Albro_The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia's Indigenous Movements

The Culture of Democracy andBolivia’s Indigenous MovementsRobert AlbroThe George Washington University

Abstract ■ This article describes the participation of Bolivia’s indigenous move-ments in encompassing popular protest coalitions of the last five years. Pointingto the importance of cultural heritage in current social movement efforts to revi-talize Bolivian democracy, this argument examines the importance of the ‘termsof recognition’ in the negotiation of the very meaning of democratic partici-pation, between the traditional political class and popular protesters, but alsowithin protesting coalitions. As both indigenous and popular traditions ofstruggle increasingly make common cause, Bolivia’s indigenous movements areproviding the cultural resources that frame the terms of popular protest. At thesame time, the terms of indigenous identity are also changing form, becomingmore available to growing urban-indigenous and non-indigenous popular socialsectors now willing to claim or reclaim an indigenous heritage. This article alsoexplores key transnational and national networks now involved in this transform-ation of the terms of indigenous cultural heritage, making it the basis of analternative democratic public in Bolivia.Keywords ■ Bolivia ■ democratization ■ indigenous movements ■ publics ■

recognition

‘Looking back, we will move forward.’Carlos Mamani Condori (1992), Aymara activist and historian

‘We need a space where the people can talk not about the past, but the future.’Oscar Olivera (2004), social movement spokesperson

On 6 June 2005, Bolivian president Carlos Mesa resigned for the secondtime, citing his inability to govern while mired in another round of large-scale social mobilizations that had paralyzed the country since mid-May.Mesa’s government was beset by over 800 protests during his year and ahalf in office (Dangl, 2005). The protests of May and June were touchedoff by the passage of a new hydrocarbons law that did not grant nationalcontrol of gas reserves to the satisfaction of popular leaders. Sparring withpolice, approximately 15,000 people filled the Plaza Murillo in La Paz on30 May. On 1 June mostly Aymara peasants blockaded access to La Paz.Meanwhile, in the city of Cochabamba, peasants and factory workers led amassive march through the city center. By 4 June all of Bolivia’s majorhighways were blockaded at 55 points throughout the country, bringing itto an economic stand-still and provoking an exasperated Mesa to stepdown.

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Vol 26(4) 387–410 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X06070122]Copyright 2006 © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CAand New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com

As it has been since the first Water War of 2000, public assembliesconvened by social movement leaders were instrumental in the run up toMesa’s resignation, including a referendum on 23 May (see Gomez, 2005;Martin, 2005). After three weeks of strikes, marches, and road blocks, onthe day of Mesa’s resignation hundreds of thousands of people convergedon the center of La Paz, the capital city. And in what became a massiveopen-air forum (popularly called a cabildo abierto), the call went up to founda new ‘Popular Assembly’.1 The proposed assembly would be composed ofdelegates from indigenous communities and urban neighborhood associ-ations, along with worker, trade, and agrarian unions. Delegates would beelected in meetings of each grassroots organization according to theirrespective and preexistent ‘customary’ procedures (usos y costumbres).2 Theassembly’s first order of business would be to address two popular callsrepeatedly raised in recent years: for the nationalization of Bolivia’s naturalgas and for a referendum to redraft a national constitution that betterrepresents the rights of the country’s indigenous majority. As I argue here,such efforts illustrate a deepening entanglement of indigenous withnational-popular traditions of struggle (see also Hylton, 2005a).

A former vice-president, Mesa himself came to power in October 2003only after his predecessor, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, fled the country inthe face of outrage over bloody efforts to control similar protests through-out that year, resulting in at least 60 deaths and hundreds injured (seeLedebur, 2003: 2). It is estimated that a crowd of up to 500,000 peopleassembled in La Paz the day Sánchez de Lozada’s helicopter took off. Priorto his own resignation Mesa’s exasperation was apparent, as he declared theEl Alto protests to be a ‘carnival of lunatics’ (Mamani, 2005). The recenttravails and premature end of Mesa’s government exemplify the kinds ofconcerns cited in a 2004 report by the United Nations DevelopmentProgram, titled ‘Democracy in Latin America: Toward a Citizen’s Democ-racy’, which somberly concluded that democracy in the region is at best‘fragile’.3

The almost routine inability of presidents to finish out their electedterms of office in Bolivia, and elsewhere, has renewed debate over the statusand meaning of democracy for the region’s popular majority. The landslideelection to the presidency in December 2005 of Evo Morales – leader of thecoca growers and one of Bolivia’s more militant social movements – hasraised fears among foreign observers that Bolivia’s democracy is heading inthe wrong direction. Until very recently the US State Department identi-fied Morales as an ‘illegal coca agitator’ and as the leader of the ‘radialMAS’ (his political party) – part of a pattern of labeling Bolivia’s indigen-ous-dominated social movements as ‘anti-systemic’ (Lindsay, 2005: 6).Bolivia continues to be a litmus test for the ongoing success of democrati-zation in Latin America. The phenomenal popularity of Morales, as leaderof a movement long in the cross-hairs of the US-backed War on Drugs in

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Bolivia, makes it increasingly clear that the terms of democracy in thiscountry mean different things to foreign and national policy-makers andto the grassroots groups that have been actively participating in the large-scale protests of the last six years.

What are the democratic stakes in Bolivia? This is not as straight-forward a question as former presidents would have us believe. In hisanalysis of contemporary Mexican democracy, Matthew Gutmann (2002:xviii) draws attention to the imprecise ‘elusiveness of the term democracy’,combining as it does a wide range of aspirations and multiple meanings.Observers of Bolivia’s current paroxysms describe the present crisis ascompeting concepts of democracy ‘locked in fierce combat’ (Hylton,2005b). And protesting coalitions speak and act in the name of a ‘realdemocracy’, in their view betrayed by government caretakers. Bolivia’spredicament illustrates what James Holston and Teresa Caldeira (1998)have called ‘disjunctive democracy’, which draws attention to the dailyexperiences of democracy, its variable depth and uneven distribution,currently lived in Bolivia in unbalanced, irregular, and increasingly contra-dictory ways. Distinguishing the state’s caretakers from the state itself, theobject of Bolivia’s current protests is to revitalize the very terms of democ-ratization. As I develop here, this includes expanding criteria of recog-nition for inclusion in Bolivia’s democratic project, renovating thecollective political subject of a national democratic process, and dramati-cally framing the cultural terms of this subject as a specific moralcommunity.

