, he survived. They tried to kill him again but failed.
Finally, they trapped him under a giant pot, and he was
forced to live underground. From there, his penis periodi-
cally emerged aboveground to have sex with a woman. One
day, the woman’s two children saw the penis and cut it off.
Their mother was so angry that she threw them out of her
house. After a long search, they decided to ascend a magical
ladder to the sky and live forever as Ofendyondyo, the peo-
ple of the Pleiades constellation (also the name of an annual
flood of the Aguarico River). The myth ends when the chil-
dren’s mother tries to climb the ladder. The children cut it at
the last moment, forcing the woman’s fall and subsequent
transformation into a bird.
Associations of the coancoan with oil derive more
substance from the other myth. People sometimes call it
the Story of Munda Tsonjen’cho (the White-Lipped Peccary-
Attracting Thing). In the myth, a man who cannot hunt
follows a herd of white-lipped peccaries through the forest.
After days, he eats their food and begins to understand their
language. In their company, he enters a hole in the ground.
There, he finds a world similar to the one he knows: there
are rivers, animals, houses, and a’i, or “humans,” called
coancoan. Very tall and very strange, they are a general class
of beings rather than a specific individual, a shift that dif-
ferentiates the myth from the Story of the Pleiades People.
The coancoan wrap their giant penises around their necks.
Instead of eating food, they nourish themselves by sniffing
it. They love the smell of the Cofán visitor’s feces, which
they rub over their bodies as perfume. For them, day is
night and night is day. During the rainy season, they trans-
form into rocks to sleep. Before the Cofán man leaves them,
they ask for his dog. In exchange, the Cofán asks for white-
lipped peccaries, of which the coancoan are na’su (masters
or owners). The coancoan give him a small object that
attracts the peccaries and allows him to bring them above-
ground. There, he leads them to his house, where other
Cofán hunters kill them. After they kill them all, the man

returns to the coancoan. Another Cofán person follows him
but is crushed under the coancoan when they fall asleep
as stones. When they wake, they brush away his bones and
laugh. The first Cofán man returns to his house with more
peccaries. But when he dies, the animals scatter into the
forest.
In the next sections, I explore six Cofán people’s state-
ments concerning the relationship between the coancoan
and oil. All make common reference to the coancoans’
mythical descriptions, but they express a variety of perspec-
tives on the beings’ petro-blood. In sharing the comments,
my intention is not to “debunk” Cofán political discourse.
Rather, I aim to construct a more ethnographically sound
characterization of an earth-being (in de la Cadena’s sense
of the term) and to describe a more substantive foundation
for the role it might play in political confrontations.
Arturo and Miguel
Knowledge of the coancoan among nonindigenous people
comes from two main sources: Arturo and Miguel.2 Both
men appear in documentaries about Cofán people and
oil that are available on the Internet. Arturo is featured in
the earlier video, titled Cofanes, resisténcia y cosmovisión.
Apparently, it was produced by the environmental organi-
zation Acción Ecológica, which is one of the Ecuadorian
institutions most critical of the country’s petroleum indus-
try. The video begins with an image of a map, a drawing of
the coancoan (sans penis), and six sentences of text, two of
which focus on the beings. They read, “The Cofán believe
in a spirit called Coancoan that guides the Shamans. The
spirits live in the earth and their blood is oil.” Halfway
through the video, Arturo speaks about the coancoan. In
Spanish, he says,
The coancoans, for us, are subterranean beings. They
live inside the earth. We respect the coancoans a lot
because they are owners of the wild animals. The
shamans, through the medium of the spirit, through
the medium of yaje [the hallucinogen Banisteriopsis
caapi], have contact with the coancoans. I believe that,
for me, it’s like a spirit. But we can’t see it without
yaje. Only the shamans, when they become inebriated,
when the vision emerges, have contact with them. I be-
lieve that it’s a spirit. Our shamans have told us that
oil is the blood of the coancoan. And we want to take
care of the coancoans. That’s why we’re against the
petroleum activities.
Like many Western films and videos about indigenous
peoples, the video features a sonic background of myste-
rious flute solos and an image of a bird soaring through
the sky to communicate the sacred nature of the beings Ar-
turo describes. Arturo is a young man, and he is neither a
shaman nor an expert on mythical discourse. His statement
is filled with pauses, and he shifts between the plural and
There might be blood  American Ethnologist
the singular to name the coancoan. He makes no claim to
know the beings directly. Rather, he reports the statements
of shamans, who supposedly maintain close relationships
with them.
