constructing local identities in a revolutionary nation: the cultural politics of the artisan class in Nicaragua, 1979‐90

During the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979‐90), the Sandinista government was simultaneously committed to a politics of class consciousness and a nation‐building project informed by an indigenista ideology. Western Nicaraguan artisan communities, a heterogeneous social group with variable and distinctive cultural practices, responded to the Sandinista Revolution by creating a union that represented artisans' interests in terms of class rather than ethnicity, which has historically been a marker of subordinate status. Through an analysis of a particular history in which class identity became salient, in this article I stress not only the fluidity of local identities, but also underscore ways in which anthropology may be complicit in nation‐building projects that maintain the subaltern position of peoples among whom anthropologists work.