After servitude: bonded histories and the encumbrances of exchange in indigenizing Bolivia

Abstract

Since 2006, Bolivia has undertaken a dramatic program of state reform aimed at overcoming the injustices of the nation’s colonial and neoliberal past. In the process, rural practices and sensibilities originating in the former hacienda system have assumed new importance, arising as volatile sites of state intervention and political critique. Like eighteenth-century Bourbon administrators, state reformers today express concern with agrarian patronage, which, they argue, facilitates continued land dispossession and reproduces a particularly servile Quechua-speaking peasantry. Yet, despite reform efforts, hacienda-based ties remain crucial to rural life, structuring acts of redistributive exchange and providing a relational medium by which former landlords attempt to make amends for past violence. By taking seriously the moral and political dimensions of post-hacienda patronage, this contribution challenges dominant frameworks of indigenous justice to foreground the reconciliatory possibilities of exchange relations rooted in a bonded past.

Keywords:

• servitude
• indigeneity
• exchange
• Bolivia
• hacienda
• patronage
• moral economy

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my friends and interlocutors in Bolivia, who opened their homes and hearts and who taught me that patience yields fruition, whether of sweet chirimoya fruits or honey combs, research or writing. Concerns with anonymity preclude my naming anyone, but I wish to express my utmost gratitude to my friends in Palca and La Llaqta: You know who you are. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee at the University of California Berkeley, Charles Hirschkind, Saba Mahmood, Charles Briggs, Sinclair Thomson and Judith Butler, for supporting the development of my research and thinking for this project. In addition, exchanges with Bruce Mannheim, Guillermo Delgado, Sinclair Thomson and Pablo Regalsky brought me in conversation with Andeanist circles of research and writing, helping me to clarify and further develop my work. In addition, I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This research was supported by generous funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California Berkeley, and the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust. Finally, I am indebted to Michael for his unceasing support and encouragement, without which this work would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Indeed, in my own archival research at the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, I found mention of mitmaq settlements common in documented hacienda property disputes in the mid-twentieth century. Raul's family, for instance, had maintained access to haciendas in both the La Paz jungle and the Ayopaya valleys, with many workers migrating between them.

2 Earlier, of course, hacienda landlords had themselves also worked as military generals, screaming insults at tenant farming colonos who had recently been released from hacienda labor arrangements in order to enlist in military training for Bolivia's Chaco War (1932–1935).

3 Names of all towns, villages and persons have been changed in order to protect the anonymity of research subjects.

4 Interviewees were selected through the use of purposive sampling – that is, by seeking out residents with known ties to the region's former hacienda system. In my interviews with former servants and their children, about 75 percent of people with whom I spoke recalled some sort of patronage relation among prior workers and landlords, whether in fiesta sponsorship, godparenting or informal adoption. Those who made no mention of such ties were primarily workers affiliated with a handful of haciendas with absent landlords, managed instead by Quechua- or Aymara-speaking overseers or jilacatas. However, that the majority of interviewees referred to some degree of patronage ties suggests that the relation between Raul and the pedestrian farmer, and that between Ramón and Fabio, while noteworthy in their explicit elaboration of proper behavior on the part of regional elites, also belong to a broader pattern of exchange typical of agrarian life in Ayopaya.

5 Through the process of land titling, INRA officials are able to detect lands that are not being cultivated and, insofar as they fail to serve a ‘social-economic function’, are subsequently turned over to the state or to rural peasant unions (see Fabricant 2012).

6 In particular, James C. Scott drew from Thomson’s (1971) account of British peasants' calls for a fair price of market goods and which, Thomson argued, reflected traditional (feudal) frameworks of patronage between lords and servants. For a critical review of scholarship applying the ‘moral economy’ concept in the Andean region, see Lyons (2006). For the limits to more universalist approaches to peasant claims and their repercussions for historiographic analyses of the hacienda system in the Andean region, see Thurner (1993).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust and Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Mareike Winchell

Mareike Winchell is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her current book project, After servitude: Indigeneity, history, and the antinomies of justice in reformist Bolivia, examines how Quechua-speaking villagers draw upon histories of bonded labor in their critical engagements with governmental reforms aimed at achieving indigenous justice. Her research and writing have been supported by the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the Designated Emphasis Program in Critical Theory at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Winchell received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 2015.