The jumara festival of Panamá

Abstract

Based on an ethnography of the First Jumara International In-digenous Film Festival, which took place in an Emberá com-munity in Panama, the aim of this article is to delve deeper into the connection between the processes of ethnicity derived from Indigenous cinema and the processes of ethnicity deri-ved from the meaning given to that cinema at specific even-ts. At Jumara, Indigenous cinema was the reason for affirming Emberá culture and for championing, in a markedly festive and performative way, the group’s main demands in a celebration in which the body and its ornamentation took on a special role. It is argued that the ethnographic focus on festivals organized in Indigenous communities makes it possible to fully analyze the committed and activist dimension of Indigenous cinema.