Miguel is one such shaman. His commentary on the
coancoan appears in the beginning of The Blood of Kouan
Kouan (Avgeropoulos 2008), a Greek documentary about
oil in Cofán territory. Largely monolingual, Miguel speaks
in A’ingae, and the film translates his words in English
subtitles. (I do not know who did the translations, although
I imagine it was a Cofán person who translated into Span-
ish, which the filmmakers then rendered into English.)
With a painted face, a feather crown, and a traditional
nose ornament, Miguel says the following, according to the
English subtitles:
Kouan-Kouan is the god that dwells in the subsurface.
When he wishes to rest he changes into a stone. He
rules over the world of the wild beasts of the jungle and
when the shamans drink the Yage they come in con-
tact with him and ask him to bring animals to the com-
munity. We easily hunt them down with blow-pipes and
share them as we always have . . . . However, the oil com-
panies that have come here place explosives and dyna-
mite in the earth to get oil out of it. They have taken
our area and they are killing Kouan-Kouan by sucking
his blood, polluting Nature with chemicals. So our god
is dying and we have no animals to hunt as we used to.
We live with diseases and little food.
My own, more accurate translation of Miguel’s statement,
which differs significantly from the film’s version, is as
follows:
Coancoan is the owner of the white-lipped peccaries.
It resides beneath our land, underground. They are
the owners [now plural] of the white-lipped peccaries.
A knowledgeable person drinks yaje, goes there, goes
to the owner, to coancoan, speaks to him, saying, “I
have come to take some of your pets.” The coancoan
replies, “OK, take some. Count how many you want and
take them.” So, they [peccaries] all return, when peo-
ple drink yaje, and come to the house. In the old times,
we used blowguns with poison to kill and eat those . . . .
Now all the companies come here, and they stink it up
with their wells. They do that, and animals, collared
peccaries, have disappeared. White-lipped peccaries,
too, are gone. Wooly monkeys, parrots, macaws, in the
old times they were plentiful here. Now there are no
macaws. It smells horrible, and because of that animals
have disappeared. They have gone into the place where
they reside [pointing downward], forever. Now we live
without game animals, without eating.
I know Miguel well. He is my ritual brother, and I
have spent nearly a year residing in his Dureno home. We
have talked for hundreds of hours about shamanism and
627
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016
Figure 2. Crude-filled sludge from an abandoned oil-well waste pit in
Cofán territory, Ecuador, February 2016. (Bear Guerra)
cosmology, and I have consumed yaje and gone hunting
with him multiple times. Although he is a respected curer,
he does not know how to aña’choma ttu’seye (call game) by
contacting the coancoan or anything else. Moreover, when
someone wants to hear an exhaustive and “accurate” ver-
sion of a myth, Miguel directs them to a different elder.
He admits that mythical discourse is not his specialty. Ap-
parently, he, too, heard about the relationship between the
coancoan, shamans, and game from someone else. Finally,
as is clear in my translation of the second half of Miguel’s
statement, his description of oil-related environmental de-
struction makes no mention of the coancoan. Instead, he
repeats a common Cofán assertion: animals flee petroleum
activity, either horizontally (to other forest areas) or verti-
cally (below the ground), to escape the disgusting smells of
oil pollution (see Figure 2).
Roberto and Rosana
Roberto is one of my Cofán research assistants. He also re-
cently received an anthropology degree through a distance
628
program with an Ecuadorian university. Rosana is a middle-
aged Dureno resident and a superb collaborator. She is
confident, funny, and knowledgeable. She exhibits none of
the shyness that younger Cofán women often express in
conversations with outsiders. In the summer of 2013, with
Roberto’s aid, I interviewed Rosana about oil development
in Dureno. When I asked what a Chinese corporation was
doing on Cofán land, she laughed and said they were look-
ing for coancoan cundyipa (coancoan male urine) or coan-
coan anjampa (coancoan blood).3 With a giggle, she said
that she was talking about petróleo (oil, in Spanish). I then
asked who owns the oil beneath Dureno. In A’ingae, she re-
sponded in the following terms, laughing softly the entire
time:
Is it not ours? Long ago, the coancoan lived on this land.
Isn’t that how oil emerged? People say the coancoan
were truly here. People say those beings were truly in
this community. A lot of oil is sitting here. And peo-
ple say they want to fettaye [open] it, to open its chan
[an archaic A’ingae word for “mother”]. Now, right over
there, they are entering the mother. The mother is what
makes the oil reproduce. It’s the petróleo mama [oil
mother].
The conversation continued in its lighthearted way.
