COMUNEROS: 
COMMUNITY AND INDIGENEITY IN SARAGURO, ECUADOR
JAMES R. STANGER
B.A. Anthropology, University of Lethbridge, 2008
A Thesis
Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies
of the University of Lethbridge
in Partial Fulfillment of the 
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of Anthropology
University of Lethbridge
LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA, CANADA
© James Stanger, 2011
Abstract
 This thesis examines the concept of the indigenous community in Saraguro, 
Ecuador. I explore the myriad and co-existing ideas of community and community 
participation at the local level, focusing on two of the defining practices of community 
integration: monthly assemblies and communal labour parties. Acknowledging the role of 
the state in the production of local communities, the historical and contemporary  relations 
between highland Ecuadorian indigenous communities and the state are examined in an 
effort to contextualize the importance placed on communities as autonomous spaces. 
Centering around a nationwide indigenous-led protest  in May of 2010, ideas of mestizaje, 
modernization, historical fears of the Indian, and community  justice are discussed to help 
analyze the continuously negotiated boundary between indigenous communities and the 
nation-state. Finally, competing conceptualizations of indigeneity  are examined with 
respect to a recent neo-Inkaic cultural revitalization movement, partly  NGO sponsored, 
that has emerged in the area. 
iii
Acknowledgements
 I wish to acknowledge, in the first place, all of those people of Saraguro whose 
lives inform this thesis and who made my time with them so memorable: my hosts in 
Ñamarín, the members and directors of Fundación Kawsay, the students and staff of Inka 
Wasi and Inti Raymi schools, the Ñamarín cabildo members and all of the Ñamarín 
comuneros, as well as everyone else who was kind enough to meet, teach, and suffer me. 
I would also like to acknowledge the support of my hosts in Cuenca, the Guillen-
Velastegui family, and the great teachers and staff at CEDEI. 
 I also owe a great debt to a number of those at the University of Lethbridge, 
particularly my supervisor, Patrick C. Wilson, as well as Andrea Cuellar and Janice 
Newberry for their years of support and instruction, and to the other members of my 
supervisory committee, Jo-Anne Fiske, and Jason Pribilsky. In addition, the members of 
my cohort have been very supportive over the past two years: Brett Freeman, Jason and 
Jennifer Jenson, Ling Ling Fan, Estanislao Pazmiño, Alison Korn, Marco Yunga, and 
Joanna Waszkiewicz. Christopher Harrison, Nick Steeves, Nerissa Bhola, and Daniel and 
Jennifer Ragan have been my constant friends throughout, and I’d like to thank them for 
that. 
 Finally, this thesis would not have been possible without financial support in the 
form of a Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship from the Social Sciences and 
Humanities Research Council of Canada, a Graduate Student Scholarship from the 
Alberta Advanced Education’s Achievement Scholarship program, a Queen Elizabeth II 
iv
Scholarship  from the Government of Alberta, as well as other support from the School of 
Graduate Studies and the University of Lethbridge. 
v
Table of Contents
Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... iv
Table of Contents ...............................................................................................................vi
Table of Figures ................................................................................................................vii
Chapter 1 - Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2 - The Indigenous Community of Ñamarín .......................................................49
Chapter 3 - The State, Autonomy, and Protest ..................................................................84
Chapter 4 - Multiple Imaginings of Indigeneity and Being Indian .................................114
Chapter 5 - Conclusions ..................................................................................................161
Bibliography.....................................................................................................................168
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Table of Figures
Figure 1: Map of Saraguro, Ecuador....................................................................................3
Figure 2: Overlooking the Saraguro Valley..........................................................................5
Figure 3: Saraguro women with their children on Easter Sunday.....................................14
Figure 4: Linda sorts and dries the harvest of corn, favas, and beans...............................45
Figure 5: The Community of Ñamarín..............................................................................51
Figure 6: Men play volleyball outside of the casa comunal..............................................64
Figure 7: An approximation of the water system in Ñamarín............................................69
Figure 8: The páramo of Ñamarín, looking South towards Uritusinka.............................73
Figure 9: Participating in the Pase del Niño parade, a young woman is costumed as an 
“Indian”..............................................................................................................................93
Figure 10: The paro at San Vicente...................................................................................96
Figure 11: Protesters prepare for the arrival of the police at the Ñamarín roadblock......100
Figure 12: A municipal employee is stranded on his tractor by protesters......................103
Figure 13: Two youth destroy a billboard........................................................................111
Figure 14: A calendar distributed by the Jatari Foundation presents Andean and Inkaic 
imagery.............................................................................................................................128 
Figure 15: Neo-Inkas lead school children in a ceremonial dance during Inti Raymi 
2010..................................................................................................................................137
Figure 16: Fiesta sponsors stand outside of the church in Saraguro during Easter.........141
Figures 17 and 18: Students from the Inti Raymi school in Las Lagunas depict members 
of their family, re-interpreted with imagery of the students’ own interest in metal.........155
vii
Chapter 1 - Introduction
 One cloudy afternoon, soon after I had arrived in the small town of Saraguro and 
while I was still living in the tourist  hostel that perches overlooking the town itself, I was 
returning along the rutted dirt road from the market when I passed a middle aged 
indigenous man. I nodded politely  in his direction, and he waved me over, asking, as it 
seemed everyone did, where I was from. Surprised that I could speak passable, if 
rudimentary  Spanish, he invited me to sit with him along the grassy  bank, inquiring about 
why I was there, what about my family, what Canada was like. Enrique, he said his name 
was. Originally  from Illincho, a nearby  indigenous community, he had been living in the 
town of Saraguro itself for years. His worn, dirty, black felt hat sat high on his head, his 
rubber boots exposing his knees below short, black pants. As a group  of teachers passed 
down the road, coming from a meeting at the hostel, he paused to nod to each one, waited 
until they had passed, and proposed we go to the nearby  tienda (small shop) for a drink. 
While we downed warm trago (cheap sugar cane alcohol) and conversed to the curiosity 
of the two other indigenous men similarly drinking, two young women dressed in bright 
sweat pants pushed baby strollers up the hill. “My neighbours,” he explained, “they  used 
to be indigenous, but not anymore. It’s a shame.” 
 My brief meeting with Enrique evoked many of the themes and experiences that I 
was to encounter in the coming months: the curiosity that a foreigner can still elicit, the 
social importance of drinking, the deference that poor indigenous persons may still show 
to those richer, whiter than them, the fear of culture loss. The process of mestizaje, of 
cultural mixing that in Saraguro is synonymous with shedding one’s identity as 
1
indigenous, has been documented throughout the Andes for decades1. The women’s 
clothes, Enrique went on to explain, were the markers of their loss of indigenous 
identification. Rather than the traditional anaku (skirt), the Saraguro version of which is 
long, black, and pleated, these women chose the sweat pants and t-shirts that many 
Saraguros say is just one symptom of a generation that is losing its identity. Others say 
that the youth just don’t want to farm or herd cattle as their parents did, or live in the 
countryside, or wear their hair long. I was there to try  and study one other aspect of 
indigeneity whose supposed degradation is being lamented: the indigenous community. 
Saraguro: A brief overview
 The cantón (county) of Saraguro is located in the southern Ecuadorian province of 
Loja, about 60 km. north of the provincial capital of Loja, and 150 km. south of Cuenca, 
Ecuador’s third largest city  and capital of Azuay  province. Saraguro is the name of the 
canton, parish, the town center, as well as the indigenous ethnic group that is home to the 
area (see Ogburn 2008 for a discussion on the possible origins of Saraguro as an ethnic 
group and place name). The town of Saraguro rests in a valley  formed by the Paquishapa 
river, through which the Panamerican highway winds, connecting Saraguro parish to 
Urdaneta in the north, and San Lucas to the south. Saraguro county has a population of 
about 30,000 inhabitants spread between the town, parish centers, and a number of 
smaller villages and communities. The lowest valleys have an elevation under 1500 
1 Mestizaje (cultural mixing) in Saraguro is popularly understood as a process of acculturation or 
culture loss that results in a decline of appreciation or expression of indigenous identities. In spite 
of this fear, indigenous groups are not disappearing, though the content of particular indigenous 
identities may be changing. Within the anthropological literature, mestizaje is more commonly 
associated with state projects aimed at constructing a singular national racial/social category, 
attempting to paint over or transform existing differences. 
2
meters, and the peak of Tayta Pulla, the mountain that dominates the panorama around 
Saraguro, tops out at just under 3400 meters. Land used for agriculture is not restricted by 
elevation, though most land above 2800 meters is largely pasture. The climate is 
temperate, with warm days alternating with very cool nights, though frost is rare. Most of 
the region has adequate rainfall throughout the year, but the eastern part of the canton is 
drier than other areas. 
Figure 1: Map of Saraguro, Ecuador. Map by Brett Freeman. 
3
 In the immediate vicinity of the town center are a handful of indigenous Saraguro 
communities whose members variously  participate in agriculture, cattle herding, 
weaving, wage labour in Saraguro or elsewhere, education (as teachers, principles, and 
administrators in Saraguro itself or within the Inka Rimay indigenous bilingual 
intercultural education network), non-profit social development organizations, as well as 
a whole range of other careers both rural and urban. Due to the increasing need for 
reliance on a cash economy, many indigenous Saraguros still live in these rural 
communities and supplement an agro-pastoral livelihood with regular or more informal 
work outside of the communities. Of course, it would be more accurate to say that much 
of the younger generations (those under 30) may supplement wage work with occasional 
agriculture and herding, while many in the older generations (those over 50) have 
amassed sufficient land and resources to live almost exclusively off agriculture and 
herding practices, selling cheese and the occasional cow, sheep, or guinea pig. As is 
commonplace in Ecuador, younger Saraguros, in their late teens and even into their 
thirties, often migrate to urban centers for education and work for extended periods of 
time, though their lives may often be split between rural and urban spaces2. Many choose 
to return home when their luck fails, when they  finish university  and find employment in 
Saraguro, or when they inherit or buy enough land to support a household of their own 
2 While Saraguro men are more likely to engage in regular wage labour either in a city or in the 
township of Saraguro itself, women also migrate for education and in search of work. Both sexes 
are responsible for the majority of tasks related to agriculture and herding, with the exception of 
plowing, a male task. Women, meanwhile, are more likely to be responsible for tending to the 
guinea pigs, rabbits, and chickens, as well as most domestic chores. Still, there are many 
exceptions, and with the availability of a daycare in the community, dual parent households may 
be supported by both parents engaged in primary wage labour or steady employment in a range 
of fields. 
4
(see Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999; 2009 for similar cases in Otavalo and Tigua, 
respectively). 
Figure 2: Overlooking the Saraguro Valley.
 The town of Saraguro is often a sleepy little parochial town, livening up on 
Sundays for market and church goers, its dusty dirt roads filled to the brim on these days 
as people from all over the canton go about their business buying produce, fish, meat, 
housewares, bootlegged DVDs and the latest CDs from the stalls set up at the feria libre, 
the open air market. The best deals can be had at the end of the day, when tired vendors 
have mostly stopped calling and enticing customers, and are eager to sell their last 
bunches of plantains, apples, mangoes, oranges, and other fruit that is shipped in from 
coastal plantations or farms in the warmer eastern (oriente) lowlands and make their way 
5
through the regional highland markets. The rest of the week, shops and tiendas, and the 
few restaurants sit mainly empty, with high school students in their brown or blue 
uniforms sucking on bolos (juice frozen in a slender plastic bag) and chatting in the two 
plazas that form the heart of the town. On Sundays, though, white pick up trucks and 
other vehicles crowd the main road along with interprovincial busses and local taxis, each 
taking whole families and their goods in and out of town. Resting from shopping, men 
and women crowd around the cement bleachers off to the side of the weathered wooden 
market stalls to watch men play 3-on-3 volleyball. The high stakes wages placed by 
teams, ranging from a few dollars a head to 150 dollars or more, mean that the tensions 
and excitement can be very high, providing quite a bit of entertainment. Groups of men 
sit on the sparse grass where it can be found flanking the court, and toss insults and off-
coloured jokes at  the players and each other as they share bottles of beer, passing around 
a single cup between themselves. 
 Down the road, partially paved with cement blocks, the main plaza’s benches are 
filled with families, groups of friends, and young couples who search for what little shade 
is provided by the tall trees lining walking paths in the plaza in the midday sun. Those 
streets, uneven, only  partially finished, and usually half blocked by  large piles of sand 
and dirt from ongoing road and building construction, were supposedly part of an election 
promise of the alcalde (mayor), who in the past years, some claim, has only succeeded in 
paving a few. The downpours of rainy months, compounded by poor drainage, mean that 
the usually dusty roads get eaten away by  the quickly flowing streams that cut trenches 
and potholes into the surface, making a muddy mess that people hop and skip to cross. 
6
 Family run tiendas side with little restaurants that offer mostly  set meals that 
come with a soup, rice, and a bit of vegetable and stewed meat. Lining the main plaza are 
a number of credit  unions bearing such hopeful names as “Semilla del progreso” (the 
seed of progress), as well as a local tourism agency  that offers community tourism 
packages in conjunction with the network of indigenous operated hostel and lodging 
houses, handicraft vendors and tour guides. The municipal and utility  company offices sit 
beside printing, photo, and clothing shops, while across the plaza the large stone church’s 
three spires dominate the view. Inside, the long, darkened hall is lined with wooden pews 
that lead up  to the typically  large and ostentatious altars. Above it all, the 3 Inka laws are 
scrawled in marble: ama quilla, ama lulla, ama shua (don’t be lazy, don’t lie, don’t steal). 
 The Kichwa script in the church hints at the racial and ethnic heterogeneity  that is 
part of Saraguro, as is the case for much of rural Ecuador. Linda Belote has previously 
described the Saraguro town centre as a predominantly white space, whose mestizo 
inhabitants jealously guarded the urban area and resented those Sunday markets when 
their streets were overrun with Indians, bringing with them their smells and their aesthetic 
(1978). The frequent  backyard cornfields of the outlying Saraguro streets speak to the 
changing face of the town, as quite a number of indigenous families have moved in to the 
center in recent decades. Now, indigenous and mestizo children learn together in 
classrooms, and certain restaurants, boutiques, tiendas and bakeries have indigenous 
owners and employees. Racism persists, though, and the derisive glances that  well-off 
white townsfolk give to groups of indigenous men drinking trago from clear plastic bags 
7
as they sit in the main plaza are evidence enough of the cultural and class divides that 
continue. 
A short history of Saraguro cantón
 The pre-Inkaic inhabitants of the Saraguro canton were most likely a sub-group of 
Cañaris, an ethnic group currently centered just north of Cuenca, while the area south of 
Saraguro, around contemporary Loja, was likely populated by Paltas (Ogburn 2008:296). 
When the Inkas conquered the area around 1460 CE, they  established an administrative 
centre in the valley, along with tambos (waystations) along the Chinchaysuyu road that 
ran through Saraguro, connecting the Inka capital Cuzco with Quito (Ogburn 2010:171). 
As was common with regions that resisted conquest, the Inka administration likely 
removed a portion of the local population, replacing them instead with more docile and 
loyal ethnic groups, possibly from the Lake Titicaca or Cuzco regions. This process of 
mitimae meant that just before the arrival of the Spanish, the population of the Saraguro 
area was most likely composed of people of various ethnic groups, and since the Inka 
state had a policy of strictly enforcing ethnic boundaries, there was likely  no singular 
Saraguro ethnicity at this time. 
 With the coming of the Spanish conquest of the Andes, however, ethnic 
boundaries among the native populations were largely  ignored by the state in favour of a 
dual racial system, with Spaniards on the one end, and the general class of Indians on the 
other, opening up the possibilities for the creation, destruction, or mixing of ethnic 
identities. It is in the early  colonial period that the region of Saraguro appears to have 
been given that name, likely stemming from a local indigenous place name (Ogburn 
8
2008). Like the Inkas, the Spanish established a waystation in the valley and extracted 
tribute from local populations, though Spanish colonial tribute is considered to have been 
far more onerous since both labour and goods were demanded. Still, the inhabitants of 
Saraguro seem to have been less devastated by  their incorporation into the Spanish 
colonial system than those in other areas. Their tribute obligations were largely  centered 
around the maintenance of the tambo, which was preferable to the often lethal mining 
obligations in the nearby Zaruma gold mines. Though a priest was stationed in the area 
by the mid 16th century, other contact with the Spanish administration was lessened by 
the relative remoteness and insignificance of the area. Indigenous inhabitants were by  and 
large able to maintain their agricultural landbase (as was required by  Spanish law - 
though landlords, indigenous and Spanish, were often known to corrupt this practice), 
even adopting cattle herding and taking advantage of the local tambo in order to market 
their goods (J. Belote 1984; Ogburn 2008:306). 
 What emerged from the long process of Spanish colonialism was the eventual 
ethnogenesis of Saraguro as an ethnic group, considered locally to be descended from 
Inka nobility, Cañaris, displaced native Andeans from other regions, or any  mixture of 
these. While in the mid 16th century native inhabitants of the region were still referred to 
by being “of” Saraguro: “indio natural de Saraguro” (A. Anda Aquirre 1980:130, quoted 
in Ogburn 2008:308), by the latter half of that century  a number of Indians living in other 
areas are recorded as using the surname Saraguro, hinting at an emerging Saraguro ethnic 
identity  (Ogburn 2008:309). By the late 1800s, Saraguro had remained a largely 
indigenous parish, with a common style of dress having been noted among its population:
9
Saraguro is of good population, its sons, almost all Indians, are well 
muscled and robust, and all dress in black, and dress thusly, we are told, 
to conserve the mourning of their lost independence. (Cevallos, 
Geographía de la Republica del Ecuador 1888:326, quoted in J. Belote 
1984:21)
The choice of black clothing is still common among most Saraguros, who continue to 
relate it either to their lost independence or as mourning dress for Atahualpa, the Inka 
lord. 
 A number of authors in the 19th and early parts of the 20th centuries have 
remarked upon the superior nature of the Saraguro native to other indigenous groups, 
noting their subservience to the gente decente (decent/cultured folk, meaning white-
mestizo), their dedication to work, their independence of means and their strong will: 
The great majority of its [Saraguro’s] population is Indian, but a new 
type of Indian ... still humble to the gente decente when facing them 
singly, but verging on insolence when gathered in groups with chicha at 
hand. Here each owns a little patch of land and refuses serfdom. 
(Franck, Vagabonding Down the Andes 1917:203-204, quoted in J. 
Belote 1984:22)
The Saraguros were considered to be a model of positive indigeneity; proud, resilient, 
and free, in contrast to other ethnic indigenous groups who were considered to be more 
reckless, more dangerous, less “advanced.” For indigenist writers of this period, the 
Saraguros would have represented the redeeming potential of the Indian race, rather than 
the unalterable backwardness and poverty that other groups seemed to be mired in. 
 Relations between the indigenous Saraguros and white Saragurenses, similar to 
other areas of Latin America, have historically been unequal, a matter Linda Belote has 
documented in some detail for the 1960s and 1970s, the decades following the 
construction of the Panamerican highway in the 1940s that  placed Saraguro once again 
10
along the main North-South road, providing a brief economic boom for the town (L. 
Belote 1978). In these decades, the privileged sociopolitical position enjoyed by white 
townspeople was contrasted with their relative economic poverty when compared to the 
rural, landowning indigenous Saraguros. With land and cattle, it was the indigenous 
population that provided local storeowners, moneylenders, and officials with the business 
that kept them afloat. Of course, subsistence farmers purchase little, a constant source of 
agitation for the townspeople who imagined the great wealth that Indians must  conceal 
(L. Belote 1984; see also Weismantel 2001). In truth, while some indigenous Saraguros 
had relatively large amounts of wealth in land and cattle, those assets did not translate 
into an easy source of readily available cash. Concerned for their children’s inheritance, 
money  was often, and continues to be, funneled into the purchase of more agricultural 
and pastoral assets destined for inheritances. In the past century, partly  due to the national 
agrarian reforms that  opened up tracts of the amazonian basin for settlement from the 
highlands (at times further marginalizing and displacing lowland indigenous groups), a 
large number of Saraguros have colonized sections of the Oriente (eastern lowlands) in 
the province of Zamora-Chinchipe (J. Belote 1984:1). 
 Because of the demands of agricultural work, as well as the exclusivity of the 
local schools, Saraguros were not often educated beyond the third grade until the late 
1960s, when a high school was first opened in the town. Though Saraguros 
acknowledged the importance of literacy, they considered three years adequate to learn 
reading and writing, and, besides, the high school did not permit Indian students. The 
local priest, however, opened up  admission for select indigenous students in 1971, and 
11
along with a group of Saraguro boys who had left the cantón to further their education 
elsewhere, and a group  of girls sponsored by the priest to study, these young Saraguros 
had opened up a path to advancement through education. More recently, a range of 
intercultural, bilingual elementary schools have been built in the indigenous communities 
in the region, though they still bear the stigma of being second rate, previously teaching 
only basic math and some rudimentary  skills that left little likelihood of advancement 
into higher education. Today, Saraguros are among the most educated ethnic group  in 
Ecuador, and young indígenas (indigenous persons) study at state and private universities 
in Loja, Cuenca, Quito, and even farther north. A number of those first students later 
returned to Saraguro and have since become doctors, lawyers, teachers, social scientists, 
politicians and indigenous activists (L. Belote 1978:214; Linda Belote, personal 
communication: April 04, 2010). Since then, while many Saraguros continue to rely  on 
small scale agro-pastoral production, the possibilities for indigenous lifeways have 
opened up, but municipal politics continues to be dominated by town mestizos. In 
addition, two local social development organizations, Fundación Jatari and Fundación 
Kawsay boast of a largely indigenous professional staff.
Indigenous Saraguro dress and ethnicity
 The Saraguros are one of the iconic indigenous ethnic groups in Ecuador, along 
with the Otavalos and the Shuar. By briefly discussing indigenous dress and style, this 
section will act as an introduction to one of the key symbols that marks indigenous 
Saraguro ethnicity in this heterogenous area. Both sexes wear their hair in long braided 
ponytails. Most  typically, men sport low cut black canvas shoes or boots, with black 
12
socks that lead up to bare calves, since Saraguro men wear cortes (short black pants 
traditionally  made of wool, but cut off trousers are now more common). A white collared 
shirt, black vest, black poncho, and black felt hat complete the traditional attire, though 
for men the black cortes are the essential piece, and a short  sleeved shirt and jacket are 
often chosen instead of a button down shirt. For ceremonial and important occasions, the 
Saraguros are known for their wide brimmed, white pressed wool hats that are often 
painted with black spots or patterns on the underside for style. Day to day, though, the 
black felt hat is more common. 
 Women’s iconic dress includes a black felt hat similar to men’s, and a black shawl 
in place of a poncho, held together with a silver starburst pin, or tupu. Layers of collares, 
beadwork necklaces, give a bit of colour and individuality, as do the embroidered white, 
pastel, or coloured blouses that are most typical. Instead of cortes, women wear two 
skirts, a pollera (colourful underskirt) and an anaku (black, pleated outer skirt). The 
bottom of the pollera is often embroidered with stylish flower patterns, and gives a little 
flair. Anakus are most often made from long bolts of acrylic cloth, since traditionally 
made woolen ones, measuring upwards of 3 meters in length, are prohibitively expensive. 
The anaku and pollera combination are held up by a faja, a patterned woven belt, and 
taken together the layers of cloth often make a bulge of sorts around the waist, which is 
not quite in touch with younger tastes that prefer waist-hugging, thin jeans and tank tops. 
Older women, as well as teachers and other professionals, wear this outfit  regularly, 
though some creative young women have made certain adjustments that distinguish their 
look from their mothers or grandmothers. For example, wrapping their skirts in such a 
13
way as to diminish the bulge of fabric around the waist, or foregoing the pollera 
altogether allow young women to make a certain compromise in taste when they wear the 
more traditional garb. For festive occasions such as graduations, women might 
complement their outfit  with fashionable heels. It is quite a sight to see whole families 
dressed in their best in this way, and mothers worry about making sure their absent 
minded young son hasn’t misplaced his hat, or that their daughter’s anaku is ironed just 
right to tighten and even out the folds. 
Figure 3: Saraguro women with their children on Easter Sunday.
 This level of dress, though, is of course reserved for the most part to 
professionals, important occasions as well as market days, with women more likely to 
dress to this ideal than men. More often than not, especially  for work in the fields and 
14
garden, with cattle, or around the house women prefer to wear cheaply made sweat pants 
and zippered sweaters that are certainly more easy to clean and more casual. Saraguro 
men of all ages are more likely to sport  cortes than women are to wear anakus. Instead of 
white collared shirts, though, men prefer to wear short sleeved shirts of all kinds, 
including plain coloured ones, soccer jerseys, shirts bearing emblems of companies or 
social development projects, and metal band t-shirts among much of the youth. These t-
shirts, always black, bear the names of the most popular metal bands, most notably 
Metallica and Motorhead. To the disapproval of many in the older generations, this is the 
music that is blared at parties, from CD players at home, and from cellphones whenever a 
group of young men get together. The “satanic” imagery and assumed to be crude lyrics 
are a common topic of conversation, with some seeing this style as the result of an ever 
encroaching globalized Western identity. Others, of course, simply say  that at least the 
younger men are still interested in listening to and playing music. While the music is no 
longer a traditional variety, the opinion is that music has long played a role in Saraguro 
life, and that this is in many ways a continuation of that history. From my  perspective, the 
black t-shirts fit  well with the Saraguro aesthetic, and only a rare few young men choose 
to wear jeans instead of cortes, following in general terms the dress code of their fathers. 
In many ways, these rockeros, as they  are called, do not see their style and taste to be in 
contradiction with an identity as indigenous, and have often defended their cultural and 
personal identities to me as indigenous Saraguros. Their choice of music accorded, in 
their eyes, with an attachment to the cultural tradition that many others criticized them for 
straying from. 
15
 Many Saraguros see the choice of clothing as a signifier of their ethnic identity. 
Accordingly, a rejection of this aesthetic could signal a rejection of self-identification as 
indigenous, as Linda Belote and Jim Belote (1984) have documented for the region. They 
cite one example in particular that evokes commonly  held ideas about the relationship 
between dress and identity in Saraguro:
Indígenas sometimes hire blancos (whites) to do manual labour. To be 
reduced to doing manual labour is discomfort enough for a blanco. To 
do it for an indígena is doubly humiliating. In one case an indígena man 
who hired a blanco labor crew to clear land for him in the Oriente woke 
up one morning after a drinking binge to find his hair had been cut. He 
was then informed by his hung-over blanco laborers that they had cut 
his hair to make him a blanco like them, and thus a more acceptable 
employer ... The shorn Saraguro indígena rejected this attempt at  forced 
transculturation and bore his shaggy hair with great embarrassment 
until it grew again to braidable length. (Belote, L. and Belote, J. 
1984:37)
 Hair is perhaps even more important a marker of Saraguro indigeneity than dress, 
since most Saraguros (women in particular) wear quite a range of clothes. The idea that a 
simple haircut can be an act of ethnic boundary crossing is a bit  fantastic, but  it 
adequately encapsulates commonly held ideas about Saraguro style and its relationship to 
ethnic identity. Even wearing jeans and a black, “satanic” t-shirt, a young man with his 
long hair pulled back into a single braid wears what is understood as an indigenous 
Saraguro identifier. Sitting around the table after dinner one evening with the indigenous 
family that I had come to live with, Linda put on a CD of Kichwa ballads sung by a range 
of musical groups from Otavalo to entertain her children as they helped clean up. 
Translating the romantic (and off colour) lyrics for the rest of us, none of whom speak 
fluent Kichwa, Linda expressed admiration that Otavalo indígenas have been so 
16
successful in maintaining their traditions (exemplified in this case by widespread Kichwa 
fluency), a common sentiment for many in Saraguro. “Pero ya empiezan a cortar los 
pelos,” she remarked: they’ve begun cutting their hair. Much like the indigenous man 
whose white workers cut his hair to make him a more appropriate employer, indigenous 
Saraguros agree that cutting your hair short is a statement about identity  and self, not 
simply style.
 Indigenous Saraguros have gone from being largely excluded from education, 
politics, and positions of respect in the town center to being one of the most wealthy and 
well-educated indigenous groups in the country. Still, poverty is widespread in the 
indigenous communities, and many Saraguros live long periods of time outside of their 
home communities, away  from their families as they try to establish themselves or seek a 
better life. As is the case with many places in Andean South America, migration, 
increased integration with cash economies and decreasing land availability  mean that the 
“traditional” lifeways of individuals have changed, a sentiment expressed in informal 
conversations that often turn to how one’s grandparents lived more cleanly, how one’s 
children don’t dress as they  should, how hardly  anyone speaks Kichwa, or how no one 
grows or cooks all the varieties of local produce they used to. It is in this context that a 
recent cultural revitalization movement has become somewhat influential in the area, 
seeking to “disinter” (as one proponent put it) the historic Saraguro lifeways, and link 
them to a resurrected Inkaic tradtion. Among the aims of this movement is a dedication to 
community, characterized by mutual aid and a common people. 
