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Taming Capitalism: The Evolution of the Indigenous Peasant Economy in Northern Ecuador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Tanya Korovkin
Tanya Korovkin*
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
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In the age of corporate empires and free trade, little attention has been paid to those who live and work on the margins of the mainstream capitalist economies. In Ecuador, these workers constitute a vast sector of the national population. Some 60 percent of urban dwellers and probably a much larger proportion of rural families exist below the poverty line, eking their living out of family plots of land or micro-enterprises (World Bank, cited in Larrea and North n.d.). Many of these belong to indigenous ethnic groups and nationalities. What is the effect of capitalist expansion on these workers and the way in which they organize their economy? Are they destined for Marx's “dustbins of history,” or have they been able to adapt to and even take advantage of capitalism without losing their historical specificity as noncapitalist producers?

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , 1997 , pp. 89 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

The fieldwork for this research note was conducted during my stay in Otavalo, in the province of Imbabura, from August 1993 to September 1994. This research was sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHIRC) and the University of Waterloo. I would like to express my gratitude to those who made this project possible, along with special thanks to Jorge León, Luciano Martínez, Vidal Sánchez, Carmen Imbaquingo, José Isama, Francisca de la Cruz, and Carroll Klein for their invaluable help.

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