The (Re)articulation of Political Subjectivities

and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

Reflections on Capitalism and the Geopolitics
of Knowledge

Catherine E. Walsh

It is to the zone of occult instability where the people dwell that

we must come.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967 [1952])

T
o think and speak from the geopo-
litical and historical location of Ecuador and from the colonial difference
formed within this location are processes that guide my reflections here. By
“geopolitical . . . location” I mean not only the physical space, the place on
the map, but also the historical, social, cultural, imagined, and what Wal-
ter Mignolo (2000a) refers to as the epistemologically diagrammed spaces
that provide the ground for political subjectivities, colonial difference, and
struggle. As Adrienne Rich (1987, 212) once commented, “A place on the
map is also a place in history.” In the spacialities of geopolitical location,
boundaries are formed, negotiated, and transgressed, power and politics
played out on both national and transnational terrains. It is also here that
diverse knowledges are generated, produced, and distributed.1
The material conditions of subjectification are always intertwined
with 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 up
through experience, identity, and power (Mohanty 1987; Pile 1997), and
in relation to the subjects/objects that we purport to study, is not usual
practice in the academic world. Instead, modernist tendencies in the so-
cial sciences disembody the author from the text and split the subject and

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 3.1
Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press

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object of knowledge, thus contributing to what José Rabasa and Javier

Sanjinés (1996 [1994], ix) refer to as “a series of forms of disciplining sub-
jectivity.” This discipline recalls both the Foucauldian use of formulas of
domination as well as the colonial experience: the discipline to organize
and 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 to
obscure the power relations grounded in the epistemological apparatus and
in the geohistorical confines of what Mignolo (2000a, 2000b) calls the mod-
ern/colonial world system, as well as the specific place of Latin America
within it. The geohistorical colonial difference created by the coloniality of
power (Quijano 1999) has subalternized not only ethnic-racial groups but
also their knowledge. “To think from the colonial difference” and “from
the ruins, the experiences and the margins created by the coloniality of
power in the structuring of the modern/colonial world” as a way not to
restore knowledges but to “make them intervene in a new epistemological,
transmodern, and postoccidental horizon” (Mignolo 2000b, 23–24), is thus
central.
In Ecuador, the complex nature of colonial difference constructs
its meaning, in part, through a national ideology of mestizaje, the princi-
pal referent of a homogeneous national identity. The perpetuation of this
national ideology marks indigenous people and blacks—who, according
to some accounts, together constitute almost half of the population—as
other. Concurrently, and in apparent contradiction with this ideology, in-
ordinate value is placed on whiteness and on everything that comes from
the 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 write
from this social and historic locality; what it means to position myself in the
interstices necessarily created when one lives in a country that is not one’s
own 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 live
through uprisings, mobilizations, and popular rebellions that have resulted,
among other changes, in the overthrow of two presidents, have made me
think more critically about the social, cultural, political, and epistemolog-
ical agency of these movements, and about the related role of state and
transterritorialized interests. It is this thinking rather than anthropological
observations 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 the
indigenous and Afro-descendent movements, as a way to enter into the
broader questions and concerns posed by capitalism, the geopolitics of
knowledge, and our role as critical and committed intellectuals. What is
the emergent relation of culture, identity, politics, and knowledge within
these movements and what are the changing roles of the state and the
neoliberal 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)disciplinary
work, the relation between social movements and the university, and the
(re)production/subalternization of knowledges? And what does all this
suggest 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 Latin
America, most notably among indigenous peoples but also among Afro-
descendents. These politics have moved beyond previous national-popular
projects and traditional leftist articulations of identity, which for much of
the twentieth century were based predominantly on class, marking both
rural Indians and blacks as campesinos,3 and making class-conscious lead-
ers the mediators of their voice and vision. Instead, the new politics of
mobilization in discussion here depart from the agency of indigenous and
black peoples themselves; taken as central are ethnic and racial differences
as well as the recognition and rearticulation of what Mignolo (2000b) refers
to 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 Latin
American identity politics or the social movements that are its result. Rather,
it is a strategical politization of difference—cultural difference but also the
epistemic 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 a
political and social recognition of the pluricultural character of national so-
ciety, the construction and strengthening of collective indigenous and black
identities (both national and transnational), as well as the establishment of
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specific policies and rights directed at reversing past injustices. Through

demands and actions like those of the Zapatistas for new conceptualizations
and practices of democracy, or those of Mapuche communities in Chile, the
Uw’a in Colombia, and blacks on the Pacific coast of Ecuador and Colom-
bia against transnational extractivist (oil, mining, timber) companies, the
struggles to transform national social and political structures, and confront
transnational interests and neoliberal policies, are increasingly evident and
visible.
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 and
their dialectic, the discussion and analysis of which is often evaded in much
of social and political theory.
The organized resistance of indigenous people and blacks in Latin
America to the coloniality of power is not new. In fact, social and political
resistance 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’s
cultural-identity politics and social movements construct themselves are
distinct from those of centuries past. The strategic politicization of iden-
tity and difference by indigenous and Afro-descendent movements in the
region takes on new significance in the current climate of globalization
and the attendant crisis and erosion of states, in the neoliberal projects and
the transformation of capitalism into something that, as Oscar Guardiola-
Rivera (2000) argues, is symbolic and cultural as well as economic (not
to mention in the simultaneous junctures and contingencies of cultural
homogeneity/cultural heterogeneity and particularity/universality that this
reality proffers). This new importance resides, in part, in the emergent po-
litical subjectivity of the movements and their leaders, in their condition
as actors of their own experience rather than as mere objects of study or
development.
Through increasingly visible and vocal processes of self-determi-
nation and self-definition, indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples are
unsettling the ethnographic and development-based paradigms that have
been prevalent in the region (see Escobar 1999). They are also beginning
to recover and reconsider their own knowledge, to construct the difference
between ethnic epistemology and Western, “civilized,” global knowledge
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

