Ethnicity, development and gender: Tsáchila indigenous women in Ecuador

In recent decades, indigenous populations have become the subjects and agents of development in national and international multicultural policy that acknowledges poverty among indigenous peoples and their historic marginalization from power over development. Although the impact of these legal and programmatic efforts is growing, one persistent axis of disadvantage, male–female difference, is rarely taken into account in ethno-development policy and practice. This article argues that assumptions that inform policy related to indigenous women fail to engage with indigenous women's development concerns. The institutional separation between gender and development policy (GAD) and multiculturalism means that provisions for gender in multicultural policies are inadequate, and ethnic rights in GAD policies are invisible. Drawing on post-colonial feminism, the paper examines ethnicity and gender as interlocking systems that structure indigenous women's development experiences. These arguments are illustrated in relation to the case of the Tsáchila ethno-cultural group in the South American country of Ecuador.     

Gendered frontiers of land control: indigenous territory,women and contests over land in Ecuador

Agricultural and rural land has become the site of considerable policy, governmental and scholarly concern worldwide because of violence and dispossession, food insecurity and contests over private property regimes. Such issues are highly gendered in territories with majorities of indigenous populations where overlapping legal regimes (statutory, multicultural, customary) and histories of dispossession have created complex spatialities and access patterns. States' formalization of indigenous rights, neoliberal restructuring and land appropriation are the backdrop to Ecuadorian women's struggles to access, retain and pass on land. Despite a burgeoning literature on Latin American indigenous territories, women are often invisible. Using collaborative research among two indigenous nationalities, the article analyses the political–economic, legal and de facto regimes shaping women's claims to land and indigenous territory. Focusing on Kichwa women in the rural Andes and Tsáchila women in a tropical export-oriented agricultural frontier area, the article examines the criteria and exclusionary practices that operate at multiple scales to shape women's (in)security in tenure. Women's struggles over claims to land and territory are also discussed. The article argues that Latin America's fraught land politics requires a gendered account of indigenous land–territoriality to unpack the cultural bias of western feminist accounts of multiculturalism and to document the racialized gender bias across socio-institutional relations.     

Ethnodevelopment: Social Movements, Creating Experts and Professionalising Indigenous Knowledge in Ecuador

Indigenous social movements have become important development actors in recent years. As the targets of "socially inclusive" neoliberal policies and protagonists in global anti‐capitalist movements, the position of these social movements in mainstream development is often ambivalent. This ambivalence reflects contradictions between economic neoliberalism and goals of social development as well as different understandings and practices in development‐with‐identity. We explore the relationship between the institutionalisation of ethnodevelopment and the creation of indigenous experts through indigenous social movements' engagement in popular training that emphasises indigenous knowledge. Drawing on Michael Watt's notion of governable spaces of indigeneity, we examine how institutionalisation is occurring in a range of ways that establish new alliances and cut across scales. Analysing the politics occurring at the development policy interface, we focus on the processes of representation, negotiation and embodiment involved in indigenous professionalisation, as activism shapes "scaled up" policy making.     

Mapuche youth between exclusion and the future: protest,civic society and participation in Chile

In Chile, indigenous Mapuche teenagers are caught in a deadlock between, on the one hand, parental aspirations and neo-liberal educational processes, and on the other, affective and social ties to a racialized and often stigmatized indigenous population and landscapes. The paper draws on the concept of vital conjuncture [Johnson-Hanks, J. 2002. “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 865–880] to explore the contradictions facing youth in transitions to adulthood [Jeffrey, C. 2010. “Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of Life.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (4): 496–505.] and to consider the spatial–territorial dynamics through which these contractions are expressed [Smith, S. H. 2012. “‘In the Heart, There's Nothing’: Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory.” Transactions of the IBG 38 (4): 572–585]. The paper explores young indigenous rural secondary students' understandings of their life trajectories and socio-political conjunctures. The paper shows that although indigenous young people express aspirations and even hope regarding their futures [cf. Kraftl, P. 2008. “Young People, Hope and Childhood-Hope.” Space and Culture 11 (2): 81–92], these expressions are best analysed in the context of ongoing racial exclusions, and the emotionally freighted situation this places them in regarding ties to indigenous communities and family members. Drawing on one year's in-depth qualitative research, the paper outlines the beliefs, practices and identities of rural Mapuche youth subjects caught between parents' experiences, and the Chile they want to inhabit with jobs, status and opportunity. The paper argues that vital conjunctures are not singular moments of modern historical ‘events', as they have tended to be construed in the previous literature. Rather, vital conjunctures arise from and directly engage longer-term histories, not least in contexts of the global South where postcolonial exclusion occurs.     

Dendrochronology reveals the construction history of an early 19th century farm settlement,southwestern Virginia,USA

The McDonald Farm (also called the Anderson-Doosing Farm) in Catawba Valley, Virginia dates to 1789 and is registered with the National Register of Historic Places maintained by the National Park Service. According to written accounts, oral histories, and architectural analyses, the construction of four structures (a collapsed cabin, a standing cabin, a barn, and a smokehouse) at the farm likely occurred in the early to mid-19th century. To verify and refine the construction dates of the four structures, we absolutely dated the tree rings in logs used in their construction by comparing their ring patterns with a composite reference tree-ring chronology created from four regional locations. We used established graphical and statistical techniques used in dendrochronology to ensure that all tree rings were dated absolutely with 99.99% certainty. We found cutting dates for the collapsed cabin ranged from 1809 to 1810, making the likely builder Samuel Myers and not Joseph Anderson, who is currently given credit for its construction. The logs in the barn had cutting dates ranging from 1830 to 1831, confirming the 1830 construction date estimated by the historical documents and confirming the builder was Joseph Anderson. The logs from the standing cabin and smokehouse had cutting dates ranging from 1838 to 1840, refining the “mid-19th century construction” listed in the register nomination. Furthermore, the nomination gave credit of the construction of these latter two structures also to Joseph Anderson, but the builder was actually John Gish who owned the farm from 1837 to 1845. Our study demonstrates the benefit and reliability of using dendrochronology to verify and refine construction dates and ownership histories of historic structures in the Southeastern U.S.     

Indigenous Professionalization: Transnational Social Reproduction in the Andes

Indigenous professionalization is occurring throughout Latin America at an increasing pace as new careers open up in social development. Under what is heralded as socially inclusive neoliberalism, a "development with identity" paradigm is producing new university courses focused on indigenous issues. Influenced by discourses of social and human capital and addressing intersections of multiculturalism and development, these courses mobilize and help shape definitions of indigeneity; they also create spaces where donors and indigenous activists contest and debate understandings of development. Operating in a range of institutions, indigenous professionalization courses are led by a small elite group of academics and practitioners who move between programs and countries. Students also move transnationally. We argue that these courses, their classrooms and their curricula are intent on understanding intercultural situations transnationally, galvanizing international funding and support from bilateral and multilateral agencies as well as local and state actors. The social reproduction of indigenous professionalization is therefore transnational, yet grounded. At times, indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced by jumping scale; at other times, it works through established social and spatial hierarchies. This essay examines how indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced as a contested process through which notions of "good" and "culturally appropriate" development are constituted and consolidated.