Among the animistic beliefs held by the ethnographic Napo Runa of Eastern Ecuador in the headwaters of the Amazon River,¹ there is the belief that people, animals, plants and even objects contain samai, an invisible-but-sensible life-giving force. Every English translation of samai, a Quichua term, will be fraught with difficulty, but we could take our chances and call it “soul,” or “spirit.” There are indeed notable parallelisms between the two. The English word “spirit” derives from the Latin spiritus, which may be translated as “breath,” and also “life.” In the Old Testament, where the animistic roots of Christianity are on display, there is no benevolent Holy Spirit: God breathes literal life into things then takes it away in terrifying blows.² In the forest, samai gives way to supai, which may cause mal aire or bad air — it is sometimes called diablo (or devil) in Spanish.³

The parallelisms, though, would end here. Samai is embodied in nature, which is never an abstract idea. Samai is a social relationship between people and beings that, to various degrees, are believed to have a personality. It can be given — elderly Napo Runa will blow samai into the crown of children’s heads － and it can be lost too, through physical exhaustion. The loss of samai involves breathlessness. Finally, samai can leave the body in the course of a disadvantageous transaction with the white-mestizo settlers. In that context, samai may be translated as dignity.

Elsewhere I have argued that samai (and therefore breathing) played an important role in the making of the postal system in Ecuador at the turn of the twentieth century.⁴ This was so because the Napo Runa were employed as porters and postmen, whose journeys to and from the capital, along a steep and treacherous path, involved stops at designated resting areas. Each pit-stop corresponded with a samai, which here referred to distance traveled on foot as well as to the actual places where the postmen could recover their breath. The government tried to regulate and modernize postal deliveries by incorporating them into a clock schedule, where distance was measured in kilometers. On paper there was a resting station every five or ten kilometers; in reality these were the old samais — places where the natives liked to rest, depending on topography and loads, among other factors. Recovering one’s breath involved recharging one’s samai. Lastly, porters were highly regarded in the community, not only because of their adventurous spirit (leaving the “Earth’s lungs” for oxygen-deprived Quito, three thousand meters above sea level, was no small feat) but also because of their ability to negotiate the terms of the journey with their employers.⁵ These young men represented Napo Runa culture and that, too, was a way of earning samai.

In the historical records, it is apparent that the Napo Runa valued autonomy more than anything else. This required strategic mobility, in-and-out of sight. Upper Amazonia offered vast swaths of breathing space. The English idiom “breathing space” should be understood literally, rather than metaphorically. Flight has been a crucial feature of Amazonian cultures since the Spanish first explored the region in the mid-sixteenth century. The emptiness of Amazonian villages, recorded by early cronistas, was in part due to the devastating impact of Old World epidemics. But many of these cultures survived, thanks to their ability to adapt. Their main survival strategy was flight, which also explains the baffling picture of deserted settlements upon European contact. At the turn of the twentieth century, what the Napo Runa asked from the white-mestizo settlers was to be left alone in their carutambos (dispersed forest dwellings). They had several residences at their disposal, each one smaller than and more distant to the pueblo or hamlet. A scattered settlement pattern reflected the requirements of swidden agriculture, and also permitted a high degree of autonomy. There was a way of reaching the Napo Runa, namely by making use of local trackers. But it was a flawed system, since the availability of local labor — on the spot, that is — was precisely the problem. It was not that the natives were not interested in the trappings of “civilization,” but that they were selective and knew from experience when and how to vote with their feet.⁶

