Marching to nation across ethnic terrain: The politics of identity, territory, and resource use in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This dissertation explores the making of place in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It examines struggles among indigenous peoples, the Ecuadorian state, and a multinational corporation over land rights and petroleum development in Pastaza Province. It analyzes in ethnographic detail the ways in which lowland peoples contested global neo-liberal economic policies through their everyday practice of ethnic politics. I argue that struggles over resource use (i.e. the control of land and oil operations) are simultaneously struggles over identity, territoriality, and nation. While global processes permeates the local, I suggest that localized identity struggles have trans-local effects. Globalizing and localizing cultural formations are complementary dimensions of a single historical moment. Through articulating local histories with a transnational discourse of nation, indigenous rights, and environmental conservation, Indian federations in Ecuador interrupted the local practices of transnational petro-capital and elite land owners, the assumed isomorphism of nation/territory/ state, and the global ordering of politics through statehood. Rainforest inhabitants actively challenge--as they are inextricably immersed in--global processes of culture and power.;Focusing on ethnic resurgence in the Ecuadorian Amazon between 1990 and 1994, I argue that the emergence of a politicized indigenous identity in opposition to exclusionary state rule and multinational resource extraction disrupts assumptions about modernity's homogenizing imperative. Far from dissipating, cultural distinctiveness in Ecuador has proliferated. Events in lowland Ecuador mirror larger patterns of indigenous organizing throughout Latin America, suggesting shifting points for the articulation of marginalized groups, state neo-liberal policy, and multinational corporations.;Many scholars argue that the nation-state is withering away, under siege from global and local forces. This dissertation proposes, however, that global and local forces spawned new forms of the national in Ecuador, changing the role of the state in the process. By articulating cultural difference through a pluralistic imagery of nation, indigenous peoples problematized the link between nation and state, envisioning alternative political communities. As critical anthropology attends to the culturally and historically specific formations emerging under globalization, it will need to map the space opened-up from the severing of the hyphen between the nation and the state.