Today, political, economic, and even environmental agency continues to be denied to indigenous societies worldwide, despite efforts to reconcile this perverse colonial legacy. Consider the seemingly benign act of purchasing a “socially just” chocolate produced by an indigenous community. The images and words that describe these communities evoke fragile societies struggling to make sense of a modern world while also desperately trying to maintain disappearing traditions. When indigenous women are depicted, the message is even more complicated because they are presented as stewards of the environment, family, and tradition, who must also strive to break free from gendered inequity and oppression. In other words, these messages quite explicitly suggest that indigenous people, and women in particular, remain marginal to the world and bound to disappear if left to their own devices.
Manuela Lavinas Picq’s new book contests these notions by showing that indigenous women matter and are active shapers of the world they (and even we) live in today. As a political scientist, Lavinas Picq anchors her analysis in the political action of the Kichwa women of Ecuador to show how indigenous women impact world politics despite being portrayed as passive political actors. The main revelation of the book is that indigenous women harness their marginality in strategic ways to assert new forms of sovereignty that typical international relations propositions underestimate or ignore. In effect, the book challenges scholars of the international to create new theoretical frameworks based on political action that happens “from the periphery.” The process of influencing world politics via unexpected, informal, yet profoundly strategic ways results in what Lavinas Picq aptly calls vernacular sovereignties.
To position her main proposition, the author first works through two important issues: indigeneity and the intersection between gender and ethnicity. After an introductory chapter that explains key terms and context, she begins chapter 1 (“Invisible Women”) by exploring how indigenous women have been obscured from political processes. By using an intersectionality framework, she effectively explains the “multiple forms of marginalization” that impact indigenous women today. This marginalization stems from a combination of sexism and gender-based violence, enduring colonial attitudes toward indigenous subjects, dispossession, and persistent socioeconomic nonfreedoms like poverty, illness, and a lack of access to culturally appropriate education. The first chapter interweaves Ecuador-specific examples with similar global evidence to illustrate the grim condition of indigenous women worldwide.
Chapter 2 (“The Inheritance of Resistance”) complicates the marginalization of indigenous women by introducing the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in indigenous movements. Lavinas Picq showcases how indigenous women have been historically central to colonial resistance yet have also been subverted by their own communities through gender-based violence. The trajectory and life story of indigenous rights activists Dolores Cacuango and Transito Amaguana are poignant examples of this contradiction. On the one hand, they were able to create and lead an indigenous movement focused on dignity, the equitable redistribution of land ownership, and the need for bilingual education. On the other hand, they each lived lives of extreme poverty, domestic and structural violence, and eventual obscurity.
The next two chapters are the core of Lavinas Picq’s goal of illustrating how indigenous women have leveraged their vernacular politics into influencing world politics and then, in turn, have used these achievements to influence local political agendas. Chapter 3 (“Indigenous International Relations”) traces how indigenous women have mobilized by participating in international forums, such as the Continental Summit of Indigenous People and Nationalities of Abya Yala. This kind of transnational participation helped draft key international laws, such as ILO Convention 169 and the United Nations Declaration of Rights for Indigenous People of 2007. She explains that the women’s success lies in an ability to leverage their ambiguous relationships to their nation-states into powerful action at the international level; this is a process she cleverly calls “worlding without stateness.”
Chapter 4 (“Self-Determination with Gender Parity”) examines how indigenous women leaders consolidate rights earned in international forums in Ecuador. This is the most ethnographic of her chapters, as she traces the political trajectory of one organization in particular: the Red Provincial de Organizaciones de Mujeres Kichwas y Rurales de Chimborazo (REDCH), which successfully advocated for gender parity in the 2008 constitutional reform in Ecuador. The case of REDCH and the Kichwa women who ran the organization tell a compelling story of extreme and frustrating adversity, yet also of resilience, persistence, and strategic political maneuvering. The result was groundbreaking legislation that was able to differentiate universal human rights and actively challenge state authority. This chapter also represents the bulk of Lavinas Picq’s ethnographic research and in many ways is the most important section in the book, as it reveals exactly how powerful political action can emerge from the periphery. It is also an inspiring chapter to read and is useful to anyone interested in social justice and civic engagement.
However, the author does not fully harness the power of her ethnographic insights, as there are few direct quotes or actual opinions from the women she interviewed directly. The lack of local voices is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the entire book. I am puzzled by Lavinas Picq’s choices in this respect, as the message of the book is precisely about vernacular power. It is important to read the actual words of the women as they explain how they conceived of, participated in, and reflected on these events. As a minor criticism, I also wish the beautiful images scattered throughout the book were referenced in the text. I assume they are meant to function as a photo essay depicting the multifaceted life of the Kichwa women of Chimborazo, but without references, they feel decontextualized instead.
Even if Lavinas Picq’s stylistic choices are justified, as an ethnographer I am troubled that her book does not explain her methodologies or address her own posi-tionality. Ethnographic research is incredibly powerful precisely because it reveals insights from hidden, informal, and unexpected realms. That is why the practice has expanded beyond the traditional ethnographic disciplines of anthropology, human geography, and sociology. Yet a common mistake is to assume that its qualitative yield excuses it from any attention to methodological rigor. This is a serious problem. The need for a methodological statement is an ethical one as well. How did the author access these women? How did she obtain consent? How did her own shifting position in Ecuador, as a scholar at risk, impact this relationship? These considerations are critical to developing ethical relationships in the field, especially when working with vulnerable or marginalized populations. A scholar of Lavinas Picq’s stature is presumably very aware of these ethical intricacies, and her experience would have been of value to future researchers.
Overall, the book is ambitious and multidimensional. For this reason, it may feel dense at times, even for scholars versed in indigenous rights issues. Yet the effort of reading it is worth it, because indigenous movements are complex and because they matter to all of us. I appreciate Lavinas Picq’s detailed attention to chronology, careful use of secondary sources, and references to both Ecuadorian and international examples at the same time. This approach provides compelling evidence that sets the stage for her final proposition, laid out in chapter 5 (“Sovereignties Within”). Here the author reminds us that paying attention to alternative, even marginal, sources of political contestation is critical to understanding world politics. In this chapter, her contribution to the field of international relations is best articulated, as she directly challenges dominant Westphalian notions of sovereignty (those anchored at the boundaries of nation-states) to propose new forms of sovereignty that stem from non-Western options, from an indigenous perspective.
I recommend this book to scholars interested in Latin American studies and indigenous movements, although I do caution that the intended audience is scholars of international relations, as Lavinas Picq is contesting specific theoretical frameworks in that discipline, an intervention that is clearly needed. To those interested in including this book in Latin American studies or anthropology and human geography courses, I suggest using excerpts to complement more ethnographically rich works, especially those by other Andean scholars that also examine the intersection between indigenous knowledge and political action (e.g., Marisol de La Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds and Sarah Radcliffe, Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy).
I also highly recommend selections from this book (chapters 1, 4, and 5) to undergraduates interested in social justice because the book shows the complexity of civic engagement and political action and provides a “real world” example of how concepts such as intersectionality, indigeneity, and social justice play out and have significant outcomes. This is the most valuable message of Lavinas Picq’s book: that the seemingly irrelevant can have significant global impact.
