Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes
Title | Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes PDF eBook |
Author | Anders Burman |
Publisher | Lexington Books |
Pages | 283 |
Release | 2016-12-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1498538495 |
Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes: Ritual Practice and Activism explores how Evo Morales’s victory in the 2005 Bolivian presidential elections led to indigeneity as the core of decolonization politics. Anders Burman analyzes how indigenous Aymara ritual specialists are essential in representing this indigeneity in official state ceremony and in legitimizing the president’s role as “the indigenous president.” This book goes behind the scenes of state-sponsored multiculturalist ritual practices and explores the political, spiritual and existential dimensions underpinning them.
Natives Making Nation
Title | Natives Making Nation PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Canessa |
Publisher | University of Arizona Press |
Pages | 209 |
Release | 2011-08-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0816506043 |
In Bolivia today, the ability to speak an indigenous language is highly valued among educated urbanites as a useful job skill, but a rural person who speaks a native language is branded with lower social status. Likewise, chewing coca in the countryside spells “inferior indian,” but in La Paz jazz bars it’s decidedly cool. In the Andes and elsewhere, the commodification of indianness has impacted urban lifestyles as people co-opt indigenous cultures for qualities that emphasize the uniqueness of their national culture. This volume looks at how metropolitan ideas of nation employed by politicians, the media and education are produced, reproduced, and contested by people of the rural Andes—people who have long been regarded as ethnically and racially distinct from more culturally European urban citizens. Yet these peripheral “natives” are shown to be actively engaged with the idea of the nation in their own communities, forcing us to re-think the ways in which indigeneity is defined by its marginality. The contributors examine the ways in which numerous identities—racial, generational, ethnic, regional, national, gender, and sexual—are both mutually informing and contradictory among subaltern Andean people who are more likely now to claim an allegiance to a nation than ever before. Although indians are less often confronted with crude assimilationist policies, they continue to face racism and discrimination as they struggle to assert an identity that is more than a mere refraction of the dominant culture. Yet despite the language of multiculturalism employed even in constitutional reform, any assertion of indian identity is likely to be resisted. By exploring topics as varied as nation-building in the 1930s or the chuqila dance, these authors expose a paradox in the relation between indians and the nation: that the nation can be claimed as a source of power and distinct identity while simultaneously making some types of national imaginings unattainable. Whether dancing together or simply talking to one another, the people described in these essays are shown creating identity through processes that are inherently social and interactive. To sing, to eat, to weave . . . In the performance of these simple acts, bodies move in particular spaces and contexts and do so within certain understandings of gender, race and nation. Through its presentation of this rich variety of ethnographic and historical contexts, Natives Making Nation provides a finely nuanced view of contemporary Andean life.
Natives Making Nation
Title | Natives Making Nation PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Canessa |
Publisher | University of Arizona Press |
Pages | 209 |
Release | 2011-08-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0816530130 |
In Bolivia today, the ability to speak an indigenous language is highly valued among educated urbanites as a useful job skill, but a rural person who speaks a native language is branded with lower social status. Likewise, chewing coca in the countryside spells “inferior indian,” but in La Paz jazz bars it’s decidedly cool. In the Andes and elsewhere, the commodification of indianness has impacted urban lifestyles as people co-opt indigenous cultures for qualities that emphasize the uniqueness of their national culture. This volume looks at how metropolitan ideas of nation employed by politicians, the media and education are produced, reproduced, and contested by people of the rural Andes—people who have long been regarded as ethnically and racially distinct from more culturally European urban citizens. Yet these peripheral “natives” are shown to be actively engaged with the idea of the nation in their own communities, forcing us to re-think the ways in which indigeneity is defined by its marginality. The contributors examine the ways in which numerous identities—racial, generational, ethnic, regional, national, gender, and sexual—are both mutually informing and contradictory among subaltern Andean people who are more likely now to claim an allegiance to a nation than ever before. Although indians are less often confronted with crude assimilationist policies, they continue to face racism and discrimination as they struggle to assert an identity that is more than a mere refraction of the dominant culture. Yet despite the language of multiculturalism employed even in constitutional reform, any assertion of indian identity is likely to be resisted. By exploring topics as varied as nation-building in the 1930s or the chuqila dance, these authors expose a paradox in the relation between indians and the nation: that the nation can be claimed as a source of power and distinct identity while simultaneously making some types of national imaginings unattainable. Whether dancing together or simply talking to one another, the people described in these essays are shown creating identity through processes that are inherently social and interactive. To sing, to eat, to weave . . . In the performance of these simple acts, bodies move in particular spaces and contexts and do so within certain understandings of gender, race and nation. Through its presentation of this rich variety of ethnographic and historical contexts, Natives Making Nation provides a finely nuanced view of contemporary Andean life.