(what is presumed to be available to everyone) and not only redefine but

decolonize the relationship between them. This involves, as Linda Tuhiwai
Smith (1999, 64) explains, a recognition of the nexus between the cultural
ways of knowing, scientific discoveries, economic impulses, and imperial
power that have enabled the West to make the ideological claims of having
a superior civilization, and to impose this positional superiority in social
institutions like schools. Recent works that analyze the consolidation of
black organizations in the southern Pacific region of Colombia and their
organizational and knowledge-based processes, particularly those in sup-
port of the environment, serve as examples (see Escobar 1998, 1999; Escobar
and Pedrosa 1996; Restrepo 2000).
In nations that have traditionally defined themselves as mestizo
while perpetuating in practice the value of whiteness or blanqueamiento,
indigenous and black peoples are making their presence visible. By pushing
these nations to redefine themselves—as evidenced, for example, by recent
constitutional reforms in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador, which now de-
note the pluricultural and multiethnic character of their societies and define
certain ethnic group rights—and to start programs of bilingual or ethno-
education in the schools, indigenous and Afro groups have succeeded in
making their demands law.5 Such changes, though they often remain dis-
cursive, without concrete application, or, in the case of education, without
adequate support or financing, bring local identity politics into the national
and transnational realms and make plurality a societal rather than just an
ethnic proposition.
Thus while political subjectivity, increased visibility, and knowl-
edge recuperation are central elements of the movements, they also point to
concerns 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 that
sustain structures of privilege and inequality, and how we should rethink
our own relationship with the centers of power and with knowledge itself,
in the past as well as in the present. Similarly raised are concerns about social
justice, the recognition and respect of differences, and the bridges and con-
tingencies between particularized demands and dimensions of universality
or interconnectedness.
The “new” significance also finds its place in the conditions of
globalization or, more particularly, in what Santiago Castro-Gómez and
Eduardo 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 not
only in local contexts but also in national and transnational spaces that cross
and make fluid geopolitical as well as ethnic or racialized borders. The
joint declaration of black organizations from the Andean region (Comité
Andino de Servicios 2001) about racism, common histories, and continued
experiences of marginalization and exclusion, as well as about economic
globalization, biodiversity and, in the case of Colombia, internal armed
conflict 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 Mexico
as a whole, as well as for an end to neoliberal policies, resonate beyond
geopolitical boundaries. They transcend ethnic divides and fuse local, na-
tional, regional, and global arenas. Thus while Zapatista demands emerge
from localized, geohistorical struggles, they also embrace the concerns of
many 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 the
international Social Forum held in Pôrto Alegre in 2001, to name just a few.
In the particularisms of each, there are seeds of universality, cores that, as
Ernesto Laclau (2000, 306) suggests, we should expand “so that we can have
a full social imaginary, capable of competing with the neoliberal consensus
which has been the hegemonic horizon of world politics for the last thirty
years.”
In countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Ecuador, the most or-
ganized and vocal political opposition continues to come from indigenous
nations. At times in alliance with other social groups and at times enacting
a politics rooted in the particularisms of their own ethnic struggle and colo-
nial difference, these groups continually construct a cultural politics that, as
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1992) notes in relation to the Sendero Luminoso
in 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 indigenous movement (an
important referent since 1990 for the rest of the region) and because of the
movement’s ability to (re)articulate political subjectivities, challenging and
transforming both cultural politics and political culture. Moreover, with
the recent establishment of an indigenous university—developed by the
movement with the support of nonindigenous individuals, organizations,
and institutions from within the country, as well as from elsewhere in Latin
America, the United States, Canada, and Europe—the case of Ecuador also
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

raises fundamental questions about the geopolitics of knowledge and new,

divergent forms of knowledge production and dissemination.

The Political and Epistemic Agency of Ecuador’s

Indigenous Movement
Since the 1990s, the cultural politics of identity and difference in Ecuador
have challenged occidental, postmodern, and deconstructivist propositions
as well as perceptions within Latin America of increased hybridization and
cultural syncretization. Academic propositions that question the “authen-
tic” essence of women, of blacks, indigenous people, or other “peoples of
color,” and denials of this essence in other forms of oppression, of imperi-
alism, local history, and so on, become unsettled when indigenous people
claim and (re)appropriate a collective self, a move that also challenges the
imputing of a Western psychological “self” to group consciousness (Smith
1999). But as Smith notes, authentic means something different here than
when it is used by first world academics; that is to say, the term functions
under a different logic.
Generally, this notion of an authentic collectivity does not refer to a
naturalized category, although there are “Indianist” tendencies in Ecuador
and other countries of the region where authentic sometimes has these
connotations. Rather, in its use by Ecuador’s indigenous movement, au-
thentic is an oppositional and politically strategic term, a way to articulate
what it has meant to be culturally and epistemically dehumanized by colo-
nization and a way to reorganize “national consciousness” in the struggles
for decolonization. This identity is not objectivized as such but part of a
lived, 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 from
the colonial difference.” This is what distinguishes it from essentialized
and objectivized categories that find their substance in ethnicity and not
in the coloniality of power, the latter understood as an established system
of social classification and identification based on the repression of native
identities and on the conformation of a negative common identity—“lo
indio” (Quijano 1999). The reinvention of “Indian” by Ecuador’s indige-
nous movement serves to highlight this colonial difference, to strategically
subvert 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 globalized
communication have made cultural hybridization the dominant norm (see,
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for example, García Canclini 1992). Although globalization has of course

