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Social Change in the Neoliberal Era: The Indigenous Movement in Saquisili, Ecuador.
Abstract
This dissertation explores social change in the post-Cold War period through a two-year ethnographic study of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement. Like many other 1990s social movement organizations, the CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) pursued social transformation along three pathways: participatory democracy, cultural citizenship, and development with identity. In all three the CONAIE has met with seeming success, and yet the outcomes of its twenty-year history have disappointed many. Drawing on participant observation, including a year of residency in an indigenous community, and formal interviews in Saquisil??, one of the highland cantons where the CONAIE and its political party were strongest, this dissertation argues that the three routes of social transformation have not produced theorized progressive outcomes. On the contrary, they have strengthened the neoliberal capitalist project they were meant to subvert.
Participatory democracy established a form of participatory clientelism that served to easily establish links between indigenous communities and neoliberal development agents. Cultural citizenship produced complex situations in which certain expressions of indigenity were not considered ???Other.??? However, those expressions, defined by the dominant ???national??? culture, effectively excluded actually existing indigenous peoples. Development with identity perpetuated under-development by its reliance on romanticized notions of indigenous tradition held by development agents, restricting indigenous aspirations to what they consider culturally appropriate.
Moreover, it is argued that the three routes of transformation have been mechanisms of neoliberal governmentality, through which the rationalities of neoliberalism, understood in the Foucaultian sense, as a mode of governance, and practices based on those rationalities have shaped indigenous subjectivities into self-regulating, neoliberal subjects.
This dissertation asserts that neoliberal governmentality grants indigenous peoples opportunities to participate in state spaces of empowerment but that change is limited to cultural rights and that which does not threaten the economic order. Although at times they can push beyond the pre-established parameters and challenge neoliberalism, participation in Saquisil?? demobilized the indigenous movement, reinforced neoliberalism, and restricted the scope of social change.
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El libro analiza el proceso organizativo de los indígenas evangélicos en Ecuador
Durante el siglo XX Saquisilí fue un verdadero calidoscopio del movimiento indígena ecuatoriano de la sierra. en los 205 km2 que abarca el actual cantón se concentran muchos de los procesos que caracterizan el movimiento indígena del Ecuador. Verificamos un ascenso vertical de lo indígena desde la sumisión en la hacienda hasta el poder local en la alcaldía.
No queremos aquí presentar un análisis o un estudio de estos procesos, como si pensáramos que des- de una visión exterior y asimétrica, desde la torre académica, podríase todo de mejor manera. Por el contrario, consideramos que todos estos antecedentes indican que estos hombres y mujeres son capaces de contar sus historias por sí mismos. Queremos mostrar las visiones “desde abajo” y “desde adentro” de estos procesos, junto con sus historias y anécdotas. En las próximas páginas escucharemos sus percepciones –muchas veces invisibles– que verdaderamente hacen correr la rueda de la historia.
Preview this book at https://unc.flexpub.com/shelfpreview/oKKko. This collection brings together innovative historical work on race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean and places this scholarship in the context of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions regarding race and nation in the Americas. Moving beyond debates about whether ideologies of racial democracy have actually served to obscure discrimination, the book shows how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time across Latin America's political landscapes.
Framing the themes and questions explored in the volume, the editors' introduction also provides an overview of the current state of the interdisciplinary literature on race and nation-state formation. Essays on the postindependence period in Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Peru consider how popular and elite racial constructs have developed in relation to one another and to processes of nation building. Contributors also examine how ideas regarding racial and national identities have been gendered and ask how racialized constructions of nationhood have shaped and limited the citizenship rights of subordinated groups.
The contributors are Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, Lillian Guerra, Anne S. Macpherson, Aims McGuinness, Gerardo Rénique, James Sanders, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Barbara Weinstein.