17
Framing research
 The community as an idea seems to hold particular discursive and moral weight in 
a fantastically wide variety  of fields, both academic and popular. We might hear talk of 
Indigenous communities, suburban communities, rural communities, church 
communities, virtual communities, the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered 
community, and a dizzying range of other communities that  exist at varying structural 
levels in various societies. Some of these communities are seen to be built  upon a shared 
space (Indigenous, rural, suburban communities), while others are marked by a 
conspicuous absence of a shared space (virtual communities, the GLBT community). 
Members in others are aligned along a shared interest, while particularly with the idea of 
an international community, it is difficult to see just what its members all have in 
common. With such a wide variety  of supposed entities marked as communities, we 
might ask whether the community concept has any meaning at all. But precisely  because 
the community  idea can be, and has been, articulated in so many forms it would be 
sensible to concede that quite apart from being devoid of meaning, the community is 
overflowing with it. So much so, that Gerald Creed has written that “the term has become 
part of the commonsensical way we understand and navigate the world” (2006b:6). 
 As an example, Miranda Joseph’s marxist  critique of the GLBT community in San 
Francisco highlights many of the contradictions centering around the community idea. 
For her, the community connotes those “cherished ideals of co-operation, equality, and 
communion” (2002:ii), relying on an “ideal of homogeneity” to construct a “ready-made 
basis for collective action” that often paints over the power differences that exist within 
18
the supposedly equal and secular public sphere, both within and outside of the 
constructed community (2002:xxii). Joseph’s theoretical project  is to illustrate how, 
contrary to popular belief, the civic sector and all its constituent communities are 
necessary  for the continued existence of neo-liberal, capitalist nation-states (2002:xxxi). 
The irony of this is, of course, that so often community (and the rural community  in 
particular) is rooted in the past: they are remnants of those outdated traditions that fight 
against a modernity characterized by capitalist accumulation. Community  comes to stand 
for the moralities lost in capitalist societies; for harmony, for the local, for a homogeneity 
increasingly  attacked by the global flow of people and ideas. For some critics of 
community, this association with an envisioned and idealized past lives on in the 
community  as goals for the future, and for Joseph, it makes unequal accumulation more 
palatable while providing producers with individual niches to market their products 
(Creed 2006b:5).
 The original research upon which this thesis is based has as a primary  goal to 
examine one particular type of community, the indigenous community, as both a site for 
the production of competing notions of what it means to be Indian, and as an outcome of 
these contestations by  the state, international and local NGOs, and indigenous peoples 
themselves. Indigenous communities in Ecuador are, like communities elsewhere, loaded 
with meanings that speak more to the aspirational ideals of stakeholders than to the lived 
realities of those who reside in these communities. Indeed, the comuna de indígenas 
(indigenous community) in Ecuador stems from a state project that aimed to solve the 
“Indian Problem”: what to do with what was seen as the mass of uneducated, unhygienic, 
19
backwards people that, because of their often autonomous means of production and self-
sustainability, were seen as impediments to the progress of a modern, rational, capitalist 
society. The 1937 Ley de Comunas (Communes Law) was the culmination of years of 
attempts to incorporate Indian subjects into the national sphere and to subdue the 
possibilities of rebellion that elite lawmakers saw embedded in the mostly indigenous 
rural highlands. Legal indigenous communities, it was thought, would provide the state 
with an avenue to the “intellectual, moral, and material improvement” of Indian lives, 
providing “a proper and safe place” for the state to guide Indian development (Lucero 
2003:31). Contrary to the indentured peon, 
The free comunero is a good worker, well-fed, dresses neatly, knows 
how to defend his rights before the usurpation of neighboring 
hacendados [large estate landowners], recovers abandoned zones of 
cultivation, utilizes irrigation.... (Pío Jaramillo Alvaredo 1980:150, 
quoted in Lucero 2003:30)
 What began as a state attempt at increasing control over the indigenous 
countryside has since, however, become one of the key elements of a resurgent 
indigenous identity. Luis Macas, Saraguro politician and indigneous activist, writes that 
“The community  is the essential organization of indigenous society. From what we 
understand, the institution of the community constitutes the fundamental axis that 
articulates and gives coherence to indigenous society” (2000, my translation). For 
contemporary  indigenous activists, the indigenous community still represents an avenue 
towards modernity, but a modernity that is in opposition to the discourse presented by the 
state: community  is the area for resistance, for the maintenance of indigenous traditions, 
for the cultivation of alternative practices. “‘Community’ can thus be at one time the 
20
organizing principle of indigenista paternalism and social control and at another time the 
discursive terrain on which alternative political projects are constructed and 
legitimated” (Lucero 2003:41). 
 In his recent critical overview of the community concept, Gerald Creed provides a 
prospective theoretical approach to contemporary  scholars who wish to unpack this 
multivocal idea and analyze it  in ways that are reflective of its importance in local, 
ethnographic contexts. He summarizes with the somewhat philosophical statement 
“Community is an aspiration envisioned as an entity” (2006b:22). In essence, 
communities must be seen not so much as concrete socio-spatial categories, and instead 
interpreted mainly in terms of the ideals that they represent, those which proponents of 
community  are attempting to bring to life. What is also important here is that 
communities are envisioned as entities, as wholes that are at least partially  closed to the 
outside world. The community as an entity  in its own right is part and parcel to the ideal 
that is aspired, and so communities come to be seen to act in ways that reflect  their 
individuality and their wholeness. Communities are seen to act for themselves, as wholes, 
and become analogous to living organisms: they are something more than the systems of 
which they are made and have a will to act.
 Accordingly, rather than seeing the rural indigenous community  solely as an 
extant space, political unit, or form of social organization, this project sets out to explore 
the myriad and co-existing ideas of community and community participation, and how 
these are activated in various competing, but connected policies and practices. Local, 
municipal, NGO, and state perceptions of indigeneity are recognized as being inseparable 
21
from the community idea, since the political forms that indigenous communities take rely 
on certain assumptions about how Indians supposedly do, or should, live. 
 The first  objective of this thesis deals with the community  as a unifying symbol 
of group membership, and asks to what degree living in an indigenous community 
governs or structures the lives of those who live in such a community. Older 
anthropological literature assumed the internal homogeneity  of what was classified as the 
“closed, corporate peasant community” (see Wolf 1955; 1956; 1957; Wolf and Hansen 
1972). More recently, scholars have shown how the (often competing) individual 
interests of community members are played out in the discourse of community 
membership and participation (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999; 2007). In acknowledging the 
divergent interests of those who claim membership in communities, it  is necessary to 
detail what their unifying desires are, how those interests come to be established, and 
when they hold relevance. In the context of Ñamarín, a small indigenous community just 
outside the town of Saraguro, these issues will be presented in discussions about 
occasions of participation in what might be called community building (such as 
communal labour parties and community  assemblies), and occasions of more informal, 
but very important participation, such as play, that is largely  organized at the level of the 
community. 
 The second research question deals with state-society relations and membership 
in an indigenous community. Recent scholarship has focused on the dialectic nature of 
community  formation, and how state policies articulate with local desires and ambitions 
to produce the realized forms of community organization (Clark 1994). Indigenous 
22
communities in Ecuador are legal political entities, and are an ideal context to discuss 
forms of “domestication,” efforts undertaken by state-systems to further incorporate rural 
areas under stricter regimes of control, continuously fraught with difficulties posed by 
people who wish to remain more autonomous (cf. Scott  1998). The ideas of state 
membership and autonomy are commonly expressed in discussion among indigenous 
people in Saraguro, and are complicated by recent historical turns that have in certain 
ways brought indigenous communities into the fold of state membership. Local 
articulations of these issues are treated largely in the context of a nationwide indigenous-
led strike in May of 2010 against  proposed water regulation reforms. Indigenous groups 
picketed members of the national government, indigenous political leaders and the 
national indigenous federations called for a mobilization of indigenous communities, and 
many Saraguro communities answered the call by blockading the Panamerican highway; 
the main transport route running North-South along the Andean spine. The protests 
provide an opportunity to see, in action, the involvement of individuals, community 
leaders, NGOs, and activists in fomenting the indigenous movement against an 
encroaching state. 
 Finally, this research attempts to frame the relationship between indigenous 
identity  and ideas of the community as they are evoked in Saraguro. Often, state policies, 
NGO initiatives, and indigenous activist  positions regarding indigenous peoples assume 
or present a connection between indigenous groups and an envisioned rural community. 
Through an examination of two separate, but not  entirely  distinct, religious/historical 
feasting traditions; one Catholic and longstanding in the region, the other drawing on 
23
Incaic precedents but set in the context of a relatively  recent push for cultural 
revitalization, I will explore the significance of the community idea with respect to 
envisioned ideals of indigeneity. 
The “community” in anthropology
 The idea of the community  lends an easy  sense of togetherness and a moral 
backing, it  conveys unity without having to prove it, and acts as a stand-in concept for 
organizational structures at many levels. These aspects of the community idea enable 
various actors to draw from its corpus of meaning almost without hesitance, though this 
in turn means the community  is a relatively poor analytical concept. There are so many 
possible definitions of community that the term necessitates scholarly attention, and has 
been the subject of many debates within anthropology and other disciplines in various 
periods for decades, if not centuries. In a review of authorship concerning community, 
George Hillery (1995) counted 94 different definitions of the term that varied not only 
across disciplines, but often within them as well. The ubiquitous use of community 
requires scholars to be ever more attentive to their use of the term, while hopefully 
drawing out the role of various communities in particular circumstances in contemporary 
societies. 
 The scope of this review on the concept of community does not claim to be so 
vast as Hillery’s array of definitions. Instead, I trace a particular history  of the community 
concept that will highlight some of the contradictions and traditions most important to a 
discussion of the concept in the Ecuadorian Andes. I do not wish to erase the 
contentiousness of the idea, but rather to draw attention to the rich and often counter-
24
intuitive implications of community. Much of the literature concerning the contemporary 
indigenous community stems from research in peasant studies, which concerns rural, 
often indigenous peoples that  live on the margins of modern capitalist states (Creed 
2006a). Many highland Andean indigenous groups, with their history of smallholder 
agricultural and pastoral production,  previously organized as peasant groups before the 
dominant discourses, in the Ecuadorean state as in anthropology, shifted from a language 
based on class to one focused on ethnicity. 
 The idea of the community is a relatively old concept in anthropology and other 
social sciences, and it serves as an entry point into the field of rural sociology and the 
concept of the folk-urban continuum. Though this area of analysis may suffer from a lack 
of critical merit with respect to newer systems of thought, it  is important to trace this 
history of the community  concept within anthropology  since it  serves to illustrate the 
close associations between a popular romantic envisioning of the community concept and 
critical approaches to the community idea. Indeed, many  of the characteristics associated 
with the folk society  remain deeply embedded in the community  concept as it is evoked 
in contexts of indigenous revitalization in Saraguro.
 Robert Redfield elaborated on the already somewhat established concept of the 
folk-urban continuum, and proposed it as an analytical scheme, a mental construct, 
through which anthropologists and sociologists might  organize aspects of societies by the 
characteristics that they share (Redfield 1947:294). As such, parts of societies may be 
aligned along a continuum that constructs two wholly  ideal extremes: the folk and the 
urban. Through time, a transition from the folk type to the urban type “could represent the 
25
course of history,” though the concept itself is not  supposed to represent any actual 
course of history, just as it is not supposed to represent any real society (Mintz 1953:136). 
 The aspects of a folk society as elaborated by Redfield contribute to a romantic 
picture of social relations in the countryside. Folk societies are
small, isolated, nonliterate, and homogenous, with a strong sense of 
group solidarity. The ways of living are conventionalized into that 
coherent system which we call “a culture.” Behavior is traditional, 
spontaneous, uncritical, and personal; there is no legislation or habit of 
experiment and its reflection for intellectual ends. Kinship, its 
relationships and institutions, are the type categories of experience and 
the familial group is the unit of action. The sacred prevails over the 
secular; the economy is one of status rather than of the market. (Miner 
1952:529, cf. Redfield 1947:294)
These folk traits are a combination of aspects observed in societies preconceived to be 
rural and primitive (though Redfield is hesitant to use the word “primitive” because of its 
obvious pejorative and evolutionary  meanings), and while every aspect is not expected to 
be present in any part of society, those cultures who fulfill more of the criteria than others 
are then positioned as more folk than others. Accordingly, the conceptual opposites of 
these traits come to identify urban society (Redfield 1947:294). As a result, the 
distinction between folk and urban societies embodies the distinction between 
Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity, as well as Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft and 
Gesellschaft (Redfield 1947:295). Mechanical solidarity  stems from the similarities that 
people have to each other, and was thought to characterize “simpler” societies, 
particularly those based on kinship, while organic solidarity stresses the interdependent 
nature of people of different social and economic roles in industrial societies. The folk 
society is envisioned as an operational, fully integrated and largely homogenous whole, 
26
though it is necessarily  small so that each member might be able to recognize and interact 
with each other on a personal, rather than an organizational basis. While folk societies 
were recognized as existing alongside urban ones, they were considered separate spheres 
of interaction, largely closed to one another. 
 The form of organization that accords most accurately with the requisite traits of a 
folk society, then, is the rural community. Redfield and others of the Chicago school 
elaborated their framework through ethnological fieldwork that was located mainly  in the 
Yucatan, Puerto Rico, and Guatemala, where small and relatively isolated rural 
settlements could be found to accord with the folk end of the continuum. These villages 
were conceived of as almost naturally occurring and constituted the organizational form 
of humanity throughout most of its history. The city, on the other hand, was highly 
organized, standardized and regulated, where the rural community  almost sprung up  as 
the logical extension of human organization. Citing de Toqueville, Redfield notes that 
“the village or township was ‘the only  association ... so perfectly natural that  wherever a 
number of men are collected it seems to constitute itself’” (1960:4). These little 
communities are described as distinct (their boundaries are definite and evident), small 
(enough so that  one investigator can observe its extent personally), homogenous (there is 
little differentiation in work or in opinion) and self-sufficient (in terms of its subsistence 
production and its boundaries as marking the extent of the majority of human interactions 
for members) (Redfield 1960:5). Just as with the folk-urban continuum, Redfield notes 
that the traits of a little community  will be apparent in different degrees, and urban 
influence on the rural community will result in culture change that dismantles the 
27
homogeneity  and boundedness of community, spelling out the demise of the community 
accompanied by conflict and an adoption of more urban forms of organization. 
 Redfield’s conceptualization of the rural village or band as a little community 
brings us back to the claim that communities are centrally  about  wholeness, that they are 
entities in their own rights. Certainly, Redfield thought that the most functional and 
integrated communities were identified by their boundedness as wholes. The most telling 
and informative aspect of the little community within the folk-urban continuum for this 
discussion of the community  concept is the dissolution of wholeness that Redfield 
associated with community death. Discussing the Swedish community of Kråkmarö, 
Redfield laments the dissolution of the integrative social structure, built around common 
landholding and farming, that once held community members together:
As common work decreased, the common sentiments that held the 
people together declined. The new pattern of settlement in scattered 
farms removed much of the effectiveness of the old controls by talk and 
example. The authority of the old over the young grew less. People 
began to move away from the community. Some sold their houses to 
city dwellers for use as summer homes. Kråkmarö is a dying village. It 
dies because it has ceased to be a whole. (1960:108-109)
This dissolution of the community whole, here attributed to a restructuring of land use 
and ownership, Redfield has in other cases attributed largely to the impact of the urban 
sphere onto the rural (Miner 1952:532). Regardless of the specific causes attributed to the 
dissolution of the community, it seems that by  and large a transition from folk to urban 
society is seen as disruptive and entails a loss of the commonalities and romantic 
solidarity that the little community, and folk society more generally, are seen to inhere. 
The onset of modernity is the death of community. 
28
 Oscar Lewis, revisiting the community  of Tepoztlán, upon which Redfield based 
much of his theoretical work, strongly  disagrees with this conceptualization of the 
general course of history for folk societies:
...underlying the folk-urban dichotomy as used by Redfield, is a system 
of value judgements which contains the old Rousseauan notion of 
primitive peoples as noble savages, and the corollary that with 
civilization has come the fall of man... in Redfield’s writings there 
emerges the value judgement that folk societies are good and urban 
societies bad.... “Progress” and urbanization now are seen as inevitable, 
but they are still evil. (1951:435)
Horace Miner, in his defense of the folk-urban construct, attempts to set aside this and 
other critiques of the idea of progress as it is formulated in the folk-urban continuum. 
Arguing that since Kroeber critiques the folk-urban construct for favouring an 
“ethnocentric idea of ‘progress’’’, and that Lewis argues Redfield instead has a folk bias, 
that both arguments in effect cancel each other out and that the continuum has no such 
bias, in either direction (Miner 1952:534-535). I side here with Lewis, who argues 
convincingly  that the folk-urban continuum falls into an all too common anthropological 
tradition of romanticizing “primitive” peoples and all the while favouring an ideal of 
progress that posits the urban centre as the (evil, anomic, conflictual) pinnacle of 
civilization. 
 The appeal of the folk-urban continuum, and therefore the little ideal community, 
lies in just how well it  can be seen to fit with certain pre-suppositions of what folk/rural 
society is supposed to look like. The model was constructed through an amalgamation of 
traits identified in societies already categorized as largely folk, and the concept acts as a 
ready-made critique of an all-too rapidly  changing city that is rampant with market forces 
29
supposedly tearing at  the fabric of society, where individualism leads every person to 
seek their own profit at the expense of others. The values that the city does not represent 
are then re-cast onto a pastoral other, who then becomes the ideal object of study  if we 
are to correct the injustices of modernity. Even critics of this type of conceptualization 
have fallen victim to its allure, searching for aspects of whole communities in order to 
prevent the abuses of modernity (see Creed 2006a:37-42). 
 Building on and diverging from the framework laid out by Redfield, students of 
the emerging field of peasant studies focused their early work on elucidating typologies 
and classificatory  schemes that in many ways were attempts at reconciling some of the 
over-simplifications of the folk-urban continuum. Sydney Mintz, for example, proposed a 
different type of society, neither folk nor urban but borrowing from both. His plantation 
communities were typified by  many of the characteristics that Redfield laid out for folk 
societies, with some important differences that were to carry forward (Mintz 1953). 
Importantly, where Redfield saw geographical isolation in little communities, the 
plantation community showed isolation in a socio-economic sense since its members had 
limited opportunities for class mobility. The members of such a plantation community 
might be largely  drawn from a local, singular ethnic group, but labourers could frequently 
enter or leave the plantation in search of work. This ethnic heterogeneity, a hallmark of 
Redfield’s urban society, was tempered by the class commonalities shared by community 
members: “while ethnic homogeneity and geographic isolation are lacking, a very real 
kind of cultural homogeneity, partly  class determined, prevails” (Mintz 1953:140). 
Perhaps the most important, and lasting, contribution of Mintz’s classification of the 
30
plantation community  (borrowing heavily from Redfield here) was that though 
membership frequently  fluctuated, the “interchangeability  of personnel while maintaining 
over-all cultural uniformity” meant that the community structure could prevail despite 
relatively fluid movement of people (Mintz 1953:140-141). 
 Others proposed similar, more detailed, typologies that broke out of the 
dichotomous continuum. Concentrating their efforts largely on Latin America, Charles 
Wagley and Marvin Harris (1955) outlined a set of subcultures that taken together might 
present a comprehensive view of Latin American societies. Outlining an array of groups, 
from Tribal and Modern Indians through to peasants, plantation tenants and urban upper, 
middle, and working classes, Wagley and Harris do not attempt to dislodge the primacy 
of the folk-urban model, but rather define the varied forms that might be found along the 
continuum. They agree in principal with the general idea that at a national level, societies 
may move towards the urban type, but the subcultures do not necessarily  “merge in 
content” since urban society changes as well (Wagley and Harris 1955:448). Following 
Lewis’ criticism of Redfield’s view of homogenous whole communities, though, they 
concede that multiple subcultures are to be expected within any community (Wagley and 
Harris 1955:446). 
The Closed, Corporate Peasant Community
 Eric Wolf’s seminal essays of the 1950s add to this tradition of attempting to 
define general analytical tools that  are applicable to a wide range of societies. Whereas 
Wagley and Harris attempted to define the range of subcultures apparent in any Latin 
American society, Wolf concentrated his efforts on delimiting the various organizational 
31
and structural categories of a strictly peasant class (1955; 1957). He stipulates that 
peasants must, by definition, be agricultural producers with “effective control of 
land” (through customary rental rights, usufruct rights, or outright ownership) who 
cultivate largely  for subsistence rather than for market based accumulation (Wolf 
1955:453-454; 1957:1). This peasantry cannot be seen, according to Wolf, as sharing 
some overarching cultural content. Rather, the category is defined by a “structural 
relationship” where “the manner in which the part-culture is organizing into the larger 
sociocultural whole” must be examined (Wolf 1955:454-455). The primary means by 
which peasants are integrated into the sociocultural whole is by  way  of the community, so 
“a typology  of peasants must include a typology  of the kinds of communities in which 
they  live” (Wolf 1955:455). The community, here, is not necessarily defined as a 
functional whole that acts to oppose modernizing influences, it is a node within the larger 
society that serves to integrate peasant producers to that society. Wolf chooses to focus on 
the structural forms of such communities, which he acknowledges are historically 
contingent and adaptive to changes in the “total social field of which they are a 
part” (1955:455; see also Wolf 1956). 
 Wolf identifies a variety of possible peasant community  forms that differ mainly 
in terms of their market integration and access to land. Ranchers, plantation semi-
proletariat, and frontier horticulturalists are acknowledged, but their community forms 
are not discussed (1995:466-468). The two types of communities treated in most detail 
are the “open” community and the closed, corporate peasant community that came to 
represent, for many, the quintessential organizational form of the peasantry  in Latin 
32
America and beyond. So-called open communities exhibit  divisions in wealth and power, 
in general produce more for markets external to the community, lack a definite boundary, 
allow the free circulation of members, have little if no formal corporate structure, and are 
often influenced by external forces (Wolf 1955:462-463). 
 To the contrary, closed, corporate communities are those that are uniformly poor 
(with customary  and structural obligations keeping members so), maintain a politico-
religious order that defines an external boundary  (such as a fiesta cargo system), produce 
largely for internal consumption using a traditional technology, and usually share 
landholding or have a taboo against the selling of land to outsiders (Wolf 1955:456-460; 
1957:2-6). These traits, taken alone, evoke a romantic vision of the peasant community; a 
place where each individual is held responsible for their actions by  the whole, where 
work is ideally done together and marginal profits shared by all. Eking out a living 
together, members of the closed, corporate peasant community  might be seen to have 
achieved the homogenous, cooperative, and moral order that  users of the community  idea 
strive towards. Quite to the contrary, though, Wolf admits that any  group relation will 
“involve conflict and accommodation, integration and disintegration” (1956:1066). The 
social structures that maintain the bounds of this type of community  are simultaneously 
integrative and coercive, since in many cases the welfare of individuals (particularly 
when sharing a resource held in common) rests on the obligation of members to the 
whole, rather than just to themselves or to their household. 
 Over-arching social and economic factors, as well as the social structures and 
institutions that make up whole societies and communities, according to Wolf, have 
33
created the world in which peasants and Indians live. In Latin America, the declining 
native populations after Spanish conquest along with a demand for labour and tribute 
meant that colonial authorities had to devise methods to govern and extract wealth from 
what were often widespread households. The result was an array of organizational forms 
that were largely  imposed on indigenous populations, including encomiendas, 
reducciones, and haciendas that served to group households together in an easily 
manageable and taxable way. “The new Indian communities were given rights to land as 
local groups” (Wolf 1957:7), and so the “repatterned Indian community emerged as 
something qualitatively new: a corporate organization of a local group  inhabited by 
peasants” (Wolf 1956:1067). The peasantry  exists only in relation to the “dominant 
entrepreneurial sector” that it must serve, meaning peasant backwardness and 
homeostasis can not be seen as cultural traits, but rather as effects of the social hierarchy 
that have created the peasantry as a subordinate class (Wolf 1957:8). The implications of 
power in the formation of rural Latin American communities is an important 
advancement in social theory, but it contributes to a view that the real social actors are 
not individuals, but rather social structure. Outside of the community, extractive 
economies impose certain group relations, and within the community  gossip, enforced 
reciprocity, and costumbres (traditions) dissuading accumulation of wealth dictate how 
individuals must act. While such an approach lends itself to destabilizing the myth of a 
benevolent community entity, it also neglects to address peasant and indigenous agency 
by ignoring how they  may  subvert, acquiesce to, or mobilize such structures to their 
advantage (a claim that Wolf himself later attempted to refute, see Wolf 1986). 
34
 What is to be gained from this brief discussion of the closed, corporate peasant 
community  is that  though it was proposed simply  as a “conceptual model that could be 
used in discovery procedures,” the concept was a powerful one that  framed later 
understandings of peasant life (Wolf 1986:325). Any community that  was recognized as 
an Indigenous community was assumed to embody the characteristics of the closed 
corporate community (Keatinge 1973:39). The idea of a “veritable redoubt of cultural 
homeostasis,” characterized by a stalwart denial of outside influences in order to maintain 
a communal corporate structure resonates well with a vision of indigenous peoples as 
backwards and tradition bound (Wolf 1956:1067; Keatinge 1973:40). Elsie Keatinge’s 
presentation of the Huanchaco indigenous community in the Moche valley  provides a 
useful revision of the open and closed peasant community  types that Wolf envisioned. 
Though Wolf acknowledged that change from a closed to an open type community was 
not the inevitable course of history, and that fluctuating market integration should be 
reflected in changes in community structure, Keatinge takes this idea one step further by 
arguing that the corporate nature of the community is not  necessarily  dependent on its 
closure, that the corporate structure of a community lends itself equally well as “a means 
of political mobilization and integration into the wider national scene,” a sentiment that 
also clearly informed the social reformers in Ecuador who saw the Ley de Comunas as 
the avenue out  of Indian backwardness and lack of integration into the modernizing state 
project (Wolf 1955:463; Keatinge 1973:55). 
35
The ayllu, an Andean organizational form
 Similar to the more general concept of community, the ayllu is an Andean 
organizational concept that is contentious, to say the least. Much like community, the 
ayllu has been studied in various contexts at differing levels of social complexity. 
Definitions of the term vary, though it is generally accepted that the ayllu is an Andean 
concept that conveys the idea of group similarity  at different scales depending on context, 
so that it is not directly translatable as, say, a lineage or descent group, a community, a 
family, or an ethnic group, but it  may reflect aspects of each of those ideas. Billie Jean 
Isbell, in her ethnography of southern Peruvian indigenous peasant comuneros in 
Chuschi, defines the term as “any group with a head,” though she chooses to discuss the 
ayllu as it pertains to the exogamous family: any person’s ayllu is the close group of 
family with whom they can not marry. This generally  extends at least to a person’s 
grandparents, excluding first cousins from eligibility but allowing second cousins 
(1978:105). Tom Zuidema similarly argues that it is a “bilateral kinship network of four 
generations’ depth” (quoted in Salomon 1982:80). Catherine Allen discusses how the 
term may apply, simultaneously, to a household, to groups of households built in the 
same geographically determined area of a village, to factions, and to a community as a 
whole (for a complete discussion, see Allen 1988:95-124). As a definition, she offers that 
“the ayllu as it  is manifested in Sonqo is a group  of people brought together as a social, 
political, and religious unit through their common connection with the sacred 
places” (Allen 1988:108). Ayllus exist in a nested hierarchy, with each smaller ayllu 
being one unit, analogous to others at a similar structural level, making up the constituent 
36
parts of an ayllu at the next higher level (Allen 1988:107). The Sonqo ayllu, and 
presumably ayllus in general for Allen, identify common ancestors from which all ayllu 
mates are descended, which at a local level might be recently dead persons, or at a 
provincial level may be the apu; deities embodied in sacred places such as the great 
mountains and volcanoes (Allen 1988:107-109) 
 For highland Peru, Catherine Allen and, more recently, Frank Salomon have 
shown how certain indigenous communities that maintain some ayllu form have 
integrated the indigenous organizational structure into the community structure favoured 
by the Peruvian government (see Allen 1988 and Salomon 2004). Officers of the ayllu are 
elected (often against their will, as these positions demand much time and are not 
remunerated) to local level political positions, cargos, whose responsibilities include 
maintaining order, resolving disputes, and generally  integrating the production of 
households with the needs of the collectivity. Generally, these officers are male heads of 
households, though the responsibilities of the cargoes requires the participation of wives 
and entire families. In Saraguro, similar offices may be held by women, though it  is more 
common for them to be occupied by  men. These officers may exist  alongside, or be 
synonymous with, elected officials of the indigenous community  (as a local node of the 
Peruvian political hierarchy). Organizing mingas and faenas (communal labour parties) 
are among the most important of the duties of these officials since the maintenance of 
trails, irrigation canals, communal pasture lands, a central road, the local school and 
daycare where they  exist, along with a whole other range of projects necessitate that 
individual households be mobilized for the benefit of the community  or ayllu. These 
37
cargos are sometimes ranked in a politico-religious hierarchy  that includes feast 
sponsoring, resulting in an array  of responsibilities that households are expected to 
undertake successively  throughout the lifetime of membership  that would, upon 
completion, move the household (often represented by the male head) into the position of 
a mayor, a senior member of the community  whose authority and knowledge are 
respected in the decision making process. 