had a major effect on all sectors of Ecuador’s society and on its everyday
social and cultural practices, the lines traditionally drawn to separate eth-
nic groups are not fading.6 On the contrary, the ideology of mestizaje in
Ecuador, historically premised on white superiority and the depreciation
of all that is indigenous, is strengthened by dominant groups reacting to
the indigenous movement. Through the discursive use of the press, these
groups promote the notion that indigenous people are reestablishing ethnic
division. In practice, however, these discourses actually help to objectivize
and essentialize “lo indio.” But while they establish the difference, they also
promote a liberal-multiculturalist vision of society based on tolerance and
inclusion, thus promulgating the idea that the indigenous people and their
movement are the perpetrators of their own exclusion.
In response to this context—which, on the one hand, masks the
modern operation of coloniality and, on the other, reinforces propensities
toward ethnic fundamentalism (Díaz Polanco 1998)—Indians increasingly
identify as Indians, and blacks as blacks. And, while these categories are
part of and essential to the colonial difference, they are reinvented and
reappropriated by indigenous and Afro-descendant movements on their
own 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 public
emergence, with the massive 1990 Inti Raymi uprising, as an important
social and political actor with “ethnic” demands, including the creation of
a plurinational state—positioned lo indígena in a new and different way
in relation to lo blanco-mestizo and to the historically homogenizing na-
tional project. The uprising’s national visibility and multitudinous force
disturbed the ethnic imaginary in which Indians were perceived as tied to
the countryside, artisan work, and/or manual labor, as disappearing entities
anxious 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 our
country” (Diario hoy, 14 October 1991, 6B). In its assumption of an anti-
capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anticolonial stance, and in its presentation
of proposals and demands not just for land rights but for a “plurinational
state,” 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 neoliberal
agenda, and with an eye to decentralization and democratization (Almeida
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

1993; Sánchez-Parga 1990). As a result, “it is now impossible to imagine a

shared [societal] destiny without considering their [the indigenous peoples’]
presence and participation” (Almeida 1993, 8).
One of the effects within the indigenous movement of this and
subsequent uprisings in the early 1990s was an increase in indigenous
identification, including the recuperation of Quichua language use and
native dress among both rural and urban people who had previously iden-
tified as mestizos, Spanish speakers, and, in the countryside, along class
lines as campesinos. This reconstruction of an identity defined for its
ethnic-cultural and epistemic difference and conceptualized as collective
and political calls into question the notion of a “national” identity and the
colonial difference it has traditionally sought to mark and control. It has
also prompted the construction of new imaginaries and representations by
white-mestizos and by the media of the indigenous other. No longer just
liminal servants, rural farmers, or producers of crafts, indigenous people
must now be recognized as politicized actors/insurgents able to shut down
the country, stand up to and speak about the patrón in a language the boss
cannot understand, and make ethnicity-based demands to a government
that in modern times has not recognized indigenous difference. Indigenous
people now can even ally themselves with the military, assume national
power, and demand dialogues with the government, including with its
president.7
Political action has laid the groundwork for a collective indige-
nous consciousness. This awareness is based on a fluid interconnection of
culture-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, as
well 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 production
that 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 indigenous
transterritoral one. By means of this dynamic and articulation, a source of
power-knowledge is built that, as is made evident in CONAIE’s publica-
tion of its own Proyecto político (1994, 1997), comes to underscore collective
action, serving as a necessary component for building a political project, a
national 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 as millennial people (“millennial” being the term used by indige-

nous people to designate their aboriginal character).
This understanding and use of knowledge by the indigenous
movement suggests that their political project is not simply political but
epistemological.8 But what is meant by knowledge in the way that it is
employed here? Embedded within this political understanding and use of
knowledge (certainly not the only understanding and use for indigenous peo-
ples) are foundational elements and a logic grounded in a cultural system
of thought produced at the collective, not the individual, level. This logic
arises from an accumulated “scientific” base of knowledge related to the
earth, 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 of
power, oppression, resistance, and continuous struggle. This logic and these
elements serve as the foundation of an indigenous epistemology, of cul-
tural, and, at the same time, epistemic difference (Mignolo 2000a). It is this
historical-cultural-colonial condition (in which indigenous knowledge was
repressed, marginalized, “disciplined,” and sometimes even destroyed) that
has engendered the production of new knowledges—new modes of analy-
sis, conceptualization, and thought that envision the “indigenous problem”
as fundamentally structural, political, and economic, as tied to capitalist
hegemony, and as both national and international (CONAIE 1994). It is
the 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 quite
different from the understanding I’ve just discussed. Since the advent of
monasteries (the precursors to universities), Western conceptions of knowl-
edge have advocated the separation of humans and nature, work and every-
day life, and made the production and use of knowledge an individualized,
expert, and consumer-based enterprise devoid of emotion (Vera Herrera
1997). This separation is particularly evident in the discourses of progress
and modernity that affirm the supremacy of time over space and of culture
over nature, severing nature’s role as a constitutive dimension of modern
wealth and of capitalism’s development (Coronil 1997, 2000b). By masking
what Coronil refers to as the dialectical play between capital, work, and
earth or nature, these discourses both constitute and construct universal
conceptions 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 of

knowledge.
Despite the globalized and neoliberal nature of present-day so-
ciety, indigenous peoples have generally resisted the adoption of these
discourses and singularized, universalized conceptions of knowledge, as
well as the separations and discontinuities they propose. As Apffel Marglin
(cited in Vera Herrera 1997, 84) notes, “Life in nonindustrial societies and
in collectivities not caged in consumption isn’t divided into spheres where
passions have a legitimate place and others where they do not; everything
merges with passion and values.” Moreover, the distinctions established
between intellectuals (who individually produce knowledge)9 and others
(who do not) do not 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 fact
derives from its ability to construct and use the correspondences among
various contemporary knowledge positions: using knowledges in the plural,
it can move between knowledges in order to exercise political tactics and
strategies.
Indigenous self-awareness and agency and their dialectical relation
to the movement’s construction and consolidation has led it to challenge a
number of other sectors. Among these is the one Edward Said (1998) refers
to as the “armies of researchers” coming from foreign and national aca-
demic institutions, governmental and nongovernmental organizations and
projects, multinationals, and other entities. With an ostensible zeal to study
and help the “civilization” of the Indians, to save and defend indigenous
knowledge 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 enterprise
as 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 the
subject that has been practiced since colonial times.
In the last decade Ecuador’s indigenous movement has called into
question this dominant mode of social science research and the colonial
trajectory 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, intellectual
actor.
Of all the challenges posed by the cultural-identity politics and
emergent agency of Ecuador’s indigenous movement, the greatest has prob-
ably been to the dominant political and epistemic order. The uprisings of
the early 1990s, accompanied by such demands as those for legal recogni-
tion, territorial rights, and a plurinational state, forced the government not
only to take into account the indigenous movement and to award collective
land titles but to seek ways to incorporate (indigenous) opposition into the
state apparatus—ways, in other words, to bring it “inside.” Although the
Ecuadorian government has taken steps to control the indigenous move-
ment’s political opposition, the movement has begun to exercise a new form
of 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 Politics

In 1996, the indigenous movement decided to participate in the electoral
process for the first time. The formation of the Movement of National
Pluricultural Unity Pachakutik–Nuevo País (which recalled Jesse Jackson’s
Rainbow Coalition) brought together indigenous peoples, peasants, unions,
Afro-Ecuadorians, and ecologists, as well as women’s, citizen’s, and youth
groups. Candidacies were launched for national and provincial posts within
congress, for mayoral and other municipal positions, and for the presidency
of the republic. After only six weeks of campaigning, Pachakutik won
seventy-five posts, including eight congressional seats, ten mayor’s offices,
and eleven provincial councilor seats. Only eleven of Pachakutik’s winning
candidates were not indigenous.10
However, the new way of doing politics was not limited to the
electoral process. In 1997, after playing a key role in the destitution of
President Abdalá Bucaram, the indigenous movement negotiated with the
new interim government for a state institution with autonomy that would
replace 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, the National Council of Planning and Devel-
opment of Indigenous and Black Peoples (CONPLADEIN) had a gover-
nance structure comprised of the national indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian
organizations.11 This new ethnic alliance, begun with Pachakutik, placed
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an emphasis on shared social, economic, political, and subaltern conditions

and 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 response
to the coloniality of power that had traditionally separated the groups and
put them in competition for resources. Further rupturing the dominant
notion of the indigenous movement was CONPLADEIN’s ability to nego-
tiate directly with the World Bank and Fondo Internacional del Desarrollo
Agrario (FIDA) for the establishment and financing of a project-based
technical arm—Prodepine—with a budget of $51 million. This revealed a
political agency—international as well as national—that could no longer
be discounted.
These new ways 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 becomes
the tool to build the movement, to highlight conditions of subalternity and
colonial difference, and to voice social, cultural, and political demands that
critique state policy and homogeneous constructs of society, citizenship,
and nation. The meaning of these concepts, as well as of democracy, are
also destabilized and put into question by the strategic use of difference.
Moreover, indigenous identity serves as a tool in assembling alliances that
themselves have a strategic or tactical function (de Certeau 1996).
For example, the alliance between the indigenous movement and
Afro-Ecuadorians was conceived, according to some of the leaders involved,
as a joining of forces by the discriminated and oppressed; a way to turn
around the racialized practices that since colonization have separated and
divided the two peoples. Yet Afro leaders maintain that some of these
same racialized practices are reconstructed in the organizational and per-
sonal relationships between indigenous peoples and blacks. By assuming
the 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 this
union, especially when indigenous leaders assume the right to speak for
them. Afro-Ecuadorians began to form their organizations at this time, but
since they did not enter the relationship on equal terms, precisely because
they did not have an organized national entity or program, the hegemonic
indigenous paradigm, or what an Afro-Ecuadorian woman leader (in a
conversation 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 racialization