Given the apparent exhaustion of the neoliberal state in Bolivia, alongwith political scientist Patrick Deneen (2004: 27–8), the present analysis ofpopular protest efforts seeks to redress the potential ‘presence of tragedyembedded in democratic overconfidence’ as a ‘cosmic optimism’ in prin-ciples of liberal democracy characterized by an absolutist and uncriticalfaith in a fully liberal and democratic future. At a moment of rejection ofneoliberalism as state policy in Bolivia, the democratic alternatives ofpopular protest movements also self-consciously reject the ‘natural’equation of the free market with democratic freedoms (Paley, 2001). Inorder to better appreciate the range of democratic aspirations in contem-porary Bolivia, in what follows I examine contributions of Bolivia’s indigen-ous movements to encompassing popular mobilizations of protest in thiscountry. I unpack how an Andean cultural heritage works as a constructiveresource for the ‘democratic’ discourse and practice of Bolivia’s socialmovements, which seek to re-imagine and to realign the growing gulfbetween the experiences of actually existing democracy and the unrepre-sentative institution-building of democratization. I sketch out how culturalheritage is used as a political resource for popular coalition-building andin an effort by social movements to frame an alternative democratic publicoutside of Bolivia’s ‘politics as usual’.

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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

Vicissitudes of neoliberal democracy

Eduardo Gamarra (1994: 10–11) has described the application ofneoliberal democracy in Bolivia since 1985 as a negotiation between ‘tech-nocrats, managers, and government officials’, on the one hand, and‘distinct social sectors attempting to find a niche’ on the other. Reformistspromoted a conception of democracy largely compatible with ‘effective andefficient management of the economy’ while the country’s popular sectorspursued the democratic promise of greater access to the policy-makingprocess. These were different conceptions of democracy, with the goals of‘order’ and ‘inclusion’ respectively. What Gamarra (1996: 97) labeledBolivia’s ‘pacted democracy’ functioned through political party coalition-building toward legislative majorities, institutionalizing a ‘largely executive-centered’ and ‘undemocratic’ approach to governance with no room for‘open debate about economic policy’. Political parties convened national‘dialogues’, advertised as public referendums while functioning as a unilat-eral means to promote the policies of structural adjustment. Historically inBolivia dialogue has been an executive tactic used to isolate social sectorsfrom each other and to paper over the sharp fissures in democratic repre-sentation. During the 1990s, national dialogues organized by traditionalpolitical parties exhibited the form of dialogue without the function, aspolicy exchanges reproducing the ‘logic of forced negotiation’ (Lasernaand Ortego, 2003: 5). Throughout this period, however, Bolivia’s pacteddemocracy illustrated a resilient ability to absorb diverse political interestsinto the formal political fold. But since 2000 when crises came to a head,the government has increasingly reverted to a ‘dialogue of rifles’, as oneeditorialist ironically noted (Puente Calvo, 2003).4

The general reaction to the upsurge of indigenous mobilization withinBolivia’s ‘traditional political class’ – as it is called – has been predictable.‘Democracy’, they regularly warn, is ‘under siege’. This includes the chargethat Bolivia’s recent upheavals have been driven by left-wing demagoguesmanipulating heterogeneous groups of the uneducated, poor, indigenous,and disillusioned (see Laserna, 2003). For unsympathetic internationalobservers, this quickly turns into an account of protests dominated by the‘perverse annual tradition’ of Bolivian ‘mobs’ (see Fantini, 2005). In aWashington Post editorial after his ouster, Sánchez de Lozada (2003)charged: ‘Mob rule overwhelmed respect for Bolivia’s democratic process.’And since then the ex-president has kept up a steady drumbeat of allega-tions associating Bolivia’s social movements with unsavory and undemocra-tic foreign patrons, from Colombia’s FARC guerrillas or Venezuela’s Chávezto a resurgent Shining Path in Peru and to Cuba’s Castro (see Los Tiempos,2005). Most recently he has insisted that Bolivia now runs the imminentrisk of being transformed into a ‘new Afghanistan’ (see Bolpress, 2005), acomparison meant to suggest the potential disintegration of Bolivia into afundamentalist narco-state. One sinister outcome of such charges has been

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a growing concern among US policy-makers that South America’s indigen-ous movements constitute a potential criminal and terrorist insurgency bestdealt with through an expansion of the ‘war on terror’ (Feiler, 2004;González, 2005; Hylton, 2003). Equations drawn between foreign agitators,home-grown demagogues, and the threat of mob violence displace theagency of protest efforts from protesters themselves and eschew any needto acknowledge the self-consciously ‘democratic’ discourse and practicecharacteristic of the mobilization of Bolivia’s social movements.

Bolivia’s traditional political class understands the promise of liberaldemocracy as the reigning fantasy of modern prosperity. This conviction isoften expressed among Latin American elites, and well represented by oneof the more vocal advocates of liberal democracy from South America, thecelebrated writer Mario Vargas Llosa, himself an erstwhile presidentialcandidate in neighboring Peru. In a characteristic statement at an inter-national seminar in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2003, titled ‘The Threats toDemocracy in Latin America’, Vargas Llosa categorically singled outcurrent indigenous movements as a threat to democracy because of ‘thepolitical and social disorder they generate’. But he went further, insistingthat indigenous movements are categorically ‘incompatible with civilizationand development’.

Vargas Llosa’s many assertions about the anti-democratic nature ofindigenous peoples in the Andes have deep, and well-publicized, roots in aspecific kind of past. His point of view has been spelled out in the VargasLlosa Report (unpublished, but discussed in Vargas Llosa, 1983), the resultof a commission organized to investigate the deaths of eight reporters atthe hands of highland peasants early in the Shining Path war, later the basisfor his magical realist novel Death in the Andes (1997). The Peruvian anthro-pologist Enrique Mayer (1991) insightfully analyzed the Vargas Llosa Report,which described indigenous Peru as ‘traditional, archaic, secret, andfrequently in conflict with official law’ (Vargas Llosa, 1983: 32). As Mayershows, and as Vargas Llosa’s most recent comments continue to confirm,this ex-presidential candidate imagines the Andes in terms of two containedand largely antagonistic cultural worlds – an indigenous ‘deep’ Andes anda modern Andes in which a ‘culture of human rights and democracy’thrives.5 In Vargas Llosa’s version, a backward looking and collectivelyenacted ancestral or ‘customary law’ – in direct conflict with ‘official’ statelaw – insures that so-called traditional peoples in the Andes remain stub-bornly, and ignorantly, opposed to modern democracy.

