3[1][1].1walsh

The (Re)articulation of Political Subjectivitiesand Colonial Difference in EcuadorReflections on Capitalism and the Geopolitics

of Knowledge

Catherine E. Walsh

It is to the zone of occult instability where the people dwell thatwe must come.—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967 [1952])

To think and speak from the geopo-litical and historical location of Ecuador and from the colonial differenceformed within this location are processes that guide my reflections here. By“geopolitical . . . location” I mean not only the physical space, the place onthe map, but also the historical, social, cultural, imagined, and what Wal-ter Mignolo (2000a) refers to as the epistemologically diagrammed spacesthat provide the ground for political subjectivities, colonial difference, andstruggle. As Adrienne Rich (1987, 212) once commented, “A place on themap is also a place in history.” In the spacialities of geopolitical location,boundaries are formed, negotiated, and transgressed, power and politicsplayed out on both national and transnational terrains. It is also here thatdiverse knowledges are generated, produced, and distributed.1

The material conditions of subjectification are always intertwinedwith space and place. That is to say, the particular site and temporal junc-tures within which subjects (and difference) are both marked and con-structed, where culture-as-political struggle is waged and authors write,matter. But locating ourselves in relation to places defined and taken upthrough experience, identity, and power (Mohanty 1987; Pile 1997), andin relation to the subjects/objects that we purport to study, is not usualpractice in the academic world. Instead, modernist tendencies in the so-cial sciences disembody the author from the text and split the subject and

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object of knowledge, thus contributing to what José Rabasa and JavierSanjinés (1996 [1994], ix) refer to as “a series of forms of disciplining sub-jectivity.” This discipline recalls both the Foucauldian use of formulas ofdomination as well as the colonial experience: the discipline to organizeand maintain control over the body, and the disciplining through knowl-edge to marginalize, exclude, and obliterate collective identities, memories,and alternative forms of knowing and living (Smith 1999). It also serves toobscure the power relations grounded in the epistemological apparatus andin the geohistorical confines of what Mignolo (2000a, 2000b) calls the mod-ern/colonial world system, as well as the specific place of Latin Americawithin it. The geohistorical colonial difference created by the coloniality ofpower (Quijano 1999) has subalternized not only ethnic-racial groups butalso their knowledge. “To think from the colonial difference” and “fromthe ruins, the experiences and the margins created by the coloniality ofpower in the structuring of the modern/colonial world” as a way not torestore knowledges but to “make them intervene in a new epistemological,transmodern, and postoccidental horizon” (Mignolo 2000b, 23–24), is thuscentral.

In Ecuador, the complex nature of colonial difference constructsits meaning, in part, through a national ideology of mestizaje, the princi-pal referent of a homogeneous national identity. The perpetuation of thisnational ideology marks indigenous people and blacks—who, accordingto some accounts, together constitute almost half of the population—asother. Concurrently, and in apparent contradiction with this ideology, in-ordinate value is placed on whiteness and on everything that comes fromthe North. In this context, my own subject positioning and embodiment(North American and white) becomes a necessarily conscious and daily act,as does the consideration of what it means to live and work in and writefrom this social and historic locality; what it means to positionmyself in theinterstices necessarily created when one lives in a country that is not one’sown but that is at the same time part of one’s identity.

The opportunities afforded to me in the last ten years to col-laborate with indigenous and Afro-descendent movements, and to livethrough uprisings,mobilizations, and popular rebellions that have resulted,among other changes, in the overthrow of two presidents, have made methink more critically about the social, cultural, political, and epistemolog-ical agency of these movements, and about the related role of state andtransterritorialized interests. It is this thinking rather than anthropologicalobservations or objectivized conclusions that informs this article.

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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

In what follows I explore the (re)articulation of political subjec-tivities and colonial difference in Ecuador, specifically in reference to theindigenous and Afro-descendent movements, as a way to enter into thebroader questions and concerns posed by capitalism, the geopolitics ofknowledge, and our role as critical and committed intellectuals. What isthe emergent relation of culture, identity, politics, and knowledge withinthese movements and what are the changing roles of the state and theneoliberal project with respect to this relation? In what way can cur-rent cultural politics in Ecuador further our understanding of transna-tionalism and the multiculturalization of capitalism? What are its impli-cations for the academy, particularly in terms of (inter/trans)disciplinarywork, the relation between social movements and the university, and the(re)production/subalternization of knowledges? And what does all thissuggest in terms of academic and intellectual work and responsibility?These are the questions that guide my reflections.

(Re)thinking the Relation of Culture, Identity,Politics, and Knowledge

In the 1990s a new form of cultural-identity politics2 emerged in LatinAmerica, most notably among indigenous peoples but also among Afro-descendents. These politics have moved beyond previous national-popularprojects and traditional leftist articulations of identity, which for much ofthe twentieth century were based predominantly on class, marking bothrural Indians and blacks as campesinos,3 and making class-conscious lead-ers the mediators of their voice and vision. Instead, the new politics ofmobilization in discussion here depart from the agency of indigenous andblack peoples themselves; taken as central are ethnic and racial differencesas well as the recognition and rearticulation of what Mignolo (2000b) refersto as colonial difference, that is, the intertwinedness of colonial legacies,subalternity, and ethnic/racial struggle.4

It is not identity or ethnicity per se that ground the new LatinAmerican identity politics or the socialmovements that are its result. Rather,it is a strategical politization of difference—cultural difference but also theepistemic difference within it—focused on recognition, construction, con-frontation, and transformation. In countries throughout the region, atten-tion, demands, and confrontational actions in the last decade have sought apolitical and social recognition of the pluricultural character of national so-ciety, the construction and strengthening of collective indigenous and blackidentities (both national and transnational), as well as the establishment of

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specific policies and rights directed at reversing past injustices. Throughdemands and actions like those of the Zapatistas for new conceptualizationsand practices of democracy, or those of Mapuche communities in Chile, theUw’a in Colombia, and blacks on the Pacific coast of Ecuador and Colom-bia against transnational extractivist (oil, mining, timber) companies, thestruggles to transform national social and political structures, and confronttransnational interests and neoliberal policies, are increasingly evident andvisible.

In part the aim has been the incorporation and inclusion of eth-nic concerns within the existing nation-state structure. At the same time,however, the goal is to bring into question the very concepts, constructs,and institutions of state, citizenship, democracy, and nation. David Slater(1997) refers to this as the inside and the outside of social movements andtheir dialectic, the discussion and analysis of which is often evaded in muchof social and political theory.

The organized resistance of indigenous people and blacks in LatinAmerica to the coloniality of power is not new. In fact, social and politicalresistance has been frequent since 1492, often taking the form of identity-based rebellions, as both Aníbal Quijano (1999) and Irene Silverblatt (1995)remind us. Yet the social and political conditions under which today’scultural-identity politics and social movements construct themselves aredistinct from those of centuries past. The strategic politicization of iden-tity and difference by indigenous and Afro-descendent movements in theregion takes on new significance in the current climate of globalizationand the attendant crisis and erosion of states, in the neoliberal projects andthe transformation of capitalism into something that, as Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (2000) argues, is symbolic and cultural as well as economic (notto mention in the simultaneous junctures and contingencies of culturalhomogeneity/cultural heterogeneity and particularity/universality that thisreality proffers). This new importance resides, in part, in the emergent po-litical subjectivity of the movements and their leaders, in their conditionas actors of their own experience rather than as mere objects of study ordevelopment.

Through increasingly visible and vocal processes of self-determi-nation and self-definition, indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples areunsettling the ethnographic and development-based paradigms that havebeen prevalent in the region (see Escobar 1999). They are also beginningto recover and reconsider their own knowledge, to construct the differencebetween ethnic epistemology and Western, “civilized,” global knowledge

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(what is presumed to be available to everyone) and not only redefine butdecolonize the relationship between them. This involves, as Linda TuhiwaiSmith (1999, 64) explains, a recognition of the nexus between the culturalways of knowing, scientific discoveries, economic impulses, and imperialpower that have enabled theWest to make the ideological claims of havinga superior civilization, and to impose this positional superiority in socialinstitutions like schools. Recent works that analyze the consolidation ofblack organizations in the southern Pacific region of Colombia and theirorganizational and knowledge-based processes, particularly those in sup-port of the environment, serve as examples (see Escobar 1998, 1999; Escobarand Pedrosa 1996; Restrepo 2000).

