Between Honey and Mission: Development, Indigenous Cosmologies, and Practical Faith among the Awajún and Wampis

• Autor: Di Fonzo, Valerio
• Formato: artículo
• Fecha de Publicación: 2025
• Institución: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
• Repositorio: Revistas - Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
• Lenguaje: español
• OAI Identifier: oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/31189
• Enlace del recurso: http://revistas.pucp.edu.pe/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/31189
• Nivel de acceso: acceso abierto
• Materia: Peruvian Amazon; Beekeeping; Sustainable development; Jesuit missions; Awajun; Wampis; Amazonía peruana; Apicultura; Desarrollo sostenible; Misiones jesuitas; Awajún

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.