Indigenous Authors on Their Own History and Culture

Recognition of ethnic diversity in multicultural nations of the Americas is changing relationships in domestic and in public life. The three books reviewed here exemplify the evolving methodological and conceptual frameworks that are ongoing in anthropology as scholars attempt to describe and analyze the impact of multicultural coexistence. The cultural revolutions related to civil rights and gender rights that took place in the 1960s and 1970s are now bearing fruit in academic publications that reflect the greater concern with everyday political and social changes that enter intimate spheres and also engage with changing relations of what were marginalized sectors in nation states and occupational spheres.

The works under review cover the Kichua-speaking Otavalan community of Peguche, Ecuador, the Aymara speakers of Wila Kjarka in Bolivia, and the Tzotzil speakers of Chenalhó in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The authors are more explicit about their collaboration with consultants in those communities than were most authorities in the past. All three anthropologists draw upon long-term, repeated visits, allowing them to envision the interactions among three generations as their early contemporaries became grandparents and in turn their children became parents. Within this generational nexus lie profound transformations as people cope with forced mobility in a globalizing world that is changing before their eyes.

In their assessments of these changes, all three of the anthropologists raise the question: What does it mean to be indigenous since the national awakening in the last quarter of the twentieth century? That awakening was marked by the first National Indian Congress in Mexico, initiated by the Catholic Diocese in 1974. The discussions there anticipated constitutional changes in 1992 that recognized the multicultural basis of Mexico. Similar changes in national constitutions occurred in Bolivia in 1994 and Ecuador in 1998. The quincentennial anniversary on October 12, 1992, of the “discovery” of America celebrated five hundred years of indigenous peoples retaining their cultural identities, some in states with large minorities or even majorities, as in Bolivia. Other Latin American countries that are not treated in these volumes, including Brazil, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela, have also made constitutional changes recognizing multiculturalism and reflecting the hemispheric movement toward multiethnic participation in governance.

Ethnicity as identity and practice

In Otavalan Women, Ethnicity, and Globalization, Linda D’Amico has taken the earlier ethnography of Peguche written by the accomplished anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons in the 1940s as a benchmark for comparing her own contemporary ethnography from 1989 to 1997. D’Amico gives full credit to Parsons for her recognition of interculturalism and her “feminist methodology.” By this she means Parsons’s positive portrayal of women’s agency in the highly developed entrepreneurial and marketing activities that characterized Otavalan society. Because Otavalans had been involved in an intercultural commercial center for textiles and vegetable products since prehistory, they were sophisticated entrepreneurs.

This is an important theme in D’Amico’s work as she shows us how “women actively rewove traditions to suit the contingencies of everyday life” (9). Women’s ability to manipulate symbols of cultural identity was, she asserts, the basis for Otavalans’ endurance as a distinctive group. This is evident in the artisanal products they make, wear, and sell. These are constantly changing as artisans respond to aesthetic impulses of the buyers yet remain attentive to Otavalan themes and talents. Women’s entry into relations with foreigners inside and beyond the borders of Ecuador enables them to promote the relations of indigenous groups in their networks with foreign agents to help cope with globalizing trends that have disinherited other ethnic groups.

D’Amico introduces us to Parson’s...