I n t i m at e I n d i g e n e i t i e s

Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life

Andrew Canessa
 Intimate Indigeneities

N a r r at i n g N at i v e H i s to r i e s

Series Editors
K. Tsianina Lomawaima • Florencia E. Mallon
Alcida Rita Ramos • Joanne Rappaport
Editorial Advisory Board
Denise Y. Arnold • Charles R. Hale • Roberta Hill
Noenoe K. Silva • David Wilkins • Juan de Dios Yapita
In t i m at e In d i g e n e i t i e s

Race, Sex,
and History
in the
Small Spaces of
Andean Life

Andrew Canessa

D u k e Un i v e r s i t y P r e s s
Durham & London 2012
 © 2012 Duke University Press
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Designed by Jennifer Hill
Typeset in Arno Pro by Newgen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed page of this book.
To Teodosio Condori and Peter Dorward
Friends and yatiris both
 Contents

ix About the Series

xi Acknowledgments

1 Introduction
34 One • A Wila Kjarka Kaleidoscope
63 Two • Intimate Histories
90 Three • The Jankho Kjarka War
119 Four • From Fetuses to Mountain Ancestors
166 Five • Fantasies of Fear
184 Six • Progress Is a Metal Flagpole
216 Seven • Intimate Citizens
244 Eight • Sex and the Citizen
281 Postscript • We Will Be People No More

293 Notes
303 References
321 Index
 About the Series

• narrating native histories aims to foster

a rethinking of the ethical, methodological, and
conceptual frameworks within which we locate our work
on Native histories and cultures. We seek to create a space
for effective and ongoing conversations between North
and South, Natives and non-Natives, and academics and
activists throughout the Americas and the Pacific region.
We are committed to complicating and transgressing the
disciplinary and epistemological boundaries of established
academic discourses on Native peoples.
This series encourages symmetrical, horizontal, collabo-
rative, and autoethnographies; work that recognizes Native
intellectuals, cultural interpreters, and alternative knowl-
edge producers within broader academic and intellectual
worlds; projects that decolonize the relationship between
orality and textuality; narratives that productively work the
tensions between the norms of Native cultures and the re-
quirements for evidence in academic circles; and analyses
that contribute to an understanding of Native peoples’ re-
lationships with nation-states, including histories of expro-
priation and exclusion as well as projects for autonomy and
sovereignty.
 x • About the Series

How do native people in the Andes identify themselves? Do they see

themselves as “indigenous” (that is, as of a distinct ethnicity) or as “indi-
ans” (as a subordinated and racialized group)? Do they identify primar-
ily with a linguistic or ethnic group (as in “Aymara”) or as members of
a localized community? Most recent ethnographies of native identity
have focused on politicized communities and indigenous organizations
in order to answer this question. In Intimate Indigeneities, in contrast, An-
drew Canessa demonstrates the value of returning to an ethnography of
a rural community of Aymara speakers in Bolivia to produce an eloquent
and textured account of how people see themselves. Canessa achieves
this through an examination of historical memory, demonstrating how
national events are remembered locally, and through close attention to
how race is diffracted through gender differences and in relationships of
rural dwellers with surrounding mestizo towns, as well as in the dynamics
of schooling, resulting in a vivid depiction of a community whose mem-
bers do not consider themselves to be “indigenous” or “indians,” although
those in the dominant society might place them in these categories.
 Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

• This book is based on over two decades of work in

Bolivia, and many people have helped me in myriad
ways. I would first like to thank my friends in Wila Kjarka
who received me, helped me, and supported me year after
year since I first arrived in 1989. Remegio Patty and Agus-
tina Alanoca lodged me and welcomed me into their family
during my first stay in Wila Kjarka, a stay that lasted almost
three years. On subsequent visits I became indebted to the
family of Pastor Mendoza and Dominga Mamani as well as
that of Maruja Alwiri and Eustaquio Mamani, who have be-
come dear friends and taught me so much about life in Wila
Kjarka. There is a long list of other people in Wila Kjarka to
whom I owe a debt of gratitude, and I could not possibly
list them all here, but among those are Teodosio Condori,
friend and shaman with whom I have spent hours talking
about his life and calling, and for whom I have a special affec-
tion and to whom this book is dedicated; Pastor Mendoza,
who deserves a second mention in recognition of our close
friendship and many hours of conversation as we herded
together; Francisca Condori, who, like many Wila Kjarke-
ños, has led a difficult and tragic life, but has maintained a
smile and sense of humor nevertheless; Pedro Choque, Wila
 xii • Acknowledgments

Kjarka’s other yatiri, and his son Germán, a kind and intelligent man, to
whom I became close when I first arrived in Wila Kjarka and who died
in a flash flood in 1992; Beatriz Mendoza, Pastor’s daughter, whom I have
known since early childhood and is possessed with a fierce intelligence and
equally fierce ambition, which most recently has taken her to São Paolo
where she currently lives; Regina Oncollo, whose life seems destined to
be filled with tragedy and despair but kindly shared her stories with me;
and to Pastora Alegre, who recounted her life’s ambitions and tribulations
around her cooking fire. Others who deserve mention are Flora Alwiri,
Arminda Chino, Celestino Chino, Edmundo Chino, Ignacio Chino, To-
ribio Chino, Victoria Chino, Zenobio Chino, Estanislao Choque, María
Condori, Marcelo Kopa, Asunta Kuraka, Paulino Laruta, Adalid Mamani,
Dominga Mamani, Juana Mamani, Justino Mamani, Erica Mendoza, Wal-
ter Mendoza, Marcelino Misme, Lucy Patty, Yola Patty, Manuel Qarani,
Pedro Quispe, Raquel Quispe, José Sea, Eugenia Sea, and Ofelia Sea.
In Sorata, Johnny Resnikowsky and Roxana Jordán received me on
many occasions in the wonderful house they had just built and allowed
me to listen to their fabulous record collection, which stopped, as far as
I could gather, in 1973. In my first years they provided me with a much-
needed resting place where the music of The Band and the Doobie Broth-
ers soothed my soul. Salomé and Natalio Arana have remained friends
since the first day I arrived in Sorata, and to Salomé I owe a particular debt
because it was she who first pointed the way to Wila Kjarka for me. It was,
however, Diane Bellomy, who first suggested I visit Wila Kjarka on my
way to Ambaná, and for this I am eternally grateful.
In Villa Esquivel, Fidel and Isabel Figueredo received me with the
greatest warmth on several occasions, and I am also grateful to Juan
Román and Pastor Mamani.
In La Paz, Wolfgang Schüler has for many years, along with his partner
Julia Durango, offered me so much more than a place to stay. It was Wolf-
gang who first suggested I go to Bolivia as we were students of anthropol-
ogy together in London. One of the quirkiest aspects of my time in Bolivia,
and the result of a chance encounter on the train from Iquique, led me to
the comfortable red couch of a house of Germans in Miraflores as my pied-
à-terre in La Paz. Gudrun Birk and Eva Dietz and the other residents of the
house in Calle Jamaica, Dorle Gutowski and Dagmar Adolph, taught me
German and so much more and have become lifelong friends.
Much of the material in this book has benefited from the comments
and criticisms that have been offered on the various occasions I have
 Acknowledgments • xiii

presented my work. I cannot thank all those people here, but I would like
to mention those who have specifically commented, inspired, provoked,
debated the content of the book over its long gestation and in its various
forms, or otherwise helped in preparing the manuscript: I thank Denise
Arnold, Bea Benito, Chetan Bhatt, Rebecca Bria, Pamela Calla, Olivia
Harris, Aida Hernández, Jean Jackson, Sian Lazar, Tony Lucero, Lu-
cinda Platt, Manuela Picq, Esther Lopez, Suzanne van Montfoort, Mike
Roper, Sydney Silverstein, Alison Spedding, Kimberly Theidon, Peter
Wade, Melanie Wright, and Elayne Zorn. Special thanks goes to Michelle
Bigenho and Peter Dorward, who kindly read the complete manuscript
and to whom I am greatly indebted for their many comments and sug-
gestions. I also give thanks to the three anonymous reviewers from Duke
University Press, whose comments greatly helped in sharpening the argu-
ments presented in this book. I owe gratitude, too, to the staff at Duke
University Press, to my editor Valerie Millholland and to Gisela Fosado
for her patience above all. There were many people who were involved in
the production of this book, but I want to especially mention Concepción
McCracken, who was extraordinarily thorough in copyediting the final
manuscript, going far beyond what I would expect from a copyeditor.
I would like to thank my children, Hannelore, Tarik, and Marisa, who
grew up knowing their father would spend four weeks a year in Bolivia
(although sometimes they accompanied me) but, these trips aside, I can-
not claim to have spent weekends or evenings writing this book when I
could have been with them. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
I do, however, thank them for the daily joy they give me and have done
since the day each was born.

