A taste for ecology: class, coloniality, and the rise of a Bolivian urban environmental movement

ABSTRACT

Since at least the mid-20th century, social movements have been key actors in Bolivian society, causing governments to fall and redrawing the cartographies of power. Recently, a new movement emerged, a middle-class movement that articulated its demands in harsh opposition to the government of former President Evo Morales: an urban environmental movement. In its rhetoric, Morales was un burro (a donkey) and un ignorante (an ignorant man) steering the country towards ecological collapse. Subsequently, the movement played a key role in the social protests that led to Morales’s fall in November 2019. In this paper, I aim to understand why this movement emerged and mobilized during the Morales administration and how colonially conditioned relations of power and contradictory images of the indigenous Other are articulated in this process. I argue that the emergence and mobilization of the movement ought to be understood in relation to: (1) the politically conditioned forms for legitimate political opposition; and (2) the challenge to coloniality implied by the coming to power of subalternized subjects. When the borders of seemingly fixed categories and spaces are blurred, the privileged develop novel ways of making social distinctions. One such way, I argue, is to display a ‘taste for ecology.’

KEYWORDS:

• Bolivia
• coloniality of power
• distinction
• environmentalism
• social movements
• taste

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pointing to the protestors’ habit of signaling their rebellion by tying small laces (pititas) to poles, fences, and lampposts, Evo Morales said in a mocking and condescending tone that ‘tying laces and setting tires [on fire in the streets], two-three people want to start a strike.’ The protestors appropriated the concept ‘pititas’ and started to talk about themselves and their protest in such terms, and even published a book called La revolución de las pititas en Bolivia (Herrera Añez 2020). Currently, to many of Evo Morales’s supporters and many other indigenous and working-class activists, to be a pitita is synonymous with being, or aiming to be, a ‘jailon,’ i.e. a non-indigenous, spoiled, upper- or middle-class person who shows contempt for rural and working-class people.

2. ‘Solamente un indio de mierda podría pensar en destruir nuestra biodiversidad de esta manera. Ni respeta los derechos de los pueblos indígenas’ (post on Facebook, 10 October 2016).

3. See also the more recent work discussing these factors, e.g. Buechler (2011); Klandermans and Roggeband (2009); Meyer (2006); Nash (2004); Reed (2015).

4. Using the concept ‘coloniality,’ I refer to that which outlived formal colonialism, or, in other words, the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies, ranging from global inequalities and racialized divisions of labor to racist and Eurocentric notions of who is a legitimate political actor and a valid producer of knowledge (see, e.g., Escobar 2007a; Grosfoguel 2011; Quijano 2007).

5. Silvia Rivera describes a similar process of ‘mass euphoria’ and the bestowal of political legitimacy to the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement; Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario) after the National Revolution in 1952 (1990, 103).

6. An Andean deity often referred to as Mother Earth.

7. Large parts of the Bolivian lowlands experienced new disastrous wildfires from July to September 2020, but the urban environmental movement did not raise their voices as vociferously as the year before when Evo Morales was still president.

8. Considering the politically sensitive topic, and in order not to expose individuals and individual organizations of the movement under study, I have decided not to name organizations or activists by their names.

9. A mere euphemism for ‘indigenous people’ or ‘peasants.’

10. See, for instance, the indigenous mobilizations against the projected hydroelectric power stations of El Bala and Chepete, around which the urban environmental movement also mobilizes.

11. ‘El cholo’ tends to be portrayed as the urbanized and supposedly acculturated indio, caught in between the indigenous community (to whom he is no longer jaqi, a social person) and the mestizo urbanites (to whom his indio origin will always shine through and be a persistent rationale for discrimination and exploitation). For an insightful discussion on la chola, see Weismantel (2001).

12. Or ‘our indigenes’ (nuestros indígenas), an expression that would need to be explored in a separate paper, but that makes manifest a persistent paternalist attitude towards indigenous people.

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Notes on contributors

Anders Burman

Anders Burman is an anthropologist and human ecologist at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg. Since the early 2000s, he has conducted ethnographic research with social movements in the Bolivian Andes, focusing on activism, ritual practice, indigeneity, knowledge production and decolonization, and, more recently, environmental conflicts and climate change. He is author of Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes: Ritual Practice and Activism (Lexington Books, 2016).