Sarah A. Radcliffe

Culture and Development: Taking Culture Seriously in Development for Andean Indigenous People

In this paper we develop a critical analysis of the new paradigm of culture and development, in which culture is taken seriously as a factor in development thinking and policy. Our analysis aims to understand how and where concepts of culture have come into development thinking and planning. Viewing cultures as multiple and development as a set of culturally embedded practices and meanings, our approach raises issues about how development paradigms have adopted explicit concepts of culture and/or carried within them implicit cultural norms. In this paper we develop a postcolonial and poststructuralist account sensitive to the historically and geographically variable and contested nature of the connections of culture with development, and analyze the ways in which ‘culturally appropriate development’ is thought and practiced in the Andes.

The Excluded ‘Indigenous’? The Implications of Multi-Ethnic Policies for Water Reform in Bolivia

Recent legislative changes throughout Latin America have produced a swathe of new laws that include multicultural agendas (Stavenhagen 1996). These laws cover a range of areas, including good governance, constitutional reform, decentralisation and resource management. The main objective of multi-ethnic policies is usually to achieve social inclusivity. However, as Lopez’s (1993) study of the evolution of the terms ‘pluri-cultural’, ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘pluri-national’ in Ecuador during the indigenous uprisings of 1990 and 1992 illustrates, specific terminology emerges as the result of strategic representations made by different groups about particular events and debates. This chapter examines how such processes of representation are becoming important in the context of specific development projects and indicates how the representation of people as ‘indigenous’ or not indigenous — regardless of the validity of these labels — shapes the outcome of the application of new laws.

Development, the state, and transnational political connections: state and subject formations in Latin America

Focusing on the processes of making and sustaining transnational political ties between actors, international actors and states, this paper reviews recent work from a number of disciplines on globalization and politics, and outlines an agenda for future research. Rather than seeing transnational political linkages merely as forerunners to the loss of local sovereignty, the paper argues for a wider conceptualization of transnational connections, embedded within processes of state formation in Latin America. Using a variety of examples, it is argued that transnational networks are associated with a wide range of meanings and a variety of responses by diverse actors. Drawing on recent work in political science, post-structuralism and anthropology, it is suggested that geographical concepts - related to scale, process and networks - offer a means through which to analyze and ‘map out’ these transnational political processes.

Environmentalist thinking and/in geography

In recent years, a new type of determinist environmental thinking has emerged. It can be understood to be one strand in a much broader realm of ‘environment talk’. Many human geographers have expressed a combination of scepticism and surprise at the apparently inexorable rise of the neo-environmentalist arguments which differ from early twentieth-century environmental determinism yet continue to draw upon biologistic accounts of human culture. Although geography has in recent years been at the forefront of the academic discussions of environmental change in relation to science, institutional context, political costs and human impacts, the discipline nevertheless has to contend with a widespread misperception of the place of environment in human affairs and the world’s future. This Forum discusses the context for the rise of, and consequences of, determinist accounts.

Indigenous Professionalization: Transnational Social Reproduction in the Andes

Indigenous professionalization is occurring throughout Latin America at an increasing pace as new careers open up in social development. Under what is heralded as socially inclusive neoliberalism, a “development with identity” paradigm is producing new university courses focused on indigenous issues. Influenced by discourses of social and human capital and addressing intersections of multiculturalism and development, these courses mobilize and help shape definitions of indigeneity; they also create spaces where donors and indigenous activists contest and debate understandings of development. Operating in a range of institutions, indigenous professionalization courses are led by a small elite group of academics and practitioners who move between programs and countries. Students also move transnationally. We argue that these courses, their classrooms and their curricula are intent on understanding intercultural situations transnationally, galvanizing international funding and support from bilateral and multilateral agencies as well as local and state actors. The social reproduction of indigenous professionalization is therefore transnational, yet grounded. At times, indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced by jumping scale; at other times, it works through established social and spatial hierarchies. This essay examines how indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced as a contested process through which notions of “good” and “culturally appropriate” development are constituted and consolidated.