In nations that have traditionally defined themselves as mestizowhile perpetuating in practice the value of whiteness or blanqueamiento,indigenous and black peoples aremaking their presence visible. By pushingthese nations to redefine themselves—as evidenced, for example, by recentconstitutional reforms in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador, which now de-note the pluricultural andmultiethnic character of their societies and definecertain ethnic group rights—and to start programs of bilingual or ethno-education in the schools, indigenous and Afro groups have succeeded inmaking their demands law.5 Such changes, though they often remain dis-cursive, without concrete application, or, in the case of education, withoutadequate support or financing, bring local identity politics into the nationaland transnational realms and make plurality a societal rather than just anethnic proposition.

Thus while political subjectivity, increased visibility, and knowl-edge recuperation are central elements of the movements, they also point toconcerns fundamental to society at large, issues that implicate each and ev-ery one of us. Concerns, for example, like those raised by Fernando Coronil(2000a) about how we ought to live, how we can counter conditions thatsustain structures of privilege and inequality, and how we should rethinkour own relationship with the centers of power and with knowledge itself,in the past aswell as in the present. Similarly raised are concerns about socialjustice, the recognition and respect of differences, and the bridges and con-tingencies between particularized demands and dimensions of universalityor interconnectedness.

The “new” significance also finds its place in the conditions ofglobalization or, more particularly, in what Santiago Castro-Gómez andEduardo Mendieta (1998) refer to, citing Ronald Robertson (1995), as “glo-calization,” the asymmetric processes of interaction between the local and

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the global. Today indigenous and black peoples’ struggles are waged notonly in local contexts but also in national and transnational spaces that crossand make fluid geopolitical as well as ethnic or racialized borders. Thejoint declaration of black organizations from the Andean region (ComitéAndino de Servicios 2001) about racism, common histories, and continuedexperiences of marginalization and exclusion, as well as about economicglobalization, biodiversity and, in the case of Colombia, internal armedconflict and forced displacements, serves as an example.

Similarly, calls from the Lacandona jungle for new visions of so-cial and political participation and democracy in Chiapas and in Mexicoas a whole, as well as for an end to neoliberal policies, resonate beyondgeopolitical boundaries. They transcend ethnic divides and fuse local, na-tional, regional, and global arenas. Thus while Zapatista demands emergefrom localized, geohistorical struggles, they also embrace the concerns ofmany throughout the region and the world. They are echoed with differ-ent localized intonations by Brazil’s Sin Terra, Argentina’s Carpa Blanca,Chile’s Mapuche organizations, Bolivia’s Coordinadora de Agua, and theinternational Social Forumheld in PôrtoAlegre in 2001, to name just a few.In the particularisms of each, there are seeds of universality, cores that, asErnesto Laclau (2000, 306) suggests, we should expand “so that we can havea full social imaginary, capable of competing with the neoliberal consensuswhich has been the hegemonic horizon of world politics for the last thirtyyears.”

In countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Ecuador, the most or-ganized and vocal political opposition continues to come from indigenousnations. At times in alliance with other social groups and at times enactinga politics rooted in the particularisms of their own ethnic struggle and colo-nial difference, these groups continually construct a cultural politics that, asSilvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1992) notes in relation to the Sendero Luminosoin Peru, social scientists have been unable to predict or fully understand.

Ecuador affords an interesting example to explore these points,both because of the organizational strength of the indigenousmovement (animportant referent since 1990 for the rest of the region) and because of themovement’s ability to (re)articulate political subjectivities, challenging andtransforming both cultural politics and political culture. Moreover, withthe recent establishment of an indigenous university—developed by themovement with the support of nonindigenous individuals, organizations,and institutions fromwithin the country, as well as from elsewhere in LatinAmerica, the United States, Canada, and Europe—the case of Ecuador also

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raises fundamental questions about the geopolitics of knowledge and new,divergent forms of knowledge production and dissemination.

The Political and Epistemic Agency of Ecuador’sIndigenous Movement

Since the 1990s, the cultural politics of identity and difference in Ecuadorhave challenged occidental, postmodern, and deconstructivist propositionsas well as perceptions within Latin America of increased hybridization andcultural syncretization. Academic propositions that question the “authen-tic” essence of women, of blacks, indigenous people, or other “peoples ofcolor,” and denials of this essence in other forms of oppression, of imperi-alism, local history, and so on, become unsettled when indigenous peopleclaim and (re)appropriate a collective self, a move that also challenges theimputing of a Western psychological “self” to group consciousness (Smith1999). But as Smith notes, authentic means something different here thanwhen it is used by first world academics; that is to say, the term functionsunder a different logic.

Generally, this notion of an authentic collectivity does not refer to anaturalized category, although there are “Indianist” tendencies in Ecuadorand other countries of the region where authentic sometimes has theseconnotations. Rather, in its use by Ecuador’s indigenous movement, au-thentic is an oppositional and politically strategic term, a way to articulatewhat it has meant to be culturally and epistemically dehumanized by colo-nization and a way to reorganize “national consciousness” in the strugglesfor decolonization. This identity is not objectivized as such but part of alived, vindicated, and creative experience of identification within condi-tions of extreme political and socioeconomic marginalization. It reflects,as Mignolo (2000b, 8) suggests, “a way to critically think modernity fromthe colonial difference.” This is what distinguishes it from essentializedand objectivized categories that find their substance in ethnicity and notin the coloniality of power, the latter understood as an established systemof social classification and identification based on the repression of nativeidentities and on the conformation of a negative common identity—“loindio” (Quijano 1999). The reinvention of “Indian” by Ecuador’s indige-nous movement serves to highlight this colonial difference, to strategicallysubvert and rearticulate it in order to think and act toward decolonization.

The cultural politics of Ecuador’s indigenous movement also up-end arguments that urbanization, migration, technology, and globalizedcommunication havemade cultural hybridization the dominant norm (see,

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for example, García Canclini 1992). Although globalization has of coursehad a major effect on all sectors of Ecuador’s society and on its everydaysocial and cultural practices, the lines traditionally drawn to separate eth-nic groups are not fading.6 On the contrary, the ideology of mestizaje inEcuador, historically premised on white superiority and the depreciationof all that is indigenous, is strengthened by dominant groups reacting tothe indigenous movement. Through the discursive use of the press, thesegroups promote the notion that indigenous people are reestablishing ethnicdivision. In practice, however, these discourses actually help to objectivizeand essentialize “lo indio.” But while they establish the difference, they alsopromote a liberal-multiculturalist vision of society based on tolerance andinclusion, thus promulgating the idea that the indigenous people and theirmovement are the perpetrators of their own exclusion.

In response to this context—which, on the one hand, masks themodern operation of coloniality and, on the other, reinforces propensitiestoward ethnic fundamentalism (Díaz Polanco 1998)—Indians increasinglyidentify as Indians, and blacks as blacks. And, while these categories arepart of and essential to the colonial difference, they are reinvented andreappropriated by indigenous and Afro-descendant movements on theirown terms but always recognizing past and present colonial relations.

The strengthening of the indigenous movement in the Confeder-ation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)—and its publicemergence, with the massive 1990 Inti Raymi uprising, as an importantsocial and political actor with “ethnic” demands, including the creation ofa plurinational state—positioned lo indígena in a new and different wayin relation to lo blanco-mestizo and to the historically homogenizing na-tional project. The uprising’s national visibility and multitudinous forcedisturbed the ethnic imaginary in which Indians were perceived as tied tothe countryside, artisan work, and/or manual labor, as disappearing entitiesanxious to become “civilized” mestizos.

The minister of social welfare commented at the time that“CONAIE is part of a process that has no parallel in the history of ourcountry” (Diario hoy, 14 October 1991, 6B). In its assumption of an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anticolonial stance, and in its presentationof proposals and demands not just for land rights but for a “plurinationalstate,” the movement called into question existing models of state, society,and nation, making evident its intent to rethink all three from the perspec-tive of the indigenous peoples, in response to the voracity of the neoliberalagenda, and with an eye to decentralization and democratization (Almeida

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1993; Sánchez-Parga 1990). As a result, “it is now impossible to imagine ashared [societal] destinywithout considering their [the indigenous peoples’]presence and participation” (Almeida 1993, 8).

One of the effects within the indigenous movement of this andsubsequent uprisings in the early 1990s was an increase in indigenousidentification, including the recuperation of Quichua language use andnative dress among both rural and urban people who had previously iden-tified as mestizos, Spanish speakers, and, in the countryside, along classlines as campesinos. This reconstruction of an identity defined for itsethnic-cultural and epistemic difference and conceptualized as collectiveand political calls into question the notion of a “national” identity and thecolonial difference it has traditionally sought to mark and control. It hasalso prompted the construction of new imaginaries and representations bywhite-mestizos and by the media of the indigenous other. No longer justliminal servants, rural farmers, or producers of crafts, indigenous peoplemust now be recognized as politicized actors/insurgents able to shut downthe country, stand up to and speak about the patrón in a language the bosscannot understand, and make ethnicity-based demands to a governmentthat inmodern times has not recognized indigenous difference. Indigenouspeople now can even ally themselves with the military, assume nationalpower, and demand dialogues with the government, including with itspresident.7

Political action has laid the groundwork for a collective indige-nous consciousness. This awareness is based on a fluid interconnection ofculture-identity-politics and its articulation with knowledge. Knowledge,here, is considered as simultaneously ancestral, communal, and political.It is rooted in a recognition of the bonds between humans and nature, aswell as in forms of coexistence and social organization marked by commu-nity cohesiveness. It also derives from both physical and symbolic struggle.As such, this knowledge is the result of a dynamic, collective productionthat articulates the past and present and the local and the global—the lat-ter understood not just as the dominant world but also as the indigenoustransterritoral one. By means of this dynamic and articulation, a source ofpower-knowledge is built that, as is made evident in CONAIE’s publica-tion of its own Proyecto político (1994, 1997), comes to underscore collectiveaction, serving as a necessary component for building a political project, anational movement. It has also served as a base from which indigenous ac-tors situate themselves vis-à-vis other social movements, establishing their

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difference asmillennial people (“millennial” being the term used by indige-nous people to designate their aboriginal character).

This understanding and use of knowledge by the indigenousmovement suggests that their political project is not simply political butepistemological.8 But what is meant by knowledge in the way that it isemployed here? Embedded within this political understanding and use ofknowledge (certainly not the only understanding anduse for indigenous peo-ples) are foundational elements and a logic grounded in a cultural systemof thought produced at the collective, not the individual, level. This logicarises from an accumulated “scientific” base of knowledge related to theearth, the environment, and the relationship between humans and nature,within a historical-cultural condition and experience that includes commu-nity organization and the exercise of authority, as well as the coloniality ofpower, oppression, resistance, and continuous struggle. This logic and theseelements serve as the foundation of an indigenous epistemology, of cul-tural, and, at the same time, epistemic difference (Mignolo 2000a). It is thishistorical-cultural-colonial condition (in which indigenous knowledge wasrepressed, marginalized, “disciplined,” and sometimes even destroyed) thathas engendered the production of new knowledges—newmodes of analy-sis, conceptualization, and thought that envision the “indigenous problem”as fundamentally structural, political, and economic, as tied to capitalisthegemony, and as both national and international (CONAIE 1994). It isthe imbrication of the historical-cultural with the new that gives this polit-ical knowledge its significance.

While knowledge also informs Western political projects, its his-torical-cultural roots and the notion of knowledge itself are obviously quitedifferent from the understanding I’ve just discussed. Since the advent ofmonasteries (the precursors to universities), Western conceptions of knowl-edge have advocated the separation of humans and nature, work and every-day life, andmade the production and use of knowledge an individualized,expert, and consumer-based enterprise devoid of emotion (Vera Herrera1997). This separation is particularly evident in the discourses of progressand modernity that affirm the supremacy of time over space and of cultureover nature, severing nature’s role as a constitutive dimension of modernwealth and of capitalism’s development (Coronil 1997, 2000b). By maskingwhat Coronil refers to as the dialectical play between capital, work, andearth or nature, these discourses both constitute and construct universalconceptions of knowledge. At the same time, they conceal the economic,political, and cultural processes and practices that conform and maintain

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the colonial difference, the coloniality of power, and the geopolitics ofknowledge.

Despite the globalized and neoliberal nature of present-day so-ciety, indigenous peoples have generally resisted the adoption of thesediscourses and singularized, universalized conceptions of knowledge, aswell as the separations and discontinuities they propose. As Apffel Marglin(cited in Vera Herrera 1997, 84) notes, “Life in nonindustrial societies andin collectivities not caged in consumption isn’t divided into spheres wherepassions have a legitimate place and others where they do not; everythingmerges with passion and values.” Moreover, the distinctions establishedbetween intellectuals (who individually produce knowledge)9 and others(whodonot) donot apply in indigenous epistemology, in the politics of com-munal consensus, in its collective exercise and the social fact of knowledge.However, Western political projects do tend to require such distinctions.Yet the issue here is not to polarize knowledges. In indigenous projects,more traditional or localized versions of knowledge do not exist in isola-tion from other knowledge forms. The efficacy of the movement in factderives from its ability to construct and use the correspondences amongvarious contemporary knowledge positions: using knowledges in the plural,it can move between knowledges in order to exercise political tactics andstrategies.

Indigenous self-awareness and agency and their dialectical relationto the movement’s construction and consolidation has led it to challenge anumber of other sectors. Among these is the one Edward Said (1998) refersto as the “armies of researchers” coming from foreign and national aca-demic institutions, governmental and nongovernmental organizations andprojects, multinationals, and other entities.With an ostensible zeal to studyand help the “civilization” of the Indians, to save and defend indigenousknowledge and culture, and/or to speak for them to national and interna-tional institutions and the academic world, these researchers often, know-ingly or not, continue to contribute to the colonial and imperial enterpriseas well as to the dominant geopolitics and the disciplining of knowledge.Moreover, in disembodying themselves from the work and failing to con-sider their own subjectivity, they perpetuate the same “disciplining” of thesubject that has been practiced since colonial times.

In the last decade Ecuador’s indigenous movement has called intoquestion this dominant mode of social science research and the colonialtrajectory and paternalism it recalls. The results are a crisis in the national

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schools of anthropology, a reticence by the movement toward nonindige-nous academics and assistance providers, and a strengthening of the move-ment’s own role as a social, political, and, as I will discuss later, intellectualactor.

Of all the challenges posed by the cultural-identity politics andemergent agency of Ecuador’s indigenousmovement, the greatest has prob-ably been to the dominant political and epistemic order. The uprisings ofthe early 1990s, accompanied by such demands as those for legal recogni-tion, territorial rights, and a plurinational state, forced the government notonly to take into account the indigenous movement and to award collectiveland titles but to seek ways to incorporate (indigenous) opposition into thestate apparatus—ways, in other words, to bring it “inside.” Although theEcuadorian government has taken steps to control the indigenous move-ment’s political opposition, themovement has begun to exercise a new formof agency and new ways of doing politics within a cultural framework, en-tering into the sphere of government and state on its own terms.

New Ways of Doing PoliticsIn 1996, the indigenous movement decided to participate in the electoralprocess for the first time. The formation of the Movement of NationalPluricultural Unity Pachakutik–Nuevo País (which recalled Jesse Jackson’sRainbowCoalition) brought together indigenous peoples, peasants, unions,Afro-Ecuadorians, and ecologists, as well as women’s, citizen’s, and youthgroups. Candidacies were launched for national and provincial posts withincongress, for mayoral and other municipal positions, and for the presidencyof the republic. After only six weeks of campaigning, Pachakutik wonseventy-five posts, including eight congressional seats, ten mayor’s offices,and eleven provincial councilor seats. Only eleven of Pachakutik’s winningcandidates were not indigenous.10

However, the new way of doing politics was not limited to theelectoral process. In 1997, after playing a key role in the destitution ofPresident Abdalá Bucaram, the indigenous movement negotiated with thenew interim government for a state institution with autonomy that wouldreplace both the Office of Indigenous Affairs and the Ethnic Ministry, es-tablished during the governments of Sixto Durán Ballen and Bucaram, re-spectively. In contrast to both, theNational Council of Planning andDevel-opment of Indigenous and Black Peoples (CONPLADEIN) had a gover-nance structure comprised of the national indigenous andAfro-Ecuadorianorganizations.11 This new ethnic alliance, begun with Pachakutik, placed

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an emphasis on shared social, economic, political, and subaltern conditionsand used cultural identity politics in a strategic way that had not been pre-viously seen in the country or in the region, a coming-together in responseto the coloniality of power that had traditionally separated the groups andput them in competition for resources. Further rupturing the dominantnotion of the indigenous movement was CONPLADEIN’s ability to nego-tiate directly with theWorld Bank and Fondo Internacional del DesarrolloAgrario (FIDA) for the establishment and financing of a project-basedtechnical arm—Prodepine—with a budget of $51 million. This revealed apolitical agency—international as well as national—that could no longerbe discounted.

These newways of doing politics raise several interesting tensions.One has to do with the strategic use of difference, or what Gayatri Chakra-vorty Spivak (1985) calls a strategic essentialism. Ethnic identity becomesthe tool to build the movement, to highlight conditions of subalternity andcolonial difference, and to voice social, cultural, and political demands thatcritique state policy and homogeneous constructs of society, citizenship,and nation. The meaning of these concepts, as well as of democracy, arealso destabilized and put into question by the strategic use of difference.Moreover, indigenous identity serves as a tool in assembling alliances thatthemselves have a strategic or tactical function (de Certeau 1996).

For example, the alliance between the indigenous movement andAfro-Ecuadorianswas conceived, according to some of the leaders involved,as a joining of forces by the discriminated and oppressed; a way to turnaround the racialized practices that since colonization have separated anddivided the two peoples. Yet Afro leaders maintain that some of thesesame racialized practices are reconstructed in the organizational and per-sonal relationships between indigenous peoples and blacks. By assumingthe leadership and determining the definition and usefulness of alliances,for instance, indigenous leaders relegate blacks to an inferior position and,some say, cast them as the racialized other. The situated knowledge, strug-gle, and subjectivity of Afro-descendent peoples becomes invisible in thisunion, especially when indigenous leaders assume the right to speak forthem. Afro-Ecuadorians began to form their organizations at this time, butsince they did not enter the relationship on equal terms, precisely becausethey did not have an organized national entity or program, the hegemonicindigenous paradigm, or what an Afro-Ecuadorian woman leader (in aconversation with me) recently referred to as “indomanía,” shrouded them.Such tension indicates the need for more critical consideration of identity

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and cultural difference and more careful examination of how racializationpractices operate among subaltern groups through notions of hierarchy andhegemony (Gilroy 1998).

Two further tensions are raised by the new ways of doing politics,neither of which is often analyzed in studies of social movements. The firsthas to do with the “inside” and “outside” that I have already mentioned.Since social movements are typically (and more easily) perceived as work-ing outside and against dominant political structures, their incorporationwithin such structures is more easily ignored. I will address this dynamic inthe next section. The second tension has to do with the distinction betweenpolitics and the political made by Slater (1997). For him, the dominion ofpolitics refers principally to the institutional order of the political system,including the codes, practices, and meanings this order creates. Geopoliticsadds a spatial dimension that can refer, for example, to the internal territo-riality of the institutional order, the relations among nation-states, and/orto global processes that transgress borders.

The political, on the other hand, “is a living movement, a kind of‘magma of conflicting wills,’ or antagonisms; it is mobile and ubiquitous,going beyond but also subverting the institutional settings and mooringsof politics” (Slater 1997, 266). The political makes possible the subversionof the institutional order, whether that order be the territorial state, theexternal or internal colonial power, the meanings that govern subjectivitiesand the concepts of citizenship and nation, the regionalized project ofneoliberalism, or universal/global knowledge with its logic of truth. It isthe periphery inside the heart of politics that cannot de taken away. Andit is for this reason that politics and the political are dialectically related(Slater 1998).12

The geo- permits a simultaneous ordering of actors, subjectivities,place, and space, not only in relation to the inner realm of the territorialstate and national political systems and institutions, but also with respect tobroader social and economic spheres, as well as to the discourses, knowl-edges, and relations of power constructed within all of them. Its spatial ori-entation permits the drawing of new political and cognitive maps of both“geopolitics from above” and “geopolitics from below” (Tuathail 1998).In the latter participate voices, discourses, and diverse and subalternizedknowledges that do not limit themselves to the contested sphere of politicsas a closed institution but rather form part of the broader, living, and con-flictive space of the (geo)political; here the exercise of power-knowledge

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and the struggle over it articulate themselves in a variety of hegemonic andcounterhegemonic forms.

As we will see below, in the Ecuadorian case, (geo)politics and the(geo)political are interwoven, intersecting with the inside/outside tensionand dialectic.

Inside/Outside, or Adentro-afuera-en contraIn order to think through the geopoliticalness of the indigenous movementand its relation to the geopolitics of the state, we might begin by consider-ing this characteristic in terms of the tension and dialectic of inside/outside(Slater 1997), given a critical consideration in Quijano’s (2000) construc-tion of adentro-afuera–en contra [inside-outside-against], which denotes acontinuous flow, filtration, or articulation of subject positions. Can a so-cial movement continue to be considered as such once it enters the statestructure and institution and begins to assume more than just an outsideposition?Can it be inside and at the same time against?How can an outsideand against position and perspective operate simultaneously with an insidereality?

In establishing and organizing CONPLADEIN, the indigenousmovement sought an “inside” place from which to push for social and po-litical change while at the same time promoting the development of andaccess to resources for indigenous and black communities. This latter goalwas aimed at constructing and implementing the communities’ own vi-sion of and approach to development: desarrollo con identidad (developmentwith identity). With a governance structure comprised of representativesfrom national and regional indigenous and black organizations, and witha government delegate functioning as chair, CONPLADEIN endeavoredto maintain a level of organizational accountability and participatory man-agement not present in other government institutions. Its technical arm,Prodepine, similarly answers not to the government or to the World Bankbut to the organizations. At least at first, it appeared that an inside-outside-against filtration was possible.

But with the constitutional reform of 1998, which legally rec-ognized the “indigenous peoples that self-identify as nationalities” and“blacks or Afro-Ecuadorians,” and established a series of fifteen collec-tive rights (the most extensive on the continent), a sector of the CONAIEleadership, in conjunction with a small group of indigenous intellectuals,began to shift the orientation of identity politics. This shift involved thereconstitution of pueblos y nacionalidades, that is, a reconstruction of the

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ancestral differences among indigenous peoples that existed before the ar-rival of the Incas, those maintained as a form of resistance throughout theInca colonization, and those that have been subject to other forms of colo-nization and neglect in the Amazon and coastal regions. The fact that thepush for this reconstitution comes primarily from urban intellectuals andnot from the communities themselves, often going against their preferredforms of identification, raises some interesting questions about the problemof social-cultural inscriptions, the (re)production of knowledge, and im-position within the movement (a different kind of inside-outside-againsttension) in the name of politics. Using ethnic-ancestral and territorial cri-teria, a series of micro-identities are now named that, although lackingmajor significance in daily life, serve to reconceptualize the representativityand organization of the indigenousmovement and substantiate the proposalfor plurinationality. The identification of twenty-eight distinct nationalitiesand peoples, while CONAIE recognized only eleven before, is illustrativeof this process.

Also constitutive of this shift are tendencies in some quarters to-ward a more separatist form of politics. These have included a break withAfro organizations and indigenous organizations not totally allied withCONAIE, and a distancing from other social movements. With this break,CONAIE began to act on its own, establishing a kind of hegemony ofprotest in which other groups were expected to support and ally them-selves with actions decided upon and defined by the CONAIE leadership.The events of January 2000 were an example of this; few knew what thestrategy of protest was to be, that it would include the alliance with a groupof insurgent colonels, the takeover of Congress, and the eventual assump-tion of the presidency by a triumvirate composed of an indigenous leader, arepresentative of the social movements, and a military man—first a coloneland later a general (see Walsh 2001b).

The trend toward a separatist politics is also reflected in the recon-ceptualization and reorganization of the government indigenous-black in-stitution.Through apresidential decree in 1998 negotiated by theCONAIEleadership, CODENPE (Council for the Development of the Nationalitiesand [Indigenous] Peoples of Ecuador), replaced CONPLADEIN, exclud-ing blacks and establishing a new form of governance based not on organi-zational participation but on the election of representatives from each of thenacionalidades and pueblos.13 This reorganization has engendered protestsand legal claims within themovement itself primarily because it dismantlesthe structure of accountability to local communities. Given this context, it

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seems appropriate to ask: Is it possible that in promoting and approvingCODENPE the state partly hoped to divide the indigenous movement andits organizational base as well as to rupture subaltern alliances?

