2000 - bebbington

Reencountering Development Livelihood Transitions and Place Transformationsin the Andes

Anthony Bebbington

Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol 90 No 3 (Sep 2000) pp 495-520

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Reencountering Development Livelihood Transitions and Place

Transformations in the Andes A n t h o n y Bebbington

Department of Geography University of Colorado at Boulder

Neither poststructural nor neoliberal interpretations of development capture the full extent and complexity of rural transformations in the Andes Poststructural critiques tend to view develop ment as a process of cultural destruction and homogenization while neoliberal interpretations identify a different development failure that inheres in inefficient patterns of resource use and the nonviability of large parts of the Andean peasantry In each case the state is seen as a problem as an agent of dominating modernization or as a brake on market-led transformation The paper reviews these positions in the light of the transformations in governance livelihoods and landscape that have occurred in the regions of Colta Guamote and Otavalo all centers of indigenous Quichua populations in the Ecuadorian Andes These transformations question the accuracy of arguments about cultural destruction or nonviability Instead they suggest that people have built economically viable livelihood strategies that while neither agricultural nor necessar ily rural allow people to sustain a link with rural places and in turn allow the continued reproduction of these places as distinctively Quichua The cases also point to the increased indigenous control of political civil and economic institutions and the important roles that development interventions including those of the state have played in fostering this control In sum this sug gests the need for more nuanced interpretations of development that emphasize human agency and the room to maneuver that can exist within otherwise constraining institutions and struc tures It also suggests the value of placing livelihood and the coproduction of place at the center of any interpretation of the processes and effects of rural development Key Words critical development geography livelihood place Andes social movements

Whether seen as pioneering biting development and its official institutions Neolib- or an opportunity lost (respectively era1 interpretations similarly see little cumula- Peet and Watts 1996b 17 Cooper tive benefit from state intervention in rural

and Packard 1997 15 Lehmann 1997 568) Ar- areas In much ofLatin America such approaches turo Escobars work (1984 1988 1991 1995) increasingly argue that large parts of-the peas- has stirred the worlds of critical geography and antry (or campesinado) are no longer viable in development studies Emblematic of a broader the face of a globalizing market economy Thus poststructural critique of development Escobars while in the poststructuralist critique the state analysis falls within a long and distinguished tra- and development are viewed as the aggressive dition that sees little possibility of improvements agents of modernization according to neoliberal in human well-being without radical political critiques they have largely stood in the way of economic change His work questions the possi- the transformative and modernizing potential bility of building or even imagining alternatives of the market This leads to recommendations from within the current languages and institu- for further liberalization of market-based resource tions of d e ~ e l o p m e n t ~ allocation from the constraints placed on it by Indeed it suggests that these very institutions and languages are deeply state and customary institutions That such lib- implicated in processes of cultural destruction eralization would fuel a redistribution of rural

Poststructural critiques are not alone in pos- resources (especially land and water) to more ing profound and critical questions about rural competitive and larger economic agents and a

Anmk of the Assoaation of Amencan Geographers 90(3) 2000 p 495-520 02000 by Assoclatlon of Amer~can Geographers Puhl~shed hy Blackwell Publ~shers 350 Maln Street Malden MA 02148 and 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JE UK

Bebbington

concomitant movement of campesinos out of agriculture and rural areas is deemed desirable on efficiency grounds

While empirically and normatively dubious such interpretations command far more political influence than do poststructural ones This makes it that much more imvortant to build a counternarrative that meets them on their own turf while questioning many of their supposi- tions on conceptual and empirical grounds Yet in this sense poststructural positions are trou- blesome By finding so little that is recoverable within the practice of development by failing to address in any detail the economic dimensions of alternatives and above all by not exploring the diversity of development processes and outcomes they fail to develop the empirical bases of a ~ossible counternarrative Furthermore when subjected to empirical interrogation the categorical assertions of such positions appear overstated in turn suggesting theoretical weaknesses As a result and however unintentionally they cede ground to neoliberal interpretations and the types of programs that might derive from them

That poststructural critiques give little attention to alternatives and leave so little space for a continuing dialogue with the development experience to date is largely a consequence of their emphasis on discursive ~r i t ique ~ Interpretations of development and its alternatives might differ if they were based on ethnographic and historical analyses of the ways in which development interventions and market transactions become part of a longer sedimented history of a place and its linkages with the wider world (Moore 1999 Massey 1994) Indeed if we look at histories of places rather than of discourses and trace actual processes of livelihood and landscape transformation and the institutional interventions that have accompanied them it becomes easier to identifv elements of feasible development alternatives Germs of these alternatives have already been elaborated at the intersection of popular practices and external interventions albeit in quite unanticipated ways In this sense I will use discussions of regional transformations in highland Ecuador to point to problems (as well as strengths) in the normative positions and analytical tools of both neoliberal and poststructural interpretations These observations will provide a basis for building theory that draws on insights of each type of interpretation and that helps identify ways forward for a far more geographical theory of devel-

opment revolving around notions of place and livelihood Indeed the implication is that a more comprehensive development theory has to be built at the interface of geography and history

To make these claims the first section of the paper lays out elements of recent poststructural and neoliberal interpretations of rural development in the Andean region subjecting them to critical scrutiny on conceptual grounds4 The second section then subjects these interpretations to empirical scrutiny through a comparative analysis of regional transformations in three localities in highland Ecuador Colta Guamote and Otavalo It quickly becomes apparent that it is impossible to judge the development experience of these places through the blunt interpretations of either type of critique These are places where outmigration and land-degradation have been accompanied by increased indigenous control of everything from municipal government to regional textile markets to bus companies They are places where increased consumption of modern commodities has come together with the emergence of assertive and ever more ethnically self-conscious social organizations More generally as the economic geography of these regions has changed so new and changing cultural practices have also been played out creating landscapes that continue to be distinctive and indeed alternative to modern capitalist landscapes even as they incorporate many ideas practices and technologies of modernity

The third section teases out certain patterns across these cases Overall profound transformations in the social relations that structure access to resources and power have accompanied and contributed to the development of these places So also has a progressive expansion of grassroots influence and control over the processes through which these places are produced and governed These changes appear to be as much a result of the external interventions of state programs NGOs and churches as they are an effect of popular initiative The transformations and interventions involved are then too complex and contingent to be judged simply as normatively desirable or not as success or failure as development or destruction They also question the accuracy of frameworks that work with relatively unitary and unproblema- tized notions of state market and community

The final section of the paper draws out implications for theory It suggests that cases such as those discussed here lay the bases for encoun-

497 Reencountering Development

tering a notion of development that is at once alternative and developmentalist critical and practicable Indeed this is the larger goal Criti- cal development research has so often been vulnerable to the charge of impracticability because its normative concerns and profound critique of mainstream notions of development have blunted empirical inquiry into whether the practice of development indeed had the effects that this critique anticipated and whether popular practices indeed carried the germs of the same utopias as those implied by this theory Too often this led to theory without actors (and therefore without entry points into practice) and alternatives that required forms of structural change that in the short-to-medium terms seemed improbable at best (Booth 1994) If re-search engaged with questions of practice- both popular and bureaucratic-it might become apparent that the goals meaning and power relationships underlying development often differ from those imputed by much development theory Power meaning and institutions are constantly being negotiated and these nego- tiations open up spaces for potentially profound social and institutional change Understanding how these spaces open and how they are used is a critical research challenge and will take us beyond some of the oppositions that haunt much development theory

Critiques of Development in the Andes

The analytical tools and normative concerns of poststructural and neoliberal critiques of development (critiques that Cooper and Packard [1997 2-31 term respectively postmodernist and ultramodernist) differ profoundly At one level these differences are part of a far long- standing split in development studies between critical Marxian and sociocultural interpretations and more developmentalist approaches informed by neoclassical economics and ratio- nal choice theory Neoliberal approaches aim to understand the means through which resources can be most efficiently allocated to maximize their economic productivity In their purest sense they therefore criticize interventions that support rural producers on criteria other than competitiveness as diversions from the normative goal of efficiency maximization In this view people are producers and consumers of value-a

value assessed in monetary terms Poststructural critiques begin from a profoundly different notion of value and of valid knowledge Valuing difference they are critical of modernizing notions of development perhaps especially neoliberalism on the grounds that they break down difference impose cultural homogenization and constitute a form of domination the project of neoliberal elobalization revresents the most re- -cent of such discourses and contains within it the attempted subordination of different modes of thought and interpretation (Slater 1997 274)

Yet ironically these critiques converge to a considerable degree around other claims each declares that oXhodox develo~ment has failed and that official development bureaucracies are deeply implicated in this failure each relies largely on externally defined criteria to judge this failure and each has suggested radical (as ov~osedto reformist) alternatives that involve a -decentering of the state5 These alternatives de- -rive in considerable measure from their respec- tive theoretical frameworks as well as their pri- maw concerns about the failure of mainstream development practice The poststructural critique primarily concerned with the ways in which development constitutes a form of cultural domination and homogenization seeks alternatives in the cultural and political practices of popular actors The neoliberal critique primarily concerned with the failure of development programs to foster rural growth and income generation seeks alternatives in the efficient allocation of resources that would derive from the liberalization of markets

Cowen and Shenton (1996) suggest a yet deeper sense in which the two frameworks converge They argue that both approaches (indeed all development doctrine) ultimately imply a notion of trusteeship in which one actor on the basis of their presumed pivileged understanding or institutional authority determines on behaif of others the direction in which development should proceed In apportioning trusteeship to agents who are ultimately not the citizenry such frameworks they suggest frustrate the possibility of autonomous human impr~vement~

Development as Knowledge-Power Regime Poststructural Critiques

While not alone in pursuing a critique of development informed by Foucault in particular

