The power of representation: Agrarian politics and rural women's interpretations of the household in coastal ecuador

Abstract

Male representation has been central to traditional conceptualizations of the household in anthropology. As Moore has pointed out, "(t)he implicit assumption was that women operated within the domestic sphere, while men utilized their links with other men to operate in the public/political domain, where links between households were created and maintained."1 In the rural context, ideologies of women as primarily domestic have masked the relations that connect women to other households, the community, and the state, limiting our understanding not only of the process of household creation and recreation but of rural politics (most often considered a male concern). A recent call for research on "depth politics" in rural communities2 indicates a need to assess both the role of rural women in the construction of household identity and the role of the rural household for the construction of women's identity in order to get at the "lived experience" which forms such a crucial part of agrarian consciousness. The questions which I should like to address here are: (i) how can a more detailed exploration of women's self representations help us to understand the complex relationships between the state and the household; and (ii) what implications do such relationships have for rural politics? The analysis here also addresses the problem of how researchers may misinterpret rural women's political identities when the societies within which those women live may involve very different notions than our own, not only of "household" and "work" but also of