Post-agrarian aspirations: tourism and rural politics in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This ethnographic study examines post-agrarian aspirations and rural politics in Ecuador. After decades of urban outmigration under a neoliberal agrarian order, many rural places have witnessed efforts to develop local tourism economies as a possibility to transcend stigmatised agrarian livelihoods and to (re)constitute communities. We build on anthropological studies of aspiration to explore how visions of post-agrarian futures are shifting the actors, scales and terms of rural politics in the present. Through two case studies, we observe how state actors have come to re-inscribe their role within post-agrarian imaginaries, partially rewriting the terms of state legitimacy in rural places.

RÉSUMÉ

Cette étude ethnographique examine les aspirations post-agraires et la politique rurale en Équateur. Après des décennies d'émigration urbaine sous un ordre agraire néolibéral, de nombreuses zones rurales sont le théâtre d'efforts visant à développer les économies touristiques locales pour transcender des modes de vie agraires stigmatisés et (re) constituer des communautés. Nous nous appuyons sur des études anthropologiques portant sur les aspirations pour explorer la manière dont les visions de l'avenir post-agraire agissent, au présent, sur les acteurs, les échelles et les paramètres politiques en milieu rural. À l’aide de deux études de cas, nous observons comment les acteurs étatiques ont reformulé leur rôle en fonction d’imaginaires post-agraires, modifiant partiellement les termes de la légitimité de l’État en zones rurales.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural politics
• agrarian change
• anthropology of aspirations
• tourism
• Ecuador

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the residents of Playas de Cuyabeno and Quilotoa for sharing their time and stories. We would like to thank Mattias Borg Rasmussen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Rune Bolding Bennike and Christian Lund for organising the workshop “Agrarian Distress, Rural Aspirations: Exploring Capitalist Transformations and Institutional Reordering” at the University of Copenhagen. Mattias Borg Rasmussen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Benjamin Rubin and two anonymous reviewers provided valuable feedback on multiple drafts of this paper.

Notes on contributors

Angus Lyall is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research centres on the politics of development and natural resources in Ecuador. Recent publications have appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers; Culture, Theory, and Critique; and Development and Change. He is a member of the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador.

Since 1991, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld has written and taught about community economies and cultural change in the context of globalisation. His most recent book is Fast, Easy and in Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy (with Jason Antrosio, Chicago 2015). He is currently the Senior Associate Dean for Social Sciences and Global Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Joe Quick is a lecturer of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha. His research explores the grounded actions and global contexts of indigenous development in highland Ecuador, particularly the ways that institutions grow and change in response to larger histories of social-political-economic exclusion and conditional inclusion. His work may be found in the Latin American Research Review and the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity.

ORCID

Angus C. Lyall http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9199-5415

Joe Quick http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0452-9505

Notes

1 See Rasmussen (2020) in this issue for an ethnographic study of the communal organisation of non-agrarian enterprises in Andean Peru as well as Jakobsen and Nielsen (2020) for their discussion of compounding aspirations, also in this issue.

2 In Playas del Cuyabeno, one author engaged in semi-structured interviews and participant observation while farming, contributing to community work projects and teaching in the high school for extended periods. In Quilotoa, the other two authors engaged in less participation and, instead, dedicated time and resources to surveys, semi-structured interviews and observation in community assemblies.

3 In such frontier spaces as the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, state actors have frequently tried to take natural resources prior to seeking consent or legitimacy, despite national and international legislation regarding indigenous rights to free, prior and informed consent (Rasmussen and Lund 2018).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hayes [P022A1600-41-006 and P022A130013-004], a Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation Field Research Grant, a Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, a Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative’s Digital Humanities Fellowship and Digital Dissertation Fellowship, and the departments of Geography and Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill.