Dilemmas of Modernity

Bolivian Encounters with Law and LiberalismBy Mark Goodale

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5982-3

Contents

List of Tables and Figures............................................................................ixAcknowledgments.......................................................................................xiii1 Modern Dilemmas.....................................................................................12 Paris in the Andes: Law and the Modern Subject......................................................303 The Making of a Legal Universe: Law and the Practice of Everyday Life...............................544 Courts of Desire: Gender, Power, and the Law........................................................825 Human Rights and the Moral Imagination: Becoming Liberal in the Norte de Potos.....................1146 Modern Dreams: An Ethnography of Grandeur...........................................................142Conclusion: New Revolutionary Moves...................................................................161Notes.................................................................................................183Bibliography..........................................................................................201Index.................................................................................................239

Chapter One

Modern Dilemmas

Prologue

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

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

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

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

To make this point another way, this book is in part an argument for what is perhaps a uniquely...