Fluid Modern Ethnic Spaces: Contesting the Spatial Ordering Of
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Area (2008) 40.1, 34–44 FluidBlackwell Publishing Ltd modern ethnic spaces: contesting the spatial ordering of the State in Bolivia Pablo Regalsky CENDA, Casilla 3226, Cochabamba, Bolivia Email: [email protected] Revised manuscript received 29 August 2007 Relationships between the Bolivian State and the emerging indigenous and peasant social movements have become increasingly fluid since the end of the 1970s. Although this process could be traced back to the 1953 Agrarian Reform, it was not until the world crisis of the 1970s and the surge in globalisation that it led to radical changes in the relationship between State and indigenous peoples. Seen from the point of view of the State, our case study of a group of Quechua communities seems to illustrate a process of fragmentation leading to ungovernability and disorder. This understanding has to do with a lack of ‘legibility’. However here I replace that ‘image’ of disorder with another ‘feeling’ of cultural ordering, one that emerges from indigenous people’s livelihoods, strategies and governance from below. I argue for understanding the apparent lack of governance as the expression of an autonomous reorganising process that leads to the regrouping and expansion of indigenous localities linked into new forms of regionalisation. Key words: Bolivia, space, ethnographic, State, ethnicity, hegemony are connected with their own strategies of social Reconfiguring State and social spaces reproduction and the building of vital spaces. in Bolivia The political process under way in Bolivia is Relationships evolved in such a way during the last interpreted by some as part of processes of negotiat- quarter of the twentieth century that a reconfiguration ing identities. I would combine that element into of social and political space took place at regional Foucault’s emphasis on the and local levels jeopardising State governance. As a corollary to that re-composition of socio-political usefulness of the ‘schema of war’ as an alternate mode forces and geographical spaces, a crisis became of conceptualization which attempts to fix power- relations in terms of a model of perpetual conflict, evident at the nation-state level in 2003.1 In this which looks ‘for the principle of intelligibility of article I examine some of these transformations politics in the general form of war’. (Foucault 2003, through the case study of Raqaypampa, now an iv, cited in Hook 2003) Indigenous District in the Cochabamba inter-valleys region, in order to understand the social actors, A new set of paradoxes and contradictory processes power relations and changing correlations of force is taking shape in and between the fields of the that lay behind fluidity in space and place. To social and the political. The thread that links both understand how new spaces – and not only new fields is made up by social control mechanisms meanings – emerged in the socio-political landscape, (Migdal 1988). Social controls initially articulated we look first at the way the communities were active and put into motion from the State downwards now in the reconfiguration of political boundaries and in acquire different meanings, even pointing to a erecting ethnic barriers, and how these processes political clash with the State from insubordinate Area Vol. 40 No. 1, pp. 34–44, 2008 ISSN 0004-0894 © The Author. Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2008 Fluid modern ethnic spaces 35 social networks mobilising upwards. Locality and legitimate violence at this stage, and the balance of place have changed their meanings in different relations of force was not stabilised. The Agrarian ways through an ethnicisation process that is taking Reform which served as the basis for implement- place at the community grassroots level, but is not ation of State clientelism through allocation of land limited to this scale. The fluidity of the relationships titles was a direct result of the armed mobilisation between State and social indigenous movements of the peasantry. Notwithstanding the instrumental as seen in the case of Bolivia implies that these nature of corporatist policies, the expansion achieved relationships are unstable and non-crystallised. by the sindicato organisations and the peasant Any social process involves contradictions between militias in the Andean rural areas of western Bolivia the different actors bringing up change and uncer- did not mean the State attained social control. Rather, tainty. Nevertheless the dramatic turnabout of the a growing number of these organisations began to 1990s with whole political systems – even empires exert a de-facto localised territorial authority with – collapsing and multiplying sites of struggle, ‘scat- influence within the geographic boundaries of the tering of antagonisms, indeed by a fragmentation of ex haciendas. In this way, the communities were the political itself’ while ‘experiencing the disinte- setting the basis for a dispute with the State over the gration of modernity’ (Watts 1991, 9) took a toll in monopoly of control over its territory. Behind its academic pride. This made it even more difficult to re-emerging ethnic identity, since the mid-1980s understand ‘the real’ and prompted some academics the rural sindicato as a local territorial authority has to take refuge in solipsistic ‘creationist’ discourses. represented the main challenge to governability. In the following section I try to capture this move- The disappearance of the hacendado authority in ment of disintegration and reordering of the political much of the Bolivian highlands with the 1953 Agrar- space at the level of locality in Bolivia. ian Reform led to the establishment of a territorial indirect local government with many of the former landlords’ attributions transferred to a different When the turmoil began social location. Not only did the rural sindicato The Bolivian countryside in 1953 was quite con- reconstitute a substantial right to control access to flictual. Armed valley peasantry militias occupied land as part of its informal jurisdictional space, but many haciendas and attacked rural towns where the some indigenous local traditional justice authorities hacendados and their administrators (gamonales) had also began to administrate functions parallel to the residences, not only in the department of Cochabamba legally established State authorities. In many high- but also in some regions of La Paz. Throughout land places the traditional ayllu2 has reconstituted the implementation of the 1953 Agrarian Reform, itself, but under a different name. Up until then, under jurisdictional rights over rural political space began the new form of the agrarian sindicato, the Andean to slowly move away from being under the authority indigenous communities were apparently vanishing of the expelled landowners and into the hands of into modernity and integrated into an individualised the new peasant ‘sindicatos’ indigenous authorities. propertied citizenship. Since 1953 a gradual reas- The struggle for an autonomous communal space sertion of its collective existence and jurisdictional combined with the uneven expansion of peasant ability has taken place in many areas where the organisation. This trend was obscured and later hacienda’s territory has now been transformed into neutralised by the clientelist policies implemented the community’s. However, as the Bolivian State by a State some authors characterise as ‘corporatist’ maintained a disciplined control of the peasant (Lavaud 1998; Yashar 1999). Based on a model of leadership through the Military Peasant Pact between corporatism that derives from well-defined arche- 1965 and 1979, the territorial powers of the sindicatos types like the Spanish State between 1939 and into developed at first in a veiled and limited manner. the 1950s I challenge this characterisation of the Bolivian State as ‘corporatist’ during that stage. I accept that what we faced in that period are ‘Corporate’ state and ethnic space corporatist policies, but nevertheless the Bolivian The post Agrarian Reform situation is still under State did not transform itself into a corporatist one debate. Yashar asserts that in Latin America because of the nature of power relations between the social sectors and the State. In the first place, a corporatist form of citizenship regime . created the Bolivian State did not attain a monopoly over and/or promoted labour and peasant associations that Area Vol. 40 No. 1, pp. 34–44, 2008 ISSN 0004-0894 © The Author. Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2008 36 Regalsky structured and often monopolized official represent- (2000) and Hall and Fenelon (2004). Furthermore, it ation . to cast aside ethnic categories . and to signals a planetary declining civilisatory hegemonic reconstitute Indians as national peasants . In this process characterised by the ‘general inflation of context, State efforts to build and register peasant cultural politics and ethnic conflict in the world, communities had unintended consequences. Via together with substantial increases in class stratification, land reforms and credit programs, Indians secured economic polarization and major shifts in capital the spaces in which they could institutionalize indigenous community practices at local level. accumulation’ (Friedman 1999, 391; 1998). (Yashar 1999, 84) A definition of identity on the other hand is not a simple derivative of locality in so far as the dynamic According to Yashar,