 Part of the problem with employing such terms as the “ayllu” in attempting to 
define a local idea of community, however, is that it  is not clear that ayllus were ever 
associated with many of the same romantic meanings that  are conflated with the 
community  idea in western thought. So, while Frank Salomon acknowledges that the 
basic political and structural unit of polities in the Quito area under Inka rule resembled 
the Peruvian ayllu, there is no indication that such a term previously held the same sort  of 
meaning that is currently attached to the ayllu as a primordial envisioned community 
(1986:122). Ayllus, mingas, and cargo systems feature prominently in Andean research, 
so no effort is made here to document them in any great detail. Communities and villages 
that maintain these practices are often those that are considered to be more traditional, to 
have maintained those pre-columbian organizational forms that are very enticing when 
one is searching for the closed, corporate peasant community, for the timeless “redoubt of 
cultural homeostasis” (Wolf 1956:1067). The desire to find such community  has, in the 
mind of Orin Starn, led many Andean anthropologists to selectively study those locales 
that exhibit such structures to the detriment of other areas: 
“Ethnographic visions of the perennial “otherness” of lo andino [that 
which is essentially and prototypically indigenous Andean] had a self-
38
fulfilling logic. In their desire to study  “indigenous” Andean culture, 
anthropologists ... largely  ignored the entire northern highlands of 
Spanish-speaking and more “acculturated” rural people. The virtual 
elision of northern Peru from the ethnographic record helped maintain 
the image of the Andean countryside as the province of ayllus and 
speakers of native languages, a place little changed from the ancient 
past. (1991:69) 
 The most egregious promulgators of such a vision for Starn include Billie Jean 
Isbell, whose account of Chuschi praises the defensive isolation of its community 
members in the region that soon was to become part of the heartland of Sendero 
Luminoso (Shining Path), the maoist revolutionary group that threw Peru into war in the 
1980s and 1990s (Starn 1991:64-66). By focusing on the supposed internal homogeneity, 
stoic cultural defensiveness, and apparent ideal cultural-ecological fit  in a marginal 
environment, such researchers neglected to see the crushing poverty, increasing urban 
migration and syncretic or ambivalent identities that were fertile ground for Sendero 
Luminoso (Starn 1991:76-80). For Starn, the models elaborated from, and approaches 
taken to, studying the Andean countryside are not faulty because they  are incorrect or do 
not exist in reality (it is difficult to argue that  there are not communities in existence that 
organize along scalar family/geographical lines called ayllus). Rather, anthropologists 
(along with tourists, travel writers, sympathetic mestizos, and NGOs) have simply  chosen 
to focus on the communities that are examples of more “traditional” lifestyles, and in so 
doing have continuously entrenched the idea of the Andes as timeless and communal. 
 More recently, Mary Weismantel has argued for the necessity  of anthropologists 
to deal with some of these ideas that we have previously  cast by  the wayside as they are 
39
picked up and re-interpreted by indigenous activists often fluent in anthropology. 
Weimantel writes:
For much to our horror, anthropologists discover in the rhetoric of 
indigenous politics a romantic vision of an unchanging Indian culture 
that exceeds our own worst excesses - and one that  partly or perhaps 
mostly  originates from our own texts. The ayllu is described in terms 
that makes us uneasy: as a survival from the ancient past, a symbol of 
steadfast Native resistance to change through five long centuries. While 
other anthropologists and historians insist on viewing the Andes 
through the lens of Modernity, indigenous scholars celebrate an 
institution they see as premodern in origins and explicitly  antimodern in 
conception. (Weismantel 2006:80)
In this way, Luis Macas (2000) can draw upon the works of Eric Wolf to support his 
claim that the ayllu or llacta (land/community) is the integral basis of indigenous social 
organization, necessary  to the survival of an alternative lifeway. Weismantel is attempting 
to portray  post-modern uses of the ayllu as “predicated upon the possibility of an Indian 
history, past and future, that is both non-Western and antimodern,” a position that she is 
wary of, but supports for the greater cause of indigenous activism (2006:91). One 
problem with such an approach, compatible with activist anthropology, is that this 
envisioned ayllu, similar to how Miranda Joseph sees communities acting within modern 
capitalist centers, is often disciplinary rather than emancipatory, and in Saraguro, is 
promoted as only  part of a neo-Inkaic tradition and culture of which a large number of 
indigenous Saraguros have reservations. Indigenous tradition and identity does not need 
to be anti-modern, and the dreams and aspirations of indigenous youth in Saraguro speak 
to the possibility of a contemporary, modern indigenous identity. To borrow the words of 
José Antonio Lucero, 
40
Community and nationality can be used ... to find new ways of putting 
our lives together, but they  can also mask injustices and inequalities. 
Social scientists can (and should) point out these problems not to 
undermine indigenous political projects but to contribute to the 
transformative processes that indigenous people themselves have set in 
motion. (2003:42)
It is in this spirit that I draw attention to the sometimes conflicting views about the nature 
of community and indigenous Inkaic revitalization in Saraguro. This discussion will be 
continued in a later chapter. 
Towards an Anthropology of the Present
 The anthropological interest in indigenous cultures and broadly conceived peasant 
studies is conflicted by this obsession with the past in the present, though the problem is 
not entirely  of our own making, and theorists as far back as Robert Redfield and Eric 
Wolf have attempted to lay out frameworks that explain the presence of what can be 
(mis)represented as elements of the past  in “modern” societies. The importance of their 
contributions, 60 years later, is not simply to set them up as easily  deconstructed 
tautological arguments that  serve to reinforce a western view of modernity. As William 
Roseberry has convincingly argued, an anthropology of the present needs an active 
engagement with the past, not just in terms of local history, by seeking out “connections 
with past anthropological generations in an attempt to construct traditions of critical, 
engaged work” (1995:152). If Andean anthropologists of the 1970s and 80s were guilty 
of placing their indigenous subjects out of time, exempt from the modernity  outside of 
their communities, a thorough examination of the students of Robert  Redfield and Julian 
Steward shows they should have at least been aware of the interpenetrations of market 
and other forces within peasant communities. 
41
 Indigenous communities in Ecuador, as in much of the Andean region, can 
historically be interpreted (at least partially) as products of colonial demands that 
necessitated easy access to Indian tribute and labour. From feudal encomiendas (land 
legally  owned by its native occupants, but a portion of whose labour and products went to 
the Spaniard to whom it  was assigned) through to reducciones (a product of Viceroy 
Toledo’s late 16th century reforms that relocated indigenous tributaries into “rational,” 
easily governed settlements), plantations, and other imposed organizational forms, the 
Spanish colonial government levied taxes collectively  on ayllus and indigenous groups as 
a whole, rather than on the individual. A necessary step, then, was to organize native 
Andeans in easily recognizable and measurable groups.  While Indian tribute was 
officially  abolished towards the end of the 19th century, it survived in a range of forms 
well into the 20th century, with indigenous persons still providing the majority  of public 
labour to the state (Larson 2004:10-11). Communal land holding was abandoned in 
favour of individual ownership with the liberal turn, focused mostly on opening up  terrain 
for global market production after independence, and re-implemented from the 1930s 
through to the late 1960s depending on country as part of agricultural reforms (Larson 
2004:12). Some communities persisted, others were newly  formed and continue to form 
under the Ley de Comunas as they break off from other communities or are established in 
new areas. While earlier theorists criticized emerging modern states for the destruction of 
community, the Andean case suggests that states have regularly  relied on indigenous 
community  structures, and the neoliberal turn has required that centralized states rely 
42
more heavily on these local structures, meaning that communities have increased 
relevance as units subordinate to the state (Creed 2006b:10). 
Research Methods
 This thesis deals less with the state level issues of community  than with the local, 
mundane practices that constitute, reproduce, or bring in to question communities. The 
early anthropological works concerning communities focused more on the structural 
aspects and ideal types of organizational institutions, but the more recent discursive, 
agentive, practice-oriented turns in anthropology allow an approach that prioritizes the 
experiences of various actors as they articulate with political, social, and cultural fields at 
various local, regional, national, and international scales. Accordingly, while my choice 
of field site as the handful of indigenous communities directly surrounding the cantón 
capital of Saraguro is relatively well defined, the lives of individuals represented in this 
research often find their way  well beyond this local sphere, and the linkages among 
indigenous groups, national governments, and international organizations require an 
acknowledgement of forces acting upon the local that may only  be partially centered 
there. The opposite is also true, as ideas, relationships, and individuals transcend a 
Saraguro context to become embedded in other areas, as is evinced by, for example, the 
establishment of a Saraguro migrant organization in Valencia, Spain. In a similar vein, 
while this research concerns itself primarily  with its Saraguro field site, it is embedded in 
previous research on community  and indigenous social movements from elsewhere, and 
speaks frequently to a more general Andean context. 
43
 Because of the constituted, produced nature of communities that are embedded 
with a mix of sentiment, emotion, and meaning, the nature of anthropological fieldwork 
is well suited to explore the questions at hand. The typically  long-term nature of 
fieldwork (in this case, from February 01 to August 08 in 2010), lasting usually at least 
one year or comprising a number of visits over years, is both critically and ethically 
important. It  is important critically  because it means that as the relationships between 
research informants and a reflexive ethnographer develop, the researcher is better 
positioned to be able to elicit more valuable information through their increasing 
knowledge of local practices, and therefore know which questions to ask, when, and how. 
Furthermore, it is only with experience that the ethnographer is able to contextualize any 
given information by considering the position of the speaker or those involved with a 
particular practice. An examination of the almost ubiquitous ideas of community and 
indigeneity necessitates the contextualization that fieldwork brings, a process that allows 
us to “test anthropological ideas against people’s lived reality, and to disturb one’s 
prejudices and bogus certainties” (MacClancy and Fuentes 2011:12). Ethically, the nature 
of extended fieldwork demands that the researcher be cognizant of their own impact upon 
the field site, and requires them to constantly evaluate their position with their host 
community. It also enables them to pursue research that is not  only  informed by the local 
context, but partially framed by informants themselves and therefore ideally more 
relevant, perhaps of more benefit, to the people themselves. 
44
Figure 4: Linda sorts and dries the harvest of corn, favas, and beans.
 The primary methods used to gather research in the field comply more or less 
generally  to those usually associated with ethnographic participant-observation, including 
participation in community assemblies and work parties, celebrations and feasts, and in 
the more mundane activities of tending cattle and sheep in the higher pastureland, 
harvesting corn, beans, and garden produce, shelling and drying harvested foods, playing 
soccer and volleyball, as well as chatting while sharing in just about any task. While such 
an approach has long been the mainstay of anthropologists, particularly those attempting 
to study small or isolated “communities,” and though the approach is invaluable in 
providing deep insight into the lifeways of a very specific set of “informants,” a grounded 
approach requires harnessing knowledge in ways that may  not be so closely associated 
45
with participant-observation: these include both structured and informal interviews with 
political figures, NGO workers and directors, and people outside of the immediate field 
context that  may speak to the issues being studied, as well as a recognition of the effects 
of the process of research upon the self, and the effects of the researcher on the process of 
research. Though participation is an integral part of the research experience, 
participation in the everyday  lives of people is a means of facilitating 
observation of particular behaviours and events and of enabling more 
open and meaningful discussions with informants. Without 
enthographers’ participation as some kind of member of the society, 
they  might not be allowed to observe or would simply not know what to 
observe or how to go about it. (Davies 1998:71) 
With this in mind, I sought to embed myself in the area in a way that also fulfilled what I 
saw as an ethical duty to provide some service or assistance in return for informants’ 
tolerating my presence and goals. With the help of a local Saraguro social development 
NGO, the Kawsay  Foundation, I began teaching English once weekly in three indigenous 
communities, which gave me the opportunity  to slowly  familiarize myself with the area 
and eventually find lodging with a family in the community of Ñamarín who operate a 
guest house in conjunction with the local community  tourism network. When I began 
taking part in the bimonthly communal labour parties in Ñamarín, my presence intrigued 
(and confused) many people, but eventually  earned me the respect of some through my 
sharing in the work, and meant that by  the time I presented myself in a community 
assembly, I was at least recognizable. Along with attending feasts, playing volleyball, and 
visiting and working with informants, these constituted the majority of my opportunities 
for participant-observation. My host family, along with their extended kin, the men with 
whom I regularly played volleyball, the members of the cabildo (elected governmental 
46
body at the community level) council, and a number of youths with whom I interacted on 
a regular basis formed the core network of my informants in Ñamarín. Still, regular 
social and other occasions provided ample opportunities to meet and interact with a wide 
variety of people within the community.  Outside of the community, the director and 
employees of the Kawsay Foundation proved very  amiable and open to share their 
opinions and knowledge, and less frequent contact with the organizers of the seasonal 
Inkaic festivals proved invaluable.
  While I initially attempted to conduct semi-structured interviews with a wide 
variety of informants, most people did not open up to the intrusiveness of being directly 
questioned, and so I instead chose to broach general topics in more casual conversations, 
and reserved interviews for members of the cabildo council and those involved with local 
social development organizations. In total, only four such formal interviews were 
conducted, two with cabildo members and two with NGO professionals. No interviews 
were recorded based on the initial failures of attempting direct interviews more widely, 
though extensive notes taken during and after interviews (as well as during other 
occasions) provide the quoted speech reported herein, the translations being as close as 
possible to the original sentiments. In general, interviews were invaluable in acquiring 
information with regard to the nascent Inkaic cultural revitalization efforts that have 
emerged particularly in communities other than Ñamarín. 
 As part  of the “ongoing interplay  between theorizing and collecting data,” my 
general area of interest in community participation and the associated research questions 
were refined and shifted focus as I became more familiar with Saraguro, and I came to 
47
see that issues of water management and access played a large role in community politics 
and were a main concern for individual families, hence the relative importance of water 
in the coming discussions (Davies 1998:31). In addition, a number of informal 
conversations allowed me to collect limited life history  information from a handful of 
informants.
 The chapters that follow are divided loosely by  scale of analysis. The first  
concerns community participation and social and political issues related to the 
functioning of one particular indigenous community, Ñamarín, and the discussion is 
restricted to the local context. The following chapter situates the events of the May 2010 
water protests in historical context, dealing centrally with the interaction between 
indigenous communities and the national state as indigenous actors negotiate their place 
within the nation as citizens and as members of smaller communities. The final chapter 
deals with the various indigenous lifeways of community members, and how an Inkaic 
cultural revitalization movement, informed by global discussions of indigeneity, draws 
on particular ideals of the indigenous community. 
48
Chapter 2 - The indigenous community of Ñamarín
 Immediately  surrounding the town of Saraguro are a handful of indigenous 
communities that range in size. In local opinion each community has a bit of its own 
character, and distinctions in wealth and “tradition” can be found between and within 
each. Descending Northeast into the valley  below Saraguro, the Panamerican highway 
winds its way past the iconic choclo statue that commemorates the importance of corn in 
the region. Choclos are ripe, fresh corn cobs that are something of a delicacy since they 
are only  available for a few weeks from April to June before the stalks and grains begin 
to dry. Just prior to harvest in these months, the choclo statue seems almost redundant 
since it sits just above a panorama of the valley where houses are interspersed between 
and almost overtaken by the scattered plots of tall green stalks, whose little purple 
flowers provide a bit of contrasting colour to the dominant green in what can be very wet 
months. Corn here is grown everywhere, and the backyard plots of the town itself 
gradually extend into small fields, usually a couple dozen meters in length and much 
fewer in width, that  cut the landscape into strips of alternating grazing land and 
agricultural terrain. Stalks of corn rise tenaciously mere steps from well worn dirt trails, 
and along the highway larger plots are dusted generously  by  the many busses, transport 
trucks, and other vehicles that pass through the region headed towards more populated 
areas. Further down the curving road are a handful of bare cement block or adobe houses 
and a dominating newer-looking gas station leads down to a sort of wholesale tienda, 
where crates of beer are plied high under a blue tarp. Here, houses begin to take 
advantage of the more open landscape and sit farther back from the road itself, until a 
49
sharp curve in the highway signals an upcoming bridge where it  crosses a stream of the 
Paquishapa river flowing down from Gunudel and Las Lagunas, two indigenous 
communities with fertile land due to their favourable location in the valley. 
 At this point the edge of a ridge rises sharply up to higher pastureland that extends 
northward from a large group of mountains that form the southern ridge of the canton. 
The Baño del Inka, a small waterfall, has carved itself into this ridge and joins the river at 
the highway. According to local tourist brochures, this waterfall was an Inka holy site, or 
huaca, where the Inka rulers would stop and purify themselves when journeying through 
the region. Today, a trail leads up to the small cave formations around the waterfall itself, 
which are often used as a ceremonial site for self-proclaimed shamans who provide 
purification ceremonies to tourists, and who often lead the Inti Raymi (Inkaic festival of 
the sun, held on the June solstice) celebrations3. It is also a party site for some local 
youth. Just below the waterfall itself a smaller paved road leads up to ridge that  sits 
between the valley and the higher plateau, and a sign proclaims the entrance to Ñamarín.
3 Such ceremonies are often held for tourists through the local community tourism network and 
tourism operator. The ceremonies themselves are usually performed by local Saraguro NGO 
professionals working within a framework of Inkaic cultural revitalization who, in these contexts, 
may refer to themselves as Shamans. Their identification as such is, however, questioned by 
many who do not align themselves with this movement. A number of folk healers do operate 
somewhat clandestinely in the area, though their identities are not known to the author. 
50
Figure 5: The Community of Ñamarín.
 Ñamarín is a relatively small community compared to Oñakapak or Lagunas, with 
about 75 active households. Most of the houses are nucleated around the center of the 
ridge on which the community sits, but others are scattered along the highway or on the 
steeper forested incline leading up to the high pasturelands. Each house generally  has a 
small amount of arable land immediately  adjacent to it, but a household’s total land will 
likely be spread between different elevations and areas. The houses themselves are varied 
and tell of a diversity  in wealth. Older U-shaped adobe houses, with small or no windows 
and coloured by years of cooking fires are maintained alongside newer breeze block 
cement structures or brick houses with large, tinted windows. Strangely enough, a 
handful of the new, larger houses sit empty, their financiers living and working in Spain 
51
or the United States and having these houses built in what has elsewhere been described 
as conspicuous consumption (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1994:845-865). 
 Other elaborate homes have been funded by the occupants’ children through 
remittances, and still others are simply  indicative of the growing number of well educated 
professional Saraguros who live and work in the region. Most of these new homes are 
built  by hired workers and contractors, rather than the communal labour parties that could 
have been assembled in decades past to make house building an activity shared between 
family, friends, clients and patrons (Pribilsky 2007:108-110). A few other homes sit 
empty and boarded up, their previous occupants having migrated relatively permanently 
to the city or the oriente, where quite a large number of ethnic Saraguros have bought 
land over the last century. Some families even spread their time between the Saraguro 
area and Yacuambi, the now largely Saraguro region in the warmer climate to the east. 
Lining the paths, road, and small corn plots, deep green grass is cut short by women and 
children to feed their cuyes (guinea pigs, a typical Andean delicacy) and the occasional 
rabbit. 
 The main road that passes through Ñamarín is, curiously, asphalt paved and in 
relatively good condition; quite a strange sight since most communities in the area have 
an uneven gravel or dirt  road that gets pitted from use in muddy  weather. The stories that 
are told about that road speak to the often patchwork, negotiated nature of infrastructure 
in such communities. Less than a decade ago, the main road in Ñamarín was dirt, but a 
deal was struck with the company who was doing the paving on the newly expanded 
Panamerican highway. Because the highway winds around lands belonging to those in the 
52
community, the trade-off was that the company  was also to pave the main road through 
Ñamarín. Apparently, when the work was nearing completion, the company attempted to 
pull their equipment out in the middle of the night and neglect the agreement. One of 
their workers was hired from Ñamarín, a low level hand who got wind of the plot and 
stole one of the paving machines. Weaving back and forth along the highway, he 
managed to bring the machine to the community, where it was held until the company  did 
pave the road. 
 Such a story is reminiscent of the long history of corruption, fractured 
agreements, and extra-legal measures that members of indigenous communities must on 
occasion confront. This chapter examines how members of one particular Saraguro 
community, Ñamarín, attempt to deal with the various problems that indigenous 
communities face in the day-to-day: interacting with various levels of government, 
establishing some consensus on a particular decision affecting the members of the 
community  as a whole, resolving disputes, and the continuous work that  goes into 
maintaining the system of tubes and canals that bring water to the community. The first 
part of the chapter details the town hall style meetings, assembleas comunales, where 
community  members gather to discuss issues, air grievances, and make decisions, while 
the second half deals with the communal labour parties and the principal of participation.
 The word used in Saraguro for the form of communal labour, or mutual aid, 
organized at the community level for the benefit  of constituent comuneros as a group is 
called a minga. This is only one of a variety of forms of mutual aid or labour tax that 
have been identified for the Andean region. In Peru, similar practices are generally 
53
termed faena or phayna. In the southern Andes, the Quechua term mink’a is used to 
describe an asymmetrical labour exchange, as in patron-client or compradrazgo 
relationships where one party obviously gives more than they receive, often to secure a 
favour later on or maintain a relationship (Trawick 2003:197).
 A range of other practices are typically discussed in association, ranging from the 
concept of ayni (mutual aid between neighbours or kin that is reciprocal and non-
exploitative) through to the mit’a (labour tribute, in the colonial period and until the late 
19th century  in Ecuador non-hacienda Indians were required to offer a number of days 
per year of work in mines or public works to the State), considered an exploitative and 
non-reciprocal practice. The labour of hacienda peons and indebted huasipungueros, who 
received a small subsistence plot and usufruct pasture and water rights in exchange for 
work on a hacienda, was expropriated by landowners, in some cases sparing indigenous 
labourers from the most onerous public service labour (Larson 2004:110). In 
contemporary  highland Ecuador, it is not uncommon for certain building materials for a 
designated rural project to be supplied by the state or municipality, while the labour is 
expected to come from mingueros (communal labourers), their work in a way continuing 
to be co-opted by the state (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999:57-58). In Ñamarín, participation 
in minga labour is both a responsibility and an ideal of behaviour, contributing to the well 
being of the community. 
Community assemblies and fragmented consensus
 Once a month, Ñamarín comuneros congregate in the casa comunal (town hall/
communal house) to discuss matters important to the collective whole or to groups and 
54
voluntary organizations working within the community, resolve any disputes that involve 
large sections of the community, and to air any particular issue of interest. These 
meetings are planned and organized by the elected cabildo, made up of a President, Vice-
President, Secretary and/or Treasurer. Each cabildo position is a two year term 
(previously  and more commonly a one year term), and the members of the cabildo are 
expected to work together to do the organizational and governmental work required 
within the community. Their duties include organizing and running the monthly  meetings, 
planning and coordinating biweekly mingas, putting on a yearly barrio (neighbourhood) 
festival in August, resolving minor disputes that involve groups within the community, 
and generally acting as representatives of the community as a political body between 
comuneros and the branches of government involved in the community (the local school 
is part  of a canton wide bilingual education network responsible to the province, the 
daycare is run under the Instituto Nacional de la Niñez y la Familia [INFA, National 
Institute of Childhood and Families], and there is also a small clinic staffed by  a young 
Lojana doctor doing her required rural practicum as well as an auxiliary nurse from 
Ñamarín, and the cabildo often acts as a go-between for the municipality  of Saraguro, 
which receives urban-scale taxes from the 6 indigenous communities closest to the town - 
Ñamarín, Gunudel, Gulacpamba, Las Lagunas, Illincho, and Quisquinchir). 
 As has been commonly noted in the Andes, cabildo positions are not always 
desirable as they require time, effort, and no small amount of personal funds since they 
are not paid positions (see, for example, Salomon 2004; Trawick 2003). As an incentive, 
those who complete a term serving on the cabildo are exempt from participating in 
55
community  mingas for two years. Cabildo positions are not integrated with the cargo 
duties of hosting the various Catholic feasts, though in other areas of Latin America the 
two responsibilities (of governing and of hosting feasts) are part of the same civil-
religious hierarchy of offices through which any  heads of household would be expected 
to pass during their lifetimes, eventually fulfilling their duties and becoming mayores, or 
semi-retired “elder.” Elders are those that have completed the requisite number of feast 
sponsorships and turns in office, and while are therefore exempt from any duties of 
leadership, their experience and age means that  their voices are often most respected with 
regards to community matters (Bastien 1978:62). While in many areas cabildo positions 
and feast sponsorships are nominally male positions, they often require the services of 
entire households, and in Saraguro positions are not restricted to men, though they are 
more likely to sit on the cabildo council. Both men and women are respected as mayores.  
 The stage for the monthly  meetings, the casa comunal, is an absolutely 
monumental three and a half story cement block building, whose half-painted exterior 
walls and mostly empty, but barred, window frames serve to illustrate, like the main road 
itself, the sometimes curious situations by  which indigenous communities are able to 
build infrastructure. Around the same time as the Panamerican was expanded and initially 
paved in the area, a gravel mining company had set up on the lower reaches of land 
belonging to those in the community, just above the ravine through which the river flows. 
According to various stories told by comuneros, the mining operations eroded the land to 
such an extent that one family lost  a large portion of their fields. As part of an agreement 
with the community, and as repayment for the lost land, the mining company offered to 
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provide the materials for the current casa comunal. The family who lost their land, in 
return, now runs a small tienda on the bottom floor of the building, offering a wide 
variety of household essentials and treats. The entire second floor, as well as much of the 
exterior, remains unfinished, though more recently the mining company had offered to 
provide the necessary funds to complete the project in return for being allowed to resume 
their operations. A delegation from the community was sent to negotiate a deal, and to the 
disappointment of some, decided that it was not in the community’s benefit  to allow the 
company to continue. Consequently, the company’s few remaining machines sit unused 
and rusting, perched along the highway just above the river. Similar occurrences seem to 
be relatively common in rural Ecuador, where funding is secured, communal labour 
organized, funds are exceeded, curtailed, or eventually  withdrawn, and large projects 
such as the casa comunal sit ever unfinished, though fully in use. 
 Meetings take place on Saturday nights, usually beginning mid-evening and often 
lasting a few hours, sometimes well into the night. Climbing the stairs to the third floor, 
reserved for community assemblies, the branches of rebar hook up out of tiled but 
unfinished steps where railings might one one day stand. The open room is painted in a 
dull yellow that when lit by the golden light from buzzing incandescent bulbs gives the 
whole space an aged look that deceives the building’s recent construction. At the far end 
of the room a large wooden desk separates the cabildo members from the rest of the 
comuneros, who sit in twin rows of long pew-like benches. Others lean against the walls, 
huddling in their woolen caps or black felt hats, their chins tucked into heavy woolen 
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ponchos to protect against the nighttime chill, and yet others mingle in the back near the 
stairs, non-committal.
 Both men and women take part in these meetings, with many women providing a 
certain disciplinary role through hushed, but all too audible, criticism or laughter with a 
friend or family member whenever a proposal is ill-thought or simply  not in their interest. 
Women are also able to sit on the cabildo council (for the 2010-2011 cabildo, the 
president and vice president were men, the secretary’s positions was occupied by a 
woman, though women have previously  served as president) and voice their opinions as 
community  members, with the most deference paid to senior men and women, addressed 
respectfully  with the honorifics tayta (father) and mama (mother). Assemblies proceed 
according to a pre-set agenda decided upon by the cabildo and read aloud at the 
commencement, with additional points of discussion added as necessary at  the end of the 
meeting. Discussion is very deferential to the president and to those present, with a 
speaking turn prefaced by a statement of greeting and of gratitude. 
 One such assembly serves to illustrate just how these community meetings 
establish a certain consensus among members. Because of the direct involvement of, 
ideally, one member of each household, this type of assembly may be considered 
democratic, though as with most politics a resolution does not often satisfy the whole or 
even a great majority. On this particular evening in April, the assembly had been 
accidentally scheduled at the same time as another meeting of the social security 
cooperative that includes members from the four communities surrounding the páramo 
(high grasslands) pasturelands of which Ñamarín is a part. Reynaldo, an outspoken and 
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sometimes aloof veterinarian, stood up  after the reading of the agenda to apologize for 
the confusion, and proposed that since everyone was present anyway he could quickly 
talk about establishing a new cooperative strictly  in Ñamarín. The cabildo president, 
Tayta Rodrigo, thanked Reynaldo and indicated that since the topic didn’t involve 
everyone and wasn’t on the agenda, he could take time after the meeting. Unsatisfied, 
Reynaldo pressed, repeating that it wouldn’t take long. The hushed voices of those in 
attendance rose as each person turned to those around them and discussed or joked, until 
finally one woman stood and offered that they just let him speak so the meeting could 
move along. So it is with almost any topic in these assemblies: proposals are met with 
quiet discussion, counter proposals, and eventual frustration can lead to either consensus 
or deferment of the discussion until another day, or until more information can be gained. 
