Dilemmas of Difference by Sarah A. Radcliffe

8/20/2019 Dilemmas of Difference by Sarah A. Radcliffe

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Indigenous Women and the Limits ofPostcolonial Development Policy

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DILEMMAS OF DIFFERENCE

Indigenous Women and

the Limits of Postcolonial

Development Policy


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© Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper∞

Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Radcliffe, Sarah A., author.

Dilemmas o difference : indigenous women and the limits o

postcolonial development policy / Sarah A. Radcliffe.

pages cmIncludes bibliographical reerences and index.

---- (hardcover : alk. paper)

---- (pbk. : alk. paper)

---- (e-book)

. Women in development—Political aspects—Ecuador.

. Indigenous women—Ecuador—Economic conditions.

. Indigenous women—Ecuador—Social conditions. I. Title.

..

.—dc

Cover art: Top photo: A Kichwa woman signs her name

on an offi cial document; photograph by the author.

Bottom texture: Robert Hamm/Alamy


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For warmikuna and sonala in Ecuador

and their allies across the world


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ix Acknowledgments

1 Development and Social Heterogeneity

37 Postcolonial Intersectionality and the

Colonial Present

75 The Daily Grind: Ethnic Topographies

o Labor, Racism, and Abandonment

121

125 Crumbs rom the Table: Participation,

Organization, and Indigenous Women

157 Politics, Statistics, and Affect: “Indigenous

Women in Development” Policy

189

193 Women, Biopolitics, and Interculturalism:

Ethnic Politics and Gendered Contradictions

225 From Development to Citizenship: Rights,

Voice, and Citizenship Practices

257 Postcolonial Heterogeneity: Sumak Kawsay

and Decolonizing Social Difference

291 Notes

325 Glossary

329 Bibliography

359 Index

CONTENTS


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This book emerges out o a previous project on how indigenous transnational

activism sought to leverage changes in development policy and decision-making. During that project, I carried out interviews with indigenous

women, ethnodevelopment staff members, and policy-makers and ound

their viewpoints were ofen at odds and inspired by distinctive agendas. The

distinctiveness and complexity o indigenous women’s positioning regard-

ing gender and development policy, and ethnodevelopment policy were

orceully brought home to me when I visited a village women’s group, gath-

ered under the iconic peak o Chimborazo volcano. I had returned to visit the

central Andes and began talking with a group o kichwa-speaking women inNitiluisa community about how they had organized a women’s group. De-

spite the und-raising diffi culties, the logistical challenges, and the uphill

task o persuading other villagers o the rightness o their endeavor, they

had, by the time I dropped in, become the proud residents and active users

o a single-story, light-lled room with tables and chairs or craf activities

and regular meetings. These Kichwa women carried out an incremental but

powerul transormation in their lives, drawing on understandings and pri-

orities orged in adversity. Inspired by the Nitiluisa group, I started to searchout and talk to elected women’s representatives rom diverse strands o

Ecuador’s indigenous movements, conducting interviews with women

recently elected to a leadership role as well as historic leaders. They each

spoke vividly o how low-income women in diverse ethnic groups across the

country’s varied geographies consistently ound themselves lef out o projects

aimed at armers, women, or indigenous people and the impoverishing effects

o such marginalization. Women’s representatives also spoke movingly o their

grassroots initiatives and alternative thinking—about dignity, livelihoods,

and interactions with rural spaces—that were not lifed rom development

plans but emerged rom women’s articulation o what they considered their

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


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rights, their agendas, and their politics, regardless o what others might say.

Gaining momentum, these conversations led me to renew an acquaintance

with Maria Andrade, one o ’s rst women’s representatives, now

a sought-afer thinker and doer across a number o policy elds. System-

atizing insights rom preliminary interviews, I drew up a research proposalthat went back and orth to Maria, as well as Ana Maria Pilamunga, Yadira

Calazacón, Norma Mayo, and Alicia Garcés or inputs and changes. They

bear no responsibility or what came out o this exchange, but I hope that it

offers them some tools or their projects. For their steady engagement and

encouragement, I wish to thank them all, mil gracias.

Once the project was under way, I worked with a wonderul range o

people whose inputs contributed to the research process that has resulted

in this book. Among these was my ever-engaged and engaging research as-sistant Andrea Pequeño, who worked tirelessly in the Tsáchila communities

while I was back in the UK, and whose dedication and intrinsic interest in the

project offered so much to the interpretations offered here. I am delighted

to see that she is now pursuing her own research. Delia Caguana, the dy-

namic women’s elected representative or the Chimborazo indigenous ed-

eration , was absolutely central to the process that takes material

orm here. Her singleness o purpose and her exemplary capacity to enthuse

and inorm are as evident in a village workshop as in my thinking about howKichwa women engage and rework development. Delia not only welcomed

me as a colleague and acilitated interviews and ocus groups; she reected

on my interviews and then, on a bus journey or coming out o a roadside

shrine, she shared her thoughts in ways that allowed me to listen and learn.

Over numerous visits to Ecuador to carry out eldwork, I was lucky enough

to catch a coffee or a meeting with a number o people whose knowledge and

expertise in relation to development, and the complex situation o diverse

indigenous, rural, and racialized women, has always exceeded—and willcontinue to exceed—my own. For her continued riendship, generosity, and

interest, I owe a huge debt o gratitude to Mercedes Prieto, who not only read

draf chapters but also gently encouraged me to be more circumspect about

my history. Also at Ecuador, Gioconda Herrera, Fernando Garcia,

and Alicia Torres, along with various students, visitors, and colleagues, were

welcoming and interested. Pilar Larreamendy and, beore he passed away,

Xavier Moscoso offered constant encouragement. Nely Shiguango and Luis

Alberto Tuaza provided translations rom kichwa transcriptions, while the

Pikitsa project, together with Alejandro Aguavil and Connie Dickinson, pro-

vided a means to engage with tsaki language material.


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Nearer to home, a large number o colleagues, graduates, and postdoc-

toral scholars additionally provided me with intellectual stimulation and

sounding boards or ideas. Denise Arnold talked over initial rameworks

and provided bibliographic material, as did Laura Rival, whose knowledge o

indigenous issues on the Ecuadorian costa is boundless. At various momentsPeter Wade, Valentina Napolitano, Humeira Iqtidar, Aída Hernández, Andrew

Canessa, and Liz Watson generously read draf chapters and provided eed-

back. Members o the Multicultural Governance in Latin America Reading

Group at the Department o Geography, namely Megan Rivers-Moore, Soa

Zaragocín, Penelope Anthias, Laura Loyola Hernández, Tara Cookson, Freddy

Alvarez, Sian Lazar, Istvan Praet, Sallie Westwood, David Lehmann, Jorge

Resina, Sandra Brunnegger, and Andrew Webb, read parts o what became

this book, and helped sharpen the argument. Carla Araujo, Conor Farrington,Dolores Figueroa, Charles Hale, Tania Murray Li, Amy Lind, Breno Marquéz

Bringel, Emma Mawdsley, Cheryl McEwan, Anahi Morales, David Nally, Pa-

tricia Oliart, Jane Pollard, Stéphanie Rousseau, Lynn Stephen, Alissa Trotz,

Fernando Urrea-Giraldo, Gina Vargas, and Montserrat Ventura Oller, through

their writing and in person, set me thinking; thank you.

Parts o this book have been presented as seminars at the Ecole des

Hautes Etudes de Sciences Sociales and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de

Amérique Latine () in Paris, the University o Toronto Intersectionsseminar series, the University o Wageningen in the Netherlands, the Univer-

sidad de la Frontera, Chile, the Pro-Doc Workshop at St Gallen, the Institute

or the Study o the Americas, London, and the Universities o Edinburgh,

London, Manchester, Essex, Liverpool, and Bath. Thanks are hence due, in

no particular order, to Guillaume Boccara, Capucine Boidin, Pamela Calla,

Rachel Silvey, Betsy Olson, Katie Willis, Henry Stobart, Steve Rubenstein

(now sadly no longer with us), Kees Jansen, Alejandro Herrera, Peter Wade,

Maxine Molyneux, Lynn Staeheli, and Yanina Welp or invitations ollowedby conversations. I also gained immeasurably rom conversations with Aída

Hernández, who came to Cambridge in –.

