“Interconnected Positionalities”: Foreigners and Foreign Experience in the Lives of Aymara Intellectuals

Abstract

When anthropologist William Carter began his research on land reform and community organization, he could not have imagined that his assistant, Mauricio Mamani, would become minister of agriculture, nor that he would be nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his promotion of cultural rights based on their joint research on the importance of coca in Aymara and Quechua society. Similarly, when, as a small child, Elvira Espejo first narrated stories to the Aymara linguist Juan de Dios Yapita and the British anthropologist Denise Arnold, she could not have foreseen that this encounter would lead to the publication of her stories in her name (Espejo 1994); her move to La Paz to study and practice art; her subsequent engagement in the research and promotion of indigenous dyeing and weaving techniques in close collaboration with Yapita and Arnold (see Arnold and Espejo 2010); and, most recently, to her appointment as director of the anthropology and folklore museum in La Paz. This chapter is about such encounters and collaborations between first-generation rural-urban Bolivian Aymara migrants and foreign intellectuals, particularly anthropologists and linguists, during the period leading up to the present foregrounding of ethnicity in Latin America (and elsewhere) and their continuing importance today.

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the conference “Re-imagining the Americas,” sponsored by Syracuse University’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, Latino-Latin American Studies, Imagining America, and the Mellon Humanities Corridor; and by Cornell University’s Latin American Studies Program and Latino Studies Program, Syracuse, April 10, 2010; in the session “The Vagaries of Neo-liberalism: Migration, Crises and Multiculturalism,” Simone Buechler organizer, at the XXIX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, Oct. 6–9, 2010; and in the session “Popular Responses to Globalization Dislocations in Space and Time: Dedicated to the Memory of Judith-Maria Buechler,” June Nash and Helen Icken Safa organizers, at the American Ethnological Society (AES) Spring Conference, 2012 in New York City. It has benefited from comments and bibliographical references to parallels in the sociological literature from Paul McLaughlin and from comments by Lars Rodseth and Gloria Rudolf, to whom I would like to express my gratitude.