practices operate among subaltern groups through notions of hierarchy and
hegemony (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 first
has 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 incorporation
within such structures is more easily ignored. I will address this dynamic in
the next section. The second tension has to do with the distinction between
politics and the political made by Slater (1997). For him, the dominion of
politics refers principally to the institutional order of the political system,
including the codes, practices, and meanings this order creates. Geopolitics
adds a spatial dimension that can refer, for example, to the internal territo-
riality of the institutional order, the relations among nation-states, and/or
to 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 moorings
of politics” (Slater 1997, 266). The political makes possible the subversion
of the institutional order, whether that order be the territorial state, the
external or internal colonial power, the meanings that govern subjectivities
and the concepts of citizenship and nation, the regionalized project of
neoliberalism, or universal/global knowledge with its logic of truth. It is
the periphery inside the heart of politics that cannot de taken away. And
it 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 territorial
state and national political systems and institutions, but also with respect to
broader 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 subalternized
knowledges that do not limit themselves to the contested sphere of politics
as 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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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

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

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

Inside/Outside, or Adentro-afuera-en contra

In order to think through the geopoliticalness of the indigenous movement
and 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 a
continuous flow, filtration, or articulation of subject positions. Can a so-
cial movement continue to be considered as such once it enters the state
structure and institution and begins to assume more than just an outside
position? Can it be inside and at the same time against? How can an outside
and against position and perspective operate simultaneously with an inside
reality?
In establishing and organizing CONPLADEIN, the indigenous
movement sought an “inside” place from which to push for social and po-
litical change while at the same time promoting the development of and
access to resources for indigenous and black communities. This latter goal
was aimed at constructing and implementing the communities’ own vi-
sion of and approach to development: desarrollo con identidad (development
with identity). With a governance structure comprised of representatives
from national and regional indigenous and black organizations, and with
a government delegate functioning as chair, CONPLADEIN endeavored
to 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 Bank
but 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 CONAIE
leadership, in conjunction with a small group of indigenous intellectuals,
began to shift the orientation of identity politics. This shift involved the
reconstitution 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 the
Inca colonization, and those that have been subject to other forms of colo-
nization and neglect in the Amazon and coastal regions. The fact that the
push for this reconstitution comes primarily from urban intellectuals and
not from the communities themselves, often going against their preferred
forms of identification, raises some interesting questions about the problem
of social-cultural inscriptions, the (re)production of knowledge, and im-
position within the movement (a different kind of inside-outside-against
tension) in the name of politics. Using ethnic-ancestral and territorial cri-
teria, a series of micro-identities are now named that, although lacking
major significance in daily life, serve to reconceptualize the representativity
and organization of the indigenous movement and substantiate the proposal
for plurinationality. The identification of twenty-eight distinct nationalities
and peoples, while CONAIE recognized only eleven before, is illustrative
of 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 with
Afro organizations and indigenous organizations not totally allied with
CONAIE, and a distancing from other social movements. With this break,
CONAIE began to act on its own, establishing a kind of hegemony of
protest 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 the
strategy of protest was to be, that it would include the alliance with a group
of insurgent colonels, the takeover of Congress, and the eventual assump-
tion of the presidency by a triumvirate composed of an indigenous leader, a
representative of the social movements, and a military man—first a colonel
and 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 a presidential decree in 1998 negotiated by the CONAIE
leadership, CODENPE (Council for the Development of the Nationalities
and [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 the
nacionalidades and pueblos.13 This reorganization has engendered protests
and legal claims within the movement itself primarily because it dismantles
the structure of accountability to local communities. Given this context, it
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

seems appropriate to ask: Is it possible that in promoting and approving

CODENPE the state partly hoped to divide the indigenous movement and
its organizational base as well as to rupture subaltern alliances?
The other concern expressed within the movement is that this
new formulation based on ancestral ethnic criteria and a defined terri-
torial space14 denies the reality in much of the sierra or highland region
where different groups frequently share the same land. It also overlooks the
fact that with increased urban migration, indigenous reality is no longer
a purely rural phenomenon. Other concerns regarding dialogues and tacit
agreements established between the leadership and the government have
also been voiced. All these concerns bring us back to our initial questions:
Can social movements continue to function as such when they enter into the
structures, institutions, and spheres of the state? To what extent does this
relationship 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 to
identify the problems and difficulties of an inside-outside-against articu-
lation, seriously questioning internal leadership, tactics, and government
relations and discussing the need to rethink and reposition itself. The cre-
ation of a space for critical reflection and the subsequent action based on
this reflection suggest a regrouping, a return to consensus, and the recon-
struction of a praxis that might afford a stronger resistance to the neoliberal
project in general, and to economic and political measures that threaten to
further deepen the national crisis in particular.15 This reflection and action
also suggests that the conditions which enable knowledge production have
been reestablished. Arturo Escobar (2000) has defined these conditions as
ones that facilitate knowledge which is both coyuntural and puntual. That
is 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 a
political strategy, and that is “ontologically dirty,” occurring in meetings,
in the preparation of documents, or in other “nonacademic” spaces. This
is the knowledge, which I discussed earlier in the context of CONAIE’s
political project, that is much more apt to drive action.
The practical effectiveness of reconstructing and unifying the
movement and of producing this kind of knowledge was shown in the
February 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 economic measures. The repression by government forces
of protesters both in Quito and in the provinces was the worst seen in
“democratic” times.
The platform developed by leaders and finally accepted by the
government as a negotiation document incorporated needs and concerns
of the majority population, not just of indigenous sectors. By highlighting
everyday problems like the cost of transportation and gasoline as well as
transnational concerns like Plan Colombia, the demands demonstrate levels
of 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 that
established the methodology of negotiation—a process of dialogue that
included both high-level indigenous leaders and representatives from the
bases. By requiring a methodology that recognizes and validates indige-
nous practices of thought, analysis, and collective representation within the
context 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 against
imposed economic and social structural adjustments and against a govern-
ment that responds not to the needs of the citizenry but to multilateral
politics and policies. However, at the same time, the movement intervened
in the political processes, working inside the system without being fenced
in by it, contributing to the redefinition of its limits and meaning. Never-
theless, the government also plays its cards. This has included attempted
co-optation of indigenous leaders, bribing of legislators, and the promotion
of 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 as
part of a new politics of diversity. This new politics is not limited to Ecuador
but can be seen throughout Latin America. It is financed and supported
in great part by the multilateral institutions (like the World Bank and the
International Development Bank) and designed to facilitate the processes
and goals of the globalized neoliberal project.
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

State Tactics and Neoliberal Agendas

What has been the role of the state and the neoliberal project with respect
to cultural identity politics and social movements in Ecuador, and what
kinds of strategies have been exercised in this regard?
Even before the early 1990s, when the indigenous movement
emerged 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 Rodrigo
Borja was to officialize bilingual education, give the bilingual education
office a level of semi-autonomy, and put an indigenous linguist in charge.
When indigenous protests of government policy continued, Borja acted
surprised. The next administration established the Office of Indigenous
Affairs. The populist government of Bucaram, which followed, maintained
this office under direct control of the presidency and added the Ministry
of Ethnic Affairs, with an extended focus to include other ethnic groups,
specifically blacks. Appointed as minister was the then–vice-president of
CONAIE, a Shuar with strong Amazonian backing. Black members of
Bucaram’s populist party were added as staff.17 It is with this government
that 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 a
recognized indigenous leader was at its head required vigilance; it also
further aggravated inside/outside tensions. But it was not until the ethnic
minister and others, including two Amazonian indigenous congressional
representatives, were caught at CONAIE’s national congress literally buy-
ing the votes of indigenous delegates with suitcases full of cash to secure the
election of another Amazonian that the focus and impact of this strategy
became clear.18 During his year-and-a-half reign, Bucaram succeeded not
only in fomenting Amazonian-highland tensions within CONAIE but also
in 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 community
base, he established a model of representation that has continued to hinder
Afro unity and the formation of a national Afro-Ecuadorian organization.
The aim of the politics of incorporation and division of various
governments during the 1990s was not simply to weaken the opposition but
to 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 tolerance
and acceptance of diversity aimed at integrating differences within the
dominant apparatus, controlling social conflict and assuring social stability.
One way to theoretically locate these political strategies is through
the tensions and contingencies of the particular and the universal. Judith
Butler (2000, 165) reminds us that if hegemony is to work, the particular
must 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 by

the indigenous movement claims a broader universal of struggle (against
the neoliberal project and for equality, justice, and self-determination),
a universal that because of particularized and ethnically divisive politics
sometimes appears shadowed. But the appropriation of the particular and
its 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 different
kind of universality. Moreover, the assumption in its use by the state is that
universality 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 and
neoliberal project recognizes them, gives them space within geopolitics,
and simultaneously incorporates them into a universal that has reinvented
itself. With the particular within its purview, this dominant universal be-
comes part and parcel of the transnational neoliberal agenda and, as I later
discuss, of the cultural logic of globalized capitalism.
The play between the particular and the universal are particularly
clear in the present government’s tactics with regards to the indigenous
movement and the movement’s own complicities through participation,
tactics that also demonstrate the present-day nature of the coloniality of
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

power. One example is President Gustavo Noboa’s recent distribution of

picks, shovels, and other basic agricultural tools to highland indigenous
communities with the support of some indigenous institutions. With the
rate of rural poverty currently estimated by indigenous organizations to be
at 95 percent, this particularized “micro” project serves as a smoke screen
for the real universal needs and realities as well as for the government’s
complicity and responsibility in the economic crisis. But do such practices
not also seem to resurrect a paternalistic colonial project and order? Con-
currently, the “macro” project of the Fondo Indígena, a new state structure
that, between support from the Inter-American Development Bank and
the national government, will channel at least $12 million to indigenous
projects,19 affords a strong financial incentive to the movement and its lead-
ership to work with rather than against the state machine and in alliance
with multilateral institutions. These days, “national” politics clearly have
global designs.
Ecuador is one of the few countries in Latin America where social
movements have until now been successful in blocking implementation
of the neoliberal agenda, known in other terms as privatization and state
structural 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. dollar
is the national currency), the government needs to rapidly implement a
series of economic measures aimed at privatizating the public sector and
transferring resources from the state to private companies. With this in
mind, the government presented an initiative to Congress that would have
reformed twenty-two laws and jump-started the privatization not just of
state enterprises like mining, oil, water, and electricity but also of public
spaces, including beaches, parks, and waterways. But before the bill could
be approved, the indigenous movement, in conjunction with the social
movements’ coordinating council, undertook a series of consultations and
developed a counterproposal demonstrating the unconstitutionality of the
proposed 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’s
actions—another new form for them of doing politics—challenged the
state, restricting its space of political action, putting its legitimacy into ques-
tion, and blocking the neoliberal agenda (ICCI 2000b).20 For the present
government and for the neoliberal project in general, the political cost of
this 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 in Manta, and the militarization of indigenous communities on the
border, the need to control the “indigenous problem” and to keep the social
movements divided is paramount not just for state but also for international
interests.21