En esta tesis de Maestría se analiza la existencia de diferencias en las evaluaciones campesinas e institucionales sobre el desarrollo rural en el caso de la Unión de Organizaciones Campesinas del Norte de Cotopaxi. Considero el término evaluación, tanto en relación a los campesinos como a los agentes institucionales, como la construcción de significados o sentidos, que realizan los individuos o grupos sociales a partir de su experiencia práctica y de su bagaje histórico. Las evaluaciones o producciones de significados sobre el desarrollo rural son fabricadas en contextos específicos de interacción social y situadas en la historia individual y colectiva. En mi trabajo indago sobre el contexto de producción de los significados tanto en los campesinos como en los agentes institucionales involucrados en el proceso de desarrollo experimentado en el área rural de la parroquia Toacaso, provincia de Cotopaxi, Ecuador.
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The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and its companion piece, which appeared in Sociological Theory, volume 3, number 2 (1995). I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is used to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology.
Nation building and the construction of citizenship, so often conducted—or coerced—from the center, are all too commonly studied from the center as well. This book moves the view of cultural citizenship to the periphery—specifically to the perspective of hinterland groups in Indonesia; the Philippines; and Sarawak, East Malaysia—to show that notions of nationhood and citizenship are not given, but created in dialogue between the state and local communities. Written by an emergent generation of anthropologists, its chapters address the question of how the identities of peoples whose lives are “marginal” to the modern nation-state have nonetheless been shaped by the impingement of the nation-state on their worlds. Together, the chapters contribute to understanding how cultural diversity in some parts of Southeast Asia has been reconfigured as modern states have promoted distinctive and powerfully backed “imaginings” of nations.
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
This is the first book that documents poverty systematically for the world's indigenous peoples in developing regions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The volume compiles results for roughly 85 percent of the world's indigenous peoples. It draws on nationally representative data to compare trends in countries' poverty rates and other social indicators with those for indigenous sub-populations and provides comparable data for a wide range of countries all over the world. It estimates global poverty numbers and analyzes other important development indicators, such as schooling, health and social protection. Provocatively, the results show a marked difference in results across regions, with rapid poverty reduction among indigenous (and non-indigenous) populations in Asia contrasting with relative stagnation – and in some cases falling back – in Latin America and Africa. Two main factors motivate the book. First, there is a growing concern among poverty analysts worldwide that countries with significant vulnerable populations – such as indigenous peoples – may not meet the Millennium Development Goals, and thus there exists a consequent need for better data tracking conditions among these groups. Second, there is a growing call by indigenous organizations, including the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, for solid, disaggregated data analyzing the size and causes of the “development gap.”
Indigenous peoples of Ecuador have organized and mobilized over the past thirty years, partly to reshape their identities after centuries of domination. This research is a preliminary effort to explore the contemporary complexity of that identity. Best viewed as a quantitative casestudy, this analysis uses responses from seventy-six indigenous college students to a self-administered questionnaire. The authors found that indigenous students with greater "acculturation experiences" with mestizo culture were more strident in rejecting elements of that culture than were their colleagues who had had fewer encounters with mestizo elements of Ecuadorian society. While the tendency to identify oneself ethnically by rejecting the dominant culture represents only one dimension of ethnic identity (maintaining distinctiveness), the authors consider the findings important for future research on the dynamics of the process of ethnic identification.