 The next issue, this time brought up by the Vice-President Javier, was the piles of 
dirt, trash, and building supplies that had been accumulating on the main road. Only a 
few weeks prior a minga had been called to clear the road of debris, but  additional piles 
of sand, dirt, and stone soon replaced the old ones. Another minga was proposed, and met 
with a range of complaints. Hesitantly, a couple of men admitted to having materials 
blocking part of the road, and each offered an excuse: they had no way to move it, the 
materials were needed for an ongoing project, or so-and-so had offered to help  move the 
debris with their truck but never came through. Others complained that  if there was a 
minga, then what would the community  do with all the collected building materials? If it 
were collected as part of a minga, was it  common property  that any member could claim 
use of, did it  belong to the cabildo, or was this a sort of theft? Tayta Rodrigo rose above 
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the clamour, insisting that if they didn’t have a minga, then it was little likely that  the 
obstructions would ever be moved. After further discussion Tayta Rodrigo put his foot 
down, planning the minga for the following Saturday. It was agreed that those with 
building materials on the road would have to take part  if they  wanted to keep their items, 
otherwise anyone could claim them. 
 Towards the end of the night, the agenda broached a usual topic of contention in 
Ñamarín: volleyball. Maria, the widowed nurse at the health post, whose large, ornate 
house sits just opposite the casa comunal complained that the teens playing volleyball on 
the road in front of the casa comunal (there is no volleyball court in Ñamarín, a net is set 
up nightly, strung from the casa comunal across to the health post) were playing 
recklessly. According to her, the kids were careless and often broke roof tiles when they 
would send a ball flying, or they  would leave the lights on too late at night or forget to 
turn them off, costing everybody money. Younger boys and men usually play volleyball 
once the sun sets, after the men of established households have played. The school does 
have a cement court, but it is used for soccer. Someone proposed, half joking, that the 
community use the building materials left on the road to build a new volleyball court.
 A couple of times a year, I am told, there is a discussion of where and how to 
build an actual court, but  so far there has been no resolution to the issue. The most 
obvious, and favourable to many, place to build the court would be at the school, just 
below the soccer field. Unfortunately, that space is currently  used as a garden, and the 
director of the school has made himself clear that he does not want to give it  up. Though 
the school is funded by the government and features a curriculum designed by the 
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provincial ministry responsible for bilingual education, members of the community (in 
conjunction with local and Spanish NGOs) take responsibility for its upkeep  and 
amelioration, and so defer to the teachers and parents’ organization on issues related 
directly  to the school. Aside from the difficulties raised by finding a suitable space for a 
dedicated volleyball court and financing the construction, the group of men who play 
regularly do not want to give up their current location, for reasons that will become 
apparent in the next section. 
 Many people weighed in on this hotly debated topic. One regular volleyball 
player offered that the fence surrounding the health post  could be extended upwards with 
poles and chicken wire, but even that suggestion was met with opposition from those who 
felt  that it would diminish the aesthetic of the center of the community or that it  would 
not stop balls from breaking tiles on Mama Carmen’s nearby house. Another proposal 
was that each volleyball player should bring a roof tile each time they break one, but that 
was not satisfactory since Mama Carmen, in particular, was not able to replace the tiles 
on her house herself. Meanwhile, Reynaldo suggested that the real issue was that the boys 
didn’t know how to play “técnicamente” (technically), so the solution was to teach them 
how to play better. From the back of the room, Linder, who according to himself knows 
how to play technically (so technically in fact that  he never plays in the community, only 
at the feria libre [market] on Sundays, since it would unbalance any team), said that most 
often its not that they don’t know how to play, but the desperation in trying to save a 
point can lead them to be a little over-enthusiastic and send the ball flying. Linder said 
that he had to learn how to play once as well, and it was at about the same age as these 
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boys. With that, the issue was left  largely unresolved, though some of the regular players 
offered to have a small workshop to teach some skills to their younger counterparts. 
 At a time when many local Saraguro NGO professionals, neo-indigenists 
attempting to resurrect a nobler Inkaic past, and community members alike are lamenting 
the loss of the comunal tradition that they see as once having pervaded the Saraguro 
lifeway, the direct democracy of community assemblies stands out as a testament to the 
capacity of these communities to survive and continue to resolve, however partially, the 
conflicts, new and old, that they face. For every  farmer complaining that he can no longer 
depend on his neighbours to help him plow, for every  parent lamenting the indifference of 
their children to a humble, indigenous lifestyle, there is also a public forum where those 
same parents can come together to discuss and attempt to resolve the adolescent 
alcoholism or general apathy of their kids, and there are mingas when comuneros, at 
times begrudgingly, put in the very real labour that supports all members of the 
community. I do not wish to romanticize the essence of the community as one of 
wholeness and equality, but I also do not agree that  some spirit of mutual aid, of 
complicity, has been completely  lost  (assuming, of course, that it  ever existed). Through 
the frequent practices of communal labour, participation in volountary organizations, and 
public debate in regular meetings, Ñamarín residents produce the outcome of community 
simultaneously as some members mourn its demise.
Volleyball and the impact of community assemblies
 The discussion over volleyball provides an opportunity to measure the possible 
impact of community assemblies in a relatively immediate way. Organizing mingas, 
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providing information on land titling or various voluntary  organizations, and enforcing 
minga and assembly participation are all fairly  straightforward administrative tasks that, 
in Ñamarín, are by and large debated democratically in the monthly meetings. Issues such 
as volleyball, littering, and drinking, though, are some of the more social aspects of 
popular governance in this indigenous community. These debates speak more to the 
social, emotional notions of communities since they are not only political/administrative 
categories, but are also locales to which people attach significance and actively  attempt to 
structure in a way that conforms to their ideals. 
 Drinking, in particular, is a contentious topic that divides opinions and is a source 
of worry for many, such as the small but significant number of Evangelical families who 
abstain from drinking. Alcohol maintains a central place in Catholic feasts, and rounds of 
shared drinks provide a very  social aspect to many gatherings, but the prevalence of 
youth alcoholism and the economic pressure that husbands who are heavy drinkers put on 
their families are sources of worry. Thus the attempts, in recent months, of some morally 
concerned comuneros to ban the sale of beer and trago from the tiendas in the 
community. Older farmers and herders, lifelong habitual drinkers, are the first to grumble 
at such proposals, but say very little in response, knowing that their habits are less likely 
to be questioned. Still, a lifetime of alcohol consumption took its toll on more than one 
Tayta during my brief stay  in Ñamarín. So just what is the power of the community 
assembly, of the decisions made in regard to the social regulation of its members? In 
order to trace the impact in this one area, a description of the place of volleyball in the 
community is necessary. 
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Figure 6: Men play volleyball outside of the casa comunal.
 The type of volleyball enjoyed in large parts of Ecuador (usually  called 
Ecuavoley, or more commonly in Saraguro, boley) is played with a heavier ball than in 
North America, usually a soccer ball; teams are composed of three rather than six players, 
and the net is generally high so that “spiking” is not feasible or allowed. These features 
combine to make the game one of technique, positioning, and teamwork. Rectangular 
courts do not divide easily into three, meaning that each team member has to move to 
cover areas opened up by the movement of another, and a lack of coordination leads to 
more points scored against than anything else. In Ñamarín, as elsewhere in Saraguro, 
boley  is a man’s game - women and most youth are more likely  to play  soccer - and in 
Ñamarín the core group  of players are middle aged men with established households and 
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families. Part of the reason for this is that betting is an essential aspect of the game. 
Unlike other forms of betting, the audience doesn’t  usually  participate, though a friend or 
family member might offer up  part  of the stake for one team or the other. During the 
week, each player is expected to wager anything from 50 cents to two dollars per match, 
though on Sundays the stakes go can go up to as high as five or ten dollars a head. 
 Since there is no dedicated boley  court in Ñamarín, the men have painted yellow 
lines on the asphalt  road directly outside of the casa comunal, where a row of bricks juts 
out from the fence of the health post  to act as a bench. The tienda in the casa comunal sits 
at the center line of the makeshift court, and during games passersby are forced to skirt 
the narrow edge of the road to avoid the court itself. Play  stops regularly for passing 
animals, vehicles, and always for the mayores who are not expected to wait for the end of 
a rally. Played almost every evening, boley is a popular diversion for many people in 
Ñamarín, even those who do not play  often sit  to watch and converse or stop by for a few 
minutes on their way home or to their fields. This is one of the reasons boley  players 
aren’t keen on actually having a dedicated court, since it would move the sport away 
from the center of the community, spatially  and metaphorically. The men who play 
usually  try to team up  with their friends and those with whom they play  regularly, though 
tensions can be very high since money is on the line. 
 The time in between matches is filled with, and extended by, often heated debates 
about how much money will be bet and on the make up of each team, since no one bets 
when they know the teams are uneven. Some people need convincing or cajoling, and at 
times finding someone to referee is even more difficult than getting the players to show 
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their wagers before the beginning of a match. Referees take more abuse than anyone, and 
a string of debated calls can end in an argument and eventual withdrawal of one of the 
teams. It  is in this very  social, though not always civil, context that the debates from the 
community assembly were played out the day following the assembley.
 Between the regular cries of “¡Alza chucha!” (Set it, cunt!), “Coje bien... puta 
verga, ¿no cojistes? Yo tampoco cojí, jeje” (Get it good... fuck, you didn’t get it? Me 
neither, haha), or “¿hoy no tomaste tu jugo de babaco?” (Didn’t you drink your babaco 
juice today?), a new joke had emerged from the previous night’s discussion. While the 
men were setting up the net in the early afternoon, Linder was leaning outside of the 
tienda, chewing on an empanada. One of the regular players invited him to play. Smiling, 
Linder responded by saying he plays far too technically  for them. That set  off a round of 
laughter, after which any time someone missed a play or put the ball in to the net, an 
onlooker would call out “!Juega mas técnicamente!” (Play more technically!). 
 This joke was in many ways a public voicing of contestation against what these 
men saw as a slight against them. In no way do the boley players attempt to send balls 
into the health post  or break roof tiles, though none of the regular players had voiced a 
defense the previous night. That  day, the men were keen to defend the space they make 
for themselves every evening against  all possible criticism by jokingly dismissing the 
whole affair. Still, that entire week, not a single ball was sent flying into a yard or house, 
and the net was promptly  taken down at nightfall without a word as a discreet, yet 
obvious message to the younger men that they were not to play  that week. A workshop 
was never held, though the men did for a while coach the youngsters more than usual. 
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There was never any complete consensus agreed upon in the assembly, but the jokes told 
the next day  spoke to an overwhelming self-consciousness that these men had perhaps 
overstepped their right to play by impacting other community members. Their attempts at 
overtly saving face, while silently  acknowledging the validity of criticism, indicate a 
certain moral power derived from the democratic nature of community  assemblies. 
Especially when dealing with social issues, rather than administrative or political ones, 
the lack of consensus among community members is sometimes tempered by individual 
compromise and unwillingness to ruffle too many feathers of the people, often extended 
family, with whom comuneros have to live and interact. 
Water and the commons in the Andes
 Steady  access to water for household use and irrigation is a regularly contentious 
issue in Ñamarín, especially in drier months when houses must limit their water use to 
ensure that an adequate amount of the resource remains in the system. Community 
assemblies regularly  feature interfamily disputes over access to water, and some of the 
largest mingas organized throughout the year are tasked with cleaning, maintaining, and 
repairing the network of tubes and canals that bring water into the community itself. 
Ñamarín, along with 5 other nearby communities, draws its water from springs in the 
southern mountains of the valley, located about seven kilometers from Ñamarín itself. 
The patchwork network had been expanded and ameliorated in the past half century, 
though the irrigation canals are said to date back at least  a century. Even some of the 
oldest campesinos claim that they don’t know when the canals still in use were originally 
built. 
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 The two springs from which water is currently drawn are Uritusinka and Nivel, 
both located in the heavily  forested southern mountains of the canton, though in the 
1970s a Misión Andina Ecuatoriana project helped to set up the first tubed water to the 
community  that drew from a smaller source at Wilimon, much closer to the community. 
The Wilimon source, just above the Baño del Inka waterfall, is now largely unused since 
it sits surrounded by pastureland and isn’t well filtered. A cement tank at Uritusinka flows 
into a long system of tubes that was constructed with the aid of a Plan Internacional 
project in the early 1990s, providing water to houses in Ñamarín and feeding two small 
reservoirs that allow for pressured sprinkler irrigation used in the small scattered 
greenhouses found in the community. Below these resevoirs, the tubed water system 
branches off to feed four smaller holding tanks that separate Ñamarín into smaller sectors 
of water use - Tiltil, Manzana, Kakaloma, and Wizholoma. 
 The irrigation canals, used to funnel water to pasture and also to lower 
agricultural fields, carve their way from the Nivel source through land still owned by 
families in Ñamarín to find their way down to the community  itself. Each of the 
communities in the area draws its water from a different source, but because land in the 
páramo is variously  owned by people living in Tambopamba, Oñakapak, and Lagunas as 
well, the members of Ñamarín are sometimes responsible for the upkeep of the canals 
that feed the high pastures of others, the other communities having their own canals to 
worry  about. Disputes over water, as well as any irregularities or immediately  pressing 
issues fall on the shoulders of the elected cabildo council, who may deal with whatever 
problems arise by bringing them up for discussion in an assembly, or may call together a 
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small group of volunteers to work an extra minga day in order to more quickly  repair a 
damaged tube or canal. Being such an important resource, ensuring access to water is 
perhaps the most important aspect of community participation: maintenance of the 
system requires the continuous work of every family, and the resulting communal labour 
parties are certainly  among the most regular occasions when members of the community 
as a whole come together to achieve a common goal. 
Figure 7: An approximation of the water system in Ñamarín. Map by Brett Freeman.
 Irrigation systems in the Andean and Peruvian North Coast regions have been 
dated as far back as 5400 years, making previously arid areas, like the wide coastal 
valleys, accessible to human occupation and agriculture (Dillehay et al. 2005:17244). 
Previously, theorists maintained, following the hydraulic hypothesis of Wittfogel and 
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Steward, that the “managerial requirements” of the complex systems of canals that  were 
necessary  for widespread irrigation and an increasing population would have required an 
increasingly  complex political system, eventually  leading to the formation of state level 
organization (Billman 2002:372). The substantial amounts of labour required to build 
large-scale canal systems, in other words, would have required a hierarchical framework 
within which to extract labour through tribute and organize subsequent building projects: 
A large quantity of water can be channeled and kept within bounds only 
by the use of mass labor, and this mass labor must  be coordinated, 
disciplined, and led. Thus a number of farmers eager to conquer arid 
lowlands and plains are forced to invoke organizational devices which - 
on the basis of premachine technology - offer the one chance of 
success: they  must work in cooperation with their fellows and 
subordinate themselves to a directing authority. (Wittfogel 1957:18, 
quoted in Billman 2002:373) 
This analysis carried particular weight on the North Coast of Peru, where wide arid 
valleys provide land unsuitable for agriculture unless they are connected to a permanent 
water source, often in the Andean foothills, and where the great pre-Inkaic Moche and 
Chimu states emerged. Subsequent studies have shown, however, that large scale 
irrigation systems do not necessarily depend upon state control, and historical and 
ethnographic evidence suggests that one of the most common practices of water system 
management in the area is largely  autonomous, segmentary organization that does not 
necessitate, though may include, some centralized oversight where states are concerned 
(Hayashida 2006:258; Mitchell 1975; Netherly  1984). Accounts of these systems 
resemble the contemporary  practices in Ñamarín, where each community, village, ayllu, 
or parcialidad controls a segment of the whole system, which they are responsible for 
maintaining and from which they receive direct benefit. Community membership, indeed, 
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can be framed as those households who benefit from the community’s water system and 
actively contribute labour towards its maintenance. 
 In many cases, commonly held resources (such as land, water, fish, or forests in 
different areas) receive academic scrutiny as part of the rolling out of the developmental 
sector, interested in the sustainable use of increasingly scarce resources along with a push 
for ecological sustainability. For some, the existence of “indigenous” systems of common 
resource management, typified in this case by access to local water sources, maintenance 
of irrigation canals built  by  previous generations, and traditional organizational 
structures, provides an alternative to centralized or market oriented property rights. 
Others have theorized around the possible dangers of common resources. Garett  Hardin, 
in particular, has outlined this in what he has called the “Tragedy  of the Commons”: a 
resource, such as land, is determined to be an indivisible property, so that each person has 
a communal right to its use. Each user, keen to maximize their own advantage, will use 
the property to a degree that damages it, since the deviant individual gains all of the profit 
for doing so, but the damage is spread out among each user so that the gain outweighs the 
cost to the individual. As a result, common properties are doomed to failure unless 
“coercive” measures are imposed to ensure the cost of abuse is greater than the possible 
profits for cheating the system (Hardin 1968:1247). The coercive measures include either 
centralized state oversight, or free-market property  rights. Part of the problem with this 
analysis, aside from the obvious social Darwinian emphasis on individual gain, is that 
Hardin neglects to consider that, particularly in the case of Andean irrigation systems, 
while there may be no central authority overseeing the entirety of a canal system, each 
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community  has within it rules for use of the common resource, along with sanctions for 
theft or overuse and a local level authority entrusted with distribution, regulation, and 
arbitration (Ostrom 1990:15-23). 
 While, as Paul Trawick has shown for southern Peru, these systems are by no 
means perfect solutions, the maintenance of local community organizational structures 
along with local oversight of irrigation systems can go a long way  towards reducing 
overuse and theft  (Trawick 2001a; Trawick 2001b; Trawick 2003). Trawick emphasizes 
the relationship between communal social structure and water management, and the 
Huaynacotas case provides a cautionary tale to those wishing to overhaul common 
property  regimes. Following the 1969 Peruvian land reforms, the continued 
encroachment of Spanish hacendados and other wealthy landowners, who now had legal 
rights to more water, led to a breakdown in the system of mutual obligation that had 
previously  governed the distribution of the increasingly scarce water supply. Government 
oversight had increased the possibilities of corruption through favouritism, since 
water distributors were no longer village leaders and community 
servants, but rather technicians who were employees of the state ... 
Increasingly, water allocation had become a kind of free-for-all struggle 
- now a highly bureaucratized one, rather than a cooperative effort - a 
slowly unfolding tragedy. This occurred because there were now 
tangible rewards - systemic ones - for resorting to illicit means of 
getting more of the resource. (Trawick 2003:197) 
In Huaynacotas, the Tragedy  of the Commons stemmed not from some natural human 
incompatibility with common property regimes, but from a centralized state’s attempt to 
regulate local access to this integral resource. Further, Trawick laments, the decline in 
communal labour that accompanied the increasingly  sparse access to water, along with 
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increasing mestizaje and outmigration has led, eventually, to the decline and even death 
of the previously  “indigenous” community. Though Trawick could be criticized for 
pursuing “lo Andino” (the essentialist view of traditional, timeless Andean indigneous 
practices), many comuneros in Saraguro also believe that declining minga participation, 
youth who do not wish to farm or herd, and increased mestizaje is leading not only to a 
change in what it  means for them to be indigenous, but  also to a decline in the 
community itself. 
Figure 8: The páramo of Ñamarín, looking South towards Uritusinka.
  That being said, in Ñamarín, water is perhaps the most evident area of communal 
interest. While canal maintenance and decisions relating to the extension or upkeep of 
tubed water do stem from a central body at the head of the community, there are no water 
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turns, as is common in the drier, higher areas of the central and southern Andes. Still, the 
claim that many Andean indigenous and campesino (peasant) communities are largely 
formed around the regulation of water holds merit. What sets much of the Saraguro 
region apart from other areas in the Andes is that water is generally not scarce, and 
indigenous campesinos have not been subjected to large scale expropriation of lands by 
outsiders. Of course, even having maintained their land base, successive generations of 
inheritance split  between all children and a decreasing relative market value of 
agricultural products mean that there is generally not enough land in any one family in 
order for full agricultural and pastoral subsistence. It should be stated here that in order to 
be legalized as a Comunidad Indígena, a community must have some land held in 
common, though in Ñamarín that land consists of a largely  unused hilltop stand of pine 
trees at Sombrera. As such, water is the one resource needed by all and held in common 
in the region. 
Mingas and participation
 Mingas are organized and led by  the cabildo council, and regularly occur in 
Ñamarín every two weeks unless a major feast is being held. People tend to complain 
whenever mingas are planned any more frequently  than that, and show their discontent 
with non-participation. Mingas serve a variety of purposes, all of which, ideally, serve the 
interest of everyone in the community rather than only  a portion. Tasks such as trail and 
canal maintenance, cleaning water reservoirs or repairing/renovating parts of the water 
system, cleaning the main road, and performing general upkeep of the school or casa 
comunal are all tasks that can be completed through mingas. Once a year after the last of 
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the corn harvest in June the irrigation canals have to be cleared in preparation for the 
drier months leading up to planting, which happens in October. Taking two or three 
mingas to complete, this is perhaps the largest  regular minga task and quite a number of 
people are required. Many families choose to send two or three members in order to 
complete their yearly obligation to the community. Minga participation is counted by 
household, but by volunteering extra hands or the use of a track animal or chainsaw when 
needed, families can pick and choose which mingas they want to attend throughout the 
year. 
 The secretary of the cabildo is responsible to take the names of minga participants 
at the end of the day, while the president leads and directs the works. The president’s role 
is a very visible one, since mingueros engage in hard labour side by side it is expected 
that the leader of the minga work just as hard as everyone else, and in some cases much 
harder. I participated in a handful of mingas in Ñamarín, but it was during the canal 
clearing mingas of 2010 that some of the complexities and grievances associated with 
this type of participation were illustrated most clearly. 
 Saturday  morning, at  eight  a.m. when a minga has been called, workers are 
expected to meet at the casa comunal equipped with a lunch and a tool appropriate for the 
job. On one such morning, the second and hopefully final day of canal maintenance, 
Tayta Rodrigo blew his quipa (a hollow bull’s horn indicative of the office of president) 
impatiently  since only a handful of mayores had so far assembled. The feeble sound that 
was produced hardly resonated off the wall of the casa comunal, and laughing, he passed 
the quipa off to a middle aged man, Felipe, to see if he could do any better. After a few 
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tries by different men, Tayta Rodrigo was able to blow loud enough that he was satisfied, 
and went back to waiting. By quarter after eight, he had had enough, and called those 
present to set off to where two weeks before they had ended the previous minga. The 
group set  off up the various trails through the woods just above the community to where 
they  meet the wider path that leads up to the páramo. Those individuals with cattle or 
much agricultural land daily climb and descend that winding path that eventually  crests 
the top  of the long ridge where most of the lands of those in the community are located. 
The path levels out  and leads through a large, open, rolling area that has been cleared for 
use as pasture or is planted with corn and beans that ripen later in the year than plots 
lower down, spreading the work associated with the harvest over weeks, and extending 
the time that  fresh corn is available. The trail continues south, winding around or atop 
rolling hills covered in thick underbrush or stands of trees that  look over cleared 
depressions, towards the mountains and the sources of water for Ñamarín, where thick 
forest still dominates. 
 Just entering the páramo from below, a small group  of workers stopped to wait  for 
the others. Felipe, a regular attendee (since he lives alone, being separated from his wife 
and his children having established their own houses), turned to a young woman and 
complained that it is always the same people in each minga. There are those, like him, 
who regularly and punctually attend, while the majority just  show up whenever they feel. 
Jenny echoed his sentiment just as Tayta Rodrigo walked into earshot with a group of 
older men. Felipe suggested that the mingas needed to be advertised at the tiendas, and 
that non-participation should be punished more strongly. Conscious of his place in this 
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suggestion, Tayta Rodrigo simply replied that those who attend the assemblies know 
when the mingas will be, and besides, everyone talks and should be informed anyway. 
 Participation is a key  concept when thinking about the role of community in 
Ñamarín. As the former director of one of the local social development NGOs who lives 
in Ñamarín, Gustavo, put it to me in an interview, 
Con tema de migracion hay mucha gente quien quiere pagar a otros. Si 
esta ausente, esta bien, pero el valor de la persona no puede valorar, 
porque la persona es importante, por sus ideas mas que por su trabajo. 
Con animo ... eso no se sustituye. (In regard to migration, there are 
many people who would rather pay others. If you’re absent, that’s fine, 
but the value of the person can’t be measured because the person is 
important, for their ideas more than their work. With enthusiasm ... that 
can’t be substituted).
While he was speaking directly to the issue of out migration as a cause for people not 
attending mingas, his comment relies on the idea that the presence of a person in a minga 
is worth more than simply whatever work they  might accomplish. Indeed, quite a number 
of Ñamarín residents live and work or study full time in nearby Cuenca or Loja, and 
many of them return on weekends to visit family and to participate in mingas (see also 
Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999:88-91). Benjamin Orlove has similarly noted that for a person 
not to contribute to the physical, sometimes dirty, and often communal work expected of 
a comunero is tantamount to implying that such work is beneath them, that there is 
something “demeaning about treading earth” (Orlove 1998:210). The very physical 
attachment to the earth (of getting dirty) is synonymous with the agricultural work so 
associated with rural indigenous lifeways in the region that  to eschew such work would 
be to demean such lifeways. 
77
 Somewhat self-consciously, Gustavo was consistently  adamant that he regularly 
took part in mingas, though he did not attend those of which I was a part. Other 
indigenous professionals, including those who occupy  residences in the town center, 
regularly maintain small plots of land for personal cultivation. Still, Gustavo’s claim 
resonates with other cases. For example, while Felipe was voicing a complaint that not 
enough people were participating of late, I highly doubt he was only concerned with 
having to do more work. Rather, it  was an issue of fairness and the duty  of all comuneros 
to contribute to the labour that benefits them all. There was a recurring issue with regard 
to attendance at  community assemblies as well. More than once a proposal was laid to 
fine people for non-attendance at meetings. After all, it was argued, why  should only a 
few have to suffer a late, cold night when others are home in their beds? 
 Orin Starn, in his penetrating ethnography Nightwatch, documents the rising 
importance of community  assemblies and rondas campesinas (peasant rounds, featuring 
nightly duties to watch for cattle rustlers, as well as community tribunals set up to resolve 
disputes and punish transgressors), and similarly  recalls a preoccupation with 
participation as one of the main aspirations of these Peruvian peasant organizations (Starn 
1999:128-132). The rural, often indigenous poor, who had been silenced and subservient 
for generations to landholders, hacienda owners, government officials and many  others, 
had by the late 1980s created spaces within which the ideal was participation by 
everyone, and anyone who refused to attend meetings could be punished. The softer side 
of this type of peasant  organization is, through the ideal of participation, the dissipation 
of power. In the Ñamarín assemblies, the cabildo president is responsible for introducing 
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topics of discussion and facilitating, asking what members have to say, rather than 
imposing decisions. The proposal to sanction non-participants was never agreed upon, 
partly because some attendees felt it  unkind to vote for a proposal that explicitly  punished 
absentees who could not, because they weren’t in attendance, defend themselves. 
 One other case to illustrate the importance of participation deals with those who 
might be considered peripheral members of the community. In particular, there are two 
men who live along the Panamerican where the road to Ñamarín splits off. Each operates 
a car wash and mechanic shop, and both rely on water that is maintained by the 
community. A continual spat between the two became part of a larger debate concerning 
water use during one assembly. One of the men had written a letter to the cabildo 
president to complain that the other was stealing water from him by continuously 
connecting his personal tubing from a point higher up  the canals, thereby  gaining a more 
privileged supply and reducing the amount of water the other could obtain. The two 
men’s feud began a heated discussion about how to ensure a continuous water supply to 
the whole community, parts of which suffer from a lack of water during the day because 
of the location of their houses (in much of Ñamarín, the patchwork tubing arrangement 
makes it so that the system, when drained, has to fill up  from the bottom, even though the 
water flows from higher up, before it can reach some of the houses that sit above the 
road). 
 Others complained about their water coming out as “agua chocolate,” a local 
euphemism to describe muddy water from a tap. A decision was made to clean one of the 
reservoirs and to organize another minga to add more tubing closer to the spring at 
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Uritusinka, but no resolution was agreed upon for the original dispute. In the following 
days, the general gossip  consensus from kitchen tables and around the boley court was 
twofold: first, those two men were always at  each other’s water supply, constantly trying 
to gain the advantage of a limited resource they both relied on for their businesses; and 
second, if they  wanted anything done to ensure their water supply, they should actually 
take part  in the mingas. Both men were quietly accused of trying to take advantage of the 
community  by a range of informants, some of whom felt that the annual minga fees and a 
bit of trago was not  sufficient if they were going to make excess demands on water. The 
least they could do, then, was take part in the work that did, after all, benefit them. 
 Returning now to the minga, by the time the initial group arrived at the upper end 
of the canal where it was still in need of clearing, it was already after nine in the morning, 
and only about 20 workers had arrived. They began the process of cleaning out all the 
debris and fixing canal walls where they were damaged, with one volunteer regulating 
water flow higher up to allow the others to work without standing knee or hip deep in 
water. By mid-morning, the original group had more than doubled and the small groups 
of workers wound quickly  down the long canal by leap-frogging past each other. Mingas 
such as these are tough work, particularly when a landslide has blocked off large sections 
of a canal, but they are also social events, where friends and family work together while 
conversing, joking, and flirting. All throughout the day, elder men and the cabildo 
president made sure everyone was contributing appropriately, particularly the younger 
teens who were more likely to prefer to talk and play than to work. It seems that no one 
shirks their duties, and I have a personal admiration for Tayta Rodrigo, who always 
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seemed to be at  the head of the pack, sweating bullets and leading by  example. The 
position of president during a minga requires stamina, leadership, and most importantly, 
the ability  to secure organizational help from those mingueros perhaps more experienced 
or who have expertise in particular aspects of the work being done. 
 Generally these mingas last until about four in the afternoon, when the quipa is 
called again, role call is taken, and the procession moves down the hill again. On this 
particular day, though, four o’clock came and went with more than a few grumbles from 
the obviously tired participants, who felt  their duty was complete. Though no one stopped 
working, conversations changed to why  they  were still there, and whether they should be 
expected to keep on. Answering these muttered complaints, the cabildo president  argued 
that most people had not shown up until midmorning, so they had not contributed a full 
day. Felipe complained, quietly, that he had been there from the beginning, but kept his 
head down and worked with the rest until he heard the sound of the quipa, taking 
seriously his responsibility to the community, but certainly not impressed with those who 
didn’t. Like the fractured nature of consensus in the community  assemblies, communal 
labour and widespread participation do not easily or necessarily translate into the 
harmonious, romantic envisioning of a closed, corporate community that some have 
envisioned. 
Water and community
  In Ñamarín, water is one of the most common topics discussed in community 
assemblies, and a month’s worth of mingas or more are dedicated solely  to cleaning the 
long expanses of irrigation canals, let alone the other labour parties required for repair or 
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amelioration. Indeed, the idea of participation is in itself conflated with the idea of water. 
Any household is required to participate in 12 minga days per year, or pay  a fine of eight 
dollars, a low day’s wage for labour, for each one. The eventual punishment for non-
payment is that the cabildo shuts off water access to a non-compliant household, meaning 
in effect that the cost of water is the 96 dollars per year in minga fines. This price is not 
prohibitive to the wealthier households in Ñamarín, but when informants were asked 
about any  comuneros who regularly chose to pay rather than work in the mingas, few 
could name even one household off the top of their head. Indeed, many of the men whom 
I asked claimed their household regularly  contributed more than was required. True or 
not, they certainly felt that a contribution to participatory effort in mingas and community 
assemblies was admirable. 
 The ethos of participating in the maintenance of a whole, of a community, brings 
us back to early  community theorist Robert Redfield, who has characterized the small 
peasant community as an entirety nested within a greater whole, that of the nation, or 
civilization (1956:26-27). The decline of these small wholes comes as civilization feeds 
upon the “rot of the village” (Homans 1950, quoted in Redfield 1960:110), and the 
wholeness of the community  is eroded as “the norms of the community with respect to 
such matters as theft, sexual irregularity, and class position are weakened and have 
become unclear. People do not have strongly  internalized values. The ethos is vague and 
the goals of life are clouded” (Redfield 1960:110). A similar sentiment resonates in the 
minds of those Saraguros who feel that life is not what it once was, that people are less 
likely to help one another without  the need of something immediate in return, that the 
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community, set  upon by the pressures of increased market integration, outmigration, and 
the threat of a loss of indigenous identity, must be rescued. But the continued existence of 
the cabildo councils, the monthly  assemblies, and the ongoing necessity of collective 
labour to ensure common access to water seem to indicate that one shouldn’t  be too 
fatalistic about the possibilities of a continuing rural, indigenous way of life in these 
small villages, these comunas de indígenas. Though conflict and worry may  characterize 
the norm more than harmony, Saraguro communities have somewhat successfully  carved 
out a place within that greater whole, the nation. The place of indigenous communities on 
a national scale comprises the scope of the following chapter. 
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Chapter 3 - The State, Autonomy, and Protest
 Indigenous communities are often said to exist “on the margins” of the state, of 
society, of the market. These marginal spaces and groups do not, and for long have not, 
existed outside of the wider national realm; the lifeways of indigenous, rural people are 
contingent on the values, perceptions, and legislations of a more mainstream national 
society. For those living in indigenous communities around Saraguro, the uneven roll-
backs and interpenetrations of the state at the local level after neo-liberal reforms of the 
past few decades mean that the state is variously an active partner in financing and 
regulating important infrastructure (the local school and daycare), a passive, distant entity 
where community  level politics are often concerned, or the prime antagonist against 
which autonomy is jealously  guarded (Radcliffe, et al. 2002). But this is nothing new. 
This chapter deals with the relationship between the indigenous community and the web 
of state and societal groups within which it is integrated. I will briefly describe the 
interweaving of autonomy and state participation by Ecuadorian indigenous groups 
through time, and then move into a discussion of a nationwide indigenous protest that 
culminated in a week of strikes, protests, and occasional violence. Legal indigenous 
communities, enshrined in Ecuadorian law through the 1937 Ley de Comunas, have 
served as the prime locus of government intervention in indigenous areas, but also serve 
as enclaves of sorts where the terms and conditions of state authority  are contested to 
protect community and cabildo autonomy. Each example shown here draws attention to 
the blurred lines at the borders of community  and state, and details how indigenous 
peoples and the state both negotiate these boundaries. Throughout, the principles of 
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autonomy and citizenship  are presented in contexts that show their interconnections, 
stressing how the images of indigenous communities are continuously  negotiated in the 
ambiguous space between citizen and outsider, between modernity and barbarity, at the 
margin, but not outside of the state. 
The State in the local
 For the indigenous communities around Saraguro, the Ecuadorian State maintains 
a presence at the local level. The comuna de indígenas exists both as the sanctioned 
political form through which indigenous peoples may make claims on the state, and it 
also necessarily exists as a locus of intervention through which the state may  provide 
services, inventory  its subjects, and make certain demands. Along with the small health 
clinic, staffed during the week by a young doctor from Loja, and the bilingual 
intercultural elementary school, there is a sizable daycare funded by the government that 
sits perched at the far end of Ñamarín overlooking the valley and the community  of 
Tambopamba. These are perhaps the most visible and important services that are 
provided by various government agencies within the community, but they can also be 
sites of tension and the source of many  headaches for the cabildo council, which is tasked 
with overseeing their general functioning as well as mediating between the different 
stakeholders. 
 The daycare, funded and operated under the Instituto de la Niñez y Adolescencia 
(The Institute for Childhood and Adolescence - INFA) provides a vital service to the 
many families in Ñamarín where both mother and father work away from the home, as 
well as to those with only one parent. Along with the childcare, diet and parental 
85
information (that often reflect white-mestizo standards of child development and care, see 
Jenson 2011), the daycare is also the source of a handful of steady, fairly well paying jobs 
for young women in the area for whom other opportunities may be limited, given that 
they  also may have children of their own.  Consequently, a large announcement hung 
outside of the casa comunal sparked a mix of outrage, rumour mongering, gossip, and 
accusations when it was erected in early May of 2011. The poster simply stated that two 
positions were becoming available at the daycare at the request of INFA. The primary 
point of contention for most was that the two positions advertised were being made 
available by firing two of the current daycare staff. Mothers who voiced their opinion 
said that their children were used to seeing Catalina every morning, and that she was 
particularly open to ensuring that the children were taken care of even if their parents 
were late to pick them up. She was to lose her job because, as INFA had requested of the 
cabildo, she and her cousin were both working at the daycare, and INFA did not want 
their daycares run by single families. 
 While this may  seem like a relatively innocent issue, the gossip quickly turned 
into allegations of betrayal being lodged against the members of the cabildo council. By 
enforcing the demands of the state agency  on the local daycare, the cabildo was seen as a 
pawn of the government, working for outside interests rather than the interests of the 
community. To be fair, the members of the cabildo would have been in a more difficult 
position had they  refused to comply with INFA; this critical service might have been 
withdrawn, or brought under closer direction from INFA itself. Tayta Rodrigo, 
community  President, was accused of powerlessness: in his old age, it  was alleged that he 
86
had become lazy, absent, and unable to defend the interests of the community  from an 
encroaching state. Worse yet, the Vice President was accused of complicity: as a 
relatively young law student who spent much of his time at study or in Loja, people were 
quickly becoming skeptical of his motivations and loyalties. At the heart of the conflict 
were the responsibilities of the cabildo members, and not the fate of the daycare, 
important an issue as it was. The cabildo was expected to act as mediator between the 
various levels of government that interact with the local community, and the community 
itself as a distinct entity, apart from but yet integrated into the wider nation state. Even as 
the members of Ñamarín are somewhat reliant on the expanded services offered by the 
state within their community, there remains an imagination of the locality  as separate 
from the wider political and social system within which it is embedded. This sense of 
autonomy, reflected in Eric Wolf’s vision of the ideal-type closed corporate peasant 
community, however, is only one aspect of the state-societal relations within which 
Saraguro communities are embedded. 
A history of autonomy, resistance, and citizenship
 The principle of autonomy exists alongside a rhetoric of citizenship  in Saraguro, 
and is not restricted to indigenous spheres. Town mestizos and rural Saraguros alike can 
be heard defending autonomous spaces for themselves, while claiming participation in 
the nation. Saraguro celebrates its cantonization festival on March 10 every  year, a 
municipal festival that brings in quite a number of visitors for daily  concerts, pageants, 
parades, and games that last over a week. Cantones are the second most local division of 
political space in Ecuador, comprising a series of rural parishes as well as, generally, a 
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municipality  at the core of the canton. In Saraguro, however, as I suspect is the case for 
many other areas, the political unit  is also a category of identification, where on March 
10 Saraguro out migrants, mestizo and indigenous, return to celebrate the place where 
they  grew up and have family ties. On this occasion, the political structural position of 
the canton within the larger state is somewhat elided, and the declaration of Saraguro as 
its own bounded, self-governing space is promoted. “Celebrando 188 años de 
independencia política” (Celebrating 188 years of political independence) was the call of 
the day, as delegations from neighborhoods, schools, and other towns paraded through 
the center of town with marching bands, gymnasts, and colourful costumes. Large 
banners that hung from balconies or were carried in procession read “Turucachi 
neighborhood salutes Saraguro’s political emancipation,” “Praise Saraguro,” and 
“Virgilio Abarca Montesinos High School salutes the illustrious city  of Saraguro in its 
liberation.” Such rhetoric is surely somewhat hyperbolic, given the occasion, and simply 
commemorates the recognition of Saraguro and Ecuador as independent from Spanish 
rule, and in becoming part of the short lived Gran Colombia.
 The focus on independence and emancipation, though, is representative of the 
multiple levels of identification that people hold dear, meaning that there is often no 
contradiction in celebrating the “independence” of a canton that is subject to a larger 
state, just as there is often no contradiction in being a proud Saragurense (white-mestizo 
of Saraguro) or Saraguro and being an Ecuadorian citizen. Celebrating the cantonization 
of Saraguro is a celebration of the voice that Saraguro’s representatives have within the 
Ecuadorian nation, giving it a level of autonomy to self-govern. This autonomy is a 
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negotiated right to a voice in politics and representation within the state, and should not 
be confused with a call for sovereignty. Similarly, contemporary  indigenous movements, 
epitomized by calls for collective, ancestral rights to land, culture, and history, may 
borrow from such anti-colonial indigenous movements as  the Tupac Katari rebellions of 
previous centuries, but do not call for the abolition of the state, and instead demand 
increased representation and rights within the state, along with less unfavourable state 
intervention at the local, community  level: “Article 98 of the constitution guarantees us 
the right to resistance, and with that guarantee we will continue to resist. 517 years have 
passed in the fight, and we will continue with the example set by our ancestral 
leaders” (Marlon Santi, quoted in CONAIE: May 17, 2010, my translation). 
 To be sure, the victories of the indigenous social movements of the past decades 
and the constitutional changes proclaiming Ecuador a pluricultural state have created new 
possibilities for indigenous identities within the state, but indigenous groups have 
historically been known to negotiate spaces of autonomy through participation as 
citizens. Likewise, Luis Macas has made the claim that  autonomy, an integral Saraguro 
value, has been defended through acquiescence as a form of resistance:
Compliance was a way by  which to show resistance. There were a 
variety of such mechanisms and forms of resistance among our people. 
The mechanisms of resistance maintained the autonomy at the 
community level. (Macas et al. 2003:220) 
One method by which the Saraguros demonstrated their compliance, however reluctant, 
was by fulfilling their mita duties to the Spanish colonial, and later, Ecuadorian state. The 
mita was a form of tribute leveled exclusively on Indian subjects in which labour, rather 
than payment or goods, was extracted. One of the most notorious cases comes from 
89
Potosí, Bolivia, where Indians worked, often to their death, in the infamous silver mines. 
Hacienda peons, meanwhile, could sometimes be exempted from such duties since 
landlords already demanded similar labour tribute. 
 This system was established in the style of similar Inkaic state demands for labour 
on such public projects as road construction, mail delivery, and mineral extraction (L. 
Belote 1978:14). In Saraguro, as part of their mita obligation to the state stemming from 
the colonial period, and continuing well into the last  century, Saraguros maintained a 
tambo (waystation) to provide lodging and aid for soldiers, mail carriers, and other 
government officials. Though unpaid extractive tribute was officially ended in the late 
19th century, similar forms of forced public labour continued well into the previous 
century, and it wasn’t until the 1940s with the construction of the Panamerican highway 
that tambo duties became obsolete, since the trip from Loja to Cuenca could be made in a 
single day. Tambo obligations could be costly - lodging, feed, and even horses - but also 
contributed to a form of supra-communal organization in the form of appointed formal 
offices (L. Belote 1978:14-17). Thus exempt from the more nefarious mita obligations 
and in a relatively remote area undesirable for large plantations or haciendas, the 
Saraguros were indeed capable of maintaining their land base when in other regions vast 
tracts of the most productive lands were sold or appropriated by state and independent 
haciendas. 
 Outward deference to the state is often part of a project to assert individual and 
collective rights legally  conferred but that are absent in practice. The Ecuadorian state has 
historically nominally included indigenous persons in the nation, often pursuing an 
90
agenda of social welfare that relied on state paternalisms towards indigenous groups in 
the highlands. In the period from 1895-1925, for example, Kim Clark (1994; 1998; 2001; 
2005) has shown that the liberal government, under the banner of indigenous rights, 
abolished state and church rights to the free labour of Indians on public works projects. 
Part of an attempt to reduce church influence and sever the debt that tied Indian peons to 
highland haciendas and to promote coastal plantation work that benefitted the liberal 
coastal plantation owners, such legislation was peppered with paternalisms that 
supposedly  conferred special protective rights to indigenous groups, seemingly 
contradictory to the equalization of rights, on the basis that “given their history of 
oppression under previous governments, Indians deserved special consideration and 
protection from public officials” (Clark 1994:51). Indians were subject  to the 
“protection” of legislators who saw them as children lacking the reason and capacities of 
full adults, while elites also had to take steps to protect society from Indians’ supposed 
“congenital inclination towards immorality” (Guerrero 1997: 566). 
 Subsequently, indigenous persons were able to petition the state against abuses by 
landowners or public officers on the basis of their rights within the state, and by 
reflecting the state’s view of a child-like indigenous class back at them. 
We are the Indians of the parish of Tixán, Alausí canton, where, 
violating the constitution and the dispositions of the Law of Internal 
Administration, our individual rights are assaulted by the authorities of 
our parish, who martyr us with demands for forced labour .... As you 
are the primary authority  of the province, we beg your protection to 
save our miserable race from this yoke, (quoted in Clark 2005:56) 
writes one indigenous group in 1914. In the latter half of the 20th century, Andean states 
underwent a series of agricultural reforms that (partly) aimed to redistribute hacienda/
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huasipungo land to peasant and indigenous populations as part  of a project  of 
modernization and national development. Essential to this attempted reconfiguration of 
production was an attempt at the “remaking of national identity” that re-valorized and 
appropriated select ethnic and indigenous cultural components in order to bring 
indigenous peoples into the fold of the state as national subjects (Crain 1990:49). This 
project was also aimed at  modernizing the Indian: to educate, to reform, to weed out the 
negative aspects of Indianness so that indigenous populations could participate fully, in 
their cleansed version, in the national project. Indigenous communities were to act as the 
method of intervention, through which Indians could learn the practices of governance 
and be redeemed from the servile ineptitude, born from centuries of colonial domination, 
that was seen to characterize their “race” (Lucero 2003).
 As part of the attempted redefinition of the place of indigenous peoples within the 
nation, of the process of mestizaje that would transform Indians into mestizo citizens, 
certain aspects of indigenous material culture and history  were adopted into the national 
envisioning. In this way, the long pre-Columbian history  of the Americas could from part 
of the history of the nation, rather than simply the history of indigenous peoples. The 
great Inkaic sites in Peru, for example, could tell of the indigenous past of a now mestizo 
nation: mestizaje through appropriation of both indigenous and European cultural forms. 
But the backwardness, the rebelliousness and filth of the contemporary Indians could still 
be construed as anachronistic and antithetical to the modernizing designs of the state. 
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Figure 9: Participating in the Pase del Niño parade, a young woman is costumed as an 
“Indian.”
 The Pase del Nino Viajero (Passage of the Traveling Child) is another example of 
this process. This parade is held yearly on the 24th of December in Cuenca, 
commemorating both the birth of Jesus, as well as the passage of a figure of Christ 
through Ecuador. Leading the procession through the streets packed with tourists and 
citizens alike is the archangel, followed on horseback by  Mary  and Joseph with their 
newborn and surrounded by costumed wise men. Neighborhood bands thump out 
rhythms for school dancers who twirl around maypoles, while beauty  queens sit on their 
floats, waving to the crowds. Indians are present as well, but these are largely portrayals 
of indigeneity incorporated into the national society: white Cuencanos dressed as exotic 
Shuars or Huaorani from the Amazonian basin, complete with painted faces and 
93
headdresses with plastic feathers. These delocalized images of indigenous material 
culture are encapsulated within the national depiction, but the attempts at re-making the 
national identity into one which is accepting of indigenous lifeways have seemingly not 
extended into the actual lives of many indigenous peoples. 
 Inclusion in the national self image does not erase or stop the continuing social 
exclusion and racism. Still, following these attempted changes, the past few decades have 
seen indigenous federations fighting for their rights as citizens, producers, and patriots of 
the Ecuadorian nation. Accordingly, there has been a refocusing of rural identities as 
indigenous, rather than as campesino, as the Ecuadorian and other national governments 
have partially  acknowledged specific indigenous rights, and as the “new” social 
movements combine indigenous calls for self determination with rural and campesino 
concerns for access to land, water, and other resources (Jackson and Warren 2005). 
 By appropriating the rhetoric of the state, indigenous groups have long been able 
to protect small, contested spaces of autonomy through a discourse of citizenship. The 
expanding role of indigenous federations, indigenous political activists, and largely 
indigenous NGOs in the last two decades mean that the state paternalisms that  considered 
indigenous peoples to be of an inferior, outdated and childish race to be protected may be 
largely absent, and there is no question that highland indigenous communities are players 
in the Ecuadorian nation state. “La lucha continua,” one young Saraguro NGO worker 
says, but the fight is within the system, as citizens fighting for their rights as part of a 
larger society, not separate from it. 
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Indigenous civil society in protest
 Still, it would be a mistake to claim that indigenous communities are not on the 
margins. Rural, semi-proletariat, campesino and indigenous groups are those often 
affected most  negatively by the interests of the central state, and are the last to see any 
benefits. It is in this context that in May of 2010, CONAIE and FEINE, two large 
national indigenous federations, called on communities across Ecuador to protest against 
proposed water legislation that would have placed the country’s water supply under the 
direction of a government appointed body in Quito. As seen in the previous chapter, 
water is certainly  one of the most fundamental and contentious resources in Andean 
indigenous communities, and its regulation forms part of the basis of local politics and 
communal participatory life, so it is perhaps no surprise that water rights have been such 
a contentious issue in Ecuador as in Peru and Bolivia (Bolin 1990; Levieil and Orlove 
1990; Perreault 2008; Trawick 2003). 
 Andean indigenous civil society  encapsulates a range of organizations and 
political structural units that operate at multiple scales. From the grassroots of indigenous 
communities themselves, cabildo councils represent their members at assemblies of 
different cabildos within parishes and cantones, and larger ethnic organizations as well as 
provincial and national pan-indigenous federations represent indigenous interests in the 
political sphere. By acting together on a national scale, such organizations have at times 
been very successful in pursuing their agenda. CONAIE, the national federation 
representing indigenous groups across Ecuador, has successfully lobbied for bilingual 
education, indigenous representation, and a declaration of Ecuador as a pluricultural state 
95
(Selverston 1994; Zamosc 1994). It has also played a large role in organizing the not 
infrequent strikes, roadblocks, and indigenous uprisings. The most  famous of these 
strikes was the 1990 Levantamiento (uprising), when highland indigenous groups across 
Ecuador organized to block roads, occupy churches, march on government buildings, and 
stop production in general strikes to lobby against failed land reforms that continued to 
deprive indigenous peoples of adequate land. What makes such large scale organizing 
possible is a scaling up of community  level participation, with each community  or lower 
level organization agreeing to support the movement as a whole. Such ad-hoc 
organization from local cabildo councils and indigenous communities themselves, taken 
collectively, amount to national protests (Zamosc 1994).
Figure 10: The paro at San Vicente.
96
 On May 6th, 2010, the leaders of three national scale indigenous federations came 
together in a speech declaring a unified front against President Correa’s proposed Ley de 
Aguas (Water Law) which, it was feared, would have taken water regulation and 
maintenance in indigenous communities out of the hands of comuneros themselves, and 
provided the government with an increased ability to prioritize water rights to oil and 
mining enterprises instead of agriculture and subsistence. Interestingly, this law would 
have had much less of an impact in the Saraguro area than in other predominantly 
indigenous regions since water is relatively plentiful, mineral extraction is minimal, and 
the indigenous communities themselves are able to claim historical and continued 
ownership over the land the canals flow through. In the central and northern Ecuadorian 
sierra, land was appropriated by the state and large landowners over centuries, and the 
canals in many areas were built to provide water to those interests. Consequently, any 
water flowing through them could be somewhat privatized by the landowners under the 
proposed legislation. The indigenous organizations were fearful that the numerous 
communities that currently  draw their water from the canals running along their villages 
might no longer have dependable access. For Saraguro, the water law could have meant 
that the municipality had increased power in its negotiations with the communities to 
secure its own water. Many  protesters were also skeptical about the increased presence 
the state would have had in the communities.
 The combined CONAIE (National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of 
Ecuador), FEINE (Federation of Indigenous  Evangelicals) and FENOCIN (National 
Confederation of Peasant, Indigenous, and Black Organizations) statement declared, 
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among other points, an anti-neoliberal agenda, a defense of constitutionally recognized 
rights, and a call to radical action on a national scale: “We ratify  and call for the 
radicalization of the national mobilization in defense of life and water” (Andrando et al. 
2010, my  translation). For communities like Ñamarín, where both communal and 
individual labour is continuous to ensure access to water for agriculture, cattle, and 
homes, the prized autonomy of self-governing hydrological resources was at stake. The 
canals that string along the páramo down to the community are a testament to the deep 
connection to place that, at least in part, results from a long history of residence. The 
history of the community itself is, quite literally, carved into the earth through the canals 
that date past anyone’s remembering. Years of labour and investment, partly  NGO 
contributed over the past half century, have resulted in the ever unfinished system. All of 
this labour has been done without government support or intervention, except where, in 
some communities, the municipality  of Saraguro has a vested interest in securing its own 
water. It is nearly  unthinkable, then, for many residents, that the government should gain 
ownership or even accountability  over a resource that is secured and maintained by 
communities themselves. 
 Subsequent to the announcement by the indigenous federations, and in the midst 
of increasing protests in Quito and news coverage of heated debates in the National 
Assembly, the cabildo presidents of Saraguro parish gathered and, supporting popular 
opinion in many of the communities, including Ñamarín, agreed that two roadblocks 
would be organized for the following week in conjunction with protests elsewhere in the 
country.
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The paros
 A paro is a strike, and is one of the favoured and most effective means of protest 
routinely employed in indigenous led protests in Ecuador. The main, if not only, road that 
unites northern and southern Ecuador and connects to Colombia and Peru is the 
Panamerican highway that winds through the inter Andean valley, cutting through many 
of the major highland towns as well as a large number of indigenous communities. By 
blocking off traffic on this one strip of road, protesters can effectively  stop transportation 
and commerce flowing through the entire country. Two roadblocks were set up on either 
end of the highway outside of Saraguro, largely isolating the town. 
 Early in the morning on Wednesday, May 12, I walked down below Ñamarín to 
the highway, where there was already a long line of cars and transport  trucks sitting. Two 
trees had been placed across the road in the night, and a growing number of people from 
the four communities in charge of this lower blockade were assembling. Someone had 
brought a chainsaw, and we were called to help fell trees and move boulders by a youth 
from Oñakapak who was taking it upon himself to fortify the blockade. As teams of men 
began moving more trees and branches onto the road, a large group of transport workers 
and others had gathered at their side of the roadblock, and, resigned to the fact  that they 
would most likely be stuck there for a while, playfully joked to the indigenous men piling 
more rubble onto the road: “!Si, muevalo, muevalo, No, por allá!” (Yeah, move it, move 
it. No, move it away!). One protester replied that those inconvenienced should be helping 
rather than standing there, since everyone in a community works together. After a while, 
the protesters settled into a slow routine of sitting, piling more rocks and debris onto the 
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blockade, drinking, and watching a group of youth push boulders off the high cliff 
overlooking the road, laughing as the stones touched the electrical wires and sent sparks 
flying. 
Figure 11: Protesters prepare for the arrival of the police at the Ñamarín roadblock.
 By midmorning, excitement began to rise after boredom had set in. Rumors of 
possible action to be taken by  the police spurred people into action, and one local NGO 
worker had brought his tractor, prominently bearing the NGO’s logo, to help  shore up the 
defenses. The directors of the two Saraguro NGOs, as well as representatives from 
indigenous federations had taken it upon themselves to communicate between the upper 
and lower roadblocks and read out a list of grievances prepared by  CONAIE in order to 
inform and educate. Meanwhile, individual donations of food, including a gift  of bread 
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and cookies from a sympathetic consejal (local elected politician), were accumulating, 
and a makeshift  kitchen was set up to feed those manning the roadblock. This kind of 
popular protest relies heavily  on individual action and interest, including the time that 
people give to make sure there is always a presence, the liquor that is shared, and the 
food prepared on site. 
 Afternoon brought news that a detachment of police from Loja had arrived at the 
roadblock of San Vicente with orders to open up the road, and had begun to fire tear gas 
into the crowd. Each cabildo president at the Ñamarín roadblock was tasked with sending 
five tigres, strong young men ready to fight, in order to help maintain the paro. By the 
time we arrived at San Vicente, each armed with a small branch as a weapon, the police 
were in retreat and the tear gas and smoke from burning tires were being put under 
control. Teenagers were excitedly  running around collecting empty gas canisters as 
souvenirs of the action, and the victory  raised the spirits of the protesters so that when the 
police returned to negotiate, they were escorted by  a group of indigenous men bearing 
staffs, branches, and flags. 
 With all of the action at the upper roadblock at San Vicente, the mayor of 
Saraguro (part of the ruling Movimiento PAIS party) had dispatched a team of municipal 
tractors to clear away the blockage at Ñamarín. By the time I, along with the team of 
tigres had returned, a large group of seemingly angry protesters had blocked the 
bulldozers into a now defunct gas station by the highway. The three municipal 
employees, obviously frightened, were stranded standing on top of their machines, 
surrounded by a growing mob of protesters. Two NGO professionals and an indigenous 
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lawyer who were largely responsible for maintaining and informing the roadblock made 
their way through the crowd to the bulldozers, and persuaded the three men to come 
down and talk as other young indigenous men clambered up onto the machines to stake 
their claim. 
 From all around, a chorus of “Al poso! Al poso!” (“To the well!”; a reference to 
practices of community justice that will be explained below) rose as the three municipal 
employees, now surrounded, uneasily shifted their weight and cowered in response to the 
overwhelming mob threatening to punish them for daring to dismantle the blockade. 
These men were not privileged to see, or failed to notice, however, that many of the faces 
surrounding them were smiling, and not menacingly. Eventually, the crowd was quieted 
down, and the leaders of the paro began to negotiate with the municipal employees, 
whose fear of the crowd likely made them more receptive to the calm, if patronizing, 
voice of the Saraguro NGO director acting as negotiator: 
Ustedes trabajan para la munipalidad, no? Y que es el gobierno sino el 
representante del pueblo? Entonces, estas máquinas apertienen al 
pueblo, a nosotros. (You work for the municipality, right? And what is a 
government if not the representation of the people? And so, these 
machines belong to the people, to us.)
Convinced or coerced, the workers agreed that they would take one bulldozer down to the 
roadblock and pile on three scoops of dirt in order to help out, but that they wouldn’t talk 
to anybody else or be bullied any more. The three scoops were supplemented by  five 
more by  the time the crowd was convinced to let  them go. In a later interview with the 
NGO director, he added, proudly:
Ellos, los operadores, no tienen culpa. [The protesters] dejaron libre a 
ellos, de cumplir una sanción a favor del pueblo. La cosa de la bomba 
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era elección del pueblo. (They, the machine operators, aren’t to blame. 
The protesters left it up to them, to fulfill a sanction/obligation on 
behalf of the people.)
Figure 12: A municipal employee is stranded on his tractor by protesters. 
