Article

The Culture of Democracy and

Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements
Robert Albro
The George Washington University
Abstract ■ This article describes the participation of Bolivia’s indigenous move-
ments in encompassing popular protest coalitions of the last five years. Pointing
to the importance of cultural heritage in current social movement efforts to revi-
talize Bolivian democracy, this argument examines the importance of the ‘terms
of recognition’ in the negotiation of the very meaning of democratic partici-
pation, between the traditional political class and popular protesters, but also
within protesting coalitions. As both indigenous and popular traditions of
struggle increasingly make common cause, Bolivia’s indigenous movements are
providing the cultural resources that frame the terms of popular protest. At the
same time, the terms of indigenous identity are also changing form, becoming
more available to growing urban-indigenous and non-indigenous popular social
sectors now willing to claim or reclaim an indigenous heritage. This article also
explores key transnational and national networks now involved in this transform-
ation of the terms of indigenous cultural heritage, making it the basis of an
alternative democratic public in Bolivia.
Keywords ■ Bolivia ■ democratization ■ indigenous movements ■ publics ■
recognition

‘Looking back, we will move forward.’

Carlos Mamani Condori (1992), Aymara activist and historian

‘We need a space where the people can talk not about the past, but the future.’
Oscar Olivera (2004), social movement spokesperson

On 6 June 2005, Bolivian president Carlos Mesa resigned for the second
time, citing his inability to govern while mired in another round of large-
scale social mobilizations that had paralyzed the country since mid-May.
Mesa’s government was beset by over 800 protests during his year and a
half in office (Dangl, 2005). The protests of May and June were touched
off by the passage of a new hydrocarbons law that did not grant national
control of gas reserves to the satisfaction of popular leaders. Sparring with
police, approximately 15,000 people filled the Plaza Murillo in La Paz on
30 May. On 1 June mostly Aymara peasants blockaded access to La Paz.
Meanwhile, in the city of Cochabamba, peasants and factory workers led a
massive march through the city center. By 4 June all of Bolivia’s major
highways were blockaded at 55 points throughout the country, bringing it
to an economic stand-still and provoking an exasperated Mesa to step
down.
Vol 26(4) 387–410 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X06070122]
Copyright 2006 © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
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Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

As it has been since the first Water War of 2000, public assemblies
convened by social movement leaders were instrumental in the run up to
Mesa’s resignation, including a referendum on 23 May (see Gomez, 2005;
Martin, 2005). After three weeks of strikes, marches, and road blocks, on
the day of Mesa’s resignation hundreds of thousands of people converged
on the center of La Paz, the capital city. And in what became a massive
open-air forum (popularly called a cabildo abierto), the call went up to found
a new ‘Popular Assembly’.1 The proposed assembly would be composed of
delegates from indigenous communities and urban neighborhood associ-
ations, along with worker, trade, and agrarian unions. Delegates would be
elected in meetings of each grassroots organization according to their
respective and preexistent ‘customary’ procedures (usos y costumbres).2 The
assembly’s first order of business would be to address two popular calls
repeatedly raised in recent years: for the nationalization of Bolivia’s natural
gas and for a referendum to redraft a national constitution that better
represents the rights of the country’s indigenous majority. As I argue here,
such efforts illustrate a deepening entanglement of indigenous with
national-popular traditions of struggle (see also Hylton, 2005a).
A former vice-president, Mesa himself came to power in October 2003
only after his predecessor, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, fled the country in
the face of outrage over bloody efforts to control similar protests through-
out that year, resulting in at least 60 deaths and hundreds injured (see
Ledebur, 2003: 2). It is estimated that a crowd of up to 500,000 people
assembled in La Paz the day Sánchez de Lozada’s helicopter took off. Prior
to his own resignation Mesa’s exasperation was apparent, as he declared the
El Alto protests to be a ‘carnival of lunatics’ (Mamani, 2005). The recent
travails and premature end of Mesa’s government exemplify the kinds of
concerns cited in a 2004 report by the United Nations Development
Program, titled ‘Democracy in Latin America: Toward a Citizen’s Democ-
racy’, which somberly concluded that democracy in the region is at best
‘fragile’.3
The almost routine inability of presidents to finish out their elected
terms of office in Bolivia, and elsewhere, has renewed debate over the status
and meaning of democracy for the region’s popular majority. The landslide
election to the presidency in December 2005 of Evo Morales – leader of the
coca growers and one of Bolivia’s more militant social movements – has
raised fears among foreign observers that Bolivia’s democracy is heading in
the wrong direction. Until very recently the US State Department identi-
fied Morales as an ‘illegal coca agitator’ and as the leader of the ‘radial
MAS’ (his political party) – part of a pattern of labeling Bolivia’s indigen-
ous-dominated social movements as ‘anti-systemic’ (Lindsay, 2005: 6).
Bolivia continues to be a litmus test for the ongoing success of democrati-
zation in Latin America. The phenomenal popularity of Morales, as leader
of a movement long in the cross-hairs of the US-backed War on Drugs in
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

Bolivia, makes it increasingly clear that the terms of democracy in this

country mean different things to foreign and national policy-makers and
to the grassroots groups that have been actively participating in the large-
scale protests of the last six years.
What are the democratic stakes in Bolivia? This is not as straight-
forward a question as former presidents would have us believe. In his
analysis of contemporary Mexican democracy, Matthew Gutmann (2002:
xviii) draws attention to the imprecise ‘elusiveness of the term democracy’,
combining as it does a wide range of aspirations and multiple meanings.
Observers of Bolivia’s current paroxysms describe the present crisis as
competing concepts of democracy ‘locked in fierce combat’ (Hylton,
2005b). And protesting coalitions speak and act in the name of a ‘real
democracy’, in their view betrayed by government caretakers. Bolivia’s
predicament illustrates what James Holston and Teresa Caldeira (1998)
have called ‘disjunctive democracy’, which draws attention to the daily
experiences of democracy, its variable depth and uneven distribution,
currently lived in Bolivia in unbalanced, irregular, and increasingly contra-
dictory ways. Distinguishing the state’s caretakers from the state itself, the
object of Bolivia’s current protests is to revitalize the very terms of democ-
ratization. As I develop here, this includes expanding criteria of recog-
nition for inclusion in Bolivia’s democratic project, renovating the
collective political subject of a national democratic process, and dramati-
cally framing the cultural terms of this subject as a specific moral
community.
Given the apparent exhaustion of the neoliberal state in Bolivia, along
with political scientist Patrick Deneen (2004: 27–8), the present analysis of
popular protest efforts seeks to redress the potential ‘presence of tragedy
embedded in democratic overconfidence’ as a ‘cosmic optimism’ in prin-
ciples of liberal democracy characterized by an absolutist and uncritical
faith in a fully liberal and democratic future. At a moment of rejection of
neoliberalism as state policy in Bolivia, the democratic alternatives of
popular protest movements also self-consciously reject the ‘natural’
equation of the free market with democratic freedoms (Paley, 2001). In
order to better appreciate the range of democratic aspirations in contem-
porary Bolivia, in what follows I examine contributions of Bolivia’s indigen-
ous movements to encompassing popular mobilizations of protest in this
country. I unpack how an Andean cultural heritage works as a constructive
resource for the ‘democratic’ discourse and practice of Bolivia’s social
movements, which seek to re-imagine and to realign the growing gulf
between the experiences of actually existing democracy and the unrepre-
sentative institution-building of democratization. I sketch out how cultural
heritage is used as a political resource for popular coalition-building and
in an effort by social movements to frame an alternative democratic public
outside of Bolivia’s ‘politics as usual’.
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Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

Vicissitudes of neoliberal democracy

Eduardo Gamarra (1994: 10–11) has described the application of

neoliberal democracy in Bolivia since 1985 as a negotiation between ‘tech-
nocrats, managers, and government officials’, on the one hand, and
‘distinct social sectors attempting to find a niche’ on the other. Reformists
promoted a conception of democracy largely compatible with ‘effective and
efficient management of the economy’ while the country’s popular sectors
pursued the democratic promise of greater access to the policy-making
process. These were different conceptions of democracy, with the goals of
‘order’ and ‘inclusion’ respectively. What Gamarra (1996: 97) labeled
Bolivia’s ‘pacted democracy’ functioned through political party coalition-
building toward legislative majorities, institutionalizing a ‘largely executive-
centered’ and ‘undemocratic’ approach to governance with no room for
‘open debate about economic policy’. Political parties convened national
‘dialogues’, advertised as public referendums while functioning as a unilat-
eral means to promote the policies of structural adjustment. Historically in
Bolivia dialogue has been an executive tactic used to isolate social sectors
from each other and to paper over the sharp fissures in democratic repre-
sentation. During the 1990s, national dialogues organized by traditional
political parties exhibited the form of dialogue without the function, as
policy exchanges reproducing the ‘logic of forced negotiation’ (Laserna
and Ortego, 2003: 5). Throughout this period, however, Bolivia’s pacted
democracy illustrated a resilient ability to absorb diverse political interests
into the formal political fold. But since 2000 when crises came to a head,
the government has increasingly reverted to a ‘dialogue of rifles’, as one
editorialist ironically noted (Puente Calvo, 2003).4
The general reaction to the upsurge of indigenous mobilization within
Bolivia’s ‘traditional political class’ – as it is called – has been predictable.
‘Democracy’, they regularly warn, is ‘under siege’. This includes the charge
that Bolivia’s recent upheavals have been driven by left-wing demagogues
manipulating heterogeneous groups of the uneducated, poor, indigenous,
and disillusioned (see Laserna, 2003). For unsympathetic international
observers, this quickly turns into an account of protests dominated by the
‘perverse annual tradition’ of Bolivian ‘mobs’ (see Fantini, 2005). In a
Washington Post editorial after his ouster, Sánchez de Lozada (2003)
charged: ‘Mob rule overwhelmed respect for Bolivia’s democratic process.’
And since then the ex-president has kept up a steady drumbeat of allega-
tions associating Bolivia’s social movements with unsavory and undemocra-
tic foreign patrons, from Colombia’s FARC guerrillas or Venezuela’s Chávez
to a resurgent Shining Path in Peru and to Cuba’s Castro (see Los Tiempos,
2005). Most recently he has insisted that Bolivia now runs the imminent
risk of being transformed into a ‘new Afghanistan’ (see Bolpress, 2005), a
comparison meant to suggest the potential disintegration of Bolivia into a
fundamentalist narco-state. One sinister outcome of such charges has been
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

a growing concern among US policy-makers that South America’s indigen-

ous movements constitute a potential criminal and terrorist insurgency best
dealt with through an expansion of the ‘war on terror’ (Feiler, 2004;
González, 2005; Hylton, 2003). Equations drawn between foreign agitators,
home-grown demagogues, and the threat of mob violence displace the
agency of protest efforts from protesters themselves and eschew any need
to acknowledge the self-consciously ‘democratic’ discourse and practice
characteristic of the mobilization of Bolivia’s social movements.
Bolivia’s traditional political class understands the promise of liberal
democracy as the reigning fantasy of modern prosperity. This conviction is
often expressed among Latin American elites, and well represented by one
of the more vocal advocates of liberal democracy from South America, the
celebrated writer Mario Vargas Llosa, himself an erstwhile presidential
candidate in neighboring Peru. In a characteristic statement at an inter-
national seminar in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2003, titled ‘The Threats to
Democracy in Latin America’, Vargas Llosa categorically singled out
current indigenous movements as a threat to democracy because of ‘the
political and social disorder they generate’. But he went further, insisting
that indigenous movements are categorically ‘incompatible with civilization
and development’.
Vargas Llosa’s many assertions about the anti-democratic nature of
indigenous peoples in the Andes have deep, and well-publicized, roots in a
specific kind of past. His point of view has been spelled out in the Vargas
Llosa Report (unpublished, but discussed in Vargas Llosa, 1983), the result
of a commission organized to investigate the deaths of eight reporters at
the hands of highland peasants early in the Shining Path war, later the basis
for his magical realist novel Death in the Andes (1997). The Peruvian anthro-
pologist Enrique Mayer (1991) insightfully analyzed the Vargas Llosa Report,
which described indigenous Peru as ‘traditional, archaic, secret, and
frequently in conflict with official law’ (Vargas Llosa, 1983: 32). As Mayer
shows, and as Vargas Llosa’s most recent comments continue to confirm,
this ex-presidential candidate imagines the Andes in terms of two contained
and largely antagonistic cultural worlds – an indigenous ‘deep’ Andes and
a modern Andes in which a ‘culture of human rights and democracy’
thrives.5 In Vargas Llosa’s version, a backward looking and collectively
enacted ancestral or ‘customary law’ – in direct conflict with ‘official’ state
law – insures that so-called traditional peoples in the Andes remain stub-
bornly, and ignorantly, opposed to modern democracy.
Vargas Llosa’s position has been reprised during recent struggles in
Bolivia in a variety of ways. Analysts critical of the social movement effort
have pointed to the ways that urbanites of indigenous descent ‘idealize the
rural and communitarian tradition of their ancestors in order to oppose it
to a present in which they have achieved less than they hope’ (Laserna,
2003). In a speech after his removal from office,6 Sánchez de Lozada
charged that Bolivia’s social movements ‘don’t believe in democracy’, and
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Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

