i think these movements are becoming politic, without forget the ethnic point of view!

Look at Engin Isin work on acts of citizenship, as well at his Handbook of citizenship studies.

Of course they are social movements. I suggest you think about it in a "pan-indigenous" way (to view the "macro" and then "re-micro"), not focusing in one case, but in the historical process along the whole continent... The raise and fall of some other movements (such as "campesinos") and the opportunities structure are comprehensible causes not in just one country. I recomend José Bengoa, 2000, "La emergencia indígena en América Latina" (don't know if there is a translation...)

Philipp, I have studied the indigenous case as a social movement network. See:

Ilse Scherer-Warren, REDES EMANCIPATÓRIAS: Nas lutas contra a exclusão e por direitos humanos. Curitiba, Ed. Appris, 2012

Detalhes e aquisição:

http://www.editoraappris.com.br/produto/3871223/Redes-Emancipatorias-Nas-lutas-contra-a-exclusao-e-por-direitos-humanos

That reminds me about Ilse Schimpf Herken, she works (or worked) with indigenous education at the Freie Universität of Berlin... Maybe you can meet her, Philipp...

This sounds like an interesting case, especially your discussion of the different forms of organizational approaches/genres (social movement, development agents, political parties, etc.) points to interesting complexities of this case. Respectfully, I'm not sure the question of whether it is or is not a social movement is the best question to ask, especially since, if we dig a little, we will find similar complexities in many of the collective actions that have historically been the paradigms of social movement scholarship. Consider the U.S. Civil Rights movement in the 1950's-60's. There were elements of community development in Septima Clark's freedom schools and Myles Horton's Highlander Center. There were ways that both unions and political parties were in relationship with SCLC, SNCC, NAACP, and CORE. The fact that there are multiple and different strategic approaches in this 'traditional social movement' suggests to me that no such 'one-size fits all' standard of social movement exists, but that the analytic tools of social movement scholarship will help us understand this episode.

I myself study indigenous movements in Siberia. It's hard to call them social movements. The whole movement and its forms and institutions were created at the end of 1980s and the beginning of 1990s. It was not created by people who wanted to fight for the rights or something else, but it was a space created by Russian government for indigenous peoples to perform their atctivity. Another words indigenous movement in Russia was developed by politics and is to a large extent supported or controlled by the government. So in my opinion it's hard to call this a social movement. Recently I have edited an article about Indian elites from Venezuelan and Peruvian Amazonia. It might be useful, especially bibliography... the article is in Polish.

Is or, rather, was not the the "old" social movement par excellence, labour movement, quite similar to what you describe? At least in the very northern Europe it consisted of a large number of related organisations, labour unions, other interest organisations, political parties, co-operative producer and consumer organisations, cultural organisations like theatres and sports clubs etc. Of course, lately many of the organisations have lost their link to the labour movement: consumer co-ops have become large corporations, sports clubs have dropped "Workers ..." from their name, labour unions have distanced themselves from left parties, etc. The distinction between movement and its organisations is, to my mind, and important one -- though it makes "movement" a bit less concrete phenomenon than when organisations are taken to be the movement .

It is a social movement, depending on its level of organization (like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, or several artistic and cultural groups in Peru). At least in El Salvador, there are indigenous movements including non profit organizations with several levels of activism and community development activities. The Permaculture movement in El Salvador could be another interesting approach, because of permaculture interest on native roots and knowledge related to the specific environment, human group and region of the planet. Another interesting case is the Mayan priest councils in Guatemala and El Salvador, not a movement, but a very closed group that expands their work to influence in different community movements according to the need of the recognition of the indigenous legacy. At least in the first two cases, there are researches (Zapatistas and indigenous organizations) in Chiapas, Mexico and San Salvador, El Salvador, in public or private universities.

Of course they are social movements and ebb and flow according to conditions that are more or less oppressive. Some times are are breakthroughs in which the govenments concede some issues and there is organization and at others they may dissipate. They are fundamental to the development of indigenous rights in the nation state and are always with us because the nation state does not acknowledge the indigenous state. Articulation in the nation state is through a social movement process by which the nation state can recognize its self and make adjustments or suppress such. There is all sorts of research on this in Canada....often they are not called social movements because the academic agents of the nation state doesn't recognize them as such....

