i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

San Juan farmers’ understandings of organic farming and cooperative
organization as avenues towards sustainable development are based in the collective
ethnohistory of this region. They have endured centuries of subjugation and
marginalization at the hands of the Nicaraguan elite, which is controlled by the
elite/bourgeois centers of power. Local claims for official indigenous recognition
underscore regional Segovian ethnicity which has persisted through the supposed
transformation from indios to mestizos as indigenous groups entered the capitalist
economy (Field 1999; Gould 1994; Kearney 1996; Wheelock 1980).
Jaime Wheelock (1978, 1985) argues that when the native Segovians became
peasants, they lost their indigenous identity. Given other, more recent literature on
alternative forms of agricultural production, however, it might be worthwhile to
reconsider them as a kind of indigenous population as well. According to Gould,
“Nicaragua indigenous identity [poses] complex problems for which traditional
anthropological models are of little use. The survival of indigenous ethnicity as well as its
demise . . . lies in people’s collective memory of specific forms of oppression and
conflict rather than in language and material culture” (1998: 3).
Instead of persisting as indigenous, as defined by outsiders, or disappearing into
extinction, native Segovians’ identities belie the strict dualism of survival versus
extinction that is based in primordialist concepts of indigenous ethnicity. Rather than
falling into a sterile debate that pits “essentialism” versus “constructivism” with regard to
indigenous identity, native Segovian identity exemplifies how the definition and the lived
reality of an indigenous group can “be seen more as an ensemble of possibilities for
transformation” (Field 1994: 240-241).
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