The evolving force of community: peasant uprisings and post-agrarian aspirations in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

Studies often suggest that the thrust of peasant politics is the advancement of autonomous family farming. Such studies seem remote in rural places where migration, pluriactivity, and non-agrarian jobs and aspirations are the norm. We examine peasant politics in rural Ecuador, where peasant communities have driven nationwide uprisings in recent years. We find that many peasant community organizations cultivate political legitimacy among their members by advancing diverse, non-agrarian objectives, rather than autonomous farming. We argue that researchers stand to learn much about peasant politics by attending to precisely how agrarian livelihoods and post-agrarian aspirations weave together to (re)produce rural institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-agrarian
• peasant politics
• Ecuador
• peasant community
• pluriactivity
• autonomy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our research participants for sharing their views and experiences with us over the last three decades. We would also thank Christian Lentz, Jeremy Rayner, Claire Nicklin, Israel Navarrete, and Patrick Clark, as well as the reviewers and editors at the Journal of Peasant Studies, for their insights and recommendations on distinct versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics committee approval

Research for this article was conducted under the oversight of the Institutional Review Board at UNC-Chapel Hill (study #: 23-1658).

Notes

1 The ‘peasantry’ is generally understood to be comprised of smallholder farmers who rely on household labor, although ‘peasant’ is also a social and political identity, as we will discuss in the third section (see Edelman 2013; Harris 2023).

2 ‘Declaration of Rights of Peasants - Women and Men,’ 2009, www.viacampesina.net/downloads/PDF/EN-3.pdf.

3 Researchers attentive to everyday economic activities have also documented rural-urban migrations and the rise of ‘informal’ or ‘popular’ urban economies (Babb 2019; Müller and Dürr 2019).

4 In 2023, we formally requested a complete listing of comunas from the Ministry of Agriculture but discovered that this data is collected and stored by district offices. The central office was able to provide us with a partial list of 1,555 comunas in Ecuador that were either currently registered or in process of registration.

5 All translations are our own, unless otherwise noted.

6 The peasantry today represents more than 600 million farms globally or 53% of agricultural land (Graeub et al. 2016, 1). Thus, the words of Wallerstein (1983) still ring true: ‘What is surprising is not that there has been so much proletarianization, but there has been so little’ (23).

7 We emphasize that post-agrarian aspirations shape personal and collective actions and investments in the present, although they do not necessary generate post-agrarian futures – in fact, they often do not.

8 A 2022 special edition of the Journal of Agrarian Change examined autonomy in terms of anti-capitalism, anti-state, and anti-development positions (Vergara-Camus and Jansen 2022). In the Journal of Peasant Studies, Borras (2023) defined Critical Agrarian Studies, in part, in terms of its interest in the political ‘autonomy’ (450) of marginalized rural sectors.

9 As Wolf (1966) noted long ago, the story of any given peasant community ‘cannot be explained in terms of that village alone; the explanation must include consideration both of the outside forces impinging on these villages and of the reactions of villagers to these forces’ (1).

10 For a discussion of the meanings and appropriations of the concept ‘buen vivir’ or good living in Ecuador, see Lyall, Colloredo-Mansfeld, and Rousseau (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angus Lyall

Angus Lyall is a political geographer who studies uneven development in Latin America through the lens of resource governance and rural livelihoods. He is a member of the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador and an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) in Quito, Ecuador. Recent publications have appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers; Development and Change; and Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment.

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld is a cultural anthropologist who studies community economies and cultural change under globalization. He is a Professor of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. His books include Fast, Easy and in Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy (with Jason Antrosio, Chicago 2015); Fighting Like A Community: Andean Civil Society in an Era of Indian Uprisings (Chicago 2009); and The Native Leisure Class: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes (Chicago 1999).