Race in the Andes: Global Movements and Popular Ontologies

Race, long discounted in Andean ethnography as relatively unimportant, is a social fact of great salience in the Andes. This essay introduces the articles in the special issue on race in the Andes with an overview of the interrelated intellectual histories of racism in the Andes, Europe and North America, from colonial proto‐racism, to the totalising theories of the 19th century, to the heterogeneous ‘neo‐racism’ found in the Andes today, in which both these earlier ideas and contemporary cultural racisms are at home. It concludes with a discussion of an oppositional ideology found in some indigenous communities, in which race is somatic but not biological in origin.