Ethnography of Violence and Situated Epistemology of the Peripheral Sectors of Ecuador: Neighborhood-Marginalized, Community and Popular Zones

Abstract

This article analyses the various mechanisms of socio-spatial segregation faced by peripheral sectors in Ecuador, acknowledging the historical, socio-economic, and cultural inequalities of these so-called “zones of sacrifice”. The marginalisation of certain bodies, produced through necropolitics, environmental racism, and the folklorisation of lived and/or epistemic experiences, stems from a modern–colonial worldview that keeps these sectors beyond the scope of state attention and, as a result, subordinates them within the zone of “non-being”. The research was conducted in strategic areas of Ecuador, including Cayambe, Otavalo, Guayaquil, and Durán—territories shaped by race, class, and gender, alongside other situated elements of multiple discrimination. Through qualitative methodologies such as critical cartographies, body-biographies, life histories, and sensory ethnographies, complemented by interviews and surveys, the study explored the diverse forms of habitus and embodied exclusion experienced by residents of these areas. Finally, interscalar violence and the subordination of local knowledges and forms of resistance continue to marginalise these communities through hegemonic discourses that operate as epistemological production devices in which the knowing “other” is rejected for subaltern ways of existing, while the violence experienced within these sectors shapes the life horizons of individuals from the social periphery, generating rejection, insecurity, and harm, and ultimately legitimising their deaths in the name of the so-called “common good”.