Historical Disruptions and Heritage: A History of Development One of the most disturbing elements of the heritage and human rights global agenda is its eerie similarity with the development project. Perhaps as the Mexican Nobel Laureate, Octavio Paz, stated, anthropology is the conscience of the West; that in one way or another, these are all internal mechanisms of capitalism that surface to attempt to alleviate the system’s unethical destruction of peoples and environment for capital accumulation and surplus. Although ironic, as an anthropologist I am even less hopeful than Paz.As I have outlined elsewhere in terms of my research in Ecuador, the CONAIE is itself one of the most successful development projects to date (Benavides 2004). It has been able to muster financial and symbolic support from international NGOs, and its environmental and human rights agenda supports its critical positioning within contemporary global relationships. However, it is also in this fashion that the Ecuadorian Indian movement faces an enormous challenge – for in this alternative Indian version there is an embryonic element, by necessity, that seeks to represent its own version as a hegemonic history in similar terms but with a different context to the official version being contested (Wylie 1995; Chatterjee 1986).The Indian movement finds itself on a political tightrope: at one level it strongly opposes the IMF and the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies, yet at another level it consistently supports the development project being funded and planned by the World Bank. The movement continues to relate to the double nature of the World Bank’s economic agenda without explicitly entertaining the idea that the development funds so badly needed by the country originate from the unequal globalization processes that overwhelmingly limit and dominate the third world’s economic production.At the same time, the recent Indian identity espoused by the movement is itself partly a result of modern capitalist globalization processes (Benavides 2004). Only this political and economic reality would justify the Indian movement’s support by foreign NGOs and other First World institutions. This same “westernization” support of Indian identity makes the movement’s relationship with its historically constituted enemies, the Catholic Church and the military, much more understandable. After 500 years of painful evangelization, the Indians have finally come full circle and are making use of the very religious institution that was initially implicated in the ethnocide and genocide of Indians (Native Americans) throughout the continent.
History and heritage enable Indians today in Ecuador to employ an ethnic identity that was the cause of their domination. Therefore, Indians are able to parlay their ethnic oppression as cultural capital to obtain funds, political recognition, and other resources from First World nations, many of which were once (and still are) perpetrators of their own cultural destruction. Native struggles, development schemes, and democratization plans are entangled retransformations of old uneven political alliances between First and Third World forces (Hall 1997). To this degree, the Indian movement is not a representative of some pristine cultural authenticity but rather a “reconversing” of previous social symbols and meaning in contemporary terms (García-Canclini 1992).
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