Vargas Llosa’s position has been reprised during recent struggles inBolivia in a variety of ways. Analysts critical of the social movement efforthave pointed to the ways that urbanites of indigenous descent ‘idealize therural and communitarian tradition of their ancestors in order to oppose itto a present in which they have achieved less than they hope’ (Laserna,2003). In a speech after his removal from office,6 Sánchez de Lozadacharged that Bolivia’s social movements ‘don’t believe in democracy’, and

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he contrasted orderly ‘representative democracy’ to an ‘authoritariancommunalistic democracy’ that is based on the supposed ‘assemblies’ ofBolivia’s indigenous societies. For Sánchez de Lozada, liberal democracycurrently is waging a battle for survival with ethnic ‘collas’ (highlandIndians), a social sector that ‘rejects modernizing itself and which clings toarchaic notions’ (Bolpress, 2005). This view also prevails in the officialresponse to lynchings, a kind of vigilante ‘community justice’ which,according to police authorities, is carried out ‘under the supposedumbrella of customary law [usos y costumbres] and which deepens the loss ofstate authority’ (Los Tiempos, 2004), where this authority is epitomized bythe orderly consolidation of state institutions.7 Political elites, in short, referto the collective indigenous politics of face-to-face assembly as a point ofdeparture for characterizing marked cultural practice as decidedly unde-mocratic, located in a past with no productive relationship to a democraticpresent or future.

Multicultural state democracy and social movements

Yet throughout the 1990s the Bolivian state invested collective culturalclaims with constructive potential, in part through legislative interventionsof indigenous peoples themselves. Representing the South AmericanIndian Council (founded in 1980), Tomás Condori (2001: 43–5) partici-pated in the drafting and ratification of the International Labor Organiz-ation’s convention No. 169, concerned with indigenous and tribal peoplesand adopted in 1989. ILO convention No. 169 calls for states to worktoward the full realization of cultural rights, which includes state recog-nition of the authority of customary law. In 1994 and partly through theinterventions of katarista historian Victor Hugo Cárdenas as vice-president,the Bolivian government followed suit, instituting a controversial PopularParticipation Law (PPL) that offers new possibilities for social inclusion interms of the constitutional redefinition of the nation as ‘multiethnic andpluricultural’. The PPL was a sharp break with Bolivian state culturalpolicies dating from the 1952 Revolution, which relegated any indigenousfuture to assimilation into a desirable culturally and ethnically mixedmiddle class, referred to as a mestizaje. Under this regime citizens’ rightsconformed to the ‘model of the mestizo citizen’, which Rivera Cusicanqui(2004: 21) has described as an individual ‘consumer and producer ofmerchandize, a speaker of Spanish and an aspirant to a Western ideal ofcivilization’.

The PPL, however, granted full legal recognition to already existingtraditional and popular local political organization and leadership, accord-ing to what are called a group’s ‘uses, customs, and statutory dispositions’(usos y costumbres), or customary law. In the process the downsizing statehanded over resources and decision-making to the local municipality. With

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the state’s recognition of ‘uses and customs’, the PPL has magnified theimportance of cultural heritage as a basis to advance political and legalclaims. Supported by related legislation, such as the 1996 update ofBolivia’s agrarian reform law recognizing the pre-existent claims of origi-nario (highland Indian) and of indígena (lowland Indian) communal land-holdings, the application of customary law through the PPL establishedlegal precedent based on continuity with the past. But the combined politi-cal, legal, and performative implications of heritage make it more than justthe ‘retrospective expression of culture’ (Brown, 2005: 43) for Bolivianprotesters.

Specifically, Bolivia’s multicultural legislation depends upon an under-standing of ‘heritage’ as ‘patrimony’ (patrimonio). The term – patrimonio –is often on the lips of Bolivia’s indigenous activists. Bolivia’s legal processof state decentralization grants local municipal ‘control over theexploitation of their patrimony’ (patrimonio propio), while also ‘promotingcultural development and the defense of autochthonous cultural values’(Ley Orgánica de Municipalidades, article 39). The etymology of ‘patrimonio’derives from the medieval Spanish legal parlance stipulating propertyinherited from one’s father. Specifying rules of family estate inheritance,for modern Bolivia patrimony refers to inherited legal jurisdictional rightsover land. The combined effects of this state-driven multicultural legis-lation, then, has been to formulate ‘popular participation’ in terms of acorrespondence of ‘customary law’ – assumed to be a unitary set ofmeanings and practices – to separate and discrete traditional cultural unitslabeled ‘territorial base organizations’. As a condition of state recognition,the ‘pastness’ of indigenous heritage potentially limits direct participationby indigenous peoples in the political realities of the present, by circum-scribing their political relevance within what the state imagines to be theboundaries of their ancestral territories. Understood in this way, multi-cultural legislation illustrates the agency of the state in setting whatPovinelli (2002: 3) has called the ‘limits of recognition’.

Bolivia’s recent developments, however, complicate this picture in avariety of ways, suggesting how indigenous and popular movements useinternational and state-based rights instruments to transform the meaningand ground of citizen participation. The terms of legal circumscription ofindigenous identity – of the state’s own condition of political recognition –are being appropriated to new ends by protesting coalitions. And duringthe Water War of 2000 the rallying point for this multi-sector and largelyurban movement was the defense of the traditional use and distribution ofwater as a collective cultural right based on usos y costumbres (see Albro,2005a; Laurie et al., 2002), which it forced the government to recognizewith a legal amendment. Customary law continues to inform large-scaleprotest efforts. Indigenous movements in Bolivia have sought to expand thestate’s limited concept of ‘land’, understood simply as a factor in agricul-tural production, to a larger conception of ‘territory’ as the location for the

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social reproduction of collective identity. During the Gas War of 2003,protesters understood the defense of Bolivia’s gas as a question of the ‘recu-peration’ of the country’s ‘national patrimony’. Such a claim rested directlyon the precedent of the pre-existent ‘territorial sovereignty’ of indigenouspeople’s communal land holdings, a position most developed by FelipeQuispe and the national agrarian union, the CSUTCB. Quispe has consist-ently promoted a traditional conception of Aymara land use defined by aculturally specific relationship of ‘the people’ to the ‘land’, which Quisperefers to as usos y costumbres, including the soil, water, air, and subsoilresources (like gas). The insistent popular call for a new constitutionalassembly to ‘refound’ the nation – perhaps the most frequently advanceddemand over the last five years – specifies that representatives to theproposed assembly be elected directly through the usos y costumbres of agiven group or organization (see CENDA et al., 2004: 2). Popular represen-tatives frame the terms for a new constitution using the convening powerof customary law.

