Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism by Mark Goodale

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Dilemmas of Modernity provides an innovative approach to the study of contemporary Bolivia, moving telescopically between social, political, legal, and discursive analyses, and drawing from a range of disciplinary traditions. Based on a decade of research, it offers an account of local encounters with law and liberalism. Mark Goodale presents, through a series of finely grained readings, a window into the lives of people in rural areas of Latin America who are playing a crucial role in the emergence of postcolonial states.

The book contends that the contemporary Bolivian experience is best understood by examining historical patterns of intention as they emerge from everyday practices. It provides a compelling case study of the appropriation and reconstruction of transnational law at the local level, and gives key insights into this important South American country.

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Dilemmas of Modernity

Stanford University Press

Chapter One

Prologue

Perhaps more than any other nation in Latin America, Bolivia is iconic. In the back alleys of the departmental capital city of Potosí, extreme tourism shops traffic in Bolivia's iconicism: twenty-somethings from Belgium and France and Spain and even Chile, bedecked in the sartorial equivalent of world music, halfway along the gringo trail's passage from Otavalo (now that southern Colombia has become too dangerous for backpackers) to Santiago de Chile (or Buenos Aires), and mildly hopped-up from drinking too many cups of mate de coca at over 13,000 feet, are promised the thrill of a literal descent into Hell. For only five dollars apiece, groups of culture tourists are given the chance to experience what is advertised as a journey into the inferno. The five-hour tour through the cooperative mines on Cerro Rico is described visually on rows of tightly packed competing signs, which depict cartloads of unnaturally white-skinned travelers moving slowly down through the sulfurous gases and rocky outcroppings dripping with silica dust, past Baroque devils who menace them with pitchforks. The local tour operators are morethan happy to transform local mining cultural practice into what is really a Hieronymus Bosch panorama-as any shopkeeper in Bolivia knows, the European imaginary is prefigured.

And two years before George Roy Hill, the director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, made the entirely predictable decision to film Bolivia in Mexico, it was no coincidence that the man who had transformed himself into an icon chose Bolivia to begin a new revolutionary movement in Latin America. It did not matter to Che that the actual prospect of the bearded revolutionary's sudden appearance in a remote Bolivian village was an even clearer portent of his death than any ill-begotten alliance between the Bolivian government and the CIA; what mattered most was what Bolivia represented-in this case, class exploitation in the abstract, as Platonic ideal. But Bolivia has always been the site of this multilayered iconicism: gringo backpackers journey to Bolivia to trace the path of the metals that allow them to listen to the panpipes of the folk music ensemble Savia Andina on their Walkmans-they move within the networks of modernity in reverse. Even the gaunt, ghoulish, and bullet-ridden corpse of Che Guevara, lying on a desolate slab in the laundry room of Vallegrande's Our Lady of Malta hospital, does not diminish the discursive power of that moment, when an icon in triplicate-Che the revolutionary lying dead in a classically exploited rural village at the heart of the world system's dependent periphery-unraveled as soon as the mundane, what Michel de Certeau (1988) described as "the practice of everyday life," could no longer be simply theorized.

Bolivia, in other words, must be understood in both the disjunctive and conjunctive. The ways in which "Bolivia" is produced-by the whole range of social actors and institutions (both "native" and "foreign")-create representational contradictions that rise to paradox in certain moments; the constitution of the social, in Bolivia as elsewhere, is untidy. Yet as the December 2005 election of Evo Morales and the subsequent political and legal uncertainty have illustrated in spades, the disjunctiveness of social life in Bolivia cannot be simply explained through reference to any of the orthodox dichotomies that have formed the basis of social scientific accounts of different aspects of economic, social, and political life: local versus national (or national versus transnational); indigenous versus mestizo; rural versus urban; Quechua (or Aymara or Guaraní) versus Spanish; communist (or socialist or syndico-anarchist) versus capitalist (or liberal or neoliberal); altiplano versus yungas; pan-Andean versus indigenist-nationalist; campesino versus miner (or proletariat); law versus custom. This is not to say that oppositional social practice-as distinct from critique or analysis-is not a salient feature of Bolivians' lives, but one does not gain by forcing the everyday play of sharp contrasts into a rigid dialectic that necessarily excludes the possibility of more nuanced relationships.