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This series of events, stemming from what was a beautiful rhetorical inversion of 
representation within the state as to who constitutes “the people,” was for many the 
highlight of the roadblocks that will surely be remembered. This reversal of power, 
however brief, speaks to two important  aspects of indigenous representation and protest 
that are worth examining: the role of projecting a certain type of indigenous community 
to outsiders, and the relationship between autonomy and citizenship in rural Saraguro. 
Projections of the ideal community
 As seen previously, communities are almost never the unified, homogenous, static 
groups that some believe or desire them to be. This is certainly  the case for those 
indigenous communities around Saraguro, but nationwide, primarily  indigenous protest 
based on community organization relies on the image of a community  united. 
Accordingly, indigenous communities have a reputation and capability to be presented to 
outsiders, Ecuadorian or otherwise, as unified fronts of action. For communities in search 
of spaces of autonomy impenetrable to the machinations of the state system, the 
presentation of unity, backed by the threat of violence, is an essential tool. Such 
representations rely  on a continued racial and cultural divide between indigenous peoples 
and white mestizos that are more aligned with a mainstream national envisioning. The 
divide is manipulated by multiple parties, perhaps most evidently  in times of protest 
when the goals of indigenous groups and the national government are most at odds. 
 The image of an Indian “uprising” plays upon the continued idea of indigenous 
peoples as violent and anti-government, an idea embedded in deep historical fears. The 
rural highlands have long been associated with Indians, with the urban centers of power 
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seen as bastions of civility  and whiteness, islands in a sea of only partially bridled 
barbarity. At any time, it is feared, the hordes of Indians might break loose and descend 
upon the city  to exact revenge for a history  of subjugation. Brooke Larson has noted that 
even in the early republican period, when Indian tribute and forced labour were first 
abolished, creole actions were more often motivated by fear of the “explosive discontent 
of the native masses” than by a desire for political reform and liberty  (2004:35). In May 
2010 the term “uprising” was commonly used by the televised news media in an attempt 
to discredit the demands of CONAIE and individual communities as an attack on the rest 
of the nation. Meanwhile, CONAIE and the roadblock organizers in Saraguro emphasized 
a position subordinate to the power of the state, while drawing on ideas of the defense of 
a common resource important to all Ecuadorians. At the Ñamarín roadblock, one 
organizer, speaking not just to the assembled indigenous protesters, but also to the 
stranded transport workers and others walking through, announced that the “movimiento 
en defensa del agua y de la vida” (movement in defense of water and of life) was 
indigenous led, but of direct benefit to mestizo campesinos, to the Afro-Ecuadorian poor 
who were equally  dependent on easy access to clean water, and to urbanites who likewise 
depended on the sources of water that flow from highland communities down to the 
urban centers. 
 While defending the nobility  of this protest and the value of indigenous activism 
to the nation as a whole, activists and protesters also played upon white fears of Indian 
irrationality, and on the darker, dangerous image that mestizos commonly associated with 
the indigenous community. Chanting “Al poso!” to the surrounded municipal employees 
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was a significant act that drew from the vigilante image of the self-policing indigenous 
community. To the many non-indigenous informants who I encountered at the outset  of 
my fieldwork in Saraguro, the indigenous communities were seen to be enclosed and 
would be resentful of an outsider. I was especially not to be in a community at night, 
since one step out of line would result  in a lynching, the type of punishment evoked by 
the chant of “Al poso.” The chant was an obvious threat  to the three men from the 
municipality, who certainly  would have known of the reputation of indigenous 
communities to take justice into their own hands and punish misdeeds with whippings, 
beatings, stinging plants, late night  dunking in frigid wells, or, at the extreme, lynching. 
Lynchings of outsiders in indigenous communities have grabbed the attention of the 
popular imagination and scholars alike (see, for example Colloredo-Mansfeld 2002; 
Goldstein 2004; Krupa 2009; Starn 1999). 
 The practice of justicia comunitaria (community  justice) applies to comuneros 
who steal or cheat, but the most infamous cases are those public lynchings that put 
punishment of an outsider on display, and act to claim indigenous communities as 
autonomous spaces where the government and the police no longer have jurisdiction. At 
least in part, such practices have arisen where the responsibilities of the police and 
government to protect citizens, in this case rural, campesino and often indigenous, are 
unfulfilled, meaning that communities take it upon themselves to protect their property 
and laws. Such was the case in Peru in the 1980s, when rondas campesinas (peasant 
rounds), community  organized peasant patrols, were used to combat increasing cattle 
rustling (Starn 1999), and is also apparent in Goldstein’s (2004) analysis of a barrio 
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lynching in Cochabamba, Bolivia. These cases were read as local condemnations of a 
state that had failed to evenly govern mestizo and indigenous spaces, and ensuring that 
the violence was public meant that indigenous groups could simultaneously  criticize a 
government’s abdication of responsibility, as well as declare an autonomous space where 
the agents of the government were no longer welcome. Fear of unbridled Indian justice 
was key to curving rural crime, and that same fear was used to ensure that the 
municipality’s men, now in indigenous hands, would “choose” to help out, rather than 
hinder, the protest efforts.
 Similar to the Peruvian case, Saraguros tell of a rise in cattle rustling as one of the 
main reasons for the establishment of community justice in the region. As many  Saraguro 
proponents of community  justice believe, if the communities were just to give over 
thieves and cattle rustlers to the police, either nothing would happen or a small bribe 
would be paid, and the thieves would be let loose. With community enforced justice, the 
physical price for transgression can be high and there is, at least principally, a focus on 
remuneration for the victims. In one recent Saraguro case, a group  of costeño (from the 
coast) cattle rustlers were caught and beaten before being handed over to the police. In 
somewhat of a legitimation of community justice, the police then paraded the thieves in 
the back of a pickup truck around one of the central plazas in the town center, allowing 
the mostly indigenous crowd to pelt the bloody, exhausted captives with insults and the 
occasional fist. 
 The sheer publicity of the most violent lynchings inspires a not unfounded, 
calculated fear, brought out by images of the burning of an afro-ecuadorian repeat 
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offender in Cayambe in 2003 (Krupa 2009) or, more recently, the highly publicized 
stripping, beating, and near drowning of a group  of men accused of murder in the parish 
of Zumbagua, both cases occurring in highland Ecuador. To be honest, there was little 
risk of such punishment for the municipality’s men during the May 2010 protests, since 
the indigenous movement as a whole would have lost the moral high ground. Indeed, in 
San Lucas parish the next day, the same contingent of police from the provincial capital 
of Loja that had previously fired tear gas on the San Vicente roadblock in an effort to 
clear the highway  had been trying to quell further protests, and had taken eight 
indigenous Saraguros hostage (into custody). In response, the protest organizers in San 
Lucas captured a police officer, and a panel of comuneros savvy in community justice 
was organized to decide what to do. In the end, according to one Ñamarín representative, 
indigenous and police negotiators - along with each of the detained - were brought 
together in an effort  to dissolve tensions and decry the violence of the past couple of 
days, with guilt being acknowledged on both sides. 
 Christopher Krupa (2009) has criticized scholars for ignoring a lynching’s 
outcome as a move to assert  autonomy that actually delegitimizes the right of indigenous 
groups to self-govern in the eyes of outsiders. The threat of violence may reinforce 
historical fears of Indian uprisings, therefore lessening support for protests that are 
ideally  presented as peaceful, and generally  in line with the desires of other social groups. 
The highly visible nature of community justice serves to present a coherent response to 
an aggression against a whole. In Saraguro, even the threat of community justice can 
quickly resolve a conflict in favour of an indigenous person who, alone, would pose no 
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threat. Community justice provides an opportunity to play upon that fear of the Indian 
collective, reinforcing the perception of rural communities as closed. However, 
indigenous groups must mediate the negative views of themselves in order for their calls 
to gain widespread acceptance. Recall that  this particular protest was framed by activists 
as a “movement in defense of water and life,” not a movement against a government that 
has historically only been interested where it suits its own needs, and should therefore 
keep out of our business. 
Autonomy and indigenous citizenship in a pluricultural society
 A similar act of discursive mediation on the indigenous/state margin was being 
made by the rhetorical inversion by which protest leaders conceptualized themselves as 
“el pueblo.” By casting themselves as “the people” and attempting to frame a discourse 
of defense of life and water, even while protesting a proposed government initiative, 
indigenous protesters were simultaneously affirming their place within the nation and 
decrying further government intervention that would, very likely, bring each of their lives 
under stricter governance through increased regulation of water. The rhetoric employed 
cast indigenous peoples as citizens and members of an Ecuadorian nation that has 
constitutionally  recognized their particular place in society  (see CONAIE: May 17, 
2010). The successes of indigenous federations and the indigenous movement in Ecuador 
have come as groups such as CONAIE have engaged with the state, rather than having 
opposed it entirely. The hegemonic process of the Ecuadorian state to assert  itself and its 
right to govern are not what  is at stake here, and Steve Stern has argued that even since 
the colonial period native Andeans have often chosen to interact with the state apparatus 
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to further their claims, rather than engaging in open rebellion against the right of the state 
to exist (Stern 1982). By channeling discontent and grievances through, for example, the 
state judicial system, indigenous groups have sought to rectify the imbalances between 
stated and actual individual and collective rights. Quite plainly, part of what was at  stake 
during the water protests was the responsibility  of the government to fulfill its inclusive 
rhetoric, and indigenous groups were campaigning for their legal rights as indigenous 
citizens, not simply as indigenous peoples. This was indigenous protest, not indigenous 
revolution. 
 The current president  of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, was brought to power on a 
popular platform that, until recently, had support  from indigenous and rural spheres. 
Correa’s face can be seen regularly  on large billboards that proudly make the claim that 
“La Patria ya es de todos” (The nation now belongs to all). Such inspiring rhetoric sounds 
all the more hollow when, fighting for popular and free access to the water that flows 
through indigenous communities, the municipal and federal governments, backed by  the 
police, attempt to quell the right to peaceful protest. As much as many may see 
indigenous groups as continual outsiders, troublemakers, and impediments to progress, 
the government’s claim that indigenous peoples form an integral part of the Ecuadorian 
nation took a more inclusive stance. When that claim was seen to be hollow, indigenous 
groups mobilized to assert their rights and their place within the state, just as indigenous 
hacienda workers had turned the 20th century liberal government’s rhetoric against itself. 
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Figure 13: Two youth destroy a billboard. 
 But just as these groups and communities seemingly  acknowledge the existence 
and authority  of the state, they  negotiate their place within it. The nation state, as 
elaborated by James Scott (1998), governs by reducing the complexity  of human society, 
thereby making it legible, visible, and controllable. While many subaltern movements 
and groups may not inherently question the existence of the state, they often attempt to 
disguise or occlude certain realms of activity  in order to maintain spaces of autonomy 
which governmental interventions are unable to penetrate. In Saraguro, as Luis Macas 
suggested, acquiescence was one strategy by which Saraguros could maintain their 
landbase and their culture by portraying themselves as subservient, and thereby 
countering any claims that direct governmental intervention was necessary. Part  of this 
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effort entails using the categories made available by  dominant groups, such as the 
rhetoric of inclusion and human or collective indigenous rights accorded by the UN 
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Similarly, the proposed water law can 
be read as an attempt to bring communities’ water within the purview of the state, a 
project that would have meant more direct governance of these indigenous communities 
that pride their autonomy. Like the INFA debate, communities were attempting to 
negotiate the place of the state within the community, as well as the place of the 
community within the state. 
 Indigenous communities, then, rely on certain essentialized projections of 
themselves, some of which depend on violent imaginings, in order to create and guard the 
spaces of autonomy that are desired. These “spaces” are quite physical in the sense that 
outsiders can often be wary and hesitant about entering indigenous communities, and the 
police are rarely, if ever seen within many  of the communities around Saraguro. The 
space of indigenous autonomy is also, however, a cultural and racial divide that  continues 
to separate highland indigenous communities and a more mainstream, mestizo national 
society. These are the “margins” on which indigenous communities are said to reside. The 
simultaneous expressions of inclusivity  (as “el pueblo”) and exclusion (but cross us in 
our space and be punished) in the May 2010 protests serve to illustrate how the place of 
indigenous communities around Saraguro are continuously negotiated. As it stands, the 
position of indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian state and society is ambiguous: 
movements attempt to delineate spaces of autonomy, while simultaneously  drawing on 
the inclusive rhetoric employed by the state and enjoying certain state services in 
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indigenous communities, thereby affirming the place of the state while countering its 
most disadvantageous penetrations at the local level. 
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Chapter 4 - Multiple Imaginings of Indigeneity and Being Indian
 One afternoon in late May when the corn harvest  was underway and much of the 
casual conversation in Ñamarín centered on the tasty  prospect of fresh, juicy  choclos that 
are a momentary  delicacy  available only just after the corn has ripened, but not dried, I 
was invited over to a newly  built and relatively opulent house for conversation and a 
meal of humitas, a type of doughy pastry made from the ground fresh corn kernels and 
steamed in the husk of the plant. Though Ñamarín, like most communities in the area, 
boasts a diversity  of houses reflecting a range of incomes, this house in particular stands 
out since, unlike the majority of the expensive cinderblock dwellings, the two story 
structure was made from red brick. Last year’s potatoes were spread beside the entryway, 
where chickens pecked at the bugs who had infested the tubers that  had been set aside as 
seed. The owners were hoping to salvage what they could so they  wouldn’t have to buy 
new potatoes to plant. Further into the house, well lit by the expansive but empty window 
frames, a refrigerator, rare for the area, hummed quietly  in the spotless tiled kitchen 
where Karen, a woman perhaps in her early 30s, was preparing lunch and dicing fruit  to 
be put in plastic bags and refrigerated for later use. Karen was eager to interview me for a 
project in a cultural studies class she was taking by distance from a university in Loja, 
meanwhile I was hopeful that her husband, Jose, an environmental engineer with one of 
the prominent local Saraguro-run NGOs, would have something to say about  the recent 
water-related strikes and mingas. 
 By the end of the afternoon, Jose had steered the conversation to a loss of 
traditional ways that, within his own family, he was trying to rectify by speaking Kichwa 
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in his home and by teaching his kids how to weave. Somewhat self critically, Jose argued 
that
No somos autenticos, no somos puros. Llevamos en nuestro ropa, 
comida, y pensamos conjunto. Eso es el mas importante para mi: no 
somos puros, pero si somos indígenas. 
(We’re not authentic, we’re not pure. We still have our clothing and our 
food, and we think ourselves together. That’s the most important for 
me: we’re not pure, but we’re still indigenous). 
Jose was speaking to the growing discussions in Saraguro that question what it  means to 
be an indigenous person, or a Saraguro specifically, in a period when many young men 
and women leave the area in search of work or education, when the possibilities of 
indigenous livelihoods have expanded beyond the agro-pastoral life that is still seen as an 
essential aspect of Saraguro identity, but when fewer youth espouse a desire to raise cattle 
and stay  in the indigenous communities. Jose and Karen have both been able to take 
advantage of these opportunities, but are also self-conscious of their involvement in 
community  politics and farming. Still, they  feel that a process of mestizaje and a loss of 
what they  feel are more traditional ways are threatening the cultural purity that makes 
Saraguros a proud example of indigenous tradition. 
 This idea of a lost tradition, of abandoned indigenous ways of life is prevalent in 
Saraguro, and is best epitomized by the relatively  recent emergence of a cultural 
revitalization movement promoted mainly by semi-urban, wealthy, intellectual NGO and 
education professionals like Jose and Karen. This movement does not  by any means 
represent the whole, or even the majority  opinion in the area, though because of its close 
attachments to local and international NGO backing, it is beginning to occupy a large 
amount of rhetorical space. Based on an envisioned Inkaic identity and history, an 
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examination of this quasi-religious indigenous revitalization effort will shed light on the 
discussions taking place about what it  means to live as an Indian, as a Saraguro, or as a 
purified indigenous person in the present. This chapter presents some of these discussions 
and places them in the context of growing NGO involvement and a global discourse of 
indigeneity that has come back to effect change locally. 
Becoming and being Indian
 Jose’s comments evoke a certain reflexivity, perhaps born of self-doubt, of what it  
means to be an indigenous person in contemporary  Ecuador. In order to properly 
contextualize his comments, we must first (however falsely, given that these terms are not 
completely separate in an individual’s envisioning of identity) disentangle the ideas of 
“Indian,” “indigenous,” and “indigeneity.” Indian is a racially-motivated socially relevant 
category in South America that  came about in the context of Spanish colonization in 
order to distinguish between the European colonizer and the native colonized, glossed as 
a universalized difference that tended to ignore the ethnic differences that, in the Andean 
region, had been maintained under the Inka administration. Local ethnic differences, 
along with (in Peru, at least) ayllu distinctions, were maintained and enforced under Inka 
rule, and the veneration of local or ayllu ancestors and deities was largely  respected so 
long as Inka ancestors were venerated as well. In this scheme, local ayllus were in many 
ways simply incorporated as separate, but lesser groups within tawantinsuyu in a 
relationship  that funneled tribute and worship through local power brokers eventually to 
the Inka and Inkaic ancestors and gods (Silverblatt 2004:189-192). Contrastingly, the 
evangelical and civilizational project of the Spanish largely ignored local ethnic 
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differences, envisioning instead the singular category  of Indian, attempting to concretize 
the European/Indian divide into two distinct “republics.” 
 As with the Inka colonial project, local receptions of the Spaniards varied by  
region as some groups attempted to reject  Spanish rule, while others would have seen 
opportunities to create new relationships with the Spanish in order to reject Inkaic 
dominance. As Irene Silverblatt  and Steve J. Stern have both noted, the movements aimed 
at resisting Spanish conquest of the 16th century  were typified by a rejection of the 
presence of the Spanish, but the ethnic and ayllu differences were largely maintained so 
that no pan-Andean native “we-consciousness” as Indian had yet developed, since 
movements such as Taqui Onqoy (a millenarian movement typified by its reliance on the 
supremacy of Andean gods and complete rejection of a future with Spanish presence) 
were not  framed within “colonial definitions of their humanness,” that is to say as a 
category analogous to Indians. (Silverblatt  2004; Stern 1982). The hegemonic presence of 
the colonizers, in other words, had not yet been established. 
 But how did native Andeans eventually come to see themselves as Indians? It  is 
important to remember that Indian is a colonial and relational category, one forged (in the 
eyes of the Spanish) in the encounter between two distinct groups. For the category to 
become self-referential and meaningful for the diverse Andean peoples, either in 
opposition to or acknowledging of Spanish rule, there would have to be a recognition of 
common circumstances that would overshadow any regional differences. In part, the 
process of colonization provided ample opportunity for some native Andeans to 
recognize themselves as collectively  disadvantaged by the demands of Spanish 
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expansion, through the heavy burden of tribute labour, of displacement into reducciones 
(forced nucleated settlements designed to make Indian labour easier to extract, make 
Indian settlement patterns more easily  read and governed, and ease Christian 
missionizing), and wider social segregation. These impositions, though their success 
varied by region, coupled with the rhetoric of the Spanish that treated all Indians as 
minors, provided native Andeans with a framework of common experience to begin to act 
within and against the state as Indians. “Indianism verbalized the collective experience of 
Andean colonized subjects - high mortality, loss of lands, insufficient food or clothing, a 
harried and insecure existence - as a constant assault  on life’s fabric,” but also enabled a 
revisioning of a past colonial experience under the Inka (Silverblatt  2004:196). Through 
time, categories created by the state can therefore, through the structuring of lifeways 
around those categories, become the foundations of categories of self-reference. 
 “Inka-ism,” as it has been called, was, throughout the colonial period, an Indian 
re-conceptualization of a shared past as Inka subjects, when “ayllus that had never 
identified with Cuzco when under its rule were now equating the fundamental colonial 
hostility between Spanish and Indian as a struggle between Spaniards and 
Incas” (Silverblatt 2004:199). The Cañari, an ethnic group of the southern Ecuadorian 
highlands, just north of Saraguro, is one group in particular whose colonial identity 
proclaimed their Inkaic ancestry, even though prior to the 1560s Cañari hostility  to Inka 
rule led them to establish military and political relations with the Spaniards, hoping to 
recover the autonomy they had lost less than a century  before when the Inka finally 
managed to incorporate them into the empire (Salomon 1987:212). While Silverblatt 
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offers a convincing analysis of how Spanish colonial state practices may have led to a 
widespread recognition of a common Indianness, Frank Solomon’s Cañari case offers an 
alternate, but compatible, explanation of how the Spanish desire for gold in the form of 
burial goods, as well as the infamous idolatry  campaigns that destroyed mummies and 
other objects of Andean worship, may have led to a recognition of common Inka-ness. 
 It is widely accepted that many highland Andean peoples recognized dead 
ancestors as living beings; Inkaic mummy worship is one example of this belief that went 
beyond the borders of tawantinsuyu. “In Quechua thinking a dead person is considered to 
be present and active so long as he or she has physical existence,” and acts as a tie to 
ancestral lines of descent that eventually  root distinct peoples to the places where, in 
origin myths, they emerged from the ground (Salomon 1987:226). These distinct places 
of origin explained regional, cultural, and ethnic differences that were maintained under 
Inka rule, so long as those lines of descent were subsumed under the ultimate ancestral 
authority of the Inka. When the Spanish began to disinter and destroy these mummies, 
first Inka ones and later Cañari and others, they also destroyed the active ties to 
individual ethnic descent, creating a common situation of ancestral “orphanhood,” and 
leading to the possibility of a shared Indianness that drew heavily on a re-imagined Inka 
descent (Salomon 1987:223-228). In the ensuing centuries, Indianness and Inka-ism 
served as counter-colonial envisionings of a just Indian world, as leaders of rebellions, 
such as Tupac Amaru, claimed Inkaic heritage and nobility. All the while, the recognition 
of themselves as Indians, a category of Spanish thought, serves as an illustration of how 
debate over belonging and the nature of colonialism in the Andes are framed by state 
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categories. Accordingly, as William Roseberry has noted for Mexico, the language of the 
dominant group has within it the possibilities of the resistance to it, which paradoxically 
must acknowledge the dominant worldview in order to attempt to resist (Roseberry 
1994). 
 The decline of Spanish colonial states, as with other American projects of 
European expansion, did not herald the death of the social and racial categories on which 
they  were built. Quite to the contrary, the revolutionary states that followed, as well as the 
liberal, military, and neo-liberal states that  exist in the present, have functioned according 
to the logic that distinguishes Indians from the rest. While approaches to the “Indian 
Problem” have changed as successive governments have attempted to paternalistically 
“protect” Indians (as outlined in the previous chapter), to extract labour in ways distinctly 
reminiscent of the colonial period, or engage more democratically with indigenous 
peoples, the racial/social categorization remains an integral aspect of social relations. The 
agrarian reforms of the mid 20th century, for example, sought in many Andean countries, 
as in Ecuador, to modernize the nation in order to move away from a largely peasant-
oriented system of production. Smallholder subsistence agriculture, associated with the 
rural indigenous masses, was seen as an archaic form that could not compete 
economically  with rationalized, capitalist production. In the same way, then, the lifeways 
of the indigenous poor were taken as backwards, as impediments to national progress. 
For the nation to move forward, not only  would production have to modernize, but so 
would the Indian masses have to undergo a process of mestizaje in order to modernize 
their lifeways and habits of consumption, which were, in the eyes of the economic 
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reformers, far too self-supporting. These reforms often took the form of social welfare 
and educational projects, and included “the hygienic reform of their living conditions, 
basic literacy, Spanish language training, and the encouragement of expanded 
engagement with the market in place of their subsistence orientation (Clark 2005:57). The 
threat of culture loss  often associated with a process of mestizaje means that, while in the 
present the Indianness of such peoples as the Saraguros is taken for granted, some, like 
Jose, perceive an ever increasing cultural mixing in terms of dress and lifestyle, and fear 
for the loss of identity  and history  that may  occur. Even so, there occur continual 
reminders that Indian is still a relevant social category quite literally embodied by  the 
Saraguro.  
 One morning, for example, at the local elementary  school in Ñamarín where I 
occasionally taught English, I remarked to Maria-Esther, a young teacher, that I 
sometimes had trouble identifying who was from an indigenous family, and who wasn’t, 
particularly if they didn’t wear their hair long or dress in the more traditional Saraguro 
manner. She helpfully replied that last names are usually  a good indication, since names 
like Quishpe, Guaman, Cartuche, Zhingre, and Poma are all common enough 
(confusingly  so, since any particular community will likely consist of large numbers of 
one or two of those names) for Saraguros. Maria-Esther is one of the educated 
professionals who has returned to the area to teach and hopefully  ameliorate the social 
conditions of the Saraguro communities, and she admits that  her identification as 
indigenous has in some ways helped her career, since the growth of intercultural bilingual 
education has created a demand for teachers with knowledge of Kichwa. Still, 
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particularly  as an attractive young woman, she has experienced first-hand the 
condescending casual racism that persists. When she visits the city, Maria-Esther 
explained, she is usually addressed as “India,” which admittedly  doesn’t bother her, since, 
after all, she is proud of being an Indian and at least the term is accurate, and better than a 
number of more pejorative options. What bothered her was when she was addressed by 
people who didn’t know her as “Maria,” or “una maria,” since the assumption was that all 
highland indigenous women were called Maria. The irony, I suppose, is that she is called 
Maria, but she does prefer Esther, since in the area there are a large number of women 
bearing that name, and most choose to go by their second name. Esther’s case may be 
somewhat of an exception, however, since it seems the case that Saraguros self-identify 
on ethnic rather than racial terms; as indígenas or Saraguro rather than as indios. 
 While Esther, like many Saraguro women, usually chooses to wear the anaku that 
marks her as Indian when she travels, the naturalization of that racial category is such that 
people simply know when someone is Indian, particularly if they are from a rural area. 
The initial ignorance I displayed at not being able to identify who was Indian brings up 
an important point about racial categories in the Andes. As mentioned above, Indianness 
is embodied, it  is not simply a matter of descent and blood as some think of racial 
difference. “Race is indeed socially  fabricated - and the construction site is the zone of 
interaction between our skin, flesh, and bones, and the world around us,” writes Mary 
Weismantel, and the social fabrication is based upon particular readings of performances 
of race, readings that are naturalized to such an extent that “seeing” Indian bodies is easy 
for those well-socialized individuals, but sometimes difficult  for an outsider (Weismantel 
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2001:188). Weismantel argues, correctly in my opinion, that particularly in the Andes 
race, ethnicity, and class are entangled to the extent that poverty is a sign of Indianness, 
and Indianness is supposed to imply poverty, though there are always conspiracies that 
suggest Indians are simply apt at hiding their true wealth (see L. Belote 1978). The body 
itself is the locus of Indianness, but not necessarily the source of it, since it is the 
interactions between the body and the world it inhabits that creates the Indian body 
through the yanga kawsay (the fruitless or toiling life) that it  lives (Colloredo-Mansfeld 
1999:87-119). 
These hands and feet, so different in their textures and coverings, render 
the abstract  concept of economic class concrete and unmistakable; and 
because they locate class within the body itself, they bind it yet more 
intimately  to the concept of race. Peasant feet look like small rhinoceri 
with their splayed toes, horny heels, and dense soles like armor plating. 
In contrast, the feet of a mestiza shopgirl, who stands all day in narrow 
heels, are as broken, confined, and misshapen as if she were the victim 
of footbinding. (Weismantel 2001:189) 
Ideologies of class and race collude to make the Indian body, as with age Saraguro 
peasants show the accumulated strains of a hard life: hunched backs, skinny  and taut legs 
showing under cortes or anakus, weatherworn faces and hands accustomed to handling 
farming implements. Even younger Saraguros wear their poverty, with capped or missing 
teeth and often clothes worn through or bearing a telltale sign of manual labour: concrete 
dust, mud, the spiny seeds of plants, or the husks from grains recently processed. Others, 
like Karen and Esther, wear the anaku and embroidered blouses that mark both their 
Indianness and their ethnicity as Saraguro, and do so proudly. As Esther mentioned, 
Indianness can be a source of pride or of contempt, but it rarely  goes unnoticed. 
However, returning to Jose’s comments, Indianness is not what is at stake when he 
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laments the loss of tradition. It  is taken for granted and naturalized, and not entirely 
equivalent, but related to, the issue of indigenousness and indigeneity  that he is 
espousing. 
Global indigeneity and the hyperreal Indian
 The European colonial expansions of the previous centuries, most notably 
Spanish involvement in Latin America, have served to produce categories of difference 
that underpin continuing social and political orders. Key among these differences has 
been the distinction between the colonizer and the native, the white and the Indian. Of 
course, such categories are simplifications of reality, but the general acceptance of that 
primary distinction has defined much internal strife in the Americas and elsewhere, as 
“nativist” resistance come to confront the extractive forces of colonization. For much of 
the 20th century, such confrontations were largely regarded as state affairs, as the 
international community was built by states whose claims to sovereignty on the 
international stage were prioritized over what we now consider to be somewhat global 
concerns for human rights and liberties (Niezen 2002:29-30). Despite the regional and 
ethnic differences of the many peoples who were incorporated, however unevenly, in 
statist projects, the similarities of their experiences have, in the past decades, led to a 
widespread recognition at the international level of a category of people who are still 
marginalized geographically, economically, and socially. These indigenous peoples are 
recognized as having some claim to original inhabitancy of the land they  currently 
occupy  or once occupied (original occupancy generally framed in opposition to European 
colonial expansion), continued cultural traditions that differ from the now-dominant 
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national norm, and political and economic marginalization that  results in relative poverty 
(Béteille 1998; Kearney 1996; Martínez Cobo 1987; Niezen 2002). 
