Black hole indigeneity: the explosion and implosion of radical difference as resistance and power in Andean Bolivia

ABSTRACT

With the coming to power of Evo Morales and el Movimiento al Socialismo, an indigenized language of resistance became the language of power. In this paper I explore how epistemological and ontological ‘radical difference’ was co-opted and used to legitimize Bolivian state power. I argue that when institutionalized and instrumentalized within the state apparatus, indigeneity – as an emancipatory device of radical difference – implodes on itself and its radical potential is lost in the black hole that is coloniality. This paper provides an analytical and historical horizon against which recent political events in Bolivia can be understood.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigeneity
• Evo Morales
• Bolivia
• resistance
• power
• decolonization

1. Introduction

Faced with street protests and accusations of electoral rigging and of not abiding by the results of the 2016 referendum, on November 10 2019, Evo Morales announces new elections. Only a few hours later, however, he adheres to the Bolivian Armed Forces’ ‘recommendation’ to resign. Rightwing political forces return to the Palacio Quemado and 14 years of ‘indigenous government’ come to an end.

To understand the rise and fall of Evo Morales, an historical analysis of indigeneity as resistance and as power is needed. This paper does not, however, deal with the alleged irregularities in the 2019 elections or how Evo Morales was forced to resign. Nor does it deal with the resurgence of far-right racism and anti-indigenous discourses in the spaces of formal political power and on the streets. This is rather a paper dealing with a specific instrumentalized governmental discourse on indigeneity and ‘indigenous knowledge’, and state appropriation of an indigenous language of resistance, which was one element among others that gave rise to the questioning of the political legitimacy of the Morales administration, prior to both the 2016 referendum and the 2019 general elections. Moreover, it assesses the different ways in which indigenous activists have used epistemological and ontological ‘radical difference’ as tools of resistance throughout the 20th century and, not least, how they have navigated the political landscape of state indigeneity, which emerged after Evo Morales’ landslide victory in the 2005 elections. As such, this paper provides a broader analytical and historical horizon against which recent political events can be understood. Let us start by returning to the collective political euphoria that followed Evo Morales’ first victory at the polls.

1.1. January 21 2006

In the early morning hours, more than one hundred thousand people were waiting at the foot of the Akapana pyramid in Tiwanaku, less than an hour by bus from the city of El Alto. There were mineworkers, coca farmers, political activists, intellectuals, students, members of indigenous and peasant communities from the highlands and the lowlands. The sun was searing from the blue Andean sky, and we had been waiting for hours. The mood was good, though. People were playing music, sharing food and coca leafs, dancing, waving wiphalas,¹ with one eye on the top of the pyramid where he was to appear – Evo Morales Ayma, the newly elected ‘Indigenous President’ and ‘The President of the Indigenous People’.

The moment Evo became visible, dressed in a creatively designed tunic with embroideries inspired by pre-colonial designs and flanked by Aymara shamans embodying ‘indigenous knowledge and wisdom’, euphoric cries lifted from the crowd. Eyes filled with tears, people sobbed with joy, indigenous musicians greeted their president with musical salutes. To many, a dream had come true. 180 years after the formation of the republic, a person of indigenous origin had been elected as the president. In a sense, this was the culmination of decades of indigenous activist resistance, and the start of a thoroughgoing indigenization of the State and the language of power.

Soon, indigeneity was everywhere. Indigenous shamans, dancers and musicians accompanied the president in official gatherings and on national holidays and the official protocol of the State was draped in indigenous rituals and paraphernalia. Indigenous universities were created and indigenous knowledges and realities acknowledged (Burman 2016a, 2016b, 2019). Decolonization became the new leitmotif of Bolivian state politics, and indigeneity was upheld as the essence of ‘radical difference’,² a fundamental element of indigenous resistance for decades, now installed in the halls of parliamentary power. Thus, indigeneity became a source of political legitimacy and a powerful narrative of the new plurinational patria under construction (Burman 2014, Canessa 2014, Postero 2017).

1.2. December 14 2018

Having made my way through the late afternoon feverish traffic of downtown La Paz, I enter a small dark room at Hotel Torino³ where a group of indianista activists and intellectuals has gathered to evaluate Evo’s 13 years in power and to discuss political visions beyond plurinational Bolivia. Their critique is severe. State politics of decolonization is nothing but a swindle, a change in form to allow continuity in essence. Indigeneity has become an empty signifier which can be filled with all kinds of essentialist, romanticized notions, more in line with New Age stereotypes of ‘Indians’ than with the identities and political projections of factual indigenous people. Rather than a genuine acknowledgement of indigenous people, the governmental predilection for indigenous ritual practices and ‘indigenous knowledge’ is a proof of pachamamismo, an exotic smokescreen to deceive the masses, behind which the government can rule without public control or scrutiny.

Ever since Evo’s first term in office, similar critique has been raised against what is held to be a romanticized and operational way of using indigeneity in state politics and a ‘co-option’ (see Trumpy 2008, Holdo 2019) of ‘radical difference’. Lately, the stream of critique has grown into a flood and an abundance of books and articles have pointed out the lack of connection between the indigeneity promoted by the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) government and the indigeneity lived by real people (e.g. Stefanoni 2011, Chambi 2016, Portugal and Macusaya 2016). If there is anything like ‘radical difference’ to be found among indigenous people, it is argued that it is not in their ‘cosmovisions’, ‘ontologies’ or ‘epistemologies,’ but rather in their socioeconomic situation and their exposure to structural racism.

This critique – in conjunction with the very different criticisms launched by rightwing political actors, racist shock troops in the lowlands, environmental activists, the non-indigenous urban middle class etc. – contributed to the undermining of the legitimacy of the Morales administration and was part of establishing the conditions that led to Evo’s fall. But what happened between the collective euphoria of January 2006 and the disbelief of December 2018? How are we to understand Evo Morales’ fall from grace in the eyes of many indigenous intellectuals and activists? This article is based on a total of eight years of ethnographic fieldwork with and within indigenous movements in the Bolivian Andes since the year 2000 and aims at understanding indigeneity as resistance and as power in novel ways. The novelty consists in reading the alterations and metamorphoses of indigeneity during the 20^th and early 21^st century in the light of the recent hegemonic state project of indigeneity, in analyzing how indigeneity was co-opted and turned into the trope by which power expressed and legitimized itself, and in scrutinizing diverse ways of re-creating (or not) indigeneity as resistance. In other words, this article discusses a specific form of state power in relation to earlier forms of resistance and in relation to current incipient and diverse resistance strategies. ‘Resistance’ is here understood as an oppositional act (Hollander and Einwohner 2004) with ‘the potential to undermine power relations’ (Johansson and Vinthagen 2016, p. 418). Nevertheless, and as the relation between the Bolivian state and indigenous movements manifests, power and resistance should not be understood in a binary opposition, but as a dialectic relation that is ‘complex, ambivalent and perpetual’ (Bayat 2000, p. 541).