I agree with Ana that the resource mobilization theory is not holistic, and therefore I agree that one should expand to incorporate Gramsci, Bourdieu, Foucault and others. Indeed, resource mobilization theory tends toward maintenance of a particular "school" rather than exploration of the complexities and dynamics of actual movement phenomena.

I recommend Suzana Sawyer's Book Crude Chronicles for an excellent exposition of how both indigeneity and neoliberal "modernity" are invoked in social mobilization as well as suppression in Ecuador. June Nash's anthropological reader Social Movements is also quite good for looking at the diversity which characterizes social movements when they are ethnographically explored: http://books.google.com/books/about/Social_Movements.html?id=Z7idQgAACAAJ

Thank you very much for your suggestions. Hannu, I agree, the case I detailed looks a lot like the 19th century labor movement - only without the clear hegemonies the labor movement had (with syndicalist structures in its center).

One of the characteristics of a social movement is that it is to a large degree autonomous - not dependent on external actors. And that's where in my example come up doubts: neither a development agent that depends on very few external and international actors, nor an ecclesiastical actor that depends on the church(es) is autonomous at all (or at least, has a reduced degree of autonomy). The organizations that are part of a union depend on that - their autonomy is also reduced somewhat. My question is: how can I get all this phenomena -as all of them are part of the indigenous movement- into one approach?

Thank you for your answer, Mario. Actually in the "real deal" (i.e. my PhD-Thesis) I used an older text from you ("The concept of social movements", 1992) in order to open up the classical theories of social movement towards a more "cultural" understanding. Nevertheless, collective identity always seemed to vague to me - at least, if I want to explain certain actions or discursive changes in social movements.

I would say that acts of collective behaviour like indigenous movements can be considered as a social movement. In breaking down a social movement or an act of collective behaviour there is rational thought, and you have similar formations. A riot, a peaceful demonstration, a fad or any act on the part of a collective begin with a few people, and they are the core. These people have the impetus to begin the act. The second layer consists of the people who share the same beliefs but need someone else to be the catalyst to call them to action they join next. Then as it gains critical mass more join and even bystanders become included. In Canada indigenous movements like Idle No More and others in Latin America formed in a similar way. The fall of Pinochet in Chile was an act of collective behaviour that gained critical mass, and became a social movement, but it started as a simple one day strike. The core group of people are different in each node of the overall movement, but as they attract more people and more people become aware civil society begins to focus energy into the group and it takes off. One person who would be good to talk to would be Dr. Benet Devetian and my university. He does course work on collective behaviour and social movements in the department of sociology. This is his area of study.

What about directionality?

By this I mean that, on the one hand, an indigenous group that recognizes some real or perceived "oppression" might organize politically and even reach out to natural allies in order to change its circumstances. Following Preston (above) I am thinking of the recent "Idle No More" movement of Indians, Metis and Inuit people in Canada, who are getting support from the remnants of the "Occupy Movement" as well as non-Native environmental groups and other "progressives."

On the other hand, what about indigenous groups that choose to turn inward, perhaps revitalizing old traditions and seeking to distance themselves from the dominant culture?

Are these no more than different strategies to deal with external threats, or is this distinction something more?

(Of course, it's not impossible to imagine the two as tactics, co-existing, at least for a time.)

I would say that moving toward an internal revitalization may also be a social movement. it would still have the support of civil society, and a core group with layers added on after the fact. Essentially if it were more than just a single family or maybe a single reserve I would say that it would be an act of collective behaviour focused at modifying the current social situation. Social movements can be small and isolated or huge. Though I would also say that in many cases a given layer of a movement regardless of the source provides agency to each subsequent lay though anonymity. Most people In many protests would not just yell a police officer if they were alone, but once their numbers begin to swell they feel safe in their anonymity and will even hurl bricks and flaming bottles of alcohol.

That being said I think that a revival or a self-segregationist movement is essentially a social movement.

Not to mention "millennarian" movements from the "Ghost Dance" to the "Cargo Cults" which embraced the material culture of Europeans while seeking to purge them from their lands ...

