Since the 1980s, Ecuador has seen the development of numerous significant indigenous and ethnic movements and organizations, leading to a new president and constitution for 2003, reflecting these changes. These essays explore the cultural, political and social developments.

IN the past decade, Ecuador has seen five indigenous uprisings, the emergence of the powerful Pachakutik political movement, and the strengthening of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and the Association of Black Ecuadorians, all of which have contributed substantially to a new constitution proclaiming the country to be "multiethnic and multicultural." Further-more, January 2003 saw the inauguration of a new populist president, who immediately appointed two indigenous persons to his cabinet. In this volume, eleven critical essays plus a lengthy introduction and a timely epilogue explore the multicultural forces that have allowed Ecuador's indigenous peoples to have such dramatic effects on the nation's political structure. The authors use their ethnographic experience to understand both the cultural systems of local-level aesthetics, ritual, and cosmology and the national political-economic transformations that have shaped this paradoxical, globalizing nation. In their descriptions and analyses, they bring the best of interpretive anthropological, sociological, and historical scholarship to bear on these transcultural and intercultural phenomena. Presenting a microcosm of the cultural transformations that are occurring throughout the Americas, the essays in Millennial Ecuador will appeal to Latin Americanists, social scientists and humanists of the Andes and Amazonia, and, in particular, anthropologists as well as undergraduate and graduate students.