Bolivian History

Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la
cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]
Change and material culture: Alfred Métraux among the Chiriguano. The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]

El análisis etnográfico parte de una descripción de las terminologías de parentesco de los chacobo, un grupo pano de la Amazonía boliviana, y Phinaya, un pueblo de pastores del Sur peruano. A partir del análisis genealógico propone una aproximación comparada a las relaciones concretas entre, por un lado, la clasificación terminológica de los parientes consanguíneos y afines; y por el otro, fenómenos sociológicos como los ordenamientos duales, la formación de parentelas, las prácticas contemporáneas de alianza matrimonial y sus cambios, las pautas de residencia postmatrimonial, las ideologías culturales de la descendencia, las conceptualizaciones de la exogamia y la endogamia o la identidad y la alteridad. Las implicancias del análisis contribuyen tanto a los debates etnológicos sobre las relaciones entre las tierras altas y bajas de América del Sur, como también presentando elementos de reflexión ligados con el clásico problema de la llamada "organización dualista".

Resumen Este artículo realiza un análisis histórico y comparado de los movimientos indígenas en Bolivia y Ecuador, con el fin de explicar el discurso de autodeterminación aymara. Su emergencia se explica por una conjunción de elementos: la existencia de rasgos tangibles de identificación gracias a la persistencia del ayllu, la experiencia histórica de intercambios fluidos y percibidos como desiguales entre los aymaras y la sociedad nacional mestiza, la influencia de un discurso radical de izquierda y la percepción de los indígenas como mayoría nacional.
Abstract This article makes a historical and comparative analysis of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador in order to explain the Aymara's self-determination discourse. Its emergence is explained by a combination of elements: The existence of tangible features of identification thanks to the persistence of the ayllu, the historical experience of fluid exchanges and perceived as unequal between the Aymara and the mestizo national society, the influence of a radical leftist discourse, and the perception of indians as national majority.

La cosmovisión y la identidad de las sociedades amerindias durante el
período colonial son temas de difícil inferencia desde la Etnohistoria.
Ante este desafío, este artículo presenta un estudio acerca de la región
del complejo hidrográfico del Madeira, en el suroeste de la
Amazonía, durante la primera mitad del siglo XVIII. A partir de la
revisión crítica de las principales fuentes primarias de la región, se
pretende abarcar esta problemática mediante el análisis de las estrategias
y los mecanismos de respuesta desarrollados por los amerindios.
Con esto, este artículo pretende demostrar cómo el estudio de las
relaciones interétnicas puede ayudar a revelar nuevos datos acerca de
las dinámicas socioculturales de los distintos grupos indígenas, y a
comprender cómo éstos construían y reformulaban sus identidades
tanto étnicas como sociales.

In 1930, Enrique Linares wrote in to the Municipal Judge of Corocoro, a small copper mining town 90 km southwest of La Paz:

"You, sir, are aware of the events in the middle of the night last 26 June, in this city and in the house inhabited by high ranking employees of the mining company Corocoro United Copper Mines, Ltd. (CUCM), which to the public has been given the name "Attack of the Indian Miners on the Company." What a falsehood!"

The attack in question had nothing to do with the local Aymara communities who farmed and worked the mines, Linares insisted. Instead, he named several young white collar employees of the mine, both Bolivian and foreign, who were seen on that night by multiple witnesses dressed as Aymara peasants. These young men, he argued, armed with guns as well as homemade bombs made from jam jars and tea tins, attacked and set fire to their own living quarters, killing in the process a neighboring indigenous man named Mateo Chipana. Linares also suggested that this plan was premeditated, with high ranking officials spreading rumors of an attack prior to the 26th, and dismissing the guard who would normally patrol the grounds on the night in question.

Between the late 1930s and early 1940s Mexico City and Buenos Aires became the centres of activity for the two most relevant anti-fascist organisations of German-speaking exiles in Latin America: the communist-inspired Free German Movement (Bewegung Freies Deutschland; BFD) and the social-democratic oriented The Other Germany (Das Andere Deutschland; DAD). Both organisations envisaged the creation of an anti-fascist front within Latin America, one which would allow for greater unity of action, and thus carried out extensive congresses at Mexico City and Montevideo in 1943. Due to crucial ideological and tactical differences, this dream of anti-fascist unity led to a power struggle between BFD and DAD, well illustrated in the impact it had on Bolivia. This article seeks a new perspective on how, thanks to the establishment of transnational networks, a continental debate on the meaning and methods of anti-fascism then took place, while also shedding light on the influence the Latin American context had in shaping the exiles’ plans for a new Germany.

In this article, we propose a reading of Walter Solón Romero Gonzales' mural 'History of Bolivian Petroleum' from 1956. We explore the scenes and the ideas expressed in the mural juxtaposing them to the current public discourse and policies to investigate the understanding of the role natural resources vis‐à‐vis development. That is, our starting point is the mural, which we link to present‐day discourses on hydrocarbons to analyse the role of hydrocarbons in the Bolivian development model. We show that this model, envisioning hydrocarbons as a driver of progress, continues to hold currency and influence policies in contemporary Bolivia.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36178.76486

RESUMEN: La firma del Tratado de Ayacucho en 1867 se inscribe en el contexto internacional de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza entre Brasil, Argentina, Uruguay contra Paraguay y, en el contexto boliviano, del controversial gobierno de Mariano Melgarejo (1864-1871) y de la búsqueda de rutas alternativas hacia el océano Atlántico para el comercio boliviano. Pero más allá de las relaciones diplomáticas, este artículo pretende examinar las repercusiones inmediatas del Tratado tanto en materia de navegación, de delimitación de fronteras como, sobre todo, en la vida de la población local de la frontera, principalmente en su población indígena chiquitana. ABSTRACT: The signing of the Treaty of Ayacucho in 1867 coincided with the War of the Triple Alliance between Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay on the one hand, and Paraguay, at the same time that Bolivia, led by the controversial general Mariano Melgarejo (1864-1871), was seeking alternative outlets to the Atlantic Ocean for Bolivian commerce. But beyond the issue of diplomatic relations , this article seeks to examine the immediate repercussions of the treaty on navigation matters, on the delimitation of the borders, and above all on the life of people living on the frontier, especially the Chiquitano Indians.

On coming to power in 2006 President Morales made a radical break with the US backed anti-drugs strategy, which focused on the forced eradication of coca leaf and the criminalization of coca growers. The new policy, often referred to as ‘coca yes cocaine no,’ draws on the coca growers’ own distinction between coca leaf (which has been consumed by Indigenous Andeans for millennia) and cocaine, the illicit drug. The strategy legalized the cultivation of a small amount of coca leaf in specific zones, encouraged the coca unions to self-police to ensure growers do not exceed this limit, and envisions the industrialization and export of coca based products. The overriding aim of the policy is to reduce harms to coca grower communities. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Chapare, one of Bolivia’s two main coca growing regions, this chapter explains how the this new policy has been operationalized. It is argued that the coca farmers have made significant sacrifices to implement the new policy and that it represents a viable, less damaging alterative to the forced eradication of coca crops.

This thesis critically examines the contemporary role of popular culture in processes of transmission of national memory.  The analysis is based on the celebration of Carnival in Oruro, Bolivia’s most prominent folkloric pageant. The Oruro Carnival celebrations are officially promoted all over the world as an accurate representation of Bolivia’s cultural heritage.  Following Hall (2006) I take cultural heritage to be a discursive practice around ideas of transmissions of cultural memory. In the bid to UNESCO for recognition as a World Intangible Heritage ‘site’, presented by Oruro’s cultural authorities, emphasis was placed on the antiquity and accumulative powers of the celebration.  In the official discourse, the Carnival parade connects past to present in ways that project particular ideas of locality and the national, centred on Catholicism and the mestizo ideology of Nationalist Populism in the 1940s and 1950s.  But, in embracing such particular traits of the national, whose past and present are being projected in official discourses of intangible cultural heritage?
The analysis, supported primarily by scholarly literature on identity and race in the Andes, decolonial thinking and heritage studies, demonstrates that the discourse of heritage transmitted through the celebration of the Oruro Carnival has been systematically used to forge nation-making projects that embody hegemonic interests, and exclude indigenous and indigenous mestizos.
The ethnographic work was organised around three main ideas: national representation and the interconnections between power and memory, race and the racialisation of culture, and the mediatory dimension of cultural performance. Using data collected primarily through participant observation and ‘participant experience’ in performative practices from fieldwork in Oruro, and a methodology based on Grounded Theory (Charmaz 2006), I identify the connections between the transmission of hegemonic depictions of the past, the ‘eclipse’ of indigenous histories and experiences, and contemporary political exclusion of indigenous actors.    I also look at the political responses that have emerged from the dialogical dimension of popular culture and festive performance and the agency of the actors

Bolivia’s foremost social and political theorist, René Zavaleta Mercado held diplomatic and ministerial posts with the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement in the 1950s and ’60s, before eventually aligning with the Marxist left, where he developed the creative, heterodox philosophy for which he is known. Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia is his final and most significant work, available in English for the first time.

Published posthumously, the book explores a series of critical moments in Bolivian history to illuminate the reconstitution of seigneurial rule and the challenges posed by plebeian, indigenous, and working-class projects, agitating for a more inclusive nation. It is a work of reflexive social theory that explores the limits of its own conceptual frameworks—including classical political philosophy and Marxism—through an engagement with the history that made possible its own conceptual horizons. In its content, method, and style, the book offers an original reflection on social formations and political knowledge that have far-reaching implications for the Global South. Rooted in history and yet exceedingly relevant, Zavaleta’s revolutionary work makes contemporary a long genealogy of theories of the national-popular—from Gramsci and Mariátegui, to Fanon and Ho Chi Minh.