Ethnicity and the State

Judith D. Toland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351294584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Modern states have evolved as complex political structures in which unitary forms of government maintain an uncertain equilibrium with ethnically plural societies. Historically, ruling elites have tried with little success to eradicate ethnicity through genocide, bury it under accusations of tribalism, discredit it with the mind-frame of modernization, or confine it to local rather than national political arenas. This broad-ranging volume examines the dynamics of ethnic manipulation and accommodation by dominant and subordinate groups in the state-building process.

Ethnicity and the State reflects the widely varying political contexts and cultures in which reasons of state contend with unyielding ethnic allegiances. European, South American, Asian, and Middle Eastern examples reveal a consistent set of themes and attitudes. The authors find that while the state must realize its authority and stability through a strictly defined charter of rights and values, ethnic identity exercises its power more freely and flexibly. The sense of peoplehood may be artificially constructed in response to immediate need, or it may be ancient and organic, growing over time. It has the potential to cut across race, class, and gender. Its central tenets and myths may be reinterpreted, recreated, enlarged upon, or modified as the political situation warrants. Flexibility of belief and the need to identify with a larger group account both for the durability of ethnic loyalty and its vulnerability to manipulation.

This volume is particularly timely at a moment when national governments in many parts of the world must face the adoption of more equitable forms of rule to hold their ethnically diverse societies together. Taken together, the analyses presented here warn against institutionalizing ethnic strife and offer a vision of how the state may foster expectations and policies that serve the interests of all ethnic groups within their borders. Political scientists, historians, and anthropologists will find this book valuable for its interpretations of forces that continue to reshape the social and political fabric of the world.

1

Nationalism and Ethnicity: Images of Ecuadorian Indians and the Imagemakers at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Blanca Muratorio

No matter how democratically the members of

the elite are chosen (usually not very) or how

deeply divided among themselves they may be

(usually more than outsiders imagine), they

justify their existence and order their actions in

terms of a collection of stories, ceremonies,

insignia, formalities, and appurtenances that

they have inherited or, in more revolutionary

situations, invented.

—Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma”

By royal decree, in 1891 Spain invited American and European countries to Madrid to commemorate the fourth centenary of the discovery of America. The center of the celebration was occupied by two joint historical exhibitions that opened in El Palacio de la Biblioteca y Museos Nacionales in October 1892. One was the Historic American Exposition, intended to illustrate the state of civilization of the New World in the pre-Columbian, Columbian, and post-Columbian periods. The other, the Historic European Exposition, was to exhibit “the evidences of the civilization of Europe at the time when the New World was discovered and colonized” (Report 1895).¹ In addition, at the request of the Royal Commission in charge of the celebrations, the American countries were encouraged to “reproduce” in the Parque de Madrid some “primitive dwellings or monuments” and to send (live) “Indians to inhabit them” (Informe 1892).² In preparation for the Historic American Exposition, the Ecuadorian Organizing Committee (Junta Directiva) had to request funds from Congress and consequently to justify the characteristics and merits as well as the cost of the objects and Indians that were to be sent to represent the country. One such request is made in a document presented to the Ecuadoran Congress in 1892 by the minister of the interior and foreign affairs, Leonidas Pallares Arteta, who was also chief delegate of the Ecuadoran committee in charge of the exhibit (Informe 1892). Further information on the Ecuadoran participation on the Exposition was obtained from the General Catalogue (Catálogo 1893).

This essay will examine the explicit and the unspoken yet unhidden images of Ecuadoran Indians represented in those documents and at the Madrid exhibition. The dominant visual images of Ecuadoran Indians (mostly in engravings, drawings, and water colors) circulating among intellectuals, artists, and other powerful producers of public images at the turn of the century, undoubtedly contributed to the construction of the images apparent in the documents. They also seem to have influenced the selection and hierarchization of the artifacts actually presented at the exhibition. I will argue that those narrative and visual images of the Indians became incorporated as important elements in the political rhetoric of an emerging nationalist ideology. It was articulated by those class groups who, at the turn of the century, were in a position to use the power of the state to write the text and to shape cultural traditions. I will then attempt to contextualize those images by providing the socioeconomic and political characterization of the period in Ecuadoran history when those representations were made and “used.” That is, how and why they were incorporated or excluded from a more comprehensive image the Ecuadoran elite was forging of the country as a whole, both as an emerging nation state (since 1830) before the mother country and the rest of Europe, and as a viable economic player in the international market. Blessed by an increasingly profitable cacao boom at the turn of the century, the new coastal bourgeoisie in control of the state was looking to the outside world to gain legitimacy as a “civilized” society. It was trying to construct its own cultural hegemony in an era when commercial success and cultural progress were perceived to be closely intertwined. The tradition that the Ecuadoran elite “invented” for the country at that particular time was intended to convey this message, and was manufactured primarily for external, not internal consumption. Two world’s fairs (Paris 1889 and Chicago 1893) as well as the Madrid Exposition—which is our particular concern here—provided an irresistible ritual stage to display and test this developing feeling of a new national self. However, in analyzing this particular historical instance in the social construction of national identity it becomes evident that “mestizaje”—the concept of Ecuador as a nation of mixed bloods—Indians and Europeans—begins to emerge as one of the important “master fictions” (Geertz 1985) of the new political order. Since then, mestizaje became the “ethnic component” in the larger discourse of nationalism, significant for both external and internal consumption. Although it served to legitimize their domination, subordinate groups participated in maintaining this master fiction, until its own contradictions provided the basis for their own autonomous ethnic consciousness and resistance.³

