Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes
Ritual Practice and Activism
By (author) Anders Burman
Publication date:
15 December 2016Length of book:
282 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
239x159mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781498538480
Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes: Ritual Practice and Activism explores how Evo Morales’s victory in the 2005 Bolivian presidential elections led to indigeneity as the core of decolonization politics. Anders Burman analyzes how indigenous Aymara ritual specialists are essential in representing this indigeneity in official state ceremony and in legitimizing the president’s role as “the indigenous president.” This book goes behind the scenes of state-sponsored multiculturalist ritual practices and explores the political, spiritual and existential dimensions underpinning them.
Candidly and with respect to those that may think that ‘tradition’ is timeless, this book experiences Aymara politics as re-membering. I think of this word as a conceptual practice, proposed by young Aymara intellectuals-politicians as a de-colonial practice of the self with which to bring to awareness that which denies their possibilities of exceeding the practices imposed by modernity, while at the same time using that which modernity offers to, precisely, emerge against the denial. The book is an ethnographically brilliant and carefully composed work in which Burman does not study the yatiris; he learns with them other ways of knowing and he thereby transforms ‘participant observation’ into experience and proposes a novel notion of methods; not a practice of collecting data, but a practice of knowing through fieldwork.