Territorialidades, Autonomía y Conflictos: Los Kichwa de Pastaza en la Segunda Mitad del Siglo Xx

The theme of the book that Pablo Ortiz-T offers us is of the highest academic and at the same time political relevance, namely: crisis of the form of geographical organization of power in the modern-colonial world system, of the territorial State, the basis of the inter-state system that still governs us. And he does not do so with a "theoretical theory" (Bourdieu) or from a "zero point" (Castro-Gómez), but in dialogue with the Kichwa of Pastaza from the Ecuadorian Amazon, in the midst of their struggle for territorial autonomy and self-government. Ortiz-T.'s theoretical-political choice for an intercultural approach reveals the author's fine critique of multicultural and post-modern approaches which, according to the author, remain prisoners of their Eurocentric foundations, especially for not facing the question of the power relations implicit in the relations between peoples and cultures. His critique of the indigenist and neo-indigenist essentialisms demonstrated from an intense local/regional relationship points to the needs of the contemporary world in crisis, to seek other territorial configurations where the necessary supralocal relationship of each place, village, town, city, territory and its territorialities do not empty the power of each place, village, town, city or territory. It is within this continuous process of territorialization that the author speaks to us and summons us.