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American Behavioral Scientist2014, Vol 58(1) 30 –52

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Article

Transcending the Coloniality of Development: Moving Beyond Human/Nature Hierarchies

Tanya Casas1

AbstractAt this particular historical conjuncture, human-made crises—from ecological disasters such as the BP oil spill or the Fukushima nuclear accident, to food shortages and national economic calamities—have rightly gained attention, and the prospect of real limits to consumption seem ever present on the horizon. According to David Harvey, such “[c]rises are moments of paradox and possibility out of which all manner of alternatives . . . can spring.” It is these moments, or encounters, of paradox and possibility that I address in this article. I specifically consider novel ecological political articulations that have emerged out of indigenous movements that unmask the material foundations of world history and demonstrate cracks in a dominant ideology that commoditizes all matter—living and otherwise.

Keywordscoloniality, environment, indigenous

(Quechua) Pacha-oqariy—translation in English: “Sickness caused by falling down on land possessed by evil spirits. The body of the sick person decays. One cures by ‘payment to Pachamama.’”

—Luis Morató Peña and Luis Morató Lara (1995, p. 176)

At this particular historical conjuncture, human-made crises—from ecological disasters such as the BP oil spill or the Fukushima nuclear accident, to food shortages and national economic calamities—have rightly gained attention, and the prospect of

1Delaware Valley College, Doylestown, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:Tanya Casas, Delaware Valley College, 700 E. Butler Ave., Doylestown, PA 18901, USA. Email: [email protected]

495030 ABS58110.1177/0002764213495030American Behavioral ScientistCasasresearch-article2013

at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on February 20, 2016abs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://abs.sagepub.com/

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real limits to consumption seem ever present on the horizon. According to David Harvey (2012), such “[c]rises are moments of paradox and possibility out of which all manner of alternatives . . . can spring” (p. 216). It is these moments, or encounters, of paradox and possibility that I address in this article. I specifically consider novel eco-logical political articulations that have emerged out of indigenous movements that unmask the material foundations of world history and demonstrate cracks in a domi-nant ideology that commoditizes all matter—living and otherwise.

For example, in September 2008, Ecuador passed a constitution that granted rights to living things and their environment. According to the document ratified by the Constituent Assembly, “nature has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution” (Article 71). There was more. Not only did the document recognize nature as an entity with rights, thereby extending a historical process of expanding the liberal democratic notion of rights from the individual to collectives, but of particular interest was the adoption and use in several sections of the constitution of the Kichwa indigenous concept and project of sumak kawsay, or “living well” for all natural systems. It differs from the idea of living better and its coexistent notions of consumerism and progress that drive the current global capitalist system (Walsh, 2009). Sumak kawsay, therefore, includes an implicit critique of traditional development strategies focused on growth and exploitation of resources rather than seeking to live and coexist within dynamic systems of interde-pendence and relations. This practice and concept integrates (and unites) peoples and communities with Pachamama (Mother Earth).1

Carlos Pilamunga, a delegate to the Constituent Assembly of Pachakutik, a party affiliated with the indigenous movement, claimed that “Western development is con-cerned only with politics and economics. We [italics added] are also concerned with cultural elements, plurinationality, and the environment.”2 He advocated modifying state structures to “search for harmony between people and the environment” (Becker, 2011, p. 50).

Bolivia went a step further on April 22, 2011, when it passed the Law of Mother Earth (Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra). Prior to outlining the specific duties of the Bolivian plurinational state and citizens toward “Mother Earth,” she is defined as “the living dynamic system comprised of the indivisible community of all living sys-tems and all living beings that are interrelated, interdependent, and complementary, and that share a common destiny. According to the cosmovisions of the first indige-nous and peasant nations and pueblos, Mother Earth is considered sacred” (Article 3). Although the law as written in Spanish contains no words in an indigenous language, unlike the Ecuadorian Constitution, there is an effort to define the meaning of Mother Earth along the lines of an indigenous ontology with an emphasis on human communi-ties conforming part of Mother Earth.

Even the former UN adviser on water, Maude Barlow, recognized indigenous peo-ples as the inspiration to push the General Assembly of the UN to adopt a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature. She claimed that the rights of nature are based on the notion that the natural world is a fully operating system, a community with its own laws (Deen, 2011). She argued that it is, therefore, necessary for humans to construct



32 American Behavioral Scientist 58(1)

laws that are compatible with the laws of nature. “This means promoting human and community development in a way that protects nature and promotes sustainability.” This means a system that would make it unlawful to drive a species to extinction or destroy a watershed. Under such a system, the Gulf of Mexico could sue British Petroleum (Deen, 2011).

The actual or potential incorporation of the ecological concepts I have outlined into state and suprastate discourses signifies the possibility of a broadened political field of action, one that takes into account, if not recognizes, a role for nonhuman entities. At the same time, however, state adaptations of indigenous articulations have a longer, if contentious, history in Latin America. Rodriguez Useche (2003) has warned of the selective application of indigenous concepts for the purpose of lend-ing legitimacy to particular policy decisions. Similarly, Charles Hale refers to “neo-liberal multiculturalism” as a way for political actors to advance their own agendas by adopting facets of indigenous cultural rights.3 For example, the 2008 official constitutional recognition of Ecuador as a “plurinational” and “intercultural” state under the administration of Rafael Correa was received with much enthusiasm and support by many progressive sectors of Ecuadorian society (Becker, 2011; Walsh, 2009). The goal of plurinationalism had served to organize and motivate indigenous and peasant movements in Ecuador for more than 20 years. Nevertheless, void of any substantive refounding of political institutions, plurinationalism has, as of yet, to be fully realized.

Although caution is warranted, when we consider the contemporary context of uncertainty that has arisen from environmental, economic, and political crises largely fueled by a hypermodern vision of development, the possibility of all forms of eco-nomic, political, and social organization, including a greater turn toward ecologism, becomes more thinkable and possible.

Drawing on encounters by indigenous communities in Ecuador with development discourse and practice, I argue that to truly incorporate all earthly entities into a politi-cal landscape, thereby broadening the public field of action, we must at one time rec-ognize both how these encounters represent distinct ontologies, or natures of existence, but also how they represent nodes of connection that mutually, if unequally condition one another. Our task then is to unravel these encounters—encounters that have often come into being through colonial relations of power where the relationship between the exploiter and the exploited (human or nonhuman) has been determined through hierarchical social classifications. More to the point, I argue that the theoretical and material foundation of the dominant paradigm of modernity rests on the antithetical and hierarchical separation of “Humanity” and “Nature.”

