Long Live Atahualpa: Indigenous Politics, Justice, and Democracy in the Northern Andes

7. Beyond Recognition

chapter seven Beyond Recognition My examination of the Inca Atahualpa’s political practice has delineated the different arenas in which access to power and resources is disputed by grassroots organizations, and has contextualized the local case within the larger process of political empowerment of indigenous people at the national level. I now focus on the national level in order to examine the reach and limitations of such political empowerment.1 The Inca Atahualpa case and its successes offer an opportunity to analyze the distinction between local and national politics, and the different predicaments related to these separate yet interrelated spheres of political action. Latin American Multiculturalism The 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium are characterized by remarkable and rapid changes in the relationships between the indigenous movement, the state, and civil society. I analyze the challenges facing the indigenous movement in Ecuador by examining the major events in indigenous politics since the 1990 uprising, which led to the “postrecognition phase,” officially initiated with the recognition of ethnic diversity in the revised constitution of 1998 (Cervone 2003). By “post-recognition phase,” I point not to a moment on a linear temporal line leading toward a predefined end, but to a spatiotemporal convergence of conditions that affected the indigenous movement and its relationships with the Ecuadorian state. Accordingly, the postrecognition phase is characterized by a major shift in terminology and political practice defining Indian-state relationships, summarized by the term multiculturalism, which is understood as a political paradigm that encapsulates the transition from a sup- 234 Chapter Seven posed homogeneity of national identity to the recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity. In the case of Latin America this political paradigm encompasses both the struggle for the recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity promoted by indigenous movements and the actions taken by different states toward official recognition of such diversity and its supposed incorporation into state politics.These two aspects defining the politics of multiculturalism are inextricably interrelated. Multicultural recognition thus signifies a point of departure—and not of arrival—for the creation of a new and more inclusive society. Defining Multiculturalism The term multiculturalism appeared in the United States in the late 1980s as an academic and political definition of cultural and ethnic diversity in a given nation-state (Goldberg 1995). However, as scholars have highlighted, in different contexts and epochs the apparently self-explanatory meaning of the term multiculturalism contains far more ambivalence and ambiguity than might be supposed.2 An idealistic and utopian vision of multicultural societies would assume that ethnically and culturally diverse groups are equally positioned and recognized by the state.Yet such an uncomplicated view does not account for the multiple and diverse forms in which power differentials and hierarchies among groups are generated historically, socially , and politically, often framing such distinctions with the language of race and ethnicity. Elazar Barkan’s (2001) analysis of multiculturalism and pluralistic models of society historically positions the emergence of those notions as contemporary imaginings promoted by “guilty” nations in order to readdress, among other things, the oppression of native peoples since colonialism. Multiculturalism, therefore, is not simply a descriptive term indicating cultural hybridity or diversity. Whether demanded by social movements or sponsored by states, multiculturalism is a political act of recognition of ethnic and cultural rights that seeks to address historical inequalities and oppression. As such, the politics of recognition produces different and often divergent understandings of the meaning and scope of these rights. Philosophers such as Charles Taylor (1994) and Will Kymlicka (1995), who have theorized multiculturalism within the framework of liberal political philosophy, consider the issue of ethnocultural diversity and its recognition as an inherent tension of the liberal and universalist notion of Beyond Recognition 235 rights. Taylor (1994) argues, for example, that the recognition of human rights as universal values implicitly recognizes the right of every individual to his or her own human and cultural integrity. Multicultural recognition, therefore, is the logical consequence of this inherent contradiction. However , the recognition of a diversity of cultures also inherently implies the existence of a number of distinctive collectivities as the beneficiaries of cultural rights—all equally “worthy” of respect. Such a universal principle inevitably creates a tension between the liberal notion of rights, which is fundamentally individual, and a collective notion of citizenship and rights (Kymlicka 1995; Taylor 1994). To this Kymlicka responds by proposing a typology of “diverse” groups and their specific rights...