An earlier version of chapter 3 was previously published as “Forgetting the

Revolution and Remembering the War: Memory and Violence in High-
land Bolivia,” in History Workshop Journal 67 (2009). Portions of chap-
ter 5 appeared in “Fear and Loathing on the Kharisiri Trail: Alterity and
Identity in the Andes,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6(4)
(2000): 705–20. Some of the material for chapter 6 appeared in “Repro-
ducing Racism: Schooling and Race in Highland Bolivia,” in Race Ethnic-
ity and Education 7(2) (2004): 185–204. An earlier version of chapter 8
appeared as “Sex and the Citizen: Barbies and Beauty Queens in the Age
of Evo Morales,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17(1) (2008):
41–64. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by the author. I am
indebted to Vitaliano Huanca for transcribing many hours of interviews
 xiv • Acknowledgments

and providing an initial translation into Spanish. Many of these transla-

tions were considerably worked subsequently and the responsibility for
the final translations from Aymara to English remains mine. All other
translations remain mine unless otherwise noted.
 I n t ro d u c t i o n

• One evening in August 2011, an unusually cold

August in Bolivia, I sat in the kitchen of my friend
Maruja, as I have done so often over the past twenty years.
Her mother-in-law, Francisca, with whom I have also had
many long conversations, sat in the corner, and I opposite.
Maruja cooked over a wood fire while engaging Francisca
in rapid conversation, touching on scandal, gossip, and the
hardness of life. We all punctuated Francisca’s discourse
with the lament, tataaay! But that was merely the appro-
priate response to the rise and fall of her speech; no one
was really aggrieved. On this occasion her new daughter-
in-law was there with Maruja’s grandson. Everyone spoke
in Aymara, an indigenous language of the Andes, and
everyone—the anthropologist notwithstanding—was
dressed in traditional indian fashion: large pollera skirts and
long black braids. That is until Maruja’s daughter, Yaquita,
walked in wearing trousers, sporting a modern hairstyle.
At one point Maruja’s cell phone rang, and we took turns
speaking to her husband, Eustaquio, who was away working
in the lower valleys for several weeks. The heat of the fire
and the presence of a happy baby warmed the atmosphere
 2 • Introduction
of what any casual observer would readily identify as an indigenous fam-
ily in an indigenous village.
But what does it mean to be indigenous? And what does it mean to
be indigenous in Bolivia, which has discriminated against indians in the
past but recently elected an indigenous president? Above all, this book
focuses on the question of what it means to be indigenous to indigenous
people themselves, not only when they are running for office or march-
ing in protest but especially when they are in the small spaces of their
lives, when they are lamenting their lot, cooing with their babies, cook-
ing in their kitchens, or talking to their husbands who are far away. These
questions cannot be answered by asking someone “what does it mean to
you to be indigenous?” Such a question is almost always a waste of time,
not the least because there is no word for indigenous in Aymara. How-
ever, other insights and other answers may be gleaned by spending time
with people as they work, cook, and talk and allow you to enter the warm,
dark, intimate spaces of their kitchens and their lives. It is here that one
can learn about how abstract concepts such as race, sex, and history are
lived in reality and what it means to be indigenous. It is important, too,
to recognize and understand the broader context of indigenous identity
since the people of the village of Wila Kjarka, where Maruja’s kitchen is
situated, are most certainly not isolated from the political and economic
currents of the nation.
In December 2005 Evo Morales became the first indigenous presi-
dent to be elected in Bolivia—and indeed in Latin America in modern
times—and he did so, moreover, with an unprecedented clear majority of
the votes: a feat he repeated with an even greater majority in December
2009. It appeared to many observers then, as it does now, that for the first
time since the Inkas’ defeat, indigenous people are once again in power in
the Andes. There can be no doubt that indigenous people and indigenous
issues have become increasingly prominent in recent decades, as has been
widely commented (e.g., Albó 1991; Wearne 1996). From Mexico to Chile
indigenous people have been formally recognized in the constitutions
of their countries (e.g., Colombia), have formed national governments
(e.g., Ecuador), and have generally become much more visible in national
politics.
The move toward greater recognition of indigenous people comes not
only from activists themselves but from international agencies. Perhaps
the most significant event has been the recognition of indigenous people
by the International Labour Organization, whose Resolution 169 has for
 Introduction • 3

the first time given them a status in international law. The World Bank,
too, in the 1990s “discovered” indigenous people and developed a series
of projects aimed at “ethnodevelopment” targeted toward indigenous
people. Countless ngos, in turn, followed the World Bank by focusing
their efforts on indigenous people’s economic and political development.
And in 2008 the United Nations published a Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples.
One of the key features of the efflorescence of indigenous sensibility
is its global nature. When the Merana of Indonesia (Tsing 1993) or the
San of Botswana (Lee 2001) argue for their rights to land or resources on
the basis of their indigeneity, they do so because being indigenous has
a global currency that ngos and governments recognize (see also de la
Cadena and Starn 2007).
In fact these processes exemplify well what Margaret Keck and Kath-
ryn Sikking (1998) describe as the boomerang effect in relation to hu-
man rights discourses. In this case, however, groups of people all over the
world learn the language of global indigeneity (often from local ngos)
and use it to lobby external agencies that, in turn, put pressure or exercise
influence on national governments. In many countries, indigenous peo-
ple are greatly marginalized politically; indeed, political marginality may
be a key feature of indigeneity. One of the few ways people can influence
political processes is through international agencies. In this way, concepts
of indigeneity circulate and recirculate back to local groups that, in turn,
may tailor their political language or even develop indigenous symbols
and practices to better achieve their aims.
This may sound instrumental, but culture has never existed independ-
ent of political frameworks. In a recent work, Tony Lucero (2008) dem-
onstrates how indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador have had
different trajectories because they operate in different political terrains.
For those of us who are uneasy with the facile assumption that indigenous
movements can be understood simply as political representations of in-
digenous people, Lucero’s work provides an important antidote. He most
certainly does not take an indigenous identity as somehow given, of hav-
ing suffered a period of latency only to be awakened by indigenous poli-
tics, as if “ ‘real’ ethnic identities seemed simply to be awaiting the right
conditions in order to emerge, almost geologically, through the cracks of
shifting political formations” (2008: 15). In his careful examination of a
wide range of groups he shows how history, region, class, and religion are
critical elements in understanding how concerns come to be articulated
 4 • Introduction
in terms of specifically indigenous identities. In some cases one might
even say the indigenous movement has formed indigenous identity. This
is not to say that indigenous people are cynically manipulated or shrewdly
opportunistic but, rather, that a series of dialogues are taking place among
a wide range of people, out of which an indigenous identity and move-
ment can emerge. Lucero offers his readers a vision of pragmatic actors
who are nevertheless embedded in historical social relations and who
have a long history of being discriminated for their cultural practices. For
Lucero, “indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia are all genuine
expressions of historical and political realities, yet they have been imag-
ined and articulated in different ways” (2008: 111).
Changing political landscapes open up spaces for particular types of
cultural expressions. In recent years I have been conducting fieldwork in
the village of Khonkho on the Bolivian altiplano where people have used
the excavation of a pre-Inka settlement to re-create traditions and revital-
ize political structures in order to push for greater control over their lives.
All of this, of course, occurs in the context of Morales’s victory and the
growing legitimacy of indigenous symbols (Canessa 2007). Aside from
the case of Tiwanaku, the nation’s principal archaeological site, these ac-
tivities, now widespread, would have been unimaginable only a few years
ago, as would indeed have been Morales’s victory as an indigenous presi-
dent. The process by which indigeneity came to be so prominent in con-
temporary Bolivia is beyond the scope of this book (although, see Hylton
and Thomson 2007; Lucero 2008), but it is important to remember that
indigeneity is not an identity that is simply given; it did not lay dormant
and suddenly emerge in the 1990s as a cultural and political force. Much
of this has to do with the failure of class politics in the 1970s and 1980s and
neoliberal reforms (Kohl and Farthing 2006) as well as the cultural turn
globally.
Indigeneity is therefore highly contingent; indigenous identities are,
moreover, thoroughly imbricated with gendered, racial, and linguistic
identities and informed by a historical consciousness. In this book I ex-
plore these multiple identities of a community in the Bolivian highlands,
through their own lived experiences and their own voices rather than the
lens of globalized concepts and discourses. This perspective contrasts
with those of others in Bolivia and elsewhere who read indigenous iden-
tity through its manifestations in public and political mobilizations. These
are certainly important perspectives, but they deny a voice to those peo-
ple who are unable or unwilling to articulate their identities in the public
 Introduction • 5

domain, whose identities and allegiances, moreover, are often taken for
granted by indigenous politicians and scholars of indigenous movements
alike. Such a perspective raises questions not only about indigenous poli-
tics but also about the very nature of indigenous identity.
In the community of Wila Kjarka, the majority of women and many
men are monolingual Aymara speakers whose economic and ritual prac-
tices show considerable continuity with the past. Whereas there is some
discussion about the indigenous identity of people who live in towns
and cities and lead modern lives, most observers would readily and un-
ambiguously describe the residents of Wila Kjarka as indigenous. The
people of Wila Kjarka, however, do not. In fact, they positively reject the
term. When speaking Aymara they describe themselves as people from
Wila Kjarka (Wila Kjarkiri) or jaqi, a word that quite simply means peo-
ple. In calling themselves people they share a feature of self-designation
with many—perhaps the majority of—indigenous people in the Ameri-
cas. But the jaqi are not just people; a better translation is perhaps proper
people (cf. Pitarch 2010: 204). The jaqi are not the same as those who live
in towns and cities and live very different lives from them; one can see
that the people Wila Kjarkeños describe as jaqi are, broadly speaking, the
same people whom other Bolivians or anthropologists might describe as
indigenous or indian. These words are not, however, synonymous, and
one of the central tasks of this book is to explore what jaqi means to the
people of Wila Kjarka and how the term differs from indigenous or indian.
It is now so established as to be commonplace to note that the dis-
tinction between indians and nonindians is fluid, historically contin-
gent, and arbitrary (see Larson and Harris 1995). Debates continue as to
whether this distinction is best seen in class terms (e.g., Friedlander 1975)
or more fundamentally in terms of cultural practices and beliefs (e.g., Al-
len 1988; Skar 1982), or indeed both simultaneously (Gose 1994 and van
den Berghe and Primov 1997).1 Between these positions lie those of many
other scholars who note the shifting semantic field of the category indian
in geographical and historical contexts (e.g., Abercrombie 1991 and Harris
1995, among others). What I offer here is an analysis of identity through
the lives of people whose race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality continue
coming to the fore and then retreating; no single identity is constantly sa-
lient, and moreover each informs the other. Yet all are circumscribed by a
particular historical, political, and economic position that can be glossed
as indigenous. To take a particular example, the relationship of a married
couple in Wila Kjarka exists in a context where being indian inflects the
 6 • Introduction
most intimate of spaces (I explore this example more fully in chapter 7).
Terminology, as a consequence, is slippery and problematic.

I n d i a n s , I n d i g e n o u s , Ay m a r a s

The term indian is obviously one of European origin, and in its Ameri-
can usage denoted a simple power relationship between Europeans and a
large number of diverse people whom they had the power to collectively
assemble under a single term: Before 1492, there were no indians in the
Americas. Indianness was not only created by the colonial state and so-
ciety but perpetuated and re-created by its republican successors (Aber-
crombie 1992). This is not to say, however, that indians share completely
these ideas of what it is to be an indian. They have little choice about the
inequalities of power and the structures of underinvestment, urban bias,
and exploitation that make them indians, but this does not mean that they
understand this difference in the same way as the participants in hegem-
onic discourse would have it. On the one hand, the boundary between
indians and nonindians is created through economic, political, and his-
torical structures that construct indians as poor, backward, and culturally
retarded; on the other hand, it is created through ritual practice, which
constructs nonindians as amoral, alienated, and culturally bereft. The
word Wila Kjarkeños use to designate whites is q’ara, which in other cir-
cumstances means “bare” or “peeled” (Gose 1994b: 21; Isbell 1978: 67); in
other words, q’ara are stripped of their humanity.
Over the past centuries, although the status of the indian and the way
that identity has been understood have changed, the term has always de-
noted a difference in status and power and, moreover, nonindians have
been the ones to decide who is and is not an indian. In this book, indian is
used principally when talking from an etic—that is, external—perspective.
One of the central issues of indian identity is that precisely because it de-
notes a historically marginalized and oppressed people, few actually want
to be indian, even if they recognize such a status. It is—a few radical poli-
ticians notwithstanding—largely a designation offered by others and is
rarely embraced by people not actively involved in indigenous politics.
To call someone an indio to their face in Bolivia today—and indeed,
pretty much anywhere else in Latin America—is to insult them. Behind
that term are centuries of images, discourses, and unequal power relations
that are profoundly racist—a complex racism to be sure, one that changes
over time and is not usually reducible to the simple concepts of blood
 Introduction • 7

and genetic inheritance with which northern readers are most familiar.
A significant proportion of this book is given to describing this racism in
its many forms to explore the ways people live with, resist, absorb, and
even reproduce it.
The people of Wila Kjarka do not live in a binary world with white rac-
ists on one side and indian victims on the other, although at times it may
appear to be so. One of the more invidious aspects of these centuries of
racism is that it has become so pervasive that people have long stopped
recognizing it is there—one of the consequences of five hundred years of
colonialism. I am not simply suggesting that because of the long history
of racial mixing in Latin America and the existence of multiple categories
of racial differentiation, a stable white/indian racial binary does not ex-
ist. Nor am I arguing that somehow Bolivia is less racist than countries
where the boundaries seem clear and ambiguous. Rather, the argument I
am putting forward here is that precisely because there is no clear social
binary, the categories white and indian are always relative: One can suffer
racism for coming from a small town and consequently being tainted by
the indianness of surrounding peasants and still visit a profound racism
upon the people one lives with, even family members. One is more or less
white; more or less indian.
This raises the question of why I use the word indian so regularly in
the book over the more politically correct indigenous. Indigenous appears
as a much more neutral descriptor and erases the power relations that
are inescapable when talking about indians (cf. Weismantel 2001: xxxiii).
Indigenous can roll off the tongue without too much reflection, as the
speaker will be sure that no one is likely to be offended. It is for this very
reason that I use the word indian: it jars; it does—or should—make one
think; and more than any other term, it refers to a long history of colonial
oppression. I also write the word with a lower case “i.” In the American
context, indian is an ethnic, not national term and therefore I follow the
usage of writing this word in lower case in the same way as other such
categories (e.g., mestizo, black, mulatto) (see Wade 1997: 121).
Indígena, in contrast, has come to have a very inclusive reach. There are
certainly some positive aspects to this term, not the least of which is the
greater respect accorded indigenous people qua indigenous people, but it
can obscure the long history of oppression of one people by another. An
example of this historical and ecumenical indigeneity was offered to me
by Gualberto Choque, an Aymara leader, in an interview in 2005: “And
so the white people, the black people, and the Aymara people should be
 8 • Introduction
united. Once we are united we will come to an agreement. And we will
call this ‘indigenous.’ ”2 Previously, during a public presentation, he de-
clared, “We are all indigenous now,” which echoes the twentieth-century
voices of many who declared new mestizo nations across the Americas.
This inclusive mestizaje, though lauding an indigenous past, was furiously
assimilationist when it came to an indigenous present; indians were ex-
cluded from this new national imaginary until they became deracinated
and adopted mestizo ways. The irony is that this modern ecumenical
indigenism3 will have the same effect of obscuring the historical injus-
tices visited upon particular marginalized peoples. If we are all indig-
enous, then it becomes difficult to view these historical injustices clearly
(Canessa 2006b).
The radical Aymara leader Felipe Quispe was also in attendance at
Gualberto Choque’s presentation, and some days later I asked him about
what Choque had said, if it was true that in Bolivia “we are all indigenous.”
He responded:
No, not in such clear terms, no. We are not all indios . . . some people are
rich, others live in poverty, that is how we are; but it is well known that
those of us who have this skin color work everywhere. We work in the
mines, we work in the altiplano, we work on the hot earth in the valleys,
scratching [a living] from the earth; it is we, we who feed those who live
in the cities; it is we who sweep the streets. It is we who serve the q’aras
[whites], bringing up their children; it is we who fetch their cooking water
for them, wash their dirty clothes, take care of their children; we who are
the soldiers in the barracks; our people, it is we who have stars [on our
chests] . . . They are ministers and presidents; they are ambassadors. For us
who work down here there is nothing: they do not allow us to take charge;
they always keep us down, truly, they walk all over us. That is why I want to
tell you that no, we are not all indians; they live in great comfort.4
Quispe did not immediately use the term I used in the question, in-
dígena, and, indeed, the one Choque used, but immediately grasped
the problem that such ecumenical indigenism implies; he corrected me
and began using the term indians. Whereas being indigenous is a posi-
tive identification that can be widely embraced, Quispe is clearly aware
that being an indian is to be one of the downtrodden: He explains the
term indian in terms of race (mentioning skin color) as well as class (the
occupations indians typically hold); thus, he offers a succinct analysis
of indian oppression wherein racial identification serves to maintain a
 Introduction • 9

disadvantageous class position. In the rest of the interview he makes the

long historical process of this oppression absolutely clear. So even though
he named his party el Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti, he has a much
longer historical engagement with the struggle of indians, rather than in-
digenous people of contemporary discourse, as he outlines in the book he
wrote in prison, Tupak Katari vive y vuelve—carajo (Tupak Katari Lives
and Will Return. Damn It!).5
Quispe is a passionate, even angry, politician, and although his political
career has been eclipsed by Evo Morales, in the 1990s and 2000s he was
the most inspiring and successful indigenous leader. He cites as his ma-
jor inspiration the indigenous intellectual Fausto Reinaga, who for more
than two decades was virtually the sole torch bearer for indian rights and
founded el Partido Indio de Bolivia (the Bolivian Indian Party). For him,
indio was an oppressive term that denoted the colonial relationship al-
luded to above. He quite simply loathed the term indígena (Canessa 2010;
Reinaga 1969) and argued forcefully that it mischievously obscured the
oppressive conditions under which indians have lived for centuries. He
titled his major work La Revolución India (The Indian Revolution) and
argued that “as indians they oppressed us and as indians we will liberate
ourselves” (Reinaga 1969).
Felipe Quispe is the most obvious inheritor of Reinaga’s mantle, al-
though Evo Morales, too, cites him as his greatest political inspiration.
I had seen Quispe speak publically on a number of occasions and had
met him before, but when we spoke alone at dawn on a June morning in
2005, I was surprised to find how much I liked this firebrand of a politi-
cian whom so many of his detractors accuse of arrogance and racism. He
seemed not to have slept that night and was wearing a thick jacket, which
I guessed served as a bed for any rest he had taken. He had forgotten our
appointment but nevertheless spoke to me for almost an hour. He was
certainly tired that morning, but what came across clearly to me was that
he was weary of the racism that he and his people have been facing since
the arrival of the Spanish, leaving me with little doubt that his experience
of being treated like an indio fuels his passion for politics.
The people of Wila Kjarka do not often use the term indio, but when
they do they refer precisely to their status as members of the poor and op-
pressed classes. They don’t want to be indios, but they are perfectly aware
that they are; so when using the word indian, I do not intend to insult peo-
ple but, rather, recognize their historical subaltern status, akin to Quispe’s
usage of the term in the interview above. It is especially important, in the
 10 • Introduction
context of the efflorescence of self-ascribed indigenous identity leading
up to Evo Morales’s election, to remember and recognize that whereas
there are many urban people and intellectuals who embrace their newly
found indigenous identity, there are still many people who are regarded
as indios—even by those who proclaim an indigenous identity. This may
seem paradoxical, or even perverse, but it is simply that being indigenous
can mean little more than taking up a position against globalization, or
embracing a particular kind of progressive politics, or even easily asserting
a connection with national authenticity. One can do this from relatively
comfortable circumstances, and I know several white middle-class left-
ist intellectuals who describe themselves as indigenous. I am not arguing
that this is always so but, rather, that one can be comfortably indigenous;
one can never be comfortably indian. Who would want to be an indio?
This raises and intriguing problem rarely considered: If one recognizes
the right to maintain one’s indian culture, is the converse also true? Does
one have the right not to be an indian? And what does it mean to recog-
nize this right? Some of these themes are explored in chapter 6.

Methods and Methodologies

Orin Starn (1991) in the 1990s offered an excoriating critique of ethnog-

raphies, especially Peruvian ones, which focused on communities while
excluding broader political concerns, as if these did not matter. In his
words, these anthropologists blinded themselves to the growing unrest
and “missed the revolution” that was about to be unleashed in the form of
the Maoist uprising known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path); and he
was also highly critical of anthropologists’ contributions to Andeanism—
the view of Andean cultures through a romanticizing, if not essential-
izing, occidental lens. Although one might argue that Starn somewhat
overstated his case, his criticisms have been important because they pro-
foundly disrupted the assumptions many scholars had been making about
the cultural and political isolation of indigenous communities.
An outstanding example of a response to Starn’s criticisms is Mi-
chelle Bigenho’s work, in particular her book Sounding Indigenous (2002).
Bigenho explores music production in two indigenous communities, in
the capital city of La Paz, in France, and, in later work, in Japan (2007,
2012). She explores the way indigenous authenticity is a variable cur-
rency: People, for example, demand a certain iconic indigenous Bolivian-
ness in France, but one that is frustratingly ignorant of the variation in
 Introduction • 11

indigenous cultures within Bolivia, thus demonstrating how indigeneity

as a cultural marker is often imposed from the outside as I explore further
in chapter 6. Bigenho’s (2002) multisited ethnography allows her to ex-
plore the way indigeneity in general and indigenous music specifically can
mean different things in different contexts. The people of the community
of Yura appear much more confident in their indigenous identity despite
being much more integrated into the national economy and bureaucratic
structures, whereas the people of the much less accessible community of
Toropalca are nostalgic for their lost traditions and are concerned about
becoming increasingly Spanish-speaking. Yureños are unconcerned
about issues of cultural authenticity, even as they practice what outside
observers may see as a much more authentic culture; Toropalqueños are
ambivalent about their place in the world and have a sense of loss and
declining authenticity. Such studies are invaluable in showing the variety
of indigenous experiences and how indigeneity is often a power trope as
marginal communities engage with state bureaucracies, local elites, and
global culture.
Even as the chapters that follow offer, quite unapologetically, a study of
a village community, this book is by no means blind to the broader con-
texts in which this community exists. This is not to say, however, that the
book presents an image of a community isolated from the outside world,
much less does it purport to offer an exposition of Andean culture. Quite
the opposite: This book concerns itself mainly with how the members
of an apparently isolated community are situated within wider regional,
national, and international networks of power and cultural meanings.
Rather than romanticizing the experiences of men and women in Wila
Kjarka, I show their lives to be complex, conflictive, messy, and contradic-
tory, rather like people’s lives anywhere else in the world. I do not offer a
view of village life under a microscope; I offer, rather, a view through a
telescope of what the world looks like from the perspectives of people in
a small village and how the world affects their lives.
One could quite easily paint a picture of the community of Wila
Kjarka—high in the mountains, without a road—as an example of an
isolated people leading a traditional life. They are, of course, not isolated.
In fact, they have never been isolated. They have long enjoyed commu-
nication with the highlands and the lowlands and been thoroughly in-
volved in empires European and Andean. The lack of roads, moreover,
only represented isolation in the Andes in the second half of the twentieth
century, when transportation in Bolivia shifted from mules to motorized
 12 • Introduction

Even with the new roads, most people still travel by foot along these paths, many of them
dating to pre-Columbian times.

transport. If anything, road building made Wila Kjarka more isolated, as

it excluded them from the principal transportation network in a way that
had not previously presented itself. Their late-twentieth-century isolation
was only ever relative, however, and throughout this period Wila Kjarke-
ños traveled, went to school, and listened to the radio.
The people of Wila Kjarka are not passive recipients of influences from
beyond their community. In fact, not only do they contest some of these,
they also generate their own meanings and understandings. Shane Greene
has called this process one in which indigeneity is “customized” (2009).
Often these understandings of, for example, race, religion, and gender,
seem to connect seamlessly with those prevalent in the broader culture,
but on closer inspection they are sometimes quite different. To put it sim-
ply: Wila Kjarkeños may identify themselves and others as different from
dominant members of the nation and, in turn, the dominant members
 Introduction • 13

of the nation may see the people of Wila Kjarka and others like them as
distinct, but how each understands this distinction may be radically dif-
ferent. The constant and unresolved dialectic between metropolitan and
rural, hispanic and indigenous, past and present, and so on, is the core
substance of the book. So even if this work is almost entirely based on
ethnography in a single site, its subject is infinitely broader.

Getting There

James Clifford has criticized anthropological accounts for beginning with

a “getting there” story in which the anthropologist climbs the mountain,
paddles up the river, or arrives by boat to his isolated community and
then disappears from the pages of the book. Readers who are particularly
averse to “getting there” stories may wish to skip the next few pages but
may also wish to consider the one or two methodological implications
of conducting research in a particular village and the basis for the rela-
tionships I formed there. Moreover, although I am not absent from the
subsequent pages, my presence is certainly light. Where my relationship
with my interlocutor is relevant, I give that context but do not assume
the reader to be interested in me much beyond that; this is, after all, an
anthropological monograph not an autobiography.
In December 1989, after having spent a couple of months in La Paz
sorting out paperwork and trying to learn Aymara, I was looking for a
field site for my doctoral research project. I was utterly unprepared for
this, and no one had told me how to go about it. I had previously spent
two weeks getting lost in the province of Licoma, searching for a good
location to undertake my studies. I had decided to find a community that
was neither on the altiplano, the highland plain, nor in the deep valleys,
the yungas. I left Licoma with a hand-drawn map, and a few days later I was
absolutely and totally lost. Heading downhill with the idea that I would
eventually get to a stream, and then a river, and then some habitable place,
I eventually made it out, but I didn’t see anyone for several days, much less
find a community that welcomed me. The few people I did see that week
regarded me with suspicion.
On my second reconnoitering trip I was a little more prepared and
had a copy of a military map and a destination: Ambaná. I thought of
spending two weeks on this trip. I started in the village of Sorata where Sa-
lomé Arana pointed me to Wila Kjarka, and off I went with an impossibly
heavy backpack whose contents included a robust and reliable Nikon fe2
Wila Kjarka with Illampu in the background.
 Introduction • 15

camera, three lenses, a shortwave radio, tent, cooking gear, food for two
weeks, and several novels, including García Márquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude. I was clearly prepared to be alone for a while.
I arrived by nightfall in Wila Kjarka and asked to pitch my tent. That
night I was visited by the curious, who told me that the following day they
were playing soccer against the combined villages of Thikata and Villa Es-
quivel. They were one man short; would I play? I have never been much
of a soccer player, but this was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
The following day we walked over to the soccer field of Thikata, which,
many years later, I realized was the main square of a pre-Columbian6 set-
tlement and which had a drop of about a thousand meters on three, al-
most four sides: The field was connected to the mountain by a narrow
stretch of land. The perimeter of the field was guarded by small boys who
would leap after the balls that crossed the boundary and usually caught
them before they went too far down the mountain.
I saw myself as a curious mascot rather than a valuable player, but life
is strange: As I was running toward the goal, the ball came my way, co-
incidentally hitting my boot and barreling into the goal. I had only once
before in my life, when I was nine, scored a goal, and never again since that
day. Our victory occasioned a celebration that night, and I contributed
toward the beers, but the following day I was in no condition whatsoever
to continue my journey, as every bone in my body was stiff and aching.
Some of my soccer companions took me on a walk. As it happens, the
three men—a year or two older than I—were Germán Choque, Zenobio
Chino, and Pastor Mendoza, who were destined to become my friends.
We didn’t get very far as I was so exhausted, but they took me far enough
to see my route to Ambaná.
They led me to the ruins of Chullpa Patana and pointed toward the
distant mountains that were brooding under heavy clouds in a rather ne-
farious manner, which immediately reminded me of a scene from Lord of
the Rings (even long before Peter Jackson’s films) as the brave hobbits look
toward Mordor. My companions appeared to be of the opinion that, even
if there were not legions of orcs between me and my destination, it was
certainly a perilous route. “In that village,” I was told, “they will rob you
and take everything you own. That one there, there they will throw stones
at you; there, further on, they will steal your body fat; and there they will
kill you.” They were, needless to say, not very encouraging.
I had explained to them that I was keen to learn Aymara and I was look-
ing for a place to do that; that evening someone suggested I stay in the
 16 • Introduction
empty storage area next to the teacher’s house: In Wila Kjarka I would
learn Aymara. I made arrangements to return and, when I did, Remegio
Patty offered me the empty storeroom next to his house. For the next
three years, I stayed there whenever I was in Wila Kjarka. To this day I
have not set foot in Ambaná, my original destination, and have visited
Wila Kjarka every year but two ever since.
Wila Kjarka was ideal: It was a community of two hundred and twenty
people at just over 3,000 meters above sea level with a fabulous view of
both the Illampu-Ancohuma massif and the Amazon basin. One might
think it frivolous to consider the view, but, after all, I was going to spend
quite some time there and would much rather gaze upon majestic snow-
clad mountains and the Amazon basin than contemplate the perpetually
darkened mountains that my companions indicated. It was also a few
hours’ walk from the road to La Paz and a couple of hours to the provin-
cial capital of Sorata, which had a market and mail service once a week.
I did not know it then, but Wila Kjarka, more than many other vil-
lages in the area, is unusually cohesive with many young people and their
children—many of the surrounding villages were and are on their way to
becoming dominated by the very old. Wila Kjarka is fortunate in having
land that goes from 2,300 meters above sea level to over 4,000, and this
allows them to grow products across a wide ecological range.
Wila Kjarka thus became the site for my PhD research on cultural val-
ues, and since then my principal source of data on religion, gender, and
identities. Spending so much time in one place has advantages and disad-
vantages. A disadvantage is that I don’t get a very representative sample;
an advantage is that I get to know a small community very well indeed,
which has allowed me to learn things and ask questions that would be
impossible in other contexts. It has also allowed me to see children grow
up and adults grow old.
One of the people I have come to know well over the years is Teodosio
Condori. Teodosio, I was told, was 100 years old when I first arrived in
Wila Kjarka in 1989, and in 2011 I was told again he was 100 years old. There
is certainly something quite ancient and timeless about Teodosio. Even in
1989 there was no member of the village who could remember Teodosio
as anything other than an adult—that is, he was at least a generation older
than anyone else. He was an adult during the Chaco War (1932–35) and
already had children, so he was possibly born about 1915 but perhaps even
before. I was drawn to Teodosio for a number of reasons: As the oldest
member of the community he could tell me much about its history; and
 Introduction • 17