Duke University Press has supported this project rom the start with

enthusiasm and exibility, rst with Valerie Millholland as the commission-

ing editor and then Gisela Fosada, who seamlessly took over the nal stages;

many, many thanks to them and the team. At the Department o Geogra-

phy, Cambridge, Phil Stickler and the cartographic offi ce drew the maps and

prepared the gures. I grateully acknowledge the Economic and Social Re-

search Council unding that permitted extended eldwork in Ecuador, and

attendance at conerences. I am also grateul to the Centre or Research in


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Arts, Social Science and Humanities () at the University o Cam-

bridge or unding a workshop, “The Politics o Presence in Latin America,”

in . The research on which this book is based would not have been possi-

ble without unding rom the Economic and Social Research Council (

---).And nally, my warmest thanks and cariño go to Guy, Jessie, Dylan, and

Ben, whose exibility, generosity, and down-to-earth support really made

this whole venture possible.


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Introduction

Development and Social Heterogeneity

“I just want people to respect me,” says Rosario as she sits on the curb under

the bright mountain sun with other women who have come into the dis-

trict capital, a ragged town o two-story buildings in the central Ecuador-

ian Andes, or a meeting o women in similar situations. Now twenty-eight

years old, Rosario is a Kichwa-speaking woman rom one o the ourteenindigenous peoples in Ecuador. She has good reason to ask or respect; her

lie has offered ew instances o opportunity, dignity, or security, based in an

impoverished peasant economy characterized by patchy access to educa-

tion, health care, and work, and hard, unpaid labor on small amily-owned

plots o land. Moreover, Rosario is dea, a act that layers into the multiple

actors o deprivation affecting her and her amily. Finding it diffi cult to un-

derstand what people say, she is swindled at urban markets, and at a young

age she was raped and lef with a young daughter. Walking rom her villageto the market where we now sit, next to street stalls selling polyester clothing

and pirated music s, is a major undertaking, as she leaves elderly parents

at home and attempts to sell potatoes and a ew onions at a price suffi cient

to buy necessities such as cooking oil, bread, sugar, and school clothes.

Speaking Kichwa but no Spanish (the language o elites, cities, and govern-

ment) exposes Rosario to racist comments and disdainul behavior rom

urban stallholders and customers. Compounding these diffi culties, Rosario

was expelled rom her village, similar to others in Chimborazo province (see

g. I.), as she could not ulll the labor and attendance requirements or

membership, meaning she lacks the ormal status to be involved in local


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decision-making. As Rosario speaks, the women around her—including

Aurora and Margarita—listen intently and elicit responses to my questions,contextualize Rosario’s lie, and express outrage at what has happened.

Although they don’t share Rosario’s deaness, Aurora and Margarita live a

lie with similar contours and struggles, as I ound out talking to them later.

None o these women has beneted in a sustained and equal way rom the

broad as well as targeted measures to improve living standards and opportu-

nities that we call development, and hence they nd themselves overlooked

or not ully taken into account in programs that proclaim themselves to be

acting on behal o poor rural populations, women, or indigenous groups.At a broad level, this exclusion results rom Latin America’s “lop-sided

development,” the skewed distribution o middle-income country growth

toward the urban, the male, the rich, the lighter-skinned, the able-bodied,

and those unencumbered by caring responsibilities (Hoffman and Cen-

teno ).

What does social diversity entail or development? In what ways do lines

o social difference—including gender, race-ethnicity, sexuality, (dis)ability,

Fig. I.. Chimborazo province, Ecuador. Photograph by the author.


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location, and class—come to be conceptualized and then acted on in de-

velopment? Persistent inequalities between social groups ofen provide the

impetus and rationale or development interventions, with projects assist-

ing women who are poorer than men, or intervening in rural areas lacking

the inrastructure common in urban districts. Lacking endless resourcesand personnel, development is impelled to take social difference into ac-

count in order to decide where and with whom to work. In response, single

dimensions o social difference—commonly gender, income, and, recently,

action on behal o racially discriminated groups—have received attention

rom scholars and development proessionals, leading to measures by gov-

ernments and s. The Millennium Developmental Goals encouraged

states and multilateral agencies to address both poverty and guls between

emale and male opportunities. Yet social difference is multiaceted, gen-erating entangled and multilayered consequences or poor populations, as

gender, race-ethnicity, location, and income security each multiplies the

disadvantages experienced by individuals and groups. Social heterogeneity

produces highly unequal distribution o secure livelihoods in terms o lie

chances, dignity, and decision-making. Being a woman and rural is qualita-

tively distinctive rom being an urban man, even i incomes are held steady.

Such patterns o intersectionality—the interlocking o gender (dis)advan-

tage, with income differentials, location, and racial group—are integraldimensions o sociospatial heterogeneity in the global South. Yet the ways

this social heterogeneity shapes the outcomes o development and the ways

it is taken on board in development thinking and policy proposals are rarely

considered and are ofen dismissed as being too complex. Hence, although

“slices through” social heterogeneity to take gender and race-ethnicity into

account are now well established and widely accepted, the wider dilemma

lies in the questions o how difference matters and how policy might take it

into account without compounding existing intersectional disadvantages.I the existing policy approaches to social heterogeneity are recognized as

contingent and inevitably compromised by their histories and applications,

an exploration o how social heterogeneity impacts the institutionalization,

operation, beneciary experience, and the very meanings o development

at play in a society opens out a wider set o questions o why and how so-

cial heterogeneity has been ‘xed’ in particular ways and not others. Social

heterogeneity—the continuously reproduced and ubiquitous existence o

complex lines o social hierarchy and meaningul difference—remains un-

derstudied. This book begins to explore these conceptual and practical

challenges, offering a means by which to think about social heterogeneity,


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examining development’s genealogy o thinking about and modeling social

difference, the postcolonial context in which these models are interpreted

and put into operation, and the resulting interactions between on the one

hand lived experiences o social difference and hierarchy and on the other

development actors and institutions.Social heterogeneity is everywhere in development. In the postcolonial

societies where development is largely active, social differences requently

have huge impacts on opportunities and lives, a nding that becomes starkly

evident in intersectional hierarchies (the ways groups ranked in terms o

power and privilege interact to create differentiated subgroups whose rela-

tive position becomes more subtly differentiated). Latin America illustrates

this issue—levels o ormal education, rates o illiteracy, poverty, and inse-

cure work are progressively worse or white men, white women, mixed-racemen, mixed-race women, Aro-Latin men, Aro-Latin women, indigenous men,

and indigenous women (Peredo Beltrán ; Calla ; ). Like-

wise, development outcomes are relatively worse or rural people in each

o these groups, than the corresponding urban population. In other words,

social difference is key to the terrain in which development seeks to improve

conditions, and cannot be considered as a residue o political economic

orces. This book makes the case or analyzing heterogeneous social di-

erences as constituted through postcolonial hierarchy, that is hierarchieso difference arising in the afermath o colonialism when dominant under-

standings o race, masculinities and emininities, and imaginative geogra-

phies o rural and urban areas, were established under power relations that

avored the whiter, the urban, the masculine, and the wealthier over others.

Rethinking domination in multiplicity means also considering the intellec-

tual and material conditions or thinking about such heterogeneity (Dorlin

).

Analyzing hierarchies in relation to power repoliticizes intersection-ality rameworks, while simultaneously centering materialities and em-

bodiments in postcolonial theory. In the global South, dynamic interactions

between sociocultural meanings and power-inected relations o interlock-

ing social differences (primarily race-ethnicity, class, gender, and geograph-

ical location) together make the basis or living conditions, authority, and

voice. Combined with the uneven landscapes o global political economies

and the selective provisioning o national territories by nation-states, these

embodiments and associated material outcomes cannot be read directly off

labor relations and capital, nor merely rom discourse, as the very “matter”

o (productive, reproductive, intellectual, political) labor is constituted and


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lived through embodiments that are always-already made through power and

meaning. Given this postcolonial ground, multiple lines o social difference

interact within, across, and beyond development thinking, to inuence policy

and on-the-ground outcomes. By means o a grounded qualitative study o

interlocking lines o social difference becoming coconstituted with develop-ment, the book examines the dynamic interace between development and

social heterogeneity in which colonial ways o knowing social categories and

their mutual interactions continue to wield enduring inuence, even while

development seemingly speaks to ever more rened characterizations o

target populations and social difference. As this book also shows, colonial

knowledges o social heterogeneity are not uncontested, being subject to

reworking and resignication by social groups who do not nd themselves

mirrored in development categories—nor indeed in existing politicizedgroups—and whose critical knowledges rom the margins o postcolonial

development generate creative rethinking and practical knowledges about

social heterogeneity in relation to development.