498 Bebbington

and post structural theory more generally Esco- bars has been the most sustained critical project (Escobar 1984 1988 1991 1995 Watts and McCarthy 1997 73) In essence he claims that development represents a further elaboration of the Enlightenment project in the process im- posing Northern interests on those of the South (Escobar 1995 55- 101 Apffel-Marglin 1998 29 cf Frank 1969)7 Thus the idea of develo~ment allows for the notion hat there are DeoDie and places that are underdeveloped backwaid and poor and therefore in need of development This labeling turns them into the targets of development programs that then intervene in order to promote a particular ethnocentric notion of what it is to be developed These interventions aim to turn rural people into efficient producers and if thev do not make this transition then they oughtbe encouraged to leave the countryside produce or perish Escobar puts it (1995 157) As these instruments are not based on an understanding of the actual concerns as- -pirations and strategies of the popular sectors they inevitably fail but this merely-he suggests-justifies a further round of intervention to get it better That there is bureaucratic -complicity in development failure is argued yet more forcefully in Fergusons (1990) study of rural development in Lesotho Ferguson suggests that development failure serves the interests of the very institutions charged with implementing development because their own reproduction depends on a continued official commit- ment to development at the same time as an official belief that it has not vet been a ~ h i e v e d ~ Fergusons state like Escobars seems mono- lithic unable and unwilling to act in a way that does anything but depoliticize development and reproduce development failure (cf Moore 1999)

These critiques are not dissimilar from the dependency writing of the 1970s (Lehmann 1997 Watts and McCarthy 1997 75) though their form of analysis and imulications for strategy are different ~ependency writing empha- sized the need for change in the wider political economy (de Janvry 198 1 ) Poststructural critiques of development instead emphasize change at a more decentralized local scale9 [Tlhere are no grand alternatives that can be applied to all places or all situations and so one must resist the desire to formulate alternatives at an abstract macro level one must also resist the idea that the articulation of alternatives will

take place in intellectual and academic circles (Escobar 1995 222) Instead this articulation will occur in the alternative grassroots practices -that resist development and more generally in the practices of popular groups1deg whose organizing strategies begin to revolve more and more around two principles the defense of cultural difference and the valorization of economic needs and opportunities in terms that are not strictly those of profit and the market (Es- cobar 1995 226) For Escobar the defining features of the alternatives being pursued among these groups reside in the defense of the local identity strengthening opposition to modernizing development and the elaboration of -proposals from the context of existing con-straints (1995 226) That these are indeed the defining features of these popular practices and that thev hold out any realistic houe for feasible alternatives is however less substantiated

In framing a view of alternatives in this way Escobar is drawing-as does much work in critical anthropologies and geographies of development- on notions of the resistant peasant (cf Scott 1985)12 Such conceptualizations however have their own difficulties-in particular the ten- dencv to essentialize about ueasant motivation and to invoke voluntaristi interpretations of cultural politics But as Smith (1989) has suggested forms of peasant cultural politics are rooted deeply in the material conditions of peasant existence-in the wavs in which thev make a living Making a living making living meaningful and struggling for the rights and possibility of doing both are all related Yet the literature on resistance and alternatives tends to detach interpretations of politics of identity and place from these livelihood practices If they were reembedded and if frameworks made clearer how very situated are such practices and politics then we might anticipate forms of political behavior and responses to development that are neither necessarily resistant nor antipathetic to the logics of markets and modernity Locality might also be conceptualized differently-not as pregiven but rather as continuously pro-duced at the intersection of livelihood practices (understood as making a living and making it meaningful) local politics institutional interventions and the wider political economy Un- derstood thus place would be less something that people defended and more something whose means and practices of production they aimed to control


Such a conceptualization means foreground- ing problems of livelihood and production as much as problems of politics and power-and emphasizing negotiation and accommodation as much as resistance More generally it suggests the importance of paying more attention to agency Poor people may be discursively constructed as objects of development (or even as subaltern subjects of resistance)13 but they also act individually and collectively creating their own room for maneuver within and beyond any constraints these categories may place on them As Escobar suggests the seeds of alternatives are most likely to be found in those actions But those same actions rather than presumed analytical categories will define the contours of those alternatives and the particular ways in which they negotiate relationships with state market and civil society

Viable Andes Neoliberalism and Andean Futures

While the poststructural critique has as-sumed progressively greater force in academic debate a quite distinct critical conversation has also emerged in Latin America the discourse on viability Though the steady differentiation of a peasantry into a capitalized sector on the one hand and a landless or land-poor proletariat on the other has absorbed many pages of debate (de Janvry 1981 Lehmann 1986 Llambi 1989 Kay 1995) the significance of this discussion has increased in recent gears Driven by the rise of neoliberal agendas some have argued with increasing explicitness that there is little virtue in an uncompetitive and inefficient campesino sector14 They therefore argue that rural development programs should focus only on viable campesinos helping them to restructure their productive strategy so as to become competitive in an open market Those who are not deemed viable ought be assisted in making the transition to other livelihoods most likely in urban areas (L6pez 1995 Hojman 1998) Though voiced most explicitly in Chile where some estimate that up to half of the peasantry is not viable (see Kay 1997 Sotomayor 1994) these discussions are equally apparent elsewhere A n InterAmerican Devel- opment Bank (IDB) report for instance suggests that significant parts of the Bolivian alti-plano [high plane] are nonviable and that programs there should foster outmigration (IDB 1996)

Such interpretations have serious flaws They read the viability of rural places only in terms of economic competitiveness and likewise understand poverty only in income terms As good trustees of development (cf Cowen and Shen- ton 1996) their authors presume to prescribe for others-prescriptions rhat will clearly foster the destruction of rural ~ractices in the name of fiscal efficiencv Yet at the same time these interpretations d i point to empirically substantiated problems related to the economic dimensions of livelihoods (Mayer and Glave 1999) Studying programs of three well-respected nongovem- mental organizations (NGOs) in the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands van Niekerk (1994) con- cludes that the imuact of their interventions on incomes was less than the cost of implementing the programs Worse still a recent study of thir- teen municipalities in four departments of the Bolivian highlands suggests that 79 percent of the population perceives a decline in crop and livestock productivity with even higher rates among poorer farmers only a handful of communities perceived any impact from livestock or crop projects (VMPPFM 1998 cf Zoomers 1998) Similar if less drastic patterns also emerge from recent surveys in Ecuador which suggest declining agricultural income an in-creased reproduction squeeze on the campesi-nado and an increase in temporary migration with between twenty and fifty-five percent of males migrating (Hentschel et al 1996 Lan- jouw 1996) Within the current policy context many farms in higher drier more remote locations seem no longer able to sustain families in situ Some observers end up succumbing to the desuair of environmental determinism When all is said and done one cant change environ- -mental limitations (an official quoted in van Niekerk 1997 3 see also Hentschelet al 1996)

For all the limits of neoliberal arguments about viability in the Andes the empirical work that underlies them is therefore a reminder of real problems of production and income It high- lights the extent to which a focus on discourse misses a large part of the drama of livelihood struggles practices and dilemmas in the Andes and therefore-like neoliberal frameworks- presents a partial view of rural life Furthermore thev remind us that a failure to address the ways in which more viable livelihoods are and might be constructed only favors the ascen-dancy and hegemony of neoliberal frameworks that would ultimately endorse policies that would

500 Bebbington

have the effect of fostering the demise of the campesino sector

Ways Forward Hybrid Livelihoods and Comparative Ethnographies

Neoliberal and poststructural positions are in one sense like oil and water their political agendas normative intents and epistemological positions are quite different Partly as a consequence they emphasize different dimensions of rural livelihoods Neoliberal takes on rural development in the Andes draw our attention to the very real challenges that Andean people confront in making a living and negotiating their relationships with a range of product labor and other markets Meanwhile poststructural positions focus our attention on the ways in which rural people make living meaningful and struggle politically for spaces of autonomy and self-realization-themes on which the viability discussion and much other development research are largely silent

Yet while their normative intents make these approaches fundamentally incompatible their substantive concerns surely represent different parts of a larger whole in which rural people are engaged all the time the challenge of securing a viable way of guaranteeing the material basis of their livelihood and at the same time building something of their own If in practice people pursue these concerns at the same time then analytical approaches that pay attention primarily to one or other dimension of them are likely to work with oversimplified notions of grassroots economic and political action and of grassroots notions of developmentn and betterment In- deed I argue that if our approaches give equal weight to these different dimensions of livelihood then this can challenge notions both of viability and of development O n the one hand it shifts the notion of viability from one focusing only on viable economic activities to one concerned with livelihood and place and the ways in which people struggle to keep rural localities alive by somehow generating incomes that will allow the material reproduction of these places O n the other hand it will challenge notions of development as destruction and of markets as anathema for one of the critical means through which people make livelihoods and places viable is engaging with the institutions of development the wider modernizing processes of which

they are a part and a range of product and labor markets Finally it is likely to challenge our notions of resistance and politics at least as these relate to development for as Keith (1997 276) notes a politics of the possible must inevitably emerge from a sustained engagement with the empirical not a naive romance of the real

Escobar provides us with something of a lens for thinking about these issues with the notion of hybrid cultures (1995 2 17-26) Popular practices-which he suggests should be the basis of any alternative development-constantly piece together the old and new elements of modernity with longer-standing elements of local practice They are in his words characterized by a relentless traffic between the traditional and the modem (1995 222) The difficulty with the notion of hybrid however is that it as- sumes that there exist prehybrid cultures Yet Latin American landscapes and livelihoods have been hybridized at least since the sixteenth century (Whitmore and Turner 1992) It is perhaps this implicit assumption of prehybridity that underlies a certain tendency to invoke ideal typical notions of popular practice as the basis of development alternatives Yet if all practices and cultures are indeed hybridized then it seems unreasonable to make categorical statements about the principles that will characterize popular practices and development alternatives-for they along with identity and place will be dy- namic unstable and above all situated

A second point of departure begins from poststructural concerns to highlight differences and identities radicalizing the point more than do their discussions of alternatives For just as people might assert difference and identity vis- 2-vis development and its institutions these differences are also at stake in relationshius within the popular sectors Imagining alternatives as well as practicing current livelihoods is therefore likely to be internally debated and conflic- tive among genders generations kin groups communities and others This is not to mini- mize the importance of these alternatives but it is to push a step further in not romanticizing them and therefore in making them seem more credible

The third and central point of departure also derives from Escobar his call for more ethnographies of development and of how it is experienced and resisted Again though if local cultures are hybrid to emphasize questions of resistance to development is perhaps once again


to apply too partial a lens to popular practices If one of the principle challenges in the contemporary Andes is to address problems of production and income it may be appropriate to call for ethnographies of how people have struggled to compose livelihoods aimed at making a living and making it meaningful It is in building these livelihoods that people encounter development interventions state and market in ways that might be interpreted sometimes as resistance sometimes as accommodation and sometimes as instrumental If in such ethnographies we find-as I believe we do-that livelihoods have not only been viable but have also allowed accumulation albeit in very unanticipated ways then the neoliberal discourse on viability needs reframing And if we find-as I believe we do- that this has been possible to a considerable degree because of development programs state interventions and market integration again in often very unanticipated ways then the poststructural critique also needs reframing normatively and analytically

In this sense empirical ethnographic and historical analysis of particular regional con-texts might also generate the type of knowledge and theory that could resolve the problem of trusteeship as laid out by Cowen and Shenton (1996) By illuminating the concerns and notions of improvement implicit in popular strategies and by understanding the types of development of which these actors aim to be trustees empirical work offers the prospect of illuminating the idea of development as lived rather than invoked thus rescuing the idea of development from the doctrinal lenses of those who would otherwise define it This might also change the criteria used for thinking about the impacts of development

Transitions and Transformations in the Ecuadorian Andes

The risk of calling for such ethnographies and histories of development is that it succumbs to the problem of exceptionalism making difficult any effort to build theory on the basis of individual cases One possible response is to do comparative analysis of ethnographic and historical material15 Though this has its own methodological difficulties (see below) it is the approach taken here I discuss the transformation of three localities in the Ecuadorian Andes

(Figure 1) during the second half of this century The cases deliberately juxtapose two localities (Colta and Guamote both in the province of Chimborazo) which for many observers have been examples of development failure and areas where campesino livelihoods are in crisis with a third case (Otavalo) which is often viewed as one of the most successful instances of local development in the Andes The reason for juxta- posing the cases is to suggest that there are also intriguing similarities among them In each case access to resources has become more inclusive and new and more accountable local governance structures have been created Likewise livelihoods have been built that by engaging with a range of markets have allowed levels of accumulation that in part sustain the material basis for these other sociopolitical and cultural changes In each case external interventions have played (often unanticipated) roles in fostering these processes of transformation To- gether these patterns make it difficult to talk glibly either of nonviability or of development as destruction16 The cases do though suggest the importance of further elaborating some of these claims First though a comment on questions of method

Reflections on Methodology

To attempt a comparative reading of the ar- ticulations between development interventions and microregional political economy opens up a series of methodological questions Such ethnographically informed comparisons across different sites may entail a novel kind of fieldwork Rather than being situated in one or perhaps two communities for the entire period of research the fieldworker must be mobile covering a network of sites that encompasses a process which is in fact the object of study (Marcus and Fischer 1986 94) This raises several interpreta- tive issues for while the analysis of the process itself might remain thick discussions of the particular place-based manifestations of that process are necessarily thinner Such a research approach also raises logistical issues Multilocale work necessarily involves extended field presence which is only possible at certain stages of a career In my own case the most in-depth basis for this comparative analysis was laid in 1988- 1989 during a fourteen-month study of the processes of agrarian change and development in-

502 Bebbington

t

P a c i f i c

- Equator -

[ Land over 2000 m 0 250 I I K l lonr tc rgt

Figure 1 Ecuador and case study locations

tervention in Colta and Guamote That research involved intensive involvement in four communities and sustained contact with leaders and staff of five federations of indigenous communities and with staff of six separate state and nongovernmental development organizations This work combined participant observation extended and repeated discussions and interviews a short household survey in two of the communities and some soil analysis and crop trials This was combined with far less intensive interactions with people in twelve other communities

I have since complemented that initial study with five other field visits to the region over the past decade Though each subsequent study has had different purposes they have been part of a larger deliberate attempt to understand the cumulative effects of development intervention on rural livelihoods and institutional change over an extended period Two studies were of umrpesim organizations in Guamote and Colta and their relationships to NGOs one looked at the role of NGOs in local development another

I Col ta

focused on the impacts of peasant organizations on local governance in Guamote and the fifth was simply a return to some of the same communities where the earliest work was conducted to discuss patterns of change This subsequent research conducted for far shorter ~eriods of vari- able dkt ion has involved in-depth interviews (rather than ethnographic work) with some of the same households federations NGOs and key informants as weamp encounteramp in thi earlier work The advantage of such a sustained involvement is that it brings to light processes of change that can be missed in single-stay periods of research It has also allowed me to discuss my own evolving interpretations with a variety of the actors involved The disadvantage is that w

the nature and quality of information and insights varies among the different periods of field research

These methodological problems of comparative analysis are made much more serious by an attempt to compare across different authors ethnographic and ethnohistorical research Eth-

Reencountering Development 503

nogra~hies emphasize lace context case specificity and authorial insights To seek more ge- neric principles across ethnographic accounts can do violence to the authors own intents Furthermore given that different ethnographies emphasize different dimensions of local social and cultural practice they do not all give com- parable attention to the same issues Any attempt to draw comparisons might then stretch the data beyond its justifiable reach Indeed some would eschew the possibility of such comparison unless they were able to witness or par- ticipate in the same empirical moments and not have to depend on the interpretations of the ethnographer (Schegloff 1999) While there can be no easy answer to this problem to reject entirely the possibility of reading across ethnographic and historical accounts greatly dimin- ishes the potential role of such approaches in building up more nuanced and problematized understandings of rural change More generally it probably undermines the potential for the sorts of ethnographically informed accounts of regional processes called for by commentators such as Marcus and Fischer (1986)

What follows is therefore my own comparative reading of these different accounts It is based on the conviction that much of what is narrated in these other accounts when read through the lens of my own experience seems quite plausible to me while at the same time providing additional insights that-though beyond my own field experience-I am pre- pared to accept as valid given the conver-gences of other authors insights with my own interpretations While this is perhaps an insuf- ficiently rigorous set of criteria for reading across different bodies of work it is akin to the criteria that researchers use when as lay folk we engage in simple conversation aimed at extending the boundaries of our own knowledge and understanding

Colta Migration and the Viability of Place

The canton of Colta is located in the central highlands of Ecuador with a population of slightly less than 50000 people17 living mostly in rural communities at altitudes of 3000 m and above along with a handful of small urban centers of some two thousand people or so Pri- marily agricultural Colta is also notable for the high levels of periodic outmigration among its

residents Such outmigration from rural areas is often taken as an indicator that local livelihoods are not viable This phenomenon has been interpreted as semiproletarianization the ever incomplete absorption of poor rural people into the urban economy as well as a necessary survival strategy in conditions of natural-resource scarcity (de Janvry 1981 ) Other authors see periodic migration as a deliberate attempt to continue to be a campesino (Farrell et al 1989) and to retain some form of economic activitv that offers a buffer against downturns in urban labor markets (cf Brown et al 1997) Without denying the sense in which migration is in considerable measure a consequence of structural constraints and regional underdevelopment these latter accounts also em~hasize that migrants are also agents and in which migration is a strategy as well as a necessity For many families in Colta it has been a strategy for maintaining a foothold in the regionlhis foothold in turn allows the maintenance of agricultural practices religious practices and local institutions through which the extent of Quichua (ie indigenous) control of Colta has expanded and thyough which its material landscape has been transformed-in both its agricultural and built forms Though transformed Colta thus continues to be the locus of a ranee of ~ractices and identifications with place and history which though constantly in flux and varying across gender generation and other lines (cf Silvey and Lawson 1999) toeether constitute an im- u

portant basis of being a Quichua from Colta These transformations are all the more re-

markable given that as recentlv as 1965 a Cor- nell research team produced a study on the Qui- chua population of Colta entitled Indians in Misery (Maynard 1965) The study depicted Quichuas dominated by large rural estates (haciendas) through various forms of tied labor relationship that restricted access to land The ties between hacienda church and local political authorities likewise restricted ~ossibilities of indigenous accumulation or anv form of ~ol i t ica l -participation preserving forms of social control and exclusion in much the same way as Casa- grande and Piper (1969) described for the neighboring parish of San Juan Yet at the same time as the Cornell team was working a series of changes were occurring that would drive the transformation of this region The most important of these was land reform National land- reform laws were passed in 1964 and more far

504 Bebbington

reachine in 1973 These laws marked the end of

the hacienda-based mode of ~roduct ion and social control and had profom effects on Coltas agrarian and sociopolitical structure Some subdivision of estates had begun before land reform

u

as early migrants used savings to purchase land and some hacienda owners began to sell especially those who had a particularly unruly labor force (cf Thumer 1993) The laws however led to an intense acceleration of this Drocess of land acquisition By 1990 more than forty-three percent of Coltas land surface had been affected by the land-reform process and no large hacienda remained though some smaller ones still did (Bebbington et al 1992 125)

~ h e s gchanges in access o land while they ended the former system of rural governance were not eaual across Colta Families and com- munities19 gained access to different qualities and amounts OFland as a result of the combined effects of different geographies of population pressure of social conflict of the onset of hacienda decline and of soil and water aualitv and avail- ability ~ n cases such as the skctorof Gatazo where families gained access to valley-bottom alluvial land with irrigation water and significantly where hacienda subdivision and migration had started at an earlier date Drocesses of

accumulation began earlier and have been relatively rapid Migration-based accumulation in Gatazo was translated into land ~urchase which has in turn allowed accumulation strategies based -on intensive horticulture Though again the extent to which this is so varies among households it has led to a reversal of outmigration as people have moved back to the locale sustaining them- -selves either entirely through agriculture or through a mix of agriculture and periodic participation in local labor markets (Allen 1993)

In other cases far more typical in Colta the land accessed was unirrigated and sloping and has not allowed any significant agricultural intensification Indeed reports from communities in Colta with this tvDe of land all em~hasize L

agricultural stagnation and land degradation rather than intensification and draw attention to the importance of periodic (and occasionally permanent) outmigration as a livelihood strategy (Bebbington 1990 Knapp 1991 Muratorio 1982 Tolen 1995) Finally in some more sui ge- neris cases such as the communities of Santiago

n

where land is poor and scarce but where migration began quite early significant numbers have become itinerant traders (Gellner 1982) and

semiprofessionals (teachers agricultural techni- cians etc)

The livelihoods of contemporary Colta are therefore now diverse none linked to the hacienda all deeply linked to the market and most still linked to rural property however small the plot or house This shift in the nature and geography of livelihoods in Colta has been accompanied by important changes in the landscape Coltas countryside is a mixture of small often visibly eroding fields dotted with breeze-block houses of one two or sometimes three and four stories Like Colta resident Manuel Alvarados two-story house (in the community of Lupaxi Grande) most of these have been built with money earned elsewhere in his case first while working in the sugar cane harvests on the coast and subsequently as a peddler of shoes and clothing Also as in his case responsibilities for the house and the fields are feminized While Manuel is as happy in Colta as on the coast- when Im on the coast Im a costeiio when Im in the community I feel content and this is my landM-he makes his money on the coast and sends it back to Colta for investment in housing Like many others that is where he will ultimately retire

Accumulation and housing investment have also been part of a subtle but important shift in the centers of governance in Colta New centers have emerged at two scales A t a local level the hacienda has ceded to the community the center of everyday political decisionmaking and ~urveillance~ese legal (and territorial) communities now govern most of rural Colta most having been created since land reform Though only localized centers of power most communities in this area (and Guamote-see below) monitor carefully the passage of other people and vehicles through the space they govern be these private individuals or government workers In- evitably as I was entering a community where I was working less intensively I would be greeted with a Adonde vas gnnguito [where are you off to gringuito] and would be sought out by one or another village dignitary shortly after arriving just checking up on me Similarly as the field workers of the farmers association with whom I spent much time in Colta would drive into a community in which they had some task or other to see to people would come and check on the purpose of their visit Very occasionally and more seriously communities have held un- wanted guests hostage


The other shift has occurred at the level of the canton where the parish and cantonal capitals (the former centers of the hacienda-state- church triumvirate) have been in demise O n the one hand old mestizo2 houses are being purchased by Quichuas who split their residence between these capitals and the community And at the same time these old centers have been partially replaced by new centers linked to other systems of authority and sources of legitimacy Some of these new regional centers are linked -to commercial success as in the semiurbanized communities of the Gatazos and Santiago (see above) Others have emerged as a result of another change that was beginning just as the Cor- nell team was conducting field work the rise and subsequent consolidation of the Evangelical Protestant church There are many explana- tions of how this religious change occurred At the very least it seems clear that the ability of the church to enter the region was itself facilitated by land reform and the weakening of the hacienda it may also have reflected the deter- mination of Quichua campesinos to look be- vond the institutions that had traditionallv dominated them Several observers have also suggested that the Evangelical churchs com-plete ban on alcohol consumption was attractive to earlier migrants who wanted to invest their migrant savings in land and housing rather than alcohol-intensive fiestas (Tolen 1995 Gellner 1982) That these migrants were also dispropor- tionately represented among a new generation of more savvy community leaders further strength- ened the authoritv of Evaneelicalism Whatever the explanation the Evangelical church dis- placed the Catholic Church Today many communities in Colta have their own community- organized center of worship and indeed some have several (Tolen 1995 Muratorio 1981) Meanwhile the community i f ~aj ipambawheie the mission had its center is now the place that is popularly understood as being Colta Its large churches radio antenna and religious organizations (some of which engage in social- development activities) mark it as the regions new center at least as seen from the communities (cf Tolen 1995 )

1 some areas within Colta the formation of communities was followed by the creation of federations of communities (this process is discussed in more detail for the case of Guamote below) Each with their own acronym-UOCACI (Uni6n de Organizaciones Campesinas de Cicalpa)

AOCACH (Asociacibn de Organizaciones Cam- pesinas Autonomas de Chimborazo) UNASAC (Unibn de Asociaciones Agricolas de Columbe) AIECH (Asociaci6n Indigena Evangelica de Chimborazo)-these organizations are new actors in the governance of Colta They have projects negotiate with government for ser-vices and have their own buildings and offices on which families and community leaders converge one day a week in order to engage in project-related business gossip and squeeze in a game or two of volleyball The organizations also mark one of the latest reversals of ethnic and institutional relationships in Colta In 1988 though many rural development NGOs worked in Colta none had its office there22 By 1995 the technical team once linked to one of these federations AIECH had recreated itself as an NGO the Center for In- digenous Development (CEDEIN) with its headquarters in the main mestizo urban center in Colta By 1998 it was hiring mestizo advi- sors and contracting other long-established NGOs from other parts of Ecuador to help with water projects Some in Colta had begun to approach its director JosC Bueno to ask him to consider running for mayor JosC smiled at me at once modestly and wryly saying he didnt think it was time yet One day he implied it would be In the meantime he wanted to im- press on me that when I had first known him and the team they were being hired by mestizos to implement the activities of other organizations now the tables were turned not aggres- sively but significantly

The distance between an image of Indians in misery and contemporary Colta is great It is an indicator of how profoundly the relationships between livelihoods access to resources rural governance and rural landscape have been transformed as a combined effect of cam~esino initiatives and the state religious institutions and NGOs This is not to imply that these changes are unproblematic People are still very poor and many (though not all) would prefer not to migrate most people sustain their (or their families) residence in Colta with income derived from elsewhere differences in access to land exist as do differences in income intrigue and gossip surround who benefits most from Coltas new institutions But it is important that arguments about development happen in Colta now and not only (nor perhaps even mainly) in provincial and national capitals

506 Bebbington

Guamotes New Geographies of Governance

Bordering Colta to the South the canton of Guamote with an almost entirely Quichua population of slightly less than 3000023 more than ninety percent of whom live in rural communities located above 3000 m has likewise been transformed in the last three decades though the contours and implications of this transformation differ In 1974 Guamote had the highest concentration of land in large estates in all of Ecuador today no large or even medium-sized individually owned property remains24 In 1974 governance-both rural and urban-was dom-inated by the hacienda today Guamote is at the head of a national list of so-called alternative municipalities where municipal government is either in the hands of or works closely with indigenous populations (MUAOZ 1998)

The roots of this transformation lie in state responses to campesino pressure for land From the 1950s to 1970s campesino mobilization for land in Guamote became increasingly assertive bolstered by links to national peasant move-ments and the communist party The state concerned with these levels of unrest made Gua- mote the object of a far-reaching program of land reform The radical Catholic Church was also active in pushing for land-redistribution and became the principal counterpart of the national land-reform agencys program in G u a m ~ t e ~ ~

In some sense the idea of Guamote as a center of chronic poverty (which it was) was insti- tutionalized in the 1970s (cf Escobar 1995 21- 54) Thus categorized Guamote became the object of a whole series of development interventions aimed at reducing this poverty Land reform was followed by a series of state agricultural and rural development programs one (Fondo de Desarrollo de Areas Rurales Margin- adas FODERUMA) coordinated entirely by the Church the other (Proyecto de Desarrollo Ru- ral Integral DRI) a project within the National Program for Integrated Rural Development im- plemented by the state Yet it is hard to argue that these development interventions became a destructive force in Guamote (Escobar 1995 44) Certainly development complicated the local institutional landscape and while its interventions (together with popular protest) helped wrest power from the hacienda they also en- dowed development institutions themselves with an apparent power to exert great influence on Guamote Sometimes under certain leader-

ship they availed themselves of this power in order to control-but not always During the leadership of Wilson Huilca in the 1980s the DRI worked towards the vision of rural development in Guamote coordinated and i m ~ l e -mented through networks of campesino federations Though nowhere written in the project documents staff from that period recall the vision clearly Ultimately some campesino leaders todav comment this was its effect26

ampate rural development programs ran more or less continuously up until the early 1990s and were then taken over (in part) by a follow- up NGO program The radical Catholic Church has remained present throughout and has built links between communities and church-related NGOs Increasingly though far less systemati- cally Evangelically related NGOs have also established themselves in some communities In this babble of intervention and acronyms many agendas and interpretations are at play No program is innocent They are all linked to wider projects-of building a state presence in the area of strengthening campesino organizational capacities of establishing Evangelicalism or indeed of fighting off its advance Yet beyond this and in conjunction with the cumulative effects of schooling these interventions have had other effects deriving in large measure from the cadre of younger campesinos who were formed in the very process of mediating between these external institutions and cornmunitie~~In some cases the interventions also deliberatelv created federated organizations to act as coun- terparts in community-level interventions-federations within which this cadre of campesinos have become active leaders The effect-in Dart deliberate in Dart accidental-has been to

change the governance of Guamote As in Colta the nexus of hacienda-priest-state representative has been re~laced bv a new institutional com~lex throigh which Guamote is-governed-a complex of communities federations NGOs the new churches and most recently the municipal government

In the early 1990s one of the two principal campesino federations in Guamote the Union of Indigenous and Campesino Organizations of Guamote (UOCIG) launched a candidate in

local government elections and won the position of mayor (Bebbington and Perreault 1999) Since reelected the mayor has initiated a series of administrative and governance changes aimed at enhancing community control over the mu-


nicipality and increasing municipal control over the federations All federations are required to coordinate with each other and the municipality in the form of a Committee for Local Devel- opment that has its base within the municipal building Under this rubric federations have become the implementing arms of municipal development policy At the same time a body to which each community is supposed to send a representative-a so-called Indigenous Parlia- ment (Parlamento 1ndCgena)-was created with the purposes of monitoring municipal actions and discussing and presenting issues of concern in the communities Giving new meaning to an old landscape the Parlamento uses the old offices of the DRI as its base

These are all incivient changes and are fraught with tensions he two ma federations in the canton-Jatun Ayllu and the UOCIG- still jostle for power and prominence UOCIG is at odds with the municipal government whose agents argue that given the indigenous control of the municipality it would make far more sense for UOCIG to pass its grain mill over to the munici~alitv UOCIG wants to maintain

L control of the mill itself Some communities complain that the federations are not well man- ageamp and particular Quichua individuals tussle for power each feeling they have special leadership roles to play At the same time some NGOs support these changes others maintain a certain distance These tensions mark out the microvol- itics of arguments over strategy and control (cf Moore 1998) in which different individuals communities and kin groups have varying opin- ions over how resources should be used within Guamote and who should determine these de- cisions Yet in some sense these are the contents of the indigenous self-management that so stir people The very occurrence of these arguments reflects how the governance of Gua- mote has changed profoundly Power and control over local development have moved from one ethnic group to another (blanco-mestizo to Quichua) from one type of unit to others (hacienda to communitv and federation) and-in the period since 1974-from central government and line agency to municipal government and f e d e r a t i ~ n ~ W i t h these changes the image and meaning of Guamote have shifted In the words of one federation leader Hilario Maola at last we have indigenous self-management (1998) (after decades of local governance being dominated by the church or state rural develop-

ment programs) For others among Ecuadors development institutions who would have once seen Guamote as a miserable bastion of brutish haciendas and unruly Indian populations where planned development intervention (and social research) was a thankless and ~ointless task Guamote is now an innovative experiment in local governance

Seen against these political transformations economic change has been much more modest There is less evidence of accumulation in the landscape than in Colta in part because the greater control exercised by the hacienda over campesinos in Guamote meant that the early accumulation linked to migration from Colta was far less frequent In some communities however accumulation is beginning In the communities of Sablog Rosa Ines and San Isidro from the one truck owned in 1988 (by a family that because of a personal relationship with the hacienda had been able to purchase twice as much land as any other family) there were by 1998 seven families with trucks combining agriculture with trade And one and two-story breeze-block houses have begun to pop up across the landscape But even though demographic pressure and the level of land subdivision in Guamote is less than in Colta incomes remain chronically low Gua- motes three parishes exhibit poverty rates of near or above 90 percent of the population (Torres 1998) While the new municipal government has shifted investment from urban centers to rural areas and has mobilized additional resources from external agencies primarily for rural investments this has more effect on the meaning of Guamote than on its poverty

Otavalo and an Ethnic Market Economyz9

If Colta and Guamote are viewed as poor eroded and backward in the national imaginary the image of Otavalo is quite the opposite Known to tourists through its weekend market and ethnic products and nationally through traveling Otavaleiio merchants in market places selling textiles for popular consumption this weaving center has a special reputation Otava- leiios are seen as proud well dressed and successful (cf Casagrande 1981) and the transformation of Otavalo into a relatively vibrant regional economy was seen early on as a possible model for community development elsewhere (Salomon 198 1 ) For Salomon the essence of

Bebbington

Otavalos success was that through these transformations Otavaleiios had in Sol Taxs terms sustained a total pattern that is distinctively their own (Salomon 1981 431) Somehow he implied they had crafted a different type of market economy that had become the material basis through which a highly distinctive place and set of regional and ethnic identities was being produced Delving into ethnographic insights into how this occurred causes intriguing parallels with the incipient processes of transformation in Colta and Guamote to become apparent Long before Otavalos current textile economy the region had a pre-Hispanic weaving culture After the Conquest this culture was harnessed by the Spanish in the form of ohajes-grim ru-ral textile factories based on indebted and otherwise tied Indian labor Though the fortunes of the obrajes waxed and waned they and other small textile enterprises kept a weaving economy alive into the twentieth century by which time Otavalefio Quichuas were already regain- ing control of land A 1909 document of the town government noted that [dlay by day the Indian is taking over the lands of the Canton albeit by fair purchase (Salomon 1981 442) The cumulative effect was that by 1946 while a third of Ecuadors rural population worked entirely on other peoples land only thirty-one percent of Otavalans did any work on others land (Salomon 1981 426 citing Salz 1955)

The relative economic and political inde- pendence afforded by early access to land has facilitated several transitions in the rural economy In some cases it enabled early migration income from which was invested in further purchase of land and other investments (Korovkin 1998) It also created a space for the formation of small Quichua textile enterprises-at both a household and small-factory scale Thus emerged both a Quichua entrepreneurial class as well as a semiproletariat that employed in these enterprises did not need to migrate long distances in order to make a living and could combine farming and weaving This economy facilitated the emergence of a trading class (larger than in Colta and this time selling products from Otavalo) who by mid-century were traveling nationally and internationally to sell textiles (Buitr6n 1962) Even by the 1960s a number of Otavalefios were investing in housing and consumer durables (Buitr6n 1962) As haciendas kept control of more fertile valley- bottom land the emergence of a more dy-

namic campesino agriculture came later than the household-weaving economy But in some areas campesinos have now also gained access to this land-not infrequently under the aus- pices of land-reform legislation and far more recently in the context of Catholic Church- financed programs of land purchase in the 1990s In these areas rather than a weaving economy a more intensive form of agriculture dominates (Korovkin 1997)

That these already market- and profit-oriented initiatives became the basis of a vartic- ularly vibrant regional economy-one that has since seen yet more dramatic expenditure on contemporary-styled housing (Colloredo-Mansfield 1994) as well as relativelv low levels

of migration-is as much due to external inter- -ventions and state policy as it is to popular practices and initiative Import-substitution indus- trialization ~ol ic ies in the 1960s and 1970s vrotected textile vroduction for the domestic market and also fueled an export boom-each favoring the expansion of the textile economy (Korovkin 1998) A t the same time the grow- ing tourist economy (also promoted if less clearly by state policy) provided a particular niche for Otavalos more ethnic products-a niche that its trading elite quickly exploited (Buitrbn 1962 Korovkin 1998)

More specific development interventions then assisted in the relatively rapid adjustment of the ethnic economy to the market first in weaving and later in agriculture Otavalo was one of the selected regions for the work of the Andean Mission in Ecuador (Jordan 1988) and the Mission provided technical assistance to weavers to help them diversify and improve the quality of their products This type of support coupled with-albeit limited-credit assis-tance continued in different forms and guises of state intervention serving to reorient Otavalan production to market opportunities (Korovkin 1998)

I f the state provided some of the means for this reaccommodation and capitalization of community entrepreneurial activity nongov-ernmental and religious (often Evangelical Protestant) institutions did much the same particularly in the form of a range of community- based savings and loan institutions that emerged to fill gaps left by the state and private banYks These institutions supported agricultural and land-purchase activities as much as textile production (Korovkin 1997 1998)


Otavalos economic transformation has been accompanied by significant political changes Local politics had been dominated by urban and landed groups linked in some way to the hacienda or urban textile economy but even by 1962 Buitr6n reported the first Quichua teniente

signaling the beginning of a more profound set of changes The progressive early dis- placement of the haciendas political power and control of land laid the foundation for a progressive if lagged shift in the traditional distribu- tion of political power (Korovkin 1998) Princi- pally these took form in the emergence of indigenous provincial federations that became active in county and national politics-a pro-cess that began in the 1970s as part of the wider rise of ethnic organizations in the country (Beb- bington et al 1992) Early leaders in these organizations came from relatively prosperous families marking the clear link between economic transformation and political change if also rais- ing questions about who it was that these new institutions represented The two main federations FICI (Federaci6n Indigena y Campesina de Imbabura) and FICAPI (Federaci6n Indi- gena y Campesina de la Provincia de Imbabura) each played active roles in the management and control bf the provincial bilingual education programs of the 1980s and 1990s and have become active in a subsequent national program for the development of indigenous communities (Andrango 1998 Korovkin 1998 133-34)

Though these changes have not been without their own conflicts among different political geographical and kin-based currents within the federations (Andrango 1998) their emergence and role in regional politics has nonetheless shifted the balance of power in discussions of develo~ment and access to resources This marks a significant shift in the political landscape of the region-a shift in which to some extent a politics that is also distinctively their own is emerging In Otavalo politics culture and economv have all been transformed and in the process become more-if far from perfectly- inclusive

Places and Theories

These cases throw light on several of the core themes in both poststructural and neoliberal discussions of rural development themes of viability and place hybrids and alternatives and

development as destruction Of course three places constitute too small and purposive a sam- ple from which to draw generalizations and my purpose here is not to stretch the material to make conclusions that cannot be sustained O n the other hand elements of these transformations show certain similarities I would argue with other places of the Andes (Bebbington 1997) in a way that calls into question some of the generalized claims of both neoliberal and poststructural frameworks This in turn calls for a more inductive empirical approach to building development theory that in working at the level of both structure and agency is more modest in the general claims it makes Such theory would serve as much to frame questions about possibility as to make assertions about determinacy

Viability Migration and Place

Migration is frequently taken as a primary indicator of nonviability Depending on ones analytical lens it can be seen as a consequence of development destroying agricultural livelihoods or as a measure of the incom~lete absomtion of land-hungry peasants into urban labor markets In these three cases however it has been more than either of these interpretations It has been a means of producing securing and investing in rural localities with the effect of transforming them

Many dynamics are at play here Migrants have consistently used earnings to purchase land particularly in those periods when more land was available because of lower ~ o ~ u l a t i o n densities and when shifts in rural power relationships weakened the haciendas grip on land31 Migration has also been an important way of financing the building of a new architectural landscape as people replace adobe and thatched-roof houses with more modem building materialsj2 Whether as peddlers urban la- borers or international traders (as in Otavalo and parts of Colta) these migrants have trans- ferred income from engagement in labor and trade markets into the same steady reconquest of land and space that Grillo has noted in the Pe- ruvian highlands (1998 136-37)

To be-a migrant may not bethe best of all possible worlds but the ways in which many people have used migration also challenge any simple notion of this behavior as a mere indicator bf the destruction of rural livelihood or im-

Bebbington

pending urban transition Migration has become constitutive of lifestyles that make claims on more than one place It has its appeal to those young adults like Manuel who love to come back to Colta periodically but with time get bored and so also like to return to urban or coastal areas It has also been used by many of all income brackets and ages not just to maintain a link with rural areas but also to consolidate this link Part of this is clearly an issue of status and conspicuous consumption (cf Colloredo- Mansfield 1994) The community of Sablog Rosa Ines in Guamote is like many others in that its showiest house-a two-story house with bal- cony and mock brick facing-is empty for much of the year while its owners work in the northern highlands But much of this sustained link is also an issue of lifestyle cultural practice and identity People comment whether talking of their homes or their participation in community public-works programs to install water or electricity that this is an investment in a place to which they can return to rest celebrate fiestas perform discrete agricultural tasks and ultimately retire Speaking of Pulucate one of the larger communities in Colta Becky Tolen (1995 318) similarly comments [wlhen those who own businesses even houses in Guayaquil are asked why they also built houses in the countryside they insist against all appearances that they will someday live in the countryside again

Migration also becomes a means of sustaining subsistence agriculture and thus the practices linked to agriculture-even if these are practiced by only some members of the household and only occasionally by migrants on their periodic returns to the highlands These practices in turn continue to be constitutive of identity Tolen (1995 130) again captures this per- f e ~ t l y ~ ~[dlespite the ever-increasing significance of migration agriculture is the heart and soul of life in Pulucate as residents describe it As a form of activity agriculture is thought of primarily as the provision of food to people and ani- mals This act in turn is the essence of human- ity and sociability The ethnographic record elsewhere in the Andes similarly emphasizes the relationship between place the practices that coresidence makes possible and cultural identity (Allen 1988 Rasnake 1988 Weismantel 1988) Retaining some toehold in farming appears to be particularly significant to such questions of practice and identity however economically uncompetitive that agriculture may be

Of course the structural constraints are many People migrate partly as a result of the sys- tematic lack of public investment in areas of dominantly indigenous populations and the historical failure of haciendas to invest significantly in employment generation Meanwhile accounts of migrant work experiences recall long hours heavy burdens long commuting trips to work and cramped living conditions So this is not to be naive But it is to put the agent back into migration and to suggest that ~ e o p l e use it for ends that are more than merely ones of survival and in many cases have turned migration into strategies that both create economic resources and re-produce rural places Agricul- ture may not be competitive but the livelihoods that it continues to be a part of clearly are

Autonomy Hybrids and Alternatives

The cases all reflect a very significant investment in rural places on the part of campesinos Individually and collectively people struggle to maintain these places and to expand their degree of control over the social and economic processes that unfold there This process occurs at various levels the body (in the case of dress) the locality (as for instance when people monitor the passage of others into and out of communities) and the microregion (as in the case of governance processes in Guamote)

While this statement resonates with Esco- bars claim that development alternatives will involve the defense of the local the notion of defense draws too sharp a distinction between local and external It implies too static a notion of the local and ultimately more antagonism in the relationship between locality and external institutions than necessarily exists Indeed to draw on another element of his framework it seems more apposite to think of people actively engaging in the production of hybridized localities than in the defense of a pregiven locality This hybridization occurs through active engagement in wider labor and product markets with the institutions of the national state and the institutions of development (discussed in the following section) Otavalo is the clearest case in which an engagement with markets has been central to strategies (including land acquisition and political organization) that help secure greater control of locality But such engagements are also apparent in the case of migrants


who work periodically elsewhere investing their savings in the highlands (see above) Beyond anv assertion of status this investment is also a way of creating places that are more subject to the persons control [tlhese houses are not only an expression of having one foot in the urban world they are also a way of maintaining one foot outside that world a refusal to accept that one is entirely defined by ones marginalized position in urban society (Tolen 1995 318)34

Of course Otavalo is something of a sui gen- eris case Nor is there necessarilv much to celebrate in livelihood strategies based on selling labor cheaply in distant environments and building houses that one cannot live in year- round because highland livelihoods are unable to generate sufficient income But something more is going on Through various types of organizations and networks people are increasing the extent to which they control these places and the processes that unfold in and on them This is most clear in the new organizational and political landscapes of each of these localities A t a local level legalized communities have multiplied across the landscape to become the basic unit of rural governance Supracommunal campesino federations have also developed in each case and an increasingly vibrant indigenous Evangelical church in most These organizations have increasingly trespassed into the ter- rain of the state seeking to make it a further mechanism through which local populations increase their influence over the wavs in which places are produced Guamote is the most obvious case of this process but in Colta and Otavalo elements of the same process are apparent In- deed this process reaches wider through the Ec- uadorian and perhaps especially Bolivian Andes (Booth et al 1997)

Each of these strategies and practices involve engaging with modernizing institutions and practices In the process new rural landscapes are produced landscapes with modern building materials new commodities new forms of dress vehicles p r k e d outside campesino houses increasing use of Spanish as an everyday language Quichuas sitting behind office desks that were once the preserve of others and so on These are new landscapes symbolic of many changes that have occurred in how people live and think of living in these rural spaces and of the extent to which so many of their practices are mediated through the incorporation of modem ideas things and commodities

La gente se esta modemizando rpeople are modernizing] one young campesino reflected approvingly as he and I looked out across Sa- blogs fields and houses one day This though was no rudderless modernization commented a friend you learn from the past You tie yourself into tradition and history and bring it forward into the present And in this process of assembling the artifacts of modem Ecuador in new ways and combining them with prior practices these materials and ideas become indigenous conveying a refashioned but still distinct identity35

More than defending and resisting people and their organizations seem to seek means of using controlling and making meaningful these processes of composition and hybridization Or in the words of three Quichua bilingual educators this speaks very clearly of the deep cultural nationalism [of Quichuas] that must be organized and directed but by their own leaders and social promoters (Bueno et al 1983 my emphasis)j6 As people produce these new places they produce new meanings and identities-but still as Salomon insists maintaining a pattern that is distinctively their own

Coproduction Institutions and Networks

The transformations that have occurred in each of the cases discussed here have much to do with the cumulative effect of individual and collective struggles to build livelihoods and rework the relations of power that structure patterns of access to resources and of participation in markets and political processes But they also have a great deal to do with the ways in which state development programs different churches and an array of nongovernmental development agencies have engaged with responded to and often promoted these individual and collective struggles Even if these intersections between popular practice and the practice of development have sometimes occurred in quite unplanned and un- predictable ways with equally unanticipated outcomes they have implications for how we think about claims that development has failed at least in the Ecuadorian Andes

It would be hard to argue that the situation in Colta Guamote and Otavalo is today worse than in the periods when hacienda-based re-gimes of power and control dominated these areas The transformation of these power relations is clearly in part a result of everyday and

Bebbington

organized forms of peasant resistance and mobilization and land purchase using migrant earnings But it is also and primarily a consequence of land-reform programs These programs in part responses to campesino mobilization also became possible because of pressure from an emerging national boureeoisie who saw the hacienda as a

u

brake on market expansion and from the US for land reform throughout Latin America in order to prevent the rise of communism The legislation created the legal space for campesinos to recover land a Drocess that verv often involved

collaborations between communities state offices the church and NGOs Over the last decade the Catholic Church and an NGO Fondo Ecuatoriano Populorum Progressio completed this process of complete land transfer in Gua- mote using Church funds to finance campesino purchase of remaining hacienda land3i

These transformations in relationshi~s of access underlie the subsequent changes in governance in each region as new political and social institutions have been built or assumed more strength The emergence of community-based organizations and federations Quichua municipal governments and now Quichua NGOs owes much to development interventions While much of this support came from NGOs and priests who supported community capacity to negotiate with state programs and to access resources some of it came from state programs themselves This was frequently because of the actions of individuals within these programs who turned institutional practice and resources to particular purposes The examples here are many Some are of those foot-slogging community organizers like Miguel Rojas who by 1997 could not remember how manv communities he had helped organize and gai the legal status they needed in order to engage with other public programs Others are educators like Carlos Moreno who-from within a government education department-managed to mobilize re-sources for literacy training programs that trained small armies of community-level promoters (including those quoted earlier) many of whom subsequently assumed leadership positions in campesino and other organizations And finally there are those occasional directors who like Wilson Huilca turned whole rural development programs into something bearing scant resem- blance to the project document38 Again none of this is to be naive about political constraints on development interventions-indeed after

five years and a change in government Huilca was forced out It is though to recognize agency within these constraints and to note that its effects can be lagged and lasting even after the agents space has been closed

The constraints on economic accumulation are greater than those on changes in local governance There has though been accumulation in these areas Much of this has occurred because of work done in other places as migrant labor Nonetheless the emergence of the weaving industry in Otavalo (Salomon 1981 Korovkin 1998) the more localized patterns of agricultural intensification in parts of Colta or cases such as the campesino agroindustrial complex of Salinas (Bebbington et al 1992) suggest that the conditions for competitiveness can be created through external i n t e r ~ e n t i o n ~ ~ In the context of a globalized economy understanding the coproduction of economic possibilities through the joint actions of people their networks and external intervention thus becomes critical to any attempt to build counternarratives against neoliberal formulations of crisis counternarratives that recognize however the importance of the economic as well as the cultural and political dimensions of alternatives

Rather than read off from different project documents the ways in which development interventions aimed to discipline and control these three areas these cases therefore highlight the ways in which the practice of development interventions and their effectshave opened up new spaces and opportunities in political and market spheres Contra many neoliberal arguments this does indeed suggest that viability can be created and-contra many poststructural interpretations-it suggests that development interventions can play roles in contribut- ing to such reworkings of power relationships

None of the above is to make the normative suggestion that current forms of market and political participation are ideal It is however to suggest that spaces have been created through the combined effect of peoples initiatives and development intervention Many people have used these spaces to secure livelihoods expand their control over highland places and con-tinue investing in the highlands Understanding how such spaces opened up and have been used is critical for thinking about alternatives Cate- gorical assertions about the destructiveness of development distract attention from these spaces and the possibilities that inhere in them


