The Citizen Life Course: Age Identity in Ecuador's Educational Revolution

Abstract

This dissertation begins from the classic anthropological observation that how we age is culturally specific, and examines how Ecuador’s “educational revolution” has changed what aging looks like in that country. As Quito's public schools underwent rapid and wide-ranging transformations from 2009-2017, its students and their families also adjusted to new ""youth"" rights and responsibilities. Ethnographic fieldwork on how high school students and their families negotiated these changes in school and at home was analyzed through a life course lens encompassing phenomenological and governmental approaches to time and identity. Here, age identities are shown to emerge from the efforts of formal schooling to define what it means to be a good citizen across the life course. The result is an ethnographic study of a particularly modern relationship between time and youth identity that joins intersectional work on gender, race, and class in considering how categories of social differentiation govern populations. This dissertation theorizes the “age horizon” to analyze age identities through informants’ encounters with a wide variety of temporal guideposts, which subjects use to locate their own identities. It develops the concept of the “citizen life cycle” as the normative life course trajectory that emerges from understanding age as a technology of citizenship. It also contextualizes the citizen life cycle as a single “path” towards national belonging within a much wider and more variable “age horizon.” The concept of the citizen life cycle emphasizes how “youth becoming” gets constructed as a “life stage” within a larger normative “life cycle.” I pay particular attention to the effects of policies, infrastructures, and practices that my informants encounter in their daily attendance in high school.