Investing in Indigeneity: Development, Finance, and the Politics of Abundance in Andean Peru

This dissertation is an ethnography of investment. Focused primarily on the shifting frontier of development intervention and the effort to empower "poor" people in Andean Peru's rural Arequipa region, I consider what it means to make an investment and what it means to be indigenous, and how these questions intersect in and beyond, the context of a development project. For development institutions there today, investment organizes a genre of activities for deploying small infusions of capital and the brief time intervals of financial cycles to render indigeneity valuable at a frontier site of market life. I label this "austere" development, for investments tend to be small, reliant on only a minimum of material assistance between development institutions and the people they are attempting to empower. These curiously tiny investments are engaged to produce big things that money cannot buy: they promise to generate returns on entrepreneurial Andean indigeneity by actualizing an unleashed economic, ecological, and cultural plenitude. Investment also means many other things in this ethnographic context: it is a form of aspiring together and of taking on the risks and rewards of somebody else's effort and commitment. One can invest money and credit, but also affect, labor, energy, and life. I trace the ways that diverse forms of investing in indigeneity thread lives together, while reconfiguring the Arequipa region's relationship to national and transnational circuits of commerce and extraction. In doing this, the dissertation offers two specific arguments. The first is about the new forms of indigenous subjectivity that regional development institutions configure by investing increasingly tiny sums of money, and the second is about what those interventions intend to accomplish. First, both indigeneity and finance are new to this Andean region in their current forms; thus, the aspiring entrepreneurs and agricultural innovators in which development institutions invest become indigenous through their financial action, and, at the same time, financial actors by virtue of their indigeneity. Second, I argue that these development interventions are best analyzed not as a form of alleviating poverty or resource scarcity, but as a means of dealing with abundance.