The “Multiculturalization” of Global Capitalism

Characteristic of the last decade in Ecuador, as in other countries of the
region, is the state’s recognition of and attempt to incorporate cultural di-
versity, specifically the oppositional politics expressed in terms of colonial
difference, into the state institution. Part of this recognition has included
the legislation of indigenous rights and, in Ecuador, of rights for Afro-
Ecuadorians. But as Héctor Díaz Polanco (1998, 5) notes, such recognition
limits the sphere of change to the ethnic particularity (a kind of cultural
relativism) 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 of
the new forms of universality advanced by the discourse and politics of
neoliberal globalization.
The World 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 a
government) and the Interamerican Bank’s recent support of the Fondo
Indígena are illustrative of this neoliberal multiculturalism. As both banks
support indigenous initiatives, they also advise and provide support for
the national government’s implementation of neoliberal policies. Similarly,
transnational oil corporations now negotiate directly with local indigenous
communities, hire sociologists and anthropologists to assist with commu-
nity relations, and design manuals for oil workers about local customs that
outline strategies for establishing amicable relations. They also fund bilin-
gual education programs (see Walsh 1994) and, in media ads, declare their
cultural sensitivity and concern for the environment. Of course, there is a
correspondence between these cultural politics and the economic interests
of 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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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

emphasis placed on tolerance, human rights, and democracy permits “each

specific ‘life-style’ to flourish in its particularity”; tension inevitably results
between the postmodern and postnational state and the earlier “concrete
universality” 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 populations
can more easily target and see, the state and nation are component parts
of a now globalized society—a broader universal—where the particular
and the universal assume contingent and hegemonic functions, and where
the post/transnational market economy reigns. In order to insure that this
economy functions, it becomes imperative to work with the particularisms,
that is, with local governments and populations, and with the colonial
differences posited within (of course made benign by their incorporation
inside the state-trans-territorial apparatus). The recognition of and respect
for cultural diversity, in this sense, becomes a central component of global
capitalism, or what Quijano (1999, 101) refers to as “its other face,” the new
model of postmodern cultural domination (Jameson 1996).
This cultural logic of global capitalism comes to serve as a modern-
day form of colonization that obfuscates and at the same time maintains
the 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 rhetoric
treats “each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as
‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studies and ‘respected’” (Žižek
1997, 44), all the while maintaining a Eurocentric distance. As such, mul-
ticulturalism establishes a relationship with Western cultural imperialism
that is exactly the same as the one between the self-colonization of global
capitalism and traditional imperialist colonialism.
It is these patterns of patronization that, along with strategies
of mediation and incorporation, define the new cultural logic of state-
neoliberal politics toward indigenous groups in Ecuador and the region as
a whole. The official discourses of pluriculturalism assume a fundamental
value 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 more
egalitarian societies but rather at controlling social conflict and insuring
social stability, all in order to push forward the model of accumulation.
However, as Dipesh Chakrabarty (1998, 108) notes, the politics
of 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 countries
are 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, a
neoliberal-global multiculturalism, there are Latin American specificities
and particularities—including the history and subjectivity geopolitically
inscribed in the coloniality of power, and the colonial difference and the
resistances of subaltern groups—that authors like Žižek do not consider.
The Ecuadorian state, for example, uses a discourse and practice
in relation to indigenous peoples that is sanctioned and supported by the
multilaterals. However, the political and epistemic agency of the indigenous
movement, and its unpredictability from the perspective of the dominant
logic, constantly disturbs and destabilizes this discourse and practice. By
identifying as pueblos y nacionalidades with collective rights (and not as
individual subjects) and from the position of their cultural and epistemic
difference, and by proposing other conceptions of nation and democracy
for the whole of society, the indigenous movement upsets the multicul-
tural logic of global capitalism, a logic that derives from the notion of
ethnic-cultural diversity and not from colonial-cultural-epistemic differ-
ence. Moreover, the fact that interculturality was an indigenous political
proposition long before the state inscribed it in the 1998 Constitution (see
Walsh 1999) places the discursive and practical meanings of the term, as
well as those of official pluriculturalism, in permanent conflict and contra-
diction. It is largely for this reason that the marketization of difference and
the large-scale application of neoliberalism have not yet been achieved in
Ecuador.
However, in the case of Ecuador and particularly in light of the
new politics of transnational corporations and of transterritorial interven-
tions like Plan Colombia, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and
dollarization, it is global capitalism, with its often hidden cultural logic
and 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 identify
as critical and committed intellectuals. The crucial question remains of
how to conceptualize this “it,” and how to effectively organize and direct
opposition.
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

