“Interconnected Positionalities”: Foreigners and Foreign Experience in the Lives of Aymara Intellectuals

Abstract

When anthropologist William Carter began his research on land reform and community organization, he could not have imagined that his assistant, Mauricio Mamani, would become minister of agriculture, nor that he would be nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his promotion of cultural rights based on their joint research on the importance of coca in Aymara and Quechua society. Similarly, when, as a small child, Elvira Espejo first narrated stories to the Aymara linguist Juan de Dios Yapita and the British anthropologist Denise Arnold, she could not have foreseen that this encounter would lead to the publication of her stories in her name (Espejo 1994); her move to La Paz to study and practice art; her subsequent engagement in the research and promotion of indigenous dyeing and weaving techniques in close collaboration with Yapita and Arnold (see Arnold and Espejo 2010); and, most recently, to her appointment as director of the anthropology and folklore museum in La Paz. This chapter is about such encounters and collaborations between first-generation rural-urban Bolivian Aymara migrants and foreign intellectuals, particularly anthropologists and linguists, during the period leading up to the present foregrounding of ethnicity in Latin America (and elsewhere) and their continuing importance today.