he contrasted orderly ‘representative democracy’ to an ‘authoritarian

communalistic democracy’ that is based on the supposed ‘assemblies’ of
Bolivia’s indigenous societies. For Sánchez de Lozada, liberal democracy
currently is waging a battle for survival with ethnic ‘collas’ (highland
Indians), a social sector that ‘rejects modernizing itself and which clings to
archaic notions’ (Bolpress, 2005). This view also prevails in the official
response to lynchings, a kind of vigilante ‘community justice’ which,
according to police authorities, is carried out ‘under the supposed
umbrella of customary law [usos y costumbres] and which deepens the loss of
state authority’ (Los Tiempos, 2004), where this authority is epitomized by
the orderly consolidation of state institutions.7 Political elites, in short, refer
to the collective indigenous politics of face-to-face assembly as a point of
departure for characterizing marked cultural practice as decidedly unde-
mocratic, located in a past with no productive relationship to a democratic
present or future.

Multicultural state democracy and social movements

Yet throughout the 1990s the Bolivian state invested collective cultural
claims with constructive potential, in part through legislative interventions
of indigenous peoples themselves. Representing the South American
Indian Council (founded in 1980), Tomás Condori (2001: 43–5) partici-
pated in the drafting and ratification of the International Labor Organiz-
ation’s convention No. 169, concerned with indigenous and tribal peoples
and adopted in 1989. ILO convention No. 169 calls for states to work
toward the full realization of cultural rights, which includes state recog-
nition of the authority of customary law. In 1994 and partly through the
interventions of katarista historian Victor Hugo Cárdenas as vice-president,
the Bolivian government followed suit, instituting a controversial Popular
Participation Law (PPL) that offers new possibilities for social inclusion in
terms of the constitutional redefinition of the nation as ‘multiethnic and
pluricultural’. The PPL was a sharp break with Bolivian state cultural
policies dating from the 1952 Revolution, which relegated any indigenous
future to assimilation into a desirable culturally and ethnically mixed
middle class, referred to as a mestizaje. Under this regime citizens’ rights
conformed to the ‘model of the mestizo citizen’, which Rivera Cusicanqui
(2004: 21) has described as an individual ‘consumer and producer of
merchandize, a speaker of Spanish and an aspirant to a Western ideal of
civilization’.
The PPL, however, granted full legal recognition to already existing
traditional and popular local political organization and leadership, accord-
ing to what are called a group’s ‘uses, customs, and statutory dispositions’
(usos y costumbres), or customary law. In the process the downsizing state
handed over resources and decision-making to the local municipality. With
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

the state’s recognition of ‘uses and customs’, the PPL has magnified the
importance of cultural heritage as a basis to advance political and legal
claims. Supported by related legislation, such as the 1996 update of
Bolivia’s agrarian reform law recognizing the pre-existent claims of origi-
nario (highland Indian) and of indígena (lowland Indian) communal land-
holdings, the application of customary law through the PPL established
legal precedent based on continuity with the past. But the combined politi-
cal, legal, and performative implications of heritage make it more than just
the ‘retrospective expression of culture’ (Brown, 2005: 43) for Bolivian
protesters.
Specifically, Bolivia’s multicultural legislation depends upon an under-
standing of ‘heritage’ as ‘patrimony’ (patrimonio). The term – patrimonio –
is often on the lips of Bolivia’s indigenous activists. Bolivia’s legal process
of state decentralization grants local municipal ‘control over the
exploitation of their patrimony’ (patrimonio propio), while also ‘promoting
cultural development and the defense of autochthonous cultural values’
(Ley Orgánica de Municipalidades, article 39). The etymology of ‘patrimonio’
derives from the medieval Spanish legal parlance stipulating property
inherited from one’s father. Specifying rules of family estate inheritance,
for modern Bolivia patrimony refers to inherited legal jurisdictional rights
over land. The combined effects of this state-driven multicultural legis-
lation, then, has been to formulate ‘popular participation’ in terms of a
correspondence of ‘customary law’ – assumed to be a unitary set of
meanings and practices – to separate and discrete traditional cultural units
labeled ‘territorial base organizations’. As a condition of state recognition,
the ‘pastness’ of indigenous heritage potentially limits direct participation
by indigenous peoples in the political realities of the present, by circum-
scribing their political relevance within what the state imagines to be the
boundaries of their ancestral territories. Understood in this way, multi-
cultural legislation illustrates the agency of the state in setting what
Povinelli (2002: 3) has called the ‘limits of recognition’.
Bolivia’s recent developments, however, complicate this picture in a
variety of ways, suggesting how indigenous and popular movements use
international and state-based rights instruments to transform the meaning
and ground of citizen participation. The terms of legal circumscription of
indigenous identity – of the state’s own condition of political recognition –
are being appropriated to new ends by protesting coalitions. And during
the Water War of 2000 the rallying point for this multi-sector and largely
urban movement was the defense of the traditional use and distribution of
water as a collective cultural right based on usos y costumbres (see Albro,
2005a; Laurie et al., 2002), which it forced the government to recognize
with a legal amendment. Customary law continues to inform large-scale
protest efforts. Indigenous movements in Bolivia have sought to expand the
state’s limited concept of ‘land’, understood simply as a factor in agricul-
tural production, to a larger conception of ‘territory’ as the location for the
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Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

