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"Aymara Indians"
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An uninterrupted view of the sky
In Bolivia in 1999, when their father is unjustly arrested and their mother leaves, Francisco, seventeen, and his sister Pilar, eight, must move to the dirty, dehumanizing, and corrupt prison.
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Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes
Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes: Ritual Practice and Activism explores how Evo Morales's victory in the 2005 Bolivian presidential elections led to indigeneity as the core of decolonization politics.
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Catechizing Culture
Nearly five centuries after the first wave of Catholic missionaries arrived in the New World to spread their Christian message, contemporary religious workers in the Bolivian highlands have begun to encourage Aymara Indians to return to traditional ritual practices. All but eradicated after hundreds of years of missionization, the \"old ways\" are now viewed as local cultural expressions of Christian values. In order to become more Christian, the Aymara must now become more Indian. This groundbreaking study of the contemporary encounter between Catholic missionaries and Aymara Indians is the first ethnography to focus both on the evangelizers and the evangelized. Andrew Orta explores the pastoral shift away from liberation theology that dominated Latin American missionization up until the mid-1980s to the recent \"theology of inculturation,\" which upholds the beliefs and practices of a supposedly pristine Aymara culture as indigenous expressions of a more universal Christianity. Addressing essential questions in cultural anthropology, religious studies, postcolonial studies, and globalization studies, Catechizing Culture is a sophisticated documentation of the widespread shift from the politics of class to the politics of ethnicity and multiculturalism.
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Aymara Indian perspectives on development in the Andes
Aymara Indians are a geographically isolated, indigenous people living in the Andes Mountains near Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the most arid regions of the world. As rapid economic growth in the area has begun to divert scarce water to hydroelectric and agricultural projects, the Aymara struggle to maintain their sustainable and traditional systems of water use, agriculture, and pastoralism.
In Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes , Amy Eisenberg provides a detailed exploration of the ethnoecological dimensions of the tension between the Aymara, whose economic, spiritual, and social life are inextricably tied to land and water, and three major challenges: the paving of Chile Highway 11, the diversion of the Altiplano waters of the Río Lauca for irrigation and power-generation, and Chilean national park policies regarding Aymara communities, their natural resources, and cultural properties within Parque Nacional Lauca, the International Biosphere Reserve.
Pursuing collaborative research, Eisenberg performed ethnographic interviews with Aymara people in more than sixteen Andean villages, some at altitudes of 4,600 meters. Drawing upon botany, agriculture, natural history, physical and cultural geography, history, archaeology and social and environmental impact assessment, she presents deep, multifaceted insights from the Aymara’s point of view.
Illustrated with maps and dramatic photographs by John Amato, Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development provides an account of indigenous perspectives and concerns related to economic development that will be invaluable to scholars and policy-makers in the fields of natural and cultural resource preservation in and beyond Chile.
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Indigeneity and กecolonization in the bolivian andes
This book explores how Evo Morales's victory in the 2005 Bolivian presidential elections led to indigeneity as the core of decolonization politics. Burman analyzes how indigenous Aymara ritual specialists are essential in representing this indigeneity in official state ceremony and in legitimizing the president's role as \"the indigenous president.\"
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Earth, Water, Fleece and Fabric
Through a richly detailed examination of the practices of spinning yarn from the fleece of llamas and alpacas, Earth, Water, Fleece and Fabric explores the relationship that herders of the present and of the past have maintained with their herd animals in the Andes. Dransart juxtaposes an ethnography of an Aymara herding community, based on more than ten years fieldwork in Isluga in the Chilean highlands, with archaeological material from excavations in the Atacama desert.Impeccably researched, this book is the first systematic study to set the material culture of pastoral communities against an understanding of the long-term effects of herding practices.
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The Metamorphosis of Heads
Since the days of the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous populations of Andean Bolivia have struggled to preserve their textile-based writings. This struggle continues today, both in schools and within the larger culture.The Metamorphosis of Headsexplores the history and cultural significance of Andean textile writings--weavings and kipus (knotted cords), and their extreme contrasts in form and production from European alphabet-based texts. Denise Arnold examines the subjugation of native texts in favor of European ones through the imposition of homogenized curricula by the Educational Reform Law. As Arnold reveals, this struggle over language and education directly correlates to long-standing conflicts for land ownership and power in the region, since the majority of the more affluent urban population is Spanish speaking, while indigenous languages are spoken primarily among the rural poor.The Metamorphosis of Headsacknowledges the vital importance of contemporary efforts to maintain Andean history and cultural heritage in schools, and shows how indigenous Andean populations have incorporated elements of Western textual practices into their own textual activities.
Based on extensive fieldwork over two decades, and historical, anthropological, and ethnographic research, Denise Arnold assembles an original and richly diverse interdisciplinary study. The textual theory she proposes has wider ramifications for studies of Latin America in general, while recognizing the specifically regional practices of indigenous struggles in the face of nation building and economic globalization.
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Acting Inca
For most of the postcolonial era, the Aymara Indians of highland Bolivia were a group without representation in national politics. Believing that their cause would finally be recognized, the Aymara fought alongside the victorious liberals during the Civil War of 1899. Despite Aymara loyalty, liberals quickly moved to marginalize them after the war. In her groundbreaking study, E. Gabrielle Kuenzli revisits the events of the civil war and its aftermath to dispel popular myths about the Aymara and reveal their forgotten role in the nation-building project of modern Bolivia.Kuenzli examines documents from the famous postwar Peñas Trial to recover Aymara testimony during what essentially became a witch hunt. She reveals that the Aymara served as both dutiful plaintiffs allied with liberals and unwitting defendants charged with wartime atrocities and instigating a race war.To further combat their \"Indian problem,\" Creole liberals developed a public discourse that positioned the Inca as the only Indians worthy of national inclusion. This was justified by the Incas' high civilization and reputation as noble conquerors, along with their current non-threatening nature. The \"whitening\" of Incans was a thinly veiled attempt to block the Aymara from politics, while also consolidating the power of the Liberal Party.Kuenzli posits that despite their repression, the Aymara did not stagnate as an idle, apolitical body after the civil war. She demonstrates how the Aymara appropriated the liberal's Indian discourse by creating theatrical productions that glorified Incan elements of the Aymara past. In this way, the Aymara were able to carve an acceptable space as \"progressive Indians\" in society. Kuenzli provides an extensive case study of an \"Inca play\" created in the Aymara town of Caracollo, which proved highly popular and helped to unify the Aymara.As her study shows, the Amyara engaged liberal Creoles in a variety of ways at the start of the twentieth century, shaping national discourse and identity in a tradition of activism that continues to this day.
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El Alto, Rebel City
Combining anthropological methods and theories with political philosophy, Sian Lazar analyzes everyday practices and experiences of citizenship in a satellite city to the Bolivian capital of La Paz: El Alto, where more than three-quarters of the population identify as indigenous Aymara. For several years, El Alto has been at the heart of resistance to neoliberal market reforms, such as the export of natural resources and the privatization of public water systems. In October 2003, protests centered in El Alto forced the Bolivian president to resign; in December 2005, the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, was elected. The growth of a strong social justice movement in Bolivia has caught the imagination of scholars and political activists worldwide. El Alto remains crucial to this ongoing process. In El Alto, Rebel City Lazar examines the values, practices, and conflicts behind the astonishing political power exercised by El Alto citizens in the twenty-first century.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 1997 and 2004, Lazar contends that in El Alto, citizenship is a set of practices defined by one's participation in a range of associations, many of them collectivist in nature. Her argument challenges Western liberal notions of the citizen by suggesting that citizenship is not only individual and national but in many ways communitarian and distinctly local, constituted through different kinds of affiliations. Since in El Alto these affiliations most often emerge through people's place of residence and their occupational ties, Lazar offers in-depth analyses of neighborhood associations and trade unions. In so doing, she describes how the city's various collectivities mediate between the state and the individual. Collective organization in El Alto and the concept of citizenship underlying it are worthy of attention; they are the basis of the city's formidable power to mobilize popular protest.
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