Rosana’s tone was definitely not anxious, reverential, or
committed to the absolute truth of her statements. She lib-
erally peppered her assertions with the A’ingae te reporta-
tive particle, which qualified her claims as reported speech
rather than certain knowledge gained through direct ex-
perience (I translate it as “people say” in the above). She
said her father told her the coancoan myths many times.
In all the stories, she continued, the coancoan—with their
giant penises—are said to live underground, where oil is
also located. (Given the beings’ stereotypically male qual-
ities, Rosana’s feminine characterization of the coancoan
as the “oil mother” surprised me. That specific assertion,
however, was not accompanied by the te particle, poten-
tially indicating its immediate creation by Rosana.) She did
not mention any relationships between the coancoan and
game animals. If oil is the coancoans’ blood, I asked, won’t
they die when it’s removed? She laughed again and said
they would. Toward the end of the conversation, I asked
whether the coancoan actually exist or whether they are
a’qquia cóndase’cho (just a story). She answered that they
are real because, though she has never encountered them
herself, the old-time people talked about them.
At that point, Roberto asked Rosana if she knew where
to find the hole mentioned in the Story of the White-Lipped
Peccary-Attracting Thing. She said no. Roberto then re-
ferred to a conversation that occurred six years earlier while
we were coordinating a mapping project in upriver Cofán
territory. An old man from a community in the Andean
foothills told us the second coancoan myth. He concluded

by saying that the hole the Cofán hunter entered in the story
is actually a cave next to a named stream not too far from
where we sat. Based on that statement, Roberto said the
coancoans’ existence must be ña’me su’cho (truly spoken).
Roberto’s report surprised Rosana, but she appeared to
accept it. Roberto then turned to me and said that during
Chigae’te (the mythical epoch when God walked on Cofán
territory, long before the Spanish arrived), Cofán people
established relations with all sorts of beings. But now, he
continued, we live in a different tiempo (time, in Spanish)
or etapa (stage, in Spanish). Direct relations with such
creatures as the coancoan are no longer possible.
Fernando
Fernando is Roberto’s father. In many ways he is the po-
lar opposite of Miguel. He has no shamanic abilities and
spends more time in urban areas than Dureno’s forests.
Long ago he realized he was not cut out for a hunting-
and fishing-based existence. Instead, he has dedicated
his life to anti-oil activism. He is probably the foremost
spokesperson for Cofán people critical of petroleum-based
development. In addition to being a master of the Spanish
language and media sound bites, Fernando is a respected
authority on Cofán myth and history. Cofán people turn to
him as a native intellectual. He is one of my most important
collaborators.
During one of my A’ingae-language interviews with
Fernando, I asked whether oil is the blood of the coancoan.
Similarly to Rosana, he responded by smiling and laughing.
Then, in an excited tone, he told me the idea emerged in
1998, when, in a massive show of strength, Cofán people
took over and shut down the Dureno 1 oil well, which sits in-
side the community’s boundaries. There was a weeks-long
standoff with the Ecuadorian military—after which Cofán
people succeeded in closing the well—and the event was
covered by the Ecuadorian and global media. Fernando said
that part of their strategy was to explain the Cofán under-
standing of oil to outsiders. A group of elders discussed
the matter for many hours. Part of our conversation was as
follows:
Fernando: What is oil to us? We didn’t know what oil
was. Before, we didn’t know that it was aceite [cooking
or motor oil, in Spanish] that came from rocks. So we
thought, What is the coancoan? The coancoan is like
a big rock, like the flint we used to use to make fires.
And flint is dark, it’s black [i.e., like oil]. We thought
about that for a while. And then one person said that
oil is not water. It’s more like a rock, like the aceite or
yaya’pa [fat] that emerges from rocks. Thinking about
that, we thought about the coancoan. We thought that
the company was sucking out the fat or blood of the
coancoan. That’s how the idea of oil as the coancoans’
blood emerged. But old-time people didn’t think oil
was the coancoan. That idea emerged only recently. We
There might be blood  American Ethnologist
couldn’t beat the oil company. We began to say it was
killing a’i, that it was killing a’i blood. That it was suck-
ing out the blood of the owner of the white-lipped pec-
caries. That’s how we made the idea about the coan-
coan, about the coancoans’ blood, emerge.
Michael: But whose idea was that?
F: The elders’ [laughs]. At that place [i.e., of the protest]
we inventa’fa’ya [invented, in Spanish, with A’ingae
suffixes] it. It’s inventa’cho [an invented thing], ña’me
su’chombi [not truly spoken]. Tsa tsu inventa’cho [It’s an
invented thing], ingi somboen’cho [something we made
emerge]. Parone somboen’cho tsu tsa [That’s something
we made emerge for our protest]. Now it exists all over
the Internet [laughs].
