Reclaiming modernity: Indigenous cosmopolitanism ... - AnthroSource

MARK GOODALE George Mason University

Reclaiming modernity: Indigenous cosmopolitanism and the coming of the second revolution in Bolivia

A B S T R A C T In this article I explore the emergence of complicated new forms of indigeneity in Bolivia over the last 15 years. I argue that although what I describe as a second revolution is under way in contemporary Bolivia, there is a danger that this revolution will be misread by scholars, political commentators, and others because of the prevailing tendency to interpret social and moral movements in Bolivia (and elsewhere) in rigidly neopolitical–economic terms. I offer an alternative theoretical framework for understanding current developments in Bolivia, which I describe as “indigenous cosmopolitanism”: the ability of national political leaders, youth rappers in El Alto, rural indigenous activists, and others to bring together apparently disparate discursive frameworks as a way of reimagining categories of belonging in Bolivia, and, by extension, the meanings of modernity itself. [cosmopolitanism, indigenous peoples, resistance, moral imagination, revolution, modernity, Bolivia, Andes, Latin America]

he Wayna Tambo Youth Cultural Center is easy to miss. It sits tucked away on one of El Alto’s many semipaved streets, away from the center of a city that is exploding in population, political consciousness, social militancy, and self-assertion. The Cultural Center itself is marked by one of those roughly drawn handmade signs that are ubiquitous in Bolivia: a simple metal sheet bolted above a corrugated metal door, midblock within a hastily constructed two-floor building. Because this El Alto neighborhood is part of the relatively less densely populated northwest side of town, the buildings are not as tightly packed together, the streets are not as bustling with people as El Alto’s centro. This means that although the price of property is not as high in this barrio, the altiplano winds blow through the streets more fiercely and unrelentingly. But it also means that the Wayna Tambo Cultural Center is removed from the political and social cacophony of the city’s central barrios. And its isolation from the crises of everyday life is what draws the youth of El Alto and La Paz to it. Inside Wayna Tambo, newly urbanized campesino adolescents who speak Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish—and idiosyncratic Hispano-Amerindian hybrids—are constructing new forms of cosmopolitanism that combine an emergent indigeneity with other, more global forms of inclusion, and in doing so are, in a small way, reclaiming the meanings and possibilities of Bolivia’s modernity. To reclaim the Bolivian modern, the youth of Wayna Tambo do not turn—as their fathers and mothers would have—to the easy certainties of Latin American historical materialism, or—as their grandparents would have—to the rousing exhortations of Bolivian nationalism; rather, they turn to rap music. When Abraham Bojórquez, one of the leaders of El Alto’s rap movement (known locally as “Wayna Rap”), sings defiantly, “¡estamos con la raza, yo!,” he is envisioning a new type of sociopolitical citizenship, a new framework of belonging in which Bolivia’s disaffected and marginalized are brought together with other members of “the race”: urban African Americans, Paris’s North African immigrants,1 the Maori of Auckland’s forgotten south side. Bojórquez and the other members of the Wayna Rap movement would

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AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 634–649, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. ISSN 1548-1425. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm.

Reclaiming modernity

undoubtedly understand the message behind the Nesian Mystik album “Polysaturated”: If the urban indigenous are saturated with rage, hopelessness, and the siren song of what James Ferguson (1999) called the “expectations of modernity,” they are also saturated with a new sense of global belonging, the ability to harness culture for aesthetic as well as political purposes, and the desire to reclaim, to demand, to take back the potentialities within what John D. Kelly (2002) has described as the “modernist sublime.” Although the legacy of oppression, in New Zealand as in Bolivia, seeps into every pore of the body politic, Wayna Rap and the other youth creators of indigenous cosmopolitanism in El Alto deracinate this legacy through their music. By refusing to accede to all of the traditional categories of Bolivian identity (campesino, Indian, Aymara, Quechua, runa, q’ara), the rappers of Wayna Tambo are part of a second revolution in Bolivia, one that is not their grandparents’ revolution, even though the tires still burn at the blockades, the air is still thick with tear gas, and the rubber bullets are all too often replaced with the real thing. This second Bolivian revolution is essentially discursive. In projecting the moral imagination beyond the boundaries of the Bolivian nation-state, in envisioning forms of global belonging that draw on the Bolivian indigenous imaginary but without regard to the heavy expectations of both modernity and traditional forms of indigeneity, Bolivia’s hip-hop generation creates more than music: They create new discursive categories through which political–economic problems in Bolivia can be understood and, more importantly, repositioned. Meanwhile, below the Ceja del Alto, the aptly named edge of the massive gash in the earth into which one descends from El Alto to La Paz, another indigenous cosmopolitanism is emerging, although this one does not draw from an artistic or more broadly aesthetic cosmovision; rather, at the headquarters of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), at meetings of the Vanguardia Universitaria held in the courtyard of the main university’s law faculty, and in gatherings of the Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos de La Paz, among other places, a reconstituted indigeneity is being located within a more modest, regional universe, one that has given the South American New Left the ability to draw from both neo-Marxism and neoliberalism without contradiction or discredit. Take MAS’s statement of ideological principles, which was still being refined during the summer of 2005, even as Evo Morales, MAS’s leader, was surging in several national opinion polls in anticipation of the December 2005 national elections (see note 9). At the same time MAS declares itself to be opposed to the static Newtonian worldview embodied by protoliberal theorists like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, it borrows from these same social contract theorists in envisioning a postrevolutionary Bolivia founded on human rights (principle 2), participatory democracy (principle 3), respect for difference (principle 6), and liberty (principle 9).

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Indeed, one could hardly find a better symbol of contemporary Latin America’s complicated modernity than this statement of ideological principles, in which Newton, “Jhon” Locke (with the common Bolivian rendering of the English “John”), Hobbes, and Adam Smith make an appearance along with references to the cosmology of Western culture, the Industrial Revolution, Homo Faber, the folly of the U.S.-led coca leaf eradication campaign, globalization, neocolonialism, the principle of a living planet expressed by Pachamama, a letter written to George Washington by an “indigenous leader of the redskins,” the philosophy of the Ayllu, structural adjustment, and the vaguely utopian writings of the Club of Rome. MAS’s radically hybrid indigenous cosmopolitanism is a striking example of what Pheng Cheah has described as “the cosmopolitical”: a political worldview that ambiguously straddles the line between “mass-based forms of global consciousness, [and] . . . existing imagined political . . . communities” (1998:32). The indigenous cosmopolitanism of MAS illustrates, in other words, a peculiar paradox: At the same time MAS articulates its ideological principles within a formally unitary cosmopolitan framework, it does so by bringing together both multiple— and competing—cosmopolitanisms and noncosmopolitan regional—and even national—frames of reference. To describe this paradox in practice is not the same as simply recognizing in MAS an example of “actually existing cosmopolitanism” (Robbins 1998); rather, MAS and other actors in the recent social movements in Bolivia force us to think of cosmopolitanism in a completely different way, as a political and, even more, moral category unmoored from its Kantian genealogy. Regardless of the subtle differences between these two types of indigenous cosmopolitanism in Bolivia, both are at the foundation of what is an emergent revolution, a second revolution (after the National Revolution of 1952), and one that brings the political and moral together within new discursive articulations. All of this will be examined in detail below. But even though scholars, journalists, and activists have written about the transformations in Bolivia since 1999 as if a revolution were imminent (or already unfolding), it is a basic argument of this article that Bolivia’s second revolution has been, so far, not well understood. In 1991, Orin Starn published what became an extremely provocative and controversial article in Cultural Anthropology, in which he chided anthropologists for “missing the revolution” in Peru (1991).2 He argued that mainstream and influential anthropologists of the Andes were blinded by what he called “Andeanism”: the tendency to romanticize especially rural Andean peoples and to reify them within prefigured historical and intellectual categories, categories that were not able to account for either the rise of Sendero Luminoso, or to process the realities of brutality and horror that were experienced by wide swaths of Peru’s rural population. Instead of overprivileging

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the symbolic and discursive lives of peoples and communities in Peru, Starn wanted anthropologists to broaden their analytical frameworks to include the political and economic networks that enmesh Andean peoples, the geopolitical contexts that shape national policies in the Andean countries, and the struggles of people in towns and rural villages to resist the impact of these broader forces, even if such resistance took forms that were not “traditional,” or that revealed both the internal diversity within rural areas and an essential conservatism (see also Starn 1994, 1999). This article is not the application of Starn’s critique to contemporary Bolivianist anthropology, and not only because anthropology has moved well beyond the academic– political ferment of the early 1990s, when rigid—and, sometimes, deceptive (see Lewis 1999)—lines were drawn in the epistemological sand; rather, it is that the problem for anthropologists—and others—writing about current Bolivian culture and politics is exactly the opposite of what Starn described for Peru. The danger is not that the second revolution in Bolivia will be missed by anyone; it is that it will be misread. The reason is not that anthropologists have ignored the wider political and economic factors that shape the practice of everyday life in Bolivia; if anything, they have been overemphasized at the expense of just the type of “Andean” discursivity that Starn believed had been inappropriately romanticized. To understand how new forms of indigenous cosmopolitanism are fueling shifts along several key cultural and political fault lines in Bolivia, shifts that are either actually or, possibly, revolutionary, it is necessary to reframe ongoing political and social struggles to take account of the broader moral and discursive contexts that give these current struggles both meaning and their radical potential. This calls for a different kind of Andeanism and a willingness to confront the fact that indigeneity as an analytical category must not be conflated with indigenismo, which, as Marisol de la Cadena has convincingly argued (2000), continues to serve as an ideological medium through which national struggles over race, class, gender, and indigenousness are played out.

Rainbow resistance Like all summarizing key symbols (Ortner 1973), the wiphala’s meanings resist both parsing into constituent parts and historical elaboration. The wiphala is a square flag or banner that contains 49 smaller squares, of equal size, which are divided into 6 of the 7 colors of the rainbow, plus white. The squares are arranged on the wiphala so that the colors pass across the flag diagonally, in a pattern that suggests unending recurrence (see Figure 1). Although the wiphala’s presence in Bolivian social movements predates the current period—indeed, its mythic antiquity is part of its power—it has increasingly become the symbol of Bolivian indigeneity since the early 1990s, an indigeneity that is

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Figure 1. The wiphala. Photo courtesy of the Consejo Andino de Naciones Originarias.

defined by both resistance and new forms of collective assertion (see Figure 2). And beyond these, the wiphala has also come to express an emergent indigenous cosmopolitanism, which brings together Bolivia’s different originarios, or “original ones,” with all of the “First Nations” of the Americas (see Figures 3 and 4).3 The basic historical outline of the most recent period of indigenous mobilization and resistance in Bolivia has been developed in many forms (by academics and journalists) and can be quickly summarized. The year 1990 is a watershed moment in this history. That was a year in which 700 indigenous Bolivians anticipated the hemisphere’s impending 1992 500 Years Celebration by marching for 35 days from Trinidad, in the lowlands, to La Paz. By the time they arrived, el movimiento was born, and in the process Bolivian indigenousness had been recast within a wider universe, symbolized by the wiphalas that the marchers carried along the route. By 1992, the 500 Years Celebration had given way to 500 Years of Resistance and, a year later, in 1993, the first self-identified indigenous Bolivian was elected to high office: V´ıctor Hugo Cárdenas Conde, who entered office as Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s vice president. The elevation of Cárdenas was extraordinary for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he was the Aymara leader of the Tupaj Katari Revolutionary Movement for Liberation (MRTKL), which was the only remaining katarista political party by the early 1990s.4 The first Sánchez de Lozada (1993– 97) government represented the peak of neoliberal optimism in Bolivia, in which the privatization of natural resources and the outsourcing of utility concerns was combined with



Figure 2. Protests in La Paz, June 2005. Photo courtesy of Nick Buxton.

progressive social and legal reforms that emphasized bilingual education, the decentralization of decision-making authority over resource allocation, and the implementation at the national legal level of different international human rights norms, especially those involving the rights of “indigenous and tribal peoples.”5 Despite the relative calm throughout Bolivia during the mid-1990s, and the rise of a discourse of multiculturalism— one, surprisingly enough, accepted by the La Paz elite, less so by the neo-hacendado landowners in Santa Cruz—signs of trouble began to appear after one of the most controversial components of Goni’s (as Sánchez de Lozada is universally referred to in Bolivia) reform agenda was passed in 1996: the Ley de Tierras (Land Law), which was meant to replace much of the existing agrarian reform legislation. Almost immediately, the new legislation and the institute that was charged with implementing it—the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria (INRA)—became the targets of intense criticism within Bolivia from both indigenous groups and their

collaborators within the intelligentsia (Solón 1997; see also Antezana 1999). This opposition to Bolivia’s commitment to neoliberalism intensified during the late 1990s, as the centerright government of Hugo Banzer Suárez (now president, not colonel) most provocatively went ahead with a plan to sell the concession to provide water to the Cochabamba Valley to Aguas de Tunari, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based multinational Bechtel Corporation. Once the water services had been privatized, prices rose dramatically within a very short period and social unrest soon followed, which culminated in the so-called Bolivian Water War of late 1999 and early 2000. As a result of this massive uprising, in which one youth was killed and dozens injured by soldiers, the Banzer government was forced to cancel its contract with Bechtel in April 2000.6 After Goni was elected for a second time in 2002— defeating Banzer’s vice president Jorge Quiroga, who had stepped in to finish Banzer’s term after Banzer had been forced to resign with inoperable lung cancer—the focus of

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Figure 3. Political poster from the north of Potos´ı Department, 2005. Photo by M. Goodale.

critical attention shifted from water to natural gas and coca. This shift was also locational: from the Cochabamba Valley to Tarija (where the second largest natural gas reserves in South America are located), the Chapare (the site of widespread coca leaf cultivation destined for global cocaine markets), and El Alto (a rapidly growing city of 750,000 people, which became the epicenter for the activities of the most radical social and political parties, including the Movimiento Ind´ıgena Pachakuti, Los Mallkus, under the leadership of Felipe Quispe).7 A perfect storm of social resistance developed in 2003, as controversy over a proposed government contract to build a natural gas pipeline through Chile came together with both the growing unease over the willingness of the Goni government to follow the Bush administration’s demands to implement draconian anticoca measures, including a dramatic militarization of the issue along the lines of Plan Colombia, and the lingering resentment and mistrust that remained from the Water War in the Cochabamba Valley. The result was what has come to be known in Bolivia as Black October: Goni, at the urging of top generals, ordered the military to take violent measures to clear blockades of roads between El Alto and La Paz and to put an end to street protests that had crippled the central districts of La Paz. At least 100 people were shot down in the streets in El Alto alone; there were also deaths and scores of casualties in La Paz.