As Sider has noted, “[t]he process of domination imposes a dialogue between dominators and dominated. Each must speak to the other for the economic and political transactions to occur” (1987, 22, emphasis added). As part of an ideology of domination, however, mestizaje hides this dialogue by turning it into a monologue—the monologue of the Self who has incorporated the Other or is in the process of doing so. It creates the illusion that the Other, as forged by the dominator, can be brought into the “imagined community”—the useful term by which Benedict Anderson (1983) refers to national social identities—through the doorway of “natural” ties. As such, the ideology of mestizaje is riddled by the same contradiction that Sider sees as the fundamental one in the colonial encounter between Europeans and Indians: a contradiction between the [European] “impossibility and the necessity of creating the other as the other—the different, the alien—and incorporating the other within a single social and cultural system of domination” (1987, 7).

While master fictions remain the unchallenged first principles of a political order, they have the power to make “any given hierarchy appear natural and just to rulers and ruled” (Wilentz 1985, 4). Like other master fictions, mestizaje was invented by the dominant turn-of-the-century elites for the subordinate peoples in order to hide and maintain the asymmetrical relations of power between whites and Indians that they had inherited from the colonial administration. As the “ethnic master fiction” in the official ideology of nationalism, mestizaje remained unchallenged until the 1970s. It is in this decade when indigenous organizations started to publicly contest it by advocating a new imagined community that conceives of Ecuador as a country embodying a plurality of autonomous nationalities.

The Narrative Images and Their Display

In his capacity as chief delegate of the Organizing Committee, Mr. Pallares Arteta was in charge of collecting, buying, and organizing all the exhibits to be sent to the Historic American Exposition. The participation of Ecuador is regarded in his report to Congress as “a very special testimony of love, deference and gratitude to Columbus” and to the “heroic Spanish nation” that “gave him her unquestioned support” and “brought [us] civilization and Christianity.” ⁴ It is also considered a matter of national honor, since Ecuador has to show the Mother Country that “the conquered nations are now powerful and flourishing,” and “have finally deserved the seed of civilization [she] planted in the New World.” The report is rich in such rhetorical imagery about the country and its distinguished citizens as well as its generous foreign friends, all of whom have contributed to the exhibition with their intellectual productions and private collections.⁵

It is precisely the rhetoric of historical texts like this that provides clues to the process by which the dominant groups produce and reproduce their hegemonic cultural meanings by incorporating, ignoring, or suppressing the symbol systems of the dominated groups. The document also describes in detail several “important Inca and Caras” artifacts, the collection of medals and coins, and other “minor and ornamental” objects all of which will be included in the Ecuadoran Hall at the exposition. Finally, the author supplies us with two vivid and contrasting images of contemporary Ecuadoran Indians: the “savages,” of whom the “Jíbaro” and the “Záparo” are given as examples, and the “Indians from Otavalo.” These two images emerge in the narrative text through the “compelling” reasons given by Pallares Arteta point by point to explain to the congressmen why the first group of Indians should not be sent to the Parque de Madrid to be housed in the “primitive dwellings,” and why the second constitutes “the most suitable group” for that exhibit.

