Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2829473
AutoresSusan C Bourque (Smith College, autor correspondente)
Ano2000
Volume80
Fascículo3
Páginas620-621
Data de publicação2000-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-80-3-620
OpenAlexW1588360540
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas13

With attention to gender now firmly joining class and ethnicity as critical factors in the experience of Latin America, scholars have called for efforts to better understand how all three variables interact. The publication of Marcia Stephenson’s excellent book, Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia, is a substantial contribution to such efforts.Stephenson begins with the assertion that modernization and miscegenation are inextricably linked and that “modernity tries to relocate subjects in terms of their cultural, racial, gendered and spatial identities.” She makes her case in a series of well-constructed arguments linking fashion, hygiene, education, and hunger, emphasizing the nation’s role in promoting modernity and the reformulation of and resistance to that project on the part of the indigenous population.As a literary scholar, Stephenson brings the tools and language of postmodern literary criticism to bear on a range of studies. She offers original readings of literary and political texts and weds these to an insightful interpretation of Bolivian social change over the course of the twentieth century.For political scientists, anthropologists, historians, as well as students of literature, this is a book well worth reading. Stephenson’s conception is brilliant. She opens the book with a fascinating account of the “acculturation” advice proffered to those crossing the ethnic divide between indigenous and criollo culture. She persuasively argues that the goal of such advice was to convince indigenous girls that on their path to mestizaje they should avoid the cultural forms of the chola. Using the work of Rossana Barragan, Stephenson argues that the chola came to represent a woman of notable strength and independence, capable of independent and successful market relations and marked by sexual desire and availability. The goal of the Bolivian modernization project was to insure that as acculturation took place, the ideal model for womanhood rejected the chola model and adopted an idealized version of womanhood, clearly subordinated to husband, dedicated to the care of the family. Cholas were women who refused to be refashioned; they are examples of cultural resistance to the modernization projects of national governments.Stephenson identifies the state’s modernization project in a variety of sources including novels, hygiene, education and fashion. Her original combination of these factors provides a new perspective on the exercise of power. Moreover, her analysis is synthetic and deeply layered, providing no singular template. She concludes: “the com plex ways in which pedagogical practices, fashion, and hygiene converge and reconverge throughout the twentieth century suggest that there is no simple way to generalize about the relation between modernity and identity in Bolivia” (p. 156).Stephenson is careful to emphasize the “agency” of Andean women. They are not the unwitting tools of a central government’s design for national integration. With respect to indigenous education, Stephenson concludes that despite the desire of the dominant groups to use the rural schools to produce acculturated mestizos: “the schools became an important vehicle with which the Aymara resisted repressive political programs” (p. 117).A powerful chapter on the politics of hunger completes the study. In it, Stephenson traces the historical battles between the subordinated indigenous population as “producers” and providers of food and the dominant yet “hostage” criollo population dependent on the labor and produce of the subordinated.Gender and Modernity is a valuable contribution to our understanding of ethnic and gender relations in Bolivia. Stephenson achieves an original reading of the complex role of the state efforts to produce modernity and to utilize gender and ethnic cleavages to enhance their project. She provides us with an appreciation of the challenges faced by indigenous Bolivians to maintain their cultural identity and integrity in the face of a design to mask ethnicity. This is a rich book, full of intriguing and original ideas, and a must for students of modernization and social change

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Ethnic group · Indigenous · Literature · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Sociology · Anthropology · Feminism, Gender, and Social Issues · Gender Studies · History · Latin American Cultural Politics · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Society in Latin America