Safeguarding the Lifecycle of the 'Jea': Construction, Utilization, and Cosmology of an Indigenous Achuar House in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract

This dissertation examines the 'Jea', the traditional thatch and pole house of the Achuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as a living architectural, social, ecological, and cosmological system. While the 'Jea' remains central to Achuar life, its material knowledge system is increasingly threatened by Westernization, state-led development, road construction, institutional housing programs, and the gradual erosion of intergenerational knowledge. Rather than approaching the 'Jea' only as a vernacular building typology, this study understands it as a relational form of architecture through which Achuar people organize domestic life, gendered space, ritual practice, forest relations, and cultural continuity. Developed with guidance from the Achuar communities of Sharamentsa, Mashientz, and Pumpuentsa, and with the approval of the Achuar Nationality of Ecuador (NAE), this research is grounded in ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged methods. Fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 included participant observation, walking interviews, storytelling, forest walks, ritual participation, photography, drone documentation, mapping, construction documentation, and co-design activities. The dissertation first examines how the 'Jea' is changing in light of new settlement patterns, access roads, state sponsored housing, and the increasing use of industrial materials. It then documents the embodied and ecological knowledge involved in the early construction stages of a 'Jea' in Sharamentsa, showing how ritual preparation, forest knowledge, body-based measurement, collective labor, and material selection are inseparable from Achuar architectural practice. Finally, it explores 'guayusadas'—a predawn purging ceremony with 'guayusa' tea—and thick mapping as Achuar-centered methods for co-design, demonstrating how planning and design can emerge through ritual deliberation, storytelling, ecological knowledge, model-making, and collective validation. Together, these chapters argue that the 'Jea' is a living spatial ecosystem through which Achuar communities negotiate continuity, change, autonomy, and futurity. By documenting the lifecycle, construction, use, and cosmology of the 'Jea', this dissertation contributes to Indigenous architectural studies, Amazonian scholarship, participatory design, and debates on development in Indigenous territories. It also offers a methodological and ethical framework for safeguarding architectural knowledge in ways that remain accountable to community priorities and support Achuar-led futures.