Bolivian Studies Coming of Age

Any essay that attempts to cast a critical eye on “the state of the field” is a treacherous enterprise. One has to navigate between the Scylla of fawning praise and the Charybdis of damning critique, and then chart exciting new research agendas. Be that as it may, in 1988 I was provoked into writing just such a review essay on Bolivian scholarship for the Latin American Research Review. What prompted me was a 1984 LASA (Latin American Studies Association) survey on field developments that had ranked Bolivia as the least studied country in Latin America (see Reference LarsonLarson 1988; Reference MerkxMerkx 1984). Sadly, it was true, at least in quantitative terms. But even then, I could see that Bolivia, along with the Andean region more widely, was on the threshold of becoming a dynamic, interdisciplinary field of study—one located at the interface of history, anthropology, and ethnohistory.Footnote ¹ I wanted to help bring the vibrant new work of Bolivianists (if only those residing in the United States) into the purview of Latin American studies.

Bolivia’s fate as the hemisphere’s least studied country was soon to change, however. I argue below that Bolivian studies crystallized into a legitimate field of study as Bolivia turned from being exclusively an object of scholarly inquiry in the global North into the primary geocultural “locus of enunciation” for scholarly theory and debate inside Bolivia itself.Footnote ² The historic struggles for voice (and the politics of self-representation) among a new cadre of indigenous activists was rapidly unfolding in the Bolivian Andes in ways that would fundamentally challenge the social practices and purposes of academic scholarship (Reference LuceroLucero 2008). There was, I argue, a kind of dual process of academic decentering and epistemic reinvention going on in Bolivia during the 1990s that resonated with the postcolonial turn in Latin American studies more generally.

First, Bolivia emerged as a vital site of scholarship and debate, becoming a wellspring of critical postcolonial and decolonization thinking that has invigorated dialogue across several disciplinary niches of the Latin American studies landscape.Footnote ³ Second, and simultaneously, the locus of scholarly research and dialogue in Bolivia moved beyond the walls of academia, staid NGO offices, and government think tanks into civil society and popular culture—that vital, unruly informal sphere of community organization, struggle, and work. In short, the axis of knowledge/power moved out of the criollo academy (Angel Rama’s metaphorical lettered city) and into what Xavier Albó (Reference Albó, Beverley, Aronna and Oviedo1995) has called “the pluralist base,” where knowledge, struggle, and identity were mutually constitutive. Although Albó’s prodigious scholarship has circulated widely among scholars and activists across Latin America, it has remained firmly anchored in Bolivia’s resurgent indigenous and peasant movements—the core of Albó’s pluralist base—that surfaced in the 1970s under conditions of dictatorship and repression, and flowered in the 1980s, after the partial restoration of civil society and democratic rule.Footnote ⁴ This remarkable political and cultural effervescence was nurtured by local collectives of activists, teachers, and students experimenting with postcolonial and indigenous-centered research agendas and methodologies—ranging from scholarly collectives in search of silenced indigenous voices, hidden transcripts, and counternarratives to the field practitioners of an insurgent “applied anthropology” that served many highland ayllu communities in their ongoing land claims and quests for local sovereignty. In the present essay, then, the flowering of Bolivian studies is planted firmly in the subsoil of activist scholarship coming out of three converging fields of political contention: the indigenous-based struggles for political rights and representation in the 1980s and 1990s; the rise of progressive NGO-driven projects empowering local scholar-activists within a larger neoliberal, “multicultural” political order in the 1990s; and the crack-up of that neoliberal/multicultural framework under the pressure of popular mobilizations and epistemic disruptions in the late 1990s and early 2000s.Footnote ⁵

But let us not go too far in provincializing the North American academe and its community of Latin American scholars.Footnote ⁶ Postcolonial modes of thinking were also the stuff of postmodernism and critical theory (including the South Asian school of subaltern studies) in the global North.Footnote ⁷ But until the late 1980s, they had made few inroads into the field of Latin American studies, the precinct of embedded structuralist and dependency perspectives.Footnote ⁸ And no wonder: leftist scholars in Latin America were long intent upon exploding US-exported theories of modernization and democracy in a hemisphere torn by endemic poverty, dictatorship, and US imperial adventures. Furthermore, much of the best historical scholarship was still wedded to structural paradigms critiquing capitalist modernity and colonial legacies.Footnote ⁹ And yet, the cultural turn toward power, politics, and identity began to pervade Latin American studies, especially as America’s counter-quincentenary approached. The field pivoted from materialist (structural) questions to the contingent politics of power and representation (and toward a “new political history from below”) (Reference MallonMallon 1995a, Reference Mallon1995b). And the convergence of three critical fields of study—subaltern studies, postcolonial theory, and a decentered anthropology of indigeneity—created the perfect epistemic storm for thrusting Bolivia (as an emerging field) and Bolivian scholars (as knowledge producers) into the eye of the postcolonial hurricane. Those field disruptions also compelled a few outsider Bolivianists (like me) to go back to the drawing board and rethink the politics and conceptual frameworks of their own earlier work (see my critical appraisals in Reference Larson, Larson, Harris and TandeterLarson 1995, Reference Larson1998).

By the end of the 1990s, Bolivia’s vigorous indigenous and popular cultures had drawn a new generation of North American scholars into their fold. They brought their scholarly passions and postcolonial sensibilities to bear on a host of new research projects: Zulawski (Reference Zulawski1995) Thomson (Reference Thomson2002), Serulnikov (Reference Serulnikov2003, Reference Serulnikov2013), and Gotkowitz (Reference Gotkowitz2007), for example, produced magnificent indigenous-centered histories of peasant politics and rebellion. Bolivia’s contemporary ethnic movements also drew a host of social scientists studying Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní movements, producing case studies often situated in the international context of Indian rights movements (for example, Reference YasharYashar 2005; Reference PosteroPostero 2007; Reference GustafsonGustafson 2009). Not least, the explosive growth of NGOs in postdictatorship Bolivia (and Latin America more generally) opened new spaces at the intersection of social science and policymaking, focused on such normative issues as grassroots (or “ethno-”) development, gender discrimination, and practices of democratic self-empowerment (Reference HealyHealy 2001; Reference Andolina, Laurie and A. RadcliffeAndolina, Laurie, and Radcliffe 2009; Reference HarrisHarris 2000; Reference LazarLazar 2008). That neoliberal decade of market-driven development in rural Bolivia, fueled by NGO projects in community-based enterprises or civil society projects, brought many indigenous organizations (as well as educated urban interlocutors) into the globalizing reach of transnational field researchers and their funders. In fact, over the 1990s, a whole generation of progressive (and opportunistic) Bolivian social scientists was buoyed, for a brief while, by the influx of transnational money promoting local NGO programs in multicultural democracy and social development.

Arguably, however, the most decisive shift occurred not in the transnational realm of high theory or NGO networking, but in the trenches of struggle and at the edges of Bolivian civil society. The irruption of Bolivia’s unruly multiculturalism, especially in the twin cities of El Alto and La Paz, saw the flowering of hundreds of grassroots activist groups of women, workers, peasants, university students, and indigenous activists over the 1990s. Local self-governing, deliberative bodies of men and women created grassroots laboratories for dialogue and decision-making in response to the government’s harsh neoliberal reforms and/or multicultural social reforms. These micropolitical contexts of “situated knowledge” soon became the sites and objects of engaged ethnographic fieldwork, some of it pioneered by Xavier Albó’s collaborative work with Aymara students and scholars at his Jesuit-funded organization, Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado (CIPCA).Footnote ¹⁰ Much of this grassroots intellectual activity was plugged into regional (and sometimes transnational) circuits of knowledge and empowerment that leveraged (as well as translated and mediated) local interests, ideas, and agendas that indigenous and popular groups were bringing to the proverbial table.Footnote ¹¹ Yet, a new generation of Aymara-based activist/intellectuals—many of them first-generation college educated—emerged as primary “movement entrepreneurs” and, as such, became critical to the production of alternative norms and knowledges that fundamentally challenged neoliberal paradigms of capitalist modernity and assimilationist ideals of mestizaje. Inspired by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s intrepid scholarship, teaching, and activism, it was this group of Bolivian scholar-activists who, far more than the purveyors of high theory in academia, performed the epistemic work of “decolonization thinking.”Footnote ¹²

An iconic example of this early decolonizing work comes from the formative years of THOA, the Taller de Historia Oral Andina. Founded in 1983 by a dozen Aymara students attending the San Andrés University in La Paz (many working under the guidance of Rivera Cusicanqui, their sociology professor), the THOA collective broke new ground in several ways. First, it improvised a communal ethos and methodologies to perform a combination of deep archival research and extensive work in the collection, translation, and transcription of oral testimonies of Aymara- and Quechua-speaking elders. In sheer volume and originality, THOA built a prodigious artisan workshop of ethnohistory, oral testimony, stories, and verse, as well as breakout historical and anthropological studies. Second, THOA virtually invented a revisionist indigenous-centered historiography.Footnote ¹³ Narrating the nation from “pluralism at the base,” THOA scholars produced and disseminated the evidence of “an autonomous indigenous historical memory and subjectivity [that had] persisted throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.” This work drew inspiration from the earlier katarista peasant movement, just as THOA’s “activist texts” were to serve resurgent ethnic movements of the late 1980s and into the 1990s (Reference StephensonStephenson 2002, 105).Footnote ¹⁴ THOA’s activist form of scholarship coincided with the historic 1990 March for Territory and Dignity, culminating in the unification of the eastern lowland and western highland flanks of what was fast becoming a nationwide indigenous movement pressing for constitutional and social reforms. Third, THOA put its archival findings (and transcribed documents) at the disposal of indigenous groups lobbying the government for the restitution of their legally held ancestral lands. It devised tools and skills to help in the formation of ayllu federations in parts of La Paz and southern Oruro.Footnote ¹⁵ And, finally, THOA broke down literate and language barriers with a torrent of inexpensive bilingual print editions and the use of other media (popular theater, radionovelas, videos, etc.). This intellectual and cultural ferment opened alternative arenas of public debate, “where native peoples could explore their own identities, voices, experiences of political disenfranchisement, and cultural dislocation” (Reference StephensonStephenson 2002, 103).Footnote ¹⁶

The ferment fed by THOA’s insurgent scholarship quickly transcended it. A new generation of Bolivian scholars and intellectuals, many with deep roots in the Aymara and Quechua countryside, burst onto the academic scene to throw open new windows on indigenous history and cultural politics—to become the authors of “a history of our own that speaks to us” (the phrase is drawn from the 1973 “Tiahuanaku Manifesto,” written by Aymara rebel students). A new intellectual school of Aymara historicism, in particular, was registered in manifold ways. It was embodied, for example, in the life experiences and work of Roberto Choque Canqui, a prolific research historian and archivist who, almost single-handedly, plowed the first furrows of an Indian-centered history and historiography of Bolivian history.Footnote ¹⁷ Other Aymara scholars have traversed the Altiplano in pursuit of moral memory and Indian-centered reinterpretations of the past. Whereas Choque, for example, excavated documentary sediments to uncover the tracks of indigenous actors, Waskar Ari tapped into oral memory and plumbed the depths of cacique and community archives to open a window on the obscure Alcalde Mayor Particular (AMP) movement and its novel uses of essentialist legal discourse, nativist schooling, and local knowledge to fashion a quasi-nationalist project of territorial and nativist redemption.Footnote ¹⁸ The intellectual work of sociologist Esteban Ticona Alejo, by contrast, moved the compass between literary analysis, oral testimony, and narrative history to critically engage colonial and postcolonial epistemologies, as well as to locate the subject of indigenous movements, and Aymara thinkers and activists specifically, at the core of his larger counternarrative of modern Bolivian history and memory.Footnote ¹⁹

Stepping back to survey the larger canvas, it is possible to see the transformative effects that Bolivia’s robust social movements (as well as the wider hemispheric Indian rights movement) has had on postcolonial “border thinking” and practices, particularly in anthropology. In her provocative 2008 article “Bolivia: Bridges and Chasms,” Rossana Barragán describes Bolivia as a vital field laboratory for observing the interplay between “research and academic thinking and practices, on the one hand, and political action and social movements, on the other” (Reference Barragán Romano and PooleBarragán 2008, 32; see also Reference Rivera CusicanquiRivera Cusicanqui 1999). Just as indigenous confederations reached out to the THOA group for help in negotiating the restoration of local ayllu territories, so too did indigenous leaders deploy the scholarly work of certain Bolivian anthropologists to leverage their local political and ethnodevelopment agendas. To be sure, this sort of indigenous and popular ferment was not exclusive to Bolivia. Surveying the activist role of Andean ethnography in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Frank Salomon (Reference Salomon1985, 92) chronicled stories about formally trained anthropologists intervening in policy debates, “less as experimenters in applied work than as expert witnesses in defense of Andean interests,” or as advocates for restoring Andean traditions of farming and healing practices; or, in defense of Andean traditions of growing and chewing the coca leaf; or, to validate and make official the use of native languages in public schools; or to adapt church practices to the demands of Aymara parishioners. But nowhere else in the Andes did anthropologists and grassroots political activists seem to be so impactful as in Bolivia, especially after they joined forces to push for fundamental changes at the state level. Those efforts culminated in the 1990s under the neoliberal regime of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (“Goni”) and his indigenous vice president, Victor Hugo Cárdenas. They presided over a symbolic and institutional reorganization of the Bolivian nation-state, redefined as being both “multiethnic and plurilingual” (if not yet plurinational).Footnote ²⁰ Spurred by indigenous activists and their allies, the government conferred legitimacy on the normative categories of pueblo indígena and ethnic nacionalidad, and thus began taking seriously indigenous claims to their ancestral cultures and languages, territories, and autonomies. A pluralist framework of ethnic and individual rights was finally beginning to supplant Bolivia’s restrictive homogeneous ideal of national belonging.Footnote ²¹

Of course, there were troubling signs that Goni was setting a new kind of political trap, as his regime tried simultaneously to co-opt or suppress the more militant factions of the Aymara and urban popular movements, while trying to mask the state’s repressive, racist, and exclusionary politics in the celebration of multiculturalism.Footnote ²² Rivera Cusicanqui’s penetrating critique was echoed in other corners of Amerindian America and reverberated in other camps of critical social science scholarship on neoliberal state-indigenous relations, including Charles Hale’s influential 2002 article broadly warning against “the menace of multiculturalism” (Reference HaleHale 2002, 485, 491). But menace or not, by no means did the fog of official multiculturalism shroud Bolivia’s vibrant sphere of indigenous and popular knowledge/activism over the 1990s. Intense transnational networking opened communication between indigenous groups within Bolivia and across Latin America, and plugged some local organizations into advocacy NGOs. There were some “trickle-up effects.” Some multilateral agencies repudiated earlier technocratic development schemes and began reconceiving culturally appropriate and interactive programs in the new field of ethnodevelopment, by recognizing indigenous people as co-participants in designing and implementing local development projects. Comparative case studies of the “NGO-ification” of Ecuador and Bolivia over the 1990s reveal how a variety of grassroots development organizations managed to hook into indigenous-movement issues and agendas (Reference Andolina, Laurie and A. RadcliffeAndolina, Laurie, and Radcliffe 2009, 34–35). Bolivia’s political and institutional climate proved especially receptive: the 1994 constitutional redefinition of the nation as multicultural and plurilingual; the 1994 education reforms establishing national-level bilingual and intercultural curricula; the 1994–1995 Law of Popular Participation (LPP) aiming to diversify local politics by shifting power to municipalities and giving recognition to indigenous civil organizations; and the 1996 provision for original community lands (Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen, TCOs) recognizing collective property titles. That cascade of government reforms, fueled by NGO money and activity, had an enormous generative effect on the training, status, and employment of Bolivian social scientists-turned-practitioners.Footnote ²³ Yet, as noted, the NGO/neoliberal pact also provoked strong countercurrents of opposition and dissent, not only among radical groups of young urban intellectuals but also within militant factions of Aymara-based and Quechua-based movements.Footnote ²⁴ Ultimately, the contradictions of globalization and its local brand of neoliberalism (with its mantra of multiculturalism) surfaced, triggering a chain of events that was difficult for Bolivian elites to anticipate, and impossible to reverse. Popular and indigenous waves of insurgency, beginning with the 1999–2000 Water War in Cochabamba and followed by the 2003 Gas War in La Paz, unleashed a wave of “intercultural” popular mobilizations that propelled Evo Morales into power by the end of 2005. From the vantage point of the new millennium, Bolivia came to symbolize Latin America’s most spectacular failure of state-controlled multiculturalism; the regime had crumbled before the specter of the popular disavowal of neoliberalism’s false promises and, by the early 2000s, increasingly austere and repressive policies.