This chapter is based on the life and activities of Dr. Luis Alberto Macas Ambuludí, who became Ecuador's minister of agriculture on January 15, 2003. He was an early participant in the development of national literacy and bilingual education programs in Ecuador. He participated in the founding of CONAIE and served as its president between 1990 and 1996, a time when CONAIE organized or coordinated several important indigenous uprisings. In 1994, Macas was awarded the international Goldman Environmental Prize for his work on indigenous land claims in the Amazonian region of Ecuador. Macas was a leader in the Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik-Nuevo Pais. As a member of that movement, he was the first indigenous person ever elected as diputado nacional (national congressional representative) to the legislature, where he served from 1996 to 1998. He was one of the founders of the Instituto Científico de Culturas Indígenas (ICCI) in 1986 and has served as its director since 1998. Finally, Luis Macas and like-minded colleagues founded the Universidad Intercultural de Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas (UINPI Amautai Wasi) in 2000, and he serves currently as its president. Macas was born about 1950 in De La Cuncha, a barrio of the community of Ilincho, in Saraguro Canton, Loja Province. By weaving together materials from his life as a member of a globalized world, as an Ecuadorian citizen, as a leader among the people of indigenous nationalities, and as an individual belonging to a community of indigenous people known as Saraguros, we may gain some understanding of the dynamics of indigenous movements in Ecuador. Linda and Jim Belote became acquainted with Luis in the early 1960s when they were Peace Corps volunteers in Saraguro and he was a barefoot elementary school student. From that beginning, Luis Macas earned a degree in linguistics from Pontificia Universidad Católica Ecuatoriana (Quito), and a J.D. from Universidad Central (Quito). The three of us have maintained contact over the intervening years. To prepare to write this chapter Macas traveled to Duluth, Minnesota, in July 2001 where we spent one week of intensive discussion, all of which we recorded. These interviews and data collected by the Belotes in Saraguro, in the United States, and in Spain between 1962 and 2002, provide our primary source material. The italicized passages at the opening of several of the sections are direct quotations from the Macas interviews of 2001. His thoughts and contributions are also contained throughout the descriptive and analytical writing that follows. Copyright
Most studies of civil society in Latin America have focused on urban social and political actors. In the Ecuadorian Andes, however, civil society has crystallized around the institutions of indigenous rural community that developed historically in opposition to wite-meztizo urban administrative centers. This article explores the evolution of indigenous communal institutions in relation to local government and national politics by focusing on the canton of Otavalo in northern Ecuador. It is argued here that over the past thirty years, Andean communities in Ecuador have played an important role in the national processes of democratization and decentralization.
Preface Acronyms and organizations Introduction: when worlds collide 1. Theory: on power, borders, and meaning 2. Voice in teh village: building a social movement 3. State security: power versus principal 4. 'Indian market': profit versus purpose 5. Identities across borders: the politics of global civil society 6. New times: the impact of the movement Conclusion: it takes a village References Index.
The 1930s was a period of slow and painful capitalist formation in the Ecuadorian highlands. Marginalized Indigenous peoples who lived in rural areas particularly felt this economic transition as modernizing elites utilized their control of state structures to extend their power to the remote corners of the republic. It was also a time of gains in social legislation, including new laws which dealt with the “Indian problem.” One of the primary examples of this type of legislation was the 1937 Ley de Comunas which extended legal recognition to Indian communities. In certain parts of the country such as in the central highland province of Chimborazo, Indigenous peoples quickly embraced this comuna structure and formed more comunas than any other area of the country (see Map 1). In similar situations in the neighboring countries of Colombia and Peru, Indian villages also used legal frameworks which the government imposed on their communities to petition for ethnic and economic demands.
Scholarship which critically deconstructs nationalist discourse as an ideology exposes a persistent paradox within this discourse in which the nation-state is frequently represented as both "eternal" and as "that most natural of all human communities." In order for political entities, such as the nation-state, to appear "natural," the process of construction must remain undiscussed as well as concealed from view. This paper addresses these issues by investigating the social construction of national identity in highland Ecuador. It focuses on the role allocated to indigenous peasants in definitions of "the national" at different points in Ecuadorean history. It is argued that earlier representations of native peoples served as a primitive contrast to the national subject. More recently, however, new constructions of "the national" that draw on symbols of Indianness and the rhetoric of ethnicity have emerged. The paper explores the success of these new national discourses in securing the consent of indigenous peoples.
Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity. The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin America. They address the double binds of indigenous organizing and "working within the system" as well as the flexibility of political tactics used to achieve cultural goals outside the scope of state politics. The contributors answer questions about who speaks for indigenous communities, how indigenous movements relate to the popular left, and how conflicts between the national indigenous leadership and local communities play out in specific cultural and political contexts. The volume sheds new light on the realities of asymmetrical power relations and on the ways in which indigenous communities and their representatives employ Western constructions of subjectivity, alterity, and authentic versus counterfeit identity, as well as how they manipulate bureaucratic structures, international organizations, and the mass media to advance goals that involve distinctive visions of an indigenous future.
