Rethinking the State as Institution. Central power, local culture and center-peryphery relations in Juan Maiguashca’s interpretations and the Scwarz-Carvalho Franco’s debate

Abstract

This article aims to challenge the models of analysis about the 19th Century State and its implications to the national formation, starting from a bibliographical review on some of the most relevant works about the theme, which is tackled here by taking into consideration the Ecuadorian and Brazilian cases. The reasons for doing so is to closely scrutinize one of the major historiographical interpretations of the process of national formation in Ecuador, which has turned out to be an important framework to Ecuadorian historiography about the subject. We hereby refer to the study of the State as an institution, developed in the 1990s by Juan Maiguashca. The interpretive contributions of this renowned scholar rose at that time, challenging scenarios for a topic that until then had been defined by the view of the state as a structure of domination. This article retrieves critically this contribution by submitting to questioning the conception of central power formation, based on a center-periphery model of analysis present by the Brazilian scholars Roberto Schwarz and Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco.