To be an Indian in Otavalo back in the 1940s was most likely to be a peasant. 1 To be an Indian in the 1990s was to be almost anything but a peasant: a migratory laborer, a household textile worker, a teacher, an entrepreneur, a freelance musician, or a long-distance trader, roaming countries and continents in search of profit. Over the past 40 or 50 years the relatively homogeneous Quichua-speaking peasantry-an ethnoclass, to use P. Van den Berghe's and G. Primove's term 2-gave rise to a bewildering variety of socioeconomic categories. Some of their members had shed their ethnic identities along with their peasant pasts. Others, however, refused to abandon their ethnic banners, even though these have admittedly changed-in shades, if not colors. These changes were caused, to a large extent, by the national market expansion, encouraged in the Ecuadorian Andes by the developmentalist state. One product of this expansion was the capitalist modernization of large landed estates (haciendas). 3 Another was the growth of rural and urban small commodity production. 4 Both processes, associated in the eyes of ruling elites with ''progress'' and ''civilization,'' implied the adoption of urban mestizo culture by some segments of the indigenous population. Indeed, some authors argued that the Indian culture is incompatible with the market expansion sponsored by the state. Thus, R. Stutzman suggested that ethnic identity in Ecuador is rooted in ''a concept of the nature, meaning, and purpose of human existence at odds with state-sponsored perceptions of those realities.'' 5 Similarly, to S. Varese, Indian culture is essentially a peasant culture, with its production of use rather than exchange values, the institutions of reciprocity, and the principles of authority rooted in ceremonial spending. 6 So what is the fate of ethnic culture in an increasingly commodified rural Andean society? Below, I will analyze economic and cultural changes in the textile artisan communities of Otavalo, a Quichua-speak
