Book Reviews

Andolina Robert, Laurie Nina and Radcliffe, Sarah A. (2009) Indigenous Development
in the Andes Culture, Power and Transnationalism, Duke University Press (Durham,
NC and London), ix + 360 pp. £65.00 hbk, £15.99 pbk.

The authors have set themselves the titanic task of understanding and making sense
of two simultaneous movements in the Andean region: the transnationalisation of
indigenous movements, and what I define as the ‘indigenisation’ of international
development in Ecuador and Bolivia.
The book interrogates the implications of a culturally and ethnically aware develop-
ment. Building upon Keck and Sikkink’s model of transnational networks, according
to which poor and disempowered Andean Indigenous Movements ‘throw boomerangs’
that connect them to organisations parallel or outside the nation-state, the authors argue
that these boomerangs have an additional and more powerful effect: they come back
‘reloaded’ through the forging of transnational governmentalities comprising the appro-
priation and articulation of ethnic issues and indigenous rights within ‘social’ neoliberal
agendas. The final result is not so much a ‘culturally appropriate development’ – as one
would imagine – but in fact a ‘developmentally appropriate culture’.
The conceptual introduction is very well achieved and sets the term for the subsequent
discussion, in five chapters, of the historical conformation of transnational networks in
indigenous development policy and practice in the Andes; the specific representations
of indigenous people in particular places thus reconfiguring local scales; the shaping
of transnational arenas by indigenous peoples’ engagement with ethnodevelopment
paradigms; the transnational professionalism of indigenous people and knowledge
through state reforms and ethnodevelopment approaches to indigenous education;
and finally, the profound gendered nature of these transnational, national and local
dynamics and relationships. The concluding chapter sets the wider relevance of the
Ecuadorian and Bolivian case.
As someone for whom Ecuador is a life project, I find this book most informative
and helpful to understand the complex multiscalar dynamics at play in the country,
and the role of the indigenous movement within it. As an anthropologist, trained to
obsessively pay attention to the ‘micro’, an approach that makes sense of the ‘macro’ is
very refreshing and provides context for better understanding the local. The approach
taken by this investigation opens the way to numerous areas of further exciting research.
What would the following up of these discourses and policies all the way through to
‘the field’ where they are put in practice, reveal? How are these transnational discourses
and policies acted out at the ‘local’ level and with what effects? The case study of water
(Chapter 3) leaves no doubt as to the importance of people’s voice. Not only the voice
of the ethnic and development elites, that is, those who shape and design development
© 2012 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2012 Society for Latin American Studies
402 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 31, No. 3
 Book Reviews

policies and whose voice the authors have rightly recorded, but also the voice of those
at the very end of the line, who bear the direct consequences of the transnationalisation
and ‘ethnicisation’ of international development.
The book excels in showing how ‘ethnicity’ has become a strategy to appropriate
discourses and resources. Yet, it seems that it has been a strategy only for the ethnic elite,
that is, indigenous leaders and organisations. Who has been excluded? For example, the
authors make the case that the lack of critical gender politics (‘gender as usual’, as they
rightly define it) (p. 222), on the one hand has disadvantaged more indigenous women
(Chapter 6), but on the other, it has also resulted in indigenous women articulating their
own discourse. This discourse has succeeded in locating them within these transnational
networks, granting them an international visibility and thus funders’ attention both
internationally and nationally. Yet, what about Afro-Ecuadorian women? Even more,
what about non-indigenous poor peasant women who are not recognised as having an
‘ethnic belonging’? Can it be that the development-with-identity discourse has in fact
favoured, rather than disadvantaged, indigenous women, by providing them with both a
strategy and an opportunity inaccessible to other non-indigenous women to whom, as a
consequence, very few national, let alone international, NGOs pay any attention? If eth-
nicity, reduced to indigeneity, has become a privileged strategy to access visibility within
transnational networks, what kind of equivalent discourse do poor non-indigenous
women (and men) have or can articulate in order to achieve the same kind of visibility?
What discourse, if any at all, could provide them with the same kind of opportunity
and shelter? Has the emphasis on culture and ethnicity-as-indigeneity ultimately created
new forms of inequalities and divisions among poor women (and men)?
This book must be read. Relevant to scholars, policy makers and development work-
ers alike, it raises a number of important questions and issues worth further research.
It has made me think, which in the end is the true purpose of any book worth reading.

Emilia Ferraro
University of St Andrews

© 2012 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2012 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 31, No. 3 403