Fernando’s account is fascinating in many ways. Per-
haps one of its most intriguing aspects is Fernando’s choice
to use the Spanish term inventar (to invent) to express how
new, and possibly false, is the idea of oil being the coan-
coans’ blood. In A’ingae, the only similar term is somboeñe,
which is the causative form of the verb somboye (to emerge
or depart). But the ontological status of a somboen’cho
(something that has been made to emerge or depart) is un-
clear. It can refer to an object that has been truly created
and thus has an independent existence. Or it can signify
something with no actuality (i.e., something “made up”).
For Fernando, such ambiguity was insufficient to commu-
nicate the doubtful nature of the being that emerged from
the elders’ conversation. Accordingly, he turned to another
language to describe the comical process through which he
helped create the idea of the coancoans’ petro-blood.
Segundo
Segundo is a Dureno elder and one of Miguel’s best friends.
Watching their constant joking, one can easily imagine
them as young boys in the 1950s, playing every day as they
hunted small birds and prepared yaje for the community’s
once-powerful shamans (see Figure 3). Although Segundo
continues to drink the hallucinogen with Miguel, he is not
a respected curer. He knows a tremendous amount about
a forest-based lifestyle, but he has such a humorous, self-
deprecating demeanor that nearly all my interviews with
him are filled with claims of ignorance and reports of the
words of others. During a conversation about the protest
at Dureno 1, Segundo expressed the awe that older Cofán
people feel when they encounter powerful shamans. (Some
of the people who participated in the conversation Fer-
nando recounted were renowned shamans from remote
communities.) Segundo marveled that, by consuming yaje
and through visionary action, the shamans at the protest
reportedly placed a large boulder over the oil deposit be-
neath the well, drying it up. He had no idea how they could
do such a thing. It was simply what he heard.
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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 4 November 2016
Figure 3. A Cofán shaman in Dureno, Ecuador, February 2016. He is prepar-
ing to drink the hallucinogen yaje (Banisteriopsis caapi) boiled by his
apprentice. (Bear Guerra)
When I asked Segundo whether oil is the coancoans’
blood, he said some people claim it is. He went on to tell an
abbreviated version of the second myth. I told him I knew
the story, but I wanted to hear more about the coancoans’
blood. He replied,
Segundo: Well, what is oil like? Is it high up in the
ground? Or is it deep down, where the coancoan reside?
Have they drilled to where the coancoans’ hearts are?
When the drilling reaches down there, what happens
to the coancoans’ blood? We have thought hard about
that. We thought about that long ago. I’m not sure if it’s
true, but it might be.
Michael: Who created the story about the coancoans’
blood?
S: Well, we just thought about it and then we stopped.
We a’i thought about it. What is the coancoans’ exis-
tence like? With the oil drillers doing what they do, what
has happened to the coancoan? When the company be-
gan drilling, did the coancoan struggle and suffer like
we would if they drilled into us? Did the drilling reach
all the way down to where they live? Or did the drilling
stop at a higher point, where that oil is, with the coan-
coan actually being much deeper? We wondered about
that. How could anyone know?
Composing a petro-being
What to make of these six accounts? Arturo is the only one
who claimed, with solemnity and sincerity, that oil is the
coancoans’ blood, that companies are extracting it, and that
Cofán people are suffering as a result. Miguel communi-
cated a set of common understandings of the coancoan, yet
he made no connection among the beings, oil, and envi-
ronmental destruction. Rosana and Fernando smiled at the
630
thought of oil as the coancoans’ blood (or fat or urine), the
former sheepishly, the latter mischievously. Roberto tried to
make sense of the idea by recruiting a set of related cultural
concepts as well as an authoritative report from a distant
elder. He concluded by stating that, though real, the coan-
coan are now beyond the reach of human affairs—including
oil drilling—because they exist in a different realm of time
and space. Segundo deferred to shamans, whose powers
he believed might give them direct knowledge of the coan-
coan. Most of his statements were composed of questions
he could not answer.
All the interviewees searched the coancoan myths for
accepted knowledge and new interpretations. They mobi-
lized a diverse set of conceptual resources for the possi-
ble constitution of a being that appeared provisionally dur-
ing a political event, as Fernando recounted so eloquently.
Together with a group of other elders—including power-
ful shamans (see Figure 4)—Fernando was one of the first
Cofán people to compose the idea of the coancoans’ petro-
blood. Romanticizing activists and reporters were quick
to publicize the notion as a sacred truth that the whole
world must respect. Whether the idea will acquire a more
general and stable reality for Cofán people, though, is an
unsettled issue. It depends on whether there develops an
additional set of semantic connections and sociopolitical
dynamics.