However, if one is to avoid simple models or analytical frameworks in the process of contributing to the production of knowledge about and within Bolivia, this does not mean one should not look for what the art historian Michael Baxandall (1987) called in another context patterns of intention-the historical and cultural forces that persist in structuring the possible ways in which systems of meaning relate to each other, the logics through which these particular systems of representation become "Bolivian." In order to make any sense at all out of Bolivia's contested present, or the way in which social analysis or cultural critique within Bolivia must encompass multiple and apparently contradictory registers (historical, cultural, epistemological) at the same time in order to approximate truth (that is, resonance across discrete groups of interlocutors), or, finally, in order to participate in an anthropological or historical or philosophical study of Bolivia that is also ethically positioned, one must move from the dissonance of social practice to the patterns of intention that have made Bolivia a site of enduring cultural and discursive creativity. In this sense it is not sufficient to contribute yet another artificially localized case study of some aspect of social life in Bolivia; to do so would be, in light of the patterns described in this book, an actual political act with limited intellectual or other justification. The major claim to relevance of this book is that it identifies and then renders a set of key historical, legal, and cultural frameworks that are both empirical (that is, constituted through social practice) and analytical, to the extent they embody concepts that serve to reflect on social practice and invest it with meaning.

To make this point another way, this book is in part an argument for what is perhaps a uniquely anthropological kind of relevance, one that combines contemporary anthropology's eclectic methodologies-ethnography, history and ethnohistory, cultural critique-with the tentative and even reluctant development of nonuniversal social, cultural, and historical theory. When the director of a nongovernmental organization in Potosí dedicated to legal reform and social justice asked me pointedly "how are you relevant?," he was really interrogating both the intellectual and social justification for a kind of social research that makes inquiries without formally embedding them in practical projects for social transformation or sustainable development. Some scholars in Latin America have responded to criticisms of this kind by either pushing epistemological boundaries in order to break down orthodox distinctions between science and political action, or by challenging the notion of epistemology itself in order to legitimate multiply valid-even if incompatible-ways of knowing. This book represents yet another way of responding to my potosino interlocutor.

If it is true, as James Clifford argued (1986), that ethnography always leads to the discovery of "partial truths," then it also must be true that some accounts are more partial than others. The recognition of essential fragmentariness is not, ipso facto, an argument for self-consciously restricting one's efforts; the constraints to comprehensive social research are all too real in themselves. Yet even though what follows reflects my best efforts-begun in 1996-to document and reflect on certain key aspects of social life in Bolivia, I should underscore the obvious fact that the result is idiosyncratic and makes no claims to positivist objectivity. In describing a particular aspect of an intellectual history that has shaped the plural Bolivian experience for the last two hundred years, I am only too aware that the choices I have made along the way, the points of analytical emphasis, the tentative conclusions and suggestions for future research and critique, even the general implications for understanding the relationship between hegemonic ideas and social practice (that is, the book's theoretical commitments, such as they are), must find their justification within a set of evaluative criteria that are ambiguous at best.

Almost immediately after returning to Bolivia in 1998 (after a three-month period of preliminary research and language training in 1996), I was troubled by a sense of profound unease. I became very quickly intellectually restless and I struggled to find what I had expected to be firm anthropological bearings. I was committed to an orthodox research project within the legal anthropological tradition-anthropologist picks a "culture" and then studies its legal dimensions-and was perfectly comfortable justifying my work on the basis that I was the "first"; that is, the first anthropologist to conduct an extended ethnographic study of law in Bolivia. However, very soon after returning to "my site," which was the province of Alonso de Ibañez in the north of Potosí Department, I was presented with the following challenge: to develop the tools to gauge local processes in ever-increasing degrees of finely grained detail, and, at the same time, to track what appeared to be outlines of a much larger network of ideas and practices that encompassed Alonso de Ibañez in such a way that the province had become only one small node, one point of articulation. This difficulty was particularly acute for someone trained in the sociocultural anthropological tradition, especially in the wake of the important critiques of epistemological metanarratives and the poverty of anthropological theory that had transformed the discipline-particularly in the United States-over the last twenty years.