The other concern expressed within the movement is that thisnew formulation based on ancestral ethnic criteria and a defined terri-torial space14 denies the reality in much of the sierra or highland regionwhere different groups frequently share the same land. It also overlooks thefact that with increased urban migration, indigenous reality is no longera purely rural phenomenon. Other concerns regarding dialogues and tacitagreements established between the leadership and the government havealso been voiced. All these concerns bring us back to our initial questions:Can social movements continue to function as suchwhen they enter into thestructures, institutions, and spheres of the state? To what extent does thisrelationship reduce the movements’ resistance and ability to act “against,”that is, how much does it diminish their social, cultural, and political sym-bolism, significance, and subjectivity?

In late 2000 and early 2001, the indigenous movement began toidentify the problems and difficulties of an inside-outside-against articu-lation, seriously questioning internal leadership, tactics, and governmentrelations and discussing the need to rethink and reposition itself. The cre-ation of a space for critical reflection and the subsequent action based onthis reflection suggest a regrouping, a return to consensus, and the recon-struction of a praxis that might afford a stronger resistance to the neoliberalproject in general, and to economic and political measures that threaten tofurther deepen the national crisis in particular.15 This reflection and actionalso suggests that the conditions which enable knowledge production havebeen reestablished. Arturo Escobar (2000) has defined these conditions asones that facilitate knowledge which is both coyuntural and puntual. Thatis to say, knowledge that is contextual and specific, that is continually rein-terpreted, that is constructed in progress or as you go along, that has apolitical strategy, and that is “ontologically dirty,” occurring in meetings,in the preparation of documents, or in other “nonacademic” spaces. Thisis the knowledge, which I discussed earlier in the context of CONAIE’spolitical project, that is much more apt to drive action.

The practical effectiveness of reconstructing and unifying themovement and of producing this kind of knowledge was shown in theFebruary 2001 levantamiento (uprising). In this protest, more than six thou-sand indigenous women, children, and men, representatives of all the na-tional indigenous organizations, set up camp for over a week at the Quito

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campus of the Politechnical Salesian University to denounce the govern-ment’s draconian economicmeasures. The repression by government forcesof protesters both in Quito and in the provinces was the worst seen in“democratic” times.

The platform developed by leaders and finally accepted by thegovernment as a negotiation document incorporated needs and concernsof the majority population, not just of indigenous sectors. By highlightingeveryday problems like the cost of transportation and gasoline as well astransnational concerns like PlanColombia, the demands demonstrate levelsof analysis that imbricate the local, regional, and global. At the same time,they show the precarious situation of the established spatial order.16

But particularly important in terms of political agency and knowl-edge use is the fact that it was the movement and not the government thatestablished the methodology of negotiation—a process of dialogue thatincluded both high-level indigenous leaders and representatives from thebases. By requiring a methodology that recognizes and validates indige-nous practices of thought, analysis, and collective representation within thecontext of government politics, the movement upset the established domin-ions, including those of politics, its institutions and culture, and knowledge.These processes reveal a tactical use of the inside-outside-against dialectic.This includes, for example, showing a mobilized and unified front againstimposed economic and social structural adjustments and against a govern-ment that responds not to the needs of the citizenry but to multilateralpolitics and policies. However, at the same time, the movement intervenedin the political processes, working inside the system without being fencedin by it, contributing to the redefinition of its limits and meaning. Never-theless, the government also plays its cards. This has included attemptedco-optation of indigenous leaders, bribing of legislators, and the promotionof divisions within the movement, including efforts to promote the leaders’candidacy in elections. But there is also another obscure side to the hege-monic game: the incorporation of the opposition into the state apparatus aspart of a newpolitics of diversity. This newpolitics is not limited to Ecuadorbut can be seen throughout Latin America. It is financed and supportedin great part by the multilateral institutions (like the World Bank and theInternational Development Bank) and designed to facilitate the processesand goals of the globalized neoliberal project.

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State Tactics and Neoliberal AgendasWhat has been the role of the state and the neoliberal project with respectto cultural identity politics and social movements in Ecuador, and whatkinds of strategies have been exercised in this regard?

Even before the early 1990s, when the indigenous movementemerged as an important social and political actor, the Ecuadorian state be-gan trying to mediate and incorporate indigenous demands and opposition.In 1988 for instance, one of the first acts of newly elected President RodrigoBorja was to officialize bilingual education, give the bilingual educationoffice a level of semi-autonomy, and put an indigenous linguist in charge.When indigenous protests of government policy continued, Borja actedsurprised. The next administration established the Office of IndigenousAffairs. The populist government of Bucaram,which followed,maintainedthis office under direct control of the presidency and added the Ministryof Ethnic Affairs, with an extended focus to include other ethnic groups,specifically blacks. Appointed as minister was the then–vice-president ofCONAIE, a Shuar with strong Amazonian backing. Black members ofBucaram’s populist party were added as staff.17 It is with this governmentthat the state strategy of incorporation and division became obvious.

Although CONAIE maintained a strong opposition to the Eth-nic Ministry and its structural and institutional presence, the fact that arecognized indigenous leader was at its head required vigilance; it alsofurther aggravated inside/outside tensions. But it was not until the ethnicminister and others, including two Amazonian indigenous congressionalrepresentatives, were caught at CONAIE’s national congress literally buy-ing the votes of indigenous delegates with suitcases full of cash to secure theelection of another Amazonian that the focus and impact of this strategybecame clear.18 During his year-and-a-half reign, Bucaram succeeded notonly in fomentingAmazonian-highland tensionswithinCONAIE but alsoin fostering the trend toward an ethnically divisive politics in which “dif-ference” has made consolidated opposition virtually impossible. Moreover,by incorporating black politicians from his party who had no communitybase, he established a model of representation that has continued to hinderAfro unity and the formation of a national Afro-Ecuadorian organization.

The aim of the politics of incorporation and division of variousgovernments during the 1990s was not simply to weaken the opposition butto debilitate it in order to insure the implementation of a neoliberal agenda.Through strategies of manipulation, co-optation, division, and control, the

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state has demonstrated, especially in the last several years, a new toleranceand acceptance of diversity aimed at integrating differences within thedominant apparatus, controlling social conflict and assuring social stability.

One way to theoretically locate these political strategies is throughthe tensions and contingencies of the particular and the universal. JudithButler (2000, 165) reminds us that if hegemony is to work, the particularmust come to represent something other than itself. As she explains,

The particular, which constitutes only one part or sector of the

sociopolitical field, nevertheless comes to represent the univer-

sal, which means that the possibility for the principles of equal-

ity and justice that define the political field within a nominally

democratic context seems now to depend upon the actualiza-

tion of the goals of the “particular” sector. It is not the case that

the particular now postures as the universal, usurping the uni-

versal in its name, but that the universal comes to be regarded

as insubstantial unless the claims of the particular are included

within its purview. (166)

In the case I am describing here, the particular represented bythe indigenous movement claims a broader universal of struggle (againstthe neoliberal project and for equality, justice, and self-determination),a universal that because of particularized and ethnically divisive politicssometimes appears shadowed. But the appropriation of the particular andits claim to the universal is not solely the purview of the indigenous move-ment; it is also used by the state itself, though of course with a differentkind of universality. Moreover, the assumption in its use by the state is thatuniversality precedes or is anterior to particular claims and is the central-izing force to integrate differences and dissolve their conflictive character.Rather than discount particularisms as it has done in the past, the state andneoliberal project recognizes them, gives them space within geopolitics,and simultaneously incorporates them into a universal that has reinventeditself. With the particular within its purview, this dominant universal be-comes part and parcel of the transnational neoliberal agenda and, as I laterdiscuss, of the cultural logic of globalized capitalism.

The play between the particular and the universal are particularlyclear in the present government’s tactics with regards to the indigenousmovement and the movement’s own complicities through participation,tactics that also demonstrate the present-day nature of the coloniality of

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power. One example is President Gustavo Noboa’s recent distribution ofpicks, shovels, and other basic agricultural tools to highland indigenouscommunities with the support of some indigenous institutions. With therate of rural poverty currently estimated by indigenous organizations to beat 95 percent, this particularized “micro” project serves as a smoke screenfor the real universal needs and realities as well as for the government’scomplicity and responsibility in the economic crisis. But do such practicesnot also seem to resurrect a paternalistic colonial project and order? Con-currently, the “macro” project of the Fondo Indígena, a new state structurethat, between support from the Inter-American Development Bank andthe national government, will channel at least $12 million to indigenousprojects,19 affords a strong financial incentive to the movement and its lead-ership to work with rather than against the state machine and in alliancewith multilateral institutions. These days, “national” politics clearly haveglobal designs.