2. Implosive indigeneity

Drawing on decades of indigenous activism in which radical difference was a foundation for resistance and massive mobilization, the election of Evo Morales implied, as it were, an explosion of indigeneity as radical difference. Indigeneity was everywhere; ‘indigenous knowledge’ was everywhere. After almost 14 years of ‘indigenous government’, though, it seems indigeneity as radical difference and as an emancipatory device imploded on itself. Many indigenous activists were simply fed up with top-down state display of indigeneity. Aymara intellectual Magali Vienca Copa (Copa 2019, p. 11) argued that ‘[t]he more indigeneity is vindicated in the spheres of state power, the more the systematic violations of indigenous rights are covered up.’

In order to understand this ‘implosive indigeneity’, I argue that we need to understand the dynamics through which a language of resistance transforms into a language of power. In this article, I explore how ‘indigeneity as radical difference’ emerged as resistance against a colonial state and how, when introduced into the resourceful machinery of the state apparatus as a legitimizing device, it developed its own powerful political and symbolical gravitational field. Not only was the language of political protest indigenized (Canessa 2007, p. 205); not only was the language of geopolitical government indigenized (Burman 2014, p. 264); rather, everything started rotating around indigeneity – be it the planned construction of a nuclear plant, the extraction of lithium and natural gas, city planning, tourism, economic growth, education, and so on and so forth. Thus, indigeneity developed its own gravitational field. And it was a politically powerful one.

Astronomers say a black hole is formed when an object’s internal pressure fails to resist the object’s own gravity. A black hole is a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape. To be sure, social and political life works according to its own dynamics, not – in any socially and politically meaningful way – according to the laws of quantum physics. Still, though, I find it helpful to think with tropes such as gravitational fields and black holes. Something collapses here, something implodes and something is being swallowed by power – radical difference as resistance, indigeneity as an emancipatory device, indigenous knowledge as counter-epistemology. Considering Mona Lilja and Stellan Vinthagen’s (2014, p. 108) argument that ‘the peculiarities of power decide how resistance can be conducted’, crucial questions emerge: How do you resist a state-induced gravitational field of indigeneity? How do you resist black hole indigeneity? How do you use ‘indigenous knowledge’ as a counter-epistemology when it is institutionalized by state power? In other words, how do you resist power when power speaks your language, enacts your reality, produces your knowledge; how do you resist power when power makes your resistant practices and elements the center of formal political gravitation?

To start addressing these questions, we need to go back in time and explore the first sparks in contemporary history of radical difference as resistance.

3. Sparks of radical difference

In the 1900 Bolivian national census report, ‘the indigenous race’ (la raza indígena) was said to be doomed to extinction due to drought, hunger, and alcohol (Rivera 2003 [1984], p. 73). ‘La raza indígena’ would prove the Bolivian demographers wrong, though, and persist. With the National Revolution of 1952, the disappearance of el indio re-emerged on the political agenda. This time, however, not in physical terms, but in social and cultural terms as el indio was discursively transformed into campesino (peasant) as part of the project of construing a new modern mestizo nation in which there would be no place for the ethnic Other (Burman 2014, p. 250). La raza indígena was thus rhetorically transformed into a national peasantry and campesino identities were internalized by generations of previously damnés subjects. Formally, they were now citizens with the right to vote and be elected and to access previously privileged spaces such as universities. Nevertheless, it soon dawned on many campesinos that theirs was a second-class citizenship and that the concept of campesino in many ways was used by the more privileged as a mere euphemism for indio. Racist structures were not pulled down by a change in racist rhetoric; a political inclusive pose was not enough to put an end to exploitation. Hence, el indianismo and el katarismo emerged as radical political projects during the second half of the 20^th century, articulating claims for social justice in an anti-colonial idiom. To both, but especially to el indianismo (Pacheco 1992), indigeneity as radical difference was from the very beginning fundamental to political mobilization and discourse: ‘As indios they oppressed us, as indios we will liberate ourselves!’ is a well-known indianista slogan, ‘Neither Christ nor Marx will liberate el indio!’ is another. This idiom, resuscitating the figure of el indio – supposedly buried in the colonial historical dust of the old patria – and transforming him (sic!) from a stigmatized colonial category of contempt into an emancipatory political actor and a revolutionary subject, was present in the 1962 founding act of the first indianista political party, Partido Indio de Bolivia:

With the blessings of Inti and Pachamama, our eternal gods, with our spirits in prayer, our eyes blinded by tears and our hearts crying: justice and at the feet of our snow dressed mountains(…), below the gaze of the guardian spirit of our race; (…) before the tears and the bloodstained suffering of millions of our ancestors; and before the barbaric dismemberment (…) of our freedom martyr: TUPAK KATARI, on our knees and with our own blood we sign and mark the Foundation Act of PIAK, which is the cornerstone of the re-conquest of our liberty and our homeland: el indio’s homeland and the homeland for el indio. AMEN.

(Manifiesto del PIB, quoted in Pacheco 1992: 34, my translation)

Interestingly, many of the essential discursive elements of 21^st century indigenous activism and even those of Evo Morales’ state indigeneity, are present here in a prototypical shape: There is el indio, as a political subject with a ‘homeland’ (patria) and as a political subject for whom a patria is envisioned. The world in which el indio is situated is one of ‘eternal gods’, mountains, ‘the guardian spirit of our race’, and ancestors. Among these ancestors, the 18^th century rebel leader Tupak Katari, who headed a rebellion against the Spanish colonial administration and besieged La Paz for several months, stands out as being worthy of special mentioning. Interestingly, at the side of white national heroes such as Simón Bolívar and José Antonio de Sucre, Tupak Katari became one of the central national martyrs in the new plurinational narrative of the Bolivian state. The repertoire of discursive elements used by the PIB activists here fulfills one crucial function: it points to difference, a radical difference from where political mobilization and resistance is encouraged, justified and accounted for. As a historical and political subject, el indio, it is argued, is different from the dominant white-mestizo subject. Dwelling in a world of ancestors and eternal pre-colonial gods, el indio is different also in, as it were, an existential and ontological sense.⁴ The indianistas perceived these differences as being at risk of being watered-down by the imposition of an elusive mestizo campesino identity. Therefore, the identity of el indio was essential to this specific form of indianista resistance that emerged in the 1960s and gained strength in the 1970s and 1980s.

While el indianismo during its first decades was primarily a radical political project of a small vanguard group of Aymara students and intellectuals, which was rather unsuccessful in mobilizing broad support for their cause, another radical Aymara-Quechua movement emerged during the 1970s, splitting from el indianismo of the 1960s. It would succeed in anchoring its political agenda in influential organizations such as the peasant union CSUTCB (Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia): el katarismo (Hurtado 1986).