social reproduction of collective identity. During the Gas War of 2003,

protesters understood the defense of Bolivia’s gas as a question of the ‘recu-
peration’ of the country’s ‘national patrimony’. Such a claim rested directly
on the precedent of the pre-existent ‘territorial sovereignty’ of indigenous
people’s communal land holdings, a position most developed by Felipe
Quispe and the national agrarian union, the CSUTCB. Quispe has consist-
ently promoted a traditional conception of Aymara land use defined by a
culturally specific relationship of ‘the people’ to the ‘land’, which Quispe
refers to as usos y costumbres, including the soil, water, air, and subsoil
resources (like gas). The insistent popular call for a new constitutional
assembly to ‘refound’ the nation – perhaps the most frequently advanced
demand over the last five years – specifies that representatives to the
proposed assembly be elected directly through the usos y costumbres of a
given group or organization (see CENDA et al., 2004: 2). Popular represen-
tatives frame the terms for a new constitution using the convening power
of customary law.
In the last five years strife between Bolivia’s social movements and
government caretakers has unfolded within the gap between the assertion
and the recognition of the claims advanced by Bolivia’s popular sectors. This
contentious gap is at once a space of cultural, political, and legal negotia-
tion for different terms of recognition within the multicultural state. If
Charles Taylor (1994) brought to our attention the importance of the
‘politics of recognition’ in multicultural states, recently Arjun Appadurai
(2004) has suggested we pay more attention to the negotiated ‘terms of
recognition’, in this case the instrumental potential of the legal authority
of cultural heritage. Using Appadurai’s (2004: 62) parlance, in order to
articulate new democratic aspirations, Bolivia’s social movements are
staking a claim to ‘recover the future as a cultural capacity’. If we can point
to the ways that law and the legal process help to constitute ‘the facts’ of
cultural identities (see Cowan et al., 2001: 11), in this case the idiom of
customary law, or usos y costumbres, has been used by Bolivia’s social move-
ments to transform the limiting political precondition of ‘pastness’ to tran-
scend a politics of irreconcilables through a dialogue between the state’s
multicultural legislation and the expressive, instrumental, and constructive
potential of local cultural practice.

The politics of association

If the admixture of social sectors, indigenous, or popular groups is not

always the same, a shared politics of assembly (política asambleística) has
become a potent unifying strategy of social movements in Bolivia since at
least 2000, leading to the organization of successive multi-sector coalitions
(García Linera, 2001, 2003). Re-establishing a popular capacity to intervene
in the public life of the nation, coalition-building has facilitated the
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

meeting of social sectors, logistical planning for collective mobilizations,

shared drafting of statements and agreements, and restored a more direct
connection between political deliberation and action in contrast to
traditional political parties. Political theorist and current vice-president
Álvaro García Linera (2004: 73) highlights the nested relationship between
the broad-based protest efforts and these more local plenary organizations:
The multitude is an association of associations in which each person who is
present in the public act of meeting does not speak for himself or herself but
rather for a local collective entity to which he or she is accountable.

García Linera’s description of protesting coalitions as an ‘association of

associations’ suggests an effort to bridge the vertical disconnect of the state
with society – popularly expressed as a desconfianza (disenchantment) for
the years of democratic consolidation – with the local experiences of the
politically familiar, immediate, and everyday.
As Sian Lazar (2006) helps to make clear with her description of the
central role of residential associations, worker, and trade unions in the
mobilizations in El Alto during the Gas War of 2003, local associational life
has been the experiential ground for collaborations among popular social
sectors. As Lazar shows, neighborhood committees (or juntas vecinales) and
trade unions (gremios) at once make direct claims on the state and serve as
the means for the state to channel resources to the local level. These ‘base
organizations’ can also substitute for the state as collective political subjects
(2006: 197), as with the civic strikes that closed markets and the organiz-
ation of autonomous defense committees in 2003 (see Hylton, 2004). As
confrontations mounted in 2003 and again in 2005, local juntas, gremios,
and sindicatos collaborated to organize barricades, vigils, and communal
cooking. Rather than an exception, the coordinated mobilization of ‘base
organizations’ is an intensified expression of the everyday organic life of
neighborhood associations in El Alto, including routine participation in
meetings, demonstrations, civic parades, and other collective responsibili-
ties. People’s daily associational commitments add up to a popular experi-
ence of democratic participation significantly different from the typical
assumptions of voting in a formal political party system.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1990) has written of the differences between
what she calls ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘ayllu democracy’8 in Bolivia, from
the perspective of Norte de Potosí. For Rivera Cusicanqui, each works on
a fundamentally different basis. Ayllu democracy operates as nested
Chinese boxes, from the smallest residential unit (or cabildo), through
intermediate levels, to that of a regional federation. Fundamental ayllu
principles of community-based direct democracy include the requirement
of service, a rotating leadership, extensive consultation, with the goals of
communal consensus and an equitable distribution of resources (1990:
102–3). These principles, Rivera Cusicanqui is clear, are in direct conflict
with those of liberal democracy, based on the individual citizen as both
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Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

rational and proprietary, and as the logical subject of national economic

advancement (1990: 117). Most importantly for our discussion is Rivera
Cusicanqui’s assertion that organized agrarian unions, particularly since
1952, are ‘foreign, imposed structures which prolong and reproduce
colonial forms of domination over the ayllus’ (1990: 109). If superficially
comparable local associations, she tells us, ayllus and unions promote
largely incompatible models of political subjecthood. This is a claim,
however, that makes increasingly less sense for an expanding ‘urban
indigenous’ experience (e.g. Riveros and Alvarado, 2001), where the
popular affinities between local associations serve as a collaborative politi-
cal starting-point. To understand the persistent fact of large-scale social
mobilizations in Bolivia over the last five years, as I have argued elsewhere
(Albro, 2005a), we should recognize the agency of a ‘plural popular’
subject rather than privilege any particular culture or class identity.
This includes recognizing the extent to which the ‘networks of soli-
darity’ of El Alto’s associational life articulate a ‘rural-urban Aymara’ experi-
ence, emergent out of the migratory history and largely unplanned rapid
growth of El Alto (see Sandoval and Sostres, 1989). Pablo Stefanoni (2004:
2–3) has described how the protracted efforts by in-migrants to obtain basic
services such as water, paved roads, electricity, and trash pick-up trans-
formed juntas vecinales into an instrument for the ‘politics of vital necessi-
ties’. Evolving from associations of renters and clients of government land
grant programs in the 1940s and 1950s, the communitarian and territory-
based politics of in-migrating Aymara agriculturalists transformed juntas
vecinales throughout the city’s rapid growth in the 1970s and 1980s. These
included an ongoing affiliation with one’s community of origin, the use of
the assembly, such principles of exchange as ayni (that is, the strict
exchange of equivalents), and the usage of kinship and fictive kinship (or
compadrazgo) to organize collective participation in neighborhood improve-
ment projects. But now rather than a given community, these cultural terms
of engagement are focused on the urban category of vecino (neighbor).
Juntas were once again transformed after 1985 with the arrival of ‘relocal-
ized’ ex-miners and their experiences with the vanguardist tradition of the
mining unions (Gill, 2000: 67–85). Far from being a unitary expression of
the interests of distinct social sectors, El Alto’s base organizations compose
overlapping arenas of encounter and dialogue for the historical and gener-
ational experiences of the associational politics of multiple social sectors,
brought together in moments of protest.
These experiences encompass the local political institutions of rural
Aymara communities with urban renters’ and trade associations, together
with the experiences of radical mining unions, through an organic associ-
ational life that is commensurate with ‘Andean’ principles of leadership,
accountability, community service, collective work, redistribution, and
consanguinity.9 Elsewhere I have described a similar convergence of diverse
traditions of local association for the six coca grower federations of the
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

Chapare, another central social movement protagonist of recent years (see

Albro, 2005b). When characterizing Bolivia’s large-scale social mobiliza-
tions as the agency of a plural popular subject, I want to point to the trans-
latable experiences of associational politics, which have brought the rural,
the urban, indigenous heritage, and the leftist histories of popular labor
movements, ex-miners, and ex-peasants, into constructive realignments of
kinship, reciprocity, exchange, solidarity, and mutual recognition. The
politics of assembly is a dialogical catalyst for cultural translatability and
mutual recognition across comparable domains of popular experience,
facilitating coalition-building across formerly distinct indigenous and
popular struggles in the post-neoliberal period.
I do not want to minimize evident regional and rural–urban differ-
ences. But, to insist, as Rivera Cusicanqui does, on irreducibly different
origins for ‘indigenous’ and ‘mestizo-creole’ political projects, and to inter-
pret local union politics primarily as an extension of internal colonialism
in Bolivia, makes it difficult to recognize the popular coalitional politics of
the present. If not unaffected by problems of hierarchy, corruption, and
the abuses of power, local associations employ a direct democracy that is
transparent, horizontal, bottom-up, and non-hierarchical, with the right of
all to speak (pedir la palabra). Whether or not these traits are always evident
in practice, in principle they represent a more direct application of the
popular will and an alternative to the failures of democracy as practiced
through political parties. During Bolivia’s recent turmoil the ‘organic life’
of residential, indigenous, and trade associations has galvanized an alterna-
tive collective politics outside of the political party system and as a basis for
cross-sector cooperation.
This is not the case only in El Alto. A union leader characteristically
began a meeting I attended in Cochabamba in 2001 saying, ‘We are here
to practice democracy. It is not a question of impositions. . . . We must talk,
argue, ask, and reach agreement.’ Associational life figures so importantly
as a model of and for popular broad-based coalitional efforts because it
composes the most immediate experience of collective political action,
serving as the ‘dialogical ground’10 for multiple historical encounters with
the negligent state and alternative considerations of ‘the desirable form
of our collective life’, in the words of Oscar Olivera (Olivera and Lewis,
2004: 36). Bolivia’s popular majority conceives of participatory democracy
as a dialogical public of collective interests. Far from antagonistic to this
process, ayllu democracy is one constructive cultural resource available for
breathing life into this restorative desire.

Andean democracy and democratic publics

One unstated goal of the government’s neoliberal structural adjustment

beginning in 1985 was to dismantle the organizational structures of
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Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

popular mobilization, including the ‘moral community’ of the COB, while

at the same time installing new forms of state administration (see Nash,
1992: 289; Sanjinés, 2004: 206–7). But the 2000 Water War illustrated the
political successes of popular coalitions, which García Linera (2003) has
called the return of the ‘multitude’ and which I have described in terms
of the ‘plural popular’ (Albro, 2005a). However, indigenous coalition
leaders more often speak of the project to ‘refound the country’ in the
cultural and cosmological terms of a ‘pachakuti’. Founded in 2000, Felipe
Quispe’s Indianist political party is the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement.
Quispe’s on-again/off-again rival, Evo Morales,11 has also publicly
discussed adding the word – pachakuti – to the existing name of his party,
the Movement Toward Socialism (founded in 1995). In both Quechua and
Aymara, ‘pachakuti’ conceptualizes ‘relations among two elements or
human groups, sometimes opposed and sometimes associated’ (Bouysse-
Cassagne and Harris, 1987: 28). The concept implies a restorative inver-
sion of time, when the past might productively become the future. In
moments of popular protest, cultural heritage is not merely retrospective
but potentially constitutive. Rivera Cusicanqui (1993: 53) has described
the 1990 indigenous March for Territory and Dignity as a pachakuti, ‘the
union of the fragmented parts of the indigenous body’. One way of
describing the multi-sector popular coalitions of recent years is as
pachakuti-like performative spectacles of protest.
The ‘return of the Indian’, as Xavier Albó (1991) once called it, has
taken place under the sign of a potential pachakuti. The activist Aymara
intellectuals of the Andean Oral History Workshop (THOA) have worked
steadily to ‘reconstitute the ayllu’ among indigenous peoples.12 The ‘ayllu’
has figured prominently in regional ethnography and ethnohistory (see
Abercrombie, 1998; Isbell, 1978; Rasnake, 1988), as a characteristically
Andean form of social organization, combining dimensions of kinship,
collective ritual practice, symbolic and social structures, economic
exchange, marriage and residence into a uniquely Andean political and
territorial unit. Indigenous leaders like Felipe Quispe continue to advance
the territorial claim of the ayllu as intrinsic to their political projects. But
the ayllu concept, as anthropologist Andy Orta (2001: 199–200) reminds
us, is also a concept with well-defined ‘connections to the past’ that offers
an ‘opportunity for decolonizing Bolivian society and reimagining it as a
pluricultural space’. It has thus become the focus of attention of indigenous
intellectuals and cultural activists in Bolivia. Now under the sign of
pachakuti, and as an orienting concept for indigenous-based social move-
ments, the ayllu concept is less the subject of academic descriptions of
Andean peoples and more a popular basis for imagining an alternative
democratic future.
Carlos Mamani Condori (2001: 49) describes this opportunity in post-
colonial, emancipatory, and democratic terms: ‘the pachakuti, the time of
return’ is also ‘the return to a state of liberty’. For THOA member María
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