Speaking to Andean Kichwa women, including Aurora, Margarita, and Rosa-

rio, as well as women rom the Tsáchila indigenous nationality on Ecuador’ssubtropical coastal plain, indicates that processual, granular, embodied, and

governmental dimensions o interactions between those who consistently

lose out rom development on the one hand and those who decide what

development is and who it goes to on the other require an ethnographic ex-

ploration o precisely how social difference and power are made real and

enduring, and what role development interventions—rom governments,

overseas agencies, national s, and others—play in these outcomes.

Development derives rom and returns to two oundational eatures in itseld o action—social heterogeneity and coloniality, which, I argue here,

cannot be considered separately but only in terms o their coconstitution.

Development consists o a “will to improve,” an impulse to governmentality

and pastoral interventions that seek to ameliorate the living conditions or

social attributes o a population. As such, development represents simulta-

neously and inextricably a orm o knowing and a presumption o embodied,

epistemological, and categorical social difference, through which governmen-

tality operates. Whether at the global scale between minority and majority

worlds, or in Andean workers’ condence that indigenous women have

primarily domestic concerns, the will to improve becomes a means by which


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to understand social difference—and the social heterogeneity on which it

rests—as well as an impulse to power in relations across difference.

In this sense, powerul myths about the composition o society guide and

motivate action, making sense o complexity in ways that have enduring e-

ects as they come to construct the social relations and categories through which development is conceived, delivered, and implemented (Cornwall

et al. ). The will to improve these social sectors that live across a line o

social difference o course occurs too within the nationalist imagined com-

munity, the dream o a common effort to overcome colonialism through

achieving development, oundering against the very social heterogeneity

on which postcolonial nation-states were established and built through

exclusion (Gupta ; Chatterjee ). Scholars o humanitarianism and

modernity-coloniality, despite proound differences in approach and siteso critical intervention, have begun to unpack the ways social categoriza-

tion and their instrumentalization in moments o grave crisis— war and dis-

placement, economic abjection that prevents dignity;—serve to distinguish

which subpopulations are worthy o which kind o assistance and under

which conditions (Groenmeyer ; Agamben ; Butler ; Sylves-

ter ; McIntyre and Nast ; Tyner ). What such scholarship also

demonstrates clearly is that the constitution o bodies, institutions, politi-

cal economies, sovereignties, policies, interpersonal interactions, and dis-courses layer in one on the other, expanding and naturalizing the eld o

social heterogeneity as well as the means by which it can be “improved.”

Social Difference, Development, and Intersectionality

The power-inected outcomes o social heterogeneity have ofen been dis-

cussed in terms o intersectionality, a term reerring to the need to recognize

diversity in analytical (and political) categories such as “women.” Inter-

sectionality originated rom the trenchant critiques by black and minor-ity racialized women o how the single policy and political category o

“women” overlooked—and in cases, actively denied—the ways overlapping

orms o power resulted in violence against women o color. Since then, in

the hands o women o color and postcolonial eminists, intersectionality

has permitted an analysis o how active processes o racing, gendering, spa-

tial containment, and sexualization produce, condone, and explain away

violence, poorer education and employment outcomes, and other orms

o discrimination and nonrecognition (Crenshaw ; Brah and Phoenix

: ; Lugones ). The intersectional power o racialization, gender-

ing, emplacement, and impoverishment operate across scales rom the body


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through to macroeconomic patterns. In this sense, “social divisions have or-

ganizational, intersubjective, experiential and representational orms . . . and

are expressed in specic institutions and organizations, such as state laws

and state agencies, trade unions, voluntary organizations and the amily.

In addition, they involve specic power and affective relationships betweenactual people” (Yuval-Davis : ). Racism, gendering, and so on are

inscribed directly and apprehended through individual bodies. Intersectional

critiques ocus on the ways such power relations become naturalized and in-

stitutionalized at wider scales. In this macro-analysis, a key intersectional

insight is the ontological distinctiveness o different social differences; male-

emale difference is not equivalent, or reducible, to race, or to class. Each

has its own clusters o meanings, metaphors, and consequences, while each

o these ontological distinctions compounds the extent and content o hier-archical social differentiation.

Historically and geographically contingent, categories o social differ-

ence are not xed across time and space, as they result rom articulation

between interests, sel-positionings, and experiences o exclusion in mul-

tiscaled congurations (Hall ). In any one place and time, these social

differences are not singular in their effects, as they acquire meanings and

practices that work to differentiate actively between an unmarked subject

(men, whites, urbanites, high-income groups) and marked others (women,blacks, and minorities, rural dwellers, the poor) in ways that qualitatively

inect each other (De Lauretis ; Yuval-Davis and Anthias ; Moore

). In other words, any one axis o difference is relational—meanings

attributed to “man” are qualities distinguishable rom but related to mean-

ings associated with “woman.” Moreover, the intersection o qualities as-

sociated with an unmarked subject (such as “whiteness”) reposition certain

“women” closer to qualities o “man” than the social eatures associated

with “black, minority and third world woman” (Crenshaw ; Carby). Bringing together intersectionality with a postcolonial ramework

(see below) seeks to more rigorously theorize intersectional hierarchies in

relation to the dynamics o power associated with colonialism and post-

colonial statehood and development. Drawing on postcolonial critiques o

power and difference, my account o postcolonial intersectionality draws

out the nuanced, relational, and multiscalar dynamics that actively work to

differentiate diverse subjects, and to reinsert an account o individual and

group agency in postcolonial societies. “A population affected in one mo-

ment by a process o social classication does not take on the eatures o

a real group, a community or a social subject. Rather these eatures are


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only constituted as part o and result o a history o conicts . . . and the

decision to plait together the particular heterogeneous and discontinuous

experiences in the articulation o a collective subject” (Quijano : ).

Focusing on the postcolonial intersectional hierarchies ound in one Latin

American country, the book examines how development—an endeavorsteeped in global and national postcolonial relations—brings into being

social categories out o colonially inected understandings o society that

in turn impact poor rural indigenous women. It seeks to demonstrate how

the meanings invested in policy categories obscure social heterogeneity by

implicitly endorsing colonial imaginaries o social relations, which generate

mixed, ofen negative, consequences or indigenous women. Development

continually works amid social heterogeneity, yet it turns again and again

to standard categories o subpopulations, which articulate with existingsocial groups in power-laden and, in the case o indigenous women inap-

propriate, ways. Drawing on poststructuralist accounts o subjectivities, the

book develops a ramework o postcolonial intersectionality to explore the

conditions under which development devises and applies its social model

in dynamics o material and discursive power, perormativity, and embodi-

ment, dispossession through racialization, and the production o space in

terms o uneven development (Fanon []; Butler , ; Legg

; Foucault ; Smith ).

As others have documented, social categories come to play a powerul role

in development because they serve as a globalized language through which

hierarchies and difference across diverse places and times can be identied

quickly and smoothly enough to acilitate project interventions (Pigg ).

While development’s standard categories—peasant, village, woman—speak

to international goals, they inevitably become tied to place and thereby ac-

quire powerul national and regional associations which make them meaning-

ul and seemingly better reections o existing social realities. Signicantlytoo, social categories are not merely about the external eatures o project

beneciaries. In the minds o policy makers and project workers, generic

categories also become invested with expectations about subjects’ affective

properties, their psychic dispositions, and “consciousness” (Pigg ; Scott

; Klenk ). Later chapters document how these development expec-

tations owe their power and endurance as much to embedded cultural tropes

as to attempts by modernization and then neoliberal governmentality to

orge new types o development subjects. Combining social categories, rela-

tional expectations and affective stereotypes then, development constructs

its models o subjectivities and social inter-relations in ways that seep into


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economic, political, social and cultural projects and agendas, because they

code or key social reerence points—anchors or action—that seemingly

predict the orms o work, attitudes and practices through which progress is

to occur, and by which modern developed subjects are to be brought into

being (Shrestha ; Hodgson ; Perreault ; Klenk ; Yeh). Applied to public and intimate spaces, social categories associated

with nature are ofen those that are most resilient and enduring, attaching

rigid norms about social qualities to diverse orms o bodies. Race, gender,

and sexuality are social eatures that are strongly associated with naturalized

attributes, binding them to stereotypes about why indigenous women, black

men, or poor armers act in specic ways. Hence development consists o a

broad political economic transormation augmented through interventions

and programs and in order to achieve its ends targets subgroups o raced-gendered-located-classed subjects.

