Claiming belonging, constructing social spaces: Citizenship practices in an Afro-Bolivian town

Abstract

Recent literature on citizenship practices and discourses highlights processes of ‘subjectification’ or ‘self-making’ in relation to a local community rather than the rights and responsibilities associated with the legal status bestowed on full members of a national community. In this paper, set in the town of Chicaloma in the Yungas region of Bolivia, I argue that this self-making is not simply a response to hegemonic national norms, nor to a communally defined image of its ideal member, but rather is bound up in simultaneous processes of ‘community-making’. Further, I argue that community-making is itself a hotly contested process. Access to specific social and economic resources is differentially available to those members of the community who are able to make more convincing claims to belonging. In this context, community members are engaged in an on-going process of making claims to belonging which work by constructing the social space in the image of the claimant as much as by producing the subject. They constitute an important citizenship practice through which subjects assert their rights in various instances of local governance, but they work by constructing the community as well as the citizen-subjects who populate it. Rather than yield clear categories of included and excluded, though, these practices and discourses result in fluid and unstable differentiations among actors, and, in fact, a fluid and unstable constitution of the community as a social space.

Plurinational Afrobolivianity

“…Anderson 2007). What is more, as my discussion of Cala Cala, as well as other authors' depictions of different communities in the Yungas show, Yungueño culture, oral tradition, political and economic institutions and festive culture could be interpreted as Afro-indigenous, since they were forged over the years by Afrobolivian and indigenous peones and comunarios living together in a common geographic, economic and social space (Busdiecker 2007;Léons 1966;Léons 1972;Spedding 2009;Sturtevant 2013).…”

“…juntas (working groups). In recent years, these parallel Afrobolivian and Aymara institutions seem to have disappeared in Chicaloma, as Charles Sturtevant's (2013) ethnography of the town suggests. In Cala Cala, nobody mentioned parallel institutions and according to my interlocutors "los Afros de Cala Cala" have always been engaged in the sindicato.…”

“…The few competing narratives decentering the Tocaña bias in political rhetoric and discursive articulations of Afrobolivianity have for the most part lost traction or have been superseded by the dominant position of political leaders from Tocaña. In the past, the Sud Yungas village of Chicaloma was known throughout Bolivia as "the village of the blacks" ("el pueblo de los negros") (Léons 1972;Sturtevant 2013). Chicalomeños also claim the title "cradle of the traditional saya" ("cuna de la saya tradicional") for their village.…”

“…Afrobolivian communities and politics in plurinational Bolivia, as well as the transformations in the aftermath of recognition, have not been thoroughly studied to this date. 16 A few exceptions aside (Sturtevant 2013;2017), recent contributions (beyond the works dedicated to Afrobolivian colonial history cited above) either summarize material already presented earlier (Angola Maconde 2010) or are fundamentally descriptive and documentary in nature (Ballivián 2015;Zambrana B. 2014).…”

Towards an anthropology of global inequalities and their local manifestations: social anthropology in 2017

“…Indeed, a number of contributions in 2017 have emphasised precisely the importance of ‘presentism’ in social movements (Grisaffi ). In Sturtevant's () account of local politics in Bolivia, political membership is bound up with everyday processes of ‘community‐making’. Similarly, across various South African cities, organisations that fight against poor living conditions often have lives outside the moments of political sphere.…”