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2007 Student Paper Competition, Student Paper Competition > 2007 Winner: Keith W. Lindner, Colorado State University Biopolitical Ecuador: Race and Nature in the Formation of Nation.” Abstract: A growing body of literature explores the ways in which nation and national identity are constructed and produced, and the inclusions, exclusions, and violences these processes inevitably entail. While categories such as race, ethnicity and gender have been central to such analyses, nature - surprisingly – has remained relatively unmarked. This paper argues, to the contrary, that nature is fundamental to productions of nation. Drawing primarily from Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben's notion of the biopolitical fracture, the paper explores the ways in which geographies of nature are deeply implicated in the production of nation in Ecuador, and argues that nature is both constitutive of, and constituted through, these contested processes. The paper maps techniques of state biopolitics, aimed at bringing the biological under state control, in contemporary Ecuador. The case illustrates the ways in which the state, in its projects of nation building, has sought to transform and control nature just as much as populations and national identities. In struggle over the nation, the state and Ecuador's indigenous populations mobilize competing geographies of nature and modes of political qualification in complex and mutually constitutive ways. For each, nature is a fundamental element in nationality and political existence, though for different reasons and in different ways. In turn, nature is produced in and through these contested processes in ways that render it inextricable from struggles over biopolitical order and productions of nation. General Information: The Student Paper Award is given for a meritorious student paper which addresses geographic research, education, mapping, theory and/or applications by, for and/or about indigenous people(s).
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