Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland
South America
Volume 3 | Issue 1 Article 4
June 2005
Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics,
Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador
Michael C. Cepak
University of Chicago
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Cepak, Michael C. (2005). "Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador," Tipití: Journal of
the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 4.
Available at: htp://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol3/iss1/4
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Cepak: Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neo
Tipití (2005) 3(1):79–89 © 2005 SALSA 79
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BOOK REVIEWS
Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism
in Ecuador. Suzana Sawyer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
xii + 294 pp., notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $21.95 (paper). ISBN
0-8223-3272-8. [dukeupress.edu]
MICHAEL C. CEPEK
University of Chicago
Suzana Sawyer’s Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil,
and Neoliberalism in Ecuador is an innovative attempt to bring new objects
of analysis into the anthropological domain. The book focuses on a series of
events and relations in the early and mid-1990s that tied indigenous Quichua-
speaking people of Amazonian Ecuador to the “neoliberal” agenda forwarded
by the Ecuadorian state and multinational oil corporations. By exploring these
articulations, Sawyer intends to provide insight into the machinations of power
in the contemporary global order. At the same time, she warns us to remain
aware of the paradoxical effects of globalization, which often lead to the protest
and transgression of particularity rather than the docility and acquiescence of
homogeneity. By examining these contemporary global concerns in a region
more known for “traditional” ethnographic analysis, Sawyer hopes that her
book will provoke discussion on what postcolonial fieldwork—and postcolonial
ethnography—might be.
Sawyer is always present in the action, making her commitments explicit
and her involvements transparent in the demonstrations and meetings that
form her main objects of analysis. The majority of her research examines the
political maneuvering of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza
(OPIP), a powerful ethnic federation in Amazonian Ecuador that represents
Canelos Quichua, Achuar, and Shiwiar communities. Each chapter of the book
focuses on a different political event—revolving around oil, land, and changing
relations between the Ecuadorian nation(s) and state—in which OPIP and
other indigenous organizations play major roles.
The “Opening” begins in the midst of a meeting between OPIP leaders and
the multinational petroleum company ARCO. It serves as a good introduction
to the book’s three main players: “subaltern groups, transnational capitalism, and
a neoliberal state” (p. 17). The historical, political, and economic background
material set the stage for the first chapter, “Amazonian Imaginaries,” which
follows indigenous protestors as they march from their lowland territories to
the national capital of Quito to demand land rights and constitutional reform.
Sawyer interprets this event as a larger instance of indigenous collective
action aimed at reconfiguring the “material, political, and symbolic meanings
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of territory, nationhood, and sovereignty in Ecuador” (p. 30). Chapter 2, on
“Crude Excesses,” examines how ARCO sought to sow discord between Canelos
Quichua communities and OPIP in order to pave the way for its operations,
which were opposed by many indigenous people. Sawyer understands this
process of breaking up indigenous collectivities into smaller, more pliable
units as an instance of what Timothy Mitchell calls “enframing”: the rhetorical
creation of a “neutral space” of interaction-among-equals as a means to divide,
contain, and set constraints on collective subjects’ ability to negotiate with state
and capital (pp. 59-60).
The next two chapters focus on engagements with the national politics
of petroleum. Chapter 3, on “Neoliberal Ironies,” pays close attention to the
1994 “Seventh Round” of oil concession bidding in Quito, where indigenous
people—and other citizens—protested the deregulation and liberalization of the
oil sector to demand the maintenance of gasoline subsidies and the requirement
of environmental impact studies for all oil operations. This chapter also follows
OPIP leaders to a World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C., where they
successfully lobby against new loans to Ecuador’s state oil company and also
helped to stymie the concession licensing so that many oil blocks were never
successfully bid on. Chapter 4, on “Corporate Antipolitics,” borrows James
Ferguson’s concept of “antipolitics” to analyze how the state and corporations
sought to position debate about the “environment” as a technical, rather than
a political (or social or historical), question.
The last two substantive chapters of the book depart from questions of oil
to look at the politics and economy of land in Ecuador. Conflicting relations
to land and environment motivated debate on the government’s replacement
of the 1964 Agrarian Reform Law with the 1994 Agrarian Development Law,
which aimed to break up communal land holdings and secure private property
in order to modernize Ecuador’s agricultural economy as an export-oriented
production force. Chapter 5, on “Contested Terrain,” explores the 1994
“Mobilization for Life,” a ten-day stretch of national roadblocks that joined
indigenous and nonindigenous campesino opposition to the new land laws.
Sawyer’s main interest in this chapter is the analysis of how a law that strove
to neutralize threatening cultural difference actually had the countereffect of
providing “new terrain for political expression” (p. 181), joining indigenous
people and colonists as a novel, “counter-hegemonic” coalitional force (p. 151).
Chapter 6, on “Liberal Legal-Scapes,” provides a deeper discussion of the debate
concerning the 1994 law. In an ideologically revealing move, Sawyer takes us
into the heart of a two-week meeting in Quito’s Presidential Palace between
state officials and national and regional indigenous leaders. In these discussions,
we can see the discursive elaboration of competing visions of the Ecuadorian
nation-state, with the “official” desire to make all citizens equal and autonomous,
and the indigenous counterdrive to bring history and cultural difference into
their self-portrayal as particular, collective actors with specific needs and rights
concerning “territory” and “identity.” This analysis sets the stage for the final
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Cepak: Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neo
Book Reviews 81
section, “Closing: A Plurinational Space,” where Sawyer engages theories of
ethnicity and nationalism to explain how indigenous evocations of “nationality”
provided the ground for the eventual declaration of Ecuador as an officially
“plurinational” country.
The main strength of Crude Chronicles is its elaboration of a central focus
across a wide range of contexts and topics. Sawyer continuously returns to her
key points, and by the end of the book her position is clear. Although many
readers might not agree with her basic definitions, she is never unclear about
what she means by her guiding terms: “globalization” is “the ever increasing and
uneven production and consumption of capital, commodities, technologies, and
imaginaries around the globe,” and “neoliberalism” is the “cluster of government
policies that aim to privatize, liberalize, and deregulate the national economy
so as to encourage foreign investment and intensify export production” (p. 7).
The aims, uses, and effects of “neoliberal globalization,” as foisted upon a group
of people who do not share its basic principles, are Sawyer’s main concerns. By
following indigenous protest and critique, Sawyer provides a new standpoint to
examine some of the current contemporary era’s most vexing questions: What
happens to citizens when the state seeks to become a “fiscal manager” rather
than a provider of social services? How do corporate actors seek to fill this
vacuum, as transnational capitalists assume a more “pastoral” stance towards
subject populations as their always partial providers of income, health care,
and education? And, most generally, what happens to the relation between
state, nation, and variously positioned citizen groups when “the free market”
is expected to provide solutions to all of life’s problems? These are extremely
important issues, and Crude Chronicles tackles them head on.
The central weakness of Sawyer’s book is that it only rarely takes us beyond
boardrooms and indigenous political rhetoric to see how the “abstract, rational,
and formalistic language of democracy, rights, and the liberal subject” (p. 8) is
refashioning indigenous self-understandings. Sawyer is obviously inspired by
poststructuralist and postcolonial thinking, portraying the key dynamics in terms
of “subalterns,” “hegemony,” and “transgression.” She explicitly approves of a
Foucauldian project, searching for the forms in which “governmentality”—“the
conduct of conduct,” a phrase that reappears continuously throughout the
book—operates productively at the most minute levels of practice. Consider
the following passage:
In essence, then, transnational capital did more than simply employ indigenous
bodies to be docile spectators and cheap labor. It simultaneously was engaged
in a project to shape and to govern the capacities, choices, and wills of subjects
to conform to a neoliberal reason. The liberal logic of capital accumulation that
informed ARCO’s practices intruded ever more intensely into local people’s
lives and shifted the terms of debate around identity, rights, and representation.
This logic (regardless of how lawed) was profoundly positive—in the techni-
cal rather than the ethical sense. Through the creative alignment of interests,
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82 Tipití
objects, institutions, and bodies, ARCO produced (with the blessing of state
agencies) new identities, dispositions, senses of knowing, and possibilities of
being among indigenous peoples in Pastaza (p. 9).
This conclusion—that a “liberal logic” led to the production of new
“identities, dispositions, senses of knowing, and possibilities of being” among
Sawyer’s research population—would require an immense amount of detailed
microanalysis to be substantiated. Yet, Sawyer provides only anecdotal evidence,
suggesting that such a transformation must be the case, rather than how,
when, and where it is the case. Crude Chronicles has very little “traditional”
ethnography in it. Sawyer provides sparse data on real-time discourse and
practice, aside from narratives of meetings and protest events. Narrative, too,
can act as an “enframing” device, as the context-thin chronological reporting
of an event or a discussion among culturally different actors eludes the varying
interpretations and intentions structuring dialogue and interaction. We never
follow the participants through the rest of their everyday lives, and we are
left wondering if any of the political rhetoric has a larger social life. In their
communities, around the cooking fire, hunting in the forest, speaking Quichua
to their children and parents, do these actors really talk about “neoliberalism,”
“globalization,” “imperialism,” “territory,” “plurinationality,” “culture,” “identity,”
“nation,” “state,” or “environmental conservation”? Or, do the terms that they use
to understand their lives show more continuity with other cultural repertoires,
constructed in relation to other forces and historical epochs? Without an answer
to these questions, can we really talk about neoliberalism’s production of new
“possibilities of being”? Sawyer’s ethnography could be strengthened in this
regard, and any reader would do well to consider her work alongside Norman
E. Whitten, Jr.’s detailed ethnographic writing on Canelos Quichua culture
and society, which deals with many of the same individuals, communities,
organizations, and events focused on by Sawyer. As she tells us, cultural
difference is never a static, simple, or bounded thing. Yet, failing to take cultural
difference completely into account in the analysis of intercultural events only
reinforces the “neutralizing” and “equalizing” neoliberal understandings that
she critiques.
That basic misgiving aside, Crude Chronicles is an important and useful book,
and it fills a void left in much of the anthropological writing on lowland South
America. It would be a good addition to courses on globalization, neoliberal
politics and economics, and contemporary Latin America. It would also be a
great book to teach with other texts on indigenous Amazonia—a juxtaposition
that would help students to imagine how contemporary political analysis could
be joined with more fine-grained and open-ended ethnographic research. In
this way, Sawyer’s book could help us to imagine what a truly adequate, nuanced,
and politically responsible account of contemporary indigenous struggles might
look like.
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