Having discussed one of the first indianista documents above, let us scrutinize the document that could be called the first katarista document, the Tiwanaku Manifesto of 1973.⁵ The first few lines of the document reads as follows:

A people which oppresses another people will never be free’ said Inca Yupanqui to the Spaniards. We, the Quechua and Aymara peasants as well as the other autochthonous cultures of this country, say the same. We feel economically exploited and culturally and politically oppressed. In Bolivia, there has been no integration of cultures, but a superposition and domination in which we remain in the lowest and most exploited stratum of this pyramid. (Centro de Coordinación y Promoción Campesina 1973, my translation).

Compared to the Foundation Act of PIB as discussed above, the Tiwanaku Manifesto is a very different document, less poetic, less bombastic, more practical and concrete, more of a definite contribution to the political debate with a clear argument being developed over several pages. The manifesto is organized with different thematic subheadings, such as ‘Economy’, ‘The political parties and the peasantry’, ‘Rural education’ etc. with concrete arguments and claims made under each. The exploitation of the peasantry is denounced, national trade policies are criticized, the assimilationist educational apparatus is reproached, and political clientilism and corruption are condemned. On the one hand, this radical but pragmatic engagement with national realpolitik is what characterizes el katarismo and distinguishes it from el indianismo of the early decades, which was more prone to a somewhat separatist emphasis on radical difference. On the other hand, though, underneath the katarista critical engagement with realpolitik, is a current of alterity similar to the one so dominant in indianista rhetoric. The very name of the movement, for instance, is a homage to Tupak Katari, who is mentioned in the manifesto along with his wife and sister-in-arms Bartolina Sisa, as bearers of ‘great ideals’. Likewise, el indio is indeed present as a political actor in the manifesto, though primarily under the label ‘campesino aymara quechua’; notions of raza are there, along with the notions of the ‘liberation of our Aymara Quechua people’. Primarily, however, radical difference is there in an all-pervading discussion on ‘cultural values’. On the one hand, it is argued that well defined Aymara and Quechua ‘cultural values’ have been denied, ignored and suppressed in everything from economic policies to educational practices. On the other hand, these cultural values are the soil out of which resistance grows; they instigate and justify political mobilization, not least during the dictatorships of the 1970s and the early 1980s (see Rivera 2003 [2003 [1984]).

4. Smoldering radical difference

Once formal democracy was reinstated in the early 1980s, indianista and katarista ideologies and rhetoric filtered into broader segments of society and into spaces of parliamentary power. Indianista activists such as Luciano Tapia and Constantino Lima were elected members of parliament, and katarista intellectuals such as Victor Hugo Cárdenas and Fernando Untoja founded katarista political parties that would come to play a not so negligible role in national politics. Katarista student unions attracted a growing number of members. Subsequently, in the early 1990s, two events combined to locate ‘indigenous issues’ on the national political agenda, and once there, they would prove hard to erase.

The first event was related to the certainty that the year 1992 was approaching. The symbolic weight in the fact that indigenous people were still present in the Americas 500 years after Christopher Columbus first set his foot on Caribbean shores in 1492 was tremendous. In indianista-katarista discourse, the five centuries were soon labelled as the ‘500 years of resistance’. The American continent was re-labelled Abya Yala, a Kuna concept meaning something akin to a ‘land in its full maturity’, which indigenous activists saw fit to use to denote the entire American continent in an anti-colonial toponymical struggle. Likewise, Bolivia was re-labelled as Qullasuyu, one of the four suyus of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca state. Moreover, the figure of the Inca was juxtaposed to the republican president and two key indianista figures of the time – Germán Choque and Jaime Apaza – were ‘crowned’ Incas in a spectacular ceremony at Plaza San Francisco in central La Paz on October 12 1992. Neither the date nor the place for the ceremony was chosen by chance. On October 12 1492, Columbus had heard the lookout’s yell of ‘Land ahoy!’, and where the Church of San Francisco was first built in 1549, it is said, a powerful wak’a – a place-being (Burman 2016a), or an earth being (de la Cadena 2015) – was once venerated. The juxtaposition of pre-colonial ritual practices and ontologies on the one hand and Catholic dogma and domination on the other was essential to indigenous resistance. The notion of indigeneity as a radically righteous alterity was thus central to much indianista and katarista mobilization of the time.

In the aftermath of the 1992 events, the first autonomous indigenous university (UTA, Universidad Indígena Tawantinsuyu) was founded by central figures of the indianista movement; many new generations of indianista activists have received their ideological training in its lecture halls (Burman 2012, 2016b). Pachakuti Aqarapi,⁶ one of the central indianista intellectuals of today and with whom I have worked for many years, describes his experiences at UTA in the early 2000s in the following way:

It was as though someone had poured a bucket of cold water over me. It occurred to me that I had been living my life with my eyes veiled. There, at the UTA, I understood this and came to see the world the way it actually is, that the true knowledge is the knowledge of our abuelos (grandfathers).

Thus, indianista activism manifested a fundamental epistemological dimension already back in the 1990s. Ever since, conflicting notions of the nature of legitimate knowledge and the (ethnic/racial) identity of legitimate knowledge producers have been inherent to political struggle (Burman 2012, 2016b, 2019). Indeed, the argument of indigenous people having the same intellectual capacity as anyone else to learn and produce knowledge was once viewed as a hilarious infringement on the academic privileges of the white-mestizo elite (Pérez 1963, Burman 2016b). However, to argue, as UTA did, that indigenous people are legitimate epistemic subjects in their own right and that they have their own legitimate epistemological frameworks and methods for producing and validating knowledge was still, in the 1990s, most likely perceived by the elite to be as scandalous as arguing that indigenous people could govern the country. Though things have changed since, this is the coloniality of knowledge: the epistemic dimension of colonial domination, epistemic violence as an integral part of the colonial relations of power that characterize the world since 1492 (see De Sousa Santos 2010, Grosfoguel 2013). Nevertheless, core elements of the epistemic indianista discourse of UTA became part and parcel of the ‘decolonizing’ discourse of the Morales administration. Thus, giving a thought-provoking twist to Foucauldian ideas of power/knowledge, ‘indigenous knowledge’ was not only institutionalized by the state, but also used to legitimize and justify state power.

The second significant event of the early 1990s was the emergence of so-called neoliberal multiculturalism from within the spaces of parliamentary and governmental power. As I have argued elsewhere (Burman 2011, 2014), neoliberal multiculturalism was primarily a top-down reaction to increasingly vociferous indianista and katarista claims for social justice, decolonization and indigenous people’s rights (Postero 2017, Sturtevant 2018). In 1993, the katarista intellectual Victor Húgo Cárdenas was appointed Vice-President in an otherwise right-wing, neoliberal government headed by Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (Goni). Interestingly, the same Aymara shaman who headed the ceremony for Evo Morales in Tiwanaku, as mentioned in the introduction, performed a similar but much less grandiose ceremony for Vice-President Cárdenas on the day of his appointment. Soon thereafter, the constitution was re-written and Bolivia was declared a pluricultural and multiethnic republic. An educational reform was implemented, acknowledging the values of multilingual and intercultural education. Thus, indigenous languages, crafts, and music entered classrooms all over the country. Nevertheless, while indigenous people were recognized as bearers of the cultural diversity of la patria, neoliberal economic reforms meant a frontal attack on the most marginalized and exploited segments of the Bolivian population. And as class and ethnicity are intricately intertwined in Bolivian society, those who suffered the most from imposed privatizations, deregulations and the down-sizing of the public sector tended to be the people whose cultural expressions simultaneously were celebrated in governmental multiculturalist rhetoric. Hence, the label ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’. It was, moreover, a politically defanged notion of indigeneity that entered official discourse and state politics, one related to crafts, language, music and dance, not to territorial rights, radical economic reforms, social justice and decolonization. Likewise, the ‘indigenous knowledge’ that was supposed to be part of the intercultural education materialized mainly in folkloric, stereotypical images of ‘traditional’ rural life – indios playing the flute and herding llamas –, not in knowledge produced by indigenous people or from within indigenous epistemological frameworks. Carlos Macusaya (2014) argues that it was the ‘culturalist’ emphasis of early katarismo – as discussed above in terms of a focus on ‘cultural values’ – that opened up for this depoliticized multiculturalist notion of indigeneity.

Nevertheless, once indigeneity had appeared on the political agenda, it was there to stay. Thus, neoliberal multiculturalism – with all its failings, contradictions and problems – implied the opening up of spaces where indigeneity could be discussed and displayed and from where it could be carried beyond a politically defanged multiculturalist setting.

5. Explosion

At the beginning of the new millennium, notions and discourses that were once present only in the minds and rhetoric of a small group of radical indianistas and kataristas were gaining weight in public debate and in social movement activism. The period between 2000 and 2005 was characterized by massive social mobilization, increasingly articulated political indigenous identities, and harsh state repression. Indigenous difference became a factor to consider, an essential checker in the political dynamics of legitimacy and power.

The wave of massive social mobilizations took off with the so-called ‘Water War’ in Cochabamba during the first four months of the year 2000, when a broad coalition of social movements and organizations joined forces to oppose the neoliberal privatization of public water services. On the streets, the protestors were met by harsh police and military repression. The protestors were steadfast, however, and after hundreds of wounded protestors and one 17-year old boy killed, the foreign water corporation left Cochabamba and the city’s water services were organized in a municipal venture. It was a tremendous victory for the social movements; a transnational corporation was expelled from the city by massive, popular mobilization. Not least, it showed to other subaltern political actors across the country that if not everything, then at least a lot is possible.

Aymara leader Felipe Quispe, the general secretary of the peasant union CSUTCB at the time, would affirm this when he headed a massive mobilization on the altiplano surrounding La Paz in April and September in the same year. Roads were blocked, the city of La Paz besieged. To besiege La Paz was a political measure that went beyond depriving the urban population of food and provisions; it was a measure that brought to the minds of the powerful, the indigenous rebellion of 1781, when Tupak Katari and Bartolina Sisa threw an iron ring round the city and starved the Spanish administration for months. Felipe Quispe knew how to capitalize on both the present and the past. While the mobilization was motivated by the general effects of neoliberalism among the most marginalized and exploited sections of the population and the failure on part of the government to live up to previous agreements with the peasant union, the overall narrative went far beyond realpolitik. The 2000 uprising was, in Quispe’s rhetoric, a continuation of the 1781 rebellion. Thus, indigeneity became the key element of mobilization and Quispe – dressed in poncho and his cheek bulging with coca leaves – emerged, as it were, as the reincarnation of Tupak Katari. As a member of the Ejército Guerrillero Tupaj Katari in the 1980s and 1990s, Quispe had already made a name for himself, not least due to the mordant reply he gave when asked by renowned Bolivian journalist Amalia Pando why he engaged in an armed struggle. Quispe replied: ‘So that my daughter won’t be your servant!’ With statements such as these, Quispe did not only point to severe inequalities based on class, but to the coloniality of power inherent in Bolivian society, in which a white-mestizo minority (personified here by Amalia Pando) exploited an indigenous majority (personified here by Quispe and his daughter). During the 2000 uprisings, Quispe spoke of this in terms of ‘the two Bolivias’, one of a privileged white-mestizo elite and one of exploited indios. I have interviewed a large number of men and women who were teenagers when Quispe mobilized their communities and barrios in protest and many of them have spoken about the political and existentially transformative weight of Quispe’s words and deeds. When the tear gas had dispersed and the police and military had withdrawn from the streets of El Alto and the country roads, something had happened to the very ‘being’ of these young protestors. Their sense of Bolivian nationhood had been called into question by their intimate and agonizing experience of state repression; their notions of ‘self’ were increasingly forged in opposition to a repressive and exclusive white-mestizo national project and rather molded on counter-narratives of indigeneity, notions of ‘being Aymara’, and attitudes of ‘not being the servant of anyone’.

Before long, subjectivities and notions such as these would return to defy the Bolivian state much more thoroughly. In 2003, a heated political debate arose regarding the government’s plan to export natural gas from the Bolivian lowland to the United States, using Chilean ports. While parts of the population found it hard to raise enough money to buy gas for their everyday cooking, the government wanted to sell Bolivian natural gas to the US for a paltry sum, and on top of it all, using the ports of the perpetual national enemy to the west. The popular resistance was compact. In September, the debate turned into street protests. Likewise, rural Aymara communities mobilized once more, blocking roads in defense of the country’s natural resources. As police and military repression increased, the protests intensified. The so-called ‘Gas War’ had begun: ‘Bolivia’s excluded indigenous and poor inhabitants made themselves visible, claiming their rights as citizens, and demanding to be taken into account’ (Postero 2017, p. 17). The more protestors in the morgue, the more protestors took to the streets. While people mobilized massively throughout the country, the city of El Alto soon crystallized as the epicenter of protests. It is a quite unique city, constantly growing due to migration from adjacent rural regions and with 74% of its population identifying as ‘being Aymara’ in the 2001 census. Moreover, its geographical location, edging on the brim above the city of La Paz and the center of national political power, is essential for understanding El Alto’s potential for influencing national politics through massive social mobilization. In September and October 2003, the city of El Alto emerged as a collective political actor: the rebel city (Lazar 2008), ‘always on its feet, never on its knees’. El Alto emerged, however, not only as a rebel city, but also as an indigenous Aymara city.

After a couple of weeks of protests and repression, the initial message of the protestors – ‘No to the gas sale!’ – gave way to a determined claim for the president’s resignation. Faced with the massification and radicalization of protests, on October 17 President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada resigned, escaped the massive street mobilizations by helicopter and boarded a plane to Miami. By then, he had the blood of 81 dead protestors on his hands.

Felipe Quispe’s notion of ‘The two Bolivias’ was never as vibrant as it was in October 2003. In their bodies – in their tissues and organs, on their skin and in their mucous membranes – protestors experienced the repressive force of a white, colonial state. They faced bullets, batons and tear gas. The juxtaposition of dead brown bodies with gunshot wounds and an arrogant white president who spoke Spanish like a gringo and allied himself with transnational capital, pointed to the acute need for a radical transformation of the racialized asymmetry of power and the legitimizing narratives that underpinned it. It pointed to the need for a country in which the subalternized majority could identify with and exercise power and not only be subjected to it. New histories, new anthropologies and sociologies, new political theories would be written in and from the barrios and communities (Mamani 2004, 2005). Social movement activists would become actors in the production of new knowledge and, in Bernie Russell’s (Russell 2015, p. 222) words, ‘tools you can fight with’. It has been convincingly argued that it is one thing to write history from the perspective of ‘Europe expanding’ and a very different thing to write history from the perspective of ‘Europe arriving’ (Grosfoguel 2002). Likewise, it is one thing to produce knowledge from a university armchair and a very different thing to produce knowledge being in the hairlines of the telescopic sights of military snipers. Thus, counter-narratives and counter-knowledges came about.

Before any radical change, however, Sánchez de Lozada’s successor, Carlos Mesa, would govern the country by continuing to implement neoliberal politics. It took a year and a half, and then people filled the streets in protest again. In June 2005, Mesa resigned. New elections were announced and the Bolivian electorate would witness a campaign never seen before. The massive mobilizations that took place between 2000 and 2005 had redrawn the cartography of political power. National politics was no longer a well-polished space for white bodies in leather-soled shoes; it was a space carved out by brown bodies mobilizing in car tire sandals and down-at-heel sneakers on coarse asphalt and muddy roads. The new patria would reflect this, or it would not be. Evo Morales knew how to capitalize this vibrant transformative fever and emerged in the campaign embodying the mobilizing frenzy. He was there, it seemed, not only to fulfill the radical agendas of the 2000–2005 mobilizations, but also to put an end to more than 500 years of colonialism. Interestingly, he was there in the campaign as indígena (indigenous), an identity label he had not used to refer to himself before. He used to be a campesino (peasant), a cocalero (coca farmer), sometimes even an obrero (worker). Nevertheless, in the presidential campaign 2005, he was the indigenous candidate, performing rituals with Aymara shamans, dressed in a poncho and speaking of 500 years of exploitation and discrimination. This transformation was a mere advert of how state ceremony and protocol and the narrative of la patria would be indigenized once the new president was appointed and the so-called ‘process of change’ was launched. Rather than a simple landslide, Evo Morales’ 54% victory at the polls on December 18 2005 was a big bang from which an image of indigeneity as radical difference would radiate through the universe of Bolivian political and social life.

6. Big bang

Three days before Evo Morales’ installation, I arrived in Bolivia to carry out a 12 months long ethnographic fieldwork for my PhD. I had already lived in the country for some years and I had well-established connections with the two focal nodes of my research: the indianista-katarista movement and organized collectives of urban Aymara shamans (so-called yatiris or amawt’as). My original research plan talked of exploring the role of the shamans within the movement and the intricate ways in which radical indigenous oppositional activism, ritual practices, and cosmological knowledge interrelate and cross-fertilize. Suddenly, however, between me and my original research plan stood Evo Morales Ayma. The government and state officials increasingly engaged many of the shamans with whom I had worked previously and with whom I had planned to work with this time. Two of the shamans with whom I worked most closely were subsequently hired by the state in different ways: One as a counselor at the Health Ministry, and one – the shaman who headed the ceremony for Evo Morales in Tiwanaku, mentioned in the introduction – as something akin to a governmental shaman, called for whenever needed. Moreover, the indianista-katarista movement was no longer in an unambiguous state of opposition against the state; many of the activists supported Evo Morales during his first years in power, some of them even entered the halls of parliamentary power as ministers, ‘engaged intellectuals’ or state officials.

Hence, I had to change my research plan. The role of the shamans within the movement was not as relevant anymore. Nevertheless, their role within the state apparatus was more appealing. So I decided to follow the shamans wherever they went. That is how I ended up doing ethnographic fieldwork with shamans and state officials behind the closed doors of ministries and state institutions, and at public state ceremonies, looking up at Evo Morales on stages and on balconies through the bulging smoke of the shamans’ incensories. The shamans, it seemed, embodied a distilled concoction of indigeneity, a condensed essence of authenticity and legitimacy, qualities that could rub off on the government more or less irrespective of the cabinet’s actual ethnic composition. Besides the president himself – born and raised in an Aymara community –, there were indeed a handful of other ministers who would both self-identify and be recognized by others as indigenous. Nevertheless, the ‘indigenous government’ proclaimed by the president – in the sense of a government constituted by a majority of indigenous cabinet members – had little resonance in reality. Still though, indigeneity was instrumentally critical for the government in order to be able to distance itself from previous governments and to give credibility to the argument that the coming to power of Evo Morales meant the end of centuries of colonial plundering and exploitation and the start of something new, a new patria. Not necessarily ‘la patria of el indio and la patria for el indio’ as the indianista activists of the 1960s envisioned, but a plurinational patria in which the indigenous majority would no longer be exploited and marginalized subaltern subjects, a patria that would have indigeneity at the very heart of its national narrative. In this sense, the Morales administration was a sensational factory of promises to many, and the indigeneity enacted by the shamans was crucial in this respect. Moreover, at their side, they had indigenous musicians, dancers, and community authorities, paying their indigenous tribute consisting of authenticity and legitimacy. From his balcony, from an improvised stage, or from the driver seat of a tractor, el presidente indígena surveyed it all.

While specific individuals came and went, shamans were at Evo’s side until the end. Some of them became increasingly critical of their role in public rituals, however, and many of the shamans who performed rituals for the government in 2006 withdrew from the public spotlight. Their ritual practices gave their office, visibility in the mass media and gave them access to certain spaces of power, but many felt they were used and made into emblematic indios, legitimizing the Evo Morales administration but receiving only rhetorical recognition in return. One of the most well-known shamans in El Alto expressed his frustration thus, only ten months after Evo’s first appointment: ‘That’s enough, no more clownery for the president!’ As soon as one shaman stepped down, though, another one stepped up. The indigenization of the state was an attractive endeavor that could work as a springboard in the career for charismatic shamans with political ambitions (Burman 2016a).

A fundamental step in politics aimed at the decolonization of the state, was the rewriting of the constitution (Schavelzon 2012, Postero 2017). In 2009, the ‘multiethnic and pluricultural’ Republic of Bolivia was transformed into the Plurinational Bolivian State. Since then, indigeneity permeates the constitution and ‘the purpose and function of the State’ is to ‘[c]onstitute a just and harmonious society, based on decolonization’ (Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia 2009, Art. 9.1, my translation). As I have argued elsewhere (Burman 2011, 2016b) however, the MAS government manifested impressive skills when it came to the politico-semantic stretching of the concept ‘decolonization’. It could mean anything from antiracist legislation and the inclusion of the wiphala among the national symbols, to the projected construction of a nuclear plant and the expansion of the agricultural frontier (implying massive deforestation and setting the stage for the horrific forest fires that afflicted the Bolivian lowlands in August to September 2019). Nevertheless, decolonizing policies found especially fertile soil in one specific area: education.

A new ‘Education Law’ materialized in 2010, envisioning Bolivian education – from kindergarten to postgraduate studies – to be ‘decolonizing, liberating, revolutionary, anti-imperialist, depatriarchalizing’ (Ministerio de Educación 2010, art. 3:1, my translation). Moreover, state-controlled indigenous universities were decreed to develop ‘processes of recovery, strengthening, creation and re-creation of the knowledges (…) of the indigenous (…) peoples’ (ibid, art. 60:2, my translation). This educational legislation goes beyond the multiculturalist educational reform of the 1990s in several ways: 1). It is not limited to compulsory school education, but focuses just as much or even more on higher education. 2). It involves an element of critical social theory and has been outlined, in part, by indianista-katarista intellectuals. 3). It is not as blatantly characterized by folkloric representations of ‘traditional’ and ‘rural’ indigeneity, but is rather somewhat influenced by decolonial epistemological critiques of the coloniality of knowledge; it is a practice of knowledge production that, to a certain extent, is characterized by (onto-)epistemological disobedience (Burman 2012, 2016b, 2019); an education dealing with the generation of what Arturo Escobar (2007) would call ‘worlds and knowledges otherwise’. In other words, it departs from the supposition that indigenous people are legitimate producers of valid knowledge in their own right and that there are such things as ‘indigenous knowledge’ and indigenous theories of knowledge that can defy, or at least complement, Eurocentric epistemological paradigms and dominant histories of global knowledge production.

Three state-endorsed indigenous universities have been founded, one on the Aymara high plateau, one in the Quechua-speaking regions of Chapare and one in the tropical Guaraní region of South-Eastern Bolivia. Interestingly, with its main campus in the region that served as bastion in the Aymara uprisings in 2000, the Indigenous Aymara University was named after Tupak Katari (Universidad Indígena Boliviana Aymara Tupak Katari). A former state official at the Ministry of Education, who is also one of the intellectual authors behind the Indigenous University, explained its rationale to me:

We want to construct a new epistemology at the indigenous universities. … To us, the indigenous universities, which are our own creation, are the vanguard to transform higher education. … As it is now, higher education has a colonized structure. … The university has only one format, one standard which implicitly favors one culture, the Castilian culture.

I have taught at the Indigenous Aymara University a couple of times. It is indeed an interesting academic environment, with mainly rural students of indigenous origin and many lectures being conducted by indianista-katarista oriented scholars. Moreover, what adds to the university’s uniqueness is that not only academics teach there; also shamans, artisans, indigenous authorities and other knowledgeable Aymara men and women share their knowledge with the students.

Critique has nevertheless been raised against the indigenous universities, not least from indianista activists and intellectuals. Why, they ask, are there only academic programs oriented towards practical and technical professions? At the Indigenous Aymara University, there are four academic programs: Agronomy, Veterinary and Zoology, Food Engineering, and Textile Engineering. At the Indigenous Guaraní University, one can study, among other programs, Oil and Natural Gas Engineering. There is no Sociology program, no Philosophy program. Critical questions thus emerge: Is this a reflection of the old colonial association of indios with manual labor and practical skills, rather than with cognitive and intellectual abilities? What is decolonizing about Oil and Natural Gas Engineering? Why create separate universities for indigenous students instead of decolonizing and indigenizing the already existing universities?

Critical voices argue that this is yet another example of a broader process of domestication of the indigenous agendas that were raised in the massive mobilizations between 2000 and 2005 (Rivera 2014). Policies, institutions and infrastructure projects were labelled ‘indigenous’ or were said to be ‘decolonizing’ as the language of geopolitical government was indigenized and radical difference was governmentalized. The Bolivian communication satellite launched in China in 2013 was named ‘Tupak Katari’; natural gas and oil reserves were said to be ‘Presents from Pachamama’; the Dakar Rally on the Bolivian high plateau was inaugurated and blessed by Aymara and Quechua shamans; a projected nuclear plant was justified in terms of ‘vivir bien’ and ‘suma qamaña’, held to be indigenous concepts pointing beyond extractivist and growth-oriented paradigms of development (Munter et al. 2017); and so on and so forth. Anything down to the most insignificant presidential decree or the official inauguration of a new synthetic soccer field was sprayed with the enchanting scent of altérité indigène. Something of significance happened here as radical difference moved from resistance to power. Having been the source of legitimate resistance for decades, radical difference turned into the source of legitimate exercise of state power. As the resourceful machinery of the state apparatus incorporated indigeneity as a legitimizing device and co-opted its radical potential, indigeneity developed its own powerful political and symbolical gravitational field. In August 2011, the stage was set for state indigeneity to implode on itself and for black hole indigeneity to appear.

7. Implosion

In mid-2011, Bolivian public debate centered around one thing: la carretera, the road. The Morales administration had decided to materialize long held dreams of connecting the departments of Beni and Cochabamba by building a road through the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure (TIPNIS), an indigenous territory and national park in the Bolivian lowlands, considered a hotspot of biodiversity. This caused a major wave of protests and a severe legitimacy crisis for the government (McNeish 2013, Burman 2014).

TIPNIS is home to three indigenous peoples (Yuracaré, Moxeño, and Chimán) who administer the territory as a TIOC (Territorio Indigena Originario Campesino; Indigenous, Originary, Peasant Territory). This implies that they must give their ‘free, prior and informed consent’ before any infrastructure project or natural resource extraction venture is initiated on their land. In this case, the inhabitants of TIPNIS were not consulted. Evo Morales simply stated that since the government was an indigenous government, there was no need to consult indigenous peoples before implementing policies that would benefit and integrate the country. Many of the indigenous communities of TIPNIS opposed the building of the highway since they feared it would open up their territory to transnational capital, state control and the expansion of cocalero settlements. Hence, protest measures were taken, and I decided to follow them closely and participate in the activities (see Burman 2014). On August 14, hundreds of protestors met in a sports hall on the outskirts of the lowland town of Trinidad. They met there to initiate one of the fundamental activities on the protest palette of Bolivian social movements: to march long distances towards the center of power. Not only did the communities of TIPNIS participate; large indigenous umbrella organizations such as CIDOB and CONAMAQ, from the lowlands and the highlands respectively, were also there in the marching lines, not because their constituent communities were directly affected by the TIPNIS conflict (except for the communities of TIPNIS who are affiliated with CIDOB), but because they saw a risk in what they perceived as the government’s arrogance and autocratic attitude to control indigenous land and resources. If they behave this way in TIPNIS, they argued, they could do the same thing in other territories. Hence, the indigenous government faced an indigenous opposition; an intense struggle over who is the most legitimately ‘indigenous’, thus began. Never before had indigeneity been such a hard political currency. The government accused the leaders of the protest march of not representing their indigenous grassroots and of living in urban areas, and thus supposedly not being indigenous, and of being financed by environmental organizations of the North, while the protestors accused the government of being an anti-indigenous, cocalero government. Interestingly, even the predominantly white-mestizo right-wing political opposition entered into the debate using the idiom of indigeneity to attack the government. The government, they argued, did not respect the rights of the indigenous peoples and was a cocalero government rather than an indigenous one, and to be a cocalero is to be ‘the opposite of indígena’ (Vacaflor 2012, third paragraph). Thus, not only the language of political protest and the language of political power were indigenized, but also the language of political reaction. The political gravitational field of indigeneity had become so intense that no political discourse or action could escape it. This is how black holes are created, a region of space develops a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.

