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Preface and Acknowledgments
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Millennial Ecuador became visible worldwide on January 21, 2000, when thousands of indigenous and nonindigenous peoples from all over the republic “took” the Legislative Palace in Quito, the country’s capital. There, in the democratic heart, soul, and cerebrum of the nation, portals of power were opened to them by the Heroes of Cenepa, the soldiers — of all races and ethnic identities — who fought bravely in the war with Peru in 1995. The subsequent ramifications of the conjuncture of military might and expanding indigenous social and political space received global scrutiny, and publications within Ecuador documented, and continue to document, ways by which indigenous people came to epitomize el pueblo, the people themselves. In 1981 the University of Illinois Press published the 811-page edited book Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador. It marked, for me, twenty years of experience in Ecuador and on Ecuadorian subjects, including especially the dynamics of Afro–Latin American culture of Esmeraldas Province of the northwest coast, Canelos Quichua and Achuar Jivaroan cultures of Pastaza Province in the Amazonian region, and peoples and their cultural systems in Tungurahua, Cotopaxi, Pichincha, and Imbabura Provinces in the Sierra. Twenty-two more years have passed, Cultural Transformations is out of print, and our attention again turns to the subjects that I have pursued since first visiting northern Andean and coastal Ecuador in the summer of 1961. In some ways, Millennial Ecuador is a sequel to Cultural Transformations. The first work stressed modernity and surgent ethnicity and sought comprehensive coverage of available contemporary ethnography. The emergence in nationalist consciousness of indigenous peoples of the Amazonian region and the cultural systems of contemporary indigenous peoples in this and other areas were stressed as examples of national modernity. The comprehensive coverage was an endeavor to represent as many of the cultural facets of modern Ecuador as possible, given the experiences and talents of the ethnographers whose expertise emerged in the context of sustained field research. Modernity referred to the complex of features that surfaced in the Americas soon after the European conquest as the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal culminated in a system of economic prosperity and class mobility for some, the oppression of indigenous and Afro-Latin American peoples, and a false resolution of this oppression through the ideology of mestizaje. By ix p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s combining modernity and ethnicity and heightening the representation of peoples of the Amazonian region, Cultural Transformations sought to move current scholarship to a new level of understanding of resurgent cultural forces within structures of domination and hegemony. Some criticized Cultural Transformations for its emphasis on the underlying system of power of the Amazonian peoples in the context of nationalist modernization. Time has proven our focus quite appropriate, if not prescient. Only nine years after publication of the tome, the first indigenous uprising occurred. Two years after that, the Caminata de Pastaza a Quito, later called the March for Land and Life, from Amazonian Puyo to the capital of Quito embodied some of the very imagery suggested in Cultural Transformations and elaborated in my final, reflective chapter in the book edited by Jonathan D. Hill, Rethinking History and Myth: “It is as though the collective body of forest natives is growing toward the Quito head, itself transformed by conquest to something alien yet attainable.” In March 1992, this reflection was mirrored not only in the indigenous march to Quito but also in the internal symbolism and dramatic metaphors that unfolded as the caminata proceeded . In 1994, the millennial social movement Pachakutik formed in Amazonian and Andean Ecuador and joined with the Nuevo País movement radiating out of Quito. The indigenous peoples of Amazonia have been central in the recent ousters of two presidents of the republic, and their presence is now felt, if not always recognized, in every sector where power is exercised. In Millennial Ecuador, we turn our attention to the dual system of globalizing modernity and millennial movements and the multiple postmodernities of their conjunctures that have come to characterize this nation-state. Following Peter Worsley, who wrote of these matters more than forty-five years ago, by millennium and millenarianism I mean a situation in which people express serious dissatisfaction with existing social relations and yearn for a happier life. A happier life is imagined in a setting that transforms people’s current social...