A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

the different cultures. And when the cult of the Indians receded, when
they had fragmented into social groups, when money for development
was finished, it was clear that the idea of interculturality was for people
to be all together in the same space, without showing the power relationships
and hiding the class conflicts, including those within the indigenous
populations themselves. From interculturality as a utopia, the
move was to interculturality as goods for tourism.
Emphasis on the ‘lite’ characteristics of the cultures (those that make
differentiation possible without contesting the logic of capitalism) led to
interculturality being experienced as multiculturalism, which is certainly
a point of departure, but which is very far from the interculturality proposal
that had been worked out by the Ecuadorian indigenous organizations
of the 1980s. This interculturality ‘lite’ always conceals the fact
that the development discourse, with all the money poured into the
structural poverty of everyone, actually maintains intact the logic of capitalist
colonial domination.
When rural living ends, the challenges of the city begin
It has already been mentioned that space and time are the two key elements
underpinning domination based on cultural difference. When entire
peoples are condemned to live eternally in the past because of their
culture, it in fact essentializes them: forcing on them models that are always
rigid, static and dead. No living culture can be essentialized. Defining
and demarcating the spaces for peoples with specific cultures to
live, makes them exotic. The idea of existence as a place where everything
good or everything bad exists in total forms, obscures and dehumanizes
entire peoples and regions. And behind the essentializing and
exoticizing, the voices of power are concealed, fixing the parameters of
who is who and where and how they may exist. Existence outside these
systems is persecuted or, more easily, delegitimized by a judgement
that excludes someone from membership of a group: acculturalization
or mixed-race status as a verdict of that judgement are two of the strategies
most utilized.
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