| Over the last four decades, the indigenous communities of Otavalo, Ecuador have taken part in a remarkable transformation, utilizing a combination of incremental savings, hired and family labor, investment, migration, capital risk, and cultural creativity to carefully recalibrate a venerable and centuries-long history of textile production to the appetites of a 21st century ethnic craft export and tourism economy. In the process, Otavalo's most prosperous indigenous entrepreneurs have become the antagonists of everyday moral dilemmas about the relationship between merchant capital and indigenous values. Based on twenty-five months of in the Otavaleno community of Peguche, Ecuador, this dissertation poses the question of how indigenous merchants work to reconcile their intense engagements in a global market economy with the expectations of indigeneity.;In chapters that focus upon efforts to organize a political protest, on the one hand, and a large-scale indigenous festival, on the other, I look at how merchants encounter a set of unique moral dangers that call into question their commitments to indigenous community, and how they fashion their responses in the form of intentional, creative, ethical work. In contrast to analyses that rely upon the idea of two competing indigenous ethics in Otavalo, one based in the reciprocities of subsistence and the other in the accumulations of entrepreneurial enterprises, I argue for the importance of an anthropology of the moral as a more agile heuristic with which to approach the social ruptures and distinct vulnerabilities that prosperity creates for indigenous lives. |