One crucial question is how Cofán understandings
of the cosmological and economic aspects of shaman-
ism will change. Until a generation ago, shamans had
the power to “call” white-lipped peccaries and a few
other animal species by communicating with a set of vajo
(supernatural game-owners). Coancoan are not vajo, and
my main consultants asserted that shamans never commu-
nicated with the former. Elders report that ttu’se’cho (called)
or ñoñan’cho (made) animals used to come right to the vil-
lage, where people dispatched them with spears and blow-
guns. Many Cofán people, however, are confused by the
myth and cosmology, which identify both coancoan and
vajo as game masters that might be able to free animals for
hunting. Hence, even though the coancoan myths pertain
to the unreachable time-space of Chigae’te—the dimen-
sion when direct communication with nonhumans was
possible—shamans’ recent peccary-calling prowess makes
the coancoan seem more like vajo, and thus more present
and helpful. Given how esoteric and virtually unknowable
game-calling skills are, is it not possible, some Cofán peo-
ple ask, that shamans did in fact establish relations with
the beings? And is it not possible that the coancoan are
still there, awaiting contact from a knowledgeable super-
natural expert? The less common game-calling shamans
are, the less clear cut is the difference between a being
known only through myth (the coancoan) and another (the
vajo) that is, at least in theory, currently available to aid in
shamanic productive activities.

Figure 4. A Cofán shaman in Dureno, Ecuador, February 2016. In 1998,
during the takeover of an oil well in Cofán territory, he worked with other
elders to devise a way to communicate the Cofán understanding of oil
to the nonindigenous journalists and activists who had gathered for the
event. After discussing various elements of Cofán cosmology, the elders
decided to tell the outsiders that oil is the blood of the coancoan, a
mythical subterranean being. (Bear Guerra)
At a more implicit level, grammar offers an additional
set of connections between oil and the coancoan that might
solidify a general acceptance of the beings’ petro-blood.
Like many indigenous languages, A’ingae has a pluralizing
nominal suffix (-ndeccu) that is attached only to human
collectivities. For example, a single Euro-American is a
gringo, but multiple Euro-Americans are gringondeccu.
Cofán people never pluralize the vast majority of super-
natural beings in this way. Interestingly, in the versions of
the myths I collected, the coancoan are sometimes called
coancoandeccu—marking them as multiple humans—
and even patundeccu, or “rock people.” The only other
nonhuman entities that are similarly pluralized are es-
pecially social animals (such as white-lipped peccaries,
or mundandeccu) and, at times, oil-related objects (such
as pozondeccu, which we could translate as “oil wells” or
There might be blood  American Ethnologist
“oil-well beings”; pozo means “well” in Spanish). Although
the latter usage is rare, and to most people strange, I have
recorded it on multiple occasions. Accordingly, I believe
there is a kind of notional cryptotype (Whorf 1964, 92) to
which oil, white-lipped peccaries, and coancoan belong.
For at least some people, they are entities that have a form
of animacy that is normally the unique property of humans.
No Cofán person explicitly claims that oil is alive or agentive
in this way. But, through the grammatical subtleties of their
speech, a few do seem to hint at the possibility.
Blood, too, provides an intriguing conceptual resource
for the potential composition of the coancoans’ petro-
nature. From the Cofán perspective, it is the bodily seat of
energy and force. When a person lacks it, they are weak
and sick. White-lipped peccaries are filled with blood. For
this reason, they are a key prohibited food species during
a girl’s menarche rite, when consuming too much blood
can lead to death. Historically, white-lipped peccaries were
Cofán people’s most important source of meat. Hence, there
is a semantic association of the underworld—the peri-
odic home of white-lipped peccaries and the permanent
home of their coancoan masters—with life-sustaining but
potentially threatening vitality. No Cofán person doubts
petroleum’s miraculous material powers. Its subterranean
origin only strengthens its connection to a productive and
possibly dangerous force, of which blood is the perfect ex-
pression and vehicle.
