Historical Perspectives on Gender, Security, and Technology: Gathering, Weaving, and Subsistence in Colonial Mission Communities of Bolivia

Abstract

The present paper brings to the discussion of human risks and rights an analysis of the gendered spheres of labor that developed in the eighteenth-century mission communities of lowland, eastern Bolivia. It argues that the differential work experiences of men and women, their access to technology and to the rewards of their labor, can be explained only by combining sensitivity to gender issues with a contextual framework that takes into account the environment, cultural expectations, and political economy. This historical case study is situated in Chiquitos, one of the Iberian colonial frontiers established in the ecological borderlands between the Andes and Amazonia.