The importance of breathing space became all the more apparent when epidemics hit the region. In the late nineteenth century, a handful of Jesuits were stationed in the Ecuadorian Amazon.⁷ The fathers acted as state representatives whose powers, at least in theory, extended beyond spiritual matters. They managed to attract hundreds of Napo Runa to the mission buildings. The natives were cautious, and lived near the mission but not quite near enough to be easily found. Their closest residence was located two or more hours away, the farthest a few days into the thicket. Long-distance walking to their second or third homes had more than one purpose: purina (trekking) kept the shungu (heart, lungs, liver) in shape; acquiring the asnai (smell) of the forest was good for hunting.⁸ The increasing number of small traders in search of rubber also drove the Napo Runa away from the mission. Absenteeism from school, Sunday mass and other scheduled routines was endemic. It became permanent when the news spread that people downriver were dying from smallpox.⁹ The Napo Runa vanished and would remain remontados (deep in the montane woodland) for many months. The Jesuits planned a cordon sanitaire, which would have only reinforced their grip over the area, but they did not have the means to carry it through.

Michel Foucault wrote how the early modern European state had discovered, in the management of contagious disease, a passage into rooms whose very purpose was to be dark and stuffy: “Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process of purifying the houses one by one is begun.”¹⁰ The state was much more pervasive in Europe than it was in Upper Amazonia. Yet the response among the underprivileged — resist passively, retreat quietly — was everywhere identical. It is no accident that so many of the “first” modern novels partake of the picaresque. Mobility freed the pícaro from the insidiousness of bureaucracy and from assuming the role of victim in the new economic order. His freedom was first and foremost a bodily freedom. Picaresque tales are full of characters who yawn, wheeze, cough and snore. They let go with abandon, as if their breath belonged to the commons. The same battle has been fought at various stages in the history of modernity across class, race, and gender lines. The bathroom scene in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (Figure 2) offers an illustrative example.¹¹

The above shows that breathing is more than a mere biological function. This idea has been touched upon in some of the classic texts on the cultural body, though not in too much depth.¹² Emphasis rests on value transfer, from the sticky commons to capital, in or around the sixteenth century. Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the living, breathing folk painted a picture of feudal conviviality, eclipsed by “the bourgeois conception of the completed atomized being” from the Renaissance onwards.¹³ Norbert Elias focused on the late-medieval rise of etiquette, what was then called civilité, including a set of rules regarding the blowing of one’s nose.¹⁴ The corset is the most graphic representation of how breathing was altered by this process, and was its logical conclusion.¹⁵ Foucault took a more critical stance than did Elias or even Bakhtin. In his view, the modern body is a product of monastic and military indoctrination. Marching soldiers, “frozen into a uniformly repeated attitude of ranks and lines,” represent the modern age. There is only one problem with this picture of perfect submission, as Foucault himself noted, quoting the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin:

The order of the architecture... imposes its rules and its geometry on the disciplined men on the ground. The columns of power. 'Very good', Grand Duke Mikhail once remarked of a regiment, after having kept it for one hour presenting arms, 'only they breathe.'¹⁶

The breathing of Russian soldiers is reminiscent of the breathing of Ecuadorian porters and postmen. Their common denominator is standardization. In a modernizing world, non-conformist cultural practice falls under the remit of infrapolitics, what James Scott referred to as the arts of everyday resistance — and the corresponding strategies of domination.¹⁷ Indigenous ways of breathing admit the same interpretation. Foucault was right, albeit not specific.¹⁸ In submarines breathing is managed directly from a command center. It can be taught by drill, too. Think, for example, of the mass of masked and socially distant individuals we have all become part of as of late. Breathing is a biological function, uncontrollable in the last instance. It is not, however, impervious to cultural conditioning. Samai is both social and subversive. It defies standardization. The same could be said of the pícaro’s snore: “blended with the world, with animals, with objects.”¹⁹ Could we, then, apply at least a fraction of the rich semantics of Napo Runa breath to Western culture and beyond?

