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The great shout of the wolves’ mouth: Indigeneity, social change and historical narrative in the Ecuadorian Andes
Abstract
This thesis is a historical ethnography of the parish of Simiatug, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present but focused mainly between 1970-2020. Simiatug is a rural parish located in the Bolívar province in the central highlands of Ecuador, where Kichwa indigenous communities, a major hacienda (Hacienda Talahua), and a white-mestizo town coexisted until the early 1980s. Relationships of exploitation and racial discrimination against indigenous people were predominant during this period. Legislation such as the agrarian reforms were not implemented locally, due to the unassailable power of the landowning family, the Cordovez, who were able to maintain their estate despite the law. This began to change in the 1970s, and social change accelerated during the 1980s. Indigenous peasants organised themselves to create a Peasant House for adult literacy, founded independent bilingual schools and a Kichwa radio frequency. They also demanded changes in market relations with mestizos, refusing the asymmetrical exchange systems that had been usual until then. In April 1981, hundreds of people marched to occupy the land of hacienda Talahua, pressing for the application of land reform legislation. In 1982, they were successful, and the hacienda’s land was granted to the indigenous organisation Fundación Runacunapac Yachana Huasi (FRY). FRY still owns several hundred hectares of communal land, on which they have since carried out many agricultural and educational projects. Each chapter of the thesis analyses a different aspect of the transformation of Simiatug, contrasting observations made during fieldwork with archival material, including documents from the Land Reform Archive and several unpublished video interviews with indigenous leaders filmed by anthropologists in the 1980s. Chapter One describes the hacienda through the landowners’ and peasants’ concepts of land, Chapter Two portrays the town and its market as a second backdrop for the struggles, Chapter Three describes the uprising in which indigenous peasants occupied Hacienda Talahua, Chapter Four looks at education and Chapter Five reflects on indigeneity as a form of historical consciousness. The main historical narrative woven through the thesis has been reconstructed from the perspective of the generation who participated in the occupation of the hacienda. This narrative is complemented by other interpretations made by the indigenous youth, mestizos, and landowners. Focusing on indigeneity, from the point of view of different actors - including not only the indigenous peasants’ perceptions of their identity but also the mestizos’ and the elites’ discourses - I trace how being indigenous in Simiatug is a complex, intricate and changing reality. I argue that the struggles for land, education and fair commerce, as a practice and lived experience of political mobilisation, shaped certain forms of historical and ethnic consciousness. This allows the consideration of historical consciousness not only as an abstract process, but as a multi-layered, embodied experience, with a strong relation to certain forms of indigeneity. Unravelling these histories of change and the pivotal events that made change possible from the perspective of my interlocutors, I present the complexities of being indigenous in Simiatug in the recent past and today and across different generations.
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Los impactos sociales, económicos y políticos de la Reforma Agraria, implementada por Juan Velasco Alvarado, se han estudiado ampliamente. Sin embargo, existe poca literatura sobre la micropolítica de dicho proceso en sociedades rurales y sobre las memorias del campesinado que, como actor político, recuerda y resignifica no solo la Reforma Agraria, sino también el régimen de las haciendas, a Velasco y la construcción de comunidades campesinas.
Sobre la base del análisis de 75 testimonios de campesinos hombres y mujeres que fueron «colonos» de la hacienda Parcco, y quienes, después de la Reforma Agraria, formaron las comunidades de San José de Parcco Alto y Buenos Aires Parcco Chacapunco (ubicados en el distrito de Anchonga, provincia de Angaraes, en Huancavelica) y usando la teoría de menoría y de comunidad imaginada, este artículo propone analizar la Reforma Agraria, el régimen de la hacienda y la construcción de las comunidades como procesos políticos interrelacionados.
Se concluye que las relaciones patrón-campesino y Estado-campesino previas a la Reforma Agraria tienen un profundo legado político en las sociedades rurales. Las narrativas campesinas sobre el «tiempo de la hacienda», la Reforma Agraria y Velasco, han consolidado un sentido de comunidad y una identidad política distintiva elaborados para inscribirse en una narrativa más amplia de construcción de Estado-nación. Por un lado, las memorias legitimadoras creadas y recreadas sobre estos eventos y sobre Velasco tienen una intención política, pero, por otro lado, son a su vez una denuncia que demanda inclusión, justicia, reconocimiento y proximidad.