as the shaman, he was a font of knowledge about the ancestral spirits and
healing; he also seemed to enjoy the long chats we had about topics that
ranged from childbirth to offerings and was always keen to read my coca
leaves.
In many ways this ancient monolingual shaman is quintessentially in-
digenous, and yet I learned that Teodosio doesn’t quite fit the model of
the pure-blooded indian immersed in the ways of the ancestors. To begin
with, Teodosio Condori was not his original name. For much of his child-
hood and adult life he went by the name of Mendoza, the name given to
him by his mother. His “natural” father was the overseer of the estate, a
creole—that is, a white man—from the town of Ilabaya who, as was so
common in those days, had sexual relations with a young indian woman
who, in turn, at the age of fourteen, bore a son whom she called Teodo-
sio. In other words, according to the conventional understanding of race
mixing, Teodosio is a mestizo; he has much more European heritage than
many—perhaps most—people self-identified or designated mestizo in
the capital city of La Paz and elsewhere.
Teodosio is an expert in the ways of the ancestors, and his reputation
reaches all the way to La Paz. The world of the chthonic spirits is con-
trasted with that of the Christian god whose son/sun is inimical to many
of the rituals Teodosio performs (when I asked people about Jesus, many
pointed to the sun in the sky). Yet Teodosio was not always so closely
associated with autochthonous religion; as a child he attended the Lu-
theran missionary school at the bottom of the mountain and was a believ-
ing Christian. These Lutherans were, moreover, from the United States
and evidently did not speak much Spanish. Teodosio has received more
education in English than in Spanish, although today he speaks neither
language.
Had Teodosio made different life choices or had different opportuni-
ties been open to him, he could today be a light-skinned Protestant mes-
tizo with an English language education—a far cry from an indigenous
Aymara shaman. In fact, in Bolivia’s current ethnic and racial categori-
zation, he would almost be at the opposite pole. The fact that he is not,
and is unambiguously recognized as indigenous, even quintessentially
so, illustrates the ways that indigenous identity is neither simple nor
given. Teodosio also made some choices: He changed his name to the
more indigenous “Condori” after the condor, which is a messenger of the
gods, in the way that many people seeking to ascend the racial hierarchy
change their names from indian ones to more Spanish-sounding ones.
 18 • Introduction
The important point, however, is that Teodosio’s unambiguous indig-
enous identity is not based on ancestry or “blood” but, rather, in a way
of life that in some measure he has chosen for himself. The telling case of
Teodosio Condori underlines the way ethnic and racial identity in Wila
Kjarka is produced through the processes of living and cannot be taken
for granted.
Rather, as Teodosio made a decision to change his name, I have had to
make decisions about names of people and places. Wila Kjarka is not the
real name of this community and the decision to give it a pseudonym is
one that was particularly difficult. Wila Kjarkeños themselves would have
liked a book to appear with the real name of the community and their
own real names, but the nature of some of the material I recount here has
the potential for causing people some very serious problems, so I have an-
onymized the name of the community, the names of other communities
in the area, and the names of many of the people who appear in this book.
I took the name from a real toponym on the territory of the community.
Wila Kjarka means the red or bloody outcrop of rock, and indeed there
are many red rocks around the community. Its neighbor was given the
name Jankho Kjarka, which means “white outcrop of rock,” which is also
suitable to the kind of rock found there.
I am often asked how I was accepted into the community. The short
answer is that insofar as I am “accepted” in Wila Kjarka at all, it is because
of fictive kinship, labor, and commensality.
As is the case with many anthropologists in the Andes, I became god-
father to a number of children. The relationship of compadrazgo is an im-
portant one for members of the community, for it is a way of extending
their ties of obligation. People may choose a wealthy outsider as a padrino
(godfather) whom they hope will give financial and political aid when
needed, but this kind of godparent is often remote and not always acces-
sible. There is therefore a risk to this sort of godfather. Often people bal-
ance these kinds of godparents with members from the village who will
give practical daily assistance but will have few resources. Anthropologists
combine both: They are wealthy and notionally powerful outsiders with
considerable resources, but they can also be a source of free labor. In return
my compadres would be obliged to defend me if there were ever conflict be-
tween me and others within the community. My compadrazgo ties give me
important fictive kin links with the village and potential political support.
As mentioned above, my labor activities (which followed from my
kinship ties) allowed me to perform tasks closely associated with a
 Introduction • 19

rural indigenous identity and certainly undermined the expectations of

how wealthy outsiders behave. Similarly, eating with people around their
hearths or sharing in communal meals called wayq’asi as well as sharing
in community rituals gave me a position within the community. These
factors, along with the fact that I return on an annual basis, make it so that
people are now certainly familiar with my presence. I am not suggesting
that anyone in Wila Kjarka has any illusions that I am not a wealthy white
outsider, but my identity is at least ambiguous, and I am not easily assimi-
lated into a clear indian/nonindian distinction. After all, labor, commen-
sality, language, and ritual are the key distinguishing features that separate
jaqi (indians) from q’ara (nonindians), but, as we shall see, they are by no
means the only ones.
Gender is a theme that runs through this book and, at the risk of
stating the obvious, my identity as a man has affected the kinds of data
I collected, but it most certainly did not reduce my observations to an
exclusively male perspective. In my first months and years of research
I spoke mostly to young men who spoke at least some Spanish, but in
subsequent years all my conversations have been in Aymara, and this has
allowed me to have long discussions with women of all ages as well as
men. I must confess, however, that I never achieved the fluency in Ay-
mara I would have liked: Every year I learn a little more but seem to forget
as well. I have also had the opportunity of developing friendships over
many years with women, usually my comadres, who have spoken to me
about a whole range of issues. For many years I was only able to travel
to Bolivia in March/April, when most men are away harvesting rice, so
whereas in the early years of my stays in Wila Kjarka my conversations
were mostly in Spanish and with men, for some time now my conversa-
tions in Wila Kjarka have been exclusively in Aymara and usually with
women (and older men who no longer engage in wage migration). My
gender, although certainly a factor, does not impose an absolute limita-
tion on the kind of data I have collected.
My racial identity has also affected my role as anthropologist. For all
my efforts to minimize its effects, it is clearly a factor in my relationships
with Wila Kjarkeños even if it is not always salient. My whiteness has been
an advantage, however, in talking to people from the mestizo village of
Villa Esquivel, whose members are keen to mark their ethnic and social
difference from the Aymara peasants who surround them. My whiteness
has also been an asset in the provincial capital of Sorata when talk-
ing to the few creoles left who, most likely, would not have made the
 20 • Introduction

Remegio Patty in front of his house, carrying firewood, 1990.

disparaging comments about indians if they had not assumed we shared

a racial identity.
My life in Wila Kjarka was not always pleasant or agreeable. Partici-
pant observation, that cornerstone of anthropological methods since
Malinowski, is variably interpreted by anthropologists. Some difficult
choices have to be made: to live alone and have privacy and independ-
ence but give up witnessing many of the intimacies of daily life. In a sense
my decision was made for me; in offering me a place to stay, Remegio
Patty invited me into his house, and I lived for several years in the store-
room next to the main family room, as would an elder son. In fact, when
Remegio’s son, Ricardo, grew up he occupied that room and I moved in
with another compadre. This meant I could observe all the comings and
goings as well as domestic conversations and quarrels. Since there was no
door between the two rooms, I was also privy to nighttime noises as well.
 Introduction • 21

In those days Remegio and Agustina slept in one bed with the youngest
child; Remegio’s mother, whom we simply called Awicha (grandmother),
slept in the other bed with the next-youngest children; and everyone else
slept on sheepskins on the floor. All went to bed at the same time: sheep-
skins were brought out, outer clothing removed, and then slowly people
settled down to sleep. The smallest children may already have been asleep,
and the others talked until, one by one, everyone was asleep. In more re-
cent years the older children would try and finish their homework by the
light of the kerosene lamp, but when I first went to Wila Kjarka the older
children didn’t go to school.
The idea that I would live with Remegio and Agustina and cook for
myself would have struck them as nothing short of bizarre. Households
have but one hearth, and this is, in fact, probably the clearest definition
of a household unit: those that share a hearth. In the initial months, food
was brought to me in the main room, and I sat and ate alone, as a guest, on
one of the two beds the house possessed. I eventually ended up sharing
my meals with the family in the small, smoky, and cramped kitchen with
no window or chimney, so the smoke just wafts through the wicker roof.
This is the only warm place in the house and a much more pleasant place
to eat than the main room. Not only is it warm, it is also the most intimate
part of the house, where the family sits close together literally and figura-
tively in a way that does not generally occur elsewhere. The kitchen is an
informal and relaxed space, and there I often feel closest to people; people
tell me things in their kitchens they don’t anywhere else.
I was never expected to do field labor in Wila Kjarka, but my daily ac-
tivities revolved around the family’s, so I usually did go out with a hoe or
iron rod for breaking earth and spent the day in the fields with the family
and have continued this pattern in all subsequent visits. Sometimes be-
fore or shortly after breakfast I would visit people I wanted to talk to, but
by midmorning almost everyone was out of their houses so, inasmuch as
there wasn’t anything to do in the village, I went out and learned about
how to farm the way people do in Wila Kjarka. I would sometimes go for
long walks, find a quiet place such as among the Inka ruins of Chullpa Pa-
tana above the village, and read or write, but on most days I accompanied
Remegio, Agustina, and their children. In later years I more or less rotated
between compadres. Not only did I learn how people farm but, next to
kitchens, the fields where during work breaks we ate or chewed coca were
the places I learned the most from people. At these moments people are
relaxed and talk. This was not only an opportunity to ask questions but
 22 • Introduction

Agustina Alanoca cooking.

also a time simply to listen to what people were saying about themselves:
I gained many insights into life in Wila Kjarka by just listening to con-
versations. Very little of my investigations, especially in these early years,
involved interviewing someone with a tape recorder in hand, but rather,
it took participating in daily conversations, even if sometimes attempting
to steer conversations into the direction in which I was most interested.
Wila Kjarkeños, like most people around the world, are not used to be-
ing interviewed—that is, being asked a series of questions and being ex-
pected to answer them on one particular theme. This is a very unnatural
way of conversing. The one exception is the shaman, Teodosio, who, as a
specialist, was quite happy to answer my questions for hours on end. I did
sometimes record conversations, but they were just that—recorded con-
versations, rather than interviews, in the sense that they usually wandered
off the topic I most wanted to talk about, often onto something that turned
out to be much more interesting. What people want to talk about is often
far more compelling than what the anthropologist wants to talk about.
Working with people, however, involved a lot more than the kinds of
conversations I was able to hear or participate in. Working in fields is one
of the major distinctions between the jaqi of Wila Kjarka and the q’aras
who live in Sorata and the cities. As a European, I was a q’ara par excel-
lence, and it was made quite clear to me in my first days and weeks that I
was expected to spend my time resting: “We are off to the fields. You will
 Introduction • 23

stay here and rest.” Whenever I offered to help with anything, I was simi-
larly told to rest. Q’aras, in the eyes of Wila Kjarkeños, spend a lot of time
sitting or lying about, and they certainly don’t do physical labor, so seeing
me day after day in the fields caused a certain amount of comment. My
blisters, somewhat to my chagrin, were treated with the greatest mirth,
but it was commented again and again that I would work in the fields all
day, and even many years after I last plowed a field with a team of oxen
it was said that I was good at plowing. The latter is perhaps particularly
significant since it is the signature productive activity of men. Most agri-
cultural tasks are gendered, but plowing is one of the very few agricultural
activities that women almost never do. My agricultural activity jarred with
their conceptions of ethnicity and race, and my plowing in particular sug-
gested a very jaqi type of masculinity.
In a rather similar fashion, the fact that I climbed up to Wila Kjarka car-
rying my own pack undermined their preconceptions about what q’aras
do. For many years and until very recently (see the final chapter), people
weighed my pack when I arrived and commented approvingly how heavy
it was, and a few days later someone would tell me how much weight I
carried up the mountain, or it would be a topic of conversation within my
hearing. Wila Kjarkeños, men and women, regularly carry two, three, or
four arrobas on their back (an arroba is about 12 kgs), so my two or three
arrobas on a sophisticated Western backpack, which spreads the load
evenly across my back, chest, and hips, is nothing to write home about. In
fact, it feels a little like cheating: So many Wila Kjarkeños—much older,
smaller, and less well fed than I—simply wrap up their load in an awayu
cloth and tie it around their upper chest and trot off up the mountain.
What is significant about the fact that I carry my pack up the mountain
is not just the weight but the fact that I do so at all. Wila Kjarkeños have
quite simply never seen q’aras carrying anything other than a small back-
pack: Teachers, priests, engineers, agronomists, nurses, and everyone
else gets their heavy loads carried for them. This is what q’aras have been
doing with indians for five hundred years. Some years ago I worked as a
very junior research assistant for a senior anthropologist in another part
of Bolivia, and I witnessed a mestiza schoolteacher summon an old man
to carry the anthropologist’s backpack to the town. We each had our own
backpacks, but my boss7—as she was then—was weary and did not want
to carry hers any further. The teacher did not make a request but sim-
ply gave him the instruction, added some of her own goods to the load,
and also told him to carry a basket of eggs, admonishing him that there
 24 • Introduction
would be hell to pay if he broke any. I felt rather sickened by this, not least
because the monolingual Quechua-speaking man was quite elderly, and
even more so because the anthropologist paid him only a couple of pesos
for the two-hour walk. It struck me that everyone seemed to think that
this kind of exchange was perfectly natural. Indians, after all, carry loads
for q’aras.
In her discussion of race in the Andes, Mary Weismantel (2001) has
demonstrated the myriad ways race adheres to substances and is articu-
lated through them, but these substances are unlike the tropes of blood
and genetics that are so familiar to Westerners. In a similar vein, Ben Or-
love (1998) has shown how earth—the earth of roads, people’s houses,
pottery, and floors—serves to index racial difference between indians and
mestizos. Race becomes inscribed, too, in short stature (due to malnutri-
tion), tanned skin, and poor teeth, and the muscles that carry, feet that
tread, and backs that bear loads. As Weismantel puts it, “race is indeed
socially fabricated—and the construction site is the zone of interaction
between our skin, flesh, bones, and the world around us” (2001: 188).
The curiosity of a gringo carrying a load is similar to that experienced by
David Roediger in Africa when Ghanaians cheerfully pointed out the in-
congruity of seeing a white man walk (Roediger 1994: 5, in Weismantel
2001: 188). It is a jarring image, one that seems to invite or even require
comment because not only is it out of place but undermines what other-
wise appears as an incontestable and axiomatic truth: indian bodies carry
loads; white bodies do not. In Sorata and La Paz one regularly sees indian
men, often quite elderly indian men, carry heavy loads onto and off trucks
and across markets, and this is one of the least well-paid jobs anyone can
do. It is not surprising then that one of the very first things any upwardly
mobile person will do is ensure someone else carries the load.
In his celebrated film La Nación Clandestina writer-director Jorge San-
jinés illustrates the white/indian relationship in a scene in which indians
have to carry a group of white people in their finery across a river, as in-
deed they used to do fifty years ago at the crossing near Villa Esquivel.
Wila Kjarkeños even today remember with particular bitterness the way
whites and mestizos crossed the river, even if they themselves were not
compelled to do the carrying; it somehow encapsulates the brutal exploi-
tation of indians before the National Revolution of 1952. This image and
memory retains its power not only because it is such an obvious meta-
phor for exploitation more broadly, but surely because the indian do-
ing the carrying is obliged to physically feel the white person’s body on
 Introduction • 25

his shoulders. No distancing is possible in this kind of exploitation, and

there is an unavoidable intimacy that immediately recalls the passage in
Michael Taussig’s book, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man,
where he writes about the intimacy of oppression: “We have to push the
notion of hegemony into the lived space of realities in social relation-
ships, in the give and take of social life, as in the sweaty, warm space be-
tween the arse of him who rides and the back of him who carries” (Taussig
1987: 288).
It is for this reason that this book explores those intimate social in-
teractions to examine how identities are formed and articulated on a
day-to-day level. It follows the insistence of postcolonial scholars such as
Ann Stoler (after Albert Memmi 1965) that it is “in the banal and humble
intimacies of the everyday” (2007: 36) that colonial relations of power
produce both colonizer and colonized. Here my concern is much less
for the colonizer who has disappeared in physical form from the lives of
Wila Kjarkeños even as he haunts their most intimate spaces, but for the
colonized who continue to live under the shadows of colonial discourses:
people who continue to experience colonial oppression in warm, sweaty
places where power continues to percolate.
Elizabeth Povinelli is another writer who has examined, after Fou-
cault, the ways in which power relations are reproduced in the small
spaces of life. She summarizes Foucault by saying that his aspiration was
not “merely to know how power disciplined sexuality, sexual expression
or sexual identity, but to understand how all of these were the means by
which power in a robust sense—power over life and death, power to crip-
ple and rot certain worlds while over-investing others with wealth and
hope—is produced, reproduced, and distributed when we seem to be
doing nothing more than kissing our lovers goodbye as we leave for the
day” (2006: 10). In a similar vein, my interest in intimacies is not born of
a simple curiosity for people’s lives but out of a desire to understand how
what appear to be large and remote power relations are reproduced and
re-created in something as simple and innocent or as damning as a kiss.
Povinelli (2006) furthermore refers to “grammars of concatenation”
to express the ways in which race, sex, and indigeneity are not only con-
ceptually yoked together but how these can work—to put it in the terms
of this book—to sexualize, indigenize, and feminize social institutions,
histories of conquest, and stories of nationhood. Her intellectual project
is to illustrate that sexuality should not be the province of those scholars
interested in sexuality per se, and, as such, far from the concerns of more
 26 • Introduction
“serious” social scientists (see also Wade 2009); rather, it is precisely in
intimate spaces where social identities, citizenship, and nationhood are
produced. Indigenous identities are to be found in marches and banners,
but they also emerge as sweat falls from the brow onto a wooden plow,
through the smoke of my comadre’s kitchen, in the doll strapped to a lit-
tle girl’s back, in the disputes between married couples—in short, indig-
enous identities form in the interstices of everyday life, in the intimate
spaces where statecraft, history, and power seem miles away but where, in
fact, they settle and emerge, sometimes unexpectedly.