It follows, therefore, that we cannot simply epistemologically incorporate the non-human world into our modern social, economic, and political systems without recog-nizing how these systems were shaped historically through coloniality,4 thereby uncovering the coloniality embedded in the hierarchical ontological assumptions that have shaped modern world history. This has affected who can express agency or rather who or what is valued as a political agent, what constitutes the political, and how this is articulated.



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How Is This Articulated? Spaces of Conflict and Novel Political Articulations

To be sure, the discourse of rights articulated by such documents as the Ecuadorian Constitution or the UN Universal Declaration has come out of the liberal democratic tradition that emphasizes the individual as the ultimate social unit. Nevertheless, as politics are played out through unequal articulatory practices (over who defines mean-ing and practices) and uneven access to public expressions of power, indigenous activ-ists have adapted and transformed the notion of rights,5 lending their own different meanings to them while utilizing the language of power to gain greater access to domi-nant political and social institutions, often at the cost of other articulatory forms.6

For example, the long history of indigenous struggles for land throughout Latin America has been linked to peasant class resistance and articulated as such. We must, however, remind ourselves of the different meaning struggles for land may have in many indigenous and peasant communities (cf. Pallares, 2002). As opposed to the instrumental logic of capitalism where land is valued for its utility toward the end of accumulating capital, the meaning of land is quite different in these communities where it is the recog-nized (and articulated) foundation of social and cultural reproduction. Thus, such actions cannot be reduced simply to economic struggles. They are also cultural and ecological actions. In 1983, Ecuadorian Kichwa activist Blanca Chancosa stated,

The difference between us and the peasants is that our struggle is cultural as well, in the sense that we have a proposal that views land as community [italics added], and then land as nationality. (Pallares, 2002, p. 207)

Such forms of expression alien to the language of liberal democracy have often been ignored or dismissed, particularly those forms related to the cosmos or nonhuman enti-ties. As Nina Pacari, another Ecuadorian Kichwa activist and lawyer, recognized, adopting concepts and discourse acknowledged by international law has been pivotal in the push to expand citizenship rights for indigenous peoples. In 1993 she claimed,

Before as Indians they didn’t notice us, but now they see us as Indians with rights, with proposals, as different Indians, not like what they thought we were, but how we can be and how we are. (Pallares, 2002, p. 17)

The point is that many indigenous forms of expression have been obscured in an attempt to expand the broader legitimacy of particular claims. Marisol de la Cadena argues that the recent appearance of “earth-beings” (or nonhuman entities) in political discourse, while not new in indigenous articulations, represents a rupture of modern politics and maybe even modern epistemologies. She questions whether the “insur-gence of indigenous forces and practices” has the power to “reshuffle hegemonic antagonisms” and render illegitimate the historical exclusion of indigenous practices from nation-state institutions (de la Cadena, 2010, p. 336).

Notwithstanding this note of caution, the more recent political utilization of indig-enous concepts such as sumak kawsay tells us something about the greater social and




political presence indigenous peoples have achieved in the region. How such ideas will be reinterpreted on a broader national and international scale, however, is yet to be determined, and, as Useche (2003) and Hale (2002) have warned, indigenous artic-ulations can be reabsorbed into a new political hegemony. Even so, hegemonic articu-lations are always incomplete and in process (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). It is, therefore, important to draw attention to the foundations of these articulations; to recognize how social movements, such as indigenous or peasant-based movements, have been engag-ing in the exchange and production of knowledge over time despite histories of mar-ginalization by dominant groups and historical silences. Only then can we fully understand how these discourses have historically informed dominant narratives.

Localized spaces and actions of resistance, transformation, negotiation, and con-sensus are often the defining sites of novel political imaginaries, not UN declarations nor, necessarily, national constitutions. A Kichwa woman active in resisting mining contracts in the Intag Valley in Ecuador clearly expressed some frustration when I asked her about recent activity of CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador), an organization that has for more than two decades successfully pushed for the formal constitutional recognition of indigenous collective rights and the pluri-nationality of the Ecuadorian state and has garnered the attention of numerous scholars and practitioners.7 She explained that CONAIE was only as powerful as its base orga-nizations and communities. Without their support, CONAIE has no foundation to stand on. People living in Intag were fighting to protect the valley in the valley yet they were not the ones benefitting from any leadership conferences, educational scholar-ship, or international summits (such as leaders of CONAIE).8

While there is a clear need to recognize and further study many of these spaces comprehensively, where actions of resistance and negotiation occur with and without support from such national organizations as CONAIE and where novel political articu-lations are often born, for the purpose of this brief article, I focus on the more global-ized indigenous articulations appearing in state and suprastate instruments. I, therefore, risk engaging in what Gibson-Graham (2003) might critique as a “politics of empire” in confronting the coloniality of political and cultural configurations without truly addressing the day-to-day lived experiences of a majority of indigenous peoples (cf. Escobar, 2008). These globalized indigenous articulations do, however, allow us to imagine a different form of macro-politics and the possibility of “another knowledge” that ceases to be beholden to a dominant, overarching narrative; a form of politics where difference is the foundation for discussion, not just the basis of social conflict, thus opening space for the coexistence of various possibilities (Sousa Santos, 2007).

What Constitutes the Political?

The Foundations of Differences

According to Arturo Escobar, “The logic of difference is a means to widen the politi-cal space and increase its complexity,” and if conceived from the perspective of the colonial difference, “the articulation of struggles across differences may lead to the



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deepening of democracy—indeed, to questioning the very principles of liberal democracy” (2008, p. 15). In other words, by recognizing and confronting cultural domination and asymmetrical cultural distribution or the effective power associated with cultural meanings and practices, we might broaden political spaces. Cultural difference emerges not simply from difference per se but from the meaning we give to this difference in the definition of social life and all this entails in terms of how it is expressed through economy, ecology, knowledge, body, cosmos, and so on (Escobar, 2008, pp. 14-15). Thus, articulations of difference, such as by indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups, are not simply about different perspectives of the world but often have to do with ontological differences—distinctions over the nature of existence.

The dominant political field we currently recognize is a world shaped by the anti-thetical and hierarchical separation of “Humanity” and “Nature” (cf. de la Cadena, 2010; Latour, 2004a). It is a world where modern science gained epistemological priv-ilege from the 17th century onward allowing eventually both for the technological supremacy of Western societies and the suppression of other knowledges (Sousa Santos, 2007). In her essay “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,” de la Cadena (2010) describes how the social construction of “nature” became the realm of science; it was reduced and objectified to study, dissect, and determine its laws. The social and relational aspect of “humans,” on the other hand, not the biological, became the realm of politics. Thus, politics existed as a category only insofar as nature had been deter-mined to be void of politics and void of subjectivity—nature as object.

