Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Agora: A Comparison of Bolivian and Spanish Galician Female Migrants

Abstract

The article questions a commonly held assumption in the ethnographic literature: that the natural role of women precludes a major contribution to the public domain. The domestic/public distinction becomes spurious if it can be shown that women are increasingly active in public arenas and conversely that communal, national and international policies penetrate domestic or personal relations. Evidence from field studies carried out by the author in Bolivia and in Galicia, Spain on female migrants (and nonmigrants in areas of high male out-migration) suggest that women increasingly control economic resources which are basic to power but also that their participation in these tasks and communal work spaces leads to the development of complex networks of communication and politization. Furthermore, female migrants engaged in commerce and industry affect (and conversely are affected by) national and international policies. The interpenetration of the two spheres-domestic/public-is explored and their separation considered invalid for the analysis of the place of women in the modern world. One of the most commonly held assumptions about women in the ethnographic literature is that their natural role precludes a major contribution to the public domain. Elise Boulding, in a seminal paper contrasting the role of women in nomadic and pioneer societies with those living urban lives of enclosure, suggests that it is the experience of mobility, the learning of the associated skill in making comparative assessments about different kinds of environments, and the development of participation skills that deal with changing environments which account for increased civic skills (1974:31). My own evidence from Bolivia and Galicia, and that from other areas, increasingly support the contention that female migrants (and to a lesser extent those women left behind in areas of high male exodus),