Chicha-Coronavirus: 1-0. On trust, natural disasters, and pandemics in the Ecuadorian Amazon
pandemia, Amazonía ecuatoriana, Sarayaku, indigenous politics, ethnographic trust
Sarayaku is an Amazonian Kichwa community on the shores of Río Bobonaza, Ecuador. There is no road connecting it to the rest of the country no electricity and no telephone network. I happened to be there on fieldwork during the times of a double disaster: the COVID19 crisis, and the biggest flood in the community’s living memory. This short article explores how the community managed both the flood and the COVID19 crisis, according to communitarian practices, as well as how relations of trust are built during sad “everyday life” events in the life of an Amazonian community, as well in not-so-everyday-life emergency situations that are more rare, yet more intense when they occur. While trust-building is crucial in any anthropological or sociological research that involves fieldwork, in the relevant bibliography trust-building during everyday life “insignificant” actions has only recently been attributed the value it deserves. At the same time, trust-building during emergencies has also gone largely unnoticed, maybe due to the rarity of events of disaster/emergency in the lifetime of an Amazonian community.