The global parameters o neoliberal development’s thinking about social

difference are by now relatively well documented. In the era o the so-called

Washington Consensus, the need to address the social and human costs o

restructuring and structural adjustment inormed attempts to rejuvenate

social policy. Reorganized around participation, decentralization, and an-

tipoverty agendas, development aimed to match saety nets with particular

subpopulations (Molyneux ). Moreover, neoliberalism’s cultural politicso coresponsibility, empowerment, and active citizenship underpinned pol-

icy design and support or technologies o the sel and entrepreneurialism

(Lemke ), thereby recasting the presumptions about individuals’

social core. In Latin America, social neoliberalism comprised a broad policy

eld in which social difference, especially along lines o gender, indigeneity,

poverty and participation, come to the ore, a “rediscovery o society as a

site o development needs and . . . potential,” a new policy agenda (Moly-

neux ; Andolina et al. : ). Forged at the unstable hybrid meetingpoints o civil movements o women, indigenous groups and the urban poor

with diverse institutional actors (Andolina et al. ; Ewig ), social

neoliberalism relied heavily on concepts o social capital to read cultural

and social difference in ways that ofen drew on conservative understand-

ings o social difference just as they masked enduring power and material

inequalities (Molyneux ; Moser ; Andolina et al. ).

The book shows how social neoliberalism’s operationalization and under-

standing o heterogeneity carried orward and retooled existing models o

social difference, both in terms o key relations between social categories

(armers and development technicians; husbands and wives; indigenous


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people and the state) and expectations about the affective and relational

dispositions and interrelations they would have (naturalized assumptions

about where different subjects’ loyalties and interests would lie, how certain

beneciaries would respond to market or empowerment interventions).

Tracing Ecuador’s development genealogy in relation to postcolonial hier-archies o difference adds another layer o insight into social neoliberal-

ism, namely how policy presumptions—even beore neoliberalism—drew

on coloniality-modernity’s meanings o indigeneity, emininity, rurality, and

poverty, as well as racialized meanings o amily, duty, and progress. Although

ostensibly post– Washington Consensus or postneoliberal, social hetero-

geneity in Ecuador is couched in terms that are prooundly postcolonial.

Uncovering coloniality-modernity’s importance in providing the contours

and content o development interventions not only raises critical questionsabout the consequences o these ramings o social heterogeneity or differ-

ent beneciary groups, but additionally prompts urgent enquiries into what

alternatives might emerge to reconceptualize social heterogeneity, enquiries

Ecuadorian indigenous women are actively involved in.

As noted, the category o “women” has considerable inuence in develop-

ment thinking. Among the rst to ensure that social heterogeneity was recog-

nized were scholars and activists who highlighted the differences between

emale and male positionalities in development and male bias in developmentthinking. Over time, women in postcolonial societies showed that ocusing

exclusively on emale-male difference ofen obscured the diversied situ-

ations o racialized men and women in the global South (Sen and Grown

; Herrera ). Postdevelopment writers drew attention to how main-

stream development works to represent populations in the South as par-

ticularly needy yet identied these groups by means o a shifing visibility

o different social categories liable to project interventions (Escobar ).

Moreover, these writers expanded the analysis to include the very proes-sionals and institutions through which development occurs, highlighting

the gaps between staffers and beneciaries in proessional proles, educa-

tion, authority, and mindset. Critical poststructural and postcolonial stud-

ies highlight the relational and power-drenched dynamics o social and

institutional position. Postcolonial scholars additionally demonstrated the

powerul ways colonial difference constructed hierarchies between cultures

through which social heterogeneity in the global South was apprehended

and reworked through development. Whether development is considered

an imminent process occurring alongside major transormations in politi-


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cal economy, state structures, and welare measures or a goal-driven set o

interventions structured through international organizations, nongovern-

mental agencies, and nation-states, social difference is oundational.

Postcolonial intersectionality matters in Latin America, as the benets o

development are so unevenly distributed across social groups. The region ischaracterized by the world’s worst income maldistributions, with the richest

percent o Latin Americans receiving twice the comparable share o their

counterparts, while the poorest receive hal. “Not only do the poor,

the darker, and the emale receive smaller slices, but the social pie is not

large to begin with” (Hoffman and Centeno : ). Inequality leads to

poorer groups working longer hours in less secure work, while economic

and social policies consistently ail to address uneven development. Guls

between rural and urban living standards and welare support remain cen-tral to income guls, in part resting on highly skewed land distributions.

Racialized and gendered segregation o labor markets results in darker, and

emale, workers concentrated in the lowest paid sectors, a wage gap that is

worse in rural areas. Being emale accounts or worse education, worse

economic security, and less political opportunity than being male, when

education and other actors are held constant. Racialization processes result

in groups identied as indigenous or black being subject to discrimination

and subordination across social lie. Development interventions ofen serveto exacerbate stratication along intersecting lines o gender, race, and loca-

tion. Afer Peru’s health sector reorms, or instance, quality private ser vices

were only available to rich employees, while women—concentrated in the

lower-paid, inormal sector—could not participate, and racialized, largely

rural, sectors were not covered (Ewig ). Neoliberal policy and global-

ized images o indigenous people with olkloric culture and arcane environ-

mental knowledge increasingly ocus on indigenous women as potential

entrepreneurs, a dramatic change rom previous representations (De Hart; Babb ). Yet as later chapters discuss, such representations have

ambivalent and contested effects, as they recongure the relations between

indigenous women and men, just as they ail to address indígenas’ demands

or moves away rom neoliberal political economies.

SOCIAL HETEROGENEITY IN DEVELOPMENT THINKING

An intersectional theoretical approach provides incisive analytical tools with

which to examine the ways development policy and practice is not socially

neutral. In practice, programs consistently overlook one or more dimensions


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o social difference. Racial difference has proven to be one o the most hid-

den and unexamined dimensions o social heterogeneity in postcolonial

development; “the silence on race is a determining silence that both masks

and marks its centrality to the development project” (White : ).

Racialization underpins the social heterogeneity o postcolonial societies, yet discussion o culture, ethnicity, or location ofen obscures its impor-

tance. Development continues to have unexamined expectations about

differently racialized subjects and the geographies they inhabit. In Ecua-

dor, as later chapters document, colonial racialized assumptions perme-

ate development thinking and practice and in turn ensure the hegemonic

position o mestizo- white social norms at the cost o other congurations

o gender, generation, economy, and meaning. By tracking the dynamics

between policy ramework and rural reality, the chapters demonstrate howpolicies ail to acknowledge colonial constructions o social difference yet

continue to rely on colonial constructions o knowledge.

For these reasons, although global policy and activist networks increasingly

advocate the use o intersectional policy approaches, the latter’s inuence re-

mains highly conditioned by existing congurations o power. The Beijing

conerence on women o called or governments to address “multiple bar-

riers to [women’s and girls’] empowerment and advancement because o . . .

their race, age, language, ethnicity, culture, religion or disability or because theyare indigenous people” (Quoted in Yuval-Davis : ). Likewise the

Durban conerence against racism o validated a gender perspective in an-

tiracism and antidiscrimination measures, diversity in plurality, and analysis o

power and rights. Despite these goals, addressing intersectionality in practice

remains a challenge, since “a project ocusing on challenging gender inequality

does not simultaneously work on challenging inequality between women rom

an ethnic minority” (der Hoogte and Kingma : ). One stumbling block

has been the core act o social categories’ irreducible ontological difference(Yuval-Davis ), namely that the problems o one social group, women,

may be compared with another, race-ethnic minorities, without recognizing

the qualitative differences intersectionality makes. Moreover, development’s

institutional arrangements contribute to xing boundaries between different

policy approaches and working styles, and requently hold mutually incom-

patible understandings o rights, the state, and proessional expertise (Luykx

; Paulson and Calla ). Later chapters show that these institutional

and philosophical guls are constructed around social categories that presume

particular characteristics, characteristics considered normal in the dominant


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13

population and inuential in projects, despite the act they do not correlate

with heterogeneous social groups on the ground.

Development institutions and project workers are at the core o processes

by which routine development intervenes in the dynamics o postcolonial so-

cial heterogeneity. As a broad-ranging and richly ethnographic set o studiesreveals (Baaz ; Barrig ; Heron ; Cook ), the institutional-

ity and personnel o development are intrinsically part o the negotiations

over meaning, value, and difference that underpin expectations o moder-

nity and development’s purpose with target populations. Echoing this, the

Ecuadorian case vividly illustrates how the global policy eld o gender and

development () draws on western liberal interpretations o gender, group

rights, and development, which inuence multilateral agencies, international

s, and national institutions.

In development, “those with power appearto have no culture [race, gender, location], those without power are culturally

endowed” as well as gendered, raced, and so on (Volpp : ). Target

populations moreover are associated strongly with specic embodied attri-

butes that gain traction in development thinking, such as dexterity, docil-

ity, or physical strength. In light o these blocks to applying intersectional

policy, policy legacies are not “neutral political actors, but . . . carry with

them clear implications or gender, race and class inequality” because they

“entrench the class, gender and race inequalities on which they arise” (Ewig: ; see Boesten ). Policy legacies are powerul because develop-

ment institutions and personnel continue to embrace deeply held under-

standings about core human attributes o project beneciaries, concerning

issues related to (lack o ) agency and (lack o ) relevant knowledge. In these

relational understandings, development actors ofen associate themselves

with a normalized modernity, in contrast to a pathologized, unchanging so-

ciety, a viewpoint that permeates policy approaches to all social categories

and intersectionality (Schech and Haggis ). Moreover, “intersectional-ity” as a policy approach ofen remains associated with already-problematic

subpopulations and vulnerable subaltern groups rather than with the ull

range o social categories ormed at the intersection o race, class, gender,

and location (Paulson and Calla : ). As later chapters show,

coloniality not only impacts how indigenous women’s gender positional-

ity is viewed but also inorms how development debates around intersec-

tionality play out in specic policy initiatives, such as ethnodevelopment

(proindigenous and pro-Aro-Latin development). In Latin America, these

postcolonial dynamics come to the surace in debates between development


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14

workers and “beneciaries” over the relative value o individual and collec-

tive rights (der Hoogte and Kingma : ). Friction between policy no-

tions o emininity, womanhood, and racialization, and indigenous women

generate in turn innovative responses by indigenous women to their posi-

tionality and standpoint.In this sense, social heterogeneity cannot be apprehended merely by

examining the genealogies and orms o governmentality inaugurated by

development, crucial though this is in providing critical comparative analy-

sis o policy (dis)continuities. The Ecuadorian case illustrates how succes-

sive waves o policy approached social heterogeneity and entrenched social

hierarchies. Bringing into ocus both colonial and policy legacies illustrates

precisely why development struggles to adopt approaches that are exible,

nuanced and sensitive enough to address social heterogeneity. In the wordso Andrea Cornwall, the challenge remains to identiy “an approach and in-

teractions that are part o everyday lie, rather than imposing categories and

concepts rom conventional . . . approaches. To do so calls or strategies

that are sensitive to local dynamics o difference” (Cornwall : ).

While aid organizations are increasingly taking complexity, volatility and the

unexpected into account (Ramalingam ), much remains to be done in

discerning what is required in relation to social development and differentia-

tion. A critical genealogy o successive development rameworks or dealing with social heterogeneity and social categories they call into being demon-

strates the ways policy recurs again and again to malleable and powerul co-

lonial templates and stereotypes. Close attention to the content and meaning

o categories over time identies which meanings and lines o difference are

mobilized and which are lef unspoken and unacknowledged.

Coloniality, Postcolonial Intersectionality, and Development

We women usually have our [ethnically distinctive] clothes, but men hardly

put their poncho on. Always when we arrive at the hospital, they treat us like

“Marías.” They don’t attend to us properly.

, ,

Colonial legacies continue to shape countries in the global South as they es-

tablish the parameters or treatment o different social groups, and the moral

and political grounds on which certain dimensions o social heterogeneity

are ignored and dismissed. Colonial constructions o social difference thusbecome marked on a daily and generational level through representations,

dispossession o populations, colonial administration, and description o


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spaces, regional political economy, and hybrid dynamics o encounters be-

tween colonizers and the colonized (Stoler ; Sylvester ; Loomba

). Everyday understandings o social heterogeneity hence owe their ve-

neer o commonsense to routine and normalized colonial vocabularies and

procedures. Teresa, rom the central Ecuadorian Andes, quoted in the epigraphto this section, is treated by public ser vices as a generic, interchangeable racial-

ized woman who is less deserving o quality attention, in comparison with men

and nonindigenous users.

Varying with colonial power, history, and geography, western representa-

tions and government produced social heterogeneity through colonialism’s

procedures o demarcation and violence, by reiying social (especially

racial-ethnic) categories and inscribing meanings on diverse bodies and by

generalizing and denying colonized social difference (Said ; Escobar; Ferguson ). Chandra Mohanty () termed this “discursive colo-

nialism,” a power exerted by demarcating a undamental difference between

the West and the rest, denying relational meanings and social exchange.

Accordingly, coloniality reers to the ways colonialism has shaped “long-

standing patterns o power that . . . dene culture, labor, inter-subjective

relations and knowledge production” into the colonial present (Mignolo

; Quijano ; Gregory ; Legg ). Coloniality’s social classi-

cations in Latin America distinguished between groups according to thetype o labor power required, thereby locking into place crosscutting ra-

cialized and gendered subcategories, even i in reality these laborers were

always heterogeneous, discontinuous, and conictive (Quijano ). Latin

American colonialism established institutional dispositions, structural in-

equalities, displacement o populations (indigenous populations rom his-

toric territories, black slaves rom Arica), and naturalized divisions o labor

between men and women, elites and laborers, colonizers and colonized, which

were in turn solidied in law, routines, and inscriptions on bodies. AlthoughSpanish colonialism ended in the early nineteenth century, coloniality con-

tinues to shape development outcomes today, producing the region’s lop-

sided development, with markedly different outcomes or social groups

(Galeano ; Mignolo ; Mahoney ).

In Latin America, state-building was widely established over indigenous

territories and populations by means o the creation o internal colonies,

which acilitated national “development” while racializing and containing

these places and people as sinks or low- value labor power (Gonzalez Casa-

nova ). Internal colonies were and ofen continue to be tied rmly into

exploitative macro-economies through trade, political, and employment


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16

relations. “Internal colonialism is not only or principally a state policy as

under oreign occupation; it is rather a widespread social grammar which

traverses social relations, public and private space, culture, thinking and

subjectivities” (De Sousa Santos : ), becoming an intrinsic part o

wider social, spatial, and governmental processes o state ormation in which “scaled contempt” (Rivera Cusicanqui : ) simultaneously inte-

grates and differentiates. In the words o Mahoney (: ), “institutions

that produce hierarchical orms o domination are . . . o great importance.

Thus attention must turn to colonial rules or securing indigenous labor,

or securing indigenous land rights, and or designating local political power

holders. Such institutions ofen connect ethnoracial categories to patterns

o resource allocation . . . and ethnic identities into highly enduring axes o

contention.”However much indigenous Americans are treated as traditional, ances-

tral, and unchanging, the reality has been that they have experienced the

most direct effects o the entangled dynamics o coloniality and moder-

nity. Ecuadorian internal colonies today consist o spaces or the low-cost

subsistence o low- wage labor underpinned by urban migration, inormal so-

cial welare measures, and poor public inrastructure, the racialized orm

o development’s contemporary will toward enclosure and enclavization

(Sidaway ). Internal colonies have not lost relevance to developmentgovernmentality and postcolonial state ormation, as they are retooled or

present concerns. While primarily serving to locate and x indigeneity, in-

ternal colonies coconstitute class and gender differences and sexuality. “The

conquest, colonization and appearance o the hacienda system constituted

a space through which [emale-male] differences were deepened” (Pala-

cios : ), impacting social differences in work, resources, and sta-

tus. Gatherings o bodies that do not matter to elites, internal colonies are

granted low priority in public investment, compounding state neglect andminimal living standards and becoming a orm o “disenranchisement due

to racism and the legacies o colonialism” (Volpp : ; also Rivera

Cusicanqui ).