Storytelling Coloniality
Title | Storytelling Coloniality PDF eBook |
Author | Amy Michelle Kennemore |
Publisher | |
Pages | 74 |
Release | 2014 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9781303988905 |
Borrowing from recent work on political ontology, this thesis explores three different versions of "storytelling coloniality": an autobiography by fourteen Mapuche scholars that enacts a politics of knowledge through the production of their own book; an experimental ethnography that approaches knowledge through the notions of colonialism and decolonization that emerge from the ritual practices of Aymara Shamans and Apprentices in the Bolivian highlands; and a science fiction novel, set roughly in the year 2070, which enacts an "oral history of the future" organized around the logic of Andean thought. Produced and circulated within local and international academic audiences, these stories make visible contemporary legacies of colonialism, explore spaces in which alternative social worlds emerge and thrive, and problematize how alterity is envisaged, enacted, articulated, and aggregated within the context of contemporary global processes and power relations. As a state-led project of change, decolonization in Bolivia can be seen as the most recent process of liberal governance that seeks to manage forms of radical alterity. Yet, as these stories reveal, there are fundamental disagreements over the meaning and scope of the transformative projects unfolding in the Andean region, which underling the salient, yet difficult task of engaging with struggles for social justice--at once ontological, epistemological, subjective, economic, and juridical--in the context of liberal frameworks and modernist assumptions. By making visible other ways of imagining and enacting decolonization, these stories provide a different reading, or diagnosis of the present moment that I suggest is worth taking seriously in order to fully grapple with the meaning and scope of decolonization emerging in the Andean region today.
Limits to Decolonization
Title | Limits to Decolonization PDF eBook |
Author | Penelope Anthias |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Pages | 310 |
Release | 2018-03-15 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 1501714295 |
Penelope Anthias’s Limits to Decolonization addresses one of the most important issues in contemporary indigenous politics: struggles for territory. Based on the experience of thirty-six Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco, Anthias reveals how two decades of indigenous mapping and land titling have failed to reverse a historical trajectory of indigenous dispossession in the Bolivian lowlands. Through an ethnographic account of the "limits" the Guaraní have encountered over the course of their territorial claim—from state boundaries to landowner opposition to hydrocarbon development—Anthias raises critical questions about the role of maps and land titles in indigenous struggles for self-determination. Anthias argues that these unresolved territorial claims are shaping the contours of an era of "post-neoliberal" politics in Bolivia. Limits to Decolonization reveals the surprising ways in which indigenous peoples are reframing their territorial projects in the context of this hydrocarbon state and drawing on their experiences of the limits of state recognition. The tensions of Bolivia’s "process of change" are revealed, as Limits to Decolonization rethinks current debates on cultural rights, resource politics, and Latin American leftist states. In sum, Anthias reveals the creative and pragmatic ways in which indigenous peoples contest and work within the limits of postcolonial rule in pursuit of their own visions of territorial autonomy.
The Five Hundred Year Rebellion
Title | The Five Hundred Year Rebellion PDF eBook |
Author | Benjamin Dangl |
Publisher | AK Press |
Pages | 146 |
Release | 2019-05-14 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1849353476 |
After centuries of colonial domination and a twentieth century riddled with dictatorships, indigenous peoples in Bolivia embarked upon a social and political struggle that would change the country forever. As part of that project activists took control of their own history, starting in the 1960s by reaching back to oral traditions and then forward to new forms of print and broadcast media. This book tells the fascinating story of how indigenous Bolivians recovered and popularized histories of past rebellions, political models, and leaders, using them to build movements for rights, land, autonomy, and political power. Drawing from rich archival sources and the author’s lively interviews with indigenous leaders and activist-historians, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion describes how movements tapped into centuries-old veins of oral history and memory to produce manifestos, booklets, and radio programs on histories of resistance, wielding them as tools to expand their struggles and radically transform society.
The Indigenous State
Title | The Indigenous State PDF eBook |
Author | Nancy Postero |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 242 |
Release | 2017-05-05 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0520294033 |
In 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in a new "democratic cultural revolution," Morales promised to overturn neoliberalism and inaugurate a new decolonized society. Nancy Postero examines the successes and failures in the ten years since Morales's election