Ecuador is one of the few countries in Latin America where socialmovements have until now been successful in blocking implementationof the neoliberal agenda, known in other terms as privatization and statestructural reform. But in order to sustain the dollarization of the Ecuado-rian economy, which began in 2000 (Ecuador is now the world’s only “free”country other than the United States and Panama where the U.S. dollaris the national currency), the government needs to rapidly implement aseries of economic measures aimed at privatizating the public sector andtransferring resources from the state to private companies. With this inmind, the government presented an initiative to Congress that would havereformed twenty-two laws and jump-started the privatization not just ofstate enterprises like mining, oil, water, and electricity but also of publicspaces, including beaches, parks, and waterways. But before the bill couldbe approved, the indigenous movement, in conjunction with the socialmovements’ coordinating council, undertook a series of consultations anddeveloped a counterproposal demonstrating the unconstitutionality of theproposed law. The Supreme Court used this document to study the leg-islation and subsequently declared various articles to be unconstitutional,thus halting the planned privatization, at least for the moment. CONAIE’sactions—another new form for them of doing politics—challenged thestate, restricting its space of political action, putting its legitimacy into ques-tion, and blocking the neoliberal agenda (ICCI 2000b).20 For the presentgovernment and for the neoliberal project in general, the political cost ofthis kind of opposition could not be greater. Furthermore, with Ecuador’s

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involvement in Plan Colombia, the ever-growing U.S. presence in the mili-tary base inManta, and themilitarization of indigenous communities on theborder, the need to control the “indigenous problem” and to keep the socialmovements divided is paramount not just for state but also for internationalinterests.21

The “Multiculturalization” of Global CapitalismCharacteristic of the last decade in Ecuador, as in other countries of theregion, is the state’s recognition of and attempt to incorporate cultural di-versity, specifically the oppositional politics expressed in terms of colonialdifference, into the state institution. Part of this recognition has includedthe legislation of indigenous rights and, in Ecuador, of rights for Afro-Ecuadorians. But as Héctor Díaz Polanco (1998, 5) notes, such recognitionlimits the sphere of change to the ethnic particularity (a kind of culturalrelativism) that “supposedly can be achieved without substantial transfor-mations to the nation-state.” This phenomenon of recognizing diversity,incorporating it inside the state apparatus while at the same time promot-ing it as a set of particularisms external to the state, is representative ofthe new forms of universality advanced by the discourse and politics ofneoliberal globalization.

TheWorld Bank’s establishment in 199122 of an operational direc-tive regarding indigenous peoples, its financing of projects like Prodepine(the first in the world where the bank’s funds go directly to an institu-tion run by indigenous organizations instead of being filtered through agovernment) and the Interamerican Bank’s recent support of the FondoIndígena are illustrative of this neoliberal multiculturalism. As both bankssupport indigenous initiatives, they also advise and provide support forthe national government’s implementation of neoliberal policies. Similarly,transnational oil corporations now negotiate directly with local indigenouscommunities, hire sociologists and anthropologists to assist with commu-nity relations, and design manuals for oil workers about local customs thatoutline strategies for establishing amicable relations. They also fund bilin-gual education programs (see Walsh 1994) and, in media ads, declare theircultural sensitivity and concern for the environment. Of course, there is acorrespondence between these cultural politics and the economic interestsof multilateral institutions, transnational corporations, and the state.

Slavoj Žižek (1997) is not alone in arguing that there is a multicul-tural logic embedded in today’s global capitalism that incorporates differ-ence while at the same time voiding it of real significance. For Žižek, the

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emphasis placed on tolerance, human rights, and democracy permits “eachspecific ‘life-style’ to flourish in its particularity”; tension inevitably resultsbetween the postmodern and postnational state and the earlier “concreteuniversality” of the nation-state (41).

While the predominant social form of the “concrete universal”continues to be the nation-state because that is what local populationscan more easily target and see, the state and nation are component partsof a now globalized society—a broader universal—where the particularand the universal assume contingent and hegemonic functions, and wherethe post/transnational market economy reigns. In order to insure that thiseconomy functions, it becomes imperative to work with the particularisms,that is, with local governments and populations, and with the colonialdifferences posited within (of course made benign by their incorporationinside the state-trans-territorial apparatus). The recognition of and respectfor cultural diversity, in this sense, becomes a central component of globalcapitalism, or what Quijano (1999, 101) refers to as “its other face,” the newmodel of postmodern cultural domination (Jameson 1996).

This cultural logic of global capitalism comes to serve as amodern-day form of colonization that obfuscates and at the same time maintainsthe colonial difference through the discursive rhetoric of multiculturalism.In the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of coloniza-tion without the colonizing metropolis of the nation-state, this rhetorictreats “each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studies and ‘respected’” (Žižek1997, 44), all the while maintaining a Eurocentric distance. As such, mul-ticulturalism establishes a relationship with Western cultural imperialismthat is exactly the same as the one between the self-colonization of globalcapitalism and traditional imperialist colonialism.

It is these patterns of patronization that, along with strategiesof mediation and incorporation, define the new cultural logic of state-neoliberal politics toward indigenous groups in Ecuador and the region asa whole. The official discourses of pluriculturalism assume a fundamentalvalue in the new order, attempting to control the particular by convert-ing differences into identities that can be integrated into the globalized,neoliberal all-world order. This integration is not aimed at creating moreegalitarian societies but rather at controlling social conflict and insuringsocial stability, all in order to push forward the model of accumulation.

However, as Dipesh Chakrabarty (1998, 108) notes, the politicsof ethnicity and of being human have contextual and cultural differences.

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The imaginaries of cultural diversity constructed by postnational and post-modern states and neoliberal globalization in so-called first world countriesare not the same as those constructed in the (post)coloniality of the South.Neither do they function under the same logic, practices, or universalities.That is to say, despite the operation of, and national complicities with, aneoliberal-global multiculturalism, there are Latin American specificitiesand particularities—including the history and subjectivity geopoliticallyinscribed in the coloniality of power, and the colonial difference and theresistances of subaltern groups—that authors like Žižek do not consider.

The Ecuadorian state, for example, uses a discourse and practicein relation to indigenous peoples that is sanctioned and supported by themultilaterals.However, the political and epistemic agency of the indigenousmovement, and its unpredictability from the perspective of the dominantlogic, constantly disturbs and destabilizes this discourse and practice. Byidentifying as pueblos y nacionalidades with collective rights (and not asindividual subjects) and from the position of their cultural and epistemicdifference, and by proposing other conceptions of nation and democracyfor the whole of society, the indigenous movement upsets the multicul-tural logic of global capitalism, a logic that derives from the notion ofethnic-cultural diversity and not from colonial-cultural-epistemic differ-ence. Moreover, the fact that interculturality was an indigenous politicalproposition long before the state inscribed it in the 1998 Constitution (seeWalsh 1999) places the discursive and practical meanings of the term, aswell as those of official pluriculturalism, in permanent conflict and contra-diction. It is largely for this reason that the marketization of difference andthe large-scale application of neoliberalism have not yet been achieved inEcuador.

However, in the case of Ecuador and particularly in light of thenew politics of transnational corporations and of transterritorial interven-tions like Plan Colombia, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, anddollarization, it is global capitalism, with its often hidden cultural logicand strategies, that is the real adversary, not just of the indigenous move-ment, but of all social movements, of civil society, and of those who identifyas critical and committed intellectuals. The crucial question remains ofhow to conceptualize this “it,” and how to effectively organize and directopposition.

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The (Re)production/Subalternization of Knowledges,the University, and Critical Intellectuals

The fluid relation of culture-identity-politics seen in Ecuador’s indigenousmovement and the production and use of knowledge in this relation remainlargely outside the confines of academic institutions. When the indigenousmovement is discussed, it is as an object of study, part of the incessant needto examine the other not as a source of knowledge but as an objectivizedcondition or reality. In a practice typical of modernist tendencies withinthe social sciences, disembodied professors and students embark on studiesthat split the subject from the object of knowledge and negate the socialprocesses that construct both, thus contributing to the “disciplining” of sub-jectivity (Rabasa and Sanjinés 1996 [1994]) that I have already mentioned.As Castro-Gómez (2000) makes clear, such tendencies are a constituentpart of the epistemological posture of universalism that within the aca-demic institution continues to define what counts as knowledge and whichindividuals produce it.