Latin American Indigenous Geographies of Fear: Living in the Shadow of Racism, Lack of Development, and Antiterror Measures

Abstract U.S.-dominated geographies of fear after 11 September 2001 represent indigenous peoples as potential security threats and destabilizing influences on Latin American nation-states. This article contextualizes these narratives by outlining the geographies of fear to which Latin American indigenous populations have been subjected in nation-building, resulting in restricted development opportunities and insecure livelihoods. As recent neoliberal development restructures indigenous rights, indigenous geographies of hope remain only unevenly realized. Yet, as a proclaimed alternative to development, postdevelopment approaches only partially capture the nature of indigenous geographies of hope. By critically evaluating neoliberal and postdevelopment approaches, the article ends by outlining the specific perspective geography brings to development.

Imaginative Geographies, Postcolonialism, and National Identities: Contemporary Discourses of the Nation in Ecuador

If the cultural significance of ’imagined geographies’ for informing the practices of colonialism has been increasingly widely recognized, its importance in the postcolonial world has been less widely analysed.’ Here I examine the institutional and discursive bases to imagined geographies of Ecuador’s postcolonial space. While interpreting colonialism’s effects engages with those discourses and practices embedded within the geographical imaginations of colonizers, travel writers, and novelists, comtemporary ’decolonization’ of mental maps and geographical imaginations has been less thoroughly studied. Continuing struggles around the creation of imaginative geographies by a variety of ’nationalist’, indigenous, and oppositional groups within postcolonial states themselves raises questions for postcolonial geography. Various social groups within the contemporary Third World are seeking creatively to reconcile their ’place’ in the global map and attempting to produce their own imaginative geographies for both internal and external audiences.2 Such creative reorganizing of place and identity are of great interest as the ’new’ world order and globalization help refashion identities and reposition countries in the global econo-

Reterritorialised Space and Ethnic Political Participation: Indigenous Municipalities in Ecuador

Municipalities with an indigenous mayor or council majority represent the reterritorialising of political units and the remaking of political subjects in Ecuadorian formal politics. These indigenous municipalities represent the successful construction of an indigenous political party, involving active citizen participation. Framed by neo-liberal decentralisation legislation in the 1990s reconfiguring Ecuadors political spaces, the reterritorialisation of politics is bound up with transnational connections that shape the national law on municipalities and the practices of local government. Indigenous municipalities are thereby contextualised in a complex politics of scale, as well as the emergence of new subjects of politics. Our focus is on the processes giving rise to indigenous-led municipalities and the implications of indigenous control of local government. Despite important political gains, we argue that the inclusionary impulse of decentralisation legislation and social movement politics is limited by persistent racial and gendered political cultures.

Frontiers and popular nationhood: geographies of identity in the 1995 Ecuador-Peru border dispute

Abstract Drawing on substantive work on Ecuadorian national identities, an examination is made of the multiple geographies of identities which were articulated and negotiated during the border dispute between Ecuador and Pern in January and February 1995, an incident which became known as Tiwintza. While territorial claims and border protocols (particularly the 1942 Rio Protocol) form a significant geography of identity through which state-initiated nation-building imaginative geographies are articulated, these are not the only geographies imagined and expressed by citizens during and around the time of the dispute. Material from survey questionnaires about national identities before the recent dispute provide contextual information for the analysis of varied responses to the 1995 incident, and allow for a theoretical consideration of relations between dominant and popular imaginative geographies and national identities. The particular situation of the Shuar-Achuar indigenous groups, and of a Peruvian and Ecuadorian womens statement, provide illustrations of these popular ‘re-drawings’ of borders.

Reimagining the nation: community, difference, and national identities among indigenous and mestizo provincials in Ecuador

During the late 1980s and 1990s, Andean Ecuador experienced the reconfiguration of national ‘imagined community’, thereby making a new civil society. With the aid of research in rural and urban Cotopaxi province—which comprises self-identified indigenous and mestizo populations—I examine how varied notions of community are expressed at the present time. Evidence from Cotopaxi suggests that senses of community are considerably more ambivalent and uncertain than either social movements or nation-centred analysts recognise. Provincial inhabitants of the Ecuadorian Andes have constituted a number of different ‘routes to community’, utilising the various resources, institutions, and cultural practices available to them, and forging an identity and political agenda from within wider circuits of power, capital, and flows. The recommunalisation of Andean society taking place at ‘local’ spatial scales and in diverse arenas—such as religion, civil associations, consumption, land distribution—has profound implications for the projects of nation building by the state, and the mobilisation around an ethnic politics of CONAIE (the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador). Serrano populations formulated a critical political interpretation of the (national) community they comprise, whereas the community of indigenous nationalities offered by CONAIE appears more attractive.