To start with, the “savages” will never be convinced of the need and advantages of the trip. Even if they were, they would most certainly cause “serious inconveniences” for the person in charge, given the fact that their “dullness” and “stubbornness” prevent them from following any instructions. Besides, they don’t speak Spanish and not even Quichua, “they are good for nothing,” “lack the most elementary notions of civility, morality or decency,” are “too fond of alcohol” (an obvious embarrassment to the government if caught by the police). Moreover, they would not even be able to perform their job of “keeping the dwellings neat and tidy.” By contrast, despite the fact that the Otavalo Indians are not “pure,” according to Mr. Pallares, they remain “outstanding” for their “correct features,” their “above-average height” and “their vigorous forms,” characteristics that they allegedly have “preserved” from their “Caras” ancestors. In addition, they are “intelligent, hard working, sober, of good manners and accustomed to neatness, order and cleanliness.” Most important, however, the Otavaleños have “special abilities” such as their “San Juan dances,” their “ball game” (similar to the “most popular Spanish Jai-Alai”), and their totora boats with which they could sail the lakes of the Madrid Park. All these exotic talents would not only attract and entertain the public, but the small fee that would be charged for this entertainment, may “even help to pay for all the expenses incurred in transporting and housing the Indians themselves” (Informe 1892).

The section of the General Catalogue (Catálogo 1893) of the exhibit devoted to Ecuador⁶ contains a long introduction presenting the “official” history of the country from its pre-Columbian past to the present, and an itemized list of the 1,327 artifacts included in the different collections exhibited. The great majority of those items are pre-Columbian artifacts designated under the all-inclusive category of “Incásicos.” Among them one should note a facsimile of Inga Pirca “Palace” in wood, commissioned especially for the occasion, by Mr. Pallares in Cuenca, five figures excavated from San Pablo, which were very “similar to the Egyptian mummies,” and a large stone found in the province of Manabí “with resonant qualities” reported to have been used by the “Caras” Indians to sound warnings. Dr. Antonio Flores, who had finished his term as president of Ecuador in 1892, was president of the exposition commission. He personally presented a collection of twenty ethnographic artifacts “belonging to the Jíbaro tribe” that included mostly necklaces, feather crowns, and feather earrings, and that had been “presented to him while President of the Republic by the Cacique Charupe, Chief of the Macas tribe.” Another private collection included a “life size figure of a Jíbaro Indian with two sets of dresses” and a specimen of a “desiccated and shrunken head of a Jíbaro Indian called Tamaguari, chief of an Oriente tribe, Canelos, year 1590.” To complete the “ethnographic” exhibit there were a series of “curiosities” of contemporary Indians exhibited all together in one large panoply, and four “paintings of Indian customs.”

In the text of the introduction, which contains the official history of the country, the author (anonymous) incorporates an already existing “mythic history” (see Murra 1963, 792) most probably invented in the eighteenth century by the Jesuit Juan de Velasco “for reasons of regional chauvinism” (see Salomon 1981, 433). This invented history refers to the “Caras” (Cara or Caranqui tribe or nation) as the first civilizers of Ecuador, who, after entering through the coast proceeded to build an empire. According to the author, the “Caras” conquered the inhabitants of the kingdom of Quito who allegedly were living in “a state of barbarism.” Soon after the Inca conquest of Ecuador, the “Caras” princess Paccha was married to Huayna Capac and Atahuallpa the last Inca emperor was her son. The Incas themselves are presented in this conjectural history as possessing “great noble character,” and their religion “although erroneous,” is not considered “bloodthirsty,” since the sacrifices performed by them “corresponded to the gentleness of their beliefs.” In sum, the image of the Incas is that of “a very advanced civilization.”

The only other powerful image of Ecuador present in this introduction takes the reader into the contemporary scene, not in the Highlands but on the Coast, and specifically in the city of Guayaquil. There one can find “several banks enjoying solid credit,” “a vertiginous commercial life,” and a place where “all the people are well off due to the abundance of well remunerated work.” Finally, this “main port of the Republic” is reported to export “more than half a million quintals o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Dialogue of Self and Other: Ethnicity and the Statehood Building Process
• 1. Nationalism and Ethnicity: Images of Ecuadorian Indians and the Imagemakers at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
• 2. Ethnicity and the State: The Hua Miao of Southwest China
• 3. Ethnicity and the Security Forces of the State: The South Asian Experience
• 4. Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Role of the Intellectual
• 5. Ethnicity and the State in Northern Ireland
• 6. Batak Heritage and the Indonesian State: Print Literacy and the Construction of Ethnic Cultures in Indonesia
• 7. Ethnicity and State-Building: The Case of the Palestinians in the Middle East
• 8. Jewish Ethnicity in Israel: Ideologies, Policies, and Outcomes
• 9. Conclusion: Ethnicity, the State, and Moral Order
• About the Contributors
• Index