Thousands of protestors had joined in the march along the way, and when they arrived in La Paz after 66 days, the protestors had been subjected to defamation campaigns and brutal police repression and were greeted by thousands of city-dwelling paceños as heroes. The governmental smokescreen of legitimizing indigeneity had been blown away. It was simply not credible to use ceremonial displays of indigeneity to legitimize a government that used its force to violently repress indigenous citizens; it was simply not coherent to use the trope of ‘indigenous knowledge’ as rhetoric, while denying that the indigenous inhabitants of TIPNIS would be knowledgeable administrators of their territory. The differential discourses carved out by indigenous intellectuals and movements in the spaces of power since the neoliberal multiculturalism of the 1990s and which intensified with the coming to power of Evo Morales and MAS, fed back into power and were devoured by it. Nancy Postero puts it neatly: ‘Increasingly, performances of indigeneity serve as tools of state legitimation rather than as sites of liberation. Thus, (…) indigeneity has become a tool of policing’ (2017: 182). Likewise, Into Goudsmit discusses the new indigenized ceremonial protocol and cautions that it might end up turning ‘indigeneity into an authoritative means of reproducing the social relations it professes to transform’ (2016, p. 13). By being defanged, domesticated, essentialized, romanticized, and instrumentalized, indigeneity became functional to state power and nationalist narratives. Nancy Postero (2017) discusses this process in terms of a ‘new state indigeneity’ by way of which the government propagates a generic version of indigeneity to consolidate and legitimize state power, rather than to empower ‘real’ indigenous people. As I have argued elsewhere (Burman 2014) however, this generic indigeneity had certain specificities as it was used to endorse a particular kind of indigenous subject, one that did not pose a threat to a strong, omnipresent and controlling Bolivian state, in other words, one that did not claim the right to self-government and the autonomous management of territories and resources.

Thus, a language of resistance transformed into a language of power. Practices of resistance, such as the ritual practices of the shamans, transformed into practices of power. Not only was indigenous knowledge acknowledged and incorporated into state discourse and educational policies, but also indigenous notions of ‘what there is’; in other words, indigenous ontologies, indigenous realities, indigenous lifeworlds were celebrated in state discourse, ceremony and protocol. Elsewhere (Burman 2016c), I have argued that this intense state emphasis on indigenous shamans, rituals and deities led to an ontological ch’akhi, an ontological hangover, in Bolivian society. There was simply no insurrectionary potential left in radical difference after its instrumentalized celebration; after years of state-induced hyperbole, indigeneity was exhausted and would no longer function as a source of political legitimacy, neither for power nor for resistance. This is black hole indigeneity – a radical difference that implodes on itself as its contestatariedad, its dissenting quality, is swallowed by power.

Thus, when radical difference as a language of resistance has turned into the language of power, how do resisting, subaltern subjects relate to radical difference? To conclude this paper, let us briefly explore five different tendencies in current Bolivian society.

8. New sparks?

One way of relating to radical difference and state-endorsed indigeneity is to ‘let it be’. Though not as overwhelming as a decade ago, the 2019 elections showed that Evo Morales and MAS still have a broad support among large sections of Bolivian society, not least in rural and peripheral urban areas. Among these sections, many would argue that the MAS government did so much good for a large majority of the population identified as indigenous, that it does not matter if their indigeneity was instrumentalized and romanticized in the process. Black hole indigeneity would then be the price one pays for progressive reforms aimed at social justice.

A second tendency is to ‘dig deeper’, to do seriously what the state did in a folkloristic way; to become, as it were, a precolonial subject. This involves anything from young men growing long hair and wearing lluchos and ch’uspas and young women putting on a pollera, a bowler hat and wearing their braids united by tullmas (Burman 2011), to learning ritual practices from the shamans and engage in pilgrimages to sacred places in the landscape (Burman 2016a). I have shared many such ritual experiences with young urban Aymara men and women over the years. Many of them speak of profound transformative experiences. Engaged in ritual practices on the mountains, it is as though the last 500 years were put within brackets; a landscape of powerful ancestral beings is invoked and people’s very selves are transformed as they return to the ‘knowledge of the abuelos’. Some of them concretize such transformative experiences by changing their ‘colonial’ given names for indigenous ones; over the years, I have seen Freddy turn into Pachakuti, René become Yawar Qala and Bruno transform into Paqapu. Though existentially significant for the people engaging in these endeavors of re-creating indigeneity and insisting on radical difference as resistance, they entail a risk of being ridiculed as pachamamistas, or being criticized for aligning with and reproducing the instrumentalist and essentialist indigeneity promulgated by the Morales administration for almost 14 years. Thus, as their struggle was co-opted by the MAS government to begin with, they now risk becoming politically irrelevant in a new political landscape. Still, they insist on a radicalized version of radical difference as their fundamental means of resistance, not least in the current political context, in which racist anti-indigenous discourses have reemerged in formal political spaces, in which Pachamama is banned from the Palacio Quemado (Criales 2019) and the supporters of Evo and MAS are called ‘hordes’ and the members of the former ‘indigenous government’ are labelled ‘savages’ by the interim president (Ariñez 2020).

A third tendency is to replace the ‘enchantment’ of indigenous epistemologies and ontologies with the magic of blood and soil; Aymara nationalism embracing modernity, rationalism and nationalist romanticism in chorus, an alterity rid of any pachamamista primitivism, but providing other enchanting narratives. Indeed, notions of blood and soil have been part of indianista discourse since the 1960s, but then in combination with a stance on epistemological and ontological indigenous alterity. In this new version of Aymara nationalism, any such traces of pachamamismo are erased in favor of a nationalist mythology more aligned with the ones sweeping through 21^st century Europe. Thus, indigeneity is re-created in an imaginary landscape of primordial nations, and its radical difference is one of blood and soil. As such, in the eyes of some, it achieves to distance itself from the pachamamista state indigeneity of the former government and to present itself as a viable political option.

