AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 37, no. 2 (Spring 1998)

PERFORMING NATIONAL CULTURE IN A BOLIVIAN MIGRANT COMMUNITY

Daniel M. Goldstein
University of Arizona

Folklorization of traditional Andean culture by a universalizing nation-state appropriates indigenous ceremony for political ends, but at the same time creates spaces within which indigenous people can assert their own claims to be the “true” custodians of the national cultural patrimony. In a local fiesta modeled on Bolivia's famous Carnaval, the residents of one migrant barrio in the city of Cochabamba labor to produce a collective identity based on their control of national folklore, in order to enhance the legitimacy of their community and to foster integration with the Bolivian nation. (Folklore, carnival, state formation, Bolivia)

NEOLIBERAL RITUALISTS OF URKUPIÑA: BEDEVILING PATRIMONIAL IDENTITY IN A BOLIVIAN PATRONAL FIESTA

Robert Albro
University of Chicago

This article examines the complications for regional cultural definition following Bolivian neoliberal democratic reforms. It analyzes Quillacollo's saint's day festival, also a national folkloric event, and the interpretive ambiguities between highland ritualists and local valley authorities over fiesta ownership. Amid the symbolic multivocality concentrated by the fiesta, the devil's appearance exposes to locals the fragility of their own identity narrative. While the region's patrimonial claim to the saint enacts a centripetal pull upon national culture, circulating counter-claims still derail the local municipal program, suggesting that cultural attachment to national places is more mediated in postreform Bolivia. (Nationhood, patrimony, regionalism, ritual, agency)

CONVERTING DIFFERENCE: METACULTURE, MISSIONARIES, AND THE POLITICS OF LOCALITY

Andrew Orta
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In recent years, Catholic missionaries have initiated a set of pastoral reforms in Aymara-speaking communities of Bolivia, predicated upon an evangelical equivalence between Aymara identity and Christian identity. Working with Aymara catechists, missionaries endeavor to codify a set of pan-Aymara traits held to reflect Christian values. In this doubly metacultural discourse, authentic Aymaraness is often displaced to a Christianized indigenous past. This article addresses this construction of ethnic inclusion and its limits, focusing on the complex assimilation of this politicized discourse of Aymaraness by the catechists across a range of social contexts. (Aymara, missionaries, locality, ethnic identity)

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE EVANESCENCE OF POWER: MAKING HISTORY IN HIGHLAND BOLIVIA

Stuart Alexander Rockefeller
University of Chicago

The Bolivian Quechua community of Quirpini appears to be governed by a number of political institutions whose activities have little capacity for historically transformative action. An analysis of actions by each institution reveals that they either never mobilize people or are set up so that collective action is possible only with the assent and co-operation of the Spanish-speaking elite of the nearby regional capital. What appears to be Quirpini's system of self-governance is in practice the means by which the village is dominated. (Politics, Bolivia, power, mediation, action)