Contribution short abstract:

This contribution looks at the importance of ethnographies’ focus on complex connections to help us to understand the contemporary power of illicit governance into which diverse lives are differentially incorporated.

Contribution long abstract:

From the UN recognition of the indigenous agroforestry chakras as “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems” to the Kawsak Sacha – “living forest” political proposal, indigenous Ecuadorians have put to work the academic and development distinctions between productive exploitation and reproductive sustainability. Yet the very opposition that makes these projects so important as critiques of extractive logics, also places them in analytically distinct spaces from contemporary problematics. The past decade’s ecological critique of the exploitation of natural resources, and often of indigenous territories, made such an opposition conceptually cogent and politically important. Today, however, when economic dispossession is significantly influenced by narco-economies, criminal governance and increasing violence, indigenous peoples, if mentioned, are portrayed only as victims. Yet the political clarity of indigenous difference in this case also obscures complex causalities. For example, how and when do non-state authorities over territories collide or collude, often without explicit discord or accord? How do new generations of indigenous youth incorporate the racialized punitive discourse widely circulated in mass media? If indigenous practices led us to more-than-human ethnographies that could be incorporated into political defense of indigenous lifeways and territories, we now need ethnographies that focus on complex connections between spaces, systems and apparently opposed spheres to help us to understand the shifting systems into which diverse lives are differentially incorporated. This paper examines such connections through a focus on the transformations of the chakra and of the Kawsak Sacha proposal in the context of the increasing power of illicit organizations in Ecuador.