Nelms, Taylor Campbell Nahikian

Preliminary Abstract: I propose to investigate 'dollarization' (the adoption and use of the U.S. dollar as the official currency) and 'plurinationality' (the official recognition of multiple nations with independent rights within a single state) as state-level legal projects that draw on and potentially transform both law and government and everyday understandings of the value of 'difference' in Ecuador. What are the repertoires of value Ecuadorians use, in policy and legal debates and in everyday practice, to make sense of dollars and ethnoracial plurality? And what happens when these repertoires of value become the objects of national law and monetary policy? My research goals, then, are: (1) to document how Ecuadorians negotiate value through monetary practice and through ethnoracial distinction and identification; and (2) to investigate how dollarization and plurinationality, as policy decisions encoded by law, shape and are shaped by such everyday practices. This research will thus proceed through an investigation of the policy histories of dollarization and plurinationality and through an ethnographic investigation of two projects of 'vernacular' institution-building in Quito, Ecuador: (1) the endeavors of some middle-class mestizo households to create and expand kin-based informal credit organizations, which draw on familial relationships of care and trust, as well as the stability the dollar is said to provide, within a context of perceived impoverishment and uncertainty, to provide an exclusive, alternative banking option; and (2) the debates of vendors in an informal market in downtown Quito over 'formalization.'