Ethnonyms are a serious matter. As historical, seemingly immutable markers of allegiance to an ethnicity which is often regarded as sacred, they carry profound significance. Yet, in contemporary urban Peruvian Amazonia, young and educated members of the Indigenous ethnic group known as Shipibo have coined a humorous ethnonym —Shipilay— to refer to themselves. Shipilay is anything but timeless or absolute. Instead of millennia of history, it is deliberately ephemeral. Rather than essentializing, it is contingent. Far from demanding unwavering loyalty, its attachment is at best ambivalent. Above all, Shipilay is highly ironic: its mismatched etymology comically blends ‘Shipi-’ (from Shipibo) with the invented suffix ‘-lay’, which evokes modernity, urbanity, and “coolness,” eliciting laughter. For this reason, I term Shipilay an ‘eironym’, which materializes the very tension faced by young Shipibo in intercultural educational settings: the simultaneous persistence of a traditional Indigenous identity and an aspiration toward global modernity and change. I argue that the ironic force and fleeting and contingent nature of Shipilay crystallize the uneven, contested negotiations of ethnicity and indigeneity undertaken by young, educated, and urban Indigenous people in contemporary Amazonia.
Dr Angela Giattino is a sociocultural anthropologist specialising in education, ethnicity, epistemology, youth, sustainability, migration, and health, with a longstanding focus on Latin America, particularly Peruvian Amazonia, as well as the Mediterranean, primarily southern Italy. Dr Giattino was until recently a UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and has also trained in Geography and History in the UK, the US, and Italy. She has held teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, UCL (University College London), San Francisco State University, and LSE —where she was awarded a Highly Commended Class Teacher Award in 2023. Dr Giattino's research has been funded by the ESRC (UKRI), the LSE Department of Anthropology, the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, the University of Cambridge (AHSS), and the Laura Bassi Foundation. In November 2025, Dr Giattino will begin a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford.