Some of the groundwork has already been done.²⁰ Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger put Western philosophy on trial on these charges, and Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis offered useful guidelines on how to undertake the project of remembering.²¹ According to Lefebvre, the analysis of rhythms must start with the biological body, and what better place to start than to listen to one’s own body breathe. “The rhythmanalyst,” the French philosopher wrote, “calls on all his senses. He draws on his breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beatings of his heart and the delivery of his speech as landmarks.”²² Lefebvre understands rhythmanalysis in terms of rediscovery. While not exactly a primitivist, he argues that modernity, and capitalism in particular, have atrophied the human senses, rendering the experience of reality inauthentic. The goal, shared with other writers of the Marxian tradition, is to rekindle humanity’s sacred bond with nature. For millennia, mystics of all denominations have walked a similar path. Harmony with nature, or God, may be achieved through prayers and renunciation — traveling inward into oneself and outward into the wilderness. Meditation requires stillness and stillness demands breath control, which is an ancient technique of the body in various world traditions. Indian yoga is a good example. In Taoism, too, self-discovery through breathing is part of a wider campaign against pomp and artifice.²³

We live in the company of others, in a world where nature is at best a simulacrum. Purposeful breathing helps us cope with this predicament. We “take a deep breath” as a way of medicating the symptoms of some unspecific modern malaise. Enter infrapolitics: a sigh well placed will put a strain on any relationship; to laugh under our breath is to laugh in the face of power.²⁴ James Scott recommends such small acts of defiance as a matter of discipline, a physical routine that he refers to as anarchist calisthenics: “Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking.”²⁵ In situations of disenfranchisement, this type of power play weighs with a heavier meaning. The Napo Runa were not only good at disappearing acts. They were often accused of lying and deflecting, for example when asked by a priest about tasks unfinished or undone. It was a habit — to play dumb while never failing to play submissive — which required calculation and cold blood. Keeping one’s pulse unaltered in the presence of an authority figure is one sure way of gaining leverage.

The Jesuits left the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1896. Their work had not been entirely in vain. It added to the efforts made by petty merchants and by the few civil servants then active in the region. By the 1910s, indigenous settlements had moved closer to the towns and the majority of Napo Runa were indebted to one settler or another. Rubber, rice and cattle set the tone. A new Catholic mission was soon followed by a group of evangelical Protestants. A landing strip, and a paved road to the Andes, made porters and postmen redundant. Oil prospectors arrived in the 1930s and by the century’s end petroleum was king. Along with oil came wealth but also spills, endless litigation, and the vivid imagery of waste. “And the fire,” one of Amelia Fiske’s informants recalled, “would make these terrible columns of smoke. Black, but thick, like when you’re making marmalade...”²⁶ Pollution has long been discussed in this fashion, that is to say as a problem of political economy. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spared no detail in the description of the mid-nineteenth century factory. They did not fail to notice the hellish atmosphere either. Marx and Engels pioneered a view of the working class cough as being socially produced.²⁷ Their reports read like early studies on indoor air pollution, where breathing is synonymous with chronic disease and death:

... there are some branches of factory-work which have an especially injurious effect. In many rooms of the cotton and flax-spinning mills, the air is filled with fibrous dust, which produces chest affections, especially among workers in the carding and combing-rooms. Some constitutions can bear it, some cannot; but the operative has no choice. He must take the room in which he finds work, whether his chest is sound or not. The most common effects of this breathing of dust are blood-spitting, hard, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughs, sleeplessness — in short, all the symptoms of asthma ending in the worst cases in consumption...²⁸

What Marx and Engels overlooked was the infrapolitical side of things. We could call it dignity, or the muscle memory of deep time. Take Charlie Chaplin: “the essence of his humor is not to be found in pity,” wrote Lefebvre in one of his earlier essays.²⁹ Chaplin animates the world, humanizing what is otherwise alienating. He breathes life into the factory floor. His critique is physical: bodily, yes, but also peripatetic. It is a universal protest. We have noted how samai, in the sense of dignity, depends on the successful negotiation of time and space. Albeit pre-Columbian in origin, samai cannot be understood without making reference to the status quo imposed by the colonizers.³⁰ Blanca Muratorio highlighted control over territory and the socialization of children as key pillars of cultural continuity.³¹ My own view is that the forest still provides refuge and solace a stone’s throw away from the shops, the jobs, and the pollution. Many Napo Runa live on the edge of town.³² Maintaining a safe distance (and one foot in the jungle) keeps modern life at bay. The transference of knowledge to children stands in a necessary relation to the passing of samai. If the forest is a geographic weapon of resistance — a breathing space, as defined here — children charged with samai provide the group with a sense of future possibilities.³³

