The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements

Robert Albro

Abstract ■ This article describes the participation of Bolivia’s indigenous movements in

encompassing popular protest coalitions of the last five years. Pointing to the importance of
cultural heritage in current social movement efforts to revitalize Bolivian democracy, this
argument examines the importance of the ‘terms of recognition’ in the negotiation of the very
meaning of democratic participation, 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 transformation of the terms of indigenous cultural heritage, making it the basis of
an alternative democratic public in Bolivia.

Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America

Anibal Quijano

The world crisis of capital has intensified the debate over contem? porary society and culture. It
is not only the economy that has been called into question; indeed, the entire framework of
knowledge, the presuppositions of rationality in the relationships between peoples themselves
and with the world around them, the projects of histori? cal meaning, the balance of fