Abstract
Constitutive Visions skilfully and systematically puts together two strands of scholarship – constitutive rhetoric and rhetorical historiography – to analyse the construction of Ecuadorian national identity between 1852 and 1947. Seeking to answer questions such as ‘How do strong identifications, such as national identities, come into being and sustain themselves? How do these identifications make claims on future change?’ (p. 1), this book focuses on the creation and dissemination of commonplaces or topoi that show both continuity and difference over the century it covers. The author adopts a dynamic perspective on rhetoric, as being related to human practices and ‘forms of communications that have designs on the values, beliefs and actions of others’ (p. xix). The articulation of a national identity is then regarded as a rhetorical procedure. Constitutional documents are also considered part of this interaction, in that they themselves represent acts, agency and purpose (p. 29). Topoi are considered ‘nodes of social value and common sense that provide places of return for convening arguments across changing circumstances’ (p. 6). This definition allows the reader to understand persistent patterns of national vision as continuously recreated rather than static.
The analysis covers two distinct periods: the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. In the former period, the emphasis was on overcoming regionalism and creating a unified territorial nation. Just as railways were built to unite distant areas of the country and to create an agro-export economy, and positivism dominated the intellectual climate, indigenous taxes were abolished and a School of Art established that contributed to a sense of nationality built on territory, history and population. Inspired by European Romanticism, artists depicted indigenous life in an idealised fashion, emphasising the mythical past and the unspoiled nature of the indigenous people in a style named indianismo. However, although indigenous people were included on paper, they remained excluded on other terms, such as the right to vote. It was an era in which academia, politics and arts alike contributed to the construction of the nation, in word, deed and image. The first half of the 20th century, on the other hand, was marked by economic crises and political struggle to gain hegemony on distinct visions on modernity. Social realism – with its commitment to the popular classes and its recognition of indigenous labour – replaced positivism. In art, this led to the adoption of indigenismo, a more politicised and less romantic identity.
The book is organised into six chapters that appear in a paired structure. Both Chapter 1 and the ‘Conclusion’ address the rhetorics of permanence and change through a focus on the history of the 11 Ecuadorian constitutions voted throughout this timespan. Chapters 2 and 3, in turn, relate indigeneity to history, landscape, labour and modernity. The first of these focuses on how Indians were represented – especially in art, but also in poetry, political debates and land disputes – as having a close connection with the land. Chapter 3 shows the rhetoric ambivalence concerning the Indian, represented both as the builder of the nation through the provision of necessary labour and tax money and as the cause of backwardness due to dullness and stupidity. Both political elites and indigenous communities returned to this topos, employing these patterns in generative ways. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the ways in which the identification of indigenous people as Other or Self allowed for arguments of national legitimacy. Chapter 4 shows how political elites positioned themselves as a superior intelligentsia, with the government being contrasted with the burden of a nation belonging to the Indians. Chapter 5 shows how the elite appropriated features of indigeneity, positioning itself at the heart of the nation while taking distance from an actually indigenous past and present. Taken together, these two chapters show how both identification and division are used to claim legitimate access to the nation while resolving troubling racial contradictions inherent to national life in Ecuador.
The constant feature revealed throughout this historiography is the ambivalent position of indigenous people in the imaginaries of the nation. On one hand, their presence represents a key feature of Ecuador’s national past and present; on the other, every shift recreates in specific ways their exclusion from full citizenship in a country run by a Mestizo–White minority. The author makes this visible by juxtaposing dominant images with the contestation found in indigenous protests and litigations. Furthermore, the careful historiographic research reveals the shift from an emphasis on land to labour, from workers to work and identification with indigenous people as the Other and Self, thus exposing the ambivalences found in dominant discourses and their subsequent changes. In sum, while in the 19th century Indians were made central to the nation while being excluded from citizenship, in the 20th century, the political elite appropriated abstract features of indigeneity, while excluding the Indian.
The dynamic vision of rhetoric and its consistent application in the analysis make this book an excellent contribution both to theories of constitutive rhetoric and to the historiography of Ecuador. Together with the carefully reflexive point of view – well aware that modern scholarship and the author’s own research are not free from dominant power relations and visions, and therefore incapable of capturing the full picture – this makes the book highly recommendable to rhetoricians, anthropologists and researchers interested in the construction of nationalism and its related mechanisms of power in Ecuador and beyond.