Conclusions

Development as Destruction or Coproduction

Poststructural and neoliberal takes on development are both in some sense narratives on destruction in the former case the narrative is that development has destroyed local cultures in the latter it is that it ought do so as a necessary if unfortunate consequence of fostering more efficient forms of resource use The cases discussed here make it difficult to accept such interpretations

There are both epistemological and empirical reasons for challenging the notion that significant parts of the Andes do not merit development investment because they are not economically viable The epistemological case revolves around the problem of trusteeship (Co- wen and Shenton 1996) and the very narrow categories through which such interpretations define viability The empirical reason is that though there is clearly a problem of agricultural viability in many parts of Colta and Guamote people have nonetheless composed livelihood strategies that allow a degree of accumulation4 They have invested heavily in local institutions and built form if not always in agriculture In this way they have kept these places viable and vibrant even though agricultural livelihoods meet only a small part of household income needs Meanwhile cases like Otavalo suggest that in situ viability can be created with time and that indeed income from migration might be an important initial stage in this process The absence of institutions through which migrant income can be translated into productive investment in places like Colta and Guamote is probably a more important reason for the current stagnation of the local economy than any ecologically determined nonviability

Poststructural interpretations are similarly vulnerable to both epistemological and empirical critique From these cases at least it is not easy to substantiate the view that development programs and plans are merely exercises in a form of cultural domination exercised through the institutions of the modernizing state While such interpretations ring true for certain cases at certain points in time these cases suggest the importance of empirical rather than simply discursive analyses of these interventions In these instances the effects of these programs have

been multiple and in many instances have contributed to the restructuring of local power relations and patterns of access to resources These effects in turn depend significantly on the practices of agents within these programs Indeed there is considerable dissonance between some of these practices and the sometimes-stated national policy that these programs were intended to foster the integration and assimilation of Quichuas into Ecuadorian society The implication is that there are a variety of knowledge- power regimes at work within the institutions of development If that is so then the ways in which poststructural analyses have deployed the knowledge-powerlinstitutions-intervention re-lationship as the cornerstone of their analyses may be too blunt obscuring the scope for and the effects of agency As Escobar notes ethnographies of development are important but in this case they challenge elements of his and related frameworks They question the generaliz- ability of the conclusions as well as some of the categories being used

The same seems to be the case in poststructural discussions of alternatives these and the knowledges that are claimed to go with them also seem to be essentialized conceptions The emphasis on resistance is in some sense wel-come and appropriate but to phrase it categori- cally as resistance to state interventions or opposition to modernization seems unhelpful for while explaining some phenomena others become harder to explain when resistance is essentialized in this way Given this and given the apparent logics at work across these diverse cases it seems more appropriate to argue at a simpler level People encounter development from their mundane daily concerns to build and improve their livelihoods to build places they enjoy being in to give meaning to their lives through these livelihoods and places and to maintain and as far as possible to extend the degree to which they can exercise control over their conditions of existence This encounter can sometimes seem like resistance sometimes like accommodation and sometimes like self- interest But first and foremost people encounter development in the process of trying to build something of their own In these cases at least this means that modernizing developmentn is not necessarily resisted but is more often taken transformed and used and similarly modernizing institutions are worked with used transformed and turned as far as possible to peoples

514 Bebbington

own purposes As a consequence almost everything about development is coproduced This coproduction occurs at the intersections of institutional practices and popular practices and of different practices within those institutions and popular sectors (for there is rarely a convergence of local minds on the sorts of home and meaning that ought to be built or over who should have a say in this) Similarly it is coproduced through peoples engagements with a range of markets and historical and modernizing ideas and practices

The notion of hybridity (Escobar 1995) is useful here but needs further elaboration If popular practice livelihood and culture has al-ways been hybrid then it is conceptually (as well as empirically) inconsistent to celebrate by definition the local over the external Rather it may be more important to understand the pre- ferred hybrid forms implied in popular strategy the terms and relationships of power under which such hybridization occurs and the conditions under which those relationships are re- worked to the benefit of those groups whose interests the author is primarily concerned with

Such an approach of course has many dan- gers To some extent it takes the broader political economy as given looking for room-for- maneuver within its constraints This not only brackets the possibilities that these constraints might be changed I t can also divert attention from critical discussion of the extent to which people have n o choice but to pursue their livelihoods through practices structured by a globalized economy whose very dominating effect closes off the possibility of imagining alternatives outside it O n the other hand a focus on coproduction can hone attention on the extent to which room-for-maneuver for generating income and further extending the social control of local political and economic institutions might exist within these political eco-nomic constraints

Theorizing Up

If coproduction and hybridity are central to development as practiced and experienced then as the material reviewed here suggests observers ought to be cautious before making ge- neric arguments about causation and possibility of the kind made by both neoliberal and poststructural critics of development in the Andes

Conversely the risk is that arguments about hybridity and lace lead inexorably to analyses of the kind that celebrate difference and context- specific alternatives Such approaches are vulnerable to the accusation of case specificity and exceptionalism and can make theory building or generalization difficult The approach taken here to compare ethnographic and historical accounts of different localities is one way of ad- dressing this problem though it has methodological difficulties of its own The claim though is that under certain circumstances it is possible to read across these texts and to suggest the existence of patterns in the ways in which development is experienced locally and in which livelihoods and landscapes are constructed4

Of course three cases are too few to make categorical claims Such claims about pattern would obviously assume more authority the greater the number of cases and the greater the convergence among interpretations of different readers of these cases As this process of validated comparison and synthesis moves forward it becomes easier to theorize and general- ize The general argument to be made at this point however is that subalterns are not merely victims who resist but also agents who have suc- ceeded in opening up spaces within states and markets They have used these spaces to build new types of hybrid livelihood institutions and landscapes that are constitutive of quite distinctive forms of place making that though incor- porating many symbols of modernity are indeed alternative to simple landscapes of modernization It is hard to imagine that the same spaces would have opened without people having engaged with markets state programs and development interventions

This is an argument for building up a body of ethnographically informed histories and geographies of development through the Andes Working at a regional level it becomes more possible to narrate stories that do more justice to human agency while at the same time being clear on structural constraints Such mesoscale knowledge (cf Turner 1989) also offers greater hope of reducing the distance between theory and practice critique and alternative In these cases it implies that increasing grassroots control over the ways in which places are produced and governed is central to alternatives Building more accountable political institutions is critical here but alone is insufficient This is so not only because the grassroots control of such insti-


tutions will never be harmonious and some popular interests will always prevail over others It is also-and more important-because such institutions have onlv limited effect on the economic dimensions of livelihood Yet these economic dimensions are critical in determining the types of rural places produced and the ability of people to spend much time actually living in and enjoying those places

More viable livelihoods will not be ro-manced into existence but must instead be built up from already existing and however imperfect strategies Understanding livelihood thus becomes critical for theory in order to understand how places are produced and governed and who participates in these processes It is also critical for practice-to understand the ways in which people have created livelihood opportunities that foster accumulation as well as the obstacles to such accumulation

In addition to studying regional transformations of the peasantry and the multiple ways in which campesinos engage with their political worlds (as called for by Roseberry 1993) it is therefore also important to understand the ways in which rural populations have engaged with different markets and the public nongovernmental and ecclesiastical institutions of development Such inquiries would seek to understand the ways in which the practices of (and within) these institutions have both closed and opened opportunities for creative forms of popular engagement with state and market Ulti- mately such an approach could identify how actions have led and might lead to change in both the local and the wider svstems in which campesinos are embedded

Cowen and Shenton (1998 50) have argued that one of the confusions common throughout the development literature is between de- ve lo~mentas an immanent and unintentional process as in for example the development of capitalism and development as an intentional activity The suggestion here is that mapping the latter onto the former and tracing the mutu- -ally constitutive interactions between the two is critical to a geography of development The challenge is to map onto the geography of capitalist development in the Andes the (always hybrid) intentions and actions both of people building livelihoods and places and of the actors involved in develo~ment interventions This would be a mapping exercise concerned to recognize constraint but above all and in the

spirit of reencountering and rescuing development to understand possibility

Acknowledgments

This paper has not been an easy one to write and it owes a great deal to feedback received in presenta- tions at Stanford University the Universities of Brit- ish Columbia Texas and Colorado and in particular to the very helpful discussion of the paper by the Col- loquium on Agrarian Studies at Yale University I am particularly grateful to Jim Scott for his encourage- ment and commentary My thanks also to the following for their constructive and always challenging comments Carolyn Cartier Hugh Raffles Don Moore Rachel Silvey Lucien Taylor Dodie McDow- ell Billie Lee Turner 11 Christian Kull Michael Woolcock Donna Goldstein Arun Agrawal Gaston Gordillo Dan Segal Bill Durham Alex Keyssar Trevor Barnes Manny Schegloff and Eric Wolby The suggestions of five anonymous referees were very helpful Thanks also to Jim Robb for the map I would also like to acknowledge all that I have learned from my exchanges on peasant economy with Octavio So- tomayor Julio Berdeguk and Nico van Niekerk and from my many hours discussing Colta with Becky Tolen The preparation of the paper was supported by a Hewlett Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Stanford University

Notes

1 For some of the many reflections on its implications for development geography and anthropology see Blaikie (1998) Watts (1993) Peet and Watts (1996) Watts and McCarthy (1997) Yapa (1998) Crush (1995) Rigg (1997) Simon (1998) Moore (1999) and Little and Painter (1995)

2 This family of broadly modernizing initiatives is generally referred to in such writtngs as the development project (Simon 1998)

3 Do you or dont you support drinking water projects after reading Escobar one otherwise sympathetic reader asked aloud Escobar himself recognizes this problem [olne of the most common questions raised about a study of this kind is what it has to say about alternatives (1995 222) James Ferguson who has pursued a similar line of critique similarly notes [tlhere seems to be a certain frustration with the fact that my analysis traces the effects or mode of operation of an apparatus without providing any sort of pre- scription or general guide for action (1990 279)

4 I want to emphasize two points here First it should be noted that mv focus is on rural commu-

516 Bebbington

nities and small towns I do not address issues of urban development Second and more impor-tant as the paper develops I put more emphasis on the limitations of the poststructural position This is not because I wish to imply that I have more sympathy with the neoliberal-quite the opposite Rather it is that because my normative sympathies lie with those positions implied or explicit in the work of poststructural authors I find the empirical analyses and programmatic implications of such approaches that much more disappointing