This paper examines the challenges and possibilities of combining archival and ethnographic methods in the field of ‘communal’ violence studies in India. Drawing insights from debates among historians and anthropologists on the multifarious interactions between archives and ethnography and reflecting on the empirical case of persistent violence between Muslims and Christians in southern India, it argues for a creative synthesis of these two modes of inquiry for an adequate understanding of ‘communal’ violence and riot inquiry commissions in India. First, the paper critiques how colonial and postcolonial Indian archival reports problematically inscribe violence between any religious communities (such as Muslims and Christians) in the same narrative as the predominant case of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Second, it illuminates how archival ethnography can be an effective way of studying violence between religious communities and thus transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries. Finally, the paper introduces a nuanced approach, called ‘ethnography of archiving’, to detail the judicial and nonjudicial discourses and bureaucratic manoeuvring involved in the creation of an archival report, thereby unravelling the power relations, mediating processes, manipulations and bureaucratic performances that make commission reports problematic even today.
El 17 de mayo de 1980, militantes de Sendero Luminoso quemaron las ánforas en la comunidad andina de Chuschi y proclamaron su intención de derrocar a estado peruano. Lo que los senderistas luego llamarían el "ILA" —el inicio de la lucha armada— coincidió con el 199º aniversario de la ejecución de Túpac Amaru II por los colonizadores españoles. Según versiones del mito de Inkarrí, el cadáver del rebelde neo-Inca estaría destinado a recomponerse en una resurrección de la sociedad andina después del cataclismo de la conquista. Pero Chuschi prefiguró no un renacimiento, sino una década de muerte. Inauguró una guerra salvaje entre los insurgentes y el gobierno que costaría más de 20,000 vidas durante los años ochenta.
This article begins with the contention that the three‐decade era of neoliberal multiculturalism is coming to an end. During that time, Indigenous peoples in Latin America gained a wide array of rights grounded in cultural difference by occupying spaces opened through the multicultural turn and using counterhegemonic strategies to push beyond their intended limits. Struggles in the judicial arena, and the accompanying work of the anthropological expert witness, played a crucial role in these strategies. I argue that the emerging era of racial retrenchment requires recalibration, starting with critical reflection on the counterhegemonic, and probing of alternative strategies, one of which I summarize with the phrase using and refusing the law. I draw on my participation in two moments of activist research in the legal arena—the 2003 landmark case Awas Tingni v. the State of Nicaragua, and a recent study of the relationship between Mapuche Indigenous people and the forest industry in southern Chile—as grounding. I conclude that while these two strategies and their associated sensibilities do stand in tension, they will need one another, as we seek effective means to contest the fierce onslaught of violence, marginalization, and roll‐back of rights for Indigenous peoples, and more broadly. [judicial pluralism, autonomy, Indigenous rights]
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.
Creating private property rights and establishing land markets were fundamental to the historical development of capitalism in the Global North and remain at the centre of capitalist development in the Global South. This article contributes to debates about these processes by analysing the relationship between land markets and indigenous peoples in Highland Ecuador. Building on Karl Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodities, it elaborates a new concept that makes an analytical distinction between the activation and development of land markets. The former refers to the occasional participation of actors in markets to secure land, whereas the latter relates to the establishment and expansion of markets that regulate the distribution and value of land through market prices. Focusing on indigenous land struggles in the late 20th century, this article shows that the activation of land markets created opportunities for indigenous peasants to secure land, whereas the development of land markets closed them down. Social and class differentiation among the highland indigenous population increased through this contradictory process. The article connects this historical analysis to recent developments in Ecuador to contribute to empirical and theoretical debates about contemporary land struggles and agrarian change elsewhere in the Global South.