How to capture the intellectual synergy that came out of Bolivia’s indigenous counterpublic sphere and local activist scholarship over the 1990s? How to plot the shifting tensions among scholarly research, social movements, the NGO world, progressive organs of the Catholic Church, and the public universities in that heady decade? These questions cry out for robust research on Bolivian cultural politics and intellectual ferment spanning two cycles of neoliberal reformism and the rise of populist hegemony under Morales.

From this vantage point, I can’t help but admire the richness and originality of the research being produced by Bolivian scholars, whether more activist or archivist in their orientation, over the past twenty-five years. Much academic work in anthropology and history, as I have argued, originated from the base, flowing from the kinetic imperatives and arguments animating Bolivia’s social movements rather than developing in mimetic relationship to the academic fashions in the global North. This effervescence is all the more impressive when we remember the material hardships and institutional fragility under which most local scholars in Bolivia continued to work. Barragán has observed how, during the 1990s, “the conditions within Bolivian academia, as well as social and political demands [on Bolivian academics], led to two very different pathways: [funding and] stability for the privileged community of [foreign] Bolivianists, and the dispersion and nomadic existence for local Bolivians” (Reference Barragán Romano and PooleBarragán 2008, 39). In spite of these gross disparities of wealth and privilege, Bolivian scholars have contributed to important transnational dialogues in several thematic and conceptual areas.

Briefly, I suggest several areas of recent scholarly activity and exchange—currents of critical scholarship and research agendas flowing out of Bolivia (South to North, and South to South)—that have stimulated, in turn, new currents of scholarly activity on Bolivian history and society in North America. Here, I identify several thematic research agendas that have drawn Bolivianists into transnational conversations, creating the kind of metaphorical bridges that Barragán wrote about in her 2008 state-of-the-field appraisal.

Conclusion

In sum, the resonance of this intellectual work, and the rebel spirit nourishing it, have imprinted Bolivian studies with an originality and integrity of its own making. If, looking back to the year 1988, Bolivian studies had yet to gain recognition as a legitimate field, by the turn of the millennium it had certainly crashed the gates and entered the big tent of Latin American studies. One small index is the fact that thirteen scholarly panels were devoted exclusively to things Bolivian during the 2016 LASA conference.Footnote ³² Paradoxically, as I have argued here, Bolivian studies slowly gained currency in international circuits precisely because it broke away, turned inward, and provincialized the North American academy over the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Most recently, the Bolivian case stands as a transcendent example of neoliberalism’s arc of (multicultural) consolidation, profound crisis, and partial transformation between the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. If Bolivia has morphed from a forgotten corner of the Andes into a hotspot of antiglobalization and decolonial “border thinking,” it is arguably because of this historical cycle in our own time. Never in Bolivia’s history, since its founding two centuries ago, has the country mattered so much to the world. The proliferation of innovative scholarship both inside and beyond Bolivia is a fundamental reflection of the country’s deep pluralist strain of emancipatory politics, even in times (like the present?) when the utopian tides of pluriethnic possibility inevitably crash against social reality, or else evaporate in the face of insidious betrayals by a governing party perhaps too long in power.

If there is an undertone of ambivalence here, it should not be allowed to distract from the main premise of this essay, that through two or three decades of scholarship and struggle, lo boliviano has become emblematic of engaged, pluriethnic modes of knowledge production, dissemination, and praxis. Indeed, Silvia Rivera and Virginia Aillón (Reference Rivera Cusicanqui and Aillón Soria2015) recently made this case in their important anthology of critical Bolivian thought. So, too, does the dazzling new collection The Bolivia Reader (Reference Thomson, Barragán, Albó, Qayuum and GoodaleThomson et al. 2018). Arguably, the most original Bolivian scholarship has been moored, in ethical and epistemic ways, to ongoing decolonizing struggles against imperial, gendered, class, and ethnic forms of oppression. On the wider canvas, earlier Andean studies paradigms and utopias may have faded in fashion, but to judge by the vitality and density of Bolivian scholarship over the last quarter century, we can rest assured that a multitude of new voices, struggles, and scholarly projects are cropping up in vertical niches across the Andean studies landscape.