Highland Bolivia Research Articles

Menstrual patterns and fecundity among non-lactating and lactating cycling women in rural highland Bolivia: implications for contraceptive choice

Choosing an appropriate contraceptive method, particularly one based on fertility awareness, depends in part upon the degree of a woman’s cycling regularity. However, while the suppressive effect of lactation on ovarian function is well established, the potential influence of continued breastfeeding on menstrual patterns once post-partum cycling has resumed is largely unexamined. This longitudinal study in a population of non-contracepting Aymara women (n = 191 providing 665 non-truncated menstrual segments) identified conceptions and fetal loss via urine tests for hCG and classified segments accordingly to test the hypotheses that (1) cycles in lactating women are significantly different in length and regularity from those of non-lactating women, and (2) cycles in women living at high altitude are significantly different in length and regularity from those at lower altitudes. Analyses found that segments are significantly longer and regularity tends to be less common among lactating than non-lactating women; however, the rate of conception is twice as great among the former than the latter, and the distribution of conception outcomes does not differ between the two groups. Menstrual regularity is not the norm in this population, even among those who are not currently breastfeeding. High altitude per se does not appear to influence menstrual cycling as both regularity and segment length are comparable to other populations, hence women indigenous to high altitude are suitable candidates for a wide variety of contraceptive choices. In addition, these findings suggest that studies of fecundability limited to non-lactating women may be biased towards those of relatively lower fecundity.

The Dynamics of Aymara Duality: Change and Continuity in Sociopolitical Structures in the Bolivian Andes

One of the most persistent and influential concepts in Andean studies during the last few decades has been that of dualism at different levels of Andean cultural and sociopolitical life. How dualism works and the manner in which it has evolved have been the subject of much debate. Within this context, Jesús de Machaqa in highland Bolivia has been recognised as a region of primary importance for investigation, because of its enduring socio-political structures. However, a study of its ‘traditional’ structure carried out in the 1970s showed that important changes had taken place. New studies of intra-communal structures and recent studies of Aymara spatial organisation, together with information held in colonial documents and oral traditions help to shed more light on the question of dualism. Drawing on all these sources, this article aims to contribute to wider debate by examining key aspects of the ‘traditional’ structure and setting out some of the methodological problems faced by those who seek to reconstruct the past of indigenous communities, in particular problems related to the combined use of colonial documents and oral traditions.

Dueling Landscapes: Singing Places and Identities in Highland Bolivia

L'A. examine la maniere dont la pratique musicale permet l'incarnation d'une identite dans un lieu specifique, la maniere dont elle participe a la construction sociale et culturelle d'un espace comme site identitaire. Il suggere que, par ce processus d'incorporation, le son musical attribue une presence physique a l'identite, l'inscrivant dans une realite phenomenologique. Il montre que pour les Amerindiens Chayantaka des Hautes-Terres boliviennes (Province de Bustillo, Departement de Potosi), la performence musicale constitue un processus d'incorporation de l'identite communautaire, par son inscription dans le paysage naturel et dans le paysage mental. Developpant le theme de l'imagination musicale de l'identite spatiale, il propose deux points de vue ethnographiques : une analyse des modeles spatiaux crees par le mouvement des groupe musicaux a travers l'espace andin (notamment a l'occasion du carnaval) ; une discussion de l'utilisation, dans les paroles des chants, des noms et surnoms des communautes d'une part, et des descriptions des paysages communautaires de l'autre.

Sensing Locality in Yura: Rituals of Carnival and of the Bolivian State

In this article, I discuss how an indigenous population in highland Bolivia established a sense of locality through participation in two different rituals: the musically based rituals of carnival and the bureaucratic practices or rituals of state that resulted from the initial implementation of a decentralizing law. Through a privileging of visually perceived representations, the logic behind the new law assumed populations were attached to contiguous territories within a national grid. In contrast, carnival rituals—through a focus on centerpoints, musical sonorities, and perceiving subjects—emphasized a relationship to locality through a sounding‐ off through space, [nation‐state, space, music performance, sense experience, Bolivia, Popular Participation, Yura]

"There is a Culture Here": Spectacle and the Inculcation of Folklore in Highland Bolivia

"There is a Culture Here": Spectacle and the Inculcation of Folklore in Highland Bolivia

`Grasping awareness': mother-tongue literacy for Quechua speaking women in Northern Potosı́, Bolivia

This paper examines cultural and linguistic issues arising from the design and implementation of a mother-tongue adult literacy programme that targets Quechua-speaking women in highland Bolivia, set up with UNICEF funding and scheduled to run over four years (1992–1996). The study is based on observation of classes and interviews in Quechua with project participants. While the programme is based on a philosophy of `interculturality', the author observes that this term remains ill-defined in the context of education planning in the Andean countries, and that, despite positive features of the curriculum, there remains a disjunction between top-down policy design and grassroots perceptions and aspirations regarding literacy acquisition.

“There is a Culture Here”: Spectacle and the Inculcation of Folklore in Highland Bolivia

Every year, the Catholic Church of San Lucas organizes a festival of regional folklore. This festival is unusual in one respect: not only the performances, but also many of the audience are Quechua speaking campesinos, whose music and dance for religious fiestas constitute the “culture” which the folkloric performances are said to display. A folklore festival in which performers and audiences are nearly interchangeable calls for a reconsideration of theories which treat folkloric performances as a display of difference.By considering the relationship between the festival “texts” (music and dance) and their shifting “contexts” (fiesta vs. folklore festival), this article shows that the festivals do not simply represent local lifeways, but teach campesinos that they are the bearers of a “culture” whose value lies in being displayed. In this way, they are being prepared to take part in the new, pluri‐ethnic pageant of Bolivian nationhood.

Procreation, Personhood and ethnic difference in Highland Bolivia

Academic debates on the difference between ‘indians’ and ‘non‐indians’ in highland Latin America typically revolve around issues of race, ethnicity and class understood from an etic perspective. Although there may be a consensus as to where the boundary between one status and the other lies, how this boundary is understood varies dramatically between scholars, as well as between actors on each side of the boundary. This paper examines the identity of those denominated ‘indian’ from an emic perspective. It argues that ‘race’, ‘ethnicity'and ‘class’ are insufficient in themselves to explain this level of social difference. At the root of the difference between jaqi (indians) and q'ara (non‐indians) are understandings of personhood. An examination of procreation beliefs and understandings of personhood sheds light on how identity is understood. The dyads indian/non‐indian and jaqi/q'ara are not, of course, generated independently of each other and this paper also examines how the one articulates with the other. Although the category ‘indian’ is one imposed historically from outside, this does not preclude people's ability to generate a different understanding of that category from within.

Political Institutions and the Evanescence of Power: Making History in Highland Bolivia

The Bolivian Quechua community of Quirpini appears to be governed by a number of political institutions whose activities have little capacity for historically transformative action. An analysis of actions by each institution reveals that they either never mobilize people or are set up so that collective action is possible only with the assent and cooperation of the Spanish-speaking elite of the nearby regional capital. What appears to be Quirpini's system of self-governance is in practice the means by which the village is dominated. (Politics, Bolivia, power, mediation, action) Until approximately 1984, the major political role of the kurajkuna (political authorities) of the indigenous Quechua community called Quirpini was to perform menial services for the leading officials in the town of San Lucas, the regional capital. Most of the authorities were required to go to town on a weekly basis to do tasks such as sweeping the mayor's patio, taking eggs to the authorities, and gathering and cutting firewood for them. One of the commonplaces of political anthropology about the Andes region is that a key, if not the central, role of communal authorities is to represent the community to those outside, particularly neighboring communities and to elements of the dominant Hispanic society and government (Abercrombie 1986; Rasnake 1988). Seen in this light, the services provided by the kurajkuna to the officials of San Lucas were not only perquisites enjoyed by members of the central town's Spanish-speaking elite, but an unmistakable representation of the subordination of Quirpini to San Lucas. By performing menial tasks and giving minor tribute to the authorities of San Lucas, the communal authorities were repeatedly concretizing, if not embodying, the submission of Quirpini to the regional center. This was the state of affairs before a new priest was assigned to the San Lucas region in the early 1980s. He began a systematic program aimed to reduce the campesino(1) communities' subservience to San Lucas, a key part of which was to put an end to the kurajkuna's services to town authorities. In Quirpini, the form this change took was an attack on the kurajkuna as the institution then existed. He allied himself with the young head of the communal peasant union (sindicato), Justiniano Cruz. According to Cruz, who provided most of the information about these events, the official leader of the community at the time (the cacique) was ineffective. The union, with the padre's support, got the community to remove the kurajkuna (including the cacique) from their positions and declare that whereas in the past an incoming authority had been chosen by his predecessor, from then on they would all be chosen at a community meeting by popular vote. Furthermore, where in the past each authority changed at a different date, according to the cycle of fiestas, now all the kurajkuna would be chosen together, and take office together. There was no specific date on which the offices changed hands; rather, the transition was gradual, as marked by the presence of both old and new authorities at the weekly meetings of authorities for some weeks after the vote in January. Finally, the community unilaterally declared that the kurajkuna would no longer perform services for the town authorities. The change was instigated by the church and union together, and made the system by which the kurajkuna were selected more similar to that of the union. It would be reasonable to suppose that the change initiated a period of union domination over the traditional authority structures, as happened in the ex-hacienda communities of the highlands and elsewhere (Rivera Cusicanqui 1990; Izko 1992). In fact, however, the union local had virtually no political significance at all, and the position of local sindicato head was a rotating one-year position treated as a rather minor requirement of male adulthood, comparable to a lesser position in the school or kurajkuna hierarchy. …

Converting Difference: Metaculture, Missionaries, and the Politics of Locality

In recent years, Catholic missionaries have initiated a set of pastoral reforms in Aymara-speaking communities of Bolivia, predicated upon an evangelical equivalence between Aymara identity and Christian identity. Working with Aymara catechists, missionaries endeavor to codify a set of pan-Aymara traits held to reflect Christian values. In this doubly metacultural discourse, authentic Aymaraness is often displaced to a Christianized indigenous past. This article addresses this construction of ethnic inclusion and its limits, focusing on complex assimilation of this politicized discourse of Aymaraness by catechists across a range of social contexts. (Aymara, missionaries, locality, ethnic identity) During course of fieldwork, a consultant, Alejandro, borrowed my copy of Huanca's (1989) El yatiri en la comunidad aymara, which presents a linguistic analysis of a life-history interview with a yatiri, an Aymara ritual specialist. After some weeks, Alejandro (who is marginally literate) returned book, expressing disappointment that it was not a manual for yatiri practice. Alejandro had hoped to find condensed in book knowledge necessary to undertake practices of yatiris, including preparation of specific offerings, divination of causes of disease and other misfortunes, and healing. His motives, I think, were twofold. On one hand, he had hoped to team up with a friend, himself a yatiri, and earn some cash by offering their ritual services to urban whites in La Paz. On other, Alejandro was a Catholic catechist, a church-trained agent of missionary practice, increasingly exhorted in recent years to remember, recuperate, and revalorize Aymara culture. Alejandro's interest in learning to be a yatiri (arguably one of most marked of Aymara cultural phenomena) was continuous with a broader consideration of what pastoral workers see as Aymaraness, undertaken within a missionary framework of evangelization and conversion. In Andes as elsewhere people often manifest a keen nostalgia for lifeways and knowledge thought to be traditional, and lamented as otherwise forgotten, degraded, and increasingly inaccessible. This concern has emerged as a salient dimension of political action and consciousness (e.g., Albo 1987, 1994; Briggs 1996; Jackson 1995; Rappaport 1994; White 1991; Whitten, Whitten, and Chango 1997). The recuperation of such tradition is often held both to constitute an authorizing local identity and to forge solidarities taken as natural base of ethnic and national inclusion (e.g., Foster 1991; Handler 1988). Harris (1995:105ff.) has recently pointed out ironic links between this sense of forgotten tradition and knowledge forms of colonial chronicles and scholarly discourse; official genres of indigenous history and subordinate identity it is held to convey, which have served at once to attribute this lack of self-knowledge to indigenous Americans, and redeem it through the creation of a lost object. Addressing these antinomies of loss in Highland Bolivia, Harris examines potency of such objectified (and alienated) knowledge and poignancy of local nostalgia in context of modern nation-state and counter discourses of indigenous nationalism. Garcia Canclini (1995) has similarly noted debt traditions owe to modernity. In a related observation, Kearney (1996:10f.) draws attention to the creation of indigena ethnicity as a process of image formation occurring also within dominant sectors of society (the media, nongovernmental organization, state agencies, anthropologists, etc.), generating new symbols and images of indigena for consumption by indigenas, who enact and embody them for further recycling. These processes and connections are certainly evident here as Alejandro sought traditional knowledge through a published book; a potent metonym of a sort of modernity often held to be at odds with tradition. The irony is sharper given Alejandro's status as a catechist, once devoted to denouncing yatiris in name of church, and now exhorted by Catholic priests to embrace indigenous tradition and model himself on his former enemies. …

The Mobilization of Human Resources by Non-Governmental Organizations in the Bolivian Andes

In the tropical Andes, a long tradition exists in the utilization and mobilization of rural resources. In certain periods, agriculture and settlement patterns were well adapted to the specific local environmental conditions; at other times, constraints of the natural environment, of historical burdens, and of current social, economic, and political problems contributed to widespread conditions of poverty and underdevelopment. This paper examines the development issues and the activities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and a number of affiliated agencies in two representative regions of highland Bolivia: the northern Altiplano and the eastern Cordillera region in the Departamento de Cochabamba. Based on documentation of the agencies and on numerous talks and formal interviews with representatives of the NGOs and the campesinos, an attempt was made to identify the major problems and constraints of specific micro-regions, as well as the perceived development priorities, and the strategies of the agencies and local communities to implement the development process. Although the NGOs may use different approaches and methods, it became obvious that the key to successful and sustained development lies in programs and projects that take into account the specific local environmental conditions, the cultural traditions of the indigenous communities, and the felt needs of the local people. Based on these premises, an effective partnership may be established between NGOs and the campesinos which can lead to a mobilization of local human and material resources and to appropriate sustainable forms of rural development.