Not only is this traditional understanding prevalent in Ecuadorianinstitutions of higher learning but, worse yet, the gaze is directed towardtheories and processes of analysis that have their roots in the global North;the epistemological concerns, knowledge production, and geocultural real-ities of the South are seldom central elements of the curriculum or seriousconsiderations within it. Zulma Palermo (2001, 94) refers to this as thereproduction of knowledge and the negation of the social “real”: “Readin the classrooms are Foucault and Deleuze (until recently it was Barthesand Kristeva) and their theories of discursive power, while in the streets,Senate corruption and the decomposition of political power are the focusof talk, questions that the students are barely informed about and that asresearchers we have no proximity to.”

This is not to suggest that we reject theoretical knowledge, partic-ularly the kind produced in the global North, or deny that the conceptualcategories presented in this work may have a universal use. Nor do I meanto suggest or promote a divide between theory and practice. Rather I sug-gest that we recognize the hegemonic nature of knowledge (re)production,dissemination, and use, the hierarchies that it constructs, and the geocul-tural subalternization of knowledge (including local versus global) that itestablishes.

In response to the colonial and geocultural subalternization ofknowledge, and in an effort to extend their agency beyond the realm of

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oppositional politics (integrating this politics in a more explicit and orga-nized way with a strategic knowledge production and dissemination), theindigenous movement inaugurated in 2000 the Universidad Interculturalde las Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas (UINPI). As the Instituto Cien-tífico de Culturas Indígenas (ICCI) notes in its description, the university is“part of the political project of the indigenous movement,” with a specificfocus on “scientific research, academic teaching, and technical preparation”(ICCI 2000a, 5).23

[The Intercultural University] is not about producing onemore

institution to replicate the existing relations of power in a soci-

ety in which indigenous people have not been a circumstantial

or formal aspect of the curriculum. Neither is it about invent-

ing a space of knowledge reserved just for indigenous people

in which the fundamental contents are merely disguised as in-

digenous, and the criteria of truth and power are reproduced.

The creation of the Intercultural University does not signify

the division of science into what is indigenous and what is

not. It signifies the opportunity to embark on a theoretical dia-

logue grounded in interculturality. It signifies the construction

of new conceptual, analytical, and theoretical frameworks that

can generate new concepts, categories, and notions under the

framework of interculturality and the comprehension of alter-

ity. (6–7)

This proposal reflects the need to foster processes of mutual trans-lation of knowledges in the plural (Vera Herrera 1997). Yet as the Inter-cultural University project implies, the object is not to mix or hybridizeknowledge forms nor invent the best of two possible worlds. Rather, theuniversity represents the construction of new epistemological frameworksthat incorporate and negotiate both indigenous and Westernized knowl-edges (and their theoretical as well as experiential bases), consistently main-taining as fundamental the coloniality of power and the colonial differenceto which these knowledges have been subject.

For the UINPI, the positioning of interculturality as a new epis-temic paradigm implies the articulation of five elements or visions centralto indigenous epistemology, elements that recall the relation of culture-identity-politics and knowledge which I have already mentioned. The firstis the vision of conflict. This includes the construction and valuation of

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indigenous peoples through uprisings and mobilizations, dialogues, andconfrontations with the dominant power. It also includes a considerationof the role of uprisings in validating indigenous demands and proposals.The second element is tied to the development of indigenous languages andtheir potential in terms of knowledge production. The third has to do withvaluing cultural as well as epistemic difference, positioning of indigenouspeoples as subjects and creators of knowledge, not as objects of study. Thefourth vision is the strengthening of cultural identity as a continuous pro-cess of construction that confronts the multiple processes of colonization.The fifth is the epistemic or scientific interculturality that references theinterrelation of aboriginal knowledges with the knowledges of “universal”cultures. These five elements form the base of the curriculum (Ramírez2001).

As a political and epistemic project of the indigenous movement,the UINPI challenges academic-institutional enclosures and epistemologi-cal borders that are always crossed by power relations and that limit studyto the confines of occidental-universal-liberal knowledge. By recognizingepistemic diversity, by working with it and at the same time recognizingand confronting epistemic-colonial violence, the UINPI creates a strategicmodel of struggle and of education. This model allows political subjec-tivities and colonial difference to be (re)articulated, and knowledge to bepolitically problematized. What does this suggest in terms of the relation-ship between social movements, subaltern groups, and universities, andin terms of our own work and responsibility as critical and committedintellectuals?

In Ecuador and in other Andean countries, a drastic and growingdivide separates those who have access to a university education, and/orthe means and support to complete it, from those who do not. Although ascholarship program financed by Prodepine through the World Bank hasenabled a number of indigenous and Afro-descendent students to study atthe undergraduate level, incompletion rates are inordinately high. Studentsfrequently complain that the curriculum, the pedagogical and epistemicapproach, and the attitude of faculty continually exclude them. The resultis that the voices, epistemologies, histories, and subjectivities of indigenousand Afro-descendent peoples are generally absent from the university andacademic world, left to be interpreted by others. The development of ahigher education institution within the indigenous movement is a positiveresponse, but this should not free other institutions from their responsibilityto address these issues nor should it pardon the epistemic-colonial violence

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that continues to characterize these institutions. The challenge establishedby the indigenous movement needs to be assumed by other universities aswell as by society. But again, cultural difference should not simply be incor-porated into dominant, standing structures, in a kind of affirmative actionthat affords entry but not access; instead these structures (including the so-cial sciences) should be (re)negotiated, (re)structured, and “(in)disciplined”so as to enable a “transplurality” and interculturalization that attends tothe meanings and specificities of in-between spaces, contact zones, and bor-der epistemologies (Bhabha 1994; Pratt 1997 [1992]; Mignolo 2000a). Thisrestructuring should promote thinking that comes, as Mignolo (2000b, 8)suggests, “from an other place,” a place from which it is possible to con-struct interculturality not as a liberal project of cultural diversity but ascolonial-cultural-epistemic difference.

And what about the more fundamental concerns of our own indi-vidual and collective locations, subjectivities, and responsibilities in relationto the geopolitics of knowledge? At the very least, such concerns require arecognition that these locations, subjectivities, and responsibilities exist andplay an important role in our work within the academy, with students, andin relation to one another. Such concerns should push us to build new typesof academic relationships and dialogue between North and South, Southand North, and within the South. Similarly, they should encourage us toconstruct transdisciplinary spaces within the social sciences, spaces that de-rive from the present-day reality of the Andean region, and permit the con-struction of new spaces of confluence of critical knowledge—disciplinary,situated, local, and global. These spaces should promote epistemologicalpractices not just “from” but “among” and “within,” practices of articu-lation that simultaneously break the division of subject/object and disturbthe modernist project that disciplines subjectivity. They should engender amore critical attention to global capitalism and to the peculiar way the An-dean countries are inserted within it. Finally, recognizing this peculiarityshould make us move from the comfortable physical and epistemologicalspace and place of the university so that we can traverse and pursue othersites of knowledge production, not just to expand academic knowledgebut, more important, to build strategies, perspectives, and analysis directedtoward the grave injustices and problems confronting the region, continent,and the planet—strategies, perspectives, and analysis that will allow us tounmask and confront the power of neoliberalism and global capitalism andthe multiple layers of imperial and colonial practice.

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The production of knowledge and the decolonization and trans-formation of the world in which we live are not necessarily distinct tasks;they need not be accomplished by individual and separate actors. Nor doacademics own or hold authority over one mission, with social and politicalmovements responsible for the other. In a reflective world, we are all pro-ducers of knowledge (Giddens 2000). And for us to unmask and confrontthe complexities and threats that neoliberalism and global capitalism posewithin the modern/colonial order, for us to imagine and construct a socialstructure radically different, collective knowledge, collective analysis, andcollective action are essential. The words of a Mexican Huichol shaman(cited in Vera Herrera 1997, 81) seem appropriate in closing:

Juntar los momentos en un solo corazón, un corazón de todos,

nos hará sabios, un poquito más para enfrentar lo que venga.

Sólo entre todos sabemos todo.

[To bring together the moments in one single heart, a heart of

everyone, will make us knowledgeable, a bit more than we are

now in order to confront what may come. Only among all of

us together do we know everything.]