Within this European reductionist imaginary, however, indigenous peoples defied the antagonism between “nature” and “humans.” They were, according to Europeans’ first introduction to Native Americans, living in a “state of nature,” and thus part of the natural world, and presented as such.9 In Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, he described the people he encountered on the island of Hispaniola:

[A]ll go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, although some women cover a single place with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they make for the purpose. They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they fitted to use them, not because they are not well built men and of handsome stature, but because they are marvelously timorous.10

While the Vallodolid controversy confirmed for some Spaniards that Indians did, indeed, have souls and could be “saved” (they were, therefore, humans), the idea was that they then had to be saved.11 They had to be brought out of this state of nature and “civilized,” whether through the introduction of Christianity or later through modern-ization and development.

New identities and positions were, therefore, created from this framework of European colonization. In his discussion on the emergence of the “coloniality of power,” Anibal Quijano claims that discussions such as the Vallodolid controversy replicated the discursive context of the period and produced two main axes of power based first on the codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the idea of “race,” a supposedly different biological structure that placed some people




in a natural situation of inferiority to others. Race became a constitutive and founding element of the relations of domination that the conquest imposed. The other process was the constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources through slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production, and reciprocity, which together would form the basis of capital and the world market (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, pp. 243-244). Here it is important to emphasize not just dominion over labor but over resources. Thus, while Quijano highlighted skin tones as ultimately determining for Europeans the degree of humanity of a group of people, he overlooked the link between the natural world and racialized identities. Indigenous peoples or Black slaves were viewed as inferior and, therefore, hierarchically closer to the natural world. They were neither fully “civilized” humans, nor fully possessed of true political agency. As de la Cadena (2010) notes,

[T]he birth of the modern political field, we learn from science scholars, was tied to the denial of the state of “Nature.” Sustaining the notion of the political that eventually became hegemonic was the ontological distinction between “Humanity” and “Nature,” the creation of the “natural Man,” his sentence to inevitable extinction along with his other-than-human beings, and the occlusion of this antagonism through the notion of an adamantly inclusive and hierarchically organized “Humanity.” Only the fully humans engaged in antagonisms, and only they could transform their enmities into adversarial relations—that is, engage in politics. (p. 344)

The political field as conceived through this distinction, through this hierarchical antagonism between humans and nature, came to define what would become America, and came to form an integral part of the European imaginary. It would become a model of power, the very basis of modern identity.

So dominant was the scientific episteme by the 19th century “second Enlightenment” (Latour, 2004b), when Europeans gained such confidence in their so-called universal knowledge and cultural expressions and in their ability to determine “natural laws,” that even the political and social realms became objects of scientific inquiry. Europeans attempted to reduce societies, states, markets and even groups of peoples through racialization, to “natural laws,” abstracting them from historical time, geographical space, and real human experience. According to Latour,

The critical power of the moderns lies in this double language: they can mobilize Nature at the heart of social relationships, even as they leave Nature infinitely remote from human beings; they are free to make and unmake their society, even as they render its laws ineluctable, necessary and absolute. (Latour, 1993, pp. 35, 37; also see McMichael, 2011, p. 3)

It then becomes clear that colonization mobilized “Nature” and formed the foundation of modernity as discourse and as a practice. Modernity would not, therefore, be pos-sible without coloniality, and coloniality continues to be an inevitable outcome of modern discourses and practices. This affects how knowledge produced by some bod-ies is systemically naturalized, while “other” knowledges and bodies are marginalized and systemically “otherized.”



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First, as a product of this historical process, a modern/developmental divide lies at the heart of social science theory and its categories, thereby reproducing an ontology that reifies a sociopolitical linear evolution of human societies moving from “natural” or tribal society (i.e., native, indigenous) to a “modern” state (in the image of Europeans—if not in hue, at least in dress and sensibility).12 Indigenous peoples, therefore, have historically and categorically been rendered unfinished or “underde-veloped” and in the process of evolving toward this modern state.

The discipline of modern anthropology, for example, arose out of natural history to research and document the “inevitable extinction” if not physically, at least culturally, of indigenous peoples as a result of European colonial expansion, and later because of the internal colonizing processes produced by modernization policies. It was based on an underlying universalizing assumption that humans would become ever distanced from and control nature through science and technological advancements as moder-nity was realized. The ecological practices and diverse knowledge systems of many indigenous peoples were studied, therefore, not by modern scientists but by scholars of the humanities as myths, legends, superstitions, and rituals.13

Second, this expected shift toward modernity consumed much of Latin American social history as “the Indian problem”14—how to assimilate (or culturally annihilate) the indigenous population. An incipient “indigenist” movement that began in the 1920s flourished in the postwar period concerned with the plight of indigenous peo-ples.15 Whether politically conservative or from the left, these nonindigenous intel-lectuals viewed native populations as passive subjects—peoples without political agency. Indigenists and other sectors of Latin American societies tended to blame their generally weak economies and limited industrialization on the persistence of premod-ern agricultural practices and forms of social organization of native populations. They advocated policies of modernization, particularly the expansion of rural education, to address this “problem” (Heurich, 1999, p. 69).16

Anthropologists and linguists, on the other hand, often regarded indigenous com-munities as isolated and in danger of being integrated and exploited. For the most part, however, they perceived integration as inevitable and dedicated much of their scholar-ship toward documenting the distinct cultural and linguistic practices of native peoples. In 1950, for example, anthropologist and indigenist Gonzalo Rubio Orbe conducted a study in Punyaro, Imbabura province, of the “Indian problem.”17 He then prescribed solutions to achieve the incorporation of “the Indian” into national life requiring more than just a change in dress and hair, but also in speech and familial patterns. He writes,

I am interested, more than anything, in knowing up close the level and characteristics of the mestizo and Indian habitat; the reciprocal relations and influences and the differences that separate them and do not allow for the absorption [of indigenous peoples] to the more advanced group with the superior culture [mestizos]. . . . On simple observation I was able to recognize the existence of persons in the process of transition from Indian to mestizo; various external elements hinted at mestizo characteristics: dress, haircut up to the shoulders; the use of shoes, for example. Other [characteristics] at the same time unmistakably hinted at indigenous roots, for example, speech, physical aspects and familial connections. (Rubio Orbe, 1950, prologue)




This order of things, at least from a Eurocentric perspective, rendered natural peoples as incapable of contemporary knowledge production—a cognitive injustice that had and continues to have fatal consequences for peoples, landscapes, memories, and other cultural phenomena. Amalia Pallares (2002, p. ix), for example, relates a joke told to her when she commented on her learning Kichwa while conducting her field work in Ecuador. A wealthy student from the coast asked her, “How do you say computer in Quichua?” Her response of silence completed the joke based on a long-held, shared assumption that indigenousness and contemporary knowledge production are incompatible.

Whether viewed as innocent victims of colonial exploitation or closed societies that negated progress, indigenous peoples, peasants, and Afro-descendants became objects of study to analyze and make policy decisions. Such characterizations, particularly of indigenous communities, would only increase as modernization came to dominate national policies during the heyday of developmentalism in the aftermath of the world wars.18 During this period that saw the expansion and consolidation of global economic links based on unequal relations of interdependence and improved communication net-works, measures of progress became systematized and rationalized through universal quantifiable measures of development, though clearly at the expense of the qualita-tively very different human experiences with these measures. In Latin America, where the discourse of modernity rejected European domination while at the same time inter-nalized the European civilizing mission, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and peasant communities all became targets of self-colonization processes that assumed distinct forms in different political contexts and historical periods (Coronil, 1997).

Developmentalism

Developmentalism as an ideological project reproduced the scientific, economic, and political categories of modernity and thus the embedded ontological assumptions regarding the progress of human societies. This was achieved through the creation of the United Nations in 1945 and other suprastate-level institutions dedicated to support-ing state-level development initiatives and the later institutionalization of the UN System of National Accounts, which represented levels of development per nation-state in terms of overall gross domestic product and rates of GDP per capita. These institutions provided an overall political-legal framework of the nation-state (e.g., the legal recognition of the self-determination of nations) that, in many ways, reified and politically naturalized the nation-state form (rather than emphasizing its mythical qualities) and provided economic institutional frameworks for newly independent states (e.g., national banks). It was presumed that any state, given the correct state-promoted policies and access to foreign capital, could march toward modernization and attain the levels of economic growth achieved by the West, and that growth or level of development could be measured through universal quantifiable measures (cf. Escobar, 1995; McMichael, 1996; Rist, 1997).

On one hand, as Da Costa and McMichael (2007) note, the developmental divide that results from these measures represents a political ontology that determines how



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we think about world ordering, but also what is valued in this order. It underlies much of social scientific inquiry and, therefore, determines the categories and methodolo-gies through which knowledge is produced, whether referring to bounded categories of comparison such as the developed or developing state—that reifies the state as the instrument of development—of groups of people or of development indicators.19 There is, however, a longer history of critiquing such categories, as Wallerstein’s (1974) world-system analysis and McMichael’s (1990) “incorporated comparison” demonstrate (McMichael, 2011), and even an attempt by the United Nations to rethink development away from GDP and incorporate a more holistic view that can be found in the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI, while still bounded by the state, includes such factors as wealth inequality and other social and health indicators such as literacy rates, gender inequalities, and infant mortality rates.

On the other hand and related, this linear, Eurocentric modern rationality imposes a quantifiable, namely economic, logic on social life. McMichael refers to this logic as an “economic calculus,”20 in contrast to the “ecological calculus” that characterizes the material and social forms of reproduction of the many societies often considered “traditional,” such as indigenous peoples, that do not, necessarily, separate their mate-rial conditions of existence from their surrounding landscape, nor do they necessarily instrumentalize this for the purpose of economic rationality. Whereas the former rep-resents a “capitalocentric” focus, namely of market objectification, that reinforces an ontology that externalizes ecological relations (McMichael, 2011, pp. 7-8), the latter, by definition, emphasizes the interactions and relationships between dynamic systems, but becomes articulated only as modernity “encounters” its ecological underpinnings, “simultaneously subordinating and clarifying ecology” (McMichael, 2011, pp. 2-3). As McMichael states,

Whereas “ecological” practices organize around replenishment, “economic” practices organize for “robbery”—at the expense of the former practices. While the former respects biological time, the latter concerns itself solely with value’s velocity of circulation. One consequence is to deem ecological (rather than economic) practices anachronistic and change-resistant. (McMichael, 2011, p. 12)

There are two important issues to add regarding this ontological encounter. First, to further enhance McMichael’s perspective, we must consider how such “robbery” has been justified through scientific principles as the epistemic foundation of the “eco-nomic calculus”—a call to rationality, so to speak, “for the advancement of the nation.”

Second, the “encounter” between modernity and its ecological underpinnings is, ultimately, a colonial encounter metaphorically through the categories it produces that legitimate the biophysical process of continued conquest of people and other earthly entities, but it is also a node of connection where these distinct logics become articu-lated, creating new identities and positions. Indigenous ecological practices, therefore, become “anachronistic and change-resistant.” Yet it is this very ecological logic that respects biological time and limits that forces a response, particularly because of the commodification of indigenous means of material existence, while it also shapes the




manner in which this distinct ecological ontology becomes articulated. In turn this can reinforce the conditions for continued biophysical, cultural, and psychological aggres-sion. Indigenous communities have historically been dismissed as valueless—except maybe to illustrate human cultural variation—not as examples of ways of knowing and producing knowledge.

While we may view the encounter between an economic-scientific modern ontol-ogy and ecological ontologies or expressions (human and nonhuman) as seemingly antithetical and maybe even in opposition, they are connected. It has been through this colonial encounter that the latter found political expression through the other—whether through the articulation of resistance (through countermovements), negotiation or building a type of consensus that I will highlight below. I will address the issue of nonhuman actions further along in the article.

The Coloniality of Development Encounters in Ecuador

The ontological assumptions embedded within the development paradigm shaped eco-nomic and political frameworks that affected how newly independent states, after the Second World War, and economically weaker states in regions such as Latin America, began to fashion their economies. Multiethnic states in Latin America, for example, would impose a singular sense of nationhood to construct the desired vehicle of eco-nomic development—the nation-state. This transpired through a process of internal colonization that affected peoples considered by the “moderns” to be traditional, obso-lete, and, ultimately, slated to disappear (given the governing ontology), and it would affect the landscape.

In the 1980s, Whitten tellingly wrote that mestizo or “mixed” Ecuadorians viewed themselves as true nationals. They believed that progress consisted in transforming the peripheries (indigenous peoples and Afro-Ecuadorians) of the nation through educa-tion and development to change the landscape and its peoples in ways that conform to the ideology and the projects of North American industrial growth (Whitten, 1993, p. 14). What is telling about this depiction of the promise of development for the “true” Ecuadorian” was that it necessitated a transformation both of the landscape and the people embedded within it. It is clear then how indigenous peoples and Afro-Ecuadorians have been considered, at least from the perspective of national narratives, as “outside” the nation or, at the very least, on its fringes socially, cognitively, and geographically.

They were viewed not as collective subjects, but as “dead weight” that stalled the progress of the nation, a characterization made poignantly in 1977 in a supplemental article in the national El Comercio newspaper concerning the National Education and Literacy Plan promoted by the military government. The article outlined the cognitive, cultural, and socioeconomic characteristics that distinguish the “New Type of Ecuadorian Man” from the “Individual or Marginalized Group” (Casas, 2006). Some of the highlighted characteristics were that the latter “is of magical-ingenuous con-sciousness” who “waits for others to ‘think for him’ and that others ‘do things for him.’” In contrast, the “New Type of Ecuadorian Man . . . thinks as an Ecuadorian, as



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the ruler of his own destiny. He acts and exercises his rights. He is ready to produce and consume more [italics added]” (Casas, 2006).

This excerpt represents yet another example of a node of connection produced out of ontological encounters that shape discursive outcomes. In this case, the “New Type of Ecuadorian Man,” and his characteristics, is clearly defined in opposition to the “Marginalized Man” (the indigenous man) who is ready to “produce and consume!”

This vision of indigenous peoples had particularly grave consequences in the Amazon region where, to relieve land pressures in the highlands, the 1964 Agrarian Reform Law was passed together with the Law of Non-Cultivated Lands (Tierras Baldías). The principle of this law was simple. It basically considered lands in the region to be abandoned because they were not cultivated (at least not in a recognizable manner to the untrained eye) and “waiting for” colonization. In this manner, govern-ment promised land titles and easy credit to settlers who migrated to the region, cleared forest, and planted crops or pasture. In addition, government officials pledged to “civi-lize” native peoples and integrate them into the dominant national culture, especially when oil was discovered in Huaorani territories in 1967. This translated not only into the continued extension of education and adult literacy programs to the region, viewed as the cornerstone of any set of development policies to achieve national integration and progress, but also into the expansion of infrastructure (roads, towns, etc.) that would attract both settlers and oil companies.

As a result, indigenous peoples found their lives and the world around them irrevoca-bly transformed—the loss of their ancestral lands, in some cases forced settlement, the rapid expansion of roads and other forms of infrastructure to the region, the expansion of education programs, including programs funded by the very companies engaged in oil exploration and exploitation, the introduction of new diseases, the erosion of food sover-eignty, the introduction of a cash economy, and, overall, a complete disregard and disre-spect for indigenous forms of social, cultural, political, and economic organization.

Development and Nodes of Connection: Pitfalls and Gains by Indigenous Peoples

The former director of education of CONAIE, Blas Chimbo, an Amazonian Kichwa, described in 2002 the physical and psychological violence even young children con-fronted as a consequence of national education projects directed toward the creation (imagination) of national unity and the construction of a “mestizo” national identity:

My parents, they’re indigenous. What I remember is that when I was in school, I was educated in the Josefina Mission boarding school. My parents would come from far away and leave us in the boarding school and here we learned to study in Spanish. . . . In school it was prohibited to speak in Kichwa. We were punished if we spoke in Kichwa. They didn’t give us food and we had to kneel for two or three hours on sand or simply they hit us and said that we had to learn Spanish. Nevertheless, even with this difficulty, we progressed and we progressed. . . . Up until this point I didn’t realize that there were these difficulties between indigenous peoples and white-mestizos—this whole situation . . . it was then that I realized




that I was of a nationality and that I should defend what was mine. Because in the end, as you know, with the conquest and with their laws and with their rules, the rest disappears. This is what has happened with us indigenous peoples. (Casas, 2006)21

Not all indigenous peoples who had been educated in the Hispanic education system viewed their experiences negatively. A Shuar activist for bilingual education described his experience as constructive. Bosco Atamaint was taken away to a missionary board-ing school when he was 5 years old until his graduation from high school. There, the missionaries did not allow the children to speak Shuar openly until the fourth grade. He said that the teachers were very strict, but he felt it was better in a way because “otherwise many would have just escaped back home to go about their fishing and hunting without having had the opportunity to make something else of themselves.” Atamaint believed the missionaries prepared him to confront a world completely dif-ferent from his own and, as he claims, “we didn’t forget Shuar or who we were.”22

Education and literacy became a type of weapon that indigenous leaders used to advance their goals and projects. As Atamaint claims, his educational experiences pre-pared him to confront a world unlike his own in which he worked toward advancing the organization of his people. Many current leaders of the indigenous movement that emerged in the 1990s began their activism through struggles for bilingual education in resistance to assimilationist and racist educational practices (Pallares, 2002; Selverston-Scher, 2001).23 A statement in a 1989 CONAIE document describes the link between education and leadership in the indigenous movement:

Education affected our organization process in two ways: on the one hand, it provided us with the knowledge and space to question the socioeconomic and political situation of the country, on the other, it created expectations of work and social ascendancy that were not satisfied by society given the few offers of employment, as well as discrimination against us: this led us to reflect upon and question the system. In our organizations and in the analysis of our distinct histories, we have found that in the majority of cases, indigenous peoples that have promoted their development and that are part of our leadership are those who have had access to education. (Useche, 2003, p. 99)

As indigenous peoples were incorporated on a broader scale into the matrix of dominant mestizo society through education, into the national economy and, in some cases, to international markets, their lives were transformed, though not always along a predict-able path. Whereas the logic of accumulation converted many subsistence economies into dependent economies, creating much more vulnerability to economic failures, many indigenous communities diversified their activities. Among those indigenous peoples who became “urbanized” in towns and cities, most maintained strong links with their communities of origin and still often own land (Korovkin, 1998; Pallares, 2002, p. 43).

Korovkin, for example, describes how the modernization of large landed estates in the 1960s and 1970s in northern Ecuador overhauled indigenous production strategies causing many to become rural and urban small commodity producers, even at the point of an increasingly commodified rural Andean society. Nevertheless, among these “new” artisans, “Indianness,” rather than disappearing or indigenous peoples blending



Casas 43

into the state-sponsored mestizoness, redefined indigenous culture and allowed for the emphasis of nonmonetized values (Korovkin, 1998, p. 126).