The linkages I describe are ideas that Cofán people con-
sider as they attempt to make meaning and use of oil. As a
material enmeshed in a multiplicity of relations and asso-
ciations, oil appears to be an “equivocation,” in Viveiros de
Castro’s (2004) sense of the term. If we envision it not as a
word but as a substance—that is, dark, productive, under-
ground liquid—it is easy to imagine that what we see as oil
is what Cofán people see as blood. Nonetheless, it is reduc-
tionist at best to suggest that a single, isolated, and alterity-
affirming statement equating oil with coancoan blood is a
“thing-concept” (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 15)
with the power to constitute a world. In Marshall Sahlins’s
words, such an argument would amount to an “understand-
ing of the phenomenon . . . at the cost of everything we
know about it” (1977, 15). Ethnography reveals the relation-
ship between blood, the coancoan, and petroleum to be
much more complex and uncertain than an ontologically
oriented approach would portray it.
Any compelling account of the ontological status of the
coancoans’ petro-blood must descend into the pragmatic
and epistemological subtleties of the social, political, lin-
guistic, and conceptual dynamics at play. As Latour argues,
ethnography must dwell on an object’s constitutive medi-
ations, not deny them (2013, 159). Rather than advancing
the cause of anthropological humility, limiting the reach of
ethnographic investigation leads to interpretive hubris and
the attribution of alien understandings to one’s research
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collaborators. In the case of the coancoan, most Cofán peo-
ple doubt and laugh at the idea of the beings’ petro-blood.
A few also imagine and employ it. Political references to the
coancoans’ petro-nature do not mark an absolute ontolog-
ical alterity. Rather, they emerge from a “finite province of
meaning” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973, 23–24), and words
of their existence have a particularly provisional accent of
reality. Moreover, the statements are subject to a division of
cultural labor. Young Cofán people leave the ultimate ver-
dict up to elders and shamans, who know the myths best
and who might be able to encounter the coancoan directly.
Today’s bicultural leaders, however, are tomorrow’s author-
itative elders. The more outsiders respond positively to the
idea of oil as the coancoans’ blood, the more powerful and
true it could seem to Cofán people themselves. In other
words, although oil might not be the coancoans’ blood to-
day, it could conceivably become it tomorrow.
The cosmopolitical risk
I sent an early draft of this article to Randy Borman, a Cofán
man born to North American missionary-linguists, who is
one of the Cofán nation’s most important leaders. Borman
speaks English, Spanish, and A’ingae, and he maintains an
active interest in anthropology. Since I met him in 1994,
he has offered many constructive criticisms of my work.
In our recent exchange, he agreed with the gist of this ar-
ticle. But he seemed upset that people such as Arturo are
getting it wrong. He conceded that all cultures, including
Cofán culture, change. Nonetheless, it disturbs him when
the transformations occur so quickly and, for lack of a better
word, poorly. Borman appeared to see a distinction between
shifts that emerge from within a way of life and make exten-
sive use of its social, practical, and mythological resources,
and changes that result from more superficial attempts to
meet the stereotypical expectations of others. In an English-
language e-mail, he wrote,
I just finished your article on the coancoan blood . . . .
So at what point do we go back to revisionism as un-
derstood within the civilized world? Arturo is a case in
point. He lives in a world where his front mind has been
far more influenced by the Western pseudo-intellectual
and semi-New Agey bunch he hangs out with [e.g.,
Ecuadorian, North American, and European environ-
mental activists]. Something like coancoan blood fits
their romantic notions to the core. Meanwhile, Fer-
nando’s statements are nearest to the mark for this gen-
eration. My constant “doubt” is the ease with which
these ideas become fact in a subsequent generation.
Similarly to Borman, others have remarked on the
apparent resemblances between the entities described
in accounts of indigenous cosmopolitics and the repre-
sentations of romanticizing Westerners. According to Joni
632
Adamson, for example, one reason so many indigenous
audiences find the film Avatar appealing is that its “sentient
earth-being” (2012, 144) characters are just like the actors
de la Cadena describes. Whether Adamson’s claim is correct
is beside the point. Its more significant lesson is that many
Westerners are quick to wish for and accept the “truth”
of any indigenous statement that describes the earth and
its features—including oil—as sacred, agentive beings. In
many ways, multinaturalism is simply a structural inver-
sion of and desired alternative to a simplified depiction of
modernity. According to the vision, the universe is a “pluri-
verse,” a multiplicity of enchanted worlds rather than a
single mute nature. There are few if any “objects” in the
multinaturalist vision. Instead, worlds are populated by a
multitude of human and nonhuman subjects, all of whom
have varying forms and levels of agency.
The multinaturalist vision is a tremendously homog-
enizing schema. Reading the literature, it is unclear how
and how much “nonmodern peoples” might differ from one
another. De la Cadena writes about “Latin American Indi-
ans” (2010, 347) as a group with a common cosmopolitical
project. Viveiros de Castro attributes a uniform conceptual
position to all indigenous Americans. His famous article on
“Amerindian perspectivism” (Viveiros de Castro 1998), for
example, constructs the ontology in question by assembling
pieces of ethnographic evidence from across the Western
hemisphere into a single philosophical system that tran-
scends the particular understandings of any individual or
society.
