Knowing Nature: Plurinationality and Productivity in Ecuador’s Socialist State

Abstract

My research explores the relationship between Ecuador’s purported disengagement with neoliberalism in 2008, and the simultaneous inclusion of certain types of indigenous knowledge in the country’s new socialistic order. Knowledge production provides a useful category of analysis because it has historically been used to undermine subaltern claims to political autonomy and self-governance. By focusing on the political space created for elite indigenous intellectuals, I examine how peasant and working class groups are re-subalternized by state discourses claiming to have solved the “indigenous question.” I analyze how market relations of power produce new discourses of equal opportunity, as well as new identities (“consumers” and “producers”), and seeks to educate the proper distribution of desires across the class spectrum so as to cultivate consent to the point that vastly unequal distributions of power are considered legitimate. I argue that this hegemony is re/produced by a much broader demographic than generally acknowledged by the political Left – one that includes not only political elites, but subaltern groups as well. Using Ecuador as a case study, my research offers an alternative understanding of how neoliberalism works. Dominant narratives tend to explain the concept using predominantly political and economic categories of analysis, describing it as a repressive ideology that privileges elite class projects to accumulate and consolidate wealth at the expense of society at large. While I fully agree that neoliberalism fosters and exacerbates economic inequalities, I find that political-economic analyses alone fall short of explaining how and why hierarchies shaped by market relations of power retain legitimacy despite political revolution and change. My research considers ongoing debates regarding the subaltern’s capacity to speak and the ways in which they do, using notions of subaltern agency and its influence on hegemony to explain that neoliberalism works by allowing subaltern groups to create limited space for themselves through assimilation and appropriation of market discourses and identities, while simultanesouly excluding the “unproductive” aspects of their subalterneity. I explore how neoliberal projects seek to educate the desires of these diversely classed groups, to cultivate consent for its continued legitimacy as a social, cultural, and political ideology.