Politics of Indigeneity in the Andean Highlands: Indigenous Social Movements and the State in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru (1940–2015)

Although rarely used by indigenous movements themselves, indigeneity has become a fashionable concept in academic discussions on the indigenous question; we can observe a strong effort to internationalize the issue of “indigeneity,” as shown by its documentation in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. As a social categorization, indigeneity presupposes a commonality among different indigenous peoples worldwide, often defined in contrast to other identitarian groups. Within the Latin American context, the catch-all category “indio” does not say anything about what is signified; instead it must be conceived as a mirror, or a negative puzzle of