Resignificar el Uso de la Fotografía Etnográfica de los Archivos Históricos: Reflexiones En Torno a la Muestra Fotográfica "Rostros y Actores en el Territorio Shuar-achuar"

Based on the photographic exhibition "Faces and actors in the Shuar-Achuar territory", presented at the International Congress of Anthropology and Linguistics 2018, Yapankam, (Sevilla Don Bosco, Ecuadorian Amazon), the authors reflect on the need to manage the audiovisual collections of missionary archives as a resource at the service of the historical memory of the Amazonian nationalities. The article analyzes the uses of the photographs collected by missionaries to clarify the different purposes and meanings beyond the propagandistic and institutional religious use. Likewise, the article identifies the uses and meanings also from the communities portrayed and the perceptive transformations around the human figure and the portrait. To this end, it begins with the description of the definitions of the body image according to the Shuar, condensed in the term wakan' and in a type of gaze that perceives the whole body as the face of the person, thus denouncing the metonymic principles that divide the portrayed body in the missionary and ethnographic photographic production. In a second moment, the article recovers the reactions and testimonies of indigenous men and women who observed the photographs in the exhibition to establish that the feeling of solidarity and historical continuity with the portrayed characters prevails over the criticism of the colonial practices of photographic registration that turn the portrayed indigenous people into anonymous beings. portrayed in anonymous and numerary beings at the service of the missionary deed.