Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador (Pitt Latin American Series) - Tapa dura

"Excellent. This will become the standard work on the origins of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement - there is nothing like it on the market. This is the book on Ecuador that all libraries will need to get." - Erick D. Langer, Georgetown University "This book, creatively straddling history and anthropology, deftly locates the recent upsurge of indigenous political mobilization in a richly varied, theoretically informed, long-term historical context. It offers a marvelous menu of ethnographies of the state (and processes of state formation from below) that hew to the volume's central analytical focus - namely, the conflictive negotiations through which local indigenous peoples tried to project their interests, identities, and ideas into the larger political arena. This volume is an essential contribution to Latin American indigenous and social movements, as well as to the comparative history of peasants and modern state formation." - Brooke Larson, author of Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910."

Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador chronicles the changing forms of indigenous engagement with the Ecuadorian state since the early nineteenth century that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, had facilitated the growth of the strongest unified indigenous movement in Latin America. Built around nine case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century ""Ecuador, Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador"" presents state formation as an uneven process, characterized by tensions and contradictions, in which Indians and other subalterns actively participated. It examines how indigenous peoples have attempted, sometimes successfully, to claim control over state formation in order to improve their relative position in society. The book concludes with four comparative essays that place indigenous organizational strategies in highland Ecuador within a larger Latin American historical context. ""Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador"" offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of state formation that will be of interest to a broad range of scholars who study how subordinate groups participate in and contest state formation.