In another case, Rudel, Bates, and Machinguiashi (2002) studied cattle ranching and cash cropping among the Shuar in the Amazonia. In response to the Law of Non-Cultivated Lands, which supported the colonization by highlanders of “non-producing” lands in the region, the Shuar not only organized to create the Shuar Federation in 1964 but also initiated the process of taking up cattle ranching and cash cropping to protect their territories from the highland settlers. Though cattle raising and cash-cropping Shuar in the tropical rain forest has shattered the essentialist image of the ecological Native American, Rudel and his colleagues demonstrate through surveys and remote-sensing data from 1987 to 1997 that Shuar and mestizo smallholder pattern of land use varied considerably, particularly as the Shuar acquired titles over their land base. They found that while Shuar initially deforested tracts of land quite rapidly, over time they relied less and less on cattle and reforested their land with traditional garden crops and some cash crops, including coffee and cacao. This was not the same with mestizo small-holders who continued to raise cattle. “The low chemical inputs and green-manure focus of Shuar smallholders, together with their appreciation for the value of forests in restoring soil fertility, makes it plausible to include them among smallholders who practice ecologically sustainable agriculture” (Rudel et al., 2002, p. 157).

Overall, development policies broadened the educational opportunities of indig-enous peoples and improved infrastructure, which increased access to national and international institutional frameworks that led to the greater possibility of demo-cratic inclusion. At the same time, however, the logic of the developmentalist state assumed a singular vision of progress and reproduced (and in many ways reaffirmed for dominant society) long-held myths regarding the superiority of European descen-dants, while categorically ignoring or disregarding the varied knowledges and life-ways of indigenous peoples, as well as Afro-descendants. Thus, development policies often produced varying responses: assimilation, adaptation, resistance through the creation of various indigenous organizations to protect territories and lifeways, and, increasingly, efforts to shape change. This process would lead toward the transformation of indigenous peoples into citizen–subjects, particularly after the country returned to democracy in 1979 and literacy was no longer a requirement of suffrage, thereby extending the vote to many indigenous peoples. It also lent greater credence to the rise of a resistance politics of culture that centered on antiracism and alternative approaches to education. As a result, cracks began to appear in the domi-nant developmentalist paradigm.

Advances made during the early 1980s were short-lived as the country made a turn toward neoliberal policies under the presidency of León Febrés Cordero. This, com-bined with continued struggles for land reform, territorial recognition, and an increas-ingly well-articulated cultural critique by indigenous intellectuals, would alter the political landscape. Claiming difference through indigenousness, as opposed to other identities—ethnic, minority, peasant—would become a type of resistance identity.24

In 1990, 4 years after CONAIE was organized, indigenous leaders would launch a national uprising to voice their demands to the state. This action, along with others




organized by CONAIE over the following decade, would mark the movement as the most powerful social movement in the country throughout the 1990s. CONAIE and its affiliate organizations provided a vital platform for the articulation of a sustained critique against state and international actors with a presence in indigenous communities.

Overall, Ecuador’s indigenous peoples joined an international network of indige-nous and other social movements throughout the world that have been a potent force in uncovering the exploitive and oppressive practices of social and political institu-tions nationally and globally, including those of academe, and have inspired various constituencies—activists, environmentalists, scholars. At the same time, they have created, constructed, and articulated novel educational, social, political, and economic projects often aimed at decentering structures of power (Casas, 2006).

What I have demonstrated then is that sites of encounter of ontological distinc-tions are nodes of articulation out of which new identities and positions emerge. This can often lead to conflict as a result of asymmetry, but also of social and material change. Sites of encounter mutually, if unequally, shape and condition one another. In Ecuador, although a unified indigenous social movement no longer captivates the attention of the country as it did in the decade of the 1990s, many sectors of Ecuadorian civil society engage in the projects and concepts proposed by indigenous sectors including the concept of sumak kawsay and rights of nature or Pachamama. The ecological advocacy by indigenous sectors of Ecuadorian society provided the momentum for the constitutional changes that, at least in theory, broadened the political field. It is evident, therefore, that indigenous responses crystallized the effects and actuality of “coloniality” in such a way as to infiltrate public discourse and recognition of the ecological principle. Yet we cannot lose sight of the fact that while nature having rights might be understood in “environmental grammar,” according to de la Cadena (2010, p. 335), ontological encounters, even when they lead to consensus and change, do not necessarily obliterate difference, nor are they about finding “common ground.” This presents a challenge, even to environmental-ists who, though they advocate for “nature,” might do so from a distinct narrative—from a distinct understanding of being.

Who Can Express Agency? The Critics

The attempt to redefine the modern ontology through the increasing formal incorpora-tion of specific indigenous belief systems and concepts into state institutions is bound to be misunderstood by representatives of the state as a result of distinct understand-ings of being.25 It is, therefore, not without its critics. In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa, though initially supported by indigenous organizations because of his stance against neoliberalism, was “clearly annoyed . . . and . . . blamed an ‘infantile’ coalition of environmentalists, leftists, and indigenists for the intrusion of Pachamama–Nature in the Constitution. Wrapping up his accusation, he added that the coalition was the worst danger for the Ecuadoran political process” (de la Cadena, 2010, p. 336).

In Bolivia, the editor of the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, Pablo Stefanioni, disparagingly referred to the pachamámicos, stating that “the process of



Casas 45

change is too important to be left in the hands of the pachamámicos.” He continued by asserting that

the affectation of ancestral authenticity may be useful for seducing revolutionary tourists in search of Latin America’s “familiar exoticism” and even more so Bolivia’s . . . but it does not seem capable of contributing anything significant in terms of building a new State, instituting a new model of development, discussing a viable productive model or new forms of democracy and mass participation. (Stefanioni, 2010)

Both Correa’s and Stefanioni’s critiques of Pachamama and the pachamámicos under-score the historically uneven ontological encounter between an “economic-scientific” and “ecological” calculus. Stefanioni justifies his role as critic of the pachamámicos because of their supposed “non-scientific” approach. He states,

So, instead of discussing how to combine developmental expectations with an intelligent eco-environmentalism, the pachamámico discourse offers us a cataract of words in Aymara, pronounced with an enigmatic tone, and a naïve reading of the crisis of capitalism and western civilization. Or directly, in interpretative broadsides like that of Fernando Huanacuni, a foreign office official, who told an Argentine newspaper that the earthquake in Haiti was a small warning of the economic-global-cosmic-telluric-educational impetuousness of the Pacha Mama. (Stefanioni, 2010, italics added)

