Mandarina malcriado, maestro maricon y el flojo sapo sopa : glimpses of manhood and meaning on a Galapagos Island

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with meaning and manhood on San Cristobal, an island in the Galapagos archipelago. It is argued that there is a dialectics between the production of meaning and the cultural construction of male deeds. In this perspective the thesis accounts for the particular place San Cristobal is and some of the men I met during my fieldwork. The ethnographic accounts describe interaction and praxis from the local perspective within an Ecuadorian context. The social representations are meant to be representative for masculine prototypes within the Catholic region stretching from the Circum Mediterranean region embracing Latin America. My emphasis is put on the conjunction of male deeds at play within an exclusively male context. In correlation to other anthropologists writing from the same region I argue that meaning associated to masculinity is created in the intersection between imagery and everyday praxis. The interpretation is furthermore grounded in symbolic forms of exchange, but supplemented with a psychoanalytical perspective and additionally pursued in intersubjective communication. My aims are to describe Galapagos and Ecuador in general, San Cristobal in particular and the local population, essentially mens social representations in everyday life.