Liberty Time in Question: Historical Duration and Indigenous Refusal in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This article examines revolutionary discourses of national historical transformation in Bolivia and tracks the ways those discourses are appropriated, contested, and recast by farmers in the rural agricultural province of Ayopaya. During fieldwork carried out with Quechua-speaking farmers in Ayopaya between 2011 and 2012, I learned about people's enduring concerns with a recent hacienda past. Against governmental declarations that Bolivia's colonial past was dead or had passed, farmers meditated on the duration of earlier histories of colonial land dispossession and violations of indigenous sovereignty. Talk about the region's oppressive history here allowed people to assess deficient state aid and resources but also to oppose unwelcome state interventions pushing a legal model of bounded collectivity. I trace the ways that farmers and villagers mobilized the hacienda past to address inequitable land tenure, violated sovereignty, and women's marginalization from political life, and thereby raise new questions about the critical possibilities opened up by the re-politicization of this colonial history. Rural support for Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism party government eroded nearly a decade ago, and this complicates both triumphalist and defeatist accounts of President Evo Morales’ 2019 resignation, which tend to paint Morales’ rural indigenous supporters as innocent and naïve.</jats:p>

The Sweet Land: Manufacturing “Tradition” in Small‐Town Bolivia

“…In doing so, I seek to engage two related concepts: the tradition-modernity binary and the concept of chronotopes (Agha 2007;Bakhtin 1981;Silverstein 2005). This study echoes observations by scholars of the Andes regarding the constructed and relational aspects of time and history (Cusicanqui 2012;Swinehart 2019;Winchell 2020). In the data I present here, tradition and modernity have substantial overlaps, with the bygone past of a rural tradition being reformulated as a distinctive identity to be pitched to an imagined public of tourists and urban migrant returnees.…”

“…And yet even within this chronotope, people use, interpret, and entextualize time differently. In a recent article, Winchell teases apart a multitude of visions of history presented by different actors (2020). In her central ethnographic examples, two consultants, Teodoro and Cecilia, share an understanding of historical events returning or doubling back on themselves, but diverge in their interpretation of recent events.…”

“…The key dimension of meaning here is contrast between opposing points on a scale that reaches across different systems of meaning, such as ethnicity, language, styles of dress (Babel 2018)—or even dirtiness and cleanliness. These systems provide the raw material for what Rivera Cusicanqui calls ch’ixi , “a sort of ‘third’ temporal space defined by an antagonistic intermingling of indigenous and Spanish, past and present” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012: 105, cited in Winchell 2020).…”

Timerendering: reflections on chronopolitical praxis in Bolivia

“…11For another critical anthropological study of temporalities of historical transformation in Bolivia that takes a similar methodological perspective, see Winchell (2020). …”

Liberty Time in Question: Historical Duration and Indigenous Refusal in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia—CORRIGENDUM

“…In the article by Winchell (2020), the text titled Mitanaje y Yanaconaje was attributed to the wrong author. The correct author is Fausto Reinaga.…”