In the last five years strife between Bolivia’s social movements andgovernment caretakers has unfolded within the gap between the assertionand the recognition of the claims advanced by Bolivia’s popular sectors. Thiscontentious gap is at once a space of cultural, political, and legal negotia-tion for different terms of recognition within the multicultural state. IfCharles Taylor (1994) brought to our attention the importance of the‘politics of recognition’ in multicultural states, recently Arjun Appadurai(2004) has suggested we pay more attention to the negotiated ‘terms ofrecognition’, in this case the instrumental potential of the legal authorityof cultural heritage. Using Appadurai’s (2004: 62) parlance, in order toarticulate new democratic aspirations, Bolivia’s social movements arestaking a claim to ‘recover the future as a cultural capacity’. If we can pointto the ways that law and the legal process help to constitute ‘the facts’ ofcultural identities (see Cowan et al., 2001: 11), in this case the idiom ofcustomary law, or usos y costumbres, has been used by Bolivia’s social move-ments to transform the limiting political precondition of ‘pastness’ to tran-scend a politics of irreconcilables through a dialogue between the state’smulticultural legislation and the expressive, instrumental, and constructivepotential of local cultural practice.

The politics of association

If the admixture of social sectors, indigenous, or popular groups is notalways the same, a shared politics of assembly (política asambleística) hasbecome a potent unifying strategy of social movements in Bolivia since atleast 2000, leading to the organization of successive multi-sector coalitions(García Linera, 2001, 2003). Re-establishing a popular capacity to intervenein the public life of the nation, coalition-building has facilitated the

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meeting of social sectors, logistical planning for collective mobilizations,shared drafting of statements and agreements, and restored a more directconnection between political deliberation and action in contrast totraditional political parties. Political theorist and current vice-presidentÁlvaro García Linera (2004: 73) highlights the nested relationship betweenthe broad-based protest efforts and these more local plenary organizations:

The multitude is an association of associations in which each person who ispresent in the public act of meeting does not speak for himself or herself butrather for a local collective entity to which he or she is accountable.

García Linera’s description of protesting coalitions as an ‘association ofassociations’ suggests an effort to bridge the vertical disconnect of the statewith society – popularly expressed as a desconfianza (disenchantment) forthe years of democratic consolidation – with the local experiences of thepolitically familiar, immediate, and everyday.

As Sian Lazar (2006) helps to make clear with her description of thecentral role of residential associations, worker, and trade unions in themobilizations in El Alto during the Gas War of 2003, local associational lifehas been the experiential ground for collaborations among popular socialsectors. As Lazar shows, neighborhood committees (or juntas vecinales) andtrade unions (gremios) at once make direct claims on the state and serve asthe means for the state to channel resources to the local level. These ‘baseorganizations’ can also substitute for the state as collective political subjects(2006: 197), as with the civic strikes that closed markets and the organiz-ation of autonomous defense committees in 2003 (see Hylton, 2004). Asconfrontations mounted in 2003 and again in 2005, local juntas, gremios,and sindicatos collaborated to organize barricades, vigils, and communalcooking. Rather than an exception, the coordinated mobilization of ‘baseorganizations’ is an intensified expression of the everyday organic life ofneighborhood associations in El Alto, including routine participation inmeetings, demonstrations, civic parades, and other collective responsibili-ties. People’s daily associational commitments add up to a popular experi-ence of democratic participation significantly different from the typicalassumptions of voting in a formal political party system.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1990) has written of the differences betweenwhat she calls ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘ayllu democracy’8 in Bolivia, fromthe perspective of Norte de Potosí. For Rivera Cusicanqui, each works ona fundamentally different basis. Ayllu democracy operates as nestedChinese boxes, from the smallest residential unit (or cabildo), throughintermediate levels, to that of a regional federation. Fundamental aylluprinciples of community-based direct democracy include the requirementof service, a rotating leadership, extensive consultation, with the goals ofcommunal consensus and an equitable distribution of resources (1990:102–3). These principles, Rivera Cusicanqui is clear, are in direct conflictwith those of liberal democracy, based on the individual citizen as both

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rational and proprietary, and as the logical subject of national economicadvancement (1990: 117). Most importantly for our discussion is RiveraCusicanqui’s assertion that organized agrarian unions, particularly since1952, are ‘foreign, imposed structures which prolong and reproducecolonial forms of domination over the ayllus’ (1990: 109). If superficiallycomparable local associations, she tells us, ayllus and unions promotelargely incompatible models of political subjecthood. This is a claim,however, that makes increasingly less sense for an expanding ‘urbanindigenous’ experience (e.g. Riveros and Alvarado, 2001), where thepopular affinities between local associations serve as a collaborative politi-cal starting-point. To understand the persistent fact of large-scale socialmobilizations in Bolivia over the last five years, as I have argued elsewhere(Albro, 2005a), we should recognize the agency of a ‘plural popular’subject rather than privilege any particular culture or class identity.

This includes recognizing the extent to which the ‘networks of soli-darity’ of El Alto’s associational life articulate a ‘rural-urban Aymara’ experi-ence, emergent out of the migratory history and largely unplanned rapidgrowth of El Alto (see Sandoval and Sostres, 1989). Pablo Stefanoni (2004:2–3) has described how the protracted efforts by in-migrants to obtain basicservices such as water, paved roads, electricity, and trash pick-up trans-formed juntas vecinales into an instrument for the ‘politics of vital necessi-ties’. Evolving from associations of renters and clients of government landgrant programs in the 1940s and 1950s, the communitarian and territory-based politics of in-migrating Aymara agriculturalists transformed juntasvecinales throughout the city’s rapid growth in the 1970s and 1980s. Theseincluded an ongoing affiliation with one’s community of origin, the use ofthe assembly, such principles of exchange as ayni (that is, the strictexchange of equivalents), and the usage of kinship and fictive kinship (orcompadrazgo) to organize collective participation in neighborhood improve-ment projects. But now rather than a given community, these cultural termsof engagement are focused on the urban category of vecino (neighbor).Juntas were once again transformed after 1985 with the arrival of ‘relocal-ized’ ex-miners and their experiences with the vanguardist tradition of themining unions (Gill, 2000: 67–85). Far from being a unitary expression ofthe interests of distinct social sectors, El Alto’s base organizations composeoverlapping arenas of encounter and dialogue for the historical and gener-ational experiences of the associational politics of multiple social sectors,brought together in moments of protest.

