Since the 1980s, Ecuador has seen five indigenous uprisings, the emergence of the powerful Pachakutik political movement and the strengthening of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and the Associations of Black Ecuadorians, all of which have contributed substantially to a new constitution proclaiming the country to be ""mulitethnic and multicultural"". Furthermore, January 2003 saw the inauguration of a new populist president, who immediately appointed two indigenous persons to his cabinet. In this volume, 11 critical essays, plus a lengthy introduction and epilogue explore the multicultural forces that have allowed Ecuador's indigenous peoples to have such dramatic effects on the nation's political structure. The authors use their ethnographic experience to understand both the cultural systems of local-level aesthetics, ritual and cosmology and the national polical-economic transformations that have shaped this paradoxical, globalizing nation. In their descriptions and analyses, they bring together interpretive anthropological, sociological and historical scholarshop to consider these transcultural and intercultural phenomena. Presenting a microcosm of the cultural transformations that are occuring throughout the Americas, these essays should appeal to Latin Americanists, social scientists and humanists of the Andes and Amazonia, and, in particular, anthropologists as well as undergraduates and graduate students.
