Microfragmentos of reinvention: ch’ixi food practices with women and children

ABSTRACT The article offers microfragmentos of reinvention in response to the incursion of capitalist and neocolonial threats. The microfragmentos – small, broken, and irregular fragments that remain incomplete – are a modest local political initiative growing from an ethnographic project among Cañari women and children in the high Ecuadorian Andes. Three microfragmentos on growing, cooking, and eating narrate reinvention around food practices. As the women collectively work their ch’ixi (that is, drawing from the Indigenous side of their subjectivities), practices of growing potatoes, making meals together, and returning to childhood meals transform dimensions of their daily living. These transformations challenge the colonial tragedies they have collectively inherited and, in turn, assist the women to reinvent their lives in the modernised Ecuadorian Andes.