CONFERENCE
IMAGINING ECUADOR
SATURDAY, APRIL 2nd, 2011
340 WEST HALL
FROM 10:30 A.M. - 7:10 P.M.
PAPERS' ABSTRACTS
Scars of Nation: Surgical Penetration and the State in Ecuador
Liz Roberts
In Ecuador, middle class women and now, more working class women, eagerly pay to be scarred. Cesarean sections carried out in private clinics leave a lateral scar, the mark of women not subject to the indignities of devalued public medical services. It’s not citizenship per se that these women are after with their scars, since in Ecuador, citizenship, especially in the medical realm, is denigrated. Instead the scar is a sign of a woman’s ability to remain distinct from the governed masses who need to make citizenship claims for social services on state institutions. Scars and the bodies that carry them enact a racialized relationship to the nation. Browner bodies can withstand vaginal birth within the disciplines of public maternity care. When women pay for c-sections, the private scars make them whiter and more worthy of the nation. After all they haven’t taken anything from the state.
Rafael Correa’s Technopopulism
Carlos de la Torre (FLACSO-Ecuador)
Inspired in a particular interpretation of Weber populism, as a form of charismatic domination, and technocracy have been portrayed as incompatible. Whereas charismatic authority is seen as irrational, technocracy is based on the application of instrumental reason to social life. In this talk I analyze how charismatic and technocratic domination are use by Rafael Correa. Studying his weekly radio and TV shows “enlaces ciudadanos”, and his speeches I explore how he uses technocratic and populist appeals. The tensions between these two forms of domination are explored in the police rebellion that led to the kidnapping of president Correa September 30, 2010. The paper explores the authoritarian appropriation of the people’s will by the charismatic leader, and of science by a technocratic elite.
Indigenismo in Ecuador
Marc Becker
Ecuador has held a curious position in international indigenista movements. Despite being home to a large number of Indigenous peoples, it failed to produce internationally recognized indigenista intellectuals or governmental policies as happened in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia. Furthermore, despite being one of the first countries to endorse proposals that emerged out of the Instituto Indigenista Interamericana (III, Inter-American Indigenista Institute) formed at Pátzcuaro, Mexico in 1940, indigenista institutions were not able to gain traction in Ecuador. Rather than a legacy of a weak indigenista tradition, this essay argues that the shortcomings of the IIE were due to the failure of liberal indigenistas to present a sufficiently radical critique of Indigenous realities based on an analysis of their class position. Instead of creating strong indigenista institutions, activists organized militant Indigenous federations that pressed for economic and social justice rather than assimilation of Indigenous peoples into the dominant culture.
Afro-Ecuador Beyond the 'lettered city': Rethinking the representation of blackness in the literary works of Nelson Estupiñán Bass
Michael Handelsman
In this paper I reflect on the meaning and function of literature written and read from the experience of blackness in Ecuador, especially with regard to the example of Nelson Estupiñán Bass (1912-2002) who is considered one of Ecuador’s principal Afro Ecuadorian writers. Part of the problem is identifying the social context in which we read Estupiñán’s literary production. My analysis moves between the so-called “lettered city” and the rural areas of the northern region of Esmeraldas province where numerous communities are struggling to take control of their own representation(s). Consequently, the question before us has to do with the conflicting role of an Afro Esmeraldan writer who purports to articulate and interpret the needs, interests, and histories that define the province’s inhabitants while assuming an hierarchical position of a socially engaged intellectual who unwittingly and paradoxically renders voiceless those Afro communities that have for centuries spoken through their elders and ancestors.
Imagining an Indigenous Ecuador in Otavalo: Beyond Commemoration in Otavalos Song
John McDowell
We will observe how Otavalos song enters into commemorative practice as a powerful device for imagining an indigenous Ecuador in Otavalo where it occasions a communion with the past; at its most effective, it can erase awareness of the commemorative vehicle and evocation may shade into invocation, as a summoned past takes on, virtually and provisionally, an aura of presence.
But does this analysis shortchange the transformative potential of experience? By insisting on the provisional, virtual, and illusory qualities of these epiphanies, are we imposing on Andean consciousness a Western epistemology rooted in a mind/body distinction, in a separation of the spiritual from everyday life, in a strictly linear sense of chronology? Is there an Andean way of experiencing the world, where constructs like transcendence and epiphany are not needed? The difference between these worldviews could be captured in an adaptation of this paper’s title, from “Imagining an Indigenous Ecuador in Otavalo” to “Living an Indigenous Ecuador in Otavalo.” Shall we drop the hypothetical, the conditional, from our accounts?
Crossing borders from Calhuasí to Quito to Brooklyn: indigenous youth’s rural-to-urban migrations and beyond
Kate Swanson, Department of Geography. San Diego State University.
Around the world, cities are increasingly implementing punitive zero tolerance policing strategies to cleanse the streets of informal workers, beggars, street children and other undesirables. Ecuador is no exception. Over the last decade, the cities of Quito and Guayaquil have imported punitive urban policies from the global north in order to revamp and restructure their urban images in an effort to attract further tourist and investment dollars. Yet, I argue that the importation of these revanchist urban policies is worrying in a nation traversed by deep racial-spatial divides. In this paper, I focus on the lives of migrant indigenous beggars and street vendors to demonstrate how the implementation of these policies serves to exacerbate preexisting inequalities and push indigenous young people into more precarious circumstances, including transnational migration.
Risk-seeking Peasants, Excessive Artisans: Speculation, Fashion, and Longing in the Northern Andes
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld & Jason Antrosio
Thomas Friedman (referencing Harvard economist Lawrence Katz) declared that the economic future for the U.S. meant that “everyone today has to be an artisan” (New York Times, October 23, 2010). But what exactly does it mean to be an artisan in a globalized world? This paper suggests that artisan and peasant economies may involve intolerable levels of risk and excess, frustrating the search for economic justice and more equitable opportunities. Fieldwork with peasant agriculturists in southwestern Colombia, apparel makers in Atuntaqui’s new fashion economy, and textile artisans in northern Ecuador challenges the stereotypes of conservative, risk-averse peasants or of traditional, low-output artisans. Rather, risk-maximization and excessive behavior is widespread, and may even be vital for maintaining the system.
The chance at windfall profits can encourage small-scale production, making it seem worth persevering through adverse conditions. At times when traditional calculations of toil and expenditure make agriculture or artisanry seem like wasted effort, an excessive display of winnings can provide motivation to continue. The paper locates these observations in a review of the political economy literature of peasant and artisan economies, as well as the recent spate of economic experimental games carried out among small-scale producers. These observations are also connected to current events and commentary that blames the crisis on greed within the financial sector. The Colombian pyramid scheme and the Ecuadorian fashion surge demonstrate how speculation permeates the global economy. In booms and busts in the northern Andes, peasants and artisans have built an infrastructure of excess: overbuilt streetscapes, overcapacity in workshops, lost economic diversity, and production shifted to niche markets. To participate in a global economy, this is the meaning of “everyone today has to be an artisan.”
Mediated Freedom(s): The Politics of AfroEcuadorian In/Exclusion in (De)Colonial Perspective
Catherine Walsh, Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar and Mellon Visiting Professor, Duke University
This talk will take as central the following questions: What are the political imaginaries about Afro-Ecuadorian freedom, liberation, inclusion -and its flip side: exclusion- in light of the new Constitution and government politics today, and in what ways do they simultaneously challenge and recall the imaginaries at the time of “Independence”? What are the politics and policies that engage, make tense, and even co-opt these imaginaries, then and now? And in what ways do they mark and construct paths of struggle of and against (de)coloniality?