This special issue examines and theorizes lasting and resurgent forms of racism after recognition and claims to decolonization in Latin America. It also analyses what the authors interpret as a retrenchment in indigenous and Afro-descendant rights. The authors argue that this shift is underpinned by factors including extractivism, aided by the ability of neoliberal multiculturalism to shape, weaken and co-opt popular movements, and launched by a backlash by elites in conjunction with actors from dominant groups rendered vulnerable by global capitalism, who have turned to populism and racial scapegoating as a reaction to increased precarity. The issue shows that the circumscription of indigenous and Afro-descendant rights manifests itself both in novel ways and as entrenched colonial practices and traditions. Moreover, the issue explores the cultures and geographies of extractivism, specifically as it relates to race and racism. The issue moves forward critiques of neoliberal multiculturalism by arguing for the need to challenge racist hierarchies instead of only focusing on difference, and by looking at discrimination and the rearticulation of racism in left leaning post-neoliberal regimes ostensibly committed to decolonizing reforms. The articles in this issue highlight the importance of interrogating cultures of power while also conducting sound ethnography at the margins. These strategies allow the authors to question the appropriation and ventriloquist use of ethnic markers and agendas by elites.
¿Quién dijo que en la selva ecuatoriana no hay elefantes? Los hay. Y son enormes (y costosos). Dos investigadores: Japhy Wilson y Manuel Bayón fueron a buscarlos. Y descubrieron que están cobijados por las “fantasías utópicas” y por un modelo de conquista de la Amazonía que, desde tiempos del caucho, se reproduce.
En su intrépida expedición, los autores de este libro, desde su mirada crítica, develan sus hallazgos y los comparten con los lectores: un personaje digno de una nueva versión de Fitzcarraldo; dos ciudades fantasma bautizadas como Ciudades del Milenio, a la que les empieza a crecer el monte y que seguramente en poco tiempo más serán tragadas por la selva; un centro de estudios de nombre shuar que va del bio-socialismo a la bio-tecnología; un puerto para cubrir la ruta Manta-Manaos en el que permanecen inmóviles las barcazas que, en el primer viaje, quedaron varadas en los bancos de arena que forman el curso del río Napo.
Estos elefantes son blancos, visten de neocolonialismo y traen consigo el despojo de territorio. Tras los elefantes van un emperador y una Revolución, desnudos, con un gran proyecto: extraer los recursos no renovables y, a cambio, compensar y urbanizar a unas comunidades indígenas. Los indígenas, por su parte, haciendo uso de su derecho a la resistencia, ríen al verlos pasar, mientras beben un enorme tazón de chicha. Ríen, porque la historia de constantes conquistas se repite.
EL PROBLEMA INDÍGENA Y CAMPESINO en el Ecuador no podrá encontrar solución definitiva si no es por medio del acceso a más recursos en tierra. Por el momento esto es inviable por la vía del mercado de tierras, lo que obliga a pensar en soluciones más integrales como las de la reforma agraria, aunque ello implica cambios en la altamente inequitativa distribución de la tierra, dentro de una estrategia de desarrollo territorial que considere los actuales cambios socio-económicos y políticos que ocurren en el medio rural. La distribución inequitativa de la tierra tiene relación con el poco impacto de las políticas de reforma agraria implementadas en el país, que no pasaron de ser " soluciones parches " al problema agrario y que no llevaron a una real democratización del ámbito rural. Como ya es conocido, estas reformas se limi-taron a eliminar las relaciones precarias que existían en el medio rural, pero no modificaron la concentración del recurso tierra. En efecto, el último Censo Agropecuario (2001) demostró que luego de cuarenta años de políticas agrarias y más de treinta de políticas de desarrollo rural, en nada había cambiado el proceso de concentración de la tierra.
LAS COMUNIDADES RURALES POBRES Y LA REFORMA AGRARIA EN EL ECUADOR Luciano Martínez FLACSO
This article explores indigenous Andean perspectives on the relationship between mining and mountains. It briefly elaborates on how, in Andean worlds, mountains are intentional agents that are crucial members of society. Paying central attention to the materiality of these beings, the article compares the different social logics at play in, on the one hand, contexts of underground mining and, on the other, those of the recent open-pit mines. Using ethnographic data from Cuzco and Ancash (Peru) as well as previous ethnographies of mining practices in Bolivia and Peru, the article analyses how underground mining involved indigenous workers and practices that engaged the mined earth-beings. In contrast, in recent open-pit mines, there are very few workers from the surrounding communities, and indigenous practices engaging earth-beings became invisible. Underground mining is assumed to damage and threaten the fertility of the mined earth-beings but it is not seen as endangering their existence. In contrast, recent open-pit mines are only made possible by destroying earth-beings and extracting metal from their corpses.
A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America is reconfiguring the relationship between resources, nation, territory, and citizenship. However, the implications for indigenous territorial projects remain underexplored. Ethnographic research in the Bolivian Chaco reveals the ways in which indigenous territorial projects are becoming implicated in and being reimagined amidst the spatializing struggles of a hydrocarbon state. The tension between indigenous peoples’ desire for inclusion in a hydrocarbon-based national development project and their experiences of dispossession by an expanding hydrocarbon frontier has given rise to competing modes of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in the Guaraní territory Itika Guasu, where a vision of corporate-sponsored indigenous autonomy is pitted against new forms of state-funded development patronage. These dynamics challenge resistance narratives and resource-curse theories, revealing how resources act as conduits for deeper postcolonial struggles over territory, sovereignty, and citizenship.
La Pedagogía de la Ternura surgió en un contexto de guerra interna en Perú. Un grupo de maestros buscaba respuesta a la violencia e indiferencia que afectaban sus vidas y la de sus estudiantes. Es un enfoque con una vista respetuosa e integral de la infancia, tomando en cuenta no solo la cognición de los estudiantes sino también sus experiencias diarias, sus emociones y relaciones interpersonales. La idea fue y es desarrollada por colaboradores del Manthoc e IFEJANT, dos organizaciones que apoyan a niños trabajadores en la defensa de sus derechos. Tiene antecedentes y movimientos hermanos en otros países con experiencias semejantes.Diá-logos 16, 63-76.
In 1955, a monument to Inca warrior Rumiñahui was erected in Otavalo’s central plaza. In this article, I study the ways in which competing imaginings of the Ecuadorian nation have shaped the material and symbolic trajectory of the monument. The monument was the outcome of a struggle for hegemony between nonindigenous elites. The current appropriation of the monument by the local indigenous population, however, is at odds with the ideological purpose for which it was built. The initiative to build the monument emerged from the public sphere—which at that time excluded indigenous peoples—in a context of national debates about the Indian problem. The widespread notion that the indigenous people of Otavalo were exceptional propelled the local nonindigenous elite to debate the Indian problem and shape, in the process, a public sphere. Elucidating the workings of the public sphere in the racialization of indigenous peoples, I aim to contribute to the academic literature about the relationship between Indian and nation in Ecuador. This literature has focused on the role that either the state or the private sphere has played in this racialization and has not paid enough explicit attention to the public sphere.
Fernando García conoce a fondo el movimiento indígena de Ecuador. Ha investigado sobre el tema y, al mismo tiempo, ha acompañado a las organizaciones, a sus líderes y a sus lideresas en la participación política y electoral. En este libro plasma su experiencia que junto con sus conocimientos académicos nos ofrecen una lectura crítica, multifacética, sólida y profunda de una parte compleja de la historia reciente del Ecuador. De las distintas teorías usadas para estudiar los movimientos indígenas en América Latina, García recoge aquellas que le permiten interpretar el entramado del movimiento en Ecuador. Su recorrido comienza en los años cuarenta del siglo pasado. Narra la creación de la Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador, cuatro décadas después, y de su brazo electoral, el Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik, en los años noventa. Estas luchas históricas de los pueblos indígenas condujeron a la reforma constitucional de 2008 en la que se de¬ne al Estado como plurinacional e intercultural, y a la formulación de políticas de reconocimiento del sistema de justicia indígena. Concluye con las confrontaciones del movimiento indígena con el gobierno del expresidente Rafael Correa. Una de las virtudes del autor de este libro es su capacidad de sostener la mirada empática, pero a la vez crítica, sobre el movimiento indígena ecuatoriano.