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Figure 4. The wiphala is raised over Toronto by the Consejo Andino de Naciones Originarias to celebrate the fall equinox, 2002. Photo courtesy of the Consejo Andino de Naciones Originarias.

This was effectively the end of Goni’s second government, and he was forced to resign and go into voluntary exile to the United States, which was not surprising given that his identification with the United States—including his “American” accent in Spanish, which has been a source of ridicule in the Bolivian press for many years—was partly to blame for his downfall and eventual disgrace, something that severed any remaining association between Goni and the early years of neoliberal confidence. Between 2003 and 2005, Bolivia’s troubles continued under Goni’s vice president, Carlos Mesa Gisbert, a popular journalist and member of an extended family of famous Bolivian historians. Despite relatively conciliatory gestures on Mesa’s part, his administration could not quell the expanding social movement in Bolivia, which by 2004 had become disconnected from particular issues—even if natural gas or coca eradication or police brutality continued to provide reference points—to become a sustained mass uprising comprised of an amalgam of rural and urban political parties and groups concentrated


in the altiplano and parts of the Bolivian lowlands, where the Movimiento Sin Tierra (Landless Movement) engaged in a series of forced occupations of absentee landholdings.

Waiting to exhale By June 2005, after several weeks of blockades and negotiations between Mesa and the leaders of MIP, MAS, and other antigovernment coalitions, like Goni before him, Mesa agreed to step down, paving the way for the president of the constitutional court, Eduardo Rodr´ıguez, to serve as caretaker president until new elections could be held in December 2005. Still to be resolved were conflicts over the nation’s hydrocarbons, a contract with a French multinational to provide water services to El Alto, calls for semiautonomy by the center-right business leaders of Santa Cruz, and the growing problem of vigilantism and the use of lynchings against alleged thieves and other petty criminals, among many others.8 Despite a period of relative calm, in which both Bolivia and its neighbors wait with bated breath for the results of the national election, one thing has not changed: the fact of a new social contract in Bolivia, in which indigenous people project their identities, their demand for inclusion, within an expanded, and, to a certain extent, radically different universe.9

Indigenous cosmopolitanism and the moral imagination In an important recent article in American Ethnologist, Thomas Biolsi (2005) explores the relationship between new spaces of American Indian political mobilization, which are shifting the terms through which Indians engage with the nation-state, and the emergence of a transnational political subjectivity that challenges common assumptions about the nature of the nation-state itself. In pursuing these connections, Biolsi analyzes four distinct categories of indigenous political space: the tribal space; a space of comanagement of resources between tribal, federal, and state levels; a transnational political space, in which Indians press claims beyond their particular nations or reservations; and what could be understood as an international political space, in which aspects of Indian subjectivity are constituted in part through the contested interrelationship between tribal and federal law, both of which are mediated by a more diffuse set of expectations and norms derived from U.S. multiculturalism. In moving between and within these different, but overlapping, spaces of political and legal engagement, contemporary American Indians assert new forms of self-identity and belonging that call into question dominant understandings of citizenship, nationalism, the legal categories of residency and domicile, and the foundations of civil and political rights.


At one level, the American Indian presence within and across these multiple political spaces is a mundanely physical one. As Biolsi says, “one should not be surprised to find ‘Indians in unexpected places’ ” (2005:249; in Deloria 2004). This multiplicity is what Biolsi describes as “indigenous cosmopolitanism”: the fact that “Indians are at least at home in cities, universities, the entertainment industry and mass media, and so on, as they are on reservations” (2005:249). This is an appropriation of what is perhaps the most common understanding of cosmopolitanism, one that describes the practices and worldviews of typically elite travelers who move easily between different physical locations and activities in ways that defy the expectations of more restrictive categories of identity. The cosmopolitanism that Biolsi alludes to here is that of the polymathic Renaissance humanists, who pursued excellence in multiple branches of science and the arts and whose political and social commitments transcended narrow ethnic or linguistic boundaries. What makes the cosmopolitanism of contemporary American Indians indigenous for Biolsi is the fact that it is subaltern: As Biolsi explains, Indians have forged new—and politically more destabilizing—forms of subjectivity in part by “excelling at the arts, sciences, and letters in and of the ‘dominant’ society, while still being Indian” (2005:249). As will soon be clear, my use of indigenous cosmopolitanism as a way of understanding the emergence of new forms of political and social action in Bolivia differs from Biolsi’s in a number of important respects. Nevertheless, I agree completely that the “modern political imaginary” (Biolsi 2005:254) in Bolivia—as in (native) North America— demands the attention of a “critically observant anthropology” (2005:254), one that is finely tuned to the implications of social and political categories that are embedded in emergent theories of indigenousness.10 As I will argue below, these implications are significant indeed. Although it is not possible to explore each of these in turn, the rise of indigenous cosmopolitanism in Bolivia suggests that several hoary master narratives must be rewritten, or at least revised: the dominant account of revolution at the end of the 20th century; the importance of direct political action in broader movements for social change; the story of the relationship between elites and Bolivia’s indigenous majority; even the master narrative of Latin American modernity itself. A careful consideration of indigenous cosmopolitanism in Bolivia even casts doubt on what can be understood as the master narrative about master narratives in current anthropology: That unifying systems of ideas and practices have either broken down because of the concatenation of forces described through that impossible referent “globalization,” or no longer carry the same theoretical weight because such systems, “worldviews,” utopias, have been revealed to be instruments of illegitimate or authoritarian power as such. As we will see, master narratives are essential to indigenous Bolivians as they envision new frameworks of inclusion, new identities

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through which very old social and economic problems can be addressed, and, even more, understood. Reenvisioning indigenousness, projecting the world If the volume of recent critical and social theory on the topic can be taken as an accurate measure of the empirical importance of the processes it purports to explain, then cosmopolitanism is thick on the ground. Almost ten years before “patriotism” reemerged as a semiotic weapon in the debates over the most recent iteration of U.S. imperialism, Martha Nussbaum argued against narrow attachments to place and race by reaching back into the toga-enwrapped mists of intellectual history. In drawing on Cynic and Stoic teachings about the importance of elevating the “moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings” (1996:7) above all other possibilities, Nussbaum urged social actors and communities to prioritize the outermost concentric circle and to “draw the circles somehow toward the center” (1996:9, from the Stoic philosopher Hierocles).11 Writing on behalf of postcolonial and marginalized peoples, Homi Bhabha has described the emergence of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (2001). This is a way of envisioning new worlds from the margins, “not as an ongoing process of selecting what is cool and interesting from all the world’s traditions, but rather as a montage of overlapping perspectives, experiences, and cultures brought into contact by global migrations of refugees, guest workers, and other subaltern populations” (Stoddard and Cornwell 2003: para. 12). A group of cultural studies scholars has approached cosmopolitanism in a similar way, but instead of worrying about the ways in which the universalizing claims of global citizenship can be cleverly vernacularized, these scholars focus on the possibilities of a subaltern “minoritarian cosmopolitanism” (Breckenridge et al. 2002). They nevertheless refuse to define cosmopolitanism, in part because “specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do” (2002:1); but they also hesitate to consider the conceptual problems of cosmopolitanism because their study is largely a critique of the act of defining cosmopolitanism itself, the way dominant understandings of universal citizenship have led to “a conformist sense of what it means to be a ‘person’ as an abstract unit of cultural exchange” (2002:5). And, finally, the political philosopher K. Anthony Appiah has argued for the usefulness of the apparently paradoxical notion of “cosmopolitan patriotism” (1996), which he recently expanded and modified into the equally apparently paradoxical concept of “rooted cosmopolitanism” (2005). Writing against, among others, theorists like Isaiah Berlin, who admire the “rootless cosmopolitans” who moved against the different nationalist tides in the 19th and 20th centuries—that is, those who chose to imagine communities on a broader scale—Appiah describes a cosmopolitan who is firmly “attached to a home of his or her own, with its own cultural particularities, but [who takes] pleasure from

