Stealing Fat: The Responsibility of the Tourist and the Artist

This past weekend I went on a two day backpacking trip to the Quilotoa Region of Ecuador which is home to one of Ecuador’s most vibrant Kichewa communities. During the trip we camped in this small pueblo called Guayama. As I walked around the town while the white Americans went to a local shop to drink beers and eat food, or the rest took picture romanticizing the poverty of the town, I began to feel horribly sad and felt like I shouldn’t be there anymore. It was strange to me that I had accepted my whiteness here so readily hoping to take responsibility for my privilege, but in doing so I forgot to question it and what it means to be a white tourist in a developing country.
For my Andean Anthropology class I read a section of a novel about the White Man in Ecuador. The reading explains the origin of indigenous myth stories surrounding the Pishtaco’s or the White Man who uses technology to steal the fat of the Indigenous people and sell it to the world. These stories are alarmingly revealing about the ways in which the tourist contributes to the maintenance of power hierarchies. The tourist takes the picture of the indigenous women because she represents the extreme opposite, a romanticized (or not) primordial life, one without technology, one without shoes or education. The moment that picture is taken it sustains all of the stereotypes of indigenous people. It represents them as one continuous and same history of poverty, of lack of technology, of the past. Their race does not become about their skin (it never was) but about the objects that surround and adorn them. Strip that away and what do we have? A body without identity, the body of the Homo Sacer.
The town of Guyama itself was probably home to about 25 families and all of them related. The entrance to the town had a sign that said “Bienvenidos a Guayama” and then, next to it, a flock of sheep munched on grass under sign painted “Internet” on a crumbling brick wall. In the center of the town was a one room school building situated with cracked windowpanes and filled with plastic chairs. To its side was a giant cement volleyball court in which the older men got together on Sundays to play the endemic Ecuadorian game of “Ecuavolley.” The teenagers sat around on the steps playing card games for petty change and the youngest played their own version of Ecuavolley over wood poles in the grass. Doorsteps were filled with old women talking and laughing while doing embroidery work.A couple kids played