UC Berkeley

Ethnoengineering is a so-called culturally appropriate building method tested between 2002 and 2010 by the Ecuadorian government, among the country's poorest indigenous peoples and peasant communities. It was part of a 45 million dollar infrastructure building program named FISE III. Ethnoengineering sought to incorporate what it called the cultural particularities of an ethnic group into the process of rural infrastructural modernization, with an eye on general sustainability. In simple terms, the method proposed that modern + culture = sustainable.

By closely studying the literature on the method, building plans and reports on its implementation, and the cases of 18 out of the 31 beneficiary communities, I focus on the negotiation of encountered visions about modernity. The modern was a contentious issue that often pitted FISE and the ethnoengineering supporters against comuneros or low-income villagers. While the former advocated for a building intervention privileging traditional technologies, the latter demanded conventionally modernist constructions. A total of 165 villages, out of the 196 that were proposed the approach, refused to take part in the project, and opposition existed even in those that accepted the intervention. As a general pattern, acceptance or opposition to the approach manifested along social class lines, with elite community members agreeing and comuneros opposing.

The comuneros' challenge to ethnoengineering brings to the forefront the question of who advocates for keeping culture as a way to ensure general sustainability. As the case of ethnoengineering suggests, the advocacy of sustainable building (and of sustainability in general) is positional, as in being mediated by social class concerns--it is also constructed from a position of power as all that is good. Also, the issue of class positionality, as well as the fact that the comuneros' agency manifested in different ways, highlight the shortfalls of representing traditional ethnic communities that are beneficiaries of sustainable development interventions as homogeneous and monolithic. This is a thread that unites both the so-called green neoliberal approach, and its postcolonial criticism.