Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Speech at the IV Ecuadorian Congress of Anthropology and Archaeology

Following the introduction to the history and topography of the Canelos forest region, I turn to the central theme of this essay, the indigenization of modernity. Next, I provide examples of mythic cosmology to guide the reader to consider Amazonian Canelos Quichua’s perspectives on cultural topography. We demonstrate the relationships between language, culture, and even topography – between the “lowlands” and the “highlands” –as we explore the culture and interculturality and then discuss the subject of ethnogenesis in indigenous thought and in written historical portrayal. In the face of a trending indigenous structure, I discuss the “epistemic distortion” existing in various academic sectors and attempt to counter or deflect what I take to be such distortions by reference especially to Sahlins (2000) and Uzendoski (2005b). The indigenization of modernity clearly contains millennial references (Whitten 2003), in which “milennial” is an English metaphor that refers to the Quichua concept of pachacutij (Uzendoski 2005b:ix), understood as “the return of space-time (chronotope) from a prosperous past to that of a prosperous future” (Whitten 2003:x). Likewise, the intertwining of modernity and its indigenization, the birthing of alternative modernities and emerging culture are present in a myriad of intercultural systems to which, hopefully, more and more ethnographers will turn their attention to, working—again it is hoped— with historians, linguists, literary professionals, and above all spokespeople for Western modernity who endeavor to appropriate modern ways of life through counterhegemonic indigenous systems and deep transformation.

“Indigenous Art: From Appreciation to Art Criticism” begins with Australian Aboriginal artist Vernon Ah Kee’s complaint that no one writes critically about his art. His claim recognizes that contemporary art, that is art that participates in international art discourses and institutions, only completely achieves this status when it is engaged critically. The failure to attract such criticism leaves Aboriginal art, as a class, out of the top sphere of the art world. This resistance may be due to institutional racism: the dominant culture refuses to recognize Aboriginal art as contemporary art. Or, perhaps the work is so advanced and different from the dominant modes that it cannot be fully apprehended by current critical writers and their worldviews. Until recently, Aboriginal art was appreciated as beautiful and interesting by collectors but institutions recognized it less as art than as works of culture. Such works were more often relegated to museums as anthropological items than displayed in art galleries as art.   To avoid significant misreading and misuse, it is important to distinguish between Aboriginal art and Indigenous art. Aboriginal art is either customary art or art designed for non-Aboriginal appreciation but that does not engage international art world discourses and institutions. Indigenous art is a new class of works that do engage international art world discourses and institutions. A crucial requirement of which is writing that shows how that art work so participates. With the rise of Indigenous artists working in non-customary styles and content, and the rise of Indigenous curation, some of this art is clearly contemporary art and, as a requirement of status, needs to be written about critically. If non-Indigenous writers are unwilling or unable to so engage, Indigenous contemporary artists need a new generation of Indigenous critics of Indigenous art. However, they also could use ally writers who perform non-colonially by learning how to “read” and write about this work. 

Since the beginning of the 20th century, academic sociology in Ecuador has produced legitimate knowledge about society. This knowledge is based on a prior conception that reinforces exclusion mechanisms. Indigenousness is understood in terms of hegemonic racialization, which leads to the indigenous population being considered as in need of paternalistic protection and, consequently, the indigenous movement being made invisible. This ignores the yachay tinkuy or confrontation of knowledge from the indigenous movement, which not only presents political demands but also its own knowledge that includes a re-reading of the indigenous in its own terms. For structural reasons, Ecuadorian academic sociology was not able to enter into the yachay tinkuy and thus continued to reproduce the invisibilization of indigenous movements and peoples.  This text compares the development of the conceptualization of the indigenous in Ecuadorian sociology and in the indigenous movement on the basis of key texts. To this end, it focuses on the hegemonic racialization of the indigenous in sociology and its development, and on the response proposed by the indigenous movement as a producer of knowledge. 

Racist ideologies and regimes confirm the incapacity to change of those who stigmatize, even while fearing their own degeneration (or longing for their own regeneration). The pace of transformation of individuals and populations can be measured at the intersection of these contradictory points of view. This is how the answers provided by race-based political thought can be interpreted. Racism appeals to nature, thus curbing in the short and medium term the processes of social mobility whose long-term effects are seen as threats. It requires certain types of social engineering, both in the old colonial regime and today. The injection of natural traits into the social game constitutes an attempt to slow down transformation or history: just as the ennobled are received into the nobility but as upstarts; just as the conversos share communion but as heirs of a dubious past; just as the American mestizos approach the "Spaniards’ Republic" but in a subordinate position; just as bastards can inherit from their natural father without being admitted to his lineage; just as freedmen cease to be slaves without becoming fellow citizens; just as the colonized are subjects of the Empire without being citizens of the European countries of the nineteenth century. What unites the different racial policies is this common response to social mobility: watching boundaries and limiting social transformation movements. 

The public display of mummified bodies in museums or other types of installations is not uncommon, something that, for various reasons, is the subject of justified controversy. The characteristic dichotomous model of the West has always understood things and people in an oppositional relationship. On the one hand, the world of inert matter and, on the other, the world of living beings. One of the interesting aspects of this distinction is that the body, understood as res extensa by Cartesianism, has remained between these two poles and easily assumes the category of object, as in the case of corpses or body fragments. Not infrequently, the exhibition of human remains has to do with the practice of racism. In this article, I use the Deleuzian notion of assemblage to analyze the centrality of the body in the problematic of racism. Throughout the text I pay special attention to the case of the dissected body of an African who, under the name of El Negro, was exhibited in a small naturalist museum in the Catalan town of Banyoles for most of the twentieth century. The case of El Negro, which in the 1990s received international media coverage until its removal from the museum and the return of the remains of the body to Botswana, can be understood within a tangled web of assemblages in which, in addition to racism, there are others such as the museum, local identity feelings and pan-Africanism. 

The article presents relevant findings on the naturalization of street sexual harassment, based on an undergraduate thesis entitled “Mechanisms of awareness on the naturalization and invisibility of verbal and non-verbal street sexual harassment in university students from Otavalo.” A qualitative methodology was used to understand the experiences, actions and opinions regarding the subject of the study. Street sexual harassment is a social problem that affects the integrity of the human being. It encompasses any non-consensual physical, verbal and non-verbal manifestation with a sexual connotation expressed in the public space towards a non-consenting person. These expressions can be understood as everyday microaggresions that, nevertheless, have been normalized by society. The naturalization of this phenomenon and its street expression has made it “invisible” and the permissiveness of these practices amongst the general public has led to a lack of recognition of the magnitude of the issue.

Sarance Nº49

Sarance Nº48

Interstitial analysis is a cross-disciplinary perspective that focuses on exploring identity on the basis of flexibility and complexity, living with the contradictions, intricacies, and folds generated by the overlap of discourse and experiences lived within bodies (Dotson, 2014; Zurcir, 2020). From there, we will try to show how advertising appropriates the discourse of resistance movements to bring about transgenerational “whitewashing” in mass media that solidifies the systemic division of labor roles on the basis of race and gender. This whitewashing is based on the reaffirmation of white superiority, using whiteness as a role model and ideal (Echeverría, 2010) standard in juxtaposition to which stereotypes of blackness can be built. By blackness, we mean a social identity generated through “promotional strategies that depend on people and other symbolic and material representations that have been socially and historically considered black (ways of speech of pronunciations, folklore, style, fashion, music, body usage or physical form)” (Crockett, 2008, 246).