Amazonía - Amazonía - Maestría en Estudios Amazónicos · 2026
Weaving a Good Existence with the Principle Word of Life: An Ethnography of Daily Life with a Group of Singers of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc in Leticia, Colombia
This thesis provides a “thick description” of the intricacies of daily ritual life in a small group of indigenous men from the Putumayo-Caquetá displaced to Leticia, and explores how they engage with one another and outsiders to maintain a longstanding yet amorphous social group despite heterogeneous moral commitments. Through ethnographic and sociolinguistic analysis of enacted emic concepts I argue the group is defined by its dialectical daily practices which navigate the tensions of contradictory desires. By exploring the intricacies of the group’s social dynamics I identify shifting structures of relationality and opposition in ritualized speech acts. I situate these shifting structures in the debate between a moral community and symbolic economy of alterity, and propose that a dialectic of the two is needed to engage with my field site, where these shifting structures manifest emically as a process of personal becoming and world making. I then explore how this process is enacted in daily practice by placing emic theory into dialogue with both naturalist and multinaturalist semiotic accounts of being and world. I propose that the same paradoxes of these semiotic accounts lie at the heart of the group’s striving for a good existence. I then explore how these paradoxes manifest as the management of conviviality and hostility in a framework of Sickness and Healing. I conclude with examples showing how the daily practice of the group consists of subtle metacommunicative acts that play with the vicissitudes of alterity by drawing on the embodied semiotic resources of The Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc.