“we have to learn to ask”: hegemony, diverse experiences, and antagonistic meanings in Bolivia

Abstract

This article examines the celebration of the Virgin of Urkupiña in Cochabamba, Bolivia, as one cultural arena of contestation in which hegemony, conceived as an ongoing formative process, is constituted. By situating the festival in a context of historical transformations, emergent forms of domination, and changing relations between the state and civil society, I show how various groups, class fractions, and institutions struggle over the meanings of shared concepts and symbols. In the course of this struggle, involving cultural imposition, appropriation, and transformation, the cult of the Virgin has changed dramatically from a rather local peasant and Indian festivity into a multiclass and multiethnic national phenomenon. [Bolivia, hegemony, power, ritual, cultural change]