Gavin Smith

A feast of flowers is simultaneously grounded in the reality of place and the practice of face-to-face social relations while at the same time being thoroughly shaped by detailed attention to actual global geopolitical economy—not just vague references to globalization, but a thorough engagement with, in this case, finance capital and the way debt has driven Northern ambitions and generated a specific kind of social world in the Ecuador of the Global South.

It has long been a tradition for anthropologists to make journeys back and forth between the site of their research and their reflections when at “home base”. In so doing they add to what they originally learned and they capture at least a small element of change over time. From 2001 to 2015 Chris Krupa conducted just such an exercise. In so doing, however, his reflections on the unfolding changes in global capitalism over that period resulted in his thoroughly redesigning the problematique he would set himself. The challenge Krupa faced over these years morphed before his eyes and, far from picking a moment, a kind of artificial stop-press, he has gone on chasing this phantom right up to the moment this book went to press. As a result this really is a global ethnography.

We have, of course, been trying to crack the problem of our ethnographic sites being in state and capitalist settings whose conditions we need to acknowledge but whose actual study is hugely challenging. But since the time 40 years ago when Eric Wolf (1982) published Europe and the people without history capitalism and state forces can no longer be understood as, for example, “penetrating” the social worlds that concern us, as though from without. Those worlds are today thoroughly imbricated into the webs and chains—lets us call them “the pandemic clouds”—of finance capital and super-Foucauldian states. What unfolds looks like this:

[The book] reverses the standard mode of inquiry characterizing anthropological studies of global political economy: rather than examining local processes as exemplifying or expressing, in perhaps culturally particular ways, the global capitalist forces acting on them, it treats the particularities of this local case as puzzles that might help us better understand the global dynamics of capitalist accumulation itself, at this especially transformative moment. In this, it aims to place the frontiers of capitalist expansion in the Global South at the center of inquiry. (Krupa 2022: 27).

We now have a number of ethnographic studies focused on the workings of finance capital in the setting of the Global North. We also have a wide range of studies that provide insight into the way in which this global expansion from the North has reconfigured the lives of those living in the South. Intentionally or not, a kind of spatial division of labor arises, “Finance for the North, production for the South” (Krupa 2022: 34). A feast of flowers very thoroughly challenges this narrative showing how, in multiple ways, the motors of risk and debt drove the forms state and capital took in Ecuador itself.

Once we learn of these currents the book turns to postcolonial forms of primitive accumulation. For the cut-flower growers, the forceful removal of people from the land already had a long history. Instead the challenge for this labor-intensive industry and the social world around it is for the people to be made into postcolonial subjects so, “people are not only the subjects of dispossession, brought into capital's orbit and proletarianized as an effect of capital's hoarding of their productive resources; they are also its objects, the resource itself directly targeted for internalization and apprehended in ways seemingly designed to make that an expression of compassion and care” (Krupa 2022: 150). In a word, redemption: “The challenge, rather, has been about finding ways to repossess Indigenous selves and fold their trajectories and histories into those of capital. This is what primitive accumulation points to” (ibid.: 164). Narratives of rupture with the fruits of modernity to be bestowed on the local population become intensified into a form of redemption that enraptures them: “Suffering is not the accidental side effect of capitalist expansion but its precondition. It holds the place of history in the transformative act of labor, the state of beforeness that the labor process is designed to negate. Labor is here both a curative act and a historical intervention. It is the groundwork of human salvation” (ibid.: 288).

Yet against or, better put, alongside such a narrative for Indigenous people, “capital is fit into a much longer historical overview of successive waves of landed powers with whom they, the Indigenous poor, must contend. . .they are merely the most recent expressions of a longer pattern of domination that has characterized the economic lives of Indigenous people in highland Ecuador” (Krupa 2022: 161).

Through the book we are taken through different structural conditionalities, various foci on different positionalities from owner to manager to industrial psychologist to laborer, always seen through a complex array of scales. One can become so enthralled by Krupa's prose that the complex world he takes us through reverberates long after we turn the last page.

Steve Striffler

A feast of flowers tells a compelling story about a particular path of economic development for rural Latin America that has been controlled by and for the benefit of elites. Prior to a series of agrarian reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, the highlands of Ecuador were ruled by a relatively small elite that owned extremely large haciendas. Agricultural production was oriented toward the domestic market, was not particularly efficient, and depended on indigenous-rural peoples who were bound to haciendas through a system of servitude that kept them landless and dependent. It also provided them a modest degree of security in the racist-paternalistic sense familiar to hacienda-dominated regions throughout highland Latin America.

Agrarian reform in Ecuador broke up many of the largest haciendas and delivered the best land to an emerging bourgeoisie that would, in theory, usher in an era of modern capitalist agriculture. It also “freed” rural-indigenous peoples from haciendas and provided them with some land. As Chris Krupa makes clear, however, the post-agrarian reform path did not work particularly well for anyone. For the newish/landed elite, there were relatively few profitable opportunities, with many turning to cattle raising and dairy production—a consolation prize that generated neither the profits nor the agricultural modernization that powerholders had envisioned when dismantling the hacienda system.

For the rural poor, the land delivered via agrarian reform was hardly ever enough, rarely of good enough quality, and did not come with the kind of state support—such as credit, access to markets, irrigation, technology, expertise, etcetera—that was necessary for creating a stable peasantry.

What Krupa so deftly lays out, however, is that if agrarian reform was a failure in a broad sense, it nonetheless (inadvertently) established the necessary conditions for capitalist export- oriented agriculture in general, and the cut-flower industry in particular. The failure of Ecuadorian agrarian reform to produce either a successful capitalist class or a stable peasantry meant that by the 1980s relatively cheap land was available, ripe for alternative capitalist experiments, and the peasantry itself was sufficiently precarious to serve as a potential labor force.

Enter debt, credit, and currency devaluation. To grossly oversimplify what Krupa brilliantly lays out in A feast of flowers, large quantities of credit became available to those with the right connections, the right cultural-racial capital, a bit of land, and the willingness to engage in profitable export production. In the highlands, export production came to mean cut flowers, an industry that seemed almost idiot-proof for capitalists as long as production costs remained well below international flower prices, something Ecuador's constant currency devaluations virtually ensured.

This would all come to a spectacular end, as booms eventually do, but while it lasted there was not only easy money to be made but also an inevitability to it all—a seemingly unstoppable political-economic momentum that served to severely limit the potential paths that development could take in the countryside.

This model was not particularly good for the rural poor. It was not simply that the export imperative served to neglect a peasant agriculture that was deeply in need of state support. It was that state support for capitalist export agriculture actively undermined rural people by taking away (or destroying) their land and other resources, funneling them toward export agriculture, and ensuring that many rural people could not survive off what little land they possessed and would therefore have to work for wages on emerging capitalist enterprises. It wiped alternative development models from the political and imaginative map.

It is in this context that elite ideologies—racist and triumphalist as they were—made a bit of sense, at least to the professional middle class that spewed them. There was actual misery in the countryside and the rural poor did need jobs, even if elites consistently viewed these conditions through a racist lens and seemed to forget how they were created in the first place as they offered up flowers as some sort of modernizing salvation that would save indigenous peoples from themselves while turning the rural highlands into a profit-making center.

The experience of workers on Ecuador's flower plantations is telling in this regard. Dur- ing the boom, when profits were not particularly dependent on the careful management of labor (largely because currency devaluations made it almost impossible to lose money), the plantations were relatively unconcerned with workers. Once the boom busted, however, plantations became much more serious about managing labor—hiring the right workers, training them, etcetera. To carry this out, they increased the presence, or at least importance, of a professional-managerial class that was now tasked with closely managing labor.

As Krupa outlines, these urban professional- managers were not simply focused on improving worker efficiency in some narrow sense, at the point of production but were concerned with transforming indigenous peoples in a larger sense, by shaping their habits, expectations, behavior, and mentalities in ways that would not simply make them better workers but better, more “modern” people at their core. This process, as I understand Krupa to suggest, gave capital a certain back-door access into communities that allowed them to restructure rural society around the modernizing image held by plantation owners and their managers.

The professional-managerial class that peoples the book's pages sincerely believed that they were having a positive, transformative, impact on the region and their rural subjects—a belief fueled by a racist-interventionist-salvationist imaginary that this urban professional class inherited and embraced like common sense.

