Senior Research Seminar: Dr Natalia Buitron-Arias

The Moral Force of Community Assemblies: towards a Non-coercive Theory of Statecraft

Anthropologists often imagine the originality of Amazonian politics against the spectre of state politics, an analytical strategy that evokes Clastres’s influential characterisation of Amerindian societies as “societies against the state”. Yet the history of village formation and recent political achievements in Western Amazonia show that indigenous and state politics cannot be disentangled. Through a study of the everyday uses of public assemblies in Ecuadorian Amazonia, this paper challenges the state/non-state distinction and puts forward a view of indigenous statecraft as an open-ended project of governance.