Eugenia Choque (2001: 212), the ‘return of the ayllu . . . is understood as

a pachakuti, which means the return of our self-esteem and identity’. The
discourse of culture is an effective political resource in no small part
because it directly addresses the historical terms of popular exclusion from
national politics, as expressed in oft-drawn descriptions by the traditional
political class of indigenous customary law as an anti-democratic cultural
institution. At the same time, the concept of ‘pachakuti’ productively relates
past to future to self-consciously frame a project of the reconstruction of a
collective political subject through cultural agency. This subject is imagined
to be newly reconstituted, superseding in pachakuti-like ways past antago-
nisms and rivalries of indigenous and national-popular projects, the frag-
mentation introduced by the neoliberal era, as well as the democratic
deficits of accountability, representation, participation, and citizenship,
identified by protesters.
In the hands of THOA and its partners, the ayllu is now the subject of
historical, political, and testimonial documents disseminated through bilin-
gual publications, videos, and radio programs or radionovelas (Stephenson,
2002: 103), including regular broadcasts on Radio Pachamama in El Alto.
Aymara intellectuals have significantly publicized the ayllu as a mixed
media and communicational event (see Ari Chachaki, 2001), and in ways
comparable to the earlier television program ‘The People’s Free Tribunal’
of Carlos Palenque, which inspired the neo-populist political party
CONDEPA in the early 1990s. As part of the program, the Open Tribunal
typically showed ‘urban Indians’ speaking for themselves and offering testi-
mony in face-to-face communication with Palenque (the show’s host) in
order to make public announcements, or to resolve political, familial, legal,
and medical problems (see Himpele, 1996). The show self-consciously
aired as a forum demanding ‘justice’ for those unrepresented by the
traditional political system. It also used informal cultural idioms of inter-
personal solidarity to effectively project an imagined community of recipro-
cal, face-to-face, and affective popular politics, for a mostly urban and
Aymara constituency. Javier Sanjinés (1996: 261) labeled CONDEPA a ‘talk
show democracy’. CONDEPA’s political stronghold was also El Alto. As with
CONDEPA, Choque (2001: 220–1) explains, ‘An objective that underlies
the ayllu proposal is the establishment of communication: to sit at the table
and talk among equals, in the common preoccupation of solving problems
of a general character.’ This ayllu model is one important cultural resource
available to popular protesters for framing local associational life as a demo-
cratic alternative.
THOA’s efforts to publicize the ayllu concept as paradigmatically
‘Andean’ have taken place in an environment of significantly international
development support, which promotes ‘community self-management’ and
actively facilitates the goals of indigenous cultural renaissance (see Healy,
2001). Accounts of THOA’s history and work highlight their long-term
collaboration with sympathetic national and international NGOs
400
Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

(Andolina, 2001; Choque, 2001; Stephenson, 2002). As I have argued else-

where (Albro, 2005a), the ‘return of the Indian’ in Bolivia has been notably
responsive to transnational currents of indigenism represented by such
THOA collaborators as OXFAM America (see Andolina, 2001: 2). Calling
the ayllu an ‘ancient form of community organization that predates the
Inca empire’, OXFAM America has supported THOA because it interprets
the structure of the ayllu as a beneficial device of empowerment ‘to articu-
late and defend their rights’ (OXFAM America, 2005: 2). For international
funders, the significance of the ayllu is as an authentic subject of global
‘rights talk’. This language of international human rights liberally informs
Aymara activism as well (see Ari Chachaki, 2001), as a prevailing frame of
debate and claim-making. Bringing a modernist human rights frame
together with the pre-colonial ayllu in fact illustrates the practice of
pachakuti. And as a cultural model of associational life, activists describe the
ayllu as a public sphere-like communicative arena of political dialogue,
debate, and the advancement of claims that fits well with prevailing concep-
tions of global civil society as an ‘arena for argument and deliberation as
well as for association and institutional collaboration’ (Edwards, 2004: 55).
If perhaps indirectly, and if usually behind the scenes, activist networks
like THOA frame the terms of intervention of protesting coalitions.
Development agencies operating in Bolivia like OXFAM America have
pursued their own cultural heritage goals, promoting representative
‘traditional authorities’ as desirable project interlocutors (Andolina, 2001:
2). THOA has itself assisted this process through leadership workshops
(Stephenson, 2002: 112), which includes an ongoing relationship with
CONAMAQ (the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu),
founded in 1997 and variously described as a First Nations organization,
native rights organization, and federation of Aymara and Quechua
communities. Carlos Mamani Condori (2000: 16) has described THOA’s
collaboration with CONAMAQ as a ‘sustained work between the indigen-
ous intellectual and the elders [los ancianos] who have once again taken up
the government of the ayllus and the markas’. CONAMAQ has also begun
to supplant the CSUTCB as the public and international face of Bolivia’s
indigenous movements, from the World Social Forum to the UN’s new
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (see Burnham, 2003).
CONAMAQ’s protagonism has been informed, and framed, by its collabo-
rations with THOA’s activism and by its increasingly international profile.
While designating its own mallku (traditional authority) of ‘cultural
heritage’,13 CONAMAQ has become an increasingly active participant in
large-scale protest efforts. Their participation can be traced at least to
CONAMAQ’s organization of a thousands-strong march in downtown La
Paz to promote recognition of the traditional leadership of Qullasuyu
(Bolivia) in March 2000. In 2002, representatives of CONAMAQ went on a
hunger strike to demand the constitutional referendum. During the
struggles of January 2003, CONAMAQ formed a part of the coalitional
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

