A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador

by Christopher Krupa

Overview

When Ecuador's cut-flower industry took off in the mid-1980s, it rode a wave of international credit peddling and currency speculation that would lead countries of the Global South into successive debt crises and northern financial firms to fortune and dominion. By the start of the twenty-first century, as the Ecuadorian economy collapsed and its ties with international finance became strained, flower exporters rebuilt their businesses around the profitability of their indigenous labor force, drawing local communities deeply into new plantation systems taking over the highlands.

In A Feast of Flowers, Christopher Krupa goes inside Ecuador's booming cut-flower industry to chronicle the ways its capitalist pioneers built a booming export industry around a racial ideology, turning indigenous people's purported differences into resources for industrial expansion. At the core of this racial system is a belief, central to postcolonial science and politics in Ecuador, in capitalism's unique capacity to change people's racial identity and to liberate oppressed populations from racial subordination. Krupa shows how such views not only guide how indigenous people are today incorporated into demanding labor systems in Ecuador's new export plantations, but also how indigenous minds and bodies became sites of study and intervention by scientists, politicians, and economic planners throughout the last century, all looking to change indigenous people in some way.

Combining nearly two decades of ethnographic and historical research, A Feast of Flowers shows how aggressive capitalist expansion in postcolonial contexts may revive longstanding intersections between race and economy to facilitate new modes of dispossession under the guise of humanitarian intervention.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812298420
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	626 KB

About the Author

Christopher Krupa is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Fields of Dreams 1

Part I Planting Money

1 Origin Stories 23

2 The Rise of Imperial Finance: A Brief History 47

3 Speculative Blooms and Busts 56

Part II Primitive Accumulations

4 Of Suffering and Salvation: Primitive Accumulation as Capitalist Historicity 103

5 Accumulation by DisPossession: Reflections on Historical Failure 139

Part III Thresholds

6 The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion: Industrial Psychology and the Science of Interiority 167

7 Indigenous Interiors 217

Part IV Farms that Grow People

8 Continuous Improvement: Investing in Human Potential 239

9 The Finca de Personas: Labor and the Art of Personal Transformation 276

Conclusion. Postcolonial Redemption 287

Notes 291

References 297

Index 309

Acknowledgments 315

Editorial Reviews

"This brilliant, powerful study is a pioneering ethnography of capitalist production and its long history of degrading lives through racializing structures of inequity. Krupa’s genius is to focus on the chain of intertwining relations, spanning continents and industries, organizational forms and systemic structures, politics and world views that are involved in the production of delicacies prized in North America and made through the labor of Ecuadorian peasants. Because of his innovative work, we come to understand the weight and trajectory of these transformations making Indigenous, subsistence farmers into ‘modern’ workers for a burgeoning, North American flower industry. Krupa’s insights, compelling prose, personal commentaries—and wit—make us take account of our roles in these histories and realize how we are also accomplices in producing chains of inequity. After reading this book, we will never look at roses the same way."

Duke University Irene Silverblatt

"A Feast of Flowers is a fascinating exploration of the inner workings of agro-industrial spaces, providing a compelling case study for how to approach the hidden histories behind everyday commodities. The importance of Krupa’s timely ethnographic approach lies in its careful dissection of boom-time capitalism and the complex links between race relations, regional history, and subjectivity. This book will supplement conversations across anthropology, geography, economics, and Latin American studies, as it poses important questions for those interested in industrial-labor conditions and transnational commodity networks and, for that matter, anyone who has ever purchased or received cut flowers."

Exertions