dr. C.R. Tym (Christian) PhD

Dr Tym’s research centres on the nexus between Amazonian indigenous cultures, histories, knowledge and politics, and Western encounters with and imaginaries about these same subjects and their effects. As part of the VICI-NWO project titled, ‘Poison, Medicine or Magic Potion? Shifting Perspectives on Drugs in Latin America (1820–2020)’, Tym currently researches the indigenous history of ayahuasca and indigenous people’s role in ayahuasca’s globalization in the late twentieth century.

He was previously awarded a Slicher van Bath de Jong post-doctoral scholarship from the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA), Universiteit van Amsterdam. Combining archival research in Ecuador with the ethnographic record and missionary histories, this research traced the origins of the trade in Shuar shrunken heads from the Ecuadorian Amazon from the end of the nineteenth century.

Tym was previously a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Philipps-Universität Marburg, where he documented indigenous oral histories of the Cenepa War fought between Peru and Ecuador in 1995.

He completed his Ph.D. (2018) in the Department of Spanish & Latin American Studies at The University of Sydney. Combining extended fieldwork in Shuar territory in Amazonia with indigenous political philosophy of interculturality and plurinationalism, his dissertation outlined the promises and challenges to operationalising Andean theories of decolonization.