These experiences encompass the local political institutions of ruralAymara communities with urban renters’ and trade associations, togetherwith the experiences of radical mining unions, through an organic associ-ational life that is commensurate with ‘Andean’ principles of leadership,accountability, community service, collective work, redistribution, andconsanguinity.9 Elsewhere I have described a similar convergence of diversetraditions of local association for the six coca grower federations of the

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Chapare, another central social movement protagonist of recent years (seeAlbro, 2005b). When characterizing Bolivia’s large-scale social mobiliza-tions as the agency of a plural popular subject, I want to point to the trans-latable experiences of associational politics, which have brought the rural,the urban, indigenous heritage, and the leftist histories of popular labormovements, ex-miners, and ex-peasants, into constructive realignments ofkinship, reciprocity, exchange, solidarity, and mutual recognition. Thepolitics of assembly is a dialogical catalyst for cultural translatability andmutual recognition across comparable domains of popular experience,facilitating coalition-building across formerly distinct indigenous andpopular struggles in the post-neoliberal period.

I do not want to minimize evident regional and rural–urban differ-ences. But, to insist, as Rivera Cusicanqui does, on irreducibly differentorigins for ‘indigenous’ and ‘mestizo-creole’ political projects, and to inter-pret local union politics primarily as an extension of internal colonialismin Bolivia, makes it difficult to recognize the popular coalitional politics ofthe present. If not unaffected by problems of hierarchy, corruption, andthe abuses of power, local associations employ a direct democracy that istransparent, horizontal, bottom-up, and non-hierarchical, with the right ofall to speak (pedir la palabra). Whether or not these traits are always evidentin practice, in principle they represent a more direct application of thepopular will and an alternative to the failures of democracy as practicedthrough political parties. During Bolivia’s recent turmoil the ‘organic life’of residential, indigenous, and trade associations has galvanized an alterna-tive collective politics outside of the political party system and as a basis forcross-sector cooperation.

This is not the case only in El Alto. A union leader characteristicallybegan a meeting I attended in Cochabamba in 2001 saying, ‘We are hereto practice democracy. It is not a question of impositions. . . . We must talk,argue, ask, and reach agreement.’ Associational life figures so importantlyas a model of and for popular broad-based coalitional efforts because itcomposes the most immediate experience of collective political action,serving as the ‘dialogical ground’10 for multiple historical encounters withthe negligent state and alternative considerations of ‘the desirable form of our collective life’, in the words of Oscar Olivera (Olivera and Lewis,2004: 36). Bolivia’s popular majority conceives of participatory democracyas a dialogical public of collective interests. Far from antagonistic to thisprocess, ayllu democracy is one constructive cultural resource available forbreathing life into this restorative desire.

Andean democracy and democratic publics

One unstated goal of the government’s neoliberal structural adjustmentbeginning in 1985 was to dismantle the organizational structures of

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popular mobilization, including the ‘moral community’ of the COB, whileat the same time installing new forms of state administration (see Nash,1992: 289; Sanjinés, 2004: 206–7). But the 2000 Water War illustrated thepolitical successes of popular coalitions, which García Linera (2003) hascalled the return of the ‘multitude’ and which I have described in termsof the ‘plural popular’ (Albro, 2005a). However, indigenous coalitionleaders more often speak of the project to ‘refound the country’ in thecultural and cosmological terms of a ‘pachakuti’. Founded in 2000, FelipeQuispe’s Indianist political party is the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement.Quispe’s on-again/off-again rival, Evo Morales,11 has also publiclydiscussed adding the word – pachakuti – to the existing name of his party,the Movement Toward Socialism (founded in 1995). In both Quechua andAymara, ‘pachakuti’ conceptualizes ‘relations among two elements orhuman groups, sometimes opposed and sometimes associated’ (Bouysse-Cassagne and Harris, 1987: 28). The concept implies a restorative inver-sion of time, when the past might productively become the future. Inmoments of popular protest, cultural heritage is not merely retrospectivebut potentially constitutive. Rivera Cusicanqui (1993: 53) has describedthe 1990 indigenous March for Territory and Dignity as a pachakuti, ‘theunion of the fragmented parts of the indigenous body’. One way ofdescribing the multi-sector popular coalitions of recent years is aspachakuti-like performative spectacles of protest.

The ‘return of the Indian’, as Xavier Albó (1991) once called it, hastaken place under the sign of a potential pachakuti. The activist Aymaraintellectuals of the Andean Oral History Workshop (THOA) have workedsteadily to ‘reconstitute the ayllu’ among indigenous peoples.12 The ‘ayllu’has figured prominently in regional ethnography and ethnohistory (seeAbercrombie, 1998; Isbell, 1978; Rasnake, 1988), as a characteristicallyAndean form of social organization, combining dimensions of kinship,collective ritual practice, symbolic and social structures, economicexchange, marriage and residence into a uniquely Andean political andterritorial unit. Indigenous leaders like Felipe Quispe continue to advancethe territorial claim of the ayllu as intrinsic to their political projects. Butthe ayllu concept, as anthropologist Andy Orta (2001: 199–200) remindsus, is also a concept with well-defined ‘connections to the past’ that offersan ‘opportunity for decolonizing Bolivian society and reimagining it as apluricultural space’. It has thus become the focus of attention of indigenousintellectuals and cultural activists in Bolivia. Now under the sign ofpachakuti, and as an orienting concept for indigenous-based social move-ments, the ayllu concept is less the subject of academic descriptions ofAndean peoples and more a popular basis for imagining an alternativedemocratic future.

Carlos Mamani Condori (2001: 49) describes this opportunity in post-colonial, emancipatory, and democratic terms: ‘the pachakuti, the time ofreturn’ is also ‘the return to a state of liberty’. For THOA member María

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Eugenia Choque (2001: 212), the ‘return of the ayllu . . . is understood asa pachakuti, which means the return of our self-esteem and identity’. Thediscourse of culture is an effective political resource in no small partbecause it directly addresses the historical terms of popular exclusion fromnational politics, as expressed in oft-drawn descriptions by the traditionalpolitical class of indigenous customary law as an anti-democratic culturalinstitution. At the same time, the concept of ‘pachakuti’ productively relatespast to future to self-consciously frame a project of the reconstruction of acollective political subject through cultural agency. This subject is imaginedto be newly reconstituted, superseding in pachakuti-like ways past antago-nisms and rivalries of indigenous and national-popular projects, the frag-mentation introduced by the neoliberal era, as well as the democraticdeficits of accountability, representation, participation, and citizenship,identified by protesters.

In the hands of THOA and its partners, the ayllu is now the subject ofhistorical, political, and testimonial documents disseminated through bilin-gual publications, videos, and radio programs or radionovelas (Stephenson,2002: 103), including regular broadcasts on Radio Pachamama in El Alto.Aymara intellectuals have significantly publicized the ayllu as a mixedmedia and communicational event (see Ari Chachaki, 2001), and in wayscomparable to the earlier television program ‘The People’s Free Tribunal’of Carlos Palenque, which inspired the neo-populist political partyCONDEPA in the early 1990s. As part of the program, the Open Tribunaltypically showed ‘urban Indians’ speaking for themselves and offering testi-mony in face-to-face communication with Palenque (the show’s host) inorder to make public announcements, or to resolve political, familial, legal,and medical problems (see Himpele, 1996). The show self-consciouslyaired as a forum demanding ‘justice’ for those unrepresented by thetraditional political system. It also used informal cultural idioms of inter-personal solidarity to effectively project an imagined community of recipro-cal, face-to-face, and affective popular politics, for a mostly urban andAymara constituency. Javier Sanjinés (1996: 261) labeled CONDEPA a ‘talkshow democracy’. CONDEPA’s political stronghold was also El Alto. As withCONDEPA, Choque (2001: 220–1) explains, ‘An objective that underliesthe ayllu proposal is the establishment of communication: to sit at the tableand talk among equals, in the common preoccupation of solving problemsof a general character.’ This ayllu model is one important cultural resourceavailable to popular protesters for framing local associational life as a demo-cratic alternative.

THOA’s efforts to publicize the ayllu concept as paradigmatically‘Andean’ have taken place in an environment of significantly internationaldevelopment support, which promotes ‘community self-management’ andactively facilitates the goals of indigenous cultural renaissance (see Healy,2001). Accounts of THOA’s history and work highlight their long-termcollaboration with sympathetic national and international NGOs

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(Andolina, 2001; Choque, 2001; Stephenson, 2002). As I have argued else-where (Albro, 2005a), the ‘return of the Indian’ in Bolivia has been notablyresponsive to transnational currents of indigenism represented by suchTHOA collaborators as OXFAM America (see Andolina, 2001: 2). Callingthe ayllu an ‘ancient form of community organization that predates theInca empire’, OXFAM America has supported THOA because it interpretsthe structure of the ayllu as a beneficial device of empowerment ‘to articu-late and defend their rights’ (OXFAM America, 2005: 2). For internationalfunders, the significance of the ayllu is as an authentic subject of global‘rights talk’. This language of international human rights liberally informsAymara activism as well (see Ari Chachaki, 2001), as a prevailing frame ofdebate and claim-making. Bringing a modernist human rights frametogether with the pre-colonial ayllu in fact illustrates the practice ofpachakuti. And as a cultural model of associational life, activists describe theayllu as a public sphere-like communicative arena of political dialogue,debate, and the advancement of claims that fits well with prevailing concep-tions of global civil society as an ‘arena for argument and deliberation aswell as for association and institutional collaboration’ (Edwards, 2004: 55).

If perhaps indirectly, and if usually behind the scenes, activist networkslike THOA frame the terms of intervention of protesting coalitions.Development agencies operating in Bolivia like OXFAM America havepursued their own cultural heritage goals, promoting representative‘traditional authorities’ as desirable project interlocutors (Andolina, 2001:2). THOA has itself assisted this process through leadership workshops(Stephenson, 2002: 112), which includes an ongoing relationship withCONAMAQ (the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu),founded in 1997 and variously described as a First Nations organization,native rights organization, and federation of Aymara and Quechuacommunities. Carlos Mamani Condori (2000: 16) has described THOA’scollaboration with CONAMAQ as a ‘sustained work between the indigen-ous intellectual and the elders [los ancianos] who have once again taken upthe government of the ayllus and the markas’. CONAMAQ has also begunto supplant the CSUTCB as the public and international face of Bolivia’sindigenous movements, from the World Social Forum to the UN’s newPermanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (see Burnham, 2003).CONAMAQ’s protagonism has been informed, and framed, by its collabo-rations with THOA’s activism and by its increasingly international profile.

While designating its own mallku (traditional authority) of ‘culturalheritage’,13 CONAMAQ has become an increasingly active participant inlarge-scale protest efforts. Their participation can be traced at least toCONAMAQ’s organization of a thousands-strong march in downtown LaPaz to promote recognition of the traditional leadership of Qullasuyu(Bolivia) in March 2000. In 2002, representatives of CONAMAQ went on ahunger strike to demand the constitutional referendum. During thestruggles of January 2003, CONAMAQ formed a part of the coalitional

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People’s High Command (see Hylton, 2003), which directed protest efforts.In March of that year CONAMAQ was among the 16 organizations to signa ‘Unity Pact’, in alliance with the Coalition in Defense of Gas, againdemanding that the referendum be advanced (Contreras, 2005), and wenton to organize roadblocks in May and June. CONAMAQ’S proposal for anew constitutional assembly has been disseminated online by a variety ofactivist and documentation-based NGOs in Bolivia.14

CONAMAQ’s particular proposal for participation in a constitutionalassembly stipulates the representation of delegates directly based on ‘usesand customs’, as this is spelled out by article 171 of the existing constitutionrecognizing Bolivia’s multicultural identity, supported by internationalmandates such as convention 169 of the International Labor Organization.It adopts the ayllu as the basic form of ‘indigenous community’ with a pre-colonial ‘historic continuity’. As a political institution, the ayllu is describedin terms of ‘the rotation of responsibilities’ (cargos), ‘service to thecommunity’ (thaki), and working through ‘deliberation and communityconsensus’ (kawiltu). The assembly will elect two representatives, a man anda woman, as an equal ‘pair’ (according to the principle of complementar-ity, or chacha-warmi). Any delegate who does not actively attend and partici-pate in the work of the kawiltu, as well as account for their actions, will bereplaced (see CONAMAQ, 2004). This proposal for a constitutionalassembly certainly expresses the fact of ‘two Bolivias’ – indigenous and non-indigenous, the excluded and the elite. But CONAMAQ’s proposal is alsonon-exclusive, as part of a dialogue within the ‘plural popular’ arena ofprotest with the likes of the MAS party (which also cites the restoration ofthe ayllu as a goal), and including urban-indigenous and non-indigenoussocial sectors. As a cultural resource, the ayllu concept directly informs theefforts of multi-sector popular protest coalitions, providing the culturalterms of difference for an alternative democratic public in Bolivia.

The contemporary political relevance of the ayllu concept for popularprotesting coalitions is that it promises a fruitful vocabulary and set of prac-tices for constructing an alternative, and dialogic, democratic public, whiledramatizing the reconstitution of this public as an assertive political subject.The ayllu concept is readily available as a concept because of the work ofAymara intellectuals and NGOs, who have transformed it into a largelyactivist-driven, rights-based, discursive and significantly mass-mediatedcultural heritage resource. As a construction of cultural heritage, for thecountry’s popular sectors, the ‘activist ayllu’ – to use Weismantel’s (2006)term – represents a departure from an earlier generation’s self-definitionbased much more directly on questions of livelihood, such as the ability tohandle ox and plow, ownership of a truck, or selling in an open-air market(Lagos, 1994). As cultural heritage, an indigenous identity is now some-thing that can be ‘claimed’ or ‘reclaimed’ by a rapidly growing public ofindigenous-descended popular and urban social sectors. In her insightfulaccount of THOA’s activism, Marcia Stephenson (2002: 103) describes

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their project as part of an effort to articulate a ‘new arena of public debateand contestation’. I would go further to suggest that, formulated as acultural resource, ayllu politics help to constitute the collective subjectcomposing this alternative public, with particular attention to thecommunicative efficacy of democracy.

Conclusion

Social movement spokesperson and labor leader Oscar Olivera describesthe practices of protesting coalitions using the terms of democraticrenewal:

Emerging from the united actions of people and the voicing of their desiresand fears is an authentic, participatory, and direct democracy. In these spacesand organizations deliberation – discussion, decision, and implementation –takes place without intermediaries and between equals. (Olivera and Lewis,2004: 133–4)

These spaces of deliberation, it is clear, refer fundamentally to the histori-cal precedent of the collective and face-to-face politics of traditional andpopular ‘base organizations’. As a communiqué circulated during theprotests of 2000 put it, new popular options for the reform of nationalgovernment are based on ‘assemblies of the neighborhood, the union, theayllu, the factory’. As I have argued, local associational politics have beencentral to the coordination of large-scale protest coalitions since they haveserved as the most local dialogical ground of shared experiences of disen-franchisement throughout the neoliberal period, and as a basis for thereconstruction of a popular political subject largely dismantled throughoutthe process of neoliberal reforms.

But as Olivera has also often noted, the political class has insured that‘for 500 years’ the ‘original inhabitants’ of Bolivia have been all but‘excluded from participating in the democratic process of the country’(quoted in Democracy Now, 2005). Though not himself indigenous,Olivera has removed the term ‘democracy’ to the moment of the onset ofthe colonial encounter itself. Protesting social sectors emphasize the need‘to reclaim’ (reivindicar or recuperar) democracy as a collective politicalbirthright, a birthright they actively ‘remember’ and rhetorically relocateas a cultural heritage upon which to build for the future. Olivera identifiesthis with an effort ‘to turn politics into a patrimony of the citizenry’(Olivera and Lewis, 2004: 135). As I have developed with this argument,expressing democratic aspirations using the idiom of heritage is a proteststrategy for traversing the gap between assertion and recognition, incultural terms that make claims upon the state rather than against it. Thisis also a strategy that asserts an alternative political project in the localcultural terms of associational life, which at the same time adopts the form

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of a dialogical, or deliberative, politics promoted by global civil society inthe terms of direct or participatory democracy (see Edwards, 2004: 54–71).

If the question of recognition has become a basic consideration for thequality of liberal democracy, far too little attention has been given to theongoing negotiation of the terms of recognition for the process of demo-cratic consolidation. As Charles Hale (2004) has argued, we should payattention to the ways neoliberal democratization, as itself a cultural project,shapes everyday political participation. Throughout Bolivia’s ongoing crisis,the concept of cultural heritage has become one such key fault line ofdemocratic recognition – at once treated as antithetical to democracy butalso as a basis for democratic alternatives. Bolivia’s traditional political classconstrues cultural heritage in the terms of customary law, on the one handexcluding it from the content of a party-based, consumer-driven, orderly,rational, and individualistic neoliberal democracy, while still inscribing it asthe collective basis for legal recognition and representation by the state. Ascustomary law, in short, cultural heritage composes a problematic limit andpoint of engagement for popular protesters to expand the possibilities fordemocratic recognition.

For social movement spokespeople, as well, the discourse and practiceof cultural heritage have become the basis for an alternative non-party-based democratic project. This is not a serendipitous fact. First, popularprotest coalitions are engaging with the state in the cultural terms set outby state reform (that is, the precedent of usos y costumbres). Second, thecultural heritage concept has been transformed into an instrumentallyuseful cultural, political, social, and legal resource, a result of the conver-gence of top-down state multicultural reform, and the pervasiveness of thelanguage of international human rights, with collaborations betweentransnational and national NGOs, indigenous activists and intellectuals.Common essentialist and primordialist approaches to cultural heritagetend to obscure this diversity of sources for its contemporary politicalefficacy. Third, cultural heritage is an effective means to frame and revi-talize the moral community of a popular, collective, politics fragmented bythe state’s own structural adjustment policies. For the large-scale work ofcoalition-building what Rivera Cusicanqui has called ‘ayllu politics’ partici-pates in the dialogical ground of local associational life, in recognition ofthe fact that ‘indigenous Bolivia’ is an increasingly migratory, displaced,and urban category of cultural identity. At the same time, and fourth,indigenous revitalization is formulated by activists and movement spokes-people as a spectacle-driven, discursive, mixed-media, and rights-basedcultural heritage resource – an identity frame no longer directlyconnected to the exigencies of livelihood and more easily ‘claimable’ byindo-mestizos of indigenous descent, or who are now generationally onceor twice removed. Heritage has become an effective coalition-buildingdevice across historically indigenous and popular political projects. Fifth,and finally, taking seriously the identification of social movement

