Thinking the End: Desiring Death and the Undead in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon

In this article, I argue that imagining the end of ends through narratives about the end of the world and the undead may be mobilised to address a crisis of ends and means. Specifically, I analyze jokes and fantasies that my indigenous Shuar interlocutors from the Ecuadorian Amazon shared with me in the context of protests in favour of the construction of a road on their territory. What brings them together is the operation they perform on previously existing material, systematically inverting them to make of death and extermination an object of desire. Furthermore, I show that fantasising the extermination of all Shuar or joking about having sex with the undead means imagining the end of kinship as desirable and makes it possible to perceive more clearly the failure of indigenous politics.