The Values of Water: Development Cultures and Indigenous Cultures in Highland Ecuador

Abstract

This article examines the symbolic transformations and material consequences of an irrigation development project designed to empower indigenous peoples in Canar, Ecuador. It argues that the project deepened market society and reproduced colonialism more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but indigenous people found ways to ap- propriate project resources and embed the market in alternative principles of social life. Market society deepened through the neoliberal hegemony of international development policy and through the indigenous movement's incorporation of market rationalities. Colonialism recurred through hierarchical representations of knowledge and skills remi- niscent of long-standing stereotypes of natives, which local indigenous leaders internal- ized. Both processes urifolded through constructions of value arid acts of evaluation. The gap between the market ideal communicated in the irrigation development project and the conditions of actually existing markets that local indigenous people engaged after project closure limited the concrete empowerment of indigenous peoples. In 1998, Tucuy Canar Ayllucunapa Tantanacuy (Tucayta), an indigenous or- ganization in Ecuador's Canar Province, secured control of significant irrigation infrastructure. Citing this acquisition as empowerment, the organization's lead- ers asserted professional competence and market competitiveness, seemingly conforming to neoliberal principles that they had rejected four years earlier when protesting an agrarian law that subjected land access to market competition. By 1998, local indigenous leaders believed that they had discerned more success- ful ways to pursue aims and procure capabilities. In this article, I demonstrate that emergent cultures of development conditioned Tucayta's attainment of the Patococha irrigation system and labeled it a qualified success. I advance a cul- tural conception of development based on neo-Polanyian, anthropologica l, and postcolonial theory. I argue that the Patococha project deepened market society and reproduced coloniality more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but in- digenous people found ways to appropriate Patococha and embed the market in alternative projects of social life.'