ABSTRACT Runa women living along the Bobonaza river in the Ecuadorian Amazon raise captured forest animals, in a practice called wibana . Runa women are attentive to the particular ways the wiba (raised) animals interface with the world, and learn the wibas’ communicative repertoires and are able to “read” what wibas sense in the forest, including dangerous beings. Runa and wibas come to know each other through processes of mutual familiarization and taming. Using concrete, ethnographic examples, I demonstrate the everyday practices that bring wiba and Runa livelihoods into alignment with each other and engender an intersubjective, interspecies relationship. I highlight the ways that wibas actively produce and mediate the relationship, including maintaining appropriate distance and boundary work to carve out status, positionality, and access to resources within the larger more‐than‐human community.
James Michael Beveridge (Sun,) studied this question.