These are pictures from a few weeks ago when we found this pacheta, which is a sacred hill or mountain. Often in Bolivia the colonizers would come in and put churches on top of pachetas on purpose. We found this one on Helena's last day, when we were supposed to be driving to look at colonial art and Silvia said, Wait, I think it's a Pacheta! and swerved off the road and started driving up this hill, where there were indeed sacred rocks, which we knew because they were shaped like animals (see the one above that looks remarkably like a frog.) So we made offerings there (threw alcohol around and burned some stuff). As we did the offerings, I did feel this incredible gratitude for all the people in my life and even for the world (or maybe the earth) in a general sense, a feeling I never have and am politically opposed to because the world is so fucked up and unequal that I've always felt that expressing gratitude for what I have would be tantamount to an endorsement of the geopolitical order. It was strange--I wouldn't say I'm a convert, but I have wished on the shrine a few times since then.
Afterward, we went to this festival, which was really beautiful. Silvia knew some people in the town, so everyone was extremely friendly to us and kept bringing us beer. The men in the drum circle were flirting with Silvia until she said "soy hombre-mujer" in Aymara. Which I thought was a cool way to shut them down. As we participated, she trained me and Helena in Aymara etiquette, which mostly consists of a lot of reciprocity: you always accept drinks from other people, and if you don't want it you throw it on the ground, to the pachamama; you always serve other people; you thank every person at the table after eating, etc. These things can sometimes be time-consuming, but they do create a certain amount of affection and community, which is nice. (Note also the 40s, which are very respectable here, so much so that Helena walked through a fancy museum carrying on and nobody batted an eye.)
I'm posting these old photos because my adventures have been basically the same as the aforementioned ones (writing, translating, being stymied at archives, cooking with Silvia, hanging out with the collective, occasionally going out dancing until 5AM and being exhausted for the next few days), I figured it was as good a time as any to continue our discussion about Indigeneity and appropriation. To help us out, here is an excerpt from the article I translated for Silvia, which is supposed to be published in the awesome-looking cultural studies journal Qui Parle ( http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~quiparle/ --they are supposed to give me the credit and pay me, but I haven't heard anything, so who knows) :
At the end of the nineteenth century the renowned liberal historian Gabriel René Moreno already celebrated this fate, imagining the Andean Indians pushed toward dissolution by the progressive impulse embodied in the elite entrepreneurs and landlords. Rough versions of the same fantasies cloud the vision of today’s elites and prevent them from seeing that Bolivia will be a colonial country as long as the dominant classes continue to be colonized, and as long as the mestizo, educated sectors do not proudly reaffirm their own cultural difference and establish equal and dialogic relations with the Indian cultures that inhabit the national territory.
This is interesting for several reasons. One (this probably will not interest others quite so much) is that it spurred Silvia to ask me to translate, because the original translator was so bad that he thought Gabriel Rene Moreno was a singer, translating her metaphor (she said he was "cantando" about the disappearance of the Indian, meaning celebrating or proclaiming) literally and not bothering to look anything up, even though he's like the most famous 19th century historian in Bolivia.
The other interesting thing about the passage is that she's talking, as she often does, about the idea of mestizos reappropriating their indigenous heritage. To me it seems like there are lots of ways that this strategy could go horribly wrong, from boston tea-party/minstrelsy-type adoption of Indian-face to act out; to the more enfranchised groups' packaging of Native cultures for the global marketplace without addressing the economic circumstances of the groups that have always been Indios; to the citing of Native traditions/orthodoxy to justify the oppression of women and gay people (not that the colonial/liberal/neoliberal culture is any better, but still). But it's really interesting, I think, this effort to make white and mestizo Bolivians substantively re-adopt their indigenous heritage. Generally Silvia celebrates this, even if the reclamation of indigenous heritage takes the form of consumption practices--of coca, for example. But it's possible that it's different when the whole country, even the elites, have suffered from tremendous colonial oppression, and other ideologies that might free them like Marxism have their roots in the same Europeans who created the systems in the first place and are quite racist besides, constructing them as "pre-capitalist" as if you have to go through capitalism. Then I guess indigenous traditions, particularly those of community and resistance, become something important to be mobilized against all the imperialist ideologies and systems. Though I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it would mean at an executive/ legislative level to indigenize the population. It would be nice if Evo gets a big mandate this november and actually uses it (unlike some other presidents I can think of), and I get to see the change in person.
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