Liberty Time in Question

Historical Duration and Indigenous Refusal in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia

Bibliographic Data

ID2109193
AuthorsMareike Winchell (0000-0002-9982-7969, University of Chicago, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume62
Issue3
Pages551-587
Publication date2020-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417520000171
OpenAlexW3039013641
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited66

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

Colonialism · Ethnology · Government (linguistics) · Indigenous · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Sociology · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Indigenous Cultures and History · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America

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