 These somewhat legalistic definitions of who constitutes an indigenous people 
seem relatively straightforward when considering, for example, the Indian tribes of North 
America who inhabit reservation lands, or the iconic Amazonian Kayapó and Xavante, or 
even Andean highland populations such as the Saraguro, but increasingly, international 
bodies such as the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues as well as 
social scientists have had to deal with claims of indigeneity from other parts of the world 
where such claims may be less expected (read: less “authentic”). In India and other parts 
of Asia where “tribal and nontribal populations have coexisted for centuries,” processes 
of miscegenation, migration, and conflict  mean it is not  quite so easy to decide who can 
rightly claim to be indigenous, and in places like North Africa, the possible distinction 
between indigenous and settler can not be drawn so easily along tribal/non-tribal lines 
(Béteille 1998: 189). In Southern Africa, the colonial expropriation of San lands has 
forced vast majorities of San to rely on wage labour on others’ land for subsistence, 
effectively mitigating their attempts at recognition as an Indigenous people since they  no 
longer rely on “traditional” practices (Sylvain 2002). Theorists such as Ronald Niezen 
have in some ways attempted to sidestep the problem, and consider only those 
populations who not only claim indigenous identity, but are recognized as such on a 
global scale (Niezen 2002: 227). 
 Part of the problem of identification and definition is that, unlike other legal 
categories, the term indigenous has become a marker of personal and collective identity, 
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the content of which is largely  dependent on the revitalization or continuation and 
portrayal of traditional, longstanding lifeways. This attachment to identity has solidly 
placed indigenous movements under the broadly defined “new social movements” that 
promote intangible culture, ethnicity, and other forms of identification over material and 
economic reforms (though those, of course, do play a part) (Escobar and Alvarez 1992). 
To be sure, the global recognition of the special case for indigenous individual and 
collective rights has in some ways empowered local and national indigenous social 
movements. Indeed, as Alison Brysk notes, the focus on identity politics has enabled 
Latin American indigenous movements to move beyond national spheres, in which they 
are typically disenfranchised and relatively powerless, and to create transnational and 
global linkages with other similar organizations, including the growing number of 
transnational NGOs who see economic development as a brother to cultural or ethnic 
development and revitalization (Brysk 1996; see Bebbington 1993; 1997; 1999; and 
Laurie et al. 2005 for a discussion of social capital and indigenous development in South 
America). 
 Saraguro bears the marks of this shift to transnational indigenism in a number of 
ways. Luis Macas, the aforementioned Saraguro politician, political activist, and scholar, 
for example, has benefited from a relationship with American anthropologists Linda and 
Jim Belote, having co-authored an interview detailing Macas’ views on Saraguro 
traditionalism and lifeways, as well as presenting lectures in the United States, principally 
in 2006 at the University  of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Macas et al. 2003). Two 
Spanish NGOs, meanwhile, ACSUD Las Segovias and Solidaridad Internacional, have 
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sponsored the creation of two local Saraguro NGOs; the Jatari and Kawsay  foundations, 
respectively. These two local NGOs funnel funds on the order of several hundreds of 
thousands of dollars in to development projects in the area, including school expansions, 
daycares, local produce collectives, and water conservation and management. Jatari also 
sponsors four yearly festivals, modeled on Inkaic seasonal rituals, designed to promote a 
Saraguro identity strongly linked to an Inkaic heritage. The employees and directors of 
these organizations are at the forefront of the cultural revitalization movement and have, 
through their NGO connections and ability  to secure funding, gained important 
representational and rhetorical space locally. Indeed, their importance now could be said 
to overshadow that of the local offices representing Saraguro within the national 
indigenous organizations such as FENOCIN and CONAIE. The brochures and publicity 
materials of these organizations evoke the relationship between local ethnic identities and 
the international sphere of indigenism and social development: by  portraying Saraguros 
as pastoral and tradition bound, the myriad chakanas (Andean cross, a symbol with 
strong ties to Inkaism), stylized suns, and bountiful maize motifs serve more to present a 
vision of Saraguro to the outside, rather than to strictly inform locals of NGO works. 
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Figure 14: A calendar distributed by the Jatari Foundation presents Andean and Inkaic 
imagery.
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 While these local-global ties have at times served to promote the causes of 
indigenous movements, the global focus on indigenous issues has threatened to 
undermine local efforts: as with the Saraguro NGO brochures that must appeal to an 
international audience, local indigenous groups must also appeal to the sensibilities and 
sometimes romantic envisionings held by outsiders of indigenous practices in order to 
make their claims heard and acknowledged on a wider scale. The Kayapó of Brazil 
provide a telling case for the dangers of attempting to translate local indigenous contexts 
into the realm of global conceptions of indigeneity. The sometimes disconnecting visions 
require that indigenous leaders become cultural brokers: those politically  minded, urban-
educated or -raised, rural focusing boundary-straddlers who are able to navigate the 
differences of regional and wider contexts (see Geertz 1960; Press 1969; Sewastynowicz 
1983 for a discussion of cultural brokers more generally). In so doing, these brokers may 
create what Beth Conklin and Laura Graham have, following Richard White, called a 
middle ground: “middle grounds are forged on the basis of assumptions about the Other 
and what the Other can contribute to specific goals. These assumptions, observes White, 
a l w a y s i n v o l v e c r o s s - c u l t u r a l m i s p e r c e p t i o n s a n d s t r a t e g i c 
misrepresentations” (1995:696). 
 For the Kayapó in the 1980s and 1990s, their middle ground was formed on the 
basis that, facing land loss from resource extraction and hydroelectric projects, they could 
position themselves as the rightful stewards to their ancestral lands, knowing best how to 
conserve and protect it from capitalist interests. The global ecological movement, 
likewise, found in Kayapó leader Payakan a perfect symbol of the noble savage and 
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environmental protector, antithesis to the evils of modern civilization. The dangers of 
having select cultural brokers represent and speak for entire groups or communities was 
laid bare in Payakan’s case, as in 1992 he was accused of rape and his NGO and 
environmentalist partners soon sought to distance themselves from him, and his tarnished 
image “unleashed the floodgates of media criticism against the Kayapó as a 
whole” (Conklin and Graham 1995:704). When the veil of “strategic misrepresentation” 
is broken, indigenous peoples striving to negotiate their place within global visions of 
indigeneity risk losing the trust, and therefore the funding and help, of international NGO 
and media worldwide, even when a single person, acting as metonym for the group, 
proves to be seen as inauthentic in the eyes of outsiders. In other words, attempts to 
embody the romantic image of global indigeneity that serves to present such peoples as 
ecologically  noble, close to the earth, spiritual, anticapitalist, and antimodern may at 
times aid indigenous movements to bypass their lack of power within national spheres by 
relating to global political currents, the inherent dangers of strategic essentialisms risk 
undermining these movements.
 The increasing role of NGOs in assuming responsibilities no longer taken on by 
the state in the wake of neo-liberal reforms (including, but not limited to: construction of 
water systems, environmental conservation, educational and social infrastructure) also 
has a role to play in the (re)production of global visions of indigeneity. As is occurring in 
Saraguro, international NGOs concerned with indigenous development are not simply 
concerned with economic development, but  also with cultural empowerment and social 
improvement. These NGOs are often convinced of the social capital inherent in 
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indigenous communities, where the close social ties and traditional participatory forms 
are seen to be indicators of spaces where development will be participatory, and therefore 
more able to bring about long term, positive changes. The problem, as argued well by 
Alcida Rita Ramos (1991; 1994) for Brazil, is that NGOs rely on these often essentialized 
envisionings of indigenous peoples in order to decide who merits their attention and help, 
aiding to bring about what she has called the “Hyperreal Indian”: a third-order 
simulacrum that not only does not represent the supposed reality of Indians, but has 
through global discourses of indigeneity and the local-global articulations of such come 
to replace the “real” Indian in civil society and indigenous politics (Baudrillard 
1983:4,101; Ramos 1994). 
 For Baudrillard, to simulate is not simply to copy or to feign the existence of a 
certain object or idea, but to replace a supposed real with an imaginary that then comes to 
be taken as the real. 
Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the 
difference between “true” and “false,” between “real and “imaginary.” 
Since the simulator produces “true” symptoms, is he ill or not? ... But 
what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is 
multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply 
incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into 
simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination - the 
visible machinery  of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible 
Idea of God? (1983:5-8)
Ramos, likewise, takes the NGO image of the indigenous person to be a confusion 
between the real lives of Indians - messy, confusing, conflicting - and the ideal Indian 
portrayed by leaders such as Payakan. NGOs, in their drive to help socially  and 
economically  marginal peoples, have come to rely on a particular envisioning of Indians 
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that is rooted in global indigeneity, and see themselves as championing the “fabrication of 
the perfect Indian whose virtues, sufferings and untiring stoicism have won for him the 
right to be defended,” rather than real people whose actions do not always conform to 
NGO desires (Ramos 1994:161). As Baudrillard states, 
Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models 
around the merest fact - the models come first, and their orbital ... 
circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events, (32)
and so it  is with the portrayals of indigenous peoples: the romantic envisionings of Indian 
lives come not just to dominate rhetorical and representational fields, but also come to be 
seen as the real, and in doing so Ramos’ “real” Indians are, in the bureaucratized and 
politicized world of NGO development, eclipsed by the “hyperreal,” “more real than the 
real” (Ramos 1994:161). 
 Though many of these depictions are created and circulated in the global sphere, 
and certainly  find deep precedents in Western thought, from such thinkers as Rousseau 
and his noble savage, the increasing connections between regional or state level 
indigenous groups and organizations and their transnational counterparts mean that these 
romantic envisionings may  also come to permeate local conceptions of indigeneity. In 
other words, real indigenous persons, in their efforts to secure NGO funding and 
international recognition, may find themselves conforming to this new indigeneity, forged 
in the imagination and the misunderstandings of the middle ground, but coming back 
home to the local to be remade as facets of local ethnicity. Remembering again Jose’s 
comments at the beginning of this chapter, his concern with purity and authenticity makes 
more sense in the context of the competing visions of indigeneity that, influenced by 
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global, national, and local discourses, are now at play  in Saraguro. Below, I will examine 
one possible indigenism that has certainly been influenced by global indigenous 
discourses; neo-Inkaism, and present two alternative imaginings; one that follows 
Catholic feasting traditions, and a youth sub-culture that, unlike the proponents of the 
neo-Inaic movement, find no problem in adopting “modern” Western styles and tastes.
The second coming of the Inka 
 The Inka conquered the area that is now Saraguro less than a hundred years before 
the empire eventually  fell with the arrival of the Spanish. Oral tradition largely maintains 
that the Inka removed the local population of Cañaris and Paltas who resisted Inka rule, 
and replaced them with more subservient peoples from a range of ethnic groups from the 
Titicaca and Cuzco regions of Peru (Ogburn 2008:295-296; Ogburn 2010:171). Despite 
the relatively  short period of Inka presence in the region, the idea of Inkaic heritage and 
tradition has found fertile ground in Saraguro, reminiscent of those colonial era rebellions 
of Tupac Katari and Tupac Amaru that sought to unite diverse ethnic groups by  a 
reconciliation with a shared Inkaic past. A small group of local NGO professionals has 
been leading the neo-Inkaic movement in Saraguro in recent years, aimed at disinterring 
what they  see as a local history that has been lost in the intervening years of Spanish 
political and cultural domination. The Jatari foundation, one of the internationally funded 
local NGOs, has been particularly  active in promoting seasonal rituals that draw on an 
Inkaic precedent. The arrival of international NGO funding that coincided with such a 
revitalization effort is not coincidental, as has been stated, NGOs often pursue social and 
economic development alongside a commitment to cultural development. In addition to 
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the celebrations, the two local NGOs have also been working on the initial stages of a 
community  tourism program, building guest rooms attached to family homes, training 
guides, and producing packages of different activities that tourists can engage in during 
their stay, from mountain bike riding to shamanic rituals and collective feasts. The 
argument made by these organizations, as has been made in many other situations of 
NGO-sponsored sustainable development, was that  tourism would contribute to the 
revitalisation of cultural traditions (Erickson 1996).  The prominence of Incaic rituals and 
newly created shamanic performances for tourists are partly the result of the strong 
identification some Saraguros express with the Inca past, but  the tourist component of the 
development project as a whole cannot be discounted. 
 The close interaction with these international and local NGOs, as well as with the 
small but significant number of tourists and visitors, has certainly shaped the direction 
that the revitalization movement has taken, as the cultural attractions offered tourists have 
ultimately  become the cornerstones of the revitalization effort. Here, global constructions 
of indigeneity  come to inform how Saraguros present themselves to foreign tourists, but 
ultimately, also how this group of Saraguros present themselves to themselves. In other 
words, the hyperreal NGO image of the Indian has, through development funding and 
cross cultural interactions, come to be the model that precedes the real and upon which 
these revitalized visions of self, for the neo-Inkans, have been forged. Accordingly, these 
NGO workers and neo-Inkans play  up  aspects of Saraguro culture that harken back to a 
less polluted time, focusing primarily on agricultural and Inkaic motifs, simultaneously a 
representation of reality  that plays upon tourists’ desires of seeing ‘true’ Saraguro Indians, 
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as well as an aspirational self-image towards which proponents of cultural revitalization 
are working. 
 The most important of the annual reborn Inkaic celebrations, Inti Raymi (the 
festival of the sun), held on the summer solstice, was being celebrated for the fifth time in 
June of 2010. On the Friday before Inti Raymi, the members of the community of Las 
Lagunas attended, along with a handful of tourists, foreign volunteers and others, a day-
long festival at the local elementary school that bears the name of the celebration itself. 
Families gathered along the grassy mound that flanks the football court, chatting, eating 
popsicles and waiting for the main event: an Inkaic style ritual commemorating an 
Indigenous past and present. At the center of the court lay flower petals and choclos that 
formed a starburst, and tall corn stalks sprouting from plastic buckets ornamented a table 
where a microphone was set up. More flowers marked each cardinal point, forming a 
cross around which the ceremony was to take place. As music started playing from a 
nearby  stereo system, Lucho (the school’s director), Fortunato (the Jatari project 
director), and Rosa (cabildo president of Illincho, teacher, and advocate of community 
tourism) led a group of students in a well-rehearsed dance around the football court. Each 
wore a long, black tunic trimmed at the bottom in golden sequins, with their hair hanging 
loose over their shoulders (a contrast to the usual style for men and women, which is a 
single long braid). Pairs of dancers were directed by the leaders to one point of the cross 
while another woman narrated the event from the microphone. Each pair, one boy and 
one girl, were said to represent one of the four ayllullactas (communities) participating in 
the festival, and each accorded with a cardinal direction and one of four elements; Fire, 
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Water, Earth, and Wind. As trails of younger students encircled the central group, their 
heads adorned with bright headbands featuring a single feather, the ceremony itself 
began. Fortunato provided the music with a variety of flutes while Lucho purified each 
participant and ritual object by blowing liquor over them. Unlike the similar Inkaic styled 
ceremonies held for tourists, this ceremony  was constructed in order to educate and 
explain the important ritual aspects, with a narrator adding in elements of spirituality, 
earth-worship, and reverence for a forgotten past. These aspects were necessary to 
explain to the gathered crowd, who, though the vast majority were indigenous Saraguros, 
were not expected to have come with previous understanding of such rituals. The job for 
the organizers was to present the ceremony in such a way as to teach people how to 
celebrate as Inka descendants, rather than as Christians. Those, like Fortunato and Rosa, 
who participate in and guide many of the Inkaic rituals, form the core group of 
proponents of this type of cultural revitalization and see it  as a positive affirmation of a 
tradition that has been left by the wayside. Well educated, mostly urban and at most part-
time agriculturalists, this group has benefitted from their NGO connections and are often 
the ones most closely associated with the tourist trade. Fortunato, in particular, has been 
able to use his position to build a large guest house, and the textile factory on his land, 
stemming from a Peace Corps project his parents were involved in, remains one of the 
main attractions offered to tourists.
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Figure 15: Neo-Inkas lead school children in a ceremonial dance during Inti Raymi 2010.
 The Inti Raymi festivities put on display the Hyperreal Indian for all to see. Those 
inconsistencies, the messiness of reality and the dirt  of poverty and all the conflicting 
moral choices that characterize the lives of the majority of those who call themselves 
Saraguro, and that Ramos’ Brazillian NGOs saw as contaminating the people who they 
were supposed to represent, are absent in this yearly festival of the sun. Instead, the 
Indians on display are cleansed (quite literally, as there is a ritual cleansing as part of the 
ceremony) to make a show - not of who Saraguros necessarily  are - of who Saraguros 
could, and should be. The choclos forming the starburst are locally grown and strongly 
symbolic of a local identity  as peasant farmers, a lifestyle that has had to be largely left 
behind as these self-proclaimed shamans have become intellectuals and professionals, but 
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they  still serve to present the image of a self-sufficient indigenous population living off 
the land. The musical instruments are percussion and various flutes, since stringed 
instruments bear the taint  of Spanish influence, and the gold-sequined tunics strongly 
mark a historical tie with the Inka, though traditional Saraguro dress elements are also 
portrayed. These are the “good” Indians of NGO development; traditional, ritualistic, 
communal, and pastoral. 
 These ceremonies, along with the cosmovision they represent, have become a 
hotly  debated topic in the area. Aside from the economic entanglements that channel 
NGO funding from Spain to local Saraguro NGOs, whose directors are also central to the 
burgeoning tourist industry and profit from their guesthouses and by putting on similar 
ceremonies and cleansing rituals for tourists, the Inkaic associations simply do not 
resonate with the identities of many Saraguros. Local Inkaism positions Saraguro history 
as usurped by  Spanish evangelical colonialism, the effects of which are no longer outside 
forces, but form an integral part of the quotidian practices and feasting traditions of the 
area. Catholism has become intertwined with indigenous expressions across Latin 
America, and while the civil-religious hierarchies that once characterized many small 
indigenous communities are on the wane, Catholic feasting days exist alongside the 
newly reforged Inkaic ones.
Catholic cargo systems 
 Civil-religious hierarchies in indigenous communities throughout Latin America 
have long been a topic of discussion and analysis for anthropologists. These cargo 
systems, as they are otherwise known, are systems “in which adult  males serve in a series 
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of hierarchically arranged offices devoted to both political and ceremonial aspects of 
community  life” (Cancian 1967:283). While the specifics of each cargo system vary, it 
can generally be said that serving in the successive religious and civil offices within the 
hierarchy, a person gains prestige and clout, until such a time when they have fulfilled 
their obligations to the community, village, or ayllu, and may then become a mayor, 
whose voice and opinions are respected (Salomon 2004:79-85). Examples of positions 
that may be included in these hierarchies include lower level political offices concerning 
a particular aspect of community  organization, such as water management, and hosting or 
contributing time, labour, and often vast amounts of wealth to Catholic feasts and 
celebrations throughout the year. Though earlier assessments made little of women’s roles 
in such systems, Holly  Mathews (1985) has outlined how in some Mexican cargo systems 
offices are shared responsibilities that fall on a household unit, rather than simply  the 
male head, an acknowledgement of the heavy  burden that the offices put on women as 
well as other members of the household. For the Andean region, both Frank Salomon 
(2004) and Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld (1999) have made similar observations. 
 In Ñamarín, a strictly religious cargo system is still responsible for hosting 
various community  oriented feasts at Christmas, Holy Week (Easter), during Corpus 
Cristi in June, and at other times of the year. These cargoes are separate from the civic 
duties that fall on the elected members of the cabildo, an occurrence that John Chance 
(1990) has associated with an increasing penetration of the state into indigenous 
communities in an effort to exert more control locally. While this may be the case, the 
previous chapters have demonstrated the sometimes fierce localism and skepticism of 
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state penetration that prevail in the area, though the cabildo system does mean that local 
politics are, in the end, regulated and defined at the national level, which explains why 
the local cargo system does not include civic offices. Indeed, as Chance notes, 
Preservation of a local cargo system of any kind is a conservative 
strategy, an attempt to assert local autonomy and community identity in 
the face of external pressures. As national governments penetrate more 
deeply into community political life, religious cargo systems may form 
to stave off further erosion of village autonomy. (1990:39) 
 The Holy week celebrations are one of the bigger, and therefore more expensive, 
cargoes since they last  an entire week and comprise a sponsor from each of the Saraguro 
communities. These alumbradores come together at the house of the primary  sponsor to 
host the festivities, which include music, dancing, food, and drinking, the costs of which 
can be very high. As it happened in 2010, Ñamarín’s cabildo president, Tayta Rodrigo, 
was also the main sponsor, and the expenses were spread out among various households 
in his family, including his sons and daughters who, working and living in the United 
States, pooled their remittances. Even being a minor sponsor or mayordomo of a lesser 
feast can put a strain on a family’s income, leading some people to be disenfranchised 
with the possible burdens of sponsorship. So, while those like Tayta Rodrigo continue to 
support the local Catholic tradition, and in doing so promote regular occasions for entire 
communities to celebrate together, others are choosing to forego the responsibilities 
associated with the cargo system. 
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Figure 16: Fiesta sponsors stand outside of the church in Saraguro during Easter.
 The Holy Week celebrations, like the other festive occasions throughout the year, 
combine community-wide feasting with Catholic worship that is more closely associated 
with the Church itself. Indigenous Catholic practices do not, however, always align 
perfectly  with more mainstream interpretations of Christian faith or dogma, having for 
centuries combined elements of European and Andean spirituality. God, the death and 
resurrection of Christ, and the Virgin Mary are brought to the center of worship  on this 
occasion, but the mountain deities, local waterfalls said to be manifestations of the 
Virgin, and the Pachamama/Earth Mother are also respected and celebrated in other ways, 
sometimes as simply  as pouring out a bit of trago. Celebrations such as Holy Week, then, 
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offer up an image of faith that is certainly  Catholic oriented, while being unmistakably 
local. 
 On the day before Good Friday, the alumbradores from each of the communities 
gathered at the house of Tayta Rodrigo, where for days people had been coming together 
to share in the food (typical food during festive occasions includes guinea pig, boiled 
maize mote, bread, cheese, and potatoes, as well as a beef soup served continuously to 
give warmth and make sure everyone has something in their stomach during the often 
long drinking sessions), liquor, music, and dancing. Each sponsor wore their best poncho 
and iconic woolen hat, with the addition of bright pink scarves, white shawls, and long 
chains of silver coins around their necks. Accompanied by drums and accordion, 
firecrackers and other celebrants, the sponsors moved in procession on horseback from 
the festival house in Ñamarín down the winding road towards the Church in the center of 
the main plaza in the town. Side by side, the alumbradores and their wives held woven 
faja belts between them, perhaps a more typically  indigenous addition to the pink motifs 
of Easter, as they eventually reached the gathered crowd in front of the Church itself. Two 
masked clowns entertained those gathered by dancing and suggestively waving their toy 
drumsticks in the faces and buttocks of the crowd, while the alumbradores stood regal, 
slightly bored, in front of the massive wooden doors waiting for the mass to begin. 
Afterwards, the alumbradores would cloister themselves in the church overnight to offer 
prayers, before once again returning to Ñamarín where festivities continued in a more 
collective, casual manner. They  would make a similar pilgrimage almost every day of 
Holy week, moving between the mestizo center where the cathedral is located and back 
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to Ñamarín and the other indigenous spaces, a movement between two poles of worship 
and spheres of control within and between which the festivities, and indigenous lives in 
general, are played out (Butler 2006:139).
  “Group  rituals” like these provide “a strategic means to define and interpret 
structures of economic and political power within and without the group, and ... provide a 
vision of the past that delineates the group in its own terms and in relation to the wider 
context of group relations within the state” (Rasnake 1986:663). Participation in these 
ritual occasions, then, signals more than just  religious affiliation, but also plays a part  in 
defining the place of indigenous groups or communities within the wider sphere of social 
relations, as well reflecting particular values and histories associated with those groups. 
So, when neo-Inkaic revivalists criticize these Catholic-oriented celebrations, they are 
also claiming a separate history  that may be cleansed of the colonial stain that  inheres in 
the church. The Inti Raymi celebrations, for example, take place almost exclusively 
within a single indigenous community, rather than moving between mestizo and 
indigenous spheres. One notable exception is that on the solstice itself, Fortunato and 
Lucho, along with many others, led a parade through the town center. Rather than paying 
respect to what they see as a Spanish institution, as the Holy Week celebrations do for the 
Church, they were attempting to reclaim the space of Saraguro as indigenous. While 
some mestizos feel that  feasting occasions simply mean that the town will periodically be 
overrun by unruly Indians (the hired security guards patrolling public spaces on these 
occasions testify  to this fear), there is not the same attempt at a redefinition of space as 
with Inti Raymi. 
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Drinking and alternative Christianities
 Between (and part of) the devotional aspects of these celebrations, during building 
inaugurations, wakes, graduations and other feasts and parties, as well as in everyday life, 
drinking has long been and remains to be a central feature. Drinking in the Andes has 
long been associated with Indianness, and drinking plays an important role in sharing and 
general reciprocity during feasts (Butler 2006). Drunkenness, then, is to a certain extent 
expected of participants, who through a public showing of vulnerability (but not complete 
loss of self-control or lack of respect) uphold their duty  to the social order: “Within the 
indigneous world, the most ambitious and respected leaders should publicly  demonstrate 
their vulnerability to members of their comuna and to social and supernatural superiors 
outside” (Butler 2006:177). Political power in an indigenous community  is largely 
dependent on the acceptance and satisfaction of the majority, who can quickly  turn 
against cabildo members whom they see as power hungry or corrupt. Displaying 
vulnerability, then, coupled with the mutual sharing and fraternal nature of these Catholic 
feasts, is a way to ensure goodwill between not just elected representatives and their 
constituents, but also between neighbours, friends, families, men and women of different 
ages, and people of differing incomes. Shared gifts of liquor, coupled with the ritualistic 
calls to drink together and the resulting mutual vulnerability, gives these feasts their 
capacity to bring people together socially as well as emotionally. 
 This is, however, an ideal outcome of the heavy drinking that does regularly 
occur. Many families, and indigenous women in particular, know that sometimes the 
reality  of drunkenness can be much more painful than restorative. The capacity and 
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knowhow to drink socially is often a necessary skill, especially for those interested in 
local level politics and wanting to ensure they  are seen as humble and of equal status with 
those they wish to represent. Equally, alcohol abuse is regarded as a serious problem 
plaguing younger men who are regularly derided for having no other interests than in 
women, rock music, and liquor. Still others are known for their habitual drunkenness, and 
there is almost always some gossip floating around about how so-and-so’s husband came 
home drunk again and was abusive, or how their small income was simply being 
funneled into the hands of the cantina owners who sell beer and more. While most of 
those who I spoke with on the subject agree that the advent of justicia comunitaria has 
made men more accountable with respect to wife beating, it has certainly not erased the 
problem completely, nor has it solved the other associated marital concerns that arise. 
Drinking is coming to be seen as so problematic that, in Ñamarín, ongoing discussions in 
community  assemblies have led some to question the right of cantina owners to sell 
liquor, since they profit  from the possible addictions and immiseration of other 
comumeros.
 The annual barrio celebration of the community, usually an occasion accompanied 
by contemporary popular music, dancing, and a bar, became increasingly criticized in the 
months of its planning because it  was seen to promote alcohol abuse among minors. The 
older generation of men for whom drinking trago and chicha is a part of their daily lives, 
though, remained largely silent; not many would question their right to drink with their 
hard-earned moderate wealth, and even if the local cantinas and tiendas did stop selling 
alcohol, they  could always visit a shop along the highway or in town, or rely on their 
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social networks that allow them to trade for  trago originating from the lowlands, or even 
to receive alcohol in return for a request of a favour. 
 Among the most outspoken critics of the culture of drinking are the Protestant 
Evangelicals, Adventists and other alcohol-abstinent believers that are becoming more 
and more typical in anthropological accounts of indigenous communities across the 
Andes. Around Otavalo canton, for instance, Butler describes how an earthquake inspired 
a number of indígenas in Huaycopungo to repent for their heavy drinking, one strategy 
being the adoption of a more conservative Protestant faith (Butler 2006). Elsewhere in 
Otavalo, among commercial weavers and indigenous capitalists, the shift from a drink-
heavy  Catholic feasting cycle to a Mormon faith entailed a shift in morality  (away from 
the “lowly” connotations associated with the drunk Indian) as well as a shift in domestic 
economy: by cutting alcohol and fiesta sponsorship out of the household budget, more 
money  could be spent on budding industrial and commercial enterprises, housing, 
clothing, and schooling (Colloredo-Mansfeld 2009:52-54). Though in some places 
indigenous Protestantism has been associated with North American imperialism and a 
betrayal of “traditional” Catholic indigenous faith, the recent successes of FEINE (the 
Ecuadorian Evangelical Indian Organization) within the greater indigenous social 
movements, as well as the appeal, particularly for women, of an alcohol-free faith mean 
that evangelism has gained in popularity, but still presents certain obstacles (Lucero 
2006:36). One of the most important of these obstacles to address here is just how 
integral drinking is to sociality and communal celebrations, and how indigenous 
Evangelicals attempt to be seen as equal participants in community life. 
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 For the Guaman-Zhingre family in Ñamarín, attempting to live an Adventist  life 
means navigating the social field ever aware of their decision to abstain from drinking, 
though they have found other ways to fulfill their social obligations and responsibilities 
to the community. Leandro and Linda live in Ñamarín with their four children, and 
operate a guest house associated with the local community tourism network Saraguro 
Rikuy. Their home, with its second floor balcony and white washed guest  room to the 
side is moderate by local standards; neither the largely windowless, older, and relatively 
poorer older style, nor the frankly extravagant brick and cement block houses that 
educated and successful professionals and emigrants to the United States or Spain have 
had built. Linda and Leandro’s home is a testament to their hard work, having been 
pieced together and added to over the years as their finances allowed and their obligations 
as parents demanded. 
 Linda was born in Ñamarín, and her parents and 3 siblings still all live in the 
community, though are now spread between different houses. Frequently  fretting over her 
children's behaviours, Linda’s attitude to parenting self-consciously  navigates the 
distances between her own upbringing, her expectations of her children, and her vision of 
an ideal mother. As Linda and I got to know one other and became more comfortable in 
each other’s company while shucking corn, gardening, or tending to her parents’ cattle, 
she would often express her concern for her children in a seemingly eternal “kids of this 
generation don’t know how good they have it” sort of way. 
 Linda grew up  in a house whose income was derived solely from the small 
agricultural and animal holdings of her parents. Her responsibilities would include 
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tending the cattle with her younger brother Javier, feeding cuyes, and preparing dinner for 
her parents. Her own children have their responsibilities around the house, though both 
Leandro and Linda insist they have it  easy, perhaps too easy. Linda particularly disliked 
having to get up in the mornings with her mother, Ana, to harvest wheat  or barley  since 
those were long, relatively fruitless affairs. Once actually harvested, the grains had to be 
milled by foot or by hoof, and then more work went in to picking out the grains from the 
waste, getting covered in chaff. She promised herself that when she was married, she 
wouldn’t grow any grains. Of course, in the first few years of her marriage, she and 
Leandro had to grow all they  could since neither had a sustained cash income. Now, at 
least, Linda can choose if she wants to plant barley or quinoa, supplementing with grains 
from the market in Saraguro. 
 As a child, life at home for Linda wasn’t always pleasant. Her parents were stern, 
beating Linda and her siblings on occasion. When that happened, the kids could 
sometimes find refuge by sleeping out with the cattle. Guillermo, Linda’s father, was and 
continues to be an avid drinker, though for a man of his generation that is not  uncommon. 
The long, cold, often solitary nature of tending cattle on far reaching pieces of cleared 
pasture means that most older, full time pastoralists in the area have trago on their breath, 
the liquor insulating against the wind. Guillermo and Ana are still regular feast sponsors 
in the Catholic religious cargo system, and they acted as mayordomo for the Corpus 
Cristi celebrations in 2010. Linda, meanwhile, remembers too many years when the soup 
had to be thinned out, when their clothes had to last a little longer, and school supplies 
went unbought as money  had to be saved to sponsor such a feast with meat, trago, chicha, 
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quetes (firecrackers) and all the other necessities. Unlike Tayta Rodrigo, they didn’t have 
a transnational network of children from which to pool their resources, so Guillermo and 
Ana had to find alternatives to fulfill what they consider to be their obligations to the 
community. 
 Linda left  home at 14, eventually migrating to Quito where she found work as a 
domestic servant in the house of a Canadian couple. Leandro, who was born in southern 
Colombia, had migrated to Imbabura province in northern Ecuador to live with his 
grandmother, and made his way to Quito where he found work on a large commercial 
flower estate just outside of the city. For him, those years were marked by rampant 
alcoholism and what he considered to be self-destructive behaviour that was typical of 
the migrant youth with whom he associated. A manager took an interest in Leandro, and 
asked him one day why he was throwing his life away instead of trying to establish 
himself. He took Leandro in to town and bought him a mattress, and managed to 
convince Leandro to buy  a small gas stove on credit. Leandro began to try and funnel his 
earnings towards accumulating household goods so that one day he could, with a good 
woman, establish a house of his own. His drinking still continued, but he began to think 
seriously about finding a partner. 
 About the same time, Linda had also began working at the same flower grower. 
She remembers the work as dirty and unhealthy, having to pick flowers while pesticides 
were sprayed all around. Disenfranchised with the Roman Catholic rural feasting cycle 
that her parents proudly supported, as well as the alcoholism that fueled her unhappy 
childhood memories, Linda took her years in Quito as an opportunity to find a church that 
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was more in line with her beliefs. She attended services and studied the general dogma of 
a variety  of faiths, even once being surprised by a congregation who spoke 
“huebadas” (in tongues, literally “nonsense”) as a part of their devotion. She eventually 
became a member of an Adventist church near Quito, and the family attends a small 
Adventist church that has been built just outside of Saraguro. 
 Linda and Leandro eventually met, though she was not going to have anything to 
do with a drinker. Leandro took it upon himself to impress her, and vowed to stop 
drinking. Only  once, says Linda, did he drink since they have been together, and she 
promptly threatened to leave him. He’s been 12 years sober, and neither of them drink 
even chicha when it is offered. When Linda fell pregnant with her first  child, she decided 
that it would be better to move back to Ñamarín to raise her children, so Linda used the 
piece of land she inherited from her grandparents in order to start building their house. 
The couple had a tough time of it, since Leandro couldn’t find any  work around Saraguro, 
and by and large it is no longer feasible in Saraguro to make a living strictly from 
farming; both men and women (particularly young ones) divide their time between 
managing their ever smaller lands and wage labour in Saraguro, Loja, or Cuenca, as well 
as selling cuyes, garden grown vegetables, or artisan crafts. As a result, Leandro decided 
to move back to Quito and send remittances to his wife and new children. This was a 
solution that pleased no one, since Linda was forced to care for her children and the cattle 
she had inherited, which meant she never felt  she had enough time to do it all herself. 
Leandro, too, felt lonely and helpless being away for so long from his family, so they 
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decided to sell the few cattle they owned and rely  on subsistence agriculture and 
whatever else they could to manage together. 
 Linda’s Adventist faith has provided her with a belief system that she feels 
shelters her family from the hardships of her youth. Many of the practices associated with 
Catholic feasting in the area, including the heavy  drinking and onerous financial burden, 
are not part of the Adventist tradition, and so their family  does not participate in the 
celebrations. Though they earn a living from tourism projects associated with the new 
Inkaic movement, they also don’t participate in rituals such as Inti Raymi. They, like a 
number of Christian Evangelicals, other Adventists, and the neo-Inkas themselves, have 
found alternatives to the Catholic faith that, through the religious cargo system, forms an 
integral part of community life in the area. Their non-attendance at these frequent feasts 
means, however, that they  do not take part in many of the more social aspects of 
community  life that, like the practice of sharing drinks, offering gifts of liquor, and 
showing their vulnerability to their neighbours by getting drunk, are so important in how 
people establish relationships of mutual interdependance. As a result, Leandro has chosen 
to participate frequently in the regular mingas, as well as help with almost any other tasks 
related to communal upkeep. This has earned him a reputation as a good comunero, 
someone who is concerned with the well-being of the community as a whole, though the 
repeated, sometimes forceful, offers of drink he receives when he does attend a feast keep 
him at arm’s length. 
 The alternative celebrations like Inti Raymi share many  similarities with the 
Catholic celebrations: they require large outpourings of money (though the sponsors now 
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include NGO funding), they  are relatively public events that bring people together 
(though only  the Inkaic celebrations are touted as touristic events), and they  serve as 
expressions of belief systems and include religious practices. It will be interesting to see 
if, in the future, the Inkaic celebrations come to eclipse the Catholic cargo system, or if 
both, as well as other denominational occasions, continue to co-exist and reflect the 
diversity of beliefs in the area. 
 What is more, the Inkaic rituals and the cargo feasts evoke two different 
envisionings of an identity  as indigenous. The Catholic celebrations work within a cargo 
system long recognized as part of Latin American indigenous communal tradition, but 
come with many of the negative associations of Indianness such as poverty, dirtiness, and 
heavy  drinking. The Inkaic celebrations, on the other hand, portray an indigeneity  in line 
with global conceptualizations of ancient natives, who, too, share in a pastoral tradition, 
but one divorced from the poverty of real peasant farmers. The Catholic feasts are often 
criticized by neo-Inkans and others for their too-close association with the church that 
played such an integral role in colonization and channels funds from poor households 
into acts of devotion, while the reborn Inkaic ceremonies cleanse the history of Saraguro, 
attempting to eliminate the contamination of Spanish colonialism and redeem a separate 
Saraguro history. But the debates over history, over what constitutes true Saraguro 
tradition that surround both practices do not encompass the entire field of imaginings of 
the ways of being indigenous. 
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A youthful alternative
 The Inkaic revitalization movement is self-consciously  stylized as anti-modern in 
conception, consistent with a view of indigeniety that places indigenous peoples as 
suffering continually from the expansion of Spanish, and then capitalist and American 
colonization. This “anti-modern” (Macas 2000) conception of indigenous cultural 
revitalization aligns politically with an indigenous movement that is characterized by 
calls for the protection of alternative, traditional methods of knowing and experiencing 
the world, as well as for creating spaces of autonomy for indigenous groups. Indigenous 
persons, as the obvious stewards of traditional lifeways, are seen to act as the sensible 
voices opposing the ills of civilization. The rhetorical power of the movement is large, 
but younger Saraguros have found other ways of expressing themselves that  are 
compatible with their self-identification as indigenous and do not strictly rely on ties to 
an Inkaic past, or even to a particular expression of indigeneity. Rather, the tastes and 
ambitions of many Saraguro youth point to an alternative conceptualization of Saraguro 
identity  that is both firmly rooted in the “modern” and respectful of a long tradition of 
Indigeneity. 
 To the disdain of some, and certainly to the misunderstanding of most parents, a 
large number of (primarily  male) Saraguro youth affiliate themselves with a subculture of 
heavy  metal music4. Typified by their appreciation of such North American and European 
imports such as Metallica, Motley Crue, and even In Flames, wearing black T-shirts with 
their favourite band logos (often described by older Saraguros as “Satanic”), and forming 
4 Young Saraguro men are generally more likely to wear the rocker aesthetic and listen to such 
music, but young women also participate and may also wear band t-shirts on informal occasions. 
Still, the subculture is generally associated with young men.
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their own musical groups, these rockeros, as they are locally known, find little that is 
contradictory in their self-identification as Indigenous and their enjoyment of metal 
music, often heard blaring from their mobile phones or house during a practice session. 
Weekend afternoons can bring the echoes of a changing soundscape: when once there 
might have been a solitary young man moving his family’s cows to water with a flute to 
keep  him company, now the sound of the electric guitar and drum set can be heard 
against the dull, hollow thumping of volleyball outside of the casa comunal. Even during 
Inti Raymi, the nightly festivities include live heavy metal music that sets itself apart 
from the Inkaic-inspired Kichwa songs about lost Inka kings, while accordion and drum 
duos feature at the more understated Catholic feasts. 
 Such changes are not welcomed by all, and the stylized band shirts that the 
rockeros wear are particularly contentious for those who mourn what they  see as the loss 
of traditional Saraguro dress. Still, most rockeros sport their black cortes, and along with 
their black tops and hats or tuques, do not deviate that much from the accepted style of 
most adult men. Importantly, these young music lovers do not see themselves as 
betraying their indigeneity, and, for some, their choice of music actually reflects their 
perceptions of racial boundaries. Sitting in the central plaza of Saraguro one night, I met 
a group of young Saraguros who were sharing some trago, listening to some Ecuadorian 
metal group from a mobile phone placed on the stone bench between them.  We got to 
talking about music, and our favourite bands, and I mentioned that I was more in to punk 
than metal. Punk, it was explained, was what the young town mestizos listened to. 
Saraguro youth listen to metal. 
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Figures 17 and 18: Students from the Inti Raymi school in Las Lagunas depict members 
of their family, re-interpreted with imagery of the students’ own interest in metal.
 Even though these youth seem to associate their identity as indigenous to their 
musical preferences, it  might be questioned why such a youth subculture should be 
considered alongside religious festivals. On the one hand, as many of their parents’ 
generation express, they might simply be searching for an expression of difference and 
resistance to their parents’ tastes and desires, an argument often associated with the acts 
of adolescence. On the other hand, it would seem that  musical and stylistic choices are of 
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a different order than religious or ritualistic ones. But the Catholic and Inkaic feasts are 
expressions of belief systems that, particularly in the case of the reborn Inkaic rituals, 
attempt to reflect underlying values and desired lifestyles. In the case of the neo-Inkaic 
movement, these include a venerated past, an agro-pastoral present and an Indigenous 
future free from the structures of Western “modernity.” The Inkaic rituals are attempts at 
defining and dealing with a contemporary indigenous society that  people see as in flux. 
Likewise, a youthful affinity  for metal music and culture should be seen as an attempt at 
definition and finding meaning and place, rather than simply as adolescent rebellion. 
 Much of the North American sociological focus on youth cultures has treated 
them as pathological or deviant expressions of a period of adolescence defined as less-
than-adulthood. Accordingly, youth are rarely  considered cultural agents in their own 
right, argues Mary Bucholtz (2002). The result has been that work on the period of 
adolescence, widely considered to be a time of self-transition and stress, has focused on 
youth culture in psychological and age-defined terms, rather than seeing young people as 
attempting “acts of semiotic resignification [that] subvert the meanings assigned to the 
appropriated objects within the dominant culture, often in ways that challenge class 
arrangements” (Bucholtz 2002:537). By  interpreting rockero culture as an attempt at 
giving meaning to the lives that  these youth lead, we open up the possibility of yet 
another proposed envisioning of indigeneity  in Saraguro. These youth find no 
contradiction in enjoying the fruits brought on by transnationalised Western cultural 
forms while simultaneously  participating, however marginally, in both Catholic feasts as 
well as attending and discussing the neo-Inkaic re-imagination of local indigeneity. With 
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family members working and living abroad, with their own lives bringing them to urban 
centers and rooting them in the rural locality of Saraguro, their interpretations of self do 
not hinge, as risk the neo-Inkas, on denying the impacts, both positive and negative, of a 
contemporary  “modern” world (see also Van Vleet 2003). While their self-identification 
as indigenous certainly does not stem from a metal aesthetic, rockero culture is not 
incompatible with their indigenous selves. 
 In a similar vein, Mark Goodale (2006) examines the emergence of indigenous 
youth rappers in El Alto, Bolivia as part of a “second revolution” that is redefining the 
place of indigenous peoples within the nation-state, as well as the content of those 
indigenous identities themselves. Connecting, through their music and lyrics, to 
racialized subalterns the world over, these rappers are part of what  Goodale calls 
indigenous cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, as it is generally understood, entails at 
least a partial rejection of local identity  and history in favour of a more inclusive, wider 
scale of belonging that, at its greatest, produces a moral good of re-creating all people as 
global citizens, thereby erasing the fractures of nationality and locality  (Goodale 
2006:639-641). Indigenous cosmopolitanism, meanwhile, means for Goodale that the 
realm of the indigenous is projected beyond what might be normally expected so that the 
category itself encompasses more than, say, the ideal of the hyperreal Indian. The result 
for the El Alto rappers is that they are able to
borrow from a transnational hip-hop  culture in a way that projects a 
“space of expression” beyond El Alto’s narrow and dusty streets, but 
without sacrificing the meanings that locate their songs within a long 
indigenous tradition of musical and cultural hybridity. (Goodale 
2006:644) 
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In the end, indigenous youth like the Saraguro rockeros and the El Alto rappers are, much 
like the neo-Inkas, attempting to trace out a place for indigeneities in the contemporary 
world that resonate with the expanded influences and possibilities brought on by 
transnational dialogues, but firmly rooted in the local. The multiple paths to such “new 
ethnicities” (Hall 1997) mean that while on the global political scale, indigenous 
politicians and activists the world over are attempting to define the shared meanings and 
rights of indigenous peoples, even at the local scale there may be no consensus as to what 
it means to be indigenous. 
The possibilities of multiple images of indigeneity
 The efforts of neo-Inkaic cultural revitalizationists in the region represent one 
possible ideal of indigeneity, one that resonates well with global discourses of Indianness. 
Events such as the Inti Raymi celebrations attempt to depict many of the most common 
traits associated with indigenous groups: attachment to a deep history, longstanding 
traditions that inform current practices, devotion to the land from which their food grows, 
and retention of a language other than the one dominant in society. These displays are 
aspirational in the sense that while they do not accurately reflect the lives of most 
contemporary  Saraguros, they project a particular future, one that forefronts the 
importance of a Saraguro ethnicity  and of an indigenous lifeway. In this way, similar 
social movements have the potential to positively  impact indigenous lives by validating 
particular practices heavily associated with being indigenous. 
 Still, the rhetoric employed by  indigenous activists and political leaders when 
laying out a framework for an indigenous movement poses problems for anthropologists. 
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Luis Macas’ (2000) position that  the indigenous community, descended from the ayllu, is 
the central axis of indigenous society borrows heavily  from the works of anthropology 
like Eric Wolf’s concept of the closed, corporate peasant community. The celebration of 
the ayllu as a bastion of indigeneity against an encroaching Western modernity (see, for 
example Allen 1988), criticized heavily in the 1990s for ignoring the changing realities of 
peasant lives in the Andes (Starn 1991), has now become enshrined in the Inti Raymi 
celebrations and other neo-Inkaic revitalization events taking place in Saraguro. The 
image of Saraguro indigeneity  put forth by the neo-Inaic movement threatens to become 
more hyperreal than real, more associated with the cleansed, safe image of the noble 
Indian preferred for NGO intervention (Ramos 1994). The claims of unbroken cultural 
links between a pre-colonial past and a modern indigenous present certainly represent 
particular political projects, but Mary Weismantel is correct that:
the standard for judging a particular image of the ayllu [or community, 
or indigeneity for that matter] is not whether it is an accurate 
description of what is or was, but whether it has the power to make 
itself become so - to will itself into being by capturing the imaginations 
of others. (2006:91)
The problem for Saraguro, though, is that the image of indigeneity that  associates itself 
with the ayllu is only one among many possible images of indigeneity that each reflect 
various aspects of life, real and envisioned. What Weismantel calls “capturing the 
imaginations of others” might just  as easily be called hegemonic struggle, as different 
conceptions of what it means (or what  it  should mean) to be Saraguro wrestle for control 
of the discursive space in which identities are contested. 
159
 Finally, the border-straddling, “indigenous cosmopolitanism” (Goodale 2006) 
vein of identification of the Saraguro rockeros provides an opportunity  to explode the 
category of indigeneity beyond the hyperreal, anti-modern envisioning employed by 
indigenous activists. The “rhetorical opposition between ayllus and Indians on the one 
hand, and modernity  and the West on the other” (Weismantel 2006:96) need not be a 
central tenet of emerging indigenous identities, and youth subcultures are providing 
alternative frameworks that negotiate the supposed divide between modernity and 
indigeneity. Rather than concentrating strictly on the depictions of indigenous lives that 
inform indigenous social movements, anthropologists would be wise to acknowledge the 
disparity between the envisionings of these political projects and the lives of those people 
who call themselves indigenous but whose lives may not accord so easily or cleanly with 
more mainstream discourses of indigeneity. 
160
Chapter 5 - Conclusions
 “Communities,” contemporary theorists assert, have more to do with aspirations 
and ideals than the realities of social relations. The community idea, so muddled and 
loaded with romantic assumptions of wholeness, of a rural idyll, of homogeneity, is 
therefore a relatively poor analytical concept, and yet remains nearly ubiquitous in its 
use. Early anthropological and sociological examinations of the community  idea were 
often in search of the ideal community, associating it with a cleansed, unified past that 
could correct the abuses of modern urbanity. Communities, then ,were sought for not in 
the city, but in a countryside that stood as a redoubt of pastoral ideals, face to face 
interaction, of whole little societies. Little wonder, then, that  along the folk-urban 
continuum, the folk was where communities could be found, though they were constantly 
seen as under pressure from an encroaching modernity. 
 Because of the focus on rural societies in community studies, community and 
peasantry were “mutually  constructed as interdependent essentialist categories” (Creed 
2006a:35), an association that has made its way into contemporary indigenous discourse, 
uniting indigenous lifeways with the same mythical community  idea. Incorporating 
anthropological notions of the “closed, corporate peasant community,” indigenous 
activists such as Luis Macas are able to draw upon a dual nostalgia for the re-emergence 
of a timeless, pure, native Andean indigenous society, built upon a community idea, 
similarly  located in the past (Macas 2000). In Saraguro, talk of communities as ayllus (or 
ayllullactas) goes hand in hand with calls for a cultural revitalization attached to an 
Inkaic past. 
161
 Indigenous communities, though, have a more complicated history in Ecuador. 
One of the problems faced by an emerging Spanish colonial state was how to regulate 
and extract tribute from a native population that didn’t live, in the eyes of Spanish 
administrators, in easily  definable, bounded communities. Thus, with the Toledan 
reforms of the late 16th century, some Indian populations were relocated into reducciones 
that made governance and evangelical efforts easier. In the 20th century, the Republican 
state, confronted with the persistent “Indian Problem,” where large populations were 
excluded or seemingly hesitant towards adopting a mestizo lifestyle and identity that 
conformed with the national envisioning, adopted the 1937 Ley de Comunas. This law, 
like many  attempts at modernizing reform of indigenous peoples, straddled the line 
between paternalistic protection of what  was perceived as a child-like indigenous class 
and a hesitant acknowledgement of the place of Indians within the nation. Living in legal 
communities, it was thought, Indians would emerge from their near-barbarism and 
serfdom, learn the necessary skills of citizens, become part of the rationalization 
(capitalization) of the rural economy, and through state-oriented education and health 
reforms, leave behind their anachronistic lifeways and become fully integrated in a 
mestizo society. 
 In contemporary Saraguro, the indigenous community now stands both as the 
local embodiment of the political system, and is also envisioned as the redoubt of 
indigenous cultural tradition. In acknowledging the sometimes ambiguous place of the 
indigenous community, it is necessary  to ask what the unifying desires are that bring 
comuneros - those that  are members of indigenous communities - together, how those 
162
interests come to be established, and when they hold relevance. The local practices of 
community  building and community participation in Ñamarín - those acts that constitute 
the maintenance of community for its members - thus speak to the continued importance 
and relevance of the indigenous community in the lives of comuneros. The direct 
democracy  of monthly assemblies, the oversight, responsibilities, and diffused power of 
cabildo councils, and the biweekly mingas emphasize how, through labour and the 
primacy of participation, the indigenous community is re-produced from within. The 
maintenance of the water system that sustains agro-pastoral production and brings water 
to the houses of community members serves as a mechanism of integration through 
which comuneros come to feel that  their livelihoods are integrated with their neighbours. 
Members who spend much of their time outside of the community itself routinely cycle 
back to Ñamarín to show their participation in communal labour parties, while parents 
and socially concerned members consider group-wide restrictions on drinking in order to 
combat problems that many of them face. Despite the increasing diversity in wealth, 
lifestyle, and even religion, the Ñamarín comuneros engage in practices that  they  value 
as being part of community  building. To explore these aspects is not to compound the 
falsely romantic idea of community, but rather to show how participants are able to 
create what they interpret as constituting community.
 Indigenous communities are also integrated into wider realms of influence that, 
notably, include the state and a national society  from which the “Indian” has historically 
been set apart. Legal indigenous communities have served as the prime locus of 
governmental intervention in indigenous areas, but they also act as enclaves of sorts 
163
where the terms and conditions of state authority are contested to protect community 
autonomy. Government provided services - like the local school and daycare - are part of 
the community space, but there remains an imagination of the locality as separate from 
the wider political system within which it  is embedded, an ideal that was reflected in Eric 
Wolf’s vision of the closed corporate peasant community. In order to maintain some 
measure of local autonomy, indigenous communities rely on a number of practices, some 
of which draw on deeply embedded racial fears of indigenous violence. The threats of 
community  justice rely on this fear, but also act to present the image of a community 
united against acts of transgression. Indigenous groups, however, must balance their 
desire for autonomy with their identification as citizens, through which they receive 
critical services and are able to present their demands to the Ecuadorian nation. Over-
reliance on violence, or even the threat  of violence, may then actually delegitimize the 
right of indigenous communities to self govern in the eyes of outsiders. 
 As such, acquiescence is also a valuable tool to assert  the local community. In 
Saraguro, as Luis Macas has suggested, subservience was one method by which 
Saraguros could maintain their landbase, thereby countering any claims that direct 
governmental intervention was necessary. Part of this effort entails using the categories 
made available by dominant groups, such as the rhetoric of inclusion and human or 
collective rights. Indigenous communities, then, rely on certain essentialized projections 
of themselves, some of which depend on violent imaginings, in order to create and guard 
the spaces of autonomy that are desired and also to enjoy  certain state services while 
countering a government’s most disadvantageous penetrations at the local level. 
164
 The idea of the indigenous community also plays a part in the re-emergence or 
resurgence of a Saraguro indigeneity that is associated with an Inkaic past in the form of 
the ayllu. The term indigenous has become a marker of personal and collective identity, 
the content of which is largely dependent on the revitalization or continuation and 
portrayal of traditional, longstanding lifeways, and the ideal community, deconstructed in 
the initial chapters of this thesis, rears its head in contemporary indigenous political 
discourse. The envisioned community  as a redoubt of cultural homeostasis in the wake of 
an oppressive modernity fits well with the Hyperreal global indigneity. The increasing 
connections between regional or state level indigenous groups and organizations and 
their transnational counterparts mean that  these romantic envisionings may also come to 
permeate local conceptions of indigeneity. In other words, real Indians, in their efforts to 
secure NGO funding and international recognition, may find themselves conforming to 
this new indigeneity, forged in the imagination and misunderstandings of the “middle 
ground” between indigenous groups and global actors, but coming back home to the local 
to be remade as facets of local ethnicity. The neo-Inkaic cultural revitalization 
movement, tied so closely as it is to international NGOs and the funding of social and 
economic development projects in Saraguro, certainly risk certain strategic essentialisms 
- the portrayal of the ideal indigenous community included. This envisioning of 
community, though, is also important to secure NGO funding since these NGOs are often 
convinced of the social capital inherent in indigenous communities, where the close 
social ties and traditional participatory  forms are seen to be indicators of spaces where 
165
development will be participatory, and therefore more able to bring about long term, 
positive change. 
 I have tried to reflect the increasing diversity of wealth, education, and religion 
that has come to distinguish indigenous communities, and one important aspect of that is 
the availability  of alternate conceptualizations of indigeneity in Saraguro. As the rockeros 
well know, a self-identification as indigenous need not hinge on the hyperreal portrayal 
of a traditional, anti-modern indigeneity, and can constitute what Mark Goodale has 
called “Indigenous Cosmopolitanism”: the expansion of indigenous identity  to include 
(or more accurately be compatible with) signifiers beyond what is typically  associated 
with indigeneity. Moreover, the primacy  that comuneros place on participation as 
constituting community  seems to indicate that a nostalgic attempt to recreate a past, 
primordial community  may  be somewhat misplaced, as the necessities of water system 
maintenance, and communal labour, along with the continued participation of community 
members who spend much of their time elsewhere, hint at the continued importance of 
the indigenous community, regardless of political intent. 
Implications for future research
 The brief nature of the field research on which this thesis is based leaves much 
room for future research, both within Saraguro and elsewhere. Perhaps most importantly, 
the emerging neo-Inkaic cultural revitalization movement, just gaining steam, merits 
continued attention. I have not been in a position to study it in its fullest, or to discuss the 
movement with its proponents in any  detail, and it is certainly coming to occupy  a central 
discursive role. The relationships between the national indigenous movement, local and 
166
international NGOs, and indigenous persons themselves should be fruitful for further 
analysis. Likewise, a more thorough examination of the irrigation systems, including 
their construction and history in the many different highland communities, should present 
an interesting account of the variation of community histories and politics, of 
governmental and NGO intervention, and even their ecological sustainability. Such 
research would likely be relevant not just to cultural anthropologists, but also to the fields 
of archaeology, political science, and ecology. 
 I am also curious to know how many of the same issues addressed here are 
equally relevant to those Saraguro communities that have been established in the warmer 
lowlands of Yacuambí, where the presence of other indigenous ethnic groups may 
complicate things. Similarly, an inquiry  into the elements of indigeneity and community 
that remain important to Saraguro ex-patriot communities, such as those in Valencia, 
Spain, could provide an interesting alternative to the account given here. Finally, the 
whole story  of the proposed legislation that sparked the national protests in May of 2010 
remains largely  unfinished - at the time of leaving the field, the government had decided 
to submit  it to “pre-legislative” discussion, likely hoping that opposition to it would die 
down after a few months. While an individual protest is an almost common event in 
indigenous Ecuador, the previous efforts of other Latin American states to attempt 
centralization of water resources have certainly  not been met with widespread success, 
and the discussion surrounding Water Law, as well as its possible implications, should 
certainly be examined in greater detail than I have been able to give. 
167
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