THE VALUES OE WATER Development Cultures and Indigenous Cultures in Highland Ecuador

This article examines the symbolic transformations and material consequences of an irrigation development project designed to empower indigenous peoples in Cañar, Ecuador. It argues that the project deepened market society and reproduced colonialism more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but indigenous people found ways to appropriate project resources and embed the market in alternative principles of social life. Market society deepened through the neoliberal hegemony of international development policy and through the indigenous movement's incorporation of market rationalities. Colonialism recurred through hierarchical representations of knowledge and skills reminiscent of long-standing stereotypes of natives, which local indigenous leaders internalized. Both processes urifolded through constructions of value arid acts of evaluation. The gap between the market ideal communicated in the irrigation development project and the conditions of actually existing markets that local indigenous people engaged after project closure limited the concrete empowerment of indigenous peoples. In 1998, Tucuy Cañar Ayllucunapa Tantanacuy (Tucayta), an indigenous organization in Ecuador's Cañar Province, secured control of significant irrigation infrastructure. Citing this acquisition as empowerment, the organization's leaders asserted professional competence and market competitiveness, seemingly conforming to neoliberal principles that they had rejected four years earlier when protesting an agrarian law that subjected land access to market competition. By 1998, local indigenous leaders believed that they had discerned more successful ways to pursue aims and procure capabilities. In this article, I demonstrate that emergent cultures of development conditioned Tucayta's attainment of the Patococha irrigation system and labeled it a qualified success. I advance a cultural conception of development based on neo-Polanyian, anthropological, and postcolonial theory. I argue that the Patococha project deepened market society and reproduced coloniality more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but indigenous people found ways to appropriate Patococha and embed the market in alternative projects of social life.' Some material in this article appeared previously in Robert Andolina, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe, Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power and Transnationalism (2009, Duke University