I have to agree with Nathaniel. At least in the case (again...) of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, the mayor integration of ethnic demands and contents in their discourse -one of the central reasons for their hegemony in the 1990s and early 2000s- started with cultural projects and workshops that were directed towards a re-discovery of the "properly indigenous" by young indigenous intellectuals in the 1980s. Those clubs were basically free spaces - only that they did not serve as a place for beaten-up-movements to survive but rather for a radical reorientation of the whole indigenous movement. The problem (I think) is the "and..." implicit in those structures: you can never tell to which structures a certain group belongs (just in the example of cargo cults and ghost dance, being part of a social movement with certain demands, but also of a religious one).

Hi, I think the problem with this case is the object of analysis, the last three problematic characteristics of the indigenous movement in Ecuador are related to the SMO's of that social movement. The definition problem can be avoided taking separately the organizations of the movement and the social movement analytically. The SMO's not have to contain the definitional characteristics of a social movement, they can be polity members, participants at worker (or religious) federations, also in coalitions with development agencies, but they only turn on the social movement with the coordinated collective action pursuing a common interest against other actors. The social movement not always there for observation through behavior or decisions of their SMO's, this organizations needs to function in the formal political competition too.

"One of the characteristics of a social movement is that it is to a large degree autonomous .." One of the problems with theory is that it is largely of western hegemonic origins....I was thinking why should I discuss the intersection of indigenous networks of these movements and they way they coordinate collective action...when I see the players for example on twitter I can tell which organizations they are oriented by and how they are participating...on what level...where the value articulations intersect and where they don't....parsimony is a tool of the oppressor....so its not a simple one frame project we are looking at...Villena is closest to the mark...of how the analysis needs to be pursued....this is a deeply structured process....predating a depth of colonization which is south america is upwards of 600 years old....one approach isn't going to cut it...

Is the indigenous movement in Ecuador a social movement? I'd say yes. Is it more than a social movement? I'd say yes to that too.

You're right, the Ecuadorian indigenous movement is very special. Ive been working in Ecuador very closely with the indigenous movement on and off since 2000. It's one of the most powerful and visionary indigenous movements I've seen anywhere. It's an incredibly culturally rich complex of autonomous indigenous governments wrapped into federations, confederations and confederations of confederations. They have linked to a political party and clientalistic connections to state appointees. But looking at social movements in the U.S. for example, there are similarly complex, heterarchical structures at play. Does that make it any less of a social movement?

These issues are sticky; categories aren't clear delineations. The Women's Mass Organization in Vietnam has done much for women, but it is embedded deeply w/in the Party structure, ensuring that certain positions are out of bounds and certain questions are unasked. Similarly clientalism is used as a tool by the powerful in the US to keep social movements under control, wrapped w/in the state, and disciplined by the possibility of loosing access. The boundary between social movements and the state is a tricky one, and establishing autonomy is never completely clear. In Ecuador, autonomy from corporate influence is an additional issue (see Sawyer's work). In my own work, I note that despite CONFENIAE's (the Amazonian component of CONAIE, the national indigenous organization) history of manipulation by corporate donors, today they are a powerful force, and perhaps THE most powerful force for resistance in Ecuador.

CONAIE has been historically dominated by the Andean contingent of the indigenous movement, and very much echoes the traditional "old" social movements, with a strong tradition of labor organizing (Becker's done some great work on this), but CONFENIAE is something totally different, much more akin to the NSM's "New social movements". Obviously there's nothing new about the new social movements, what's new is that academics were able to abandon their extremely labor-focused bias to notice other social formations that had long been at work. Particularly in post-neoliberal ecuador (or socialist, if you want to believe the rhetoric), NSMs are very important anti-colonial agents, and CONFENIAE is exceptional among social movements throughout the world in that regard.

At the end of the day, I guess the bigger questions is what aspects of social movement theory are you interested in applying to the Ecuadorian case, and how do they fit? Perhaps instead of wondering what social movement theory can tell us about Ecuador's indigenous movement, we should wonder what CONIAE and CONFENIAE can help us refine our understanding of social movements and improve our theory.

Maybe it is of your interest (you all, that is), that I followed this line of thought and published on article (in Spanish) on this topic (here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256387320_El_movimiento_indgena_ecuatoriano_como_movimiento_social?ev=prf_pub). Another one, in English, is on its way. So, thank you for your support and inspiration.

Article El movimiento indígena ecuatoriano como movimiento social