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the presence of other, different, places that are home to other, different, people” (1996:22). Appiah very much intends rooted cosmopolitanism to be a way of describing cosmopolitanism in the world, a sentiment that people in different places, expressing different “cultural particularities,” can embrace programmatically without surrendering the range of attachments without which social meaning and value become abstract, artificial. Indeed, as Appiah sees it, rooted cosmopolitanism is the best way to characterize an emerging Weltanschauung that reflects the fact that “local form[s] of human life [are] the result of long term and persistent processes of cultural hybridization,” processes that will determine “a world . . . much like the world we live in now” (1996:23).12 Each of these efforts to develop the notion of cosmopolitanism conceptually (Appiah), or to employ it as a way of explaining certain patterns of transnational resistance (Bhabha), or, finally, to reestablish it as part of a more sustained argument for political change (Nussbaum), all fail, in one way or another, to fully account for the emergence of indigenous cosmopolitanism in Bolivia (and, perhaps, elsewhere). First, a critical aspect of cosmopolitanism is the projection of a different world, a different context beyond the expected, in which the expected is defined in cultural, political, or national terms. But as cosmopolitanism in Bolivia shows, the cosmos that is projected or envisioned is highly variable and relative to the range of expected categories that the newly projected cosmos is intended to replace or expand. In other words, there is a mistaken assumption—one that connects most analyses of cosmopolitanism—that the new universe that comes to determine citizenship (and belonging more generally) is “global,” that it must express the widest possible framework of inclusion (e.g., “world citizenship”). It is not difficult to trace the origins of this assumption to the continuing influence of a particular Western intellectual history of cosmopolitanism, one that begins with classical philosophy and is reinforced with Kant’s program for a global cosmopolitan community underpinned by a law of world citizenship. Even though the indigenous cosmos that is projected by Bolivians is one that extends beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, the most that can be said of it ontologically is that it is transnational and regional; it is a universe that is restricted in scope. If the indigenous Bolivian cosmos is restricted and, thus, not global in any meaningful sense, this is not because indigenous Bolivians have a limited understanding or knowledge of the world and its inhabitants; the tentacles of Spanish CNN (although not, of course, Quechua or Aymara) reach into provincial towns and even hamlets throughout Bolivia, and indigenous children in the norte de Potos´ı can discuss the relative merits of the Simpsons and Japanese anime (esp. Dragon Ball Z) with equal authority (see Goodale 2001, n.d.). Rather, what indigenous cosmopolitanism in Bolivia demonstrates is that a cosmos, projected as a new and more expansive framework


of essential inclusion, can be both translocal and transnational and nonglobal and nonuniversal at the same time.13 So, even though indigenous Bolivians project a new cosmos as a way of breaking free from, or resisting, all of the expected historical and cultural categories within Bolivia, they do not, in the process, envision a world in which they are essentially the same in rights and obligations as everyone else, indigenous or not. Even so, the essence of cosmopolitanism is still present: the desire to project a new world beyond the expected. If the dominant perspectives on cosmopolitanism are mistaken about the scope at which new worlds can, and, more important, are, projected, they seem to revolve around an equally mistaken understanding of the mechanics of identity formation as a matter of practice. Again, one detects the influence of a particular intellectual history of cosmopolitanism here, the one that scholars like Nussbaum have attempted to reinscribe within current political and intellectual frameworks. Understood in this way, cosmopolitanism is a process through which one reorients identity to privilege the outermost circle within a set of concentric circles. Notice the different assumptions here: One’s identity is defined by a series of constituent (sub)identities; each subidentity is distinct from the other; each subidentity (male, Christian, American, truck driver, Bostonian, Bolivian, etc.) is comfortably nestled within ever increasing—or decreasing, depending on the angle— degrees of inclusion (or exclusion); and, finally, the degrees of inclusion (or exclusion) that define the concentric circles of one’s identity are infused with a kind of “ethics of identity” (Appiah), which favors the most inclusive circle and is skeptical of the least. Although this concentric circle approach to identity is perhaps analytically convenient, it cannot begin to capture the complexity of identity formation in Bolivia, or anywhere else for that matter. Identity among indigenous Bolivians is multiple, contested, dynamic, and often contradictory; in Bolivia one is, and is not, many things at the same time. These different dimensions of identity cannot be parsed into hierarchically related constituent parts; this is not how people experience themselves in the world, and any attempt to describe identity in these terms is seriously misleading. This means that if indigenous cosmopolitanism in Bolivia reflects, in part, a shift in identity, a change in the way people position themselves in relation to others, then this shift cannot be explained as a change in the way people privilege the different levels of identity, because identity is not formed in this way. Instead, cosmopolitanism reflects the projection or envisioning of a different cosmos within which one’s identity itself is redefined or given new meaning. When young rappers in El Alto rail against oppression against indigenous people, in Bolivia and elsewhere, they are envisioning a world in which their identities are relocated and thereby reinscribed within all of the existing cultural, economic, and


political categories of meaning in Bolivia, regardless of the eventual effects—political or otherwise—of this projection. To return to Appiah’s argument for “rooted cosmopolitanism”: Although his is perhaps an exaggerated example of this tendency, theorists of cosmopolitanism across the range have given it a kind of normativity that can also be tracked to antiquity, when cosmopolitanism emerged from reflections on ethics. In this framing, it is an unqualified ethical good to “draw the circles somehow toward the center”; in other words, cosmopolitanism is virtuous. This is what Eve Walsh Stoddard and Grant Cornwell have in mind when they describe Nussbaum’s neo-Stoic cosmopolitanism as an “ethical cosmopolitanism” (2003).14 Without this underlying ethical normativity, in which cosmopolitanism is treated as if it were a kind of Kantian categorical imperative,15 it is very difficult indeed to explain Appiah’s argument that contemporary cosmopolitanism does—and should—depend on a person’s ability to find pleasure in the mere fact of difference, a notion that finds very little support in any general cultural or historical facts. Indigenous cosmopolitanism in Bolivia is, however, ethically neutral. What I mean is that indigenous political leaders, youth rappers, and others who are responsible for the emergence of a cosmopolitan worldview in Bolivia do not envision new universes of indigeneity because it is virtuous or good or a reflection of moral development. In fact, this is precisely why it is difficult to interpret the emergence of cosmopolitanism in Bolivia as Cosmopolitanism. The traditional idea of cosmopolitanism implies a self-conscious individual or collective attempt to project categories of belonging beyond the narrow, the local, the national, for a very specific reason: because this projection is compelled by a preexisting ethical or political theory or ideology that both defines identity in these scalar terms and then normatively privileges the broadest circle of inclusion at the expense of all the others (as I have described above). This traditional idea of cosmopolitanism, which has now become a transnational discourse, does not resonate in Bolivia, and those who project or envision an indigenous cosmopolitan world do not justify their writings or political resistance or rap lyrics on the basis of an abstract principle of the good or within a well-developed moral framework that has something normative to say about the changing nature of identity in Bolivia. Rather, the reasons for the emergence of indigenous cosmopolitanism—if they can be drawn out at all—are, not surprisingly, multiple. Indigenousness is reenvisioned because it is part of the broader struggle for political power; indigenous cosmopolitanism represents a discursive weapon to be used against entrenched elites in Bolivia, which, no matter how understandable, could hardly be described as a virtuous—in the classical sense—exercise of the moral imagination; and, in its expression through the Movimiento Ind´ıgena Pachakuti (MIP) and its fiery leader, Felipe Quispe (aka El Mallku), indigenous cosmopolitanism becomes a