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coalitions as an ‘association of associations’, local associational life has beenconstructed by international and national activist networks as the sourcefor an alternative democratic project based upon principles of power-sharing and communicative efficacy such as dialogue, debate, and deliber-ation, epitomized by the ayllu as a state-sanctioned expression of culturalheritage and a recognizable democratic ‘public’. Over the past six years inBolivia, it has been indigenous politics that has come to frame popularefforts of democratic revitalization rather than the other way around.

Acknowledgements

A shorter version of this argument was presented in the Fellows Conference of theCarnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York, 13–15 June 2005.I would like to thank Richard Wilson for his helpful comments on that earlier draft.This manuscript was written while a fellow both at the Carnegie Council and at theSmithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and also while a Scholarin Residence at George Washington University’s Program on Culture in GlobalAffairs during 2004–5. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted inBolivia in 1993–5, 2001 and 2002. Any inaccuracies are my own.

Notes

1 In part this call is a reference to Bolivia’s 1970–1 Popular Assembly governmentof radical general Juan José Torres, which attempted to establish an alternativepopular government, led by radical mining unionism and consisting primarilyof worker and peasant organizations. An effort to radically transform societyfrom below, the 1971 Popular Assembly succumbed to ideological differencesof the left, giving way to the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer (see Dunkerley, 1987:155–72).

2 Election by ‘usos y costumbres’ – where each social sector would elect a repre-sentative according to prevailing customary law for that sector – was also partof the proposals advanced by many groups for this year’s constitutionalreferendum.

3 The UNDP report was not exceptional in this regard. Coining such terms as‘democracy deficit’, ‘low intensity democracy’, and ‘democracy lite’, a veritablecottage industry of writers has proclaimed the inadequacies of democraticconsolidation in Latin America since the 1990s, declaring it to be ‘incomplete’,‘shallow’, ‘skin-deep’, ‘hybrid’, ‘imperfect’, ‘illiberal’, ‘unconsolidated’,‘paralyzed’, ‘unsettling’, ‘destabilizing’, ‘divided’, ‘inchoate’, and ‘disjunctive’(e.g. Aguëro, 1998; Dresser, 2004; Holston and Caldeira, 1998; Paley, 2002).

4 Carlos Mesa was an exception to this, repeatedly underscoring his refusal tocommit the same error as his predecessor by using state violence to maintainsocial control. However, during a public statement on 21 June 2005, Bolivia’sambassador to the US emphasized that one of the first tasks of the newadministration would be to ‘regain the state’s monopoly over the use of force’( Jaime Aparicio Otero, public address at the Inter-American Dialogue,Washington, DC).

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5 An analogous distinction between a ‘deep’ and ‘modern’ Andes was the basisfor a debate among Andeanist scholars in the early 1990s regarding the statusof ‘lo andino’ (explicitly Andean belief and practice) in modern Andean nation-states (see Starn, 1991, 1994).

6 Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, public address at American University, Washing-ton, DC, 5 November 2003.

7 Daniel Goldstein (2004) has written extensively on the significance of lynchingfor the peripheral urban community of Villa Pagador in Cochabamba, whichhe understands as a spectacular communicative performance by communitymembers to contest their social marginalization from the benefits of urban life.

8 The term ‘ayllu’ refers to a uniquely Andean ‘social, ritual, and politicalformation’ (Orta, 2001: 198). There are many definitions of the term. For athorough summary of scholarship on this key Andean concept, see Weisman-tel (2006).

9 As Lazar (2006: 194) and others have made clear, the democratic organizationof local associations in Bolivia also has authoritarian features, most evident inobligatory participation in protest actions. The fact that people can be fined ifthey do not participate is often used as evidence for the ‘undemocratic’ natureof local associations.

10 For more discussion of the ‘dialogical ground’ of culture see Tedlock andMannheim’s (1995) excellent collection.

11 During periods of intense social mobilization, the leaders of different socialsectors, including Quispe and Morales, have cooperated with each other. Butover the years, Quispe and Morales have vied to control the CSUTCB, histori-cally the most important expression of indigenous political organizing. Theyhave also competed against each other in successive national elections in 2002and 2005, and are sometimes bitterly critical rivals representing different‘indigenous’ options.

12 Although among the best known, THOA is not the only, or first, activist AymaraNGO. A short list would include such research and activist organizations asMINKA, or Qhantatu, and more recently, the Kuechuaymara Foundation, aswell as online efforts such as AymaraNet.org, among others (see Ari Chachaki,2001).

13 Given recent UNESCO attention to international conventions to protecttangible and intangible cultural heritage (see Brown, 2003), CONAMAQ’screation of a ‘mallku of cultural heritage’ is an indication of the responsivenessof Bolivia’s indigenous groups to an emphasis upon indigenous self-represen-tation in international forums like the UN.

14 A short list includes Aymaranet.org, ‘dedicated to giving voice to indigenousculture’, and Bolivia’s Documentation and Information Center (CEDIB), basedin Cochabamba, both of which have given substantial attention to CONAMAQ’sparticular proposal.

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■ Robert Albro currently teaches anthropology at George Washington Universityand serves as Chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthro-pological Association. His current research explores the relationships betweentransnational indigenous and cultural rights advocacy networks, discourses ofcultural citizenship, and global cultural policymaking. Recent articles include‘Neoliberal Cultural Heritage and Bolivia’s New Indigenous Public’ (to appear inPolitics, Publics, and Personhood: Ethnography at the Limits of Neoliberalism, ed. CarolGreenhouse) and ‘Bolivia’s “Evo Phenomenon”’ (to appear in the Journal of LatinAmerican Anthropology, 2006). Address: Anthropology Department, The George Wash-ington University, Hortense Amsterdam House, 2110 G Street, NW, Washington, DC20052, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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