Investigating the complex interrelations between culture and politics in a wide range of social movements in Latin America, this book focuses on the cultural politics enacted by social movements as they struggle for new visions and practices of citizenship, democracy, social relations, and development. The volume explores the potential of these cultural politics for fostering alternative political cultures and social transformations. Theoretical and empirical chapters assess and build upon novel conceptions of culture and politics in a variety of disciplines and fields-particularly anthropology, political science, sociology, feminist theory, and cultural studies.The notion of the cultural politics of social movements provides a lens for analyzing emergent discourses and practices grounded in society and culture, the state and political institutions, and the extent to which they may unsettle, or be reinscribed into, the dominant neoliberal strategies of the 1990s. Contributors explore how social movements-urban popular, women’s, indigenous, and black movements as well as movements for citizenship and democracy-engage in the cultural resignification of notions such as rights, equality, and difference, thus altering what counts as political. By highlighting simultaneously the cultural dimensions of the political and the political dimensions of the cultural, the book transcends the distinction between “new” and “old” social movements and thus significantly renews our understanding of them.
Preface Introduction: Traditions of Nationhood in France and Germany I. The Institution of Citizenship 1. Citizenship as Social Closure 2. The French Revolution and the Invention of National Citizenship 3. State, State-System, and Citizenship in Germany II. Defining The Citizenry: The Bounds of Belonging 4. Citizenship and Naturalization in France and Germany 5. Migrants into Citizens: The Crystallization of Jus Soli in Late-Nineteenth-Century France 6. The Citizenry as Community of Descent: The Nationalization of Citizenship in Wilhelmine Germany 7. "Etre Francais, Cela se Merite": Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in France in the 1980s 8. Continuities in the German Politics of Citizenship Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
It is argued that all the major conceptualizations of development in the post-war period contain and express a geopolitical imagination which has had a conditioning effect on the enframing of the meanings and relations of development. The Occidental deployment of modernization theory for the developing countries reflected a will to geopolitical power. It provided a discursive legitimation for a whole series of practical interventions and penetrations that sought to subordinate and assimilate the Third World other. It is suggested that in any attempt to rethink development for global times the nature of our geopolitical imagination must be a key element, just as the theorization of the geo-political is equally relevant for development theorists and political geographers. -from Author
Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action.
In the mid- 1990s, Bolivia's indigenous movement realized a significant victory by influencing a series of legislative reforms. I will review some of the reforms that represent transformational opportunities for local-level indigenous organizations and then examine how these are affecting such organizations in the municipality of San Ignacio de Moxos, arguably the cradle of the lowland movement. I will show that indigenous organizations in Moxos have generally not benefited from the new opportunities because of (1) a lack of understanding of the laws, (2) interference by municipal elite and logging interests, and (3) conflicts and divisions within and between the indigenous organizations. This case underscores the significance of accountability in implementing legislative reforms. It also demonstrates that distinct interests and identities that are often overshadowed within broader movements are more likely to be exposed in local-level politics and development and that "indigenousness" may no longer serve as a meaningful basis for solidarity and indigenous empowerment at this level.
What is often referred to as the "globalization," or the increasing integration, of the Latin American and Caribbean region (as well as other regions) into the contemporary global capitalist system has not propelled the people living in this important part of the world into a new era of postmodernity. Many of the "old" problems and issues confronted by the societies in this region during the twentieth century persist. In fact, the effects of contemporary globalization-perhaps best defined as the global expansion of late-twentieth-century capitalism or what has been called "turbo-capitalism" have aggravated most of the chronic problems of the Latin American and Caribbean societies while adding new ones. Most of these problems are still best characterized in terms of such "classical" or "modernist" concepts as corporate capitalism, imperialism, neocolonialism, economic exploitation, political repression, social inequality, and social injustice.