Indigenous Protest as a Performance Genre

When carrying out organized political protest, indigenous peoples around the world often perform traditional dance and music, as well as wear traditional attire. Rather than taking these performances for granted, as habitual acts of resistance, this paper examines the conditions of possibility that have enabled them and argues that such explicit, self-conscious cultural performance is a recent development enabled by contemporary globalization. More so, such performances have become a performance genre on their own right, a conventional style for the staging and reading of indigenous protest. Drawing from fieldwork research in the Ecuadorian highlands and aiming to provide a general theoretical framework, I examine the political work of indigenous protest as a performance genre that structures and is structured by the nature of audiences to which is geared and the alliances that it enables.