Ancestral Food KNowledge and Traditions

On this episode of Ancestral Health Today, we have a candid conversation with Pilar Eguez, PhD. We discussed the role of food and community and the ancestral ways of experiencing them. 

Pilar Egüez Guevara, PhD is an Ecuadorian award-winning filmmaker, cultural anthropologist, speaker and writer. She obtained her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, two MA degrees in Anthropology (University of Illinois) and Social Sciences (FLACSO-Ecuador) and a BA in Economics from Wellesley College. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Community Health, in 2012 she co-founded and directed Comidas que Curan, an independent food education and media company dedicated to research and promote traditional foods and knowledge through ethnographic research and film.

In 2021 the US Library of Congress selected Comidas que Curan’s website for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to the Food and Foodways Web Archive.  Her films have won awards and have been screened in three different languages across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Her film Raspando Coco (2019), a documentary advocating for the preservation of the culinary traditions of Afro-Ecuadorians, is now part of the library collections of 20 colleges and universities across the United States. Raspando Coco was nominated for best documentary short by the Indie Short Fest in Los Angeles (2019) and best foreign documentary by the Firenze Film Festival in Florence (2019). She also received honorable mention for best female director by the Independent Shorts Awards in Los Angeles in 2019.

More recently she worked as Producer and Distribution Executive for the documentary series Tarpuna of the Seed Savers of Ecuador. She produced the documentary series episode Tarpuna: Guardians of the Coconut and the Mangrove directed by Gustavo Chiriboga, awarded for Best Sound Design (Gold Award by Independent Shorts Awards 2023), Best Documentary Short (Platinum Award by Independent Shorts Awards 2023), Best Cinematography and Best Documentary in Sustainability (Nominations by WIFI Film Festival 2023). She was the Producer for the recently released documentary film Salango: A Living Ancestral Legacy (2023) directed by Esteban Cedeño. She also directed the documentary series Jóvenes Guardianes de Saberes (Youth Heritage Guardians) which is made of three short films produced and shot collaboratively with youth and women in rural coastal towns of Ecuador (2021).

Through her research, public speaking and films, she amplifies the voices of older men and women who are the bearers of traditional knowledge about food and medicine in Ecuador. She has brought this work to communities in Ecuador through filmmaking and research education projects, as well as to US college students in the United States through film screenings and Q&A sessions. She has worked directly with communities for 20 years on participatory-research and community-based projects in Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, and the United States.

She is a published author and speaks internationally on topics ranging from cultural history, food heritage, nutrition, health and conflict transformation. She is currently lecturer at the Anthropology Department of University of Massachusetts Amherst.