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.

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.