The real tragedy in Stefanioni’s comments is not his critique of Bolivian social move-ments, but his refusal to engage them—his dismissal of them as nonintelligent (unlike “eco-environmentalists) and naïve (unworthy). What exactly was said at the Tiquipaya summit in Bolivia? Apparently, for Stefanioni, there was nothing of interest said. After all, Bolivian pachamámicos are nothing compared to the informed Europeans:

In Europe there is much greater awareness of the recycling of garbage (including plastic products) than there is in our country, where in many ways everything remains to be done, and an informed and technically solid environmentalism seems much more effective than managing climate change on the basis of a supposed First Nations’ philosophy, often an excuse of some urban intellectuals for not addressing the urgent problems facing the country. (Stefanioni, 2010)

These remarks demonstrate the challenge of transcending the epistemological catego-ries defined by a modern universalizing rationality founded on coloniality. De la Cadena similarly recognizes this challenge. In her essay, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,” she describes her experiences in Peru joining a number of peasants in protest of a proposed mine concession in the Sinakara mountain chain. She, however, recognized that while she was protesting for a similar outcome—to halt the conces-sion—her logic was quite different. She explains,

My friend Nazario, whose village, Pacchanta, is at the foot of the Ausangate . . . was there to protest the mining project—in fact he had called to let me know about the event. Initially, while we were demonstrating, I thought we shared a single view against the mine; however,




once we debriefed about the meeting, and how it could influence future events, I realized that our shared view was also more than one. My reason for opposing the mine was that it would destroy the pastures that families depend on to earn their living grazing alpacas and sheep, and selling their wool and meat. Nazario agreed with me, but said it would be worse: Ausangate would not allow the mine in Sinakara, a mountain over which it presided. Ausangate would get mad, could even kill people. To prevent that killing, the mine should not happen. I could not agree more, and although I could not bring myself to think that Ausangate would kill, I found it impossible to consider it a metaphor. Preventing Ausangate’s ire was Nazario’s motivation to participate in the demonstration and therefore it had political import (de la Cadena, 2010, pp. 338-339).

Yet, unlike Stefanioni, de la Cadena recognizes this ontological encounter for what it is. She recognizes that while particular issues may bring various actors together to express even a different type of politics—such as indigenous peoples and environmentalists organizing against neoliberal policies—there might be disagreement over the meaning of their actions or even over the meaning of the discourse used.26 The real problem then is to determine the relationship between these two (or many) worlds, and ultimately recognize that nodes of connection most often have material expressions. This can be our point of departure for creating a politics that is less about dominance (coloniality) of one ideal (or world) over another and more about the relationship between worlds.

How can this be achieved? Clearly part of the process must involve “inverting modernity” and prioritizing ecological relations where an economistic rationality assumes a secondary role (McMichael, 2011, p. 20). It also requires that we rethink the political field. Jane Bennett (2010), for example, attempts to demythologize the notion that the public is a strictly human affair (cf. Latour, 2004a; Stengers, 2005). She asks,

[C]an worms be considered members of the public . . . even if a convincing case is made for worms as active members of, say, an ecosystem of a rainforest? What is the difference between an ecosystem and a political system? Are they analogs? Two names for the same system at different scales? . . . Does an action count as political by virtue of its having taken place “in” a public? Are there nonhuman members of a public? (Bennett 2010, p. 94)

Bennett ultimately recognizes worms as actants drawing on Latour’s concept, mean-ing a “source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events” (Bennett, 2010, p. viii). In pursuing what she refers to as “vital materialism,” Bennett (2010, pp. 110-113) advocates learning to discern the vitality of matter, and so doing, she hopes, will better frame problems and create public will to induce more sustainable political economies. She even notes the increasingly problematic life/matter binary, where life, assumed to be active and influx, is juxtaposed to an inert, stable, and unchanging matter. She states,

All forces and lows (materialities) are or can become lively, affective, and signaling. And so an affective, speaking human body is not radically different from the affect, signaling nonhumans with which it coexists, hosts, enjoys, serves, consumes, produces, and competes. (Bennett, 2010, p. 117)



Casas 47

Bennett is, in many ways, attempting to find a space for a different ontology that transcends modernity and recognizes and validates the vitality of nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms. She advocates for “a careful [italics added] course of anthropo-morphization” (Bennett, 2010, p. 122). De la Cadena (2010, p. 336), for her part, urges us to “take seriously (perhaps literally) the presence in politics” of those actors that are other than human. Thus, when we consider the idea of extending political rights beyond humans (though corporate rights have already established this prece-dent), we should take seriously the idea that nonhumans can exert a type of agency. How exactly we define this agency—as anthropomorphic such as the wrath of Ausangate, or through Bennett’s vital materialism—matters less than broadening the political field and uncovering the historical silences of the material foundations of world history. This is not to suggest that our definitions of agency do not matter, but that these differences can be a point of departure for discussion, for negotiation, for achieving a type of consensus, not dominion. Thus, when we consider the Kichwa concept pacha-oqariy,27 we might equally recognize the validity of a sickness caused by land possessed by evil spirits or a sickness caused by a poisoned landscape. In each case, the land is causing the sickness, and in each case there might be forms of remediation. We can therefore broaden discussions allowing for more possibilities, rather than reducing them.

Conclusion

In this article I have demonstrated the epistemological cracks in the dominant para-digm of modernity that have become evident as a result of the incorporation of indigenous concepts into formal state and suprastate discourses and through the increasing attention paid to the nonhuman earthly entities that shape material exis-tence—a rupture, so to speak, in the rigid definitions of object and subject. These cracks underscore a moment of new possibility, particularly of adopting a greater ecological logic that transcends the reductive and colonizing ontological founda-tions of modern rationality. This is possible only if we lay bare the coloniality of relationships—the biophysical and psychological violence—that the process of modernity set in motion, particularly of those worlds referred to as “traditional” (or the antithesis of modernity) because of their ecological practices and closer ties to “nature.” We must also recognize that the world as set in motion by the economic rationalistic terms of modernity was never independent of these other worlds defined or determined by it. The “upside-down” map of the Americas adopted by indigenous peoples protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Ecuador in 2003 was insightful because it is necessary to invert modernity to achieve other possibilities. It also visually called attention to the earthly materiality that we do share, even if we occupy different worlds.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.




Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. It is important to note that the term Pacha in Quechua means more than just “earth.” In modern usage it could be translated to “spacetime,” world, universe. In Andean mythology Pachamama was a goddess of fertility.