The (Re)production/Subalternization of Knowledges,

the University, and Critical Intellectuals
The fluid relation of culture-identity-politics seen in Ecuador’s indigenous
movement and the production and use of knowledge in this relation remain
largely outside the confines of academic institutions. When the indigenous
movement is discussed, it is as an object of study, part of the incessant need
to examine the other not as a source of knowledge but as an objectivized
condition or reality. In a practice typical of modernist tendencies within
the social sciences, disembodied professors and students embark on studies
that split the subject from the object of knowledge and negate the social
processes 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 constituent
part of the epistemological posture of universalism that within the aca-
demic institution continues to define what counts as knowledge and which
individuals produce it.
Not only is this traditional understanding prevalent in Ecuadorian
institutions of higher learning but, worse yet, the gaze is directed toward
theories 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 serious
considerations within it. Zulma Palermo (2001, 94) refers to this as the
reproduction of knowledge and the negation of the social “real”: “Read
in the classrooms are Foucault and Deleuze (until recently it was Barthes
and Kristeva) and their theories of discursive power, while in the streets,
Senate corruption and the decomposition of political power are the focus
of talk, questions that the students are barely informed about and that as
researchers 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 conceptual
categories presented in this work may have a universal use. Nor do I mean
to 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 it
establishes.
In response to the colonial and geocultural subalternization of
knowledge, 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), the
indigenous movement inaugurated in 2000 the Universidad Intercultural
de 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 specific
focus on “scientific research, academic teaching, and technical preparation”
(ICCI 2000a, 5).23

[The Intercultural University] is not about producing one more

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 hybridize
knowledge forms nor invent the best of two possible worlds. Rather, the
university represents the construction of new epistemological frameworks
that 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 difference
to 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 central
to indigenous epistemology, elements that recall the relation of culture-
identity-politics and knowledge which I have already mentioned. The first
is the vision of conflict. This includes the construction and valuation of
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

indigenous peoples through uprisings and mobilizations, dialogues, and

confrontations with the dominant power. It also includes a consideration
of the role of uprisings in validating indigenous demands and proposals.
The second element is tied to the development of indigenous languages and
their potential in terms of knowledge production. The third has to do with
valuing cultural as well as epistemic difference, positioning of indigenous
peoples as subjects and creators of knowledge, not as objects of study. The
fourth 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 the
interrelation of aboriginal knowledges with the knowledges of “universal”
cultures. These five elements form the base of the curriculum (Ramírez
2001).
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 study
to the confines of occidental-universal-liberal knowledge. By recognizing
epistemic diversity, by working with it and at the same time recognizing
and confronting epistemic-colonial violence, the UINPI creates a strategic
model of struggle and of education. This model allows political subjec-
tivities and colonial difference to be (re)articulated, and knowledge to be
politically problematized. What does this suggest in terms of the relation-
ship between social movements, subaltern groups, and universities, and
in terms of our own work and responsibility as critical and committed
intellectuals?
In Ecuador and in other Andean countries, a drastic and growing
divide separates those who have access to a university education, and/or
the means and support to complete it, from those who do not. Although a
scholarship program financed by Prodepine through the World Bank has
enabled a number of indigenous and Afro-descendent students to study at
the undergraduate level, incompletion rates are inordinately high. Students
frequently complain that the curriculum, the pedagogical and epistemic
approach, and the attitude of faculty continually exclude them. The result
is that the voices, epistemologies, histories, and subjectivities of indigenous
and Afro-descendent peoples are generally absent from the university and
academic world, left to be interpreted by others. The development of a
higher education institution within the indigenous movement is a positive
response, but this should not free other institutions from their responsibility
to address these issues nor should it pardon the epistemic-colonial violence
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that continues to characterize these institutions. The challenge established

by the indigenous movement needs to be assumed by other universities as
well as by society. But again, cultural difference should not simply be incor-
porated into dominant, standing structures, in a kind of affirmative action
that 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 to
the meanings and specificities of in-between spaces, contact zones, and bor-
der epistemologies (Bhabha 1994; Pratt 1997 [1992]; Mignolo 2000a). This
restructuring 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 as
colonial-cultural-epistemic difference.
And what about the more fundamental concerns of our own indi-
vidual and collective locations, subjectivities, and responsibilities in relation
to the geopolitics of knowledge? At the very least, such concerns require a
recognition that these locations, subjectivities, and responsibilities exist and
play an important role in our work within the academy, with students, and
in relation to one another. Such concerns should push us to build new types
of academic relationships and dialogue between North and South, South
and North, and within the South. Similarly, they should encourage us to
construct 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 epistemological
practices not just “from” but “among” and “within,” practices of articu-
lation that simultaneously break the division of subject/object and disturb
the modernist project that disciplines subjectivity. They should engender a
more critical attention to global capitalism and to the peculiar way the An-
dean countries are inserted within it. Finally, recognizing this peculiarity
should make us move from the comfortable physical and epistemological
space and place of the university so that we can traverse and pursue other
sites of knowledge production, not just to expand academic knowledge
but, more important, to build strategies, perspectives, and analysis directed
toward the grave injustices and problems confronting the region, continent,
and the planet—strategies, perspectives, and analysis that will allow us to
unmask and confront the power of neoliberalism and global capitalism and
the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practice.
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

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 do
academics own or hold authority over one mission, with social and political
movements responsible for the other. In a reflective world, we are all pro-
ducers of knowledge (Giddens 2000). And for us to unmask and confront
the complexities and threats that neoliberalism and global capitalism pose
within the modern/colonial order, for us to imagine and construct a social
structure radically different, collective knowledge, collective analysis, and
collective 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.]

Notes
The 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 through which 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 to make it one more 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 other members of civil society—coordinated by the Univer-
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
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

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 from knowledge 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 a Western 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. The Amazonian candidate, Antonio Vargas, won the election. From 1996 to October
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 in March 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
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Walsh . Political Subjectivities and Colonial Difference in Ecuador

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, the World 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 from U.S., Canadian, and European institutions of
higher education have helped make 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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