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Intercultural Indians, multicultural Mestizas : developing gender and identity in neoliberal Ecuador
textIn Ecuador and elsewhere in developing Latin America, femininity and
indigenousness are the subjects of multicultural development methodologies of identity
and gender "training", such as capacity building, education, and participation. This
dissertation considers how neoliberal economic and political shifts affect actors in these
development projects for indigenous women of Eastern Ecuador. At the same time, it
shows how this "neoliberal multiculturalism" shapes and limits efforts to create social
and economic justice for indigenous women. In this feminist ethnography,
development participants express politics of identity among transnationalized spaces of
indigenous political interests, racial and gender ideologies, economic and political
crises, and donor shifts of funding, methodologies and target populations. This
manuscript critically analyzes multicultural development discourses, such as
interculturality, identity, participation, and gender through their articulation and
practice, where these performances are theorized as expression of "development desire".
Development's ground level intermediaries, "Intercultural Indians", bear a burden of
mediating development and identity, and show how power productively works through
historical subjects to racisms and patriarchies. "Multicultural Mestizas" are
development professionals who employ identity and gender development models upon
indigenous women. They ambiguously benefit from a patriarchal and racist mestizaje
ideology. Indigenous politics and development practices come together in a form of
neoliberal multiculturalism that provokes national anxieties about emergent national
configurations of race and gender.Anthropolog