Abstract:

In a race towards modernity and progress, trying to be whiter and more western, we undervalued our own knowledge, ignoring our skin color. Regardless, the indigenous, blacks and montubios, who bore the most of the weight of discrimination and injustice have resisted the processes of cultural destruction through creative responses, sometimes active (subversion) others passive (religious conversion, migration). Their continual fight, persevering and optimistic, finally achieved recognition, respect, and cultural value in 2008 with Ecuador´s constitutional declaration as a plural-national and intercultural country. This is the beginning of new times: the battle has been won, but the challenge of knowing the correct meaning of these terms and how they should fit into everyday life and public policy has just begun. These ideas also constitute a questioning of the social sciences on the part of social movements who question the latter’s suspicion and hesitance towards local knowledge. This article makes a light review of these themes, reminding that history needs to be revised in order to develop a better understanding of the processes of social struggle that lead Ecuador to declare its plurinationality and interculturality.

Abstract

The present article analyzes the political process of the Indigenous and Campesino Movement of Cotopaxi (MICC in Spanish) since the beginning of the 80´s. The analysis of the principle events is deepened keeping in mind three political moments key to the dynamic of the movement. The first events of organization and establishment of the MICC were framed as the demand of rights. In second place keep in mind the rise and consolidation of the group as a new political stakeholder starting with the uprising of 1990 when a new phase of political protest began. Finally we analyze the incursion of the Movement in the electoral competitions, the pros and cons of the functioning of the ¨democratic¨ logic in the political consolidation of the indigenous movement at a provincial level. The present article, therefore, is an approximation towards the MICC from their politics taking into account the actors that intervene.

No soy un borracho, pero tampoco un santo. Un hechicero no debería ser un “santo”… Debería poder descender tan bajo como un piojo y elevarse tan alto como águila… Debes ser dios y diablo a la vez. Ser un buen hechicero significa estar en medio de la tormenta y no guarecerse. Quiere decir experimentar la vida en todas sus fases. Quiere decir hacer el loco de vez en cuando. Eso también es sagrado.

Corzo Cojo (Brujo Siux de la tribu Lakota)²

Abstract

The Napo Runa ethnic group has been characterized by its historic configuration of binding character and for having a rich cultural baggage of ethno-medical knowledge. Evidently it is an ethnic group that has had successive contact throughout time, the reason for which it has been revisited in innumerable imaginations following the established interests and the type of encounters.

We allude to the type of encounter which exploits the sale of ayahuasca rituals on the part of the Shaman and their family to ethno tourists. It is an encounter which inevitably generates tension, which is shown on an internal level in the relations of power within the family or the Shaman and the community, and on an external level as the cultural distance that puts in question the ¨loaning¨ of symbolic codes, which are as valuable to the Napo runa as they are to the ethno tourists.

The nodal point from which we embark on the present study is the consideration of Shamanism as the axis on which the Napo Runa maintain themselves and diversify within a sociocultural context. On this premise, we will see the forms in which Shamanism operates in this ethnic group focusing on the way in which the cultural system is underlined by the gift economy.

This will reveal the type of change that is created by the sale of rituals and the cultural reproduction adopted as strategies faced with the foreign injections in contemporaneity.

“El qual juicio de visita tiene su apoyo, en lo que Dios se refiere en el Génesis, quando hablando á nuestro modo dixo que quería baxar y ver, si era cierto el clamor que había llegado á sus oídos” (Solórzano y Pereyra)¹.

“El Virrey marqués de Montesclaros comparaba estas visitas a los torbellinos que uele haver en las plazas y calles, que no sirven sino de levantar el polvo y otras horruras de ellas, y hacen que se suban a las cabezas” (Solórzano y Pereyra)².

Abstract:

Personal visits to indians in the form of administrative inspections were used widely in the colonial world. Their interpretation has given special emphasis to their value as a financial instrument in the charging of tribute and as a reflection of the social organization of the era. The present article suggests a different reading: to look at these roles as power scenarios, emphasizing the dramatization of rituals in which colonial legislation and traditional local practices of rights and obligations converged. In order to sustain this new reading we use the case of the visit made to the group of the Collaguazos, in 1623, in the Audencia ofQuito. This was a local ethnic group that had been registered since the sixteenth century and on the date of the visit was a supra local cheifdom that had efficiently adapted to the new colonial structure.

Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally-constituted unity – an ‘identity’ in it’s traditional meaning (Hall 1996, 4).

Abstract

One of the components of identity is, without a doubt, physical space. The Contemporary concept of the Nation should have had some type of correlation in the sedentary societies of the past, given that the growing conceptual similarity is directly proportional to the complexity of their political organization. Assuming a structural correspondence between the concept of space and socio-cultural strategies (Criado 1991), we consider that a very effective way to strengthen spaces is assigning them a sacred and irreplaceable value in a given society. Few things can be more ¨propias¨ and more sacred than the dead of the same family or the same group, those who are converted into ancestors; the tombs constitute ¨containers¨ of social identity and their placement in a determined physical space strengthens the sense of belonging of a group to this space.

The observations of the authors during the final period of investigation at Rumipamba (Quito) have provoked a few reflections on the use of space from a diachronic perspective. The large temporal range within which archaeologists usually work makes archaeology perfect for providing a chronological perspective on aspects of past identity (Díaz-Andreu and Lucy 2005). The persistence of the use of a reduced space like that of a children’s cemetery throughout two periods of settlement, on the one hand, and the re-use of the space as a waste disposal site, on the other, invite use to ask about the identity-space relations of this pre-Hispanic society.

Abstract

This article reconstructs the long path of pre-Columbian development of the populations of the Machalilla Nacional Park, in Southern Manabi, Ecuador, from the formative period up until the arrival of the Spanish. The results of a systematic investigation of complete coverage indicates that these populations retained low demographic levels and little evidence of social stratification until the end of the Regional Development (cerca. 700 a.C.). On the other hand, the archeological evidence suggests that the following Period of Integration (700- 1532 a.C.) presided a considerable demographic leap, a high concentration of inhabitants at the Machalilla settlement, evidence which is more marked by social stratification and the development of supra-local communities.

Abstract

The present article is based on an investigation that was part of my dissertation. The study developed following the analysis of the ceramics collection of La Lomita in the Alto Upano region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. The region presents evidence of a strong pre-Hispanic settlement that has been studied in various previous investigations (Porras 1985, 1987, Salazar 1995, 1998, 1999, 2000, Rostain 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2006.). Although at first the lengthy presence of the Upano cultural group was established (see Porras 1987), recent investigations (Rostain 1999b, 2006) confront this information and propose the existence of at least two clear settlements: Upano and Huapula. These studies exposed the possibility that there is evidence in the region of even more settlements. The present work confirms the existence of three different ceramic groupings registered in La Lomita: Sangay, Upano, and Huapula. The definition of these ceramic groupings suggests the existence of distinct periods of settlement in the valley, in which the interaction with the Andean region developed on different scales.