Between Honey and Mission
Development, Indigenous Cosmologies, and Practical Faith among the Awajún and Wampis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18800/anthropologica.202502.002Keywords:
Peruvian Amazon, Beekeeping, Sustainable development, Jesuit missions, Awajun, WampisAbstract
This ethnographic article explores how a beekeeping project promoted by the Jesuit NGO SAIPE in Awajún and Wampis communities of the Peruvian Amazon becomes a site of negotiation between indigenous cosmologies, kinship structures, sustainability expectations, and institutional logics of development and Jesuit missionary practice. Through a situated narrative across the villages of Ideal and Soledad, the article examines daily tensions involving gender, labor, markets, and collective organization. Far from being a mere productive initiative, beekeeping emerges as a moral and political field where the Jesuit work tradition, local aspirations, and the dilemmas of translating communal systems into donor-friendly formats intersect. The article suggests understanding such projects not as failures or successes, but as unstable and creative forms of world-making.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Valerio Di Fonzo
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