Andean Utopias in Evo Morales's Bolivia

As indigenous people have emerged as political actors in Bolivia, indigenous activists, the media, and scholars have begun to articulate a new discourse that represents Andean culture as coherent, enduring, and fundamental to the transformation of contemporary Bolivian society. This essay focuses on the ways new president Evo Morales and his government are utilizing idealist utopian visions of Andean culture, such as the notion of pachakuti, to negotiate spaces for social and political reform. Is this just strategic essentialism? Instead of assuming continuity of Andean culture, I demonstrate instead how elements of traditional narratives and myth are arranged and enacted to produce consensus about the kinds and forms of change that are appropriate and possible in given historical conjunctures. This may be effective political strategy, but it also carries dangers, including reverse racism, fanning the flames of ethnic violence, and Andino-centrism. Keywords: indigenous politicsculture continuityessentialismmyth pachakuti Bolivia Acknowledgements This work was originally presented at a seminar on Culture and Violence in the Andes sponsored by the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego, in June 2006. I would like to thank the participants of that conference, and especially CILAS director Christine Hunefeldt, for comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Xavier Albó, Pamela Calla, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Sinclair Thomson for sharing their analyses of contemporary Bolivian politics during an August 2006 field trip to Bolivia. The final version of the article benefited by suggestions from Robert Albro, Nancy Eegan, Jorge Montesinos, Rodrigo Montoya, Joel Robbins, Elana Zilberg, LACES editor Joanne Rappaport, and three anonymous reviewers for LACES. Notes [1] As I have described elsewhere (Postero, Citation2007), the relation between class and race in Bolivia is complex. Rarely do people or groups identify themselves exclusively on one dimension or the other. [2] The autonomy movement is an expression of long-held desires of lowland departments for independence from central state control. See Postero (Citation2007) for a description of its trajectory. These demands exploded most recently in January 2004 in Santa Cruz in a series of marches and demonstrations. Then president Mesa acknowledged the demands in part by allowing popular elections of departmental prefects in the December 2005 elections (prefects had previously been appointed by the president). In Santa Cruz, the leader of the autonomy movement, Rubén Costas, was elected prefect. Autonomy was also debated at the national level in the July 2006 referendum on Autonomy. The results demonstrated a strong regional demarcation, with the ‘yes’ vote winning in the lowlands departments, and the ‘no’ carrying the highlands. [3] As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui put it so elegantly many years ago, ‘And so the nightmare of the Indian siege continues to trouble the sleep of the Bolivian Creole class’ (1987, p. 155). [4] The most important discussion of historical memory in indigenous populations is Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's famous book Oppressed but not Defeated (1987). [5] Here, they seem to be referring to a structuralist notion of culture of the sort made famous by Andean religious scholar R. Tom Zuidema, whose work on myth and history in the Andes analyzed deep structures of language, kinship, and ritual (see Zuidema, Citation1982). I would argue that there is a profound difference between identifying structures in the logic of myths and kinship models, on the one hand, and assuming a corresponding unconscious mental structure in the minds of Andean peoples, on the other. Anthropologists such as Joanne Rappaport and Thomas Abercrombie have demonstrated that, far from being a rote enactment of unconscious structures, the formation and reproduction of historical memory in Andean communities is a complex process of re-appropriation of the past, invention of tradition, and conscious re-enactment of ritual practices (Rappaport, Citation1990; Abercrombie, Citation1998). [6] Here, one can think of Ruth Benedict's ‘great arch of possibilities’ (Benedict, Citation1934). [7] Starn was referring to those Andeanists who had focused their research on traditional religious rituals and lifeways while ignoring the tensions that produced the terrifying Sendero Luminoso civil war (Starn, Citation1994). [8] Steve Stern gives a detailed description of the Taqui Onkoy movement in Stern (Citation1987). [9] Spanish literature scholar Mary Louise Pratt analyzed the order of the Spanish judge, José Antonio de Areche. She argues that, although the goal of the order was to destroy the neo-Inca power structure and all its symbolic effects, the wording of the order itself reproduced the structures of meaning and values it was trying to eliminate. She suggests that all of the actors in this drama were caught up in the complexities and ambivalences of the colonial era ‘contact zone,’ and could not help but reflect that in their texts and actions (Pratt, Citation1996). [10] This section benefited greatly from fruitful discussions with visiting scholar Rodrigo Montoya at UCSD in May and June 2006. [11] A mestizo educated in Spain, de la Vega's goal was to show that the Incas were not barbarians, but were an advanced civilization, a sort of Rome of the Americas, where there was no hunger (Montoya Rojas, Citation2005, p. 39). The commentary was written in a way that did not directly threaten the colonial hierarchy, and was widely circulated among literate Indians and mestizos (Pratt, Citation1996, p. 4). [12] Hylton's chapter shows similar creativity in the 1927 insurrection in Chayanta, where local leaders formed alliances with urban intellectuals and adopted part of the communist ideology, reworking it into their local forms of resistance. [13] Thomson's chapter analyzes their strategies as the era of the cacique was coming to an end, Serulnikov shows how indigenous actors were able to use the Bourbon reforms to develop new forms of collective action, and Hylton's chapter shows the creativity in forming alliances across sectors in the difficult years before the Chaco War. [14] I am grateful to Jorge Montesinos for this point. [15] Such understandings are undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that UNESCO has recently recognized two ‘master works of oral and intangible patrimony’ in Bolivia, the carnival in Oruro and the Andean cosmovisión of the Kallawayas, a group of indigenous people known for their traditional healings basted on Andean spirituality and millennial knowledge of herbs (UNESCO, Citation2006). For an interesting discussion of the effect of the UNESCO declaration on Bolivian festivals, see Scarborough (Citation2005). [16] The small number of lowlands activists is the result of party politics: only recently have the lowlands organizations begun to ally themselves with the MAS party.