Fears and Desires

In discussing identities—be they gendered, ethnic, national, or racial—I

assume neither a bounded subject nor a fixed set of identities. That is to
say, I make no assumption that the categories of man and woman, much
less white and indian, are stable positions unambiguously occupied by
bounded individuals. Gender and ethnicity are always relational terms,
and as we shall see, particularly in chapter 7, people can be more or less
indian, more or less female, or more or less Bolivian, depending on the
context in which they find themselves.
In having unstable identities, people in Wila Kjarka are not unique, but
they are unusual in being very clear that being, say, a man, or a jaqi, is not
immutable. In this they are very similar to the Tzeltal of southern Mexico
(Pitarch 2010) where “one is not born indigenous—it is not an inher-
ited condition—one becomes indigenous, or at least this is the ideal goal”
(p. 204; see also p. 90). This disturbs primordialist and essentialist as-
sumptions about indigenous identities, since people can become jaqi or
not in the course of their lifetimes.
This is not to say, however, that identities in Wila Kjarka are infinitely
flexible, that people have wide choices about which identities to adopt;
rather, people understand that identities have to be produced through
action. For people in Wila Kjarka, who they are is in a constant state of
process; that is, their identities are iterative, in the sense used by Henrietta
Moore (2007). Moore draws on Judith Butler’s (1993) notion of iterativ-
ity but moves away from her earlier idea of performance (1990) because,
even though this was not Butler’s intention, it seems to imply that people
have a real choice in their identities, whereas, in fact, they are usually very
heavily constrained. Moore, drawing on Butler’s later work (1993), sug-
gests that we think of gender identities (and to this we can add racial and
 Introduction • 27

ethnic ones) as iterative, as the products of a large number of small, often

unconscious, acts. I find this idea of iteration particularly useful because
it suggests much more clearly an interactive engagement with the social
world; moreover, it captures well the sense of identities produced over
time as a product of numerous small social interactions, rather than an
exaggerated sense of agency that might be suggested by “performance.”
Each iteration reinforces or undermines a particular identity, but any sin-
gle act is unlikely to have a major effect. Butler underlines this aspect of
performativity in Bodies That Matter: “Performativity cannot be under-
stood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained
repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject;
this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal con-
dition for the subject. This iterability implies that ‘performance’ is not a
singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under
and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and
taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and com-
pelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it
fully in advance” (Butler 1993: 95).
In Wila Kjarka, there is a clear sense that bodies change over time;
identity is produced through practice. In Mary Weismantel’s words, “As
it ingests, digests, and expels substances from the world around it, [the
Andean body] provides its own identity drawn from worldly substances.
Body and identity thus originate in the intimate physical relationship be-
tween persons and their social milieu” (2001: 192). These bodies are ra-
cialized in that social differences are inscribed into them. Even as they are
essentialized, racial ideologies in the Andes differ from Euro-American
ones in that race is clearly mutable; that is, iterative identities are pro-
duced through bodies and do not simply belong to the realm of the non-
corporal social sphere.
In Wila Kjarka there are many ways to talk about racial difference—
that is, to index social difference in terms of bodily substances or
characteristics—but the one that carries the greatest ideological weight is
body fat. Wila Kjarkeños hold, as do many other Andean people, that the
food they eat and the labor they perform produce brown fat around their
organs which white people simply do not possess. Their indianness in-
heres into that body fat, which is produced through a life of labor; in this
way it is clearly essentialized even as people recognize that it is something
that changes over time. This resonates with Pedro Pitarch’s (2010) discus-
sion of the relationship between indigenous souls and bodies in Mexico
 28 • Introduction
where “the body is thought of as belonging to the realm of the ‘cultural,’ or
what human beings can and should morally do, and thus to be fabricated
through human intervention, while the soul belongs to the realm of the
‘sacred,’ and comes to this world as something already given” (2010: 3).
Unlike Tzeltal people, Wila Kjarkeños clearly do see their spiritual exist-
ence in collective terms, but what is important to underline is that neither
holds the view that identity is ontologically rooted in the body. Perhaps
this is simply noting that Europeans since the Enlightenment have seen
social difference, such as race and gender, as being produced in bodies
that can be measured, whose brains can be weighed, and more latterly,
whose genes can be coded. We should not, then, be surprised when non-
Europeans have very different conceptions of the body and how it pro-
duces identities.
This book offers many examples of how identities are produced itera-
tively through action, and there are many examples here of people having
different beliefs and making different choices in how they lead their lives,
and real choices can and are made. It is, however, important not to lose
sight of the enormous inequalities of power that structure such agency
and constrain choices. Wila Kjarkeños are born into a community on the
margins, even now, of the national imaginary, with limited opportunities,
where they are likely to experience profound and even brutal examples
of racism and sexism. They are also born into a nation that promises in-
clusion and advancement but yet publicly ignores and actively excludes
them. Many Wila Kjarkeños are simultaneously aware of the profound
social injustices, and hold to the promise of a whitened and masculinized
social advancement.
Wila Kjarkeños’s desires for personal progress may become fetishized
around skin color and dress because there are such close associations
between power and (male) whiteness. For Slavoj Žižek (1989) ideology
works in the realm of fantasy to make life tolerable, to cover the inter-
stices of the symbolic order. Wila Kjarkeños share a set of coherent be-
liefs about personhood, gender, agency, and being human; but these are
regularly contradicted by experiences that undermine these values. Some
of these are generated by external forces (Canessa 1995), but others are
generated from within the community and from within individuals.
As each individual comes to terms with his or her (changing) posi-
tion, he or she produces and pursues desires that challenge and contest
not only the beliefs widely held by others but his or her very own be-
liefs. There is a dynamism to this sense of self that makes the self appear
 Introduction • 29

unstable and fractured. From an anthropologist’s point of view, this is

made manifest in the contradictions and twists that one observes in what
people say and do.
Žižek’s work is important in placing fantasy and desire at the center of
an understanding of hegemonic processes and the importance of fantasy
in challenging and undermining as well as supporting those processes.
For Žižek, desires and fantasies do not simply reside within the level of
the individual but are profoundly social (see also Moore 2007). In the ex-
amples given here, fantasies of desire connect and even constitute wider
social relations and processes.
Desire is always multidimensional, idiosyncratic, and personal, even as
it is socially constructed. There can never be a straightforward prediction
of the contours of desire. What must be absolutely clear is that even as de-
sire is a “fuzzy” matrix (Whittier and Simon 2001), it is very hard to imag-
ine any situation in Latin America where race (but also class, age, etc.) is
not going to be a constitutive element in the construction of desire. David
Murray’s (1999) ethnography of Martinican men (those who expressed
desire for women and those who expressed desire for men) would appear
to confirm this point. Among Martinican men, he could find no consistent
pattern of desire around race: Some desired white partners, and Murray
links this to the influence of racial hypergamy and racial and sexual myths
established in colonial plantation society; and some desire black part-
ners, which Murray attributes to the influence of anticolonial narratives
of liberation (1999: 168). What he found common to all Martinican men
is the way race has a primary role in the construction of sexual desire: At
its minimum it is the language through which other political desires and
fantasies are expressed, but given Whittier and Simon’s analysis, it appears
more likely that fantasies of power are eroticized and those desires are
satisfied through raced bodies. What is also worth noting about Murray’s
ethnography is that men—of whatever race or sexual orientation—have
a common discourse of masculinity based on dominance through sexual
activity: “Neither homosexual nor heterosexual men communicated nar-
ratives in which they made themselves into objects of desire. Neither did
they acknowledge the possibility that desire could be constituted mutu-
ally. The emphasis on the sexual proclivities of the ideal partner enhanced
the speaker’s masculinity through the reduction of the partner to a sexual
object of desire, a strategy that distances any possibility of experiencing
the other’s subjectivity” (Murray 1999: 169). And in some narratives, race
plays a role in aiding the prevention of any subjective similarities between
 30 • Introduction
subjects. In Murray’s ethnography the key element in constructing male
desire for white or black, men or women, is the maintenance and as-
sertion of hegemonic masculinity. In the words of Whittier and Simon,
“There are many more reasons for desiring sex than there are ways of be-
ing sexual, the meaning of the desire being expressed cannot be fully un-
derstood by merely describing the behavior” (2001: 161).
People’s physical desires and sexuality are therefore deeply embedded
in racialized relations of power and difference—that is, in race. Sex and
race in this context are consequently intimately linked to the point of be-
ing analytically inseparable. Some scholars, such as Verena Martínez Alier
(1974), Donna Goldstein (2003), and Mary Weismantel (2001), have con-
sidered the way ideologies of sexuality and race are mutually reinforcing
in Latin America, but it is perhaps surprising how few have attempted an
integrated treatment of sex and race; fewer still have considered the role
of desire in both configuring sexuality and racial identity. Peter Wade’s re-
cent work (2009) is a welcome exception, and he places desire at the very
center of his analysis (see also Moore 2007; Murray 1999; Sangren 2004).
He makes the important point that “desire/fear and power are intimately
conjoined in their very production; so to say that sex is about one rather
than or as much as the other does not really work” (2009: 36). It is, thus, an
unsatisfactory shorthand to say that sex is about race or vice versa, or that
they are both about power since they constitute each other.
This analytical position whereby power and sex are merely refrac-
tions of the same desire/fear helps explain one of the curious aspects of
the nexus of race and sex—the fact that the despised racial other is of-
ten sexually desired; and indeed the ways in which sexual desire may not
be exclusively configured around pleasure but other powerful emotional
responses that may be quite negative. The obverse of desire is fear, and
fearful fantasies play as much a role in constructing identities as desirous
ones. In chapters 7 and 8, I discuss how fantasies of whiteness play a role
in configuring ethnic and gender identities; as a consequence, race—that
is, the embodiment of social difference—is a key element in the discus-
sion of identity. In chapters 3 and 5, however, it is fantasies of fear that are
shown to play a possibly more powerful role in developing racial iden-
tities. If Wila Kjarkeños desire whiteness, and whiteness appears as fet-
ish of power, then they also fear its castrating potential: the kharisiri fat
stealer who sucks out people’s life force, their capacity for agency pro-
duced through a set of practices associated with an indigenous life. The
profound terror people feel for the kharisiri is, in itself, constitutive of the
 Introduction • 31