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highly polished strategy for excluding and then defeating rivals within the indigenous movement itself. As Quispe recently put it (2005), in explaining why the indigenous vision of MIP is authentic while MAS’s (and, thus, Evo Morales’s) is not, “I have studied Machiavelli and the psychology of our people. . . . I project myself for 100 years. . . . I am not seeking immediate results. MIP is a project for the indigenous nation as a whole.”16 Notice both his striking candor and his sophisticated understanding of European political theory. Moreover, by asserting that he “projects [himself] for 100 years,” Quispe expresses a complicated type of indigenous cosmopolitanism, in which one individual, who has come to embody indigenousness itself for many Bolivians, can bring a new cosmos into being through a sheer force of will. There is something positively Whitmanesque about El Mallku. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for my purposes here, most studies of cosmopolitanism make the mistake of framing its actual or prospective emergence in largely political or instrumental terms. This is, again, a legacy of a particular intellectual history, in which cosmopolitanism was understood quite literally, as Nussbaum emphasizes in her appropriation of this history (1996:7). In other words, cosmopolitanism was originally a much more limited idea, one that expressed the virtue of the world citizen (kosmou politês), in which citizenship denoted membership in a quite circumscribed political community, a membership that entailed particular political rights and obligations. But with indigenous cosmopolitanism in Bolivia, the kosmou is much more important than the politês. The projection of an indigenous world beyond the expected categories should not be understood exclusively in political terms, despite its connection with current political struggles; rather, the political and instrumental (and even the legal) merely mediate what can be more usefully understood as a radical exercise of the moral imagination. So, even though Cheah and Robbins gesture toward this key feature of cosmopolitanism in exploring what it means to “think and feel beyond the nation,” they obscure the real importance of thinking and feeling as a type of moral projection when they characterize it as an expression of “cosmopolitics.” To understand cosmopolitanism beyond the narrowly political is to also understand how many indigenous Bolivians can be both thoroughly cosmopolitan and, for the most part, politically uncommitted. Many key social actors in the norte de Potos´ı, for example, whom I have described elsewhere as “rural-legal intellectuals” (Goodale 2001, 2002), embody precisely this combination, particularly those who have embraced human rights or social justice discourses over the last 15 years as part of transnational development activities based in Bolivia’s most impoverished regions. Utopian and hip-hop cosmopolitanism The Movimiento Originario Popular (MOP) is a relatively new social and political party that is most active in Bolivia’s

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norte de Potos´ı region. It is, in many ways, the nortepotosino expression of a particular type of indigenous movement in Bolivia, one that has been most clearly represented by MIP and its leader Felipe Quispe. But as relatively small as Bolivia is, it is nevertheless strictly divided by regions, a type of division that is reinforced by the difficulty in communication between regions and even towns and hamlets within regions, differences in first language, and the sheer extremeness of Bolivia’s topography, which creates a series of sparsely populated cultural islands within a landscape of high mountains, vast high plains, and dense lowland forests.17 So, even though MIP is represented in the norte de Potos´ı (and is referenced in political iconography; see Figure 3), it is still identified with La Paz Department and its primarily Aymara first-language provinces. The norte de Potos´ı is much more linguistically diverse, with Quechua and Aymara mixed together as first languages within the same provinces—for example, in the ˜ province Alonso de Ibanez, the one I know the best—and even within the same cantons. And there are other ethnic boundary markers that separate the norte de Potos´ı from the heart of MIP country in La Paz Department: clothing patterns, different ayllus, proximity to the great mining centers, and proximity to La Paz, among others. Nevertheless, despite the fact that MOP is not nearly as well-established as MIP—either nationally, or within its home region—it has managed to fundamentally shift relations of power in the norte de Potos´ı. In the town of Sacaca, the capital of the ˜ province Alonso de Ibanez, the alcald´ıa, or mayor’s office, which had always been controlled by a local sacaqueno ˜ oligarchy of male vecinos (lit. “neighbors”), had by June 2005 fallen into the hands of MOP. The MOP alcalde, or mayor, did not even live in Sacaca itself but was from Layumpampa, an important cantonal capital about one hour’s walking distance from Sacaca. Now what is so important for my purposes here about the rise of MOP in the norte de Potos´ı, and its political takeover of the province’s branches of political power,18 is the discourse through which MOP captured the regional indigenous imaginary. MOP leaders completely bypassed all of the traditional discursive categories that had been used, at least since the 1952 National Revolution, to frame a series of much older political and social problems in the norte de Potos´ı: the problem of land ownership and land tenure more generally, especially the pressure to “rationalize” ownership (read: privatize) within hamlets and re-renew corporate titles with departmental agencies; the fact that political power in rural provinces had traditionally been monopolized by mestizo townspeople; the chronic tendency toward microdivision of land over time and the need for both rural– rural and rural–urban migration (including, from Alonso ˜ de Ibanez, regular migration to the coca fields of the Chapare); and the basic problem of governmental inattention to ˜ in which both economic and provinces like Alonso de Ibanez, political capital are kept close to the departmental centers


around Potos´ı and then are distributed in concentric circles until they dry up long before they reach the far northwest of the department.19 At least since the first Bolivian revolution, these issues were framed within a hybrid socialist– nationalist discourse, which both denounced the problems of Bolivia’s campesinos—and those responsible for them— as anti-Bolivian (or contrary to the interests of la patria) and argued that such problems were simply part of a particular historical epoch whose intrinsic contradictions pointed to its eventual transformation. Since the mid-1990s (and, esp., since the watershed year 1999), these problems have been reinterpreted through a much different, cosmopolitan, discourse, one that is anchored in an indigenous imaginary that is both empowering and utopian. Look again at Figure 3. The colors of the wiphala provide the background, one that, as I have already described, stands in for individual political candidates in cases in which their photographs were not available. It is the center of this political poster that, more than anything else here, expresses a utopian variation on indigenous cosmopolitanism. A man and woman stand equally positioned, something that reflects the ideal gender relationship of complementarity, an idealization that is captured by the Quechua expression “tukuy ima qhariwarmi”—“everything is man-and-woman” (cf. Isbell 1976, 1978; see also Harris 2000).20 Both figures are dressed in the most symbolically indigenous clothing possible and not, importantly, in the clothing of rural peasant syndicalists, which would have been the case even ten years ago. They both hold a pututu in one hand, the ubiquitous cow horn (or seashell in other parts of the Andes) that is used to signal danger and call people together. The pututu was also the military trumpet used by the armies of Tupaj Katari in the rebellion of the late 18th century, and, in fact, the male figure in this political poster from 2005 is most likely a reproduction of a popular image of Tupaj Katari himself (see Figure 5). In their other hands, the woman holds a wiphala and the man a military rifle. To complete this complicated example of indigenous cosmopolitan iconography, the two figures flank an image of Wiracocha, the Sun God, as depicted above the Gateway to the Sun at the archaeological site at Tiahuanaco near Lake Titicaca. This political poster—and the wider discursive moves of the MOP in the norte de Potos´ı that it represents—combines symbols of indigenous power (the military rifle of Tupaj Katari, the head of Wiracocha radiating sunbeams), vigilance and resistance (the pututu, the image of indigenous people on the march), and cosmic balance (man and woman equally positioned), and refracts them through an emerging cosmopolitanism represented by the transnational colors of the wiphala. The utopianism of this iconographic projection of the indigenous moral imaginary is perhaps most overt in the way the colors of the wiphala fade and shimmer across the poster, something that was likely done for aesthetic reasons but that nevertheless highlights the fact that the indige-


Figure 5. Popular representation of Tupaj Katari, who led a doomed rebellion against the Spanish in the late 18th century. Image courtesy of the Consejo Andino de Naciones Originarias.

nous world that is being projected is as much imaginary (and utopian) as real.21 Back at the Wayna Tambo Cultural Center in El Alto, Abraham Bojórquez and the other members of the Wayna Rap movement are elaborating on yet another variation on indigenous cosmopolitanism (see Figure 6). Most of the El Alto rappers are children of the generation that poured into the city during the mid-1980s as a result of neoliberal austerity programs, which caused massive unemployment— especially among miners—and internal migration. Their eventual response to this social and economic disruption should not be surprising. Similar second-generational urban youth movements, in which new cultural—or, in Dick Hebdige’s framing, subcultural (1979)—forms (esp. music) are used to both derive meaning from, and resist, dislocation and alienation, have emerged in Britain (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979), South Africa (Erlmann 1999), and elsewhere.22 It is no coincidence that the young indigenous cosmopolitans of El Alto use rap or hip-hop as a preferred mode of (sub)cultural production (see, e.g., Dyson 1997; Flores 2000), although other musical forms, such as “hardcore” (as another Wayna Tambo musician described it, using

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Figure 6. El Alto’s youth rappers pose in front of the Wayna Tambo Cultural Center in April 2005. Photo courtesy of Jaqueline Calatayud.

the English), are also emerging to serve the same set of complication functions. As Santos Callejas, one of the directors of Wayna Tambo, explained during an interview in July 2005, the rappers and other youth musicians borrow from a transnational hip-hop culture in a way that projects a “space of expression” beyond El Alto’s narrow and dusty streets, but without sacrificing the meanings that locate their songs within a long indigenous tradition of musical and cultural hybridity. Another leader at Wayna Tambo, Jeaneth Calatayud, explained that El Alto’s rappers were “negotiating between politics and culture” in ways that expressed a sophisticated awareness of their own power as cultural innovators and moral actors. This power is recognized by both the adult leaders of El Alto’s different political movements, and the rappers’ own parents, whose bowler hats and polleras (multilayered women’s skirts) reflect an earlier period of indigenous cultural and aesthetic appropriation. Jeaneth described a scene in which the mother of Grover Canaviri, a rapper with another Wayna Tambo group called Los Clandestinos (The Clandestines), listened patiently to a Saturday recording session, Saturdays being the days when the entire El Alto rap scene converges on Wayna Tambo to try out new lyrics and record programs for Radia Wayna Tambo, which is heard in both El Alto and La Paz. After the music was over, Canaviri’s mother turned to Jeaneth and said that even though she did not understand the music, she was proud of her son for creating it. El Alto’s youth rappers adopt the baggy clothing of the Latin American artists they see on MTV and create a hiphop vernacular that brings Aymara and Quechua words and expressions together with Spanish and exclamations that were perhaps originally English but that now reflect a transnational musical Esperanto (like the “yo” in “esta-

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mos con la raza, yo”). This cultural appropriation can also be seen in the names they adopt for themselves and their groups, something which is perhaps no better illustrated than through the stage name of one rapper—MC Choclo, which brings the transnational rap title “MC” (i.e., Master of Ceremonies) together with the word for a common Bolivian corn dish.23 What is most important is what these hip-hop borrowings express: the search for “self-dignity” (as Callejas put it) through the projection of a new indigenous cosmos, one that finds moral value and indeed empowerment within the marginalization of disaffected urban youth culture across the Americas (and beyond). What reconnects these utopian and hip-hop variations on indigenous cosmopolitanism are three things: First, they are projections that bring the moral together with the political; second, they are anchored in emerging understandings of indigeneity—one based in idealized imagery from a popular self-essentialist discourse, the other that equates indigeneity with especially youth subalterneity—that both encompass Bolivia and extend beyond it; and, finally, these variations on a theme both complicate orthodox understandings of cosmopolitanism itself and show the process of envisioning new universes of meaning in these ways to be more radical and potentially transformative than assumed within existing accounts. It is to this last that I now turn.

Misreading the revolution If indigenous cosmopolitanism characterizes the emergence of different, but related, projects in Bolivia, then we must press the analysis somewhat further to locate these projects in relation to contemporary political developments. A central argument of this article has been that there is a danger of interpreting exercises of the moral imagination in narrowly political terms. In this last section, I develop this argument further by describing the current political climate in Bolivia as revolutionary, although by revolution I mean something different than what would be expected: a profound transformation of both the discursive and moral terrains in Bolivia, despite the presence of barricades and bullets and calls by the opposition to take power by force if necessary. In other words, there has been a specter haunting Bolivia over the last ten years, but it has not been the specter of Che (let alone Marx). And in many ways, the image of that ghoulish corpse, lying on a slab in the laundry room of Vallegrande’s Our Lady of Malta hospital in 1967, represented the definitive end to that kind of revolution in Bolivia, and a macabre prefiguration of the moral and discursive revolution that is now unfolding in Bolivia.

Revolutions missed and misread In his wide-ranging critique of Andean anthropology, Starn charged that the traditional focus within Andean studies on the symbolic life of indigenous Andeans had


prevented scholars from both seeing and understanding the complicated convergence of political, economic, and social forces that were expressed through Peru’s Sendero Luminoso and the different reactions to what was, in the end, their failed attempt to transform Peru through armed revolution. Starn’s critique highlighted an important phenomenon: Anthropologists who conduct research throughout the rural Andes cannot help but have their worldviews shaped by what can feel like an isolated universe of closed corporate hamlets, ayllus, and the rituals that mark the different stages of the agricultural–spiritual lifecycle that gives structure and meaning to the life of peasant agropastoralists throughout the Andes. But Starn went further than this: He refracted what was at one level an important methodological point through the lens of the profound politicization of anthropology that had transformed its epistemological landscape in earnest by the mid-1980s. The response to Starn’s article—and others like it (both with Andean anthropology and beyond)—that interests me here is not the more immediate reaction to his charges against specific scholars. Rather, what is important for my purposes is Starn’s more general argument: that anthropologists working in the Andean countries must reverse their priorities. Instead of studying the political and economic factors that impact Andean peoples to better understand the complexities of Andean symbolic and discursive universes, anthropologists should recognize that Andean communities are embedded in political–economic networks that prefigure these more classically “anthropological” categories. The result was that many in the next generation of Andeanist anthropologists listened to Starn and other critical anthropologists and shifted away from the study of ancestor cults, religious pilgrimages to the high places, and the structure of ayllu kinship to focus on the politics of indigenousness, the relationship between communities and transnational development agencies, the participation of campesinos in the world economy in different forms (coca production, textiles, ecotourism), and the impact of neoliberalism on rural communities, among other themes that foreground political– economics. There is no question that these shifts in focus within Andean anthropology have been important in their own terms, not the least of which is the fact that a grounding in political–economics provides an opening for comparing cultural processes in the Andes with those elsewhere, and for highlighting the broader historical patterns that converge through the transnational networks that enmesh campesinos. But here is the rub: Despite these advances, they have had the effect of shifting attention too far away from the symbolic and discursive lifeworlds of Andean peoples, including those who have, over the last 15 years, come to reconstitute themselves through the kind of indigenous forms of subjectivity that I have described throughout this article. To be sure, studies of different aspects of Andean rit-


ual and symbolism have continued to make important contributions, most obviously (and recently) through the work of scholars like Frank Salomon (2004) and Gary Urton (1997, 2003), whose writings on culture and the khipu, or knotted cord, have—among other things—reshaped the way we understand the meaning of writing and the nature of recording more generally. Yet when we consider the rise of new forms of indigeneity over the last 15 years in Bolivia, it is clear that the kind of symbolic and discursive framing represented by Salomon’s and Urton’s studies has been obscured in the rush to locate these developments within broader political and economic contexts. Because of this, there is a danger that the importance of the rise of new forms of indigeneity in Bolivia will be misread, not missed. There is a revolution under way in Bolivia, one in which new forms of indigeneity—which I have described as indigenous cosmopolitanism—are creating “spaces of expression” through which all of the traditional understandings—selfand otherwise—of Bolivia itself are shifting. To understand current developments in Bolivia, therefore, it is necessary to reorder analytical priorities so that political, economic, and legal moves are located within what I have argued is a broader, and more radical, moral project. So although the writings of the indigenist revolutionist Fausto Reinaga have been resurrected by leaders of the El Alto Federation of Neighborhood Assemblies, which played a major part in the recent blockades of La Paz and the resignation of President Carlos Mesa, they focus not on Reinaga’s call to resist the economic classes who oppress Bolivia’s “Indians.” Rather, they turn to other passages, like this one: Indians must “tear to shreds the infamous wall of ‘organized silence’ that . . . Bolivia . . . has built around me” (Reinaga 1969). This is a call for a revolution of the moral imagination, despite the violent imagery. Bolivia’s indigenous peoples are being urged to project a new universe beyond the one that Bolivia has historically offered them. Reinaga is exhorting them to envision new categories of belonging through which the very idea of Bolivia itself must be reconsidered. And they are.

Conclusion: Reclaiming modernity In their recent review of indigenous movements in Latin America, Jean Jackson and Kay Warren survey the range of scholarship on social and political movements between 1992 and 2004 and discuss the ways in which anthropologists have framed these developments as problems of anthropological theory, methodology, and activism (Jackson and Warren 2005). As they show, this body of work both “illustrate[s] the complex imaginings and reimaginings of what is involved in being ‘modern’ ” (2005:559) in contemporary Latin America and explains the ways in which indigenous leaders in Latin America navigate among politically charged and contested discursive categories like “indigenousness,” “authenticity,” and “modernity.” What emerges so clearly from their article

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is the fact that indigenous movements in Latin America are increasingly destabilizing the meanings of modernity itself. It is one thing to challenge the order of political or legal or cultural priority that locates modernity on one side of an invisible line and authenticity or tradition or indigenousness on the other (while taking the meanings of these categories as given); it is quite another thing to challenge the meanings of the categories themselves. This is exactly what political leaders and youth rappers and other indigenous cosmopolitans are doing in Bolivia. By envisioning new categories of inclusion, by constructing an alternative moral universe in which indigenousness represents a set of principles that are both cosmopolitan and uniquely Bolivian, indigenous leaders and others in Bolivia do not simply “vernacularize” modernity or strike a “bargain” with it (Foster 2002). Nor is indigenous cosmopolitanism a way of constructing either an “alternative modernity” or an “alternative to modernity” (Kelly 2002). Rather, indigenous cosmopolitanism is a way of reclaiming modernity, a way of redefining both what modernity as a cultural category means and what it means to be modern in Bolivia.

Notes Acknowledgments. I would like to thank both the Office of the Provost and the Center for Global Studies at George Mason University for their generous research support during 2006. Earlier funding for research in Bolivia was provided by the National Science Foundation, the Organization of American States, the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the David L. Boren Fellowship Program. Parts of this article were presented during public lectures in December 2005 at the Department of Anthropology, Stockholm University; the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Zurich; and at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Many thanks to the faculty and students at these institutions for engaging critically with my ideas. Finally, I want to acknowledge the critical and constructive engagement with an earlier draft of this article by the editor of American Ethnologist, Virginia Dominguez, and two anonymous reviewers. 1. At the exact moment I write this (November 2, 2005), Paris is burning. While the Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy denounces the youth protestors of Clichy-sous-Bois and the arrondissements of North and Northeast Paris as “scum,” the Parisian boys of Muslim North Africa continue to throw stones, set police cars on fire, and prepare their Molotov cocktails. The spark this time might have been the deaths of two teenagers, who were electrocuted trying to evade police by hiding in a power substation, but their rage is broader; it is the cosmopolitan rage of El Alto, Detroit, Sao Paolo’s shantytowns. 2. Not surprisingly, Starn’s critique became itself the subject of critique. For some of the response to Starn, see Enrique Mayer’s article in Rereading Cultural Anthropology (1992), Turino 1996, and the 1992 Allpanchis special issue La guerra en los Andes. Regardless of the merits of this debate, Starn’s original article cannot be understood apart from the wider academic–political currents of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when Young Turks in cultural anthropology were riding riot and wreaking havoc in the halls of departments and in the pages of journals. Seen in this light, Starn’s 1991 article was a quintessential post–Writing Culture (Clifford and

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Marcus 1986) salvo directed against the entrenched order, no matter how illusory both the entrenchment and the order turned out to be. 3. Figure 3 is a political poster for provincial elections in the north of Potos´ı Department. Notice the complex uses of the wiphala here: It serves as a backdrop image that unifies different political parties and candidates; it is shown at places opaquely, or miragelike, which suggests a symbol submerged in the collective unconscious; and, for those who are not pictured for whatever reason, the wiphala is used to represent the candidates themselves. 4. Katarismo was an important precursor to the current indigenous social and political movements in Bolivia. Katarismo reflected a series of political developments that had their origins in the 1960s, but that came to fruition during the regime of Hugo Banzer Suárez (1971–78). Interestingly, although the movement took its name from the late-18th-century indigenous leader Julián Apasa, whose nom de guerre was Tupaj Katari, the movement itself emerged in La Paz among university students with origins in traditionally radicalized areas of the Aymara countryside. As the definitive historian of this movement, Xavier Albó, says, “these students were . . . influenced by Fausto Reinaga, the prolific and marginalized writer and selfpublisher of Indianist themes, and the founder of a more symbolic than real Indian Party” (1987:391). See also this same 1987 article by Albó for a good overview of the political and intellectual threads that connect what I have called the second Bolivian revolution to the first (1952). 5. For example, in 1994 the Bolivian government announced the National Plan for the Eradication, Prevention, and Punishment of Violence against Women. This plan, which was implemented through more specific laws in 1995 and 1996, appeared just one year after the 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, which was enacted to give new impetus to the international women’s rights-as-human rights movement that had been initiated with the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. For more on Bolivian legal reform during the 1990s in relation to broader currents in international human rights law, see Goodale 2001, 2002; see also Van Cott 2000. 6. For an excellent first-person account and analysis of the 1999– 2000 Bolivian Water War, see the recent book by Oscar Olivera, the machinist who emerged as the leader of Cochabamba’s Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y la Vida (Coalition in Defense of Water and Life), known as La Coordinadora (Olivera 2004). 7. Although the Movimiento Ind´ıgena Pachakuti (MIP) is a national indigenous party in Bolivia with a platform that emphasizes indigenous dignity and unity, antiracism, anticolonialism, and the rights of Bolivia’s rural agropastoralists, its resistance activities during the 2003 Bolivian Gas War I were centered on the urban areas in and around El Alto and the roads connecting El Alto with La Paz. 8. On the problems of lynching and vigilantism in contemporary Bolivia, see Daniel Goldstein’s 2004 book The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia, which I recently reviewed for American Anthropologist (Goodale 2005). Between June and August 2005, “citizen security” continued to be arguably the most pressing public concern in Bolivia’s urban centers, even with the ever-present threat of social mobilizations, national strikes, and political uncertainty. Linchamientos, and various cases of “intento de linchamiento” (attempted lynching), captured national attention, with major newspapers running front page articles on incidents and journalists and intellectuals opining in the editorial pages about the deeper meanings of these public acts of “barbarism.” Interestingly for my purposes here, very few commentators have explored the connections between the political and social movements of the last five years and the rise of vigilante justice in Bolivia’s urban and periurban districts (but see Goldstein 2004).


9. Evo Morales was, in fact, elected president of Bolivia on December 18, 2005, with 54 percent of the vote, which was a much more decisive victory than even MAS and its supporters had anticipated. Morales’s share of the total vote—in which 84.5 percent of eligible voters participated—was almost double that of Jorge Fernando “Tuto” Quiroga Ram´ırez (29 percent), who went down in a crushing defeat. 10. The wider literature—both within anthropology and beyond—on indigenousness is a large one, but two especially insightful recent studies are Tania Murray Li’s use of Stuart Hall’s concepts of “positioning” and “articulation” to explain “the diversity of conditions and struggles in the Indonesian countryside” (2000:150), and James Clifford’s 2001 article on indigenous articulations, which is also, of course, indebted to the work of Stuart Hall. 11. By an odd coincidence, Nussbaum makes reference to Bolivia in her article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” which originally appeared (followed by no less than 29 replies) in the Boston Review (1994), later published with revised versions of 11 of the original commentaries as For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (1996). But Bolivia’s appearance within Nussbaum’s article appears almost completely symbolic, as an idea that represents both geographic diversity (it is mentioned in a list of countries with India, Nigeria, and Norway) and apparent ethical distance from the United States. As it turns out, Bolivia the nation-state (rather than Bolivia the mistakenly conceived idea) is as much a child of the Enlightenment as the United States and in many ways has much more in common with the United States than a country like Norway. 12. As important as Appiah’s recent writings on cosmopolitanism are, it is difficult to accept his underlying premise: that very many people living in different places and times have any inclination at all to “tak[e] pleasure from the presence of other, different, places that are home to other, different, people” (1996:22). It is not clear what kind of pleasure in other places and people Appiah has in mind here. As Alan Ryan emphasized, in his review of Appiah’s 2005 book (Ryan 2005), the theoretical development of rooted cosmopolitanism is very much informed by Appiah’s own biography. 13. For a more extended recent critique of the relationship between the “global” and the “local” within anthropology and social theory more generally, see my introduction to The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (Goodale in press). I argue, among other things, that the global–local dichotomy is one of the most enduring, and problematic, conceptual assumptions, one that expresses itself within debates over cosmopolitanism as much as within debates over the scope and practice of human rights. 14. Despite their otherwise quite helpful and concise overview of current debates over cosmopolitanism, the authors focus too heavily on Appiah’s development of “rootedness,” which leads them to describe his approach as “the very antithesis of Nussbaum’s . . . idea of cosmopolitanism” (Stoddard and Cornwell 2003). As I argue here, despite the obvious differences between Appiah and Nussbaum, their approaches should be seen as variations on a theme, in particular along the four dimensions I describe in this section. 15. Nussbaum makes this connection explicit in her reprinted Boston Review article (1996:8), in which she alludes to Kant’s categorical imperative through his argument for cosmopolitanism leading to a “kingdom of ends” (i.e., a kingdom of ends would be a place where cosmopolitans made ethical choices in light of Kant’s Third Categorical Imperative). 16. Quispe made these comments in a preelection interview with the leading La Paz daily La Razón on October 31, 2005. 17. This is what John Murra referred to as the “vertical archipelagos” of the Andes (Murra 1972), although in Bolivia these ecolog-


ical and cultural islands are also spread “horizontally,” as it were, throughout the altiplano. 18. MOP also took control of the office of subprefect by 2005 (the period of my most recent research in Bolivia), which is a locally less consequential position that is appointed within the departmental prefecture in the departmental capital, also called Potos´ı. The alcalde, however, is directly elected. 19. Indeed, it is a constant problem for a province like Alonso de ˜ and its capital Sacaca that they are much closer to both Oruro Ibanez and Cochabamba, even though these last two are both capitals of different departments and, as such, have no financial responsibility over what is dolefully referred to by urban Bolivians as the “extremo norte de Potos´ı.” 20. As Isbell explains, “the clearest expression of [gender] complementarity is found in the belief that one is not an adult until one marries. Chuschinos say that a male and a female are not complete until they have been united with their “essential other half” (1978:214). For an interesting analysis of the connections between Isbell’s and Harris’s studies of gender, see Frank Salomon’s 2001 review of Harris’s 2000 book. He argues that both Isbell and Harris focus on the way rural Andeans “consider that the world is built by a unified biological-technological productivity unfolding seamlessly from human–telluric bonds through matrimonial alliance outward to very wide regional alignments and toward cosmological forces” (Salomon 2001:654). As I have documented in different places (e.g., Goodale 2001, 2002, n.d.), gender complementarity is in large part idealized because men and women do not coexist equally, at least in the norte de Potos´ı. There are any number of expressions of this “practical” inequality—meaning an inequality that arises for practical, rather than ideological, reasons—including patrilocal postmarital residence, more extensive landholdings by men, the problem of domestic abuse, and the fact that women do not serve within the range of authority positions in rural Bolivia. 21. For a book-length example that uses photographic and other visual images to examine the way other (i.e., noncosmopolitan) imaginaries of modernity have been constituted in the Andes, see Deborah Poole’s Vision, Race, Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (1997). 22. More recent examples of the anthropology of youth culture can be found in the series of articles published in a November 2004 special focus on youth in American Ethnologist. See also Mary Bucholtz’s excellent review essay on the anthropology of youth and culture (2002). 23. Other Wayna Tambo rap groups (as of July 2005) go by the following names: Raza Insana, Movimiento L´ırico Urbano, and Abraham Bojórquez’s own two-man group, Ukamau y Ké. Compact discs, reading materials, and information about El Alto’s rap music movement can be accessed through the Wayna Tambo website: http://www.casawaynatambo.tk.

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Turino, Thomas 1996 From Essentialism to the Essential: Pragmatics and Mean˜ Sikuri Performance in Lima. In Cosmolog´ıa y ing of Puneno ´ musica en los Andes. Max Baumann, ed. Pp. 469–482. Vervuert, Spain: Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana. Urton, Gary 1997 The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2003 Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: University of Texas Press. Van Cott, Donna Lee 2000 The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. accepted March 13, 2006 final version submitted April 10, 2006 Mark Goodale Assistant Professor of Conflict Studies and Anthropology George Mason University 3330 N. Washington Blvd., 5th Floor Arlington, VA 22201 [email protected]

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