Governing Indigenous Territories: Enacting Sovereignty in the Ecuadorian Amazon by Juliet S. Erazo (review)

This thought-provoking and readable book presents the complex story of an indigenous Kichwa community in the Ecuadorian Amazon that successfully claimed a large territory from the state. This achievement is just the beginning of Juliet Erazo’s analysis, however, as the community then had to organize itself to be able to govern territory it had obtained, which also required new forms of governing its indigenous territorial citizens.

Erazo depicts the internal negotiations—including conflicts, alliances, and political strategies—in an indigenous community whose members are shown to be thoroughly political actors. These are not just internal matters, however. The ethnographic material is set in the context of changing social relations over an extended period of time, and examines regional, national, and international processes that constrain and enable local possibilities. At the same time, Erazo does not shortchange the importance of local ethnic perspectives and cultural models, in a discussion, for instance, of deeply rooted ways of thinking about territory and landscape. But by showing that these conceptions are not static but rather have been forged over time in shifting circumstances, she also demonstrates how local actors in this region have been entangled with broader processes and relationships for many centuries.

Rather than depicting the community as victims of progress or noble savages—common depictions of Amazonian populations—Erazo builds a portrait of a group of people faced with difficult decisions on matters on which reasonable people may (and clearly do) disagree. She does not present a harmonious community of people with a single set of experiences and perspectives, but rather a population challenged to deal with dilemmas, generated both internally and externally, and engaged in quite serious arguments over how to proceed. The broader political landscape on which these arguments play out is itself in motion, with shifting emphases on how communities are expected to demonstrate productive and responsible use of their lands, from the promotion of ranching in the area through national agrarian policy, to the (conflicting) promotion of forest conservation in the context of international environmental discourse and policy.

A major contribution of this book is its exploration of how local actors themselves necessarily develop governmental strategies toward their fellow community members. Erazo does an excellent job of exploring the internalization of some of these strategies by local political leaders, in ways that don’t make them straightforward handmaidens of the state. Rather, they must adopt and adapt these strategies in order to be effective advocates for their community. In doing so she produces a significant analysis of both indigenous-state relations in Ecuador and of indigenous organizing there in general. While Erazo’s work will be of interest to other anthropologists working in the area of political ecology, as well as to scholars of the Amazon or Ecuador or Latin America, her insights into governmentality will appeal to a broader audience of scholars of state formation.

Altogether, this book makes a compelling argument for what a nuanced ethnographic perspective, grounded in everyday activities and lived experience and simultaneously sensitive to historical change, can offer to an understanding of broader geopolitical processes. Indeed, I have already used it in a graduate seminar on the anthropology of the state, where its theoretical insights were of considerable interest to students who were largely not Latin Americanists. This book also provoked discussion about the role of the anthropologist, as it shows how over time researchers become enmeshed in the communities where they work, and the resulting complex positioning that enables some kinds of research (and activism) while constraining other possibilities. This may indeed be inevitable with sustained research, and Erazo’s book brings these issues out in ways conducive to fruitful discussion. This book may also prompt student readers to think critically about the involvement of North American and European environmental organizations in the region, and perhaps even how they themselves...