People’s High Command (see Hylton, 2003), which directed protest efforts.
In March of that year CONAMAQ was among the 16 organizations to sign
a ‘Unity Pact’, in alliance with the Coalition in Defense of Gas, again
demanding that the referendum be advanced (Contreras, 2005), and went
on to organize roadblocks in May and June. CONAMAQ’S proposal for a
new constitutional assembly has been disseminated online by a variety of
activist and documentation-based NGOs in Bolivia.14
CONAMAQ’s particular proposal for participation in a constitutional
assembly stipulates the representation of delegates directly based on ‘uses
and customs’, as this is spelled out by article 171 of the existing constitution
recognizing Bolivia’s multicultural identity, supported by international
mandates such as convention 169 of the International Labor Organization.
It adopts the ayllu as the basic form of ‘indigenous community’ with a pre-
colonial ‘historic continuity’. As a political institution, the ayllu is described
in terms of ‘the rotation of responsibilities’ (cargos), ‘service to the
community’ (thaki), and working through ‘deliberation and community
consensus’ (kawiltu). The assembly will elect two representatives, a man and
a woman, as an equal ‘pair’ (according to the principle of complementar-
ity, or chacha-warmi). Any delegate who does not actively attend and partici-
pate in the work of the kawiltu, as well as account for their actions, will be
replaced (see CONAMAQ, 2004). This proposal for a constitutional
assembly certainly expresses the fact of ‘two Bolivias’ – indigenous and non-
indigenous, the excluded and the elite. But CONAMAQ’s proposal is also
non-exclusive, as part of a dialogue within the ‘plural popular’ arena of
protest with the likes of the MAS party (which also cites the restoration of
the ayllu as a goal), and including urban-indigenous and non-indigenous
social sectors. As a cultural resource, the ayllu concept directly informs the
efforts of multi-sector popular protest coalitions, providing the cultural
terms of difference for an alternative democratic public in Bolivia.
The contemporary political relevance of the ayllu concept for popular
protesting coalitions is that it promises a fruitful vocabulary and set of prac-
tices for constructing an alternative, and dialogic, democratic public, while
dramatizing the reconstitution of this public as an assertive political subject.
The ayllu concept is readily available as a concept because of the work of
Aymara intellectuals and NGOs, who have transformed it into a largely
activist-driven, rights-based, discursive and significantly mass-mediated
cultural heritage resource. As a construction of cultural heritage, for the
country’s popular sectors, the ‘activist ayllu’ – to use Weismantel’s (2006)
term – represents a departure from an earlier generation’s self-definition
based much more directly on questions of livelihood, such as the ability to
handle ox and plow, ownership of a truck, or selling in an open-air market
(Lagos, 1994). As cultural heritage, an indigenous identity is now some-
thing that can be ‘claimed’ or ‘reclaimed’ by a rapidly growing public of
indigenous-descended popular and urban social sectors. In her insightful
account of THOA’s activism, Marcia Stephenson (2002: 103) describes
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Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

their project as part of an effort to articulate a ‘new arena of public debate

and contestation’. I would go further to suggest that, formulated as a
cultural resource, ayllu politics help to constitute the collective subject
composing this alternative public, with particular attention to the
communicative efficacy of democracy.

Conclusion

Social movement spokesperson and labor leader Oscar Olivera describes

the practices of protesting coalitions using the terms of democratic
renewal:
Emerging from the united actions of people and the voicing of their desires
and fears is an authentic, participatory, and direct democracy. In these spaces
and organizations deliberation – discussion, decision, and implementation –
takes place without intermediaries and between equals. (Olivera and Lewis,
2004: 133–4)

These spaces of deliberation, it is clear, refer fundamentally to the histori-

cal precedent of the collective and face-to-face politics of traditional and
popular ‘base organizations’. As a communiqué circulated during the
protests of 2000 put it, new popular options for the reform of national
government are based on ‘assemblies of the neighborhood, the union, the
ayllu, the factory’. As I have argued, local associational politics have been
central to the coordination of large-scale protest coalitions since they have
served as the most local dialogical ground of shared experiences of disen-
franchisement throughout the neoliberal period, and as a basis for the
reconstruction of a popular political subject largely dismantled throughout
the process of neoliberal reforms.
But as Olivera has also often noted, the political class has insured that
‘for 500 years’ the ‘original inhabitants’ of Bolivia have been all but
‘excluded from participating in the democratic process of the country’
(quoted in Democracy Now, 2005). Though not himself indigenous,
Olivera has removed the term ‘democracy’ to the moment of the onset of
the colonial encounter itself. Protesting social sectors emphasize the need
‘to reclaim’ (reivindicar or recuperar) democracy as a collective political
birthright, a birthright they actively ‘remember’ and rhetorically relocate
as a cultural heritage upon which to build for the future. Olivera identifies
this with an effort ‘to turn politics into a patrimony of the citizenry’
(Olivera and Lewis, 2004: 135). As I have developed with this argument,
expressing democratic aspirations using the idiom of heritage is a protest
strategy for traversing the gap between assertion and recognition, in
cultural terms that make claims upon the state rather than against it. This
is also a strategy that asserts an alternative political project in the local
cultural terms of associational life, which at the same time adopts the form
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

of a dialogical, or deliberative, politics promoted by global civil society in

the terms of direct or participatory democracy (see Edwards, 2004: 54–71).
If the question of recognition has become a basic consideration for the
quality of liberal democracy, far too little attention has been given to the
ongoing negotiation of the terms of recognition for the process of demo-
cratic consolidation. As Charles Hale (2004) has argued, we should pay
attention to the ways neoliberal democratization, as itself a cultural project,
shapes everyday political participation. Throughout Bolivia’s ongoing crisis,
the concept of cultural heritage has become one such key fault line of
democratic recognition – at once treated as antithetical to democracy but
also as a basis for democratic alternatives. Bolivia’s traditional political class
construes cultural heritage in the terms of customary law, on the one hand
excluding it from the content of a party-based, consumer-driven, orderly,
rational, and individualistic neoliberal democracy, while still inscribing it as
the collective basis for legal recognition and representation by the state. As
customary law, in short, cultural heritage composes a problematic limit and
point of engagement for popular protesters to expand the possibilities for
democratic recognition.
For social movement spokespeople, as well, the discourse and practice
of cultural heritage have become the basis for an alternative non-party-
based democratic project. This is not a serendipitous fact. First, popular
protest coalitions are engaging with the state in the cultural terms set out
by state reform (that is, the precedent of usos y costumbres). Second, the
cultural heritage concept has been transformed into an instrumentally
useful cultural, political, social, and legal resource, a result of the conver-
gence of top-down state multicultural reform, and the pervasiveness of the
language of international human rights, with collaborations between
transnational and national NGOs, indigenous activists and intellectuals.
Common essentialist and primordialist approaches to cultural heritage
tend to obscure this diversity of sources for its contemporary political
efficacy. Third, cultural heritage is an effective means to frame and revi-
talize the moral community of a popular, collective, politics fragmented by
the state’s own structural adjustment policies. For the large-scale work of
coalition-building what Rivera Cusicanqui has called ‘ayllu politics’ partici-
pates in the dialogical ground of local associational life, in recognition of
the fact that ‘indigenous Bolivia’ is an increasingly migratory, displaced,
and urban category of cultural identity. At the same time, and fourth,
indigenous revitalization is formulated by activists and movement spokes-
people as a spectacle-driven, discursive, mixed-media, and rights-based
cultural heritage resource – an identity frame no longer directly
connected to the exigencies of livelihood and more easily ‘claimable’ by
indo-mestizos of indigenous descent, or who are now generationally once
or twice removed. Heritage has become an effective coalition-building
device across historically indigenous and popular political projects. Fifth,
and finally, taking seriously the identification of social movement
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Critique of Anthropology 26(4)

