Le réveil de l’immatériel. La production onirique du patrimoine des Indiens Zápara (Haute Amazonie)

The Zapara Indians in the Upper Amazon are on the verge of disappearing from the linguistic map. This is a fact. And yet, their emergence within the political landscape in Ecuador (but not yet in Peru), has provided them with a greater international visibility as an indigenous group. Most unusually, the accounts of dreams become one of the key elements of new forms of identity practices and identification processes – as those narrated here by two Zapara political leaders will attest. In search of their material and immaterial heritage, these leaders make use of the realm of dreams, using occurred dreams to orient their choices in the reconstruction of a collective memory. The dream, as a tool for engaging in a regredient process or in the return into the past, provides the historical elements that the Indians will then re-inject into their present in order to construct new “traditions”. In this dissertation, I will be describing the mechanisms, the learning of, and the local theories concerning the experience of dreams. In order to be understood, the dream must first circulate, and must have an issuer as a point of departure. Dreaming is also the means for a privileged relationship between human and non- human beings. Throughout this thesis, various systems of memory will be examined based upon empirical data revealing of the dreamt experience, but also of daily life, such as new teaching methods, or the creation of artefacts, produced both by ancestors or contemporaries. These accounts will help us to understand this new process of “Zaparaisation”, which depends as much on a process of ethno-archiving than on ethno-museography, and which awakens the immaterial.