It still raises a question. To what extent did these managerial initiatives actually work? Did they improve worker efficiency, or reduce turnover, let alone succeed in the broader project of transforming indigenous subjectivities and communities in some way? It is a little unclear how central this type of Human Resources nonsense was to the overall work experience, or how it was experienced, let alone, internalized by workers. Or how it all trickled down into community life. Are Human Resources efforts to make indigenous people “better/modern” simply overwhelmed by a labor process that consumes workers’ time and no doubt thoughts? Do these efforts matter to indigenous peoples or the capitalist process?

Similarly, how long did these Human Resources practices stick around? Did they repeatedly change forms over time in an almost faddish sort of way? How much did they vary from plantation to plantation (etc.). All this is a little unclear, as is the extent to which workers internalized this stuff. This all raises the question: To what extent do these types of managerial machinations matter to the capitalist project—to profits, to the reproduction of the plantations themselves, or to the broader elite project of indigenous transformation?

Put a slightly different way, one cannot help but wonder when some plantation owner is go- ing to realize, either because profit margins get tighter or just for the hell of it, that their enterprise can actually run pretty well with half the number of relatively well-paid urban professionals they have running around—that these types can be fired, and that this stuff can be subcontracted out to third-party contractors who just hire, fire, and re-hire workers with little concern about whether they are being “bettered” in any deeper sense. At some point it seems likely that a plantation owner is go- ing to do what a lot of capitalists in low-wage, labor-intensive industries do. That is, they will reduce or limit supervision largely to that which increases worker efficiency at or near the point of production and effectively realize that the rest of this stuff is unnecessary nonsense that urban professionals come up with to justify their own jobs. To be fair, maybe the racist fog is too thick for them to see this, or perhaps it is more central to the overall enterprise than I recognize.

Related to all this is one final question, which the book does address, if not in a definitive way (which may not be possible). What are the material impacts of the industry on both workers and communities in the region? Perhaps it is just my newsfeed, but every year around Valentine's Day and Mother's Day we are inundated by articles from vaguely progressive publications like The Guardian or NPR asking us if we know: where our flowers come from; whether child labor produced them; whether X percent of flower workers are women who are sexually harassed at work; or whether the flowers themselves are pesticide-filled and consume ungodly amounts of water.

I have no doubt much of this is true but also suspect that the impact of the flower industry is a bit more complicated. Because the industry is highly concentrated in a few regions of Ecuador, or really micro-regions, and because a single acre produces more value than any other agricultural product in the country, the industry has no doubt brought in a lot of money to those regions (while sucking a lot out). The industry employs thousands of workers from a very small area who are probably attracted to the work because there are no alternatives that pay what flower plantations are paying. Notwithstanding all sorts of valid critiques about elite narratives of this process, it is still the case that these relatively small flower plantations are bringing in significant amounts of money to a small area.

How does the influx of this money impact peasant-indigenous economies and communities? Are we seeing, for example, a process of differentiation, whereby thoroughly proletarianized workers exist alongside a relatively stable peasant class that produces on some mix of individual plots and communal holdings? Or, are wages from plantation workers sustaining, or at least making sustainable, subsistence agriculture? Do indigenous families, agriculture, and communities rely on income earned on plantations? Or are flower plantations simply a drain on indigenous agriculture and communities? Have any small-scale producers gotten into flower production, or does capital investment make this impossible? And does this matter politically in terms of being able to build an opposition to the industry or, better yet, building a movement capable to articulating and mobilizing around an alternative model of development—as we have seen from indigenous people throughout Latin America during recent decades?

Paul Eiss

The concept of “primitive accumulation” lies at the heart of Christopher Krupa's brilliant and important book, A feast of flowers. It is important to note that for Karl Marx—who notably prefaced the term with “so-called”—“so-called primitive accumulation” was neither “accumulation” nor “primitive.” It was a conjuration of bourgeois political economists, who postulated an origin for industrial accumulation in an original “accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure” (Marx 1977: 873). They evoked a distant past in which capital first emerged—before capitalism—as a by-product of human virtue and vice. A “frugal elite” worked hard and saved the products of their labor, while other “lazy rascals” did not. The former accumulated capital and would become industrialists. The latter were doomed to poverty, eventually forming the ranks of the working class. In refutation of this mythical original accumulation, Marx positioned the “actual history” (ibid.: 874) of the emergence of the wage laboring class as part of a historical shift from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist one. The critical part of “actual history” that “bourgeois historians” had excised from their accounts was the separation of workers from access to the means of production through the “forcible dispossession of their lands.” Far from primitive accumulation's tale of just desserts, Marx rendered capital's beginnings as a history in which “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force play the greatest part” (ibid.: 874) in producing a new class of “rightless proletarians” (ibid.: 876).

More than a correction of the historical record, Marx's analysis provides a strong statement about the use, abuse, and power, of historical narrative under capitalist auspices. In calling primitive accumulation a moralizing story of “economic original sin” (Marx 1977: 874) that plays the same role as “original sin in theology” (ibid.: 873), Marx signaled how it lays the foundations of capitalism not just as a moral system but as a providential one. Thus, the “tender annals of political economy” present capitalism as not just “idyllic” but almost eternal, as having reigned “from time immemorial” (ibid.: 874). More than just bad history, so-called primitive accumulation was a surrogate history, whose effacement of a prior history dispossession helped to secure the ideological and perceptual naturalization of capitalism. Hence, the importance, for Marx, of revealing what he called its “secret.”

In A feast of flowers, Christopher Krupa seeks to unravel primitive accumulation's secret in highland Ecuador, in the wake of the late- twentieth-century rise of export capitalism in the cut-flower sector. In a way that recalls Marx's descriptions of English workers, the formation of a new working class in Cayambe was historically predicated on the “freeing” of indigenous highland populations not only of indebted servitude on the region's haciendas but also of the lands and other resources upon which their subsistence was based. Social and land reforms set the stage on both fronts, ending indebted servitude and fragmenting the old haciendas, even as they left highland populations with insufficient communal lands and resources for subsistence. As with the political economists Marx critiqued, Ecuadorian capitalists and plantation managers embrace narratives of primitive accumulation, as what Krupa calls a “register of historical consciousness or mode of historicity” (Krupa 2022: 16). At the slightest prodding from the ethnographer, or even without it, they launch into “transition narratives” (ibid.: 105): Indigenous people lived in penury, suffering the legacies hacienda exploitation and mired in their own unproductive subsistence practices; then the plantations came, giving them the opportunity of truly free labor for a decent wage; as a result, Indigenous plantation workers now enjoy the material, psychological, and cultural benefits of decent work and the prospects of continued betterment in the future. Echoing Marx's analysis, these narratives effect the “radical negation” (Krupa 2022: 35) of the Ecuadorian hacienda and its legacies, and are constructed as moralizing stories of “beforeness” (ibid.: 105) that sanctify capitalist free labor while sidelining or effacing the kinds of suffering and dispossession that condition the availability of Indigenous people as workers. Like the historians mocked by Marx, they voice a historical narrative that presents “capitalist class relations as an effect of preexisting social differences, not economic exploitation, and leading toward universal betterment, not widening differentiation” (ibid.: 106).

Yet the primitive accumulation narratives, which A feast of flowers depicts, are also profoundly different, reflecting a fundamental post- colonial logic (Krupa 2022: 10). In the Ecuadorian case, unlike the English one, the internal origins of capital are not a concern of capitalist narratives; capital comes from abroad and without, via debt financing arrangements between international lenders and Ecuadorian banks. In contrast with Marx's story of capital's origin in terms of interiors, Cayambe's primitive accumulation narratives are stories of capital's exterior origins, particularly focused on the arrival of new landowners without previous involvement in the highlands (conocidos), urban mestizo managers, and the like, who in such narratives are depicted as agents of external salvation. Against Marx's depiction of narratives of capitalist antiquity, these narratives are shot through with a “surge of newness” (ibid.: 3) associated with the cut-flower sector, and marked by a rhetoric of social uplift (ibid.: 105) and of redemption through labor. Cayambe's capitalists assign no blame to Indigenous workers or their forbears, evincing only sympathy for a degraded condition that they blame on the lingering effects of the hacienda system. Rather than condemn sloth, they tender salvation. In this way they connect with, and indeed claim to resolve, a century or more of efforts by Ecuadorian politicians and intellectuals to diagnose and resolve the country's “Indian problem” via a kind of “salvationist intervention” (Krupa 2022: 138) that presumed to introduce capitalism as a cure for presumed Indian inferiority or marginality. Thus, the secret of Ecuador's postcolonial narratives of primitive accumulation, Krupa argues, has “everything to do with the historic links between ideas of economy and those of race” (ibid.: 123).