This paper explores how coal extraction activities in La Guajira and Cesar, Colombia, are confronting the territorial claims of the local communities with the land claims of the coal companies. I argue that for the communities affected, this is not just a matter of land; it is also a matter of place. The paper introduces the concept of “territorial grabbing” as a way of understanding our spatial surroundings beyond considerations of land tenure, ownership, use, and occupation, taking into consideration symbolic and emotional structures, power relations, and social configurations involved in contexts of social occupation and appropriation. The paper presents how the actions and activities of the mining companies triggered processes of territorial grabbing, thus, confronting the communitieś spatial understandings with the spatial logic of the mining companies.
For centuries Andean civilization and ecology has afforded a special fascination for European travellers and officials. In this volume, eight writers - anthropologists, economists and historians working in Bolivia, Britain, France, Ireland and Peru - describe and analyse aspects of rural society in various Andean regions. They focus on the impact of capitalist development on both the peasant economy and the landed elite in the Andes and the ways in which that impact has been shaped by a specific Andean culture and a characteristic Andean ecology and climate. Their discussion of Andean specificity centres on the notion of verticality, first developed by John Murra to describe political and economic adaptation to climatic variation in the Andean eco-system. The volume represents a substantial contribution to our understanding of Andean rural society and the nature of the Latin American peasantry and peasant economy. It will appeal to all those interested in economic anthropology, Latin America, peasant studies and the capitalist world-economy.
Latin America has been caught for centuries in a vicious cycle of land consolidation and land reform; the issue perennially resurfaces since concentration of land and associated resources results in conflict.’ Latin American nations are among the world’s leaders when it comes to the inequality of land distribution. Land reform, or agrarian reform, as it is more commonly referred to in Latin America, is hardly a new phenomenon. As we will show, the need to develop a policy to redress the consolidation of lands by a powerful few and redistribute it in the name of equity and development has its pedigree in Greco-Roman times. In Latin America land reform began in colonial times and has persisted through the present, resisted by elites who benefited from the largesse of the colonial powers. In the colonial era, the land and its resources was all the crown could offer to the conquistadors, colonial elites, and to the church. As a result, the newly independent states immediately entrenched a resistant, wealthy class of latifundistas, or large landed estate holders, setting the stage for a legacy of revolution and attempts at land reform.
This article explores the dynamics of power and ideology that congeal around the narrative of Sumak Kawsay, or Good Living in Ecuador. My purpose is document these social and cultural logics of extractivist capitalism through a detailed ethnography of these processes within indigenous communities in Ecuador. Specifically, I focus on the communities within Block 20 of Amazonian Ecuador, the site of the Pungarayacu heavy petroleum project, 2008–2015, in the Province of Napo. The paper provides an analysis and ethnographic examples of the political, social and cultural relations that defined the implementation of the heavy petroleum project in the region; the analysis details not only the close connections among the State, the company, and local governments, but also the way indigenous communities were controlled and subordinated to the interests of extractivism. My argument is that, for Amazonian communities located in strategic zones, extractivism is a sphere of exchange that is intimately connected with development. Development and its ideology of Good Living naturalize and legitimate extractivist activities, and allow capitalism to expand and adapt to different State logics. The narrative of Good Living, I conclude, is ideological. Its true purpose is not social welfare or the reform of capitalism, but rather power.
This article discusses two forms of discrimination against indigenous people: ventriloquism and open racism, and argues that a transition from paternalism to open intolerance has taken place in Ecuador in the context of governmental emphasis on natural resource extraction. Ventriloquism, when non-Indians speak for indigenous people, is analysed through the Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) policies of the government of Rafael Correa (2007–2017). Public racism is examined by looking at government repression against indigenous leaders and communities and Presidential speeches. The article concludes that the state’s ventriloquist and racist discourses and practices are equally rooted in the country’s colonial past. These findings are contrasted with the writings of scholars that have called the government of Mr. Correa decolonizing. The article examines the ways in which decolonial theorists informed and promoted the policies of this regime, and argues that decolonial scholars have been insufficiently self-critical and reflective of their own complicity with the state’s repressive project vis-à-vis indigenous communities.
