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Getting over the Andes: The Geo-Eco-Politics of Indigenous Movements in Peru's Twenty-First Century Inca Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2006

SHANE GREENE
Affiliation:
Anthropology at Indiana University.

Abstract

This article examines how President Alejandro Toledo's self-professed Andean identity and efforts to establish a state-led indigenous rights framework conflicted with a growing eco-ethno alliance of Andean and Amazonian representatives in Peru. Existing scholarly accounts declare the indigenous movement to be unimportant or, indeed, entirely absent in Peru. Yet, they do so by emphasising the centrality of the historical dynamic between the Andean region, where until recently local peoples have desisted from making explicit indigenous claims, and the urbanised coastal region, where the elite's power is most clearly concentrated. This obscures the Amazon as a site of historical events and eco-ethno-politics of national and global scope. The recent emergence of a debate on indigenous issues shows that the Amazonians' longer engagement in the global sphere of indigenous and environmental politics now places them in the position of exemplifying indigeneity for the Andeans and Peruvians at large. This shift challenges in fundamental ways the historical image of Peru the nation as inextricably implicated in the post-colonial fantasies of what I term the ‘Inca slot’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Some of the research this article is based on was made possible by generous grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council and the Fulbright programme. I owe Cecilia Méndez, María Elena García and two anonymous reviewers a word of thanks for some very helpful comments. Jean Jackson also provided helpful feedback on a very early draft at the 2003 AAA meetings in Chicago.