The Displacement of Peasant Settlers in the Amazon: The Case of Santa Cruz, Bolivia

Unlike peasants in many other parts of the Amazon, those settling on much of the frontier in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, have shown little tendency to be displaced by large farmers. This article attempts to identify the reasons for the persistence of peasant settlement. These include ambiguities in state support for the large farmer, the lack of dynamism of commercial agriculture, different spatial patterns of expansion of peasant and commercial farming, the occupation of land by peasant farmers in legally recognised agrarian unions and the Andeanisation of the frontier with the extension of a distinctive social and economic space originating in highland Bolivia into the lowland environment.

The school in the Quechua and Aymara communities of highland Bolivia

Drawing on field research, this paper examines the inherently ambiguous position of the teacher and the school in Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities of highland Bolivia. The traditional school is not only a vehicle for hispanisation, but also plays a key role in encouraging social and cultural change. This feature comes to the fore during patriotic school-focused ceremonies that take place annually in the month of August. Discourse analysis of teachers' speeches is set in the context of a more general discussion of the varying attitudes towards school and schooling held by parents and teachers alike, and the paper will suggest a framework for interpretation of these variations in terms of socioeconomic, cultural and linguistic factors.

Mining and Agriculture in Highland Bolivia: Ecology, History, and Commerce Among the Jukumanis

Mining and Agriculture in Highland Bolivia: Ecology, History, and Commerce Among the Jukumanis

Ideology and Pre-Columbian Civilizations

Employing data from central Mexico, the Maya area, coastal Peru, and highland Peru and Bolivia, directors of several major archaeological field projects interpret evidence of prehistoric ideology and address the question, has ideology any relevance in the reconstruction of prehistory?

Domestic Artifact Assemblages and Ritual Activities in the Bolivian Formative

AbstractSurvey and excavation in Oruro, Bolivia, have begun to reveal the nature of residential life during the Formative Period (1800 B.C.–A.C. 300) in central highland Bolivia. This report presents the results of recent investigations at the “Wankarani complex” site of San Andres. Excavation revealed clusters of clay figurines, grinding stones, and chipped stone bifaces in domestic contexts. Patterns of interassemblage variability and differential discard at the site suggest such artifacts were placed in ritual caches.

Mining and Agriculture in Highland Bolivia: Ecology, History, and Commerce among the Jukumanis. RICARDO A. GODOY

<i>Mining and Agriculture in Highland Bolivia: Ecology, History, and Commerce among the Jukumanis</i>. RICARDO A. GODOY

Lukurmata: household archaeology in prehispanic Bolivia

Household archaeology, together with community and regional settlement information, forms the basis for a unique local perspective of Andean prehistory in this study of the evolution of the site of Lukurmata, a pre-Columbian community in highland Bolivia. First established nearly 2000 years ago, Lukurmata grew to be a major ceremonial centre in the Tiwanaku state, a polity that dominated the south-central Andes from 400 to 1200 AD. After the Tiwanaku state collapsed, Lukurmata rapidly declined, becoming once again a small village. In his analysis of 1300-year-old changes in Lukurmata, the author traces patterns in the organization of domestic life, household ritual, ties to other communities and mortuary activities, as well as household adaptations to political and economic trends.

Flourishing horns and enchanted tubers: Music and potatoes in highland Bolivia

This paper examines the relationship between musical performance and the potato and its cultivation in a rural Andean hamlet. The potato, it emerges, is not viewed as a mundane staple, but is central to the structuring of musical expression. Unlike industrialised societies, musical performance is not abstracted away from everyday objects and activities. Rather, they provide the basis and inspiriation for such expression, revealing a very different approach to ecology.

Restructuring Bolivian rurality? Batallas in the 1990s

This paper examines changes over a 21 year period in an area in highland Bolivia in order to show how people and their activities have changed and the extent to which these changes imply a restructuring of such areas that is similar to what is taking place in the First World. It will be suggested that these changes are a response to increasing commercial opportunities and new needs, in part related to the liberalisation of social and economic life in the post-agrarian reform period. As populations engage in a greater variety of forms of work in different locations in order to get by so their use of rural areas changes.