coalitions as an ‘association of associations’, local associational life has been

constructed by international and national activist networks as the source
for an alternative democratic project based upon principles of power-
sharing and communicative efficacy such as dialogue, debate, and deliber-
ation, epitomized by the ayllu as a state-sanctioned expression of cultural
heritage and a recognizable democratic ‘public’. Over the past six years in
Bolivia, it has been indigenous politics that has come to frame popular
efforts of democratic revitalization rather than the other way around.

Acknowledgements
A shorter version of this argument was presented in the Fellows Conference of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York, 13–15 June 2005.
I would like to thank Richard Wilson for his helpful comments on that earlier draft.
This manuscript was written while a fellow both at the Carnegie Council and at the
Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and also while a Scholar
in Residence at George Washington University’s Program on Culture in Global
Affairs during 2004–5. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in
Bolivia in 1993–5, 2001 and 2002. Any inaccuracies are my own.

Notes
1 In part this call is a reference to Bolivia’s 1970–1 Popular Assembly government
of radical general Juan José Torres, which attempted to establish an alternative
popular government, led by radical mining unionism and consisting primarily
of worker and peasant organizations. An effort to radically transform society
from below, the 1971 Popular Assembly succumbed to ideological differences
of the left, giving way to the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer (see Dunkerley, 1987:
155–72).
2 Election by ‘usos y costumbres’ – where each social sector would elect a repre-
sentative according to prevailing customary law for that sector – was also part
of the proposals advanced by many groups for this year’s constitutional
referendum.
3 The UNDP report was not exceptional in this regard. Coining such terms as
‘democracy deficit’, ‘low intensity democracy’, and ‘democracy lite’, a veritable
cottage industry of writers has proclaimed the inadequacies of democratic
consolidation in Latin America since the 1990s, declaring it to be ‘incomplete’,
‘shallow’, ‘skin-deep’, ‘hybrid’, ‘imperfect’, ‘illiberal’, ‘unconsolidated’,
‘paralyzed’, ‘unsettling’, ‘destabilizing’, ‘divided’, ‘inchoate’, and ‘disjunctive’
(e.g. Aguëro, 1998; Dresser, 2004; Holston and Caldeira, 1998; Paley, 2002).
4 Carlos Mesa was an exception to this, repeatedly underscoring his refusal to
commit the same error as his predecessor by using state violence to maintain
social control. However, during a public statement on 21 June 2005, Bolivia’s
ambassador to the US emphasized that one of the first tasks of the new
administration would be to ‘regain the state’s monopoly over the use of force’
( Jaime Aparicio Otero, public address at the Inter-American Dialogue,
Washington, DC).
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Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

5 An analogous distinction between a ‘deep’ and ‘modern’ Andes was the basis
for a debate among Andeanist scholars in the early 1990s regarding the status
of ‘lo andino’ (explicitly Andean belief and practice) in modern Andean nation-
states (see Starn, 1991, 1994).
6 Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, public address at American University, Washing-
ton, DC, 5 November 2003.
7 Daniel Goldstein (2004) has written extensively on the significance of lynching
for the peripheral urban community of Villa Pagador in Cochabamba, which
he understands as a spectacular communicative performance by community
members to contest their social marginalization from the benefits of urban life.
8 The term ‘ayllu’ refers to a uniquely Andean ‘social, ritual, and political
formation’ (Orta, 2001: 198). There are many definitions of the term. For a
thorough summary of scholarship on this key Andean concept, see Weisman-
tel (2006).
9 As Lazar (2006: 194) and others have made clear, the democratic organization
of local associations in Bolivia also has authoritarian features, most evident in
obligatory participation in protest actions. The fact that people can be fined if
they do not participate is often used as evidence for the ‘undemocratic’ nature
of local associations.
10 For more discussion of the ‘dialogical ground’ of culture see Tedlock and
Mannheim’s (1995) excellent collection.
11 During periods of intense social mobilization, the leaders of different social
sectors, including Quispe and Morales, have cooperated with each other. But
over the years, Quispe and Morales have vied to control the CSUTCB, histori-
cally the most important expression of indigenous political organizing. They
have also competed against each other in successive national elections in 2002
and 2005, and are sometimes bitterly critical rivals representing different
‘indigenous’ options.
12 Although among the best known, THOA is not the only, or first, activist Aymara
NGO. A short list would include such research and activist organizations as
MINKA, or Qhantatu, and more recently, the Kuechuaymara Foundation, as
well as online efforts such as AymaraNet.org, among others (see Ari Chachaki,
2001).
13 Given recent UNESCO attention to international conventions to protect
tangible and intangible cultural heritage (see Brown, 2003), CONAMAQ’s
creation of a ‘mallku of cultural heritage’ is an indication of the responsiveness
of Bolivia’s indigenous groups to an emphasis upon indigenous self-represen-
tation in international forums like the UN.
14 A short list includes Aymaranet.org, ‘dedicated to giving voice to indigenous
culture’, and Bolivia’s Documentation and Information Center (CEDIB), based
in Cochabamba, both of which have given substantial attention to CONAMAQ’s
particular proposal.

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■ Robert Albro currently teaches anthropology at George Washington University

and serves as Chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthro-
pological Association. His current research explores the relationships between
transnational indigenous and cultural rights advocacy networks, discourses of
cultural citizenship, and global cultural policymaking. Recent articles include
‘Neoliberal Cultural Heritage and Bolivia’s New Indigenous Public’ (to appear in
Politics, Publics, and Personhood: Ethnography at the Limits of Neoliberalism, ed. Carol
Greenhouse) and ‘Bolivia’s “Evo Phenomenon”’ (to appear in the Journal of Latin
American Anthropology, 2006). Address: Anthropology Department, The George Wash-
ington University, Hortense Amsterdam House, 2110 G Street, NW, Washington, DC
20052, USA. [email: Robert.albro@verizon.net]