difference between jaqi and nonjaqi, and in this sense physical fear is at
least as much a somatization of race as skin color, which is highly variable
among Wila Kjarkeños.
In a number of works (e.g., 2002, 2007), Neil Whitehead has stressed
the importance of the role of the imagination in understanding terror.
Terror is a violent act of the imagination or, perhaps more accurately, an
act for the imagination. Whether the terror is produced by the kanaimà of
Guyana, the kharisiri of the Andes, or the furtive agents against which the
“War on Terror” is waged, the fear of violence plays a greater role in the
cultural imaginary than the actual violence perpetrated. Although the ter-
ror may originate in a particular act of violence, its power is perpetuated
and represented far more potently in the forms of fear that invade human
bodies.
With respect to violence and terror, Whitehead has called for “a more
explicit anthropology of experience and imagination in which individual
meanings, emotive forces, and bodily practices, become central to the in-
terpretation of violent acts” (2007: 233). What is offered in chapter 5 is
such an anthropology of experience and imagination, which focuses on
how people not only understand their bodily practices but how their bod-
ies produce agency and how terror interrupts that agency. The terror the
kharisiri invokes is much more than simply a product of the imagination:
It is an essential part of the formation of the cultural imaginary that con-
stitutes identity. It is not enough to assume that a given act (imagined or
real) produces fear or terror; the very terror needs to be understood in
culturally specific terms.
Fantasies of fear do not only play a role in the form of creatures with
supernatural powers but also in the memories of real events. As we shall
see in chapter 4, Wila Kjarkeños’ accounts of acts of extreme violence fifty
years ago are also a communal fantasy of revenge and retribution and an
exaggerated sense of historical agency. Direct witnesses to the violence
recount the incidents within a generic form, elevating it from a personal
experience to a larger historical narrative. The extreme violence has a
dramatic effect and consequently serves as a mnemonic device when the
accounts are reproduced by people born long after the events. The final
chapter of this book explores the ways in which fantasies of power and
whiteness are played out on a national level as well as in the intimate lives
of people.
Race, sex, and indigenous identity are big themes that play out in
public stages: They are regulated, contested, and profoundly influential
 32 • Introduction
in people’s lives. These identities configure—even if they don’t fully
determine—the ways individuals imagine their worlds and move through
social spaces; they are also intensely personal. The title of this book al-
ludes to the intimate space where race, sex, and indigeneity are experi-
enced, imagined, and developed; it is in the small spaces of everyday life
that these abstract concepts are made manifest and mold individuals.
Scale is therefore a clear organizing principle of this book; or, rather,
the collapsing of scales is a central trope of the book. Intimate fantasies
of sex, even as they break taboos, never exist in social and political vacu-
ums; desires are similarly constructed in terms of what is beyond us. Not
only is this not simply a community study, it also one where the subject
of inquiry is the intimate spaces where people actually live, the better to
explore the broader global questions of sex, race, and indigenous identity.
The structure of the book follows this schema: The first chapters estab-
lish the geographical and even temporal isolation of the community, as
remote and “authentic” as any you are likely to find in the Andes; the later
chapters expose this illusion as the focus pulls out to broader national and
global issues even as they examine more closely the personal and the inti-
mate. The deeper one delves into the intimate spaces of human lives, the
greater the scale of the issues that are exposed; as such, this book intends
to be more than a multisited study but, rather, a multiscalar study.
If one of the axes along which this book is organized is spatial, the
other is temporal. There are two reasons for this: The first is that Wila
Kjarkeños have a very intimate relationship with the past, a relationship
that distinguishes them from q’aras, as we shall see in chapters 2 and 3;
but beyond this, the very nature of an indigenous identity is a historical
perspective. At its very core is the sense that present-day injustices are
rooted in the injustices of the past, and the basis of this injustice is that
“my people were here before your people.” Indigeneity, be it in Botswana,
Indonesia, or Bolivia, is about a sense of historical injustice, and so history
and historical consciousness have a prominent role in this book. One of
the key features of Aymara thought is that the past is not remote and inac-
cessible but, in contrast, visible and immanent. This idea is rooted in the
very language: The word for past, nayra, is the same for eyes; and the word
for future, qhepha, is the same for behind. The future is thus behind, un-
knowable and invisible, and the past is in front, visible through personal
knowledge but also through communication with the ancestors. As we
shall see, some Wila Kjarkeños claim to speak not only to their immediate
 Introduction • 33

ancestors but to the Inkas who, although in the past, are living in a differ-
ent but ultimately accessible realm.
If space collapses in on itself as the global impacts on the very intimate,
and the intimate is contoured by the global, so it is with time: The past
irrupts into the present. This irruption can be pleasant and beneficial as is
often the case with ancestors’ interventions, or it can be an open wound of
historical injustice that informs indigenous consciousness. Temporally or
spatially, indigeneity for Wila Kjarkeños is a deeply intimate experience.
 N ot e s

i n t ro d u c t i o n

1 For a very good summary and discussion of the debates surround-

ing the ethnic versus class differences between indians and mestizos
(and the degree to which the one constitutes the other), see Gose
(1994: 16–28).
2 Interview with author, April 15, 2005.
3 This is very different from indigenismo of the first half of the twenti-
eth century, which grew out of the Mexican Revolution and sought
to valorize indigenous culture but principally that of the past. Indi-
genismo was a discourse principally espoused by mestizos and, in
many cases, was actively opposed to the cultures and lifeways of
contemporary indians. See Brading (1988). Indigenismo can be un-
derstood as part of the process whereby the rising Latin American
elites felt comfortable with their own mixed heritage and as an ide-
ology of engagement with the creole landowning oligarchy. What
is absolutely clear is that indigenismo is about a mixed heritage, not
an indigenous one: The mestizo is the iconic citizen. Contempo-
rary indigenism, conversely, presents the indigenous person as the
iconic citizen. See Brading (1988).
4 Interview with author translated from Aymara.
5 Tupak Katari was the indian leader who, along with his partner Bar-
tolina Sisa, almost successfully led a revolt against the Spanish in
the late eighteenth century. They are both important contemporary
icons of indigenous resistance. He was captured and quartered by
the Spanish in 1781, and his body parts, it is believed, were buried far
 294 • Notes to Chapter One
apart. Many people today hold that these body parts are growing and will eventually
rejoin in Tupak Katari’s second coming and thus fulfill the prophecy in his dying
words: “Nayawa jiwtxa, nayjarusti waranqa waranqaranakawa kutanïpxa [I die, but I
shall return tomorrow as thousands and thousands].”
6 A suspicion confirmed in 2011 by the archaeologist Alejandra Korstanje.
7 I learned a lot from this woman in the one year I worked for her, mostly how not to
treat people.

Chapter one

1 A substantial proportion of the fifteenth-century population of Seville was African,

and it was absorbed into the general population over time.
2 Pedro de Alvarado was known for his brutality toward indians, which was consid-
ered extreme even for the period. The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan shows that he
dispatched indians by means of hanging, burning, and throwing them to the dogs
(Asselbergs 2004). His marriage to noblewoman Doña Francisca de la Cueva and,
after her death, to her sister Beatriz, produced no children, but he recognized three
children with his partner of many years, Luisa de Tlaxcala, an indian noblewoman
(also known as Xicoténcatl). It was these children who he took to court to be de-
clared Spaniards.
3 The siege of Sorata took place during one of the many occasions in recent decades in
which tensions were high. The country mobilized around a new constitution, among
other things, in order to address ethnic inequalities, and the town of Sorata was be-
sieged for several weeks—that is, the main road in and out was blockaded. Indians
could, of course, walk in and out, but the handful of white and mestizo residents,
along with foreign tourists, were stuck. It took an army convoy to “liberate” the
town—a convoy that was visible for miles and was an easy target for sharpshooters.
Wila Kjarkeños played no part in the siege and simply watched it all from a comfort-
able distance.
4 There is also a road from Sorata to San Pedro, which is longer than the footpath but
which is usually suitable for a four-wheel-drive car for most of the year. The priest
arrives by car.
5 I was also told this to be the case for another mountain achachila, Illimani. Illimani
is a mountain 6,460 meters high, very near La Paz. The idea of orange trees on a
mountain top otherwise covered by permanent snow and ice indicates a truly mi-
raculous place. These gold crosses are surrounded by spells, which prevents anyone
from reaching the summit. Illampu is regularly climbed, but Wila Kjarkeños refuse
to believe this. “If anyone tries, the mountain will take their life away.” Sure enough,
every now and again someone dies on the mountain and this is seen as confirma-
tion. I never told anyone in Wila Kjarka that I myself had been up Illampu, but I did
ask Zenobio once, if no one has been up there, how anyone knew about the gold
cross and orange trees. He didn’t miss a beat: “You can see them from an airplane, of
course.” And that was the end of that conversation.
6 I use the term autochthonous here not just as a synonym of indigenous but to indicate
that it relates to spirits that are understood to come out of the earth, a literal transla-
tion of autochthonous.