2. Pachakutik is the political arm (or party) of the largest indigenous organization in Ecuador, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador. Since its founding in 1996, one of its major goals has been the creation of Ecuador as a plurinational country. This goal was achieved in the new constitution of 2008.

3. Charles Hale refers to “neoliberal multiculturalism,” whereby proponents of the neoliberal doctrine proactively endorse a substantive, if limited, version of indigenous cultural rights, as a means to resolve their own problems and advance their own political agendas (Hale, 2002, pp. 486-487).

4. Whereas colonialism denotes a type of political and economic relationship in which one group of people/nation dominates another, coloniality continues beyond colonialism and refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged out of the colonial experience. Coloniality emerged in a particular sociohistorical setting, that of the European encounter and conquest of the Americas.

5. In Ecuador and other Latin American countries, such rights include the rights of nature, collective and cultural rights, and the right to food through the notion of food sovereignty.

6. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) provide valuable insight into the rise of movements often con-sidered to be “identity-based,” such as indigenous movements. Their central thesis is that discourses of resistance and entitlement claims can become politicized only to the degree that “progressive” democratic ideas (such as rights) are appropriated and redefined in the specific historical conditions and transferred to the social site in question (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 7). The problem with naming certain movements “identity based” or “identity politics” is that it reduces the radical nature of many of these movements that are trying to reshape the nature of political power. They are not just about “identity.”

7. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador is the largest national indig-enous organization in the country representing all 14 indigenous nationalities.

8. This information is paraphrased from an informal conversation I had while driving with this woman on my way to Quito on July 18, 2011.

9. While the myth of Native American “primitiveness” has been amply dispelled by many authors, my concern is with the forms this myth took in the European imaginary.

10. In Jane (1988).11. The great debate of Valladolid between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda

between 1550 and 1551 coalesced around long-debated issues between the Indian and European worlds, particularly the right of conquest and just war. It revolved around the question of the judiciousness of declaring war against the Indians before instructing them in the Christian faith so as to facilitate their conversion. For his part, Ginés de Sepúlveda put forward four propositions in favor of the just war against the Native Americans because they were barbarians, committed crimes against natural law, oppressed and killed the inno-cent among themselves, and were infidels who needed to be instructed in the Christian



Casas 49

faith. Las Casas, in contrast, set out to expand and clarify each one of these points. In the process, he came to advocate the essential unity of humankind, that Indians were just at a different and backward stage of human development than the Europeans, but they were no less rational. They were, therefore, able to peacefully receive the Christian faith. In sum, since the Indians were rational and civilized human beings, Spaniards had no right to sub-ject them to either slavery or war.

The Valladolid debate was something clearly irrelevant to the natives, as Latour high-lights, citing Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s retelling of the controversy where while Europeans were busy debating whether or not Native Americans had souls, the Indians were determining whether Europeans had bodies. “The theory under which Amerindians were operating was that all entities share by default the same fundamental organization which is that of humans” (Latour, 2004b, p. 451).

12. The proliferation and interest in “human zoos” that highlighted “natural populations” in the 19th century really epitomizes this assumption (Hernandez, n.d.) that the process towards “civilization” involved at least an outward transformation by way of adopting Western-style clothing.

13. There were, of course, indigenous practices that were appropriated and became part of the modern or Western body of knowledge.

14. In Ecuador and other Andean countries the central problematic was focused on indigenous peoples, not Afro-descendants, though in other contexts this was the case.

15. Indigenism represents a myriad of scholarship by nonindigenous intellectuals dedicated to the “Indian problem.”

16. Although most modernization policies were concentrated in urban areas to foment indus-trialization, particularly after the Cuban Revolution land reform and, to a degree, land distribution were also important policies put forth to quiet unrest.

17. Punyaro used to be part of the old “Hacienda Mojanda” in Imbabura province.18. In the case of Ecuador, Afro-descendants are depicted in a very distinct manner in the

national imaginary than indigenous peoples who have historically been linked to the natu-ral world. At a recent multiethnic tour in 2011 of the Middle of the World monument, my tour guide ensured the crowd that Afro-Ecuadorians are a “happy” people full of energy who love music and dance. Jean Muteba Rahier’s (1999) work outlines other hypersexual-ized and violent stereotypical images of afro-descendants in Ecuador.

19. In my example above, Orbe perfectly articulates the progressive ordering of human soci-eties when he observes the “transition from Indian to mestizo”—two categories that are implicitly modern. The former refers to a “natural man” and the latter to a man progressing toward modernity.

20. According to McMichael (2011),

Polanyi’s term for this ontology was “economic liberalism,” an assumption that humans have a natural/generic motive for “self-gain,” for which the most appropriate institution is the “self-regulating market” (1957). At the same time, Polanyi referred to this belief as the “economist fallacy,” whereby subjection of society to a “disembedded” market risked “annihilation” of “the human and natural substance of society.” (p. 4)

21. I interviewed Blas Chimbo, the director of education of CONAIE, on March 25, 2002, in the CONAIE building in Quito, Ecuador.

22. Conversation with Bosco Atamaint, former director of SERBISH, on April 12, 2002, in Sucúa.




23. These leaders include Alberto Andrango, Luis Macas, Antonio Vargas, Salvador Quishpe, and many others.

24. The politicization of indigenousness can render an indigenous identity problematic due to a lack of clear distinction between being indigenous and adopting a politicized indigenous consciousness.

25. To be clear, there are many indigenous belief systems, though it is generally recognized and accepted that indigenous peoples have historically had a greater reverence for natu-ral systems. In addition, it is important to highlight the cross-cultural exchanges in such politico-legal adoptions. In the case of Ecuador, members of CELDF, an organization from Pennsylvania, served as legal advisors to the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly (see http://www.celdf.org).

26. She notes that the use of words such as “nature” and “Mother Earth” may be a site of rela-tions of equivocations or misunderstandings, where seemingly the same words are under-stood differently given distinct social, political, and spiritual subjectivities. In other words, equivocations arise when views from different worlds (not different perspectives of the same world) use a homonymical term to refer to something that is different (de la Cadena, 2010, pp. 350-351).

27. Pacha-oqariy is a sickness caused by falling down on land possessed by evil spirits. The body of the sick person decays. One cures by “payment to Pachamama” (Morató Peña & Morató Lara, 1995, p. 176).

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Author Biography

Tanya Casas is the co-director of Graduate Policy Studies and an assistant professor of sociol-ogy at Delaware Valley College.



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