All of this meant I was only too conscious of the inadequacy of a research strategy that drew artificial boundaries around either a place or group of people and then adopted the standard synchronic framework that purported to offer a comprehensive portrait of people and place within an abstracted ethnographic present-a kind of chrono-cultural dimension that is loaded with unstated assumptions about nature, cultural change, and cultural difference. I also knew, however, that I could not simply ignore local social practices in order to trace the contours of the broader patterns of intention that became clearer with each passing day, because "tracing" would mean, to a certain extent, conceptualizing, envisioning, and giving shape to this larger network through the complicated act of articulating it, and this would seem to eliminate most of the empirical foundation upon which conventional sociocultural anthropology justifies its activities. Although I had not been prepared for the way these two imperatives seemed to pull in opposite directions, I was certain that I could not merely yield to one and intentionally ignore the other. Therefore, I resolved to reconcile this tension by reconceiving the nature of my research; everything that followed was an attempt to mediate between these two currents by documenting their effects and meanings at what were always two ever-present, but distinct, levels: the empirical and the conceptual. In other words, the reflection on technique and process became inseparable from the pursuit and analysis of substantive research findings.

Locations

Bolivia is divided into nine departments, which are further subdivided into provinces, sections of provinces, and, finally, cantons. Bolivia's nine departments, however, map more than simply square kilometers or land distribution; they express a range of complex social geographies, which can be divided not only into jurisdictional units, but into categories of the Bolivian social imagination. Each department is defined by a set of topographical, historical, ethnic, agricultural, political, and even moral characteristics, so that despite the internal diversity, departments frame identity and provide a reference point for public debates over everything from the sequential ordering of dance troupes during Carnival in Oruro to the post-2005 debates over regional autonomy. Potosí is one of the larger and more historically significant of Bolivia's nine departments. The silver and gold extracted from Cerro Rico, or the Rich Mountain, outside of the department's eponymously named capital, Potosí, financed much of the Spanish colonial enterprise until about the mid-seventeenth century. Bolivians themselves like to emphasize the importance of Potosí to the Spanish empire by asserting that enough silver was pulled out of the mountain to build a solid bridge from Potosí to Madrid.

In the north of the Potosí department, there is a grouping of five provinces that forms a head or extension, and which is known as the norte de Potosí (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). In many ways, the norte de Potosí encapsulates much of the departmental identity itself, and nortepotosinos are alternatively proud and ambivalent about this fact. The norte de Potosí is the location of several large mining operations that figured prominently in early twentieth century Bolivian history; it is the poorest region in Bolivia's poorest department, according to international development criteria; it is where ritual combats known as tinkus still mark key points in the agro-spiritual yearly cycle; and more than other regions of Bolivia, it is the place where ayllus (roughly glossed as "indigenous social structures") continue to serve as ordering principles along with jurisdictional logics derived from other political and legal institutions. However, more than anything else, the norte de Potosí symbolizes a particular vision of indigenous Bolivia, in which punas (high and dry Andean ecoregions), inaccessible hamlets, and what is believed to be a basic struggle for survival, come together in the minds of especially urban Bolivians to produce a response that is part visceral, part ideological. At a café in La Paz, a middle-class office worker reacted in horror and awe when I told him that I was on my way to the norte de Potosí. "Qué frío, qué bárbaro!" ("How cold, how barbarous!") he said, thereby spontaneously and succinctly expressing the way the norte de Potosí's topography and climate commingle in people's minds with a certain cultural retrogressiveness, one not defined by an imagined distance from some abstract notion of "civilization" but from the imagined historical distance from the trajectory of modern Bolivia. For many Bolivians, the norte de Potosí is barbarous not because young men beat each other to death with rocks in order to mark the onset of the planting season or to herald a bountiful harvest during the time of rain, but because it would seem to lie outside the boundaries of Bolivia's liberal origin myths. Yet as we will see, the norte de Potosí is as essential to these origin myths, or patterns of intention, as any urban barrio of La Paz, or Cochabamba hacienda.

Within the norte de Potosí itself, the problem of identity is more complicated, of course, although the ways in which something like a national imaginary constitutes the norte de Potosí enter into local and regional self-definitions through popular media, local appropriations of national legislation (which expresses a particular image of the norte de Potosí), and the activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), whose presence in the region is in part based on an idealized understanding of the extremo norte de Potosí. If "extreme" carries a double meaning in this common reference-far from the departmental capital and far from the categories of modern Bolivia-there are certain basic material and political implications to the region's otherwise complicated remoteness. In Potosí, as in other departments in Bolivia, the allocation of governmental resources tends to follow a concentric principle: the farther a region is from the seat of power (usually the departmental capital), the less likely it will benefit from everything from road repair programs to school construction funds to visits from departmental political officials. Although the work of transnational NGOs over the last twenty years in places like the norte de Potosí has qualified this principle to a certain extent, there is no question that a region's sheer distance from a departmental capital can lead to neglect, isolation, and a kind of social marginalization.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Dilemmas of Modernity by Mark Goodale Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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