This paper -which was presented as the presidential address at the 1988 annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory- analyzes several historiographical definitions of what constitutes an event, and argues for a more reflexive and cautious characterization ofmeaningful events in ethnohistorical research. After introducing positivist and aprioristic definitions of historical events, the author presents a critique of these definitions that is deeply rooted in the contributions ofthe Annales school and structural anthropology. This paper argues that meaningful historical events -and even meaningful narrative silences- are not self-evident, universal phenomena, but the product of the particular historical consciousness ofindigenous or European societies. The author also proposes a brieftaxonomy of "nonevents" -pseudo-events, imagined events, epitomizing events, latent events, and denied events- that exemplify the response range of the historical consciousness of various North American indigenous groups as they confronted the European colonial powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Studies of the emergence of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, which burst onto the national political scene in 1990, have not paid enough attention to indigenous historical consciousness. Using historical and ethnographic evidence, this study examines the emergence of historical consciousness among indigenous peasants involved in the land struggle for the Quinchuquí hacienda, in Otavalo, Ecuador. The research demonstrates that it was only during the struggle for the land that the peasants became aware of the colonial dispossession of indigenous lands. Legitimating their politics in terms of history, they articulated a political identity that increasingly emphasised ethnicity over class.
Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalised groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements' internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining), and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilisation and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.
On December 30, 1930, agricultural workers on the Pesillo hacienda in the canton of Cayambe, in the northern Ecuador highlands, rose up in protest against abuses they faced at the hands of their bosses. Local governmental officials reported that no one was working as the strike spread across the hacienda and threatened to engulf neighboring properties. Pesillo's newly formed peasant union El Inca, as well as Tierra Libre from the neighboring Moyurco hacienda, presented a list of 17 demands which focused almost exclusively on issues of working conditions, indebtedness, and salaries. They demanded that the patrones (bosses) fire mayordomos (overseers) who mistreated workers, raise their daily salary to forty centavos, recognize an eight-hour work day, pay women for their labor, and establish a school for their children.
Brooke Larson's interpretive analysis of the history of Andean peasants reveals the challenges of nation making in the republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the volatile nineteenth century. Nowhere in Latin America were postcolonial transitions more turbulent than in the Andes, where communal indigenous roots grew deep and where the "Indian problem" seemed so discouraging to liberalizing states. The analysis raises broader issues about the interplay of liberalism, racism, and ethnicity in the formation of exclusionary "republics without citizens" over the nineteenth century.
Land reform was one of the most important policies introduced in Latin America in the twentieth century and remains high on the political agenda due to sustained pressure from rural social movements. Improving our understanding of the issue therefore remains a pressing concern. This paper responds to this need by proposing a new theoretical framework to explore land reform and providing a fresh analysis of historical and contemporary land struggles in Ecuador. Drawing on the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi, the paper characterizes these struggles as the attempt to increase the social and political control of land in the face of mounting commodification. The movement started in the 1960s and remains evident in Ecuador today. Exploring land reform in Ecuador from this theoretical perspective provides new insight into land struggles in the country and contributes to debates over land reforms of the past and present elsewhere in the Global South.
The article seeks to reconceptualize the recent history of peasant politics along ethnographic lines. Two haciendas, Gatazo and Culluctus, are discussed. After 1972, the landlord of Culluctus attempted to rationalize labor relations and modernize production in a belated Junker-style transition toward a capitalist hacienda. This transition was ultimately blocked by "internal' and "external' herders who invaded the hacienda's pastures and won a court battle under the agrarian reform law, taking possession of about half of the hacienda's upland pastures in the 1980s. By 1973, Gatazo had made a partial attempt to take the "Junker road' to mechanized dairy production. But the internal peasant community staged an extended campaign to pressure, invade, resist, and buy up the shrinking demesne piece by piece. This campaign began in the 1920s and culminated in the late 1980s. In these cases and many others, the belated "neo-Junker' push of the 1970s on traditional Ecuadorian haciendas partly resulted from the "productionist' Agrarian Reform Law of 1973, which threatened to expropriate haciendas that did not modernize. -from Author