Viveiros de Castro and other anthropologists of Ama-
zonia sustain the concepts of perspectivism and multi-
naturalism with traditional structuralist techniques (Cepek
2013, 2015; see also Ramos 2012; Turner 2009). They largely
follow the example of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who in the
Mythologiques writes that the relevant question is not “how
men think in myths” but “how myths operate in men’s
minds without their being aware of the fact” (1983, 12).
Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism does not attend to the uncer-
tain presence of mythical beings in sociopolitical life; his
approach to mythical discourse ignores its pragmatic func-
tion, grammatical form, performative context, and individ-
ual interpretation (Lévi-Strauss 1974, 208–30). One could
say the same of the abstract conceptual nature of many on-
tologically oriented works.
It is only by attending to the kinds of data eschewed
by some analysts of ontologies and cosmopolitics that one
can understand Cofán stances toward the coancoan and
their relationship to oil. To consider the entity a “thing”
(Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007) whose most impor-
tant quality is its ability to inspire anthropological construc-
tions of abstract conceptual worlds—which force us to re-
think our ideas, but which no one actually inhabits—is to
misunderstand its nature. A more ethnographically faith-
ful and fruitful approach is to grapple with the coancoans’

complex figuration in the skeptical, humorous, contradic-
tory, inventive, and quotation-riddled statements of actual
individuals. In short, rather than mining our subjects’ dis-
course for bits of alterity-affirming content, we would do a
better job of honoring their intellectual agency by accept-
ing their multiple epistemological positions, their uncer-
tain political representations, and their explicit acknowl-
edgment of the provisional nature of such quasi-objects as
earth-beings, of which the coancoan—and their possible
petro-blood—are perfect examples.
The cosmopolitical project entails a danger that is
practical as well as intellectual. As a commonsensical
principle, taking indigenous public discourse seriously
is important, but complicated political consequences
can result from asserting the “truth” or “reality” of the
claims and beings that appear in actual discursive perfor-
mances. For example, Cofán people have long employed
environmental rhetoric to articulate their commitments
and objectives. Their leaders commonly assert that Cofán
people are tsampima coira’su (caretakers of the forest) who
would cease to be Cofán if the forest were destroyed. The
claim is relatively recent, but it is thick with “sociocultural
substance” (Cepek 2008b, 202). To dismiss it as just another
bit of self-essentializing, self-Orientalizing discourse would
delegitimize the projects of Cofán activists, who portray
themselves as logical allies of Western conservationists.
After the new millennium, many environmental organi-
zations no longer trusted indigenous peoples’ claims to
be willing conservationists (Chapin 2004). Anthropolog-
ical critiques of indigenous environmental rhetoric only
strengthened their doubts. Consequently, many indige-
nous peoples found it harder and harder to maintain the
alliances they had worked so hard to build.
Arguing for the reality of the coancoans’ petro-
blood would have different political consequences than
defending Cofán people’s assertions of their territorial en-
meshment. Equating oil extraction with coancoan suffering
offers little in the way of sociocultural substance or political
utility. Many outsiders find the image compelling, but most
Cofán people do not—at least not yet. As for its political
yield, the idea of the coancoans’ petro-blood has attracted
significant publicity. Nonetheless, journalists, filmmakers,
activists, and NGOs reported widely on Cofán people’s
suffering at the hands of petroleum companies long before
the coancoan entered into Cofán public discourse. Trans-
forming Cofán anti-oil activism into a cosmopolitical war
for the coancoans’ well-being would carry significant risks.
In the corrected translation of his speech from The Blood of
Kouan Kouan, Miguel does not identify the basic extraction
of oil as a problem. Rather, he focuses on the aboveground
contamination such extraction causes. Cofán people cite
petroleum pollution’s decimation of wildlife and assault
on human health. They also describe how the settlers
who followed the oil roads dispossessed them of their
There might be blood  American Ethnologist
territory, forcing them to survive on tiny, contaminated,
and overused forest fragments (Cepek 2012b).
