Telling Stories in Order to Live: Narratives on Danger and Modernity in a Quito Market.
Adamson, Diane R.
2015
- El Camal, a large municipal market in Quito, Ecuador, is widely considered by residents as a “dangerous” place, yet fewer crimes actually occur there than elsewhere in the city. During ten weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at the market in 2013, I attempted to understand the gap between popular discourse and reality when it came to “danger” at Camal. Drawing on anthropological theories about the ... read moreinformal economy, globalization, and insecurity, this thesis proposes that concerns about danger reflect more complicated perceptions of race and modernity that are being given a new gloss as Ecuador becomes more involved in globalized capitalism. Chapter One sketches the history of Ecuador from the pre-Colombian era to the present, with a particular focus on how imaginaries of race and modernity have shaped the nation. Chapter Two is a spatial exploration of Quito’s markets and the city’s distinctive North-South geographic orientation, showing how notions of race have influenced the placement and perception of markets. In Chapter Three, I examine discourse about the market and argue that many Quiteños fear Camal’s clearly hybridized form of exchange and relatively undisciplined space, which challenge seemingly stable racialized categories in a city felt to be insecure in general. Chapter Four is dedicated to the vendors’ behaviors and their own stories about the market. Using as a starting-point anthropologist Cindi Katz’s categories of resilience, reworking, and resistance, the chapter shows how the global and the local produce one another on many levels, while simultaneously creating “excesses” that cannot fully be captured through any single analytical lens. I conclude with a brief discussion of positionality and a rationale for producing ethnographic knowledge even in the absence of definitive conclusions.read less
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- tufts:sd.0000300
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