Review of Ritual Encounters: Otavalan Modern and Mythic Community By Michelle Wibbelsman

Abstract

The indigenous communities in the area surrounding Otavalo, in Ecuador’s Imbabura province, are a native people of the Americas that has prospered over the last several decades and, to a significant degree, managed to neutralize or even reverse its position in the regional social hierarchy. These communities are justly famous for their textiles and for their music among other things, both on vivid display at the Saturday market in Otavalo and transported to the world’s marketplaces by traveling musicians and merchants from the area. In some ways the tale of the Otavalans, who have so successfully leveraged their ethnicity into cultural capital, appears to be a unique development, but on inspection, it seems more likely that their experience is typical, in kind if not in degree, of many native peoples throughout the Andes and indeed the world over. Contemporary global society places a premium on the evocative local, and indigenous peoples with viable traditional expressive cultures, like the Otavalans, are finding and seizing ways of making profitable connections with these external loci of interest.