NotesThe stimulus for this text came from dialogues initiated at the workshop “Knowledges

and the Known,” Duke University, Durham, NC, November 2000. I wish to

thank Walter Mignolo for his invitation to participate in this workshop and

he and Freya Schiwy for the subsequent comments that they offered on an

earlier version of this article.

1. For a discussion on the geopolitics of knowledge in relation to Latin America, see the

special issue of Comentario internacional (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón

Bolívar), no. 2 (2001), which includes my interview with Mignolo (Walsh

2001a) and a partial dossier of the “Knowledges and the Known” workshop.

2. I use the notion of “identity politics” here in much the same way as does Charles

Hale (1997), that is, as the “collective sensibilities and actions that come from

a particular location within society, in direct defiance of universal categories

that tend to subsume, erase, or suppress this particularity” (568) and as “a

generalized idiom throughwhich groups engage in politics with one another,

the state, and other powerful adversaries” (572).

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3. For an important and critical discussion of the category of “class” and the current

trend tomake it onemore link in an enumerative chain of identities associated

with the new social movements, see Laclau 2000.

4. While the indigenous and Afro movements may not speak of colonial difference

or a coloniality of power as such, the sociohistorical past and present of

domination, marginalization, racism, and exclusion serve as clear referents

and reasons for organization and struggle.

5. Ethnoeducation is the term used in Colombia to refer to indigenous bilingual pro-

grams and, with the passing of Colombia’s Law 70, to Afro-centered edu-

cation. In the Andean region, the idea of Afro ethnoeducation has begun

to spread. In Ecuador, for example, there are initial experiences at the com-

munity level that have been shared with both Peru and Colombia. Within

the Afro Workshop—a permanent space for dialogue and debate with Afro

communities and othermembers of civil society—coordinated by theUniver-

sidad Andina Simón Bolívar in conjunction with Afro organizations, these

experiences are being socialized and discussions initiated regarding national

educational policy.

It is important to note that constitutional reforms, while often

fought for by these social movements, are not necessarily the sole result of

their struggles, nor do they necessarily suggest a new openness or sensitivity

by governments to their interests and demands. Rather, as I discuss later, the

new official attention to diversity in the region also reflects global, neoliberal

interests.

6. This is in contrast to Peru, for example, where the construction of a “cholo” identity

during the period from the Second World War until the 1970s (see Quijano

1999), and newer constructions of a cultura chicha among migrants during

the last thirty years, suggest creative and positive processes of what Quijano

calls “subversion and reoriginalization.”

7. The media has played a particularly crucial role in constructing representations of

the indigenous other. This was made particularly evident during the events of

21 January 2000. For example, isolated incidents of Indians harassing white-

mestizos (e.g., pulling a white-mestizo man by the necktie and making him

dance) were displayed prominently, as if they were widespread occurrences.

These images shared the screen with interviews of right-wing politicians

and ex-presidents, who decried the notion of an Indian president (see Walsh

2001b).

8. I am grateful to Freya Schiwy for pointing this out to me.

9. In fact, the modern-day notion of the intellectual is also distinct. The formation of an

indigenous intellectual class comprised of lawyers, social scientists, medical

91


doctors, agronomists, and other “professionals” mostly trained outside the

country (e.g., in Cuba and the Soviet Union) incorporates within it yachags or

shamans and other recognized leaders and elders. Yet the authority of these

so-called intellectuals does not come fromknowledge per se, individually held

and administered, but from the recognition bestowed by the communities

themselves through praxis, including a constant give-and-take that results in

new knowledge generation.

10. In the most recent elections, in May 2000, Pachakutik finished third in terms of

seats won. Elected from its ranks were more than 30 indigenous mayors,

5 indigenous provincial prefects (out of a national total of 22), and a large

number of town councilors. Pachakutik also took 60 percent of the seats on

parochial juntas (Walsh 2001b).

11. Although there was an initial agreement for autonomy, in the final presidential

decree that officialized the institution, the word autonomy did not appear. As

a result, the government has had control over the appointment of the executive

secretary (i.e., director). And while the governance council of the institution

is made up of indigenous representatives, a government representative chairs

and presides over this council.

12. The distinction and relation between politics and the political is particularly impor-

tant in the context of the South, where the notion of aWestern territorial state

does not quite fit and where the coloniality of power, with its impositions,

logics, and effects, violates the bond between national sovereignty and the

constitution of societal being (Slater 1997).

13. The response by blacks to this exclusion has been to petition for their own gov-

ernmental institution. CODAE, the Council for the Development of Afro-

Ecuadorians, was recently approved, but it has been the subject of consider-

able discussion and debate within the Afro community, much of this centered

on concerns about representation.

14. These territorial concerns are tied to the collective rights established in the 1998

Constitution, which permit the development and legalization of “territorial

circumscriptions” for both indigenous and black groups, similar to the res-

guardos indígenas in Colombia or the notion of reservations in the United

States. The circumscriptions establish autonomy, self-governance, and legal

authority within a defined geographical space under the jurisdiction of one

ethnic group, for example, Afro-Ecuadorians, or, in the case of Indians, a

recognized indigenous nationality, or, for Quichua highland groups, a par-

ticular pueblo or peoples (e.g., Cayambes, Otavalos, Saraguros, etc.). But in

contrast to Colombia or the United States, these circumscriptions present a

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major challenge to the territoriality of the state because they could conceivably

occupy the majority of “national” territory.

15. For a discussion of the elements involved in an internal evaluation of the movement,

see Macas 2000.

16. For a discussion of similar processes among the Zapatistas that imbricate the local,

regional, and global, see Slater 1998.

17. The strong regional conflicts in the country played a major role in Bucaram’s strate-

gies. One of these traditional conflicts has been between Amazonian and

highland indigenous groups, particularly in terms of power within the move-

ment and its organizations. CONAIE until this time had a strong base of

highland control. By putting an Amazonian in charge of the ministry, Bu-

caram succeeded almost immediately in gaining Amazonian support and in

wresting some of the Amazonian organizations away from CONAIE. But

as the first president from the coast in almost a decade and as the leader of

a coastal-based populist party strongly allied with coastal economic interests,

Bucaram also used the coastal-highland conflict to his advantage. His pop-

ulist message and approach aimed at constructing an image of a president “of

the people,” affording a supposed representation to those sectors previously

excluded from national government, including the poor, indigenous people,

and blacks.

18. TheAmazonian candidate,AntonioVargas,won the election. From1996 toOctober

2001, Vargas served as the president of CONAIE. He was also the indige-

nous member of the triumvirate that attempted to assume the presidency in

the popular rebellion of January 2000. As a result of demands and internal

evaluations within the movement, Vargas and the rest of the leadership of

CONAIE agreed to leave their positions inMarch 2001 without possibility of

reelection. However, after the successes of the February 2001 uprising, their

resignation was put off until October. Contributing to the tension between

Vargas and the movement is his announced interest in becoming a candidate

for the presidency of the Republic.

19. This sum is expected to increase with the inclusion of royalty payments on certain

products.

20. Although the indigenous movement continues to develop an oppositional agenda,

neither it nor any other social movement has offered alternative proposals. In

this regard, the threat the opposition presents is just that, opposition without

concrete substance.

21. Adding to this concern and particularly impacting indigenous communities was,

initially, the aerial spray-testing of bacteria-based fungi, and more recently,

the aerial spraying of glisofate, designed to kill coca crops but obviously

93


affecting all forms of plant (and possibly human) life. Recent investigative

reports indicate that at least six thousand peasants and indigenous people

have been seriously affected, both with health problems and the destruction

of their crops. This “damnification that has arrived from the heavens,” as the

people call it, continues to be the denied by the Ecuadorian government and

is the source of major current debates among the governments of Ecuador,

Colombia, and the United States, as well as ecological and nongovernment

entities.

22. In 1998, theWorld Bank began a revision, now in its final stage, of its policy toward

indigenous peoples. Between March and June 2001 a series of new drafts

of operational policies, procedures, and strategies was circulated, directed at

“securing the process of development.”

23. While the design and development of the university is the work of the Ecuadorian

indigenous movement, transnational networks of support from indigenous

universities elsewhere and fromU.S., Canadian, andEuropean institutions of

higher education have helpedmake it a reality, including in terms of legal op-

eration. The rector of the university is Luis Macas, a lawyer, former president

of CONAIE, and former member of the Ecuadorian national congress.

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