Feeling with the Land: Llakichina and the Emotional Life of Relatedness in Amazonian Kichwa Thinking

Abstract

This article explores how traditional Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon experience and practice emotional life. In particular, we focus on the centrality accorded to acts intended to elicit compassion in others (llakichina) and on the role these acts play in holding communities together. We argue that the importance given to the eliciting of compassion is tied to the Kichwa construal of the self as inherently relational and, for this reason, precarious. Further, we show how the emotional life of relatedness encompasses relationships with land and other species (particularly birds) in multi-layered ways. Drawing on interviews, songs, and narratives, we show how an understanding of other species as transformed humans informs affective connections with the land and how these in turn mediate emotional relations.