5 In their discussion of Marglins (1990) call for alternative development in India Cowen and Shenton (1996 470) note a similar irony Mar- glins recommendations are they suggest ultimately the same as those of Conservatives in the British colonial ~ e r i o d who also areued that im- -provement could only come from Indian society rather than state policy What irony What was once the part played by conservative doctrine becomes the script for a present-day very self- conscious radicalism (1996 470)

6 At one level this critique seems to square poorly with the fact that writers on alternative development almost consistently argue that the authors of alternatives ought to be popular actors The ~roblem Cowen and Shenton 11996 458-59) imply is that ultimately the few still determine the contents of alternatives for the many because only those conscious of being so free and being relatively developed can assume the burden of trusteeship for the purpose of the relative har- mony of authentic development (1996 458)

7 Based on a reading of development planning in Colombia Escobars is already a view from the Andes It has been elaborated in Apffel-Marglin and PRATECs (1998) more specifically Andean critique of development This critique similarly sees development as a failed extension of a Euro- pean enlightenment project Development is a symptom of the senile dementia of the plague of European colonization (Grillo 1998 137)

8 As I shall discuss below recent debates in the Andes question elements of this argument as the notions of failure and hopelessness have been used by other parts of the bureaucracy to argue that certain programs and types of investment ought be terminated for reasons of fiscal tight- ness Again the problem derives from a treat- ment of bureaucracies and states as unitary over- looking their internal struggles for resources power and the definition of policy

9 This is not to imply that such authors do not also see the need for broader social change

10 Fergusons ( 1990) epilogue similarly emphasizes the role of such social movements

11 Escobars writing on Afro-Colombian communi-

ties however begins to ask some of these questions (Grueso et al 1998) Pile and Keith (1997 xi) suggest that we are in a ~ e r i o d where evervone seems to be talking-about resistance and domination Thanks to Lucien Taylor for making this paren- thetical observation Julio Berdegue former director of the small-farm technology transfer program of the Ministry of Agriculture notes that it was questioned from two auite different ~ositions that nonetheless compiemented each bther in hat they called for the termination of the program the technocrats of the economic sector for whom the camDesl- nado are a pointless waste of time (urn huevadn sin destino) and that it therefore made no sense at all to waste US$20 a year [in per-capita program expenditure] since it was better to support their migration to the city and into other lines of employment and [secondly] the populists (Ber- deeue 1999) -Another approach would be to combine ethnographies and survey research-a potentially fruit- ful approach though also with its methodological and loeistical ~roblems

c3

It also merits saying that although the paper fo- cuses on Ecuadorian material I have come to these interpretations on the basis of studies in other parts of the Andes especially in Bolivia In conducting this other research I have been for- tunate enough to collaborate with Tom Carroll Chema Garcia Leonith Hinojosa Adalberto Kopp Luciano Martinez Diego Mufioz Perico Perks Godofredo Sandovd Tom Perreault Galo Ram6n Victor Huno Torres the late HernBn -Carrasco and not least Denise Bebbington The 1990 census counts 47658 people in Colta (INEC 1992 13) Thls is not to i m ~ l v that all families use the strat-

amp

egy Some leave permanently (or only return for one fiesta a year) yet most families maintain the foothold in Colta retlected in the fact that population continues to increase although more slowly than other cantons in Chimborazo (INEC 1992) The comuna a legally recognized administrative unit since the early 1930s in essence replaced the hacienda as the basic unit for the governance of rural space I use the term community to refer to these legally constituted entities and not to imply a homogeneity of interests within local populations I use the term surveillance deliberately communities monitor arrivals and departures not only of local people but also more important of strangers Cars and people on foot are stopped and asked who they are and where they are going Periodically forms of popular law are exercised by the community when it identifies


wrong-doers In areas to both the north and south of Colta this has recently led to tensions between communitv authorities and the official judicial and police ampstem Mestizo refers to mixed-race whiteindigenous people who in Colta and Guamote typically managed served and traded with the haciendas and would subject Quichuas to a range of abuses (Maynard 1965) One family-planning NGO did though have its office there The 1990 census counts 28058 people in Gua- mote (INEC 1992 13) I say individual because some communities own large extensions of land (generally high grass- lands) in common An official in the regional office of IERAC (the former national institute for land reform) re-ferred to the priest in Guamote as a very good friend of IERAC facilitating the rapid imple- mentation of land redistribution programs in the area (Andrade 1989) I refer to discussions with Hilario Maola Genaro Guaylla and Agapito Muiioz A number of these leaders had parents who had greater access to land This meant that their chil- dren had to migrate less frequently and so were better positioned to assume this mediating role There has though been little change in the gen- dering of local government in Guamote This section draws on the work of others and only a few interviews of my own The teniente politico is a local state authority Lehmann (1986) similarly identifies migration as a key source of income for land purchase in Carchi These patterns are akin to Jokischs (1998) won- derful evocations of the landscape transformations associated with international labor migration in Caiiar Becky Tolens work (1995) and my own informed each other and I want to acknowledge the way in which she helped shape my understanding of Colta Although Catherine Allens (1988) ethnogra- phy of a Peruvian community primarily investi- gates the role of coca chewing in cultural identity she ends her book with a vignette that conveys the sense that younger adults who have migrated to the city of Cuzco seek ways of combining a presence in urban areas and modern livelihoods with a presence in their communities of origin She talks of Jose the son of her principal informant Jose mentioned that he would like to sell the taxi and buy a truck The taxi was fine-but he liked driving in the countryside With a truck he could haul produce between Cuzco and Sonqo [his community] and between Cuzco and Cachin [his wifes community] Emilia [his wife] could go along with him

driving back and forth between the city and their ayllus Now tha t could be a good life he commented wistfully (1988 235-36)

35 This notion has been especially well articulated for the case of indigenous dress in the Andes (Zom 1997 Tolen 1995) but also see Jokisch (1998) for the case of housing and Bebbington (1993) for that of agricultural practice

36 This is from a document written by three Qui- chuas for their training course to become bilingual educators One of them Jose Bueno subsequently became very active in one campesino organization and now leads the Quichua NGO CEDEIN mentioned in the discussion of Colta

37 The program was though a national one 38 This observation of course cuts both ways the

institutional weaknesses that allowed these individual actions can also allow less savory uses of public resources Either way the point is that there is much scope for agency within these institutions

39 Evans (1995 1996) has similarly argued that in- dustrial comparative advantage can be created at a national level via certain types of state-business embeddedness The suggestion here following North and Cameron (1998) is that such comparative advantage can also be created at a sub- national level

40 This is to challenge the neoliberal frameworks on their own epistemological grounds

41 The parallel in some sense is that while each region has its own indigenous peasant movement these movements are also able to coalesce nationally around certain shared concerns and experiences however internally debated these national platforms might be

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Correspondence Department of Geography University of Colorado Boulder C O 80309-0260 email Anthony BebbingtonColoradoedu

Reencountering Development Livelihood Transitions and Place

Transformations in the Andes A n t h o n y Bebbington

Department of Geography University of Colorado at Boulder

Neither poststructural nor neoliberal interpretations of development capture the full extent and complexity of rural transformations in the Andes Poststructural critiques tend to view develop ment as a process of cultural destruction and homogenization while neoliberal interpretations identify a different development failure that inheres in inefficient patterns of resource use and the nonviability of large parts of the Andean peasantry In each case the state is seen as a problem as an agent of dominating modernization or as a brake on market-led transformation The paper reviews these positions in the light of the transformations in governance livelihoods and landscape that have occurred in the regions of Colta Guamote and Otavalo all centers of indigenous Quichua populations in the Ecuadorian Andes These transformations question the accuracy of arguments about cultural destruction or nonviability Instead they suggest that people have built economically viable livelihood strategies that while neither agricultural nor necessar ily rural allow people to sustain a link with rural places and in turn allow the continued reproduction of these places as distinctively Quichua The cases also point to the increased indigenous control of political civil and economic institutions and the important roles that development interventions including those of the state have played in fostering this control In sum this sug gests the need for more nuanced interpretations of development that emphasize human agency and the room to maneuver that can exist within otherwise constraining institutions and struc tures It also suggests the value of placing livelihood and the coproduction of place at the center of any interpretation of the processes and effects of rural development Key Words critical development geography livelihood place Andes social movements

Whether seen as pioneering biting development and its official institutions Neolib- or an opportunity lost (respectively era1 interpretations similarly see little cumula- Peet and Watts 1996b 17 Cooper tive benefit from state intervention in rural

and Packard 1997 15 Lehmann 1997 568) Ar- areas In much ofLatin America such approaches turo Escobars work (1984 1988 1991 1995) increasingly argue that large parts of-the peas- has stirred the worlds of critical geography and antry (or campesinado) are no longer viable in development studies Emblematic of a broader the face of a globalizing market economy Thus poststructural critique of development Escobars while in the poststructuralist critique the state analysis falls within a long and distinguished tra- and development are viewed as the aggressive dition that sees little possibility of improvements agents of modernization according to neoliberal in human well-being without radical political critiques they have largely stood in the way of economic change His work questions the possi- the transformative and modernizing potential bility of building or even imagining alternatives of the market This leads to recommendations from within the current languages and institu- for further liberalization of market-based resource tions of d e ~ e l o p m e n t ~ allocation from the constraints placed on it by Indeed it suggests that these very institutions and languages are deeply state and customary institutions That such lib- implicated in processes of cultural destruction eralization would fuel a redistribution of rural

Poststructural critiques are not alone in pos- resources (especially land and water) to more ing profound and critical questions about rural competitive and larger economic agents and a

Anmk of the Assoaation of Amencan Geographers 90(3) 2000 p 495-520 02000 by Assoclatlon of Amer~can Geographers Puhl~shed hy Blackwell Publ~shers 350 Maln Street Malden MA 02148 and 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JE UK

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