Indianidad evanescente en los Andes de Ecuador

This book is a result of the author’s vocation for research on the crossed paths of ethnicity, development and power in Latin America. It questions the changing nature of the relationship between public powers, the strategies deployed by the dominant groups and the subaltern ones (specifically those classified as “indigenous”). It explores, from their point of view of the indigenous, the management of ethnic identity as an element that can be activated in the fight for recognition, selective integration or access to any kind of resources. Taking as its central axis the casuistry of the Andes of Ecuador, it offers elements of comparison with the parallel and diverse trajectories experienced in the Andean region as a whole, mainly since the liquidation of the national developmental regimes in the last third of the last century. Its main interest is the dialectical relationship between the universe of development and its agents (public and private) and the indigenous and peasant groups (also heterogeneous) that are the object of intervention: their strategic capacity for response, accommodation, resistance or resilience, depends on the case and the conjuncture. It constitutes a commitment to the search for useful knowledge for reflection and exchange, beyond the academy, with activists, intellectuals, Indianists or Indianophiles who avoid the neo-romantic and ideologized essentialism so common in these times.