Indigenous Labor and the Hacienda System: Examining Everyday Micropolitics and Global Capitalism at the Historic Hacienda Guachalá, Ecuador

Summary

Scholarship in a variety of disciplines pertaining to global flows of people, goods and ideas have begun to emphasize the mediating effects of local communities and cultural logics on and against broader transformations and structural conditions. This topic is of particular importance to an anthropological understanding of both contemporary capitalist processes globally as well as their historical precedents. Recent theoretical approaches to contemporary capitalism, specifically, approach capitalism as performative, as highly adaptive yet premised on stable repetition, and as a relational series of networks that compose an ongoing project rather than a fixed total system. More than an economic system, it is a medium for intercultural entanglements that consist of dynamic social formations, networks of production and circulations. In this paper I synthesize archaeological and documentary evidence pertaining to the colonial and post-independence occupations of the historic Hacienda Guachalá in the highlands of Ecuador. In so doing, I reflect on the ways that this literature usefully intersects with archaeological work and the capacity of material analysis to contribute to such discussions.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage