Andolina, Robert. Indigenous development in the Andes: culture, power, and transnationalism, by Robert Andolina, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe. Duke University, 2009. 345p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780822345237, $89.95; ISBN 9780822345404 pbk, $24.95. Reviewed in 2011jan CHOICE.
Andolina (international studies, Seattle Univ.), Laurie (development and environment, Newcastle Univ., UK), and Radcliffe (geography, Univ. of Cambridge, UK) expertly interrogate transnational development strategies in indigenous communities. Moving seamlessly back and forth between examples from Bolivia and Ecuador, the authors ask how ethnic practices change development policies, and how multiethnic transnationalism emerges and sustains itself. They argue that indigenous development networks are multiscalar and emerge out of contingent transnational linkages. Individual chapters examine water struggles, education, and gender dynamics. These authors embrace ethnodevelopment policies they term "social liberalism," rooted in market-oriented solutions to poverty, in contrast to indigenous movements in the Andes that emerged out of a strong leftist tradition that challenged economic marginalization and social exclusion. Unfortunately, the authors fail to examine structural issues of poverty in indigenous communities, how neoliberalism exacerbates those problems, and how the limited aims of development policies fail to address these concerns on a more fundamental level. Whereas indigenous activists now commonly speak of rebuilding society through the formation of new plurinational states, this book returns to the more limited multicultural goals of embracing cultural differences. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and above. -- M. Becker, Truman State University