Consuming

Abstract

This article follows consumers from Otavalo, Ecuador through narratives of devilish eating, jokes, and family gatherings in order to focus on a general problem: how a dispersed Andean indigenous people produce themselves as families, neighbors and community. In the episodes of consumption described here, consuming cultivates responsive relationships and using up and ingesting can act as generative moments for communities. However, the folktales and preoccupations of the transnational migrants reveal the risks that consuming entails. Human soulfulness – creativity, feeling, and morality – does not sit neatly within human agents, but rather can be augmented, diminished, or entirely dislodged in the consumption acts that join human and non-human; cultural and material. Even when consumption does augment a generative social agency, it also limits it. To consume is to stop one’s movement through the world, converting the potential to matter to the reality of mattering in one place among a certain set of people.