Outside allies have worked hard to help Cofán people
recover their territory, fight oil contamination, and find so-
lutions to their health problems. More publicity and aid are
always needed, but a shift toward the coancoan as a cen-
tral concern would be problematic. On multiple occasions,
I have worked as a translator for Cofán leaders in meet-
ings with conservation organizations and Ecuadorian state
agencies. More than once, officials have asked Cofán peo-
ple to note the location of their “sacred places” on maps
that illustrate threats to Cofán territory and targets for con-
servation. The requests always cause confusion. In A’ingae,
my Cofán collaborators asked me, “What does sagrado [sa-
cred, in Spanish] mean?” I could never come up with an ad-
equate translation. The concept has little valence in Cofán
cosmology. Mythical figures such as the coancoan are often
little more than sources of amusement. They are certainly
not objects of respectful care. The only supernatural beings
that enter regularly into Cofán concerns are the malevolent
agents with whom shamans negotiate to cure the ill and at-
tack their enemies. Such entities are feared but not revered
(Cepek 2008a). Moreover, they often have no geographically
locatable home.
If Cofán allies were to direct their aid to the protec-
tion of the coancoan, their projects would take a very dif-
ferent form. They might focus their interventions on the
general subsurface realm, which is of little use or interest
to most Cofán people. Or they might target such sites as
the cave that Roberto mentioned—the possible passageway
that the mythical Cofán hunter took to encounter the coan-
coan. That location, however, is of no special relevance to
contemporary Cofán people. Moreover, it lies on the lands
of nonindigenous settlers, who used oil roads to take over
Cofán territory in the 1970s. The newcomers would be loath
to give up their property. With much success, Cofán lead-
ers have focused their territorial campaigns on the still-
unoccupied portions of their homeland. Engaging in violent
battles over small pieces of ecologically degraded territory is
not part of their plan.
In short, although this article might contradict the pub-
lic discourse of a few Cofán individuals, it aligns with the
perspectives, concerns, and objectives of many more. It also
aims to serve as a cautionary tale for advocates of indige-
nous struggles. Analysts and activists should be careful not
to give credence to political imaginaries that correspond
to neither the complex perspectives of indigenous actors
nor the transformative projects they strive to sustain—
especially if those imaginaries deem only certain forms
of struggle sympathetically “other.” Surely there are many
cases in which protecting a sacred entity or collaborating
with an other-than-human actor are essential aspects
of political action. The case of Cofán anti-oil activism,
however, is not one of them. An empirically adequate and
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politically engaged anthropology should be capable of
telling the difference and distributing its energies accord-
ingly. Ontologically inspired anthropology makes it harder,
not easier, for ethnographers to meet that challenge.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I wrote this article with the support of grant
no. 8518 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned
Societies. For their helpful commentary, I wish to thank Lucas
Bessire, David Bond, Randy Borman, Luiz Costa, Juliet Erazo, Jill
Fleuriet, Santiago Giraldo, David Graeber, Bret Gustafson, Jamon
Halvaksz, Cameron Hu, Chris Jarrett, Evan Killick, Paul Kockelman,
Doug Rogers, Norman E. Whitten Jr., and four anonymous review-
ers. The editorial direction of Niko Besnier and Pablo Morales was
essential as well. Finally, I wish to thank my many Cofán collabora-
tors in the communities of Dureno and Zábalo.
1. After I submitted the manuscript of this article for review, two
works relevant to my argument appeared. The first was David Grae-
ber’s (2015) “Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying ‘Reality’:
A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” Graeber makes some of the
same points I do, namely, that there are no bounded social groups
with singular conceptual perspectives, and that many (if not all)
peoples discuss apparently “supernatural” phenomena with skep-
ticism and humor. Nonetheless, Graeber does not engage the con-
cept of cosmopolitics and does not explicitly address the aim of
humility. The second publication was de la Cadena’s (2015) Earth
Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. De la Ca-
dena states that her 2010 article serves as the “conceptual struc-
ture” (2015, 289) of the book, although the latter discusses
the concept of cosmopolitics only in the epilogue, which cov-
ers much of the same ground as the article. Earth Beings pro-
vides an extremely detailed account of the lives of de la Ca-
dena’s two primary interlocutors, Mariano and Nazario Turpo,
and it includes large segments of their quoted speech. The
two figures serve primarily to demonstrate the kinds of par-
tially connected but radically divergent “worlding” practices of
runakuna (Quechua-speaking indigenous Andeans). De la Ca-
dena’s discussion of runakuna stances toward earth-beings and
related entities demonstrates little of the uncertainty, comedy, or
diversity of opinion and function that Graeber and I highlight.
2. I change the names of Cofán individuals to protect their pri-
vacy. Many of the quotes I include, however, are semipublic.
3. A’ingae has separate terms for male and female urine.
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Michael L. Cepek
Department of Anthropology
University of Texas at San Antonio
One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, TX 78249
michael.cepek@utsa.edu
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