Under the colonial gaze, stereotypes about the clumsiness, inarticulacy,

and lack o agency o an indigenous woman conrm social difference while

leaving in place underlying ambivalence about distinctions, even as it im-

poses impossible demands on subalterns. Accordingly, “it is the orce o

ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency; ensures its re-

peatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; inorms

its strategies o individuation and marginalization; produces the effect o


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17

probabilistic truths and predictability which, or the stereotype, must always

be in excess o what can be empirically proved or logically construed” (Bhabha

: –, original emphasis). In postcolonial intersectionality, indige-

neity is perormed and embodied—through clothing, speech, bodily ex-

pression, and inscriptions on the body—in daily interactions, under theracializing gaze o dominant groups. Latin American politics o indigeneity

are entangled with tensions between elite-state labeling and postcolonial

processes o sel-identication. In this book, the term indigenous is used to

signal state labels as well as broad sel-identication, while the terms nation-

ality and pueblo reer to larger and smaller ethnocultural-linguistic groups,

respectively. As later chapters demonstrate, colonial stereotyping is ound

through development policy—rom modernization to multiculturalism—

although it originates in a broader biopolitics that marks a sharp distinctionbetween bodies that are worth valuing and subalterns who are not, a modern

nonethics arguably originating in sixteenth-century debates over whether

Indians had souls (Maldonado-Torres ). Latin American nation-states’

colonial discourses disavow indigenous claims over material plenitude and

epistemic equality, requently placing them outside the imaginative, legal, and

material category o suffi cient humanity (Agamben ; Anderson ).

Colonial criteria set the stage or development governmentality just as it ren-

dered subaltern claims ragile. Although nominally covered by development’sremit o poverty alleviation, indigenous and other racialized groups in Latin

American countries are construed in the colonial present as dispensable

(Fanon []; Wright ; Maldonado-Torres ; Butler ). In

this sense, indigenous experiences o development in Latin America link

to analyses o how abject and surplus populations are produced as dispos-

able through sociospatial relations (Wright ; McIntyre and Nast ;

Tyner ). The “epidermalization” (Fanon []) o marginaliza-

tion is experienced physically and psychically in the orms o quotidianepistemic and physical violence, against individuals and groups viewed as

raced—conquered, gendered, and sexualized.

In Latin American postcolonial societies, indigeneity is intersectional

(de la Cadena : ; Valdivia ), an inherently multiple and context-

dependent social position and subjectivity constituted through interrelating

sociospatial relations and incomprehensible outside o them, as indeed are

race and gender. Indigeneity, being identied with prior claims to territory

and sociocultural difference, is associated in Latin America with impover-

ishment, an insecure segment o labor markets, and a low socioeconomic

class status. Indigeneity is also largely a social position associated with rural


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places and social abandonment. Populations claiming originary ties to the

American continent are highly diverse, yet they strategically identiy com-

mon demands arising rom their position afer conquest, as the deni-

tion o indigenous peoples makes clear:

Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having

a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that

developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct rom other

sectors o the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts o

them. They orm at present non-dominant sectors o society and are

determined to preserve, develop and transmit to uture generations

their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis o their

continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural

patterns, social institutions and legal systems.

As a colonial legacy, land distribution is most skewed and uneven in Latin

American countries with large indigenous populations. Moreover, countries

with large indigenous populations have tended to be those where the liberal

politics o oligarchic elites have been more strictly exclusionary and harshly

authoritarian. “Indigenous” identity, whether adopted or ascribed, thus re-

ects a political positioning in global, national and local power structures.

While indigeneity is at times dened through resistance to dam constructionor large-scale mineral extraction (or example, Chile’s Bio-Bio dam, Peruvian

antimining activism, and Panama’s Ngobe-Buglé), elsewhere it is constituted

through lives o quiet desperation and everyday resilience.

“Coloniality does not just reer to racial classication. It is an encompass-

ing phenomenon . . . and as such it permeates all control o sexual access,

collective authority, labor, subjectivity, intersubjectivity and the production

o knowledge” (Lugones : ). In coloniality, the intractable pro-

duction o difference occurs where interlocking relations o gender, sexu-ality, race, class, and location constitute colonial power and the nature

o resistance to it (Anthias and Yuval-Davis ; McClintock ; Stoler

). Male-emale difference remains intrinsic to postcolonial indigenous

experience, as labor markets, technical assistance, expectations about pro-

ductive and reproductive inputs, and authority continue to be strongly biased

against emale agency and toward nonindigenous norms, with women’s po-

sition ofen viewed as “more Indian” than men’s (de la Cadena ). Cen-

tral to Latin American coloniality in this regard has been white(r) men’s

sexual access to, and rape o, low-income, largely rural, indigenous women,

a process that has contributed to the emergence o a mixed-race (mestizo in


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Spanish) and increasingly middle-income, urban class group. In colonial-

ity’s eld o social differentiation, the “rapeability” o indigenous women

inormed elites’ eminization o indigenous men, and indigenous eminin-

ity’s association with lack o worth (Curiel ; Maldonado-Torres ;

Wade ; Galindo ). Although indigenous women bore mestizo chil-dren, they remained at the bottom o postcolonial hierarchies, whereas

indigenous men were permitted highly conditional entry into law, paid work,

and literacy (Rivera Cusicanqui ; Galindo ). The colonial cate-

gory o “indigenous women” hence established a specic context in which

development projects came to operate. As postcolonial critic Gayatri Spi-

vak argues, the archetypal woman o the global South is placed in a highly

unstable and ambivalent position, as she represents the subject who is the

not- yet-modern yet the archetypal remains-to-be-modernized. Hence “thedisplaced guration o the ‘third world woman’ [is] caught between tradi-

tion and modernization” (Spivak []: ; also Minh-ha ;

Mohanty ). In development programs, the “thirdworldwoman” becomes

a boundary-marker or cultural difference, as policy views her in ways that

bear no relation to ordinary women’s lives. As later chapters document,

Ecuadorian indigenous women respond to their positionality in coloniality-

modernity by critically reworking the colonial ramework and presumptions

about difference and subjectivity in ways that contribute to alternative mo-dernities. To signal the multiple and uid nature o postcolonial intersec-

tionality as an experience and a political category, this book uses the term

indígena to reer to subjects sel-identiying with indigeneity and emininity,

a context-specic concatenation o claims.

Rather than listen to policy-makers and development proessionals talk

about intersectional goals, the book centers the perspectives o indigenous

women talking about connections between existing policy, entrenched in-

equalities, and the costs o postcolonial intersectionality (see Hodgson ;Escobar ; Asher ). Racialized emale beneciaries’ words about

postcolonial development reveal how they learn rom bitter experience how

interventions consolidate inequalities rather than tackle them, and hence

provide key insights into the underbelly o development’s selective and

colonial engagement with social heterogeneity. The deeply contextualized

case study analysis provides a window onto the shifing developmental vis-

ibilities o different social categories and their consequences or variously

situated groups at diverse intersections o postcolonial hierarchies. The

critical institutional and community ethnographic ocus on low-income in-

digenous women demonstrates how the nonrecognition o diversity within


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diversity results in indigenous women’s limited gains, and their dissatisac-

tion with development’s reading o social heterogeneity. Their experiences

provide key insights into the power relations that result in developmental

approaches to social heterogeneity at multiple interlocking scales rom

household to village and to region, indigenous ethnic group, nation, andthe global scale. Indigenous women are treated differently in development

rom indigenous men, nonindigenous women, and nonindigenous men, as

interlocking inequalities o power variously deprive them o resources, make

their specic positionality and needs invisible, prejudge their social disposi-

tion, and/or override their demands in the name o a greater community.

Pinpointing the proximate power-holders in these dynamics suggests that

the nation-state, development agencies (global, national, and nongovern-

mental organizations), women and men in dominant class-race-locationalpositions, and indigenous men are signicant, i not equally inuential, in

every context or moment in history.

The Politics of Postcolonial Intersectionality, Development, and Citizenship

Critical accounts o development highlight the need to distinguish between

citizenship as a set o practices ensuring voice, authority, and resources,

rom development and welare interventions that work to contain and

channel claims to resources and decision-making power (Lemke ).According to Partha Chatterjee (), republican citizenship ideals were

“overtaken” by the developmental state and were reoriented toward ullling

dreams o prosperity and modernity. In this way, postcolonial governmen-

tality and biopolitics became bound up in distinguishing between groups

in need o intervention and other groups who became bearers o ull

substantive citizenship. This divergence in goals and inter ventions, how-

ever, also becomes bound up with pinpointing particular social groups or

improvement: “The protection o woman (today the “third world woman”)becomes a signier o the establishment o a good society” (Spivak

[]: , original emphasis). Security and welare agendas gave rise, in

this context, to a different kind o citizenship. By drawing attention to the

irreducibility o development to citizenship, Chatterjee’s incisive analytics

orces us to query how social heterogeneity becomes bound up with di-

erentiated claims, rights, acts, and protections across a highly ractured

political terrain.

According to Chatterjee, development governmentality has as its end the

reduction o poverty within designated subpopulations, prompting the de-

velopmental state to invest in acquiring knowledge about subpopulations,


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a process whereby “older ethnographic concepts [became] con venient de-

scriptive categories or classiying groups o people into suitable targets

or administrative, legal, economic or electoral policy. In many cases, clas-

sicatory criteria used by colonial governmental regimes continued into

the postcolonial era, shaping the orms o both political demands and developmental policy” (Chatterjee : ). Under the developmental state,

policy thinking and inter ventions viewed social difference through a postco-

lonial lens that attempted to distinguish unmodern and modern character-

istics (Schech and Haggis ). Liberalism’s eld o differentiated subjects

and substantive citizenships inuses interventions’ raming o social hetero-

geneity and the suitability and content o what development “should do.”

The existence o social categories through which development is governed

and directed reects not a xed grid o subpopulations but the constitutiono relational, context-dependent categories that come into being inormed

by mainstream understandings o social difference, as well as challenges to

the boundary between citizenship and development. Citizenship’s nego-

tiable substantive content remains in tension with colonial distinctions be-

tween categories o human, as exemplied in recent Ecuadorian nonwestern

policy o buen vivir development.

Although colonial rule created endless ssures and social heterogeneity,

there remain subterranean points o political articulation, leading to inter-ruptions to governance and development (Bhabha ; Li ; Quijano

). Mobilized around grievances at being marginalized or discriminated

against, contingent groups galvanize to press or reormulations o develop-

ment’s reading o the postcolonial terrain (Chatterjee ), resulting

in some cases in the incorporation o single lines o social difference into

development (e.g., global women’s movement’s gender mainstreaming). Such

struggles ofen straddle the boundary between development and citizenship,

between redistribution and recognition, and arise out o coloniality’s exclu-sions and subaltern disadvantage (Young ; Fraser ; Isin and Nielsen

). Political mobilizations outside the rame o development, as well as

at times the unintended consequences o participatory development, gener-

ate disruptions to the contingent and ragile boundary between citizenship

and programs to alleviate disadvantage (Alvarez et al. ; Chatterjee ;

Hickey and Mohan ; Holston ). Such politics—i it is to occur at

all—has to be orged through new orms o communication and practice

(Spivak []; Chua et al. ; McEwan ). Through colonial

and republican history, Latin American indigenous women and men peri-

odically contested the colonial terms o recognition (how to be indigenous)


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and redistribution (colonial allocations o land, postcolonial distributions

o education, investment, dignity).

In this regard, multicultural recognition o plural cultures and ethnici-

ties seemingly reormulates political and developmental responses to social

heterogeneity on more equitable grounds (or an overview on Latin Ameri-can citizenship, see Dagnino ). Latin America’s multicultural reorms

recongured the dynamics between racialization, development and citizen-

ship rom the s, while indigenous movements in some countries seized

the moment to pursue deeper redistribution and recognition goals (Pos-

tero ; Gershon ). In the region, multiculturalism worked its way

quickly into constitutions, political rhetoric, and state institutionalization,

although racialized, poor, rural, and emale subjects saw uneven gains in

economic, social, and political rights (Hale ; Yashar ; Walsh et al.). Inorming social neoliberalism, policy recognition o indigenous

difference through the lens o culture resulted in specic development in-

terventions that entailed mixed outcomes or racialized groups. Although

Ecuador adapted the millennium development goals or indigenous needs

(Ecuador Indígenas ), multicultural reorms in development and health

had only partial impacts on indigenous women, as long-standing social as-

sumptions remained largely in place. Fundamentally, multiculturalism did

little to challenge, let alone overturn, entrenched colonial hierarchies, as ittended to regulate expressions o difference while retaining orms o privi-

lege and stigmatization (Bhabha ; Hale ; Melamed ), generat-

ing paradoxical effects in development programs. I gender policy did little

to acknowledge postcolonial power differentials between women, neolib-

eral multicultural policy worked rom reied, culturally ocused denitions

o indigeneity, thereby closing down consideration o material inequalities

and male-emale difference.

Yet to the degree that multicultural development arises rom rights tocultural recognition, it resembles the rights-based agenda in development,

which seeks to use a rights ramework in order to ensure more equitable

well-being and security (Cornwall and Nyuma-Musembi ). Rights-

based development inuences Latin American measures to tackle emale-

male inequality, and racial-ethnic disadvantages, and recently in Ecuador’s

“postneoliberal” buen vivir development (see chapter ). Scholarship demon-

strates the challenge o moving rom abstract rights in law toward the real-

ization o rights in the context o development interventions. Later chapters

add another dimension to this, exploring how postcolonial intersectionality


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means that even i rights are specied or one group, the heterogeneity and

crosscutting power relations within that group results in uneven access to

rights. The result can be the homogenization o rights-bearers, rather than

a heterogeneous politics o presence (Phillips ). Hence, although the

human rights ramework is widely vernacularized among Ecuadorian indig-enous women, as well as celebrated in development agencies, it remains a

proound challenge to ensure that rights come to be practiced in a socially

sensitive manner.

Reecting postcolonial intersectionality, indigenous women’s rights and

citizenship are structured differently rom indigenous men’s and nonindig-

enous women’s, whether under political liberalism or neoliberal multicultur-

alism (Rivera Cusicanqui ). In later chapters, indígenas’ postcolonial

positionality in citizenship becomes evident. Feminism’s liberal politics as-sumes that thirdworldwomen will be empowered by individual rights instead

o by ethnic communities, and that subalterns will become individual sub-

jects, combining social detachment and sel-authorization (Povinelli ).

Aurora’s and Margarita’s solidarity with Rosario, described earlier, speaks to

indigenous women’s struggles to work together to change development in

ways that upset coloniality’s liberal expectations. Shortly beore our conver-

sation under the midday Andean sun, we had all attended a workshop about

sexual and reproductive health in a simple community hall, an event orga-nized by the women’s representative or the provincial indigenous edera-

tion, the redoubtable and cheerul Delia. Over one hundred women—some

carrying babies in bright carrying cloths on their backs—and a ew men lis-

tened to Delia’s talk, which was given in a mix o Spanish and Kichwa. On

the bus later that day, Delia expressed outrage on hearing Rosario’s story

and vowed to talk to her ethnic organization. Her response was character-

istic o Ecuadorian indigenous women’s affi liations. Rather than pinpoint

gender as the major axis o Rosario’s disadvantage or view the state as an e-ective arbiter, Delia turned to civil organizations o indigenous women and

men, whose widespread legitimacy and authority might get Rosario read-

mittance to her community. Meetings, acts o solidarity, and conederation

spaces echo with indigenous women’s agency and strategies or sociocul-

tural change. Not that Delia believes women are always best served by ethnic

politics tout court. She is also a vocal advocate or action by and on behal o

indigenous women to gain autonomy, education, and decision-making, and

so she contributes to templates that copy neither development nor ethnic

agendas. Although struggling to leverage resources and power, indigenous


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women orge unique agendas or development and citizenship that selec-

tively borrow rom development, eminism, and intersectional indigeneity

to create an alternative ormulation o rights and dignity.

