NATURAL ENGAGEMENTS AND ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS ...

putes and sell pita fiber. Hilario and Luisa accompanied him once, making the eight-day trip
barefoot to marvel at the wonders of this city. 60
Other Utopias
Quito is not the only geographical/architectural model for the world of the game masters.
Given that the game masters are often depicted as priests, one might think that the Jesuit mission
may well be another source. These “sacred experiments” constituted attempts to establish vil-
lages of Catholic Indians that reproduced what were considered the virtuous elements of
European civil society while excluding those elements that were seen as unfavorable: “The
Reductions defiantly proclaimed the need to construct a society parallel to that of settlers, free of
interference either from them or from a civil administration sensitive to their interests” (Barnadas
1984: 533). The leaders of these ideal communities, of course, would be the priests. There was
never, however, such a Reduction in Ávila. When the Jesuits began to establish their network of
missions in the Amazon in the 17 th century, Ávila was still an encomienda and, religiously, it was
under secular clerical control. 61 Furthermore, at this time, the Jesuits were primarily concerned
with the “heathen” Indians and, the Ávila region, by now had had more than half a century of sus-
tained contact with Europeans. In addition, unlike Archidona –which would go back and forth
between Jesuit and secular control– Ávila was not on the route taken by the Jesuits to their Mainas
missions. 62 Ávila seems to have been directly influenced by the Jesuits only during the brief sec-
ond era of Jesuit missionization in the Amazon from 1861 to 1896. 63 During this time there was
a Jesuit school and mission in nearby Loreto. Here too there was an attempt to create an ideal
society of Indians. For example, before the nuns known as the Madres religiosas del Buen Pastor
hastily left the Oriente in 1895, shortly before the expulsion of the Jesuits, they arranged for six
couples of Indian boys and girls that had been raised in the missionary school in Loreto to be mar-
ried: “one could expect that they would form the nucleus of the new Christian population to be
established. These six couples inhabited the house that the nuns left vacant when they left for
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