Social Change in the Neoliberal Era: The Indigenous Movement in Saquisili, Ecuador.

Abstract

This dissertation explores social change in the post-Cold War period through a two-year ethnographic study of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement. Like many other 1990s social movement organizations, the CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) pursued social transformation along three pathways: participatory democracy, cultural citizenship, and development with identity. In all three the CONAIE has met with seeming success, and yet the outcomes of its twenty-year history have disappointed many. Drawing on participant observation, including a year of residency in an indigenous community, and formal interviews in Saquisilí, one of the highland cantons where the CONAIE and its political party were strongest, this dissertation argues that the three routes of social transformation have not produced theorized progressive outcomes. On the contrary, they have strengthened the neoliberal capitalist project they were meant to subvert. Participatory democracy established a form of participatory clientelism that served to easily establish links between indigenous communities and neoliberal development agents. Cultural citizenship produced complex situations in which certain expressions of indigenity were not considered ‘Other.’ However, those expressions, defined by the dominant ‘national’ culture, effectively excluded actually existing indigenous peoples. Development with identity perpetuated under-development by its reliance on romanticized notions of indigenous tradition held by development agents, restricting indigenous aspirations to what they consider culturally appropriate. Moreover, it is argued that the three routes of transformation have been mechanisms of neoliberal governmentality, through which the rationalities of neoliberalism, understood in the Foucaultian sense, as a mode of governance, and practices based on those rationalities have shaped indigenous subjectivities into self-regulating, neoliberal subjects. This dissertation asserts that neoliberal governmentality grants indigenous peoples opportunities to participate in state spaces of empowerment but that change is limited to cultural rights and that which does not threaten the economic order. Although at times they can push beyond the pre-established parameters and challenge neoliberalism, participation in Saquisilí demobilized the indigenous movement, reinforced neoliberalism, and restricted the scope of social change.