With such arguments, A feast of flowers might be described as an ethnography of history, albeit in ways strongly conditioned by the study's nature as an ethnography of capitalism. Hence the historical narratives featured in this text are largely stories told by capitalists: owners, founders, lawyers, managers, industrial psychologists. In one episode, Luis, a computer technician whose parents are Indigenous highland laborers, shares his family's story of immiseration and redemption at the instruction of a manager who knows that Luis's narrative will substantiate his own. In another, plantation manager Wilfrido Casagrande, speaking at a meeting with comuneros resisting the plantation's establishment, performs an impassioned narrative that Krupa calls a “marvel of capitalist poetics” (Krupa 2022: 151). Where A feast of flowers is most novel, though, may be in Krupa's attention to how historicity “becomes politicized as a technology of labor discipline” (ibid.: 108) on the plantations, as narratives of primitive accumulation serve as a “blueprint. . .for strategies of labor optimization in the present” (ibid.: 141). Interactions with workers via reward or penalty; hiring strategies; psychologists’ “psychometric” interviews of workers; racial segmentation of the labor process and the use of outsourcing (tercerización): all are surrounded and ratified by narratives of primitive accumulation, recounting the salvation of Indigenous workers by benevolent outsiders via the curative force of wage labor.

In contrast, the voices of workers are scarcer and deliberately so, stemming from the author's determination “not to speak for [Indigenous workers], through them, or even so much about them but with them” (Krupa 2022: 20). The rare mention of the words of someone like the picker María T.—who warns Krupa not to eat the roses due to toxins—serve to “punctuate” (ibid.: 19) rather than contest primitive accumulation narratives. The exception is Krupa's extended analysis of a story told not by a plantation worker but by Indigenous comunera Tránsito Andrango, as she recounts the failure of the comunero movement to block a plantation's establishment. Krupa offers the narrative neither as a “counternarrative” to primitive accumulation narratives, nor as a “correction” of their “mythic historicity.” Instead, Krupa counterposes it to Casagrande's poetic injunctions, suggesting how Andrango's story “disrupts” the “coherences” of narratives of primitive accumulation. Her refusal to parrot the owners, he argues, is characterized by the “total destabilization of the structure of historical time that primitive accumulation emplots” and the undermining of the “temporality of rupture central to capitalist historicity” (ibid.: 155).

Here, though, an alternative reading might be proposed: what if it is not stories like Andrango's that are the “counternarratives” here, but rather those like Casagrande's? Such a reading might hew more closely to the spirit of Marx's analysis, which represents primitive accumulation narratives as retrospective “nursery tales” meant to stand as surrogates for prior experiences of violent dispossession, that were “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (Krupa 2022: 875). Are primitive accumulation narratives in Cayambe of a fundamentally different epistemological value and political valence, from stories like those of Andrango—that is, in that they are produced out of an impetus to surrogate and displace the stories Indigenous workers or comuneros might tell about themselves in witnessing and making sense of their own experience and suffering before and after the plantations’ foundation?

I raise these questions not because I think that Krupa equates or conflates these narratives, but because I think that they highlight some of the implications of Krupa's choice to focus for the most part on analysis of highland capitalism through its own rhetoric, rather than aiming or claiming to convey Indigenous voices, which by design remain largely outside the scope of A feast of flowers. Krupa brilliantly dissects capitalist attempts to “command temporality” (Krupa 2022: 164) through the messaging surrounding the plantations and embedded in the labor process. If those attempts are not just self-directed rationalizations, though, but rather have hegemonic aspirations—that is, toward molding the hearts and minds of Indigenous workers—how can we assess their success, or limits, without hearing more from workers? Similar questions might be asked about the historical narratives of comunero activists, particularly within the context of and in the wake of struggles over land and labor with the plantations.

I do not ask these questions as a way of finding fault with A feast of flowers. Indeed, they are made possible both by the thoroughness and rigor of Christopher Krupa's dissection of postcolonial capitalism, and also by his directness in informing the reader about his choices about which, of the many stories and voices he has heard, he chooses to tell, and which, for very good reasons, he chooses not to. There are silences here, but they are purposeful, meaningful and productive. It is a testament to Krupa's skill as an ethnographer and as a writer that those silences, and the histories they contain, always somehow remain present, inspiring in this reader an intense desire to hear more.

