Kichwa-Canelos Pottery as Embodied Practice of Knowledge and Female Identity Construction

Abstract (English)

This study explores pottery production among Kichwa-Canelos women in the Ecuadorian Amazon as a complex knowledge system that transcends mere technical craftsmanship to constitute a fundamental process of gender identity construction. In Amazonian ontologies, pottery represents not simply a productive activity, but an embodied process through which women establish significant relationships with non-human entities like manga!pa apamama (the grandmother of clay), materializing an ontological continuum between female bodies, objects, and cosmos (Belaunde, 2017; Mezzenzana, 2015; Premauer, 2016).
Of particular interest is the transmission system of this knowledge through paju (Mezzenzana, 2015), a concept uniting power and knowledge in an embodied learning process. Young women learn not only through observation but literally by "following" the movements of elder women, incorporating appropriate gestures into their bodies. This learning also occurs through dreams, where women meet the grandmother of clay who transmits designs and techniques, making visible otherwise invisible knowledge.
Today, this ancestral practice faces significant transformations due to digitalization, urbanization, and reduced use of the native language, as observed during preliminary fieldwork. My presentation proposes a theoretical-methodological framework to analyze how these changes might reconfigure not only productive techniques but potentially the entire conception of the body and female identity. The hypothesis is that, far from representing a simple abandonment of traditions, these transformations may reveal creative adaptation strategies where indigenous women act as active agents in reinterpreting their cultural identity.
Analyzing these dynamics is particularly relevant for contemporary anthropology as it overcomes essentialist views of indigenous cultures, offering an interpretive model that recognizes indigenous women's agency in responding to global changes, challenging Western epistemologies of materiality and gender.