This brief book is a preliminary attempt to examine the past and present development of anthropological thinking and research in Ecuador. Its three sections deal, respectively, with the precursors of Ecuadoran anthropology, its formative intellectual trends, and its establishment as a professional discipline.
Several Ecuadoran intellectuals, some proponents of the ideas of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and others influenced by Romanticism since the middle of the nineteenth century, are cited as the precursors of anthropological thinking insofar as they tried to reflect, first, on the issues of an emerging creole “American” culture, and later on the constitution of the nation-state and the consolidation of national culture and identity. In addition to its brief analysis of local authors for these two historical periods, the book recognizes European travelers contributions to the social and natural sciences in Ecuador. This suggests interesting possibilities for future research into Ecuadoran intellectual history and the yet-untapped wealth of “Costumbrista” paintings and travelers’ accounts for an ethnography of nineteenth-century Ecuador.
The second section of the book examines the positive influence of the Liberal revolution and the consequent democratization of culture in creating an opening for the social sciences in early twentieth-century Ecuadoran society. Positivism and indigenismo are considered in some detail for having influenced the study of indigenous populations and national politics of development. Archaeology, on the other hand, begins under the influence of diffusionist ideas and the research guidance of North American scholars.
According to Segundo Moreno Yánez, contemporary professional anthropology started in the 1970s with the creation of the anthropology program at the Catholic University in Quito and other research programs at private and regional institutions. In this third section of the book, the author discusses different trends in archaeological research, advances in ethnohistory, and Ecuadoran anthropologists’ rather exclusive concentration on the study of highland indigenous peasants, in contrast to the research on tropical forest societies done almost entirely by non-Ecuadoran anthropologists. He also draws attention to local anthropologists’ lack of interest in the cultural wealth of Ecuador’s Afro-American groups.
The rest of this section is devoted to a discussion of research on urban, linguistic, and symbolic anthropology. Yet it omits several Ph.D. theses by foreign anthropologists in almost all the categories the author mentions and others, such as gender, ethnomusicology, oral tradition, and ritual and medical anthropology. A very small number of these theses have been published in Spanish. That the rest remain almost unknown in Ecuador reveals some of the problems that Moreno himself mentions: the weakness of Ecuadoran institutions in gathering information about foreign researchers in the country and the poor commitment of some of those scholars to making their work known in Ecuador.
In the last section of the book, Moreno makes a final assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current research in Ecuadoran anthropology. He thereby provides a useful summary of areas and topics that need to be the object of further research.
