Identity and Development in Rural Bolivia: Negotiating Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in Development Contexts
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IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN RURAL BOLIVIA: NEGOTIATING GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND CLASS IN DEVELOPMENT CONTEXTS by Christine Hippert B.A., Clark University, 1994 M.A., University of Wyoming, 2000 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2007 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Christine Hippert It was defended on April, 2007 and approved by Carol McAllister, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology Joseph Alter, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology Elizabeth Monasterios, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. Richard Scaglion, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology ii Copyright © by Christine Hippert 2007 iii IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN RURAL BOLIVIA: NEGOTIATING GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND CLASS IN DEVELOPMENT CONTEXTS Christine Hippert, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2007 This dissertation examines participatory development in its cultural context: how people define it, the significance of their definitions, who participates in it, and how. Since the passage of the Law of Popular Participation in 1994, participation has become obligatory and emblematic of Bolivian citizenship. At the same time, identity based on culturally determined conceptualizations of gender, ethnicity, and class has become increasingly salient in questions of policy, politics, the law, education, and the Bolivian economy. In this social milieu, local people first and foremost must engage identity discourse in order to “do development.” My central argument is that local people are required to deliberately accommodate, resist, and/or construct their own particular “development identities” in different development contexts. They employ a variety of subject positionalities – either forged themselves or imposed on them – on instrumental grounds, so that they sell the community as a good risk for development in order to garner development funding, and for transformative reasons, to engender community social relations. The study is based on 13 months of anthropological fieldwork in the small, rural community of Huancarani near Cochabamba, Bolivia. I conducted participation observation in three development contexts: 1) the local governing body, 2) a grassroots food security organization, and 3) a local women’s organization. Although many of the same community members participate in more than one of these contexts, they forge different development identities for iv each. Participation observation was also complemented with intensive, unstructured interviews with 10 key informants and semi-structured interview schedules with 30 community members and 20 community leaders. Identity politics has the potential to both limit community participation and empower local people. My study shows that participatory development work in Bolivia is squarely a matter of negotiating and reformulating collective community identities. Instead of leveling the playing field, participation in Bolivian development often means that not having the right development identity restricts people from competing for already very scarce development resources. Under these conditions, the current model of development in Bolivia is one in which external political processes attempt to regulate not only the direction of rural development, but the very identity of communities. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE................................................................................................................................. XVI 0.0 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 2 0.1 RESEARCH PROBLEM.................................................................................... 2 0.2 IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN BOLIVIA.......................................... 6 0.3 PRELIMINARY PREPARATIONS AND FIELDWORK IN HUANCARANI .................................................................................................................. 10 0.4 OUTLINE OF THE DISSERTATION............................................................ 11 1.0 CHAPTER ONE: DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTITY: THEORETICAL INFLUENCES............................................................................................................................. 19 1.1 DEVELOPMENT AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL GAZE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT AS IDEA, SYMBOL, POLICY, PRACTICE........ 20 1.1.1 Modernization theory ................................................................................. 23 1.1.2 Dependency theory...................................................................................... 26 1.1.3 Neoliberalism and the rise of social movements....................................... 28 1.2 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PARTICIPATION .................................... 34 1.2.1 The unfolding of the concept of participation .......................................... 34 1.2.2 Co-optation of the concept ......................................................................... 39 1.2.3 Participation and power............................................................................. 42 vi 1.3 THE RELEVANCE OF GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND CLASS IN DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE ...................................................................................... 45 1.4 FROM MESTIZAJE TO A PLURIETHNIC NATION: THE POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT IN BOLIVIA....................................................................................... 50 1.5 CONCLUSIONS................................................................................................ 61 2.0 CHAPTER TWO: HUANCARANI: A HISTORY OF PEOPLES AND PLACES ...................................................................................................................................... 63 2.1 METHODOLOGY FOR THE PRESENT STUDY IN HUANCARANI ..... 64 2.2 COMMUNITY PROFILE ................................................................................ 69 2.3 A HISTORY OF A PLACE.............................................................................. 87 2.4 THE NEED FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AND PARTICIPATION.............................................................................................................. 90 2.4.1 José – cultural and development broker................................................... 91 2.4.2 The beginning of contemporary community participation..................... 94 2.5 IDENTITY AND BELONGING IN HUANCARANI: FOUR GROUPS..... 97 2.5.1 Group 1 – Those who left and returned: los relocalizados...................... 97 2.5.2 Group 2 – Spouses of relocalizados: insiders and outsiders. ................ 102 2.5.3 Group 3 – Nuevos migrantes: three waves of migration....................... 106 2.5.4 Group 4 – Los orureños............................................................................ 114 2.6 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 117 3.0 CHAPTER THREE: DEVELOPMENT IDENTITITES AND PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT: DEVELOPMENT WORK AS IDENTITY WORK .................................................................................................................................... 119 vii 3.1 DEVELOPMENT IDENTITIES.................................................................... 121 3.2 TWO TYPES OF DEVELOPMENT IDENTITIES: IMPOSED AND COMMUNITY-FORGED ............................................................................................... 128 3.3 PARTICIPATION AND THE USE OF MULTIPLE IDENTITIES.......... 134 3.4 WHAT DEVELOPMENT MEANS – AND DOESN’T MEAN – IN HUANCARANI ................................................................................................................ 140 3.5 CONCLUSIONS.............................................................................................. 147 4.0 CHAPTER FOUR: THE LPP, OTB, PDM, AND POA: LOCAL POLITICS AND THE ALPHABET SOUP OF DEVELOPMENT IN HUANCARANI....................... 149 4.1 THE LPP – SETTING THE STAGE............................................................. 151 4.2 PARTICIPATION IN THE NATIONAL DISCOURSE – SOLVING LONGSTANDING PROBLEMS.................................................................................... 153 4.3 THE STRUCTURE OF THE LPP................................................................. 157 4.3.1 The law and the actors.............................................................................. 157 4.3.2 Objectives and goals ................................................................................. 163 4.4 PDMS AND POAS IN THE MUNICIPALITY: PRIORITIES AND GOALS ........................................................................................................................... 167 4.5 PARTICIPATING IN THE OTB IN HUANCARANI ................................ 170 4.5.1 Positions of leadership in the OTB in Huancarani ................................ 171 4.5.2 The monthly OTB meeting....................................................................... 174 4.6 FORGING A DEVELOPMENT IDENTITY: SOLVING COMMUNITY PROBLEMS IN THE OTB ............................................................................................. 179 viii 4.7 FORGING DEVELOPMENT IDENTITIES: CONSTRUCTING AND DEFENDING THE POA, AGAIN AND AGAIN…...................................................... 185 4.7.1 Huancarani: a development failure?....................................................... 185 4.7.2 The process of constructing