Chaplin’s cheeky cigarette was met with fury by management, not because he was smoking but because he was being unproductive. In other words, he was slacking off, a common accusation thrown against the Napo Runa as well.³⁴ While the complaint was consistent with the myth of the lazy native, which circulated everywhere white people went, it was also based on factual observation: the locals did not necessarily share the colonists’ work ethic. The Napo Runa — whether in the role of postmen, builders, servants or parishioners — were asked to move at specific rhythms which matched those of the nation-state. And by and large they failed at it. They could and did breathe at their own will because the forest provided refuge from retribution, but also because they were skilled at dealing with colonists. They did so through disarmingly unassuming means. Foucault stopped short of listing those hyper-modern spaces (the weather-controlled shopping center, the air-tight office building, the hotel room with locked windows) where the air itself is a commodity. But he came close to calling air the last alienable human right. Samai connects the ethnographic Napo Runa to the totality of life, including culture and self-respect, and these are only negotiable to a point.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Napo Runa were required to pay annual tribute in gold, which was then found on the river bed. They collected the precious metal for two or three days, enough to keep the authorities happy for another year. And then they threw any leftover gold dust back into the current. For the Napo Runa, in sum, value was found elsewhere.³⁵ The ethnographic Napo Runa place great value on hard labor, when it is done for the muntun or kinship group. Working in the chacra or vegetable garden, together with hunting and gathering, are the main productive activities, and are valued accordingly. They use Quichua terms to refer to this kind of work instead of the Spanish word trabajo, which is employed in money-making contexts, or its Quichuanized form, tarabana, which specifically refers to the kind of labor (half-hearted labor, usually underpaid) that throws them and their culture out of balance.³⁶ Modernity has not altered this worldview substantially. Samai is central to the Napo Runa hierarchy of value. Since all living (and some non-living) things have it, samai is inherent to the production and consumption process, and circulates across when food is procured, cooked, and, above all, shared.³⁷ None of this can be separated from trekking (purina), talking (shimi), and smelling (asnai). There is a raw quality to rural Napo Runa livelihoods (in which breathing acts as the glue that holds everything together) that is also evident in Lefebvre’s idea of what a “good” rhythm is:

Rational, numerical, quantitative, and qualitative rhythms superimpose themselves on the multiple natural rhythms of the body (respiration, the heart, hunger and thirst, etc.), though not without changing them.³⁸

Lefebvre suggested that music is the one cultural leftover from ancient or pre-capitalist times where natural rhythms can still be appreciated.³⁹ Musical rhythms are not unlike walking rhythms, as in the case of Napo Runa porters and postmen. Breathing emerges here as the universal unit of measurement. Lefebvre speaks of “measure,” rather than value, but the correspondence between the two concepts is obvious. He also speaks of “energy,” which again recalls Napo Runa’s careful administration of samai: “Isn’t all expenditure of energy accomplished in accordance with a rhythm?”⁴⁰ Transmogrified into sound, breathing reaches beyond the self and becomes collective, therefore political. But the infrapolitical roots of music, which link self and culture and highlight the social uses of opting out, are buried deep in the physical body. In the Upper Amazon, even light songs performed during fiestas are “expressions of samay and power.”⁴¹ Napo Runa music is not at bottom different from breathing, which is as cosmic a cycle as it is rooted in the flesh. Musical language, no matter how atrophied by centuries of intellectual development, draws a great deal from “instinct,” “spontaneity,” and “immediacy.” It seems to me that if we are to approach breathing from critical theory, these are some of the keywords to linger over.⁴²