Abstract
This article reviews recent ethnographic approaches to indigeneity in Bolivia from the global north. It examines some consequences of ethnographic choices to treat indigeneity as primarily a political challenge of power and inclusion, where indigenous identity is understood to be most characteristically expressed in collective terms or through social mobilization. At the same time, it also assesses a complementary ethnographic focus upon legacies of neoliberalism, as a major context for situating contemporary indigenous projects in Bolivia, specifically, ethnographic contrasts drawn between political indigeneity and the liberal subject. Finally, this article offers an account of indigenous sense-making for the urban landscape of Quillacollo and explores the relevance of indigenous claims as integral to that small city’s “cholo politics,” and as an alternative means of understanding the construction of indigenous subjects.
Highlights
This article reviews recent ethnographic approaches to indigeneity in Bolivia from the global north
In light of the turn-of-the century emergence of neo-popular and indigenous political alternatives – with the ascendancy of Evo Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Quillacollo would quickly be dominated by the MAS –the label, cholo, has surprisingly acquired an ambiguously positive valence, as a means of partial if contested access to “humble” Andean indigenous ancestry and fluency, as a personally-relevant cultural heritage
Fractiously social, these claims of indigeneity in Quillacollo are composed over the course of long careers and are not necessarily part of a collective indigenous politics or identity
Summary
“Cholo” is an insulting term heard with a great deal of regularity in Quillacollo, recently grown into a small satellite city and composing part of the urban periphery of the nearby much larger city of Cochabamba. This would seem to disregard that both the 1980s kataristas –a political project with roots in the 1970s Indianist political party of Fausto Reinaga– and the 1990s cocaleros effectively used Bolivia’s national union hierarchy to advance their recognizably indigenous agendas Even as it makes strong claims about the terms through which projects of indigeneity are recognizable as such, Rivera’s analysis helped to establish a recurrent fault line, which we can identify in the contemporary ethnography of the Bolivian Andes, which often draws zero sum contrasts between indigenous and liberal or neoliberal political alternatives. As Brooke Larson (2019, 295) has observed, in her review of recent academic research in Bolivia from the global north, a more “activist scholarship” has embraced “indigenous-centered research agendas and methodologies.” Ethnographers collaborate with their indigenous counterparts in projects that seek to decolonize scholarship, and to decenter epistemic starting points like the liberal subject, while describing and supporting an oppositional politics with the intention of advancing indigenous agency and autonomy. Such a scholarly focus on what we will call, again borrowing from Canessa (2012), “political indigeneity,” can divert our appreciation for the multiplicity of ways that indigeneity participates, often partially or controversially, in the construction of social and cultural subjects that do not necessarily take the form of collective political projects or movements
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