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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2020

Mareike Winchell
Mareike Winchell*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Chicago
*
mareike@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

PachakutislaveryrevolutionEvo Moralesindigenous nationalismQuechua
Type
Contamination and the Half-Life of History
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 551 - 587
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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