Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life by Andrew Canessa (review)

Abstract

Andrew Canessa, Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in Small Spaces of Andean Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 344 pp.The of Wila Kjarka are focus of Andrew Canessa's poignant and deeply insightful ethnography about everyday lives of villagers of this Andean highland community in Bolivia. Canessa draws on over 20 years of field work in Bolivia-dating from 1989-to show how these small spaces are integral to a far canvas across which specters of colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, transnationalism, and celebration of heritage and indigeneity march. Several major arguments and themes weave in and out of narrative, much like a fine Andean textile. The overarching question Canessa asks is: what does it mean to be jaqi-proper who are indians-in Wila Kjarka. To answer question, he delves deeply into a few key themes-the nature of exchange, specifically, reciprocity; ways in which racialized and sexualized relationships come to constitute differentiation and inequalities both between indians and non-indians (q'ara), as well as among indians themselves; how these inequalities are produced and reproduced by institutions such as army, school, and beauty pageants; and complexity between being and being indigenous, especially on national and even international stages. From start, he makes it clear that to understand meaningfulness of culture and identity entails collapsing scales in which even most intimate of sexual fantasies or daily activities of working, eating, and dressing are bound up with broader global questions (32).Narrative has great potential but it is nevertheless an immense challenge to demonstrate at one and same time dynamic nature of identity construction, sustained rhythms of everyday life that people engage in, and ways these rhythms and dynamics also harden into cultural assumptions, ideologies, and institutional practices at multiple scales. Canessa mostly succeeds in these endeavors. He stretches narrative genre to its limits, by combining a keen analytical lens and lucid prose. His telling anecdotes and stories, culled from his long acquaintance with Wila Kjarkanos, draw reader in, again and again.One of important arguments that Canessa immediately lays out and then proceeds to provide evidence for in remaining chapters is that, in lived reality of Bolivians, their world is not a binary one, divided between white racists and victims. Rather, racism is so pervasive that it goes unnoticed. He therefore makes choice to use indian rather than in order to call attention to the long history of colonial oppression (32). While he finds that indigeneity plays a significant role in Bolivia, it is not a meaningful analytical category for distinguishing one group of people from (66). Any number of groups of native peoples can be clustered into category indigenous. To be labeled indigenous or to call something or oneself indigenous has political and cultural implications, but it does not tell us much about what it means to be an living in Wila Kjarka.When Canessa began his field work, Wila Kjarka resembled so many other highland Andean hamlets nestled far from infrastructure of roads, schools, markets, and mass communications. Yet, they were site of deep inequalities, some of which lay just below surface, others that were nearly invisible. What it means to be begins with history, but historical consciousness in Wila Kjarka is hardly transparent. Canessa became intrigued by codes he encountered and challenges to assumptions he himself implicitly had about what mattered to Wila Kjarkanos. The reach of large landed estate owners (hacendados) had been felt by entire region. They wreaked havoc with land tenure and labor regimes. The first puzzle Canessa tries to solve is why-if Bolivian Revolution and concomitant Agrarian Reform in 1952 were so central to diminishing power of hacendados-the Wila Kjarkanos hardly speak of this moment, but rather of battle they fought with another village, Jankho Kjarka. …