Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld has written an exceptional book about collective action, indigenous politics and statecraft. An outstanding work of anthropology and a terrific example of the possibilities of long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book should be read by political scientists, sociologists and all others who study states, communities and social movements. Moving gracefully from individual biographies to community dynamics to national mobilisations, the author provides a compelling and multi-layered account of the cultural politics of highland Ecuador. The book is divided into three parts, all of which describe the complexities of indigenous communities. Part 1 examines the embedded lives and careers of three indigenous men (an artist, a capitalist and an activist). Part 2 turns to the role of lists, jurisdictions and councils in constituting community and adjudicating conflicts. Part 3 turns to the encounters between indigenous individuals and collectives on one side and state authorities on the other.

As I read it, the book braids together two interrelated arguments. The first is about the importance of internal divisions within indigenous communities to the construction of national social movements. The second is about ‘vernacular statecraft’, which challenges the oppositions between state and civil society. Let me take each in turn. In making the case for taking the internal conflicts of indigenous collectivities seriously, Colloredo-Mansfeld is not shy about critiquing the anthropological literature on social movements in which ‘the investigation of disunity has been neglected if not specifically discouraged’ (p. 145). For instance, Suzanna Sawyer's book on the Amazonian federation OPIP (Organisation of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza) ‘is so positive that it comes as a shock, when in the final pages of the book, we learn that OPIP tore itself apart in a corruption scandal and its articulate leader was impeached by followers’. Colloredo-Mansfeld concludes: ‘Clearly, a political story had been missed’ (p. 147). One senses that this book will make for heated seminar-room discussions as the author raises the ethical and analytical consequences of investigating internal divisions in the works of scholars such as David Stoll, Charles Hale and Joanne Rappaport. In examining some of these differences, one cannot help but suspect that the community of anthropology has also benefited from its own internal divisions.

To be clear, the author spends much more time on his community and movement ethnographies than on anthropological family feuds. Indeed, his account of the local dynamics of the national 2006 anti-Free Trade Agreement protest is an especially instructive example of how attention to local tensions can enrich our understanding of national movements. Writing about blockades on the Pan-American Highway in Ecuador (just north of Otavalo), Colloredo-Mansfeld illustrates how the mobilisation was coordinated not in a top-down style (in which national and provincial ‘leaders’ direct their local ‘bases’) but in a more diffuse manner. Decisions about the fate of the blockade (and the cars that tried to pass through it) could only be made through debates at the sites of the blockades themselves; these barricades became kinds of ‘parliaments’, zones of intense political engagement (pp. 191–9). These spaces are never romanticised, however. The blockades took their toll on community members who were obliged to participate in their construction (or pay a fine), city residents whose livelihoods were threatened, and even a visiting anthropologist trying to get through the blockades to get some medicine for a sick child. The writer's account of his own frustration with the adolescents who staffed these blockades – ‘strikes endowed kids with the purpose of a revolutionary and the power of a petty border officer’ (p. 177) – is tempered by his wide-angle account of tensions within rural communities, and between country and city, indigenous people and mestizos, and social movements and the state. Indeed, far from a celebratory account of society versus the state, this mobilisation and the costs it imposed on a variety of subjects tested the fabric of local and national statecraft.

Turning to his second major argument, Colloredo-Mansfeld urges us to see how the seemingly prosaic elements of indigenous community life – marking jurisdictional lines, having lists for communal labour, and the work of local councils – are not separate and opposed to the state but rather are forms of ‘vernacular statecraft’. In chapters on indigenous justice, the political economy of indigenous art and anti-neoliberal protest, it becomes clear what he means by ‘vernacular’, a term borrowed not from linguistics but from vernacular architecture, in which ‘builders imitate and appropriate standard elements of widely used design, adapting them for local conditions’ (p. 17). Citing James Scott's well-known work on the state as an inspiration, Colloredo-Mansfeld nevertheless argues that Scott's dualisms (big state versus small community, high modernism versus local metis) run into trouble in the Andes, as they would have us think that the community is outside of the state. Turning Scott's argument on its head, Colloredo-Mansfeld suggests that the state's categories and practices (such as the mapping and registration of indigenous comunas with state ministries) make possible the ‘massing’ and scaling-up of indigenous mobilisation. In this discussion, the author breathes new life into older and classic anthropological studies of ‘segmentary societies’. Once the structural–functionalist dust is blown off these ethnographies, their relevance for seeing how multiple local units can be articulated politically becomes clear. Thus, it becomes apparent that the subtitle of this book is somewhat misleading. Rather than being a study of ‘Andean civil society’, this book's historical and ethnographic exploration of the links between community and state makes it a valuable addition to the scholarship on state formation in Latin America. Along with works such as Kim Clark and Marc Becker's recent volume on highland indigenous people and the state, and Donna Lee Van Cott's last book on local governments in the Andes (which may have appeared too recently to make it into Colloredo-Mansfeld's bibliography), this book is part of a new wave of scholarship on Ecuador and Andean state–society relations.

Inevitably, there are some spots where one wishes for just a little bit more. Aside from a critique of Sawyer's work, there is almost no engagement with the different rhythm of state-community dynamics in the Amazonian lowlands. Similarly, it is strange that a book on indigenous social movements is silent on the legacy of the disastrous alliance between national indigenous leaders and Colonel (and later President) Lucio Gutiérrez that produced a short-lived military–indigenous junta in 2000. Finally, in all the conflicts and tensions that Colloredo-Mansfeld studies, a discussion of gender is largely absent. Of course, no book does it all, but this book does a lot. It deserves to be read and debated widely.