ABSTRACT
People in Ecuador, as in many other countries, are aware of the contradictions generated by power-saturated national projects, and claims on their collective identification. Ecuadoreans demonstrate a great awareness of the context for their lives when asked about national identities. Rather than take on board unquestioningly a nationalist agenda, they assess different elements of it in light of their own subjectivity and social practice. Ecuadorean identities are constituted in and through the extremely powerful nationalist ideological work done daily—to return to Stuart Hall’s phrase with which we began this book— yet they are not constituted through it alone. Being part of self/otherawareness, national identities are part of a response by ordinary subjects to official ideologies and practices of nation-building. Such responses are contradictorily and simultaneously emotion-laden and thought-through, an ideological production by everyday people.