Victor Bretón Solo de Zaldívar

A feast of flowers is a detailed study of the development process of flower companies in an enclave in the northern Sierra of Ecuador: Cayambe, an emblematic rural municipality characterized, until the 1970s, by the predominance of the hacienda regime. After the agrarian reforms (of 1964 and 1973) and the dismantling of that system of domination, the foundations were laid so that, starting in the final decades of the twentieth century, the flower production industry in greenhouses would flourish, with Cayambe becoming one of the icons of the “new export crops” publicized from the World Bank environment as a strategy to combat poverty in increasingly impoverished peasant economies. Christopher Krupa approaches his analysis in an innovative and tremendously polyhedral way. He delves into the ways in which pioneering investors built this “novel” industry—novel in the Ecuadorian case, of course—around a (re)signified racial ideology, turning the supposed “natural” differences of indigenous peoples into a resource for industrial expansion.

At the center of this racialized system is the belief, a kind of faith fundamental to postcolonial science and politics in Ecuador, in the unique capacity of capitalism to change the presumed immanent nature of human collectives and liberate the oppressed population from subordination justified on the basis of those racial prejudices. Krupa shows to what extent indigenous minds and bodies became sites of study and intervention by scientists, politicians, and economic planners throughout the last century, for the sake of a long-term functional civilizing and liberating project of “Lo Indio”, from the point of view of their disciplining and integration into the demanding labor systems of export plantations. In this sense, it seems to me that one of the original features of the book is the proposition that Andean scenarios such as that of Cayambe can only be explained by understanding capitalism as a postcolonial artifact, that is, as a “force for improvement” historically constituted in its process of expansion toward territories characterized as “indigenous”. Postcoloniality thus points to a commitment to difference, in the sense of those conditions structured and elaborated under colonial rule and its enduring legacies in the present.

In the Ecuadorian inter-Andean alley, the central figure of difference was, throughout the entire republican system of the private administration of the population (Guerrero 2010), the rural Indian constructed as an icon of racialized alterity—less by biology than by economics, certainly—constituting the central node and the protagonist of the hacienda servitude and its sequels. It is through their historical subalternization in and around the hacienda compounds that the indigenous peoples took on the status of a problem, an object of suffering and sympathy, appearing before the white-mestizo society as deserving of redemption through economic intervention. This was the case from the beginning of the flourishing of liberal thought, it crossed from the great watershed in the country's history known as la revolucion alfarista (1895–1911) to be further developed by the indigenist authors in the early twentieth century, and it continued with the transformative approaches that culminated in the liquidation of the Gamonal regime at the hands of the agrarian reform through the latter part of that century.

A particular distinction of Krupa's ethnography is the approach he uses to explore global capitalism from the perspective of anthropology, that is, from within the social processes he studies. He does this especially revealingly by taking as an ethnographic field a “peripheral” area—Cayambe—representative of so many others that are articulated throughout the Global South, demonstrating their contradictions, their discursive practices and their peculiar processes of dispossession/subordination based, as paradoxical as it may seem, on exemplary narratives of a civilizational nature (Prakash 1990). This allows him to identify—and this is for me one of the great achievements of the book—the convergence between a rapid and aggressive capitalist expansion, within the framework of neoliberal globalization, and a kind of racialized “humanitarian reason” that is constituted, de facto as an emancipatory meta-narrative that operates in this particular postcolonial mode of primary accumulation in the zones of flower production.

All in all, it is surprising, as the text reveals, that the sector of flower growing companies was presented from the beginning as something new, radically different and opposed to the appalling exploitative regime that preceded it, presenting itself as a force with the capacity to save racialized subalterns from the past and to give birth to Ecuador's entry into the world of neoliberal capitalism. Krupa shows with great perception the rhetorical component of this type of vision. The reality is that, with the coming of the greenhouses the forms of discipline, exploitation and dispossession of the indigenous labor force are grafted onto the old wineskins of racialization. Interiorized, these old forms are reconfigured in the idiom of redemption.

Reading the book reminds me of other recent works on the central highlands that reveal the transformation of atron-precarista links—anchored in a secular kind of moral economy with paternalistic attributes—toward a type of clientelist wage relationship that is highly beneficial to company profits at the expense of potential union organizing to defend the labor rights of these semi-proletarianized peasants (Martinez Valle 2019). In some ways the image of the old hacienda patrón looms beneath the figure of today's entrepreneur. Among highland communities the old figure of the mayoral is transfigured into the contemporary informal employer, often a leader of a community or of an Organización de Segundo Grado (OSG) that distributes precarious work among families, extracts royalties from companies for the community (such as financing for micro-projects) and accumulates symbolic capital among community members (Fransoi 2020). New forms of mediation that re-actualize intermediary figures that, in their structural attributes we could trace back to the curacas and colonial caciques, mayors and regidores republicanos, hacienda kipukamayos, presidents of councils and directors of contemporary OSGs.¹ In Cayambe, the fact that most of the flower companies were managed by people outside the rural world and the region itself in Krupa's opinion facilitated the articulation of a new elite with a redemptive, “modernist” aura in relation to the old systems of landowner domination. None the less beyond this kind of “urban-rural colonization” the modus operandi of managing the workforce and the discourses that support it rely on the resilience of the habitus distilled during the long Gamonal period that preceded it.

Along another dimension, and this seems to me especially innovative, Krupa demonstrates how the emergence of flower growers in Ecuador was part of a strategy of global capitalism in the process of restructuring from the energy crises of the 70s. The accumulation of petrodollars in the financial centers of the Global North generated a flow of capital that was invested in the South in the form of debt (particularly in Latin America). In the face of the great debt crisis of the 1980s, this produced a conjunction of projects between international financial organizations and commercial banks. An expression of this was the commitment to new export goods, which facilitated the massive arrival of capital in the form of credits, currency speculation in a context of permanent devaluation, and the obtaining of high interest and profit rates for the entities that facilitated this flow of capital that appeared to flow as providential manna.

One of the characteristics of this capitalist restructuring was precisely to link the highlands of Ecuador with global markets through the production of flowers. Previously, inter-Andean agriculture only exported essential products to the coast so in fact the floricultural restructuring involved the definitive burial of the logics of articulation to the regional markets of the old hacienda regime. In this sense, another of the book's innovations is the demonstration that the flower boom is not due to a “natural” evolution of capitalist growth in highland agriculture, but rather is a consequence, in large part, of the interests of capital in the use of credit to increase its profits. This explains the attraction that professional urban actors, not previously linked to the agricultural sector, felt for capturing part of that credit to open their own flower business. Moreover to the extent that flowers are a crop that cannot be mechanized, the only way to augment the production process is by optimizing and maximizing the use of the labor force. And it is here that Krupa connects his analysis with that of the subtle and supposedly well-intentioned ways in which capitalism constructs narratives that naturalize domination and social differences on preexisting elements of social classification in postcolonial contexts. Some narratives though, I suggest, do overlap with those evoked in the liberal revolution and developed by indigenistas around the necessity of redemptive civilizing of the Indian, and their conversion into free workers capable of being hired and integrated into the body of the fledgling nation. In any case the author shows that the discourse and narrative of floriculture, as well as its extraordinary ability to model the subjectivities of all the actors in its operations is akin to the final moment of that civilizing process.

But beyond the substantive findings of the book in terms of the knowledge it provides about a complex social process—the development and implications of these new population management systems—what seems to me most remarkable is its innovative (and successful) perception that, advancing on current ethnographies, it takes on the challenge of the holistic nature of its field of study. A holistic approach in which variables of an economic nature strictu senso intersect—in a Polanyian sense of the term—with particular narratives that become discursive practices and mold individual and collective subjectivities. There remains, then, the chain of intertwined relationships that span continents and industries, local forms of organization and systemic structures, as well as worldviews and policies involved in the production of flowers for the Global North at the expense of the exploitation of racialized peasants from Cayambe. For all these reasons and beyond its epistemological and methodological qualities, A feast of flowers is an excellent example of anthropology with social ambition, as it reveals the hidden links and opaque causalities that operate in the complex interface between race, work, and society and the nature of capitalist development in peripheralized environments such as those of contemporary Ecuador.

Response: The inner life of postcolonial primitive accumulation