Ecuadorian women rom many indigenous nationalities are active partici-

pants in ethnic rights groups, alongside men, and jointly pursue anti-racism,recognition and redistributive goals, with a number gaining leadership posi-

tions (Cervone , ). Women’s activism in ethnocultural movements

reects indigeneity’s postcolonial intersectionality, the existence o diver-

sity within diversity, where demands or antiracism exist in tension with co-

lonial representations o women’s tradition (Saa ). Indigenous women

experience worse racism than male counterparts in markets, schools, public

offi ces, and streets, prompting active engagement with antiracist and group

rights demands (Palacios : ; Encalada ; see chapters , ). How-ever, indigenous women in Ecuador are increasingly unwilling to condone

representations o emale quiescent culture-bearers. In everyday contexts,

Kichwa and Tsáchila women’s granular, recombined practices contribute to

a reimagining o political subjectivity and agendas, at the intersection o ra-

cialization and gendering. As the Ecuadorian case demonstrates, indigenous

women appropriate multicultural spaces with a distinctive raced-gendered

politics that creates innovative and creative political subjectivities and agen-

das. To these ends, indigenous women orm practical and strategic alliancesacross national borders, across and between social differences. Indigenous

women across Latin America struggle against coloniality’s understandings

o subalterns to dissociate themselves rom social labeling that reinorces

gendered racialized power, adopting a multiplicity o tactics and methods

(del Campo ).

Although it promised substantive citizenship via development, Ecuador in

practice has delivered irregular, highly conditional development, in which a

small coterie o elite amilies have dominated political economic activities inexport agriculture, resource extraction, politics, and statecraf, against which a

small, tenuous middle class and large numbers o diverse low-income subjects

struggle to maintain dignity and livelihood. With weak state institutionaliza-

tion, Ecuador’s postcolonial state has one o the world’s worst income distribu-

tions, alongside the United States and South Arica, with a Gini coeffi cient

o . in , and inequalities that remain entrenched, as an underclass is

granted minimal social protection (Ramírez Gallegos ; Mahoney ).

Racialized inequality is marked: unlike nonindigenous Ecuadorians, sel-

identied indigenous peoples living on less than $ a day rose rom . to


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. percent, while indigenous people with unmet basic needs (another

measure o poverty) remained above percent. Formally democratic, Ec-

uador is a middle-ranking country in global terms, yet the richest per-

cent control . times the income o the poorest tenth.

Producing Knowledge on Postcolonial Development

O my body makes o me always a man who questions.

, ,

Development’s reliance on and instrumental deployment o social difference

speaks to processes o knowledge production. Knowledge about benecia-

ries’ social characteristics constitutes development procedures as manage-

able and grounded. Existing accounts o indigenous women’s development

experiences are ramed through colonially inected orms o knowledge,

statistically shown to be disadvantaged in education, income, landholdings,

credit, political offi ce, and health, in comparison with women in dominant

racial-ethnic categories, and indigenous men (Vinding ; Cardenas et al.

; ). In Ecuador, too, government data suggests that indig-

enous women are worse off as a group at the start o the twenty-rst century

than a decade previously.

Analyzing the operations o postcolonial intersectional development

hence requires discussion o knowledge production, methods, and position-

ality in institutional and community contexts. As noted by women o color,

power relations generate differently positioned orms o knowledge, while

being at the margins generates a double sight that draws on dominant and

marginalized experiences alike (Anzaldúa ; Rappaport ). Build-

ing on these insights, this study gathered inormation through a process in-

ormed by a decolonial attitude, seeking “responsibility and the willingness

to take many perspectives, particularly the . . . points o view whose veryexistence is questioned and produced as insignicant . . . [and] recognize

their intellectual production as thinking—not only as culture or ideology”

(Maldonado-Torres : ; Tuhiwai Smith ). Consistent with ex-

plorations o the epistemologies under modernity/coloniality (Mignolo

; Walsh et al. ; Jazeel and McFarlane ), a critical examination

o social heterogeneity in postcolonial development entails careul theoriza-

tion o development “rom the perspective o postcolonial people and their

daily dilemmas” (Sylvester : ).

For these reasons, this account oindigenous women’s experiences o development arises out o a collabora-

tive and ethical process in which I take responsibility or the organization,


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selection, and theorization o ndings generated through participatory

methods (also Jazeel and McFarlane ; Noxolo et al. ; Hale and

Stephen ).

The experience o development or marginalized groups reers to social

processes, emplaced meanings, and expectations o careully calibrateddifferences that are best captured through ethnographic and qualitative ap-

proaches (Hart ). Indigenous women’s encounters with development

are experienced as raced-gendered-sexualized as well as ractured, dispa-

rate, uneven, episodic, inappropriate, dismissive o their knowledge, and

insuffi cient. Women gain knowledge o being ignored in project planning

and racist abuse rom state offi cials. Yet indígenas’ insights inorm us not

merely o the limited reach o development—an empirical description com-

ing rom the global South. Rather, indigenous women become observersand embodied knowledge-holders about the types o intervention they en-

counter, illustrating “the ways in which theory and practice interact. . . .

The real lie solutions that women craf ofen navigate them between theory

and practice, the local and the global” (Perry and Schenck : ). Latin

American indígena organizations incisively critique the ways global develop-

ment rameworks describe their social situation and prescribe policy. As in

Arica, “the planners may have historical amnesia but those who are the tar-

get o repeated development efforts remember the struggles, successes andailures all too well” (Hodgson : ). Taking this knowledge as its start-

ing point, this book documents indigenous women’s process o learning

about development’s socially uneven and exclusionary effects, which con-

stitute them in relation to a wider political and moral project. Indigenous

women’s embodied and grounded experiences o interventions—ofen short-

term, uninormed, and dea to women’s situation—give rise to uniquely po-

sitioned orms o critical border knowledges, providing extensive evidence

on development’s blind spots and egregious ailures, their bodies makingo them a questioning, troubled subject, to adapt Fanon. Although unac-

knowledged in much development policy and analysis, indigenous women

are actively involved in rethinking development knowledge and practices, in-

ormed by their unique positionality at the crossover o ways o lie with de-

velopment governmentality (Hernández ; Lugones ; Paredes ;

Galindo ). In doing so, they rethink dominant epistemologies on how

to achieve well-being and dignity as they become knowledgeable critics o

lopsided systems o distribution and welare, citizenship, and the postco-

lonial state.


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Across the world, subalterns are denied a voice through the deployment

o epistemic violence that misrecognizes their knowledge and denies epis-

temological equivalence and validity (Spivak []; Mignolo ;

Maldonado-Torres ). Postcolonial writer Gayatri Spivak ( [])

amously argued that knowledge and difference are particularly raught orsubaltern women as the powerul—northern nations, capitalist political

economies, states, masculine power, and western eminism—claim to always

already know them. In Ecuador, eminist development experts, indigenous

social movements, and the nation-state each claim to speak on Andean in-

digenous women’s behal and represent them as muted, and unable to ex-

press themselves independently. By contrast, critical scholarship documents

the numerous and wide-ranging registers through which emale subalterns

articulate, systematize, and make effective their agency and provides extensiveevidence o women’s diverse voices, orms o authority, creativity, and knowl-

edge (Arnold ; Burman ). Decolonizing knowledge production

regarding Latin American indigenous women hence involves recognizing

their diverse and distinctive standpoints, off-center perspectives, and varied

tactics. Critical ethnographic work documents the diversity o Ecuador’s

indigenous women and the increasingly urban-based, market-inuenced,

and hybrid cultural contexts o their lives (or example Crain ; Weis-

mantel ; Prieto et al. ; Garcés Dávila ; O’Connor ; Swan-son , Prieto , Pequeño ).

Ecuadorian indigenous women vividly exempliy “

Dilemmas of Difference by Sarah A. Radcliffe

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