The State and the Production of Indigenous Alterities in Ecuador

Abstract

In countries with Indigenous communities, the recognition of interculturality, plurinationality, multiethnicity, and legal pluralism in some political constitutions would guarantee the gradual overcoming of a racialized social structure that has been constitutive. These processes are indicative of a structural reconfiguration that has led to the incorporation of otherness’s, previously excluded, in novel ways into legal frameworks, development projects, and seemingly avant-garde currents of thought that have legitimized the nation-state. A qualitative study, employing methods of historical-logical analysis and analysis-synthesis, among others, allowed for a deeper understanding of how otherness’s have been treated within the states. In Ecuador, constitutional and institutional changes have granted indigenous sectors a new position in the imaginaries of the nation-state and in development processes. One might think that there is a double act of ventriloquism: the first becomes visible when the political, economic, and epistemic elites or vanguards, operating at the national and transnational levels, attempt to exercise indirect private government by filtering their knowledge and interests into the institutions of the state system. The second occurs when the institutions of the state system, selectively appropriating supposed attributes of otherness, produce and reinscribe them under stereotypes, which would reactivate old colonial perspectives that even organize the rationalities of certain avant-garde movements. It is proposed that the state, as a political organization of domination, should be understood as the synthesis that results from the interrelation between these two acts of ventriloquism.