A fourth tendency is, perhaps surprisingly, de-indigenization: Abandoning the project of indigenous alterity as resistance. Indigenous alterity has fulfilled its purpose, it is argued. It has outlived itself in a grotesque state-endorsed essentialist costume. And it imploded. Proponents of de-indigenization, such as Carlos Macusaya (2018), motivate such a move by pointing to the risk that the alterity which has been creatively propelled by indigenous activists and the Morales administration might feed back into the dynamics of racialization from above as in the past and that it might be used once more by privileged, non-indigenous actors to justify a racialized division of labor and a racialized organization of social and political space. Therefore, it is argued, resistance ought to be de-indigenized.

A fifth tendency is what I call cholo alterity. 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 true social person) and the mestizo urbanites (to whom his indio origin will shine through and be a persistent rationale for discrimination and exploitation). Currently, though, the meaning of cholo is changing. El cholo upsets categories, identities and alterities. New differences, new alterities and new indigeneities are in the making, less essentialist in nature, but politically more contestatarias, not least since they draw on the history of class-based struggle that has been attached to both indigeneity and cholo subjectivities historically. These are cholo alterities, carved out in spaces of modernity with pockets of alterity, in spaces of alterity with pockets of modernity; these are ch’ixi alterities. Consulting an Aymara dictionary, you will read that ch’ixi means ‘grey’. However, this seemingly trivial meaning hides a semantic richness. While that which is ch’ixi may seem grey to the eye, the color is actually composed of small black and white spots. Bolivian sociologist and activist Silvia Rivera (2012) uses the concept ch’ixi to draw attention to how elements from different cultural, epistemological and ontological contexts coexist in social practices and identities. These elements form a whole, but they never merge completely.

Josef Estermann (2006: 314, my translation) argues that ‘El mestizaje (…) is the most authentic way of living one’s proper Andean being’. Elsewhere (Burman 2016a: 48), I have explained why and in what sense Estermann is wrong. However, if we replace ‘mestizaje’ with choleaje, I would be more willing to agree. Being cholo is something very different from being mestizo. In the Bolivian context, being mestizo tends to involve an aspiration towards whiteness as one’s Spanish descent is strategically celebrated and one’s indigenous roots are rejected. Thus, distance is created in relation to indigenous people and a relatively privileged position in society is procured.⁷ To be cholo, though, is about being indigenous in peri-urban ways, without pretentions to either whiteness or ‘indigenous authenticity and purity’. Could it be so that the historical context in which ‘pure’ and bombastic indigeneity and ‘millenarian’ indigenous knowledge were sources of political legitimacy is coming to a close? New strategies of resistance – more cholo, more ch’ixi, rather anarchist than nationalist – are in the making. Could it be so that these subjectivities are the ones most apt for navigating the new political landscape and confronting the resurgence of blatant anti-indigenous racism in formal politics and on the streets? Its contestatariedad lies in neither blindly embracing all that shines of modernity, nor uncritically excavating a precolonial past for knowledge to solve current problems, but in valuing the quasi-modern, living in the in-between, resisting from the betwixt spaces of peripheral urban barrios and the anything-but-‘pure’ rural communities, neither accepting conventional Bolivian patriotism, nor creating indigenous carbon copies thereof; producing knowledge from the boundaries of the black hole from which, the astronomers tell us, no escape is possible, the event horizon; having perceived the black hole of state indigeneity, having felt its gravitation and said: ¡Que se joden!

Hence, there are ways of dealing with situations when resistance is kidnapped by power, some more creative and contestarios and with more prospects of succeeding than others. As power is not a monolithic force, resistance comes in diverse configurations. Consequently, indigenous resistance to the specific form of Bolivian ‘indigenous’ state power that was exercised by Evo Morales and MAS, was an assemblage of heterogeneous practices of openly or covertly refusing to participate in the generation and reproduction of state indigeneity and radical difference as power and instead participate in the generation and reproduction of other ways of being and resisting, in the enactment of other alterities and subjectivities. While doing so, however, the door was opened to reactionary forces of Bolivian society and indigenous resisters now have to navigate a new and repressive political landscape, at least until new elections are held.

While these strategies can only be understood in relation to the power they oppose, they are not, as Foucault (1981, p. 95) reminds us, ‘only a reaction or a rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat’. Resistance is, in the end, not only reversed power (Lilja and Vinthagen 2014, p. 111). Thus, even as power speaks the language of resistance and institutionalizes counter-epistemologies, even as the machineries of power make resistance practices and elements the center of formal political gravitation, radical difference is never fully defanged. Only time will tell what role such radical difference will have in navigating and resisting a post-Evo political landscape.

Acknowledgments

I thank Juan José Ayala, Oscar Ayala and Il Grosso for their kind cooperation and my maestro Carlos Yujra (QEPD) and Davíd Quispe for their unceasing teachings. Likewise, I thank the anonymous reviewers and the members of the PoReSo research group at the School of Global Studies for their constructive critique.

Disclosure statement

There is no potential conflict of interest in regard to this article.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this paper was made possible by a generous writing grant from the Ann-Ida Broström and Dan Broström Funds.

Notes on contributors

Anders Burman

Anders Burman currently serves as an associate professor in Human Ecology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since the early 2000s, he has conducted ethnographic research in the Bolivian Andes, focusing on social movements and activist research, ritual practice, questions of indigeneity, knowledge production and decolonization, and, more recently, environmental conflicts and climate change. Some of Burman’s papers have appeared in the Journal of Political Ecology, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Journal of Latin American Studies.

Notes

1. Wiphala, the multicolored banner has been used since the early 1970s to symbolize Andean indigenous peoples and resistance on a pan-Andean scale, and since 2009, it is one of the official national symbols of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

2. ‘Radical difference’ is not a concept used by the principal actors in these dynamics; rather, it is an analytical concept used by Mario Blaser (2013) and others to characterize that which escapes the epistemological and ontological straightjacket of coloniality/modernity.

3. For decades, a legendary meeting place for indianista-katarista activists (see Nacionalismo Aymara 2018, p. 10).

4. Interestingly, notions such as these would be criticized in terms of pachamamismo by 21^st century indianistas such as Pedro Portugal and Carlos Macusaya (2016).

5. Carlos Macusaya (2014) makes an interesting analysis of the manifesto, the circumstances surrounding its writing and its significance as a document that concretized the differences between el indianismo and el katarismo.

6. Among his scholarly works, see for instance his 2016 book Macha: Políticas de descolonización del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia en la perspectiva de 500 años de guerra anticolonial (Aqarapi 2016).

7. In the political context of the Morales administration, where ’indigeneity’ could be a political asset, these dynamics were to a certain extent changing.