CRASSH

The 1998 constitution of Ecuador consecrated the establishment of juntas parroquiales, effectively intermediaries between the state and the people, as elected organs of local government. In 2000, the highland Ecuadorian village of Salinas established its own. This paper explores the processes entailed in rendering it a viable representative both of Salineros and the state it petitioned, looking at the ways in which the complexities of this interface problematised the boundary between what was constituted as state and non-state.  Timothy Mitchell has argued that the state is commonly regarded as “an abstraction in relation to the concreteness of the social”, and the “objectness of the material world” (2006:185).  In Salinas, I argue by contrast that the state was partly constituted through representations that were not clearly distinguished from the distributed materiality of its workings.  It is the junta, janus-faced and ambivalent, I suggest, that marks this merging of “representation” and “reality”, this abstracted materiality of the state; the council at once preserved, deployed and fractured the fantasy of distinction between state and people, ideal and real.  Ambivalence takes particular forms, and my concern here is to explore how the junta deployed irony as a means of mediating its paradoxical role.  I designate irony not simply as a form of language, but as a practice and style, an often un-intentioned orientation, that is immanent and necessary to the co-production of state and Salinero.