Millennial Ecuador: Critical Essays on Cultural Transformations & Social Dynamics - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877458642 ISBN 13: 9780877458647

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2003

Synopsis

Since the 1980s, Ecuador has seen five indigenous uprisings, the emergence of the powerful Pachakutik political movement and the strengthening of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and the Associations of Black Ecuadorians, all of which have contributed substantially to a new constitution proclaiming the country to be ""mulitethnic and multicultural"". Furthermore, January 2003 saw the inauguration of a new populist president, who immediately appointed two indigenous persons to his cabinet. In this volume, 11 critical essays, plus a lengthy introduction and epilogue explore the multicultural forces that have allowed Ecuador's indigenous peoples to have such dramatic effects on the nation's political structure. The authors use their ethnographic experience to understand both the cultural systems of local-level aesthetics, ritual and cosmology and the national polical-economic transformations that have shaped this paradoxical, globalizing nation. In their descriptions and analyses, they bring together interpretive anthropological, sociological and historical scholarshop to consider these transcultural and intercultural phenomena. Presenting a microcosm of the cultural transformations that are occuring throughout the Americas, these essays should appeal to Latin Americanists, social scientists and humanists of the Andes and Amazonia, and, in particular, anthropologists as well as undergraduates and graduate students.

About this title

Review

"Millennial Ecuador is a superb collection of essays by leading anthropologists, historians, and indigenous intellectuals that provides a multifaceted, critical view of the social and cultural practices of Andean, Amazonian, and Afro-Ecuadorian peoples engaged in mounting political struggles. Focusing on the clash between structural and contra-structural power, on empowerment processes of traditionally disenfranchised populations, and on multiple and competing, representations of current confrontations, the book constitutes an outstanding analysis of the contradictions of modern and millennial globality through detailed investigation of local cases."

About the Author

Norman E. Whitten Jr., is a professor of anthropology, professor and director of Latin American and Caribbean studies, and curator at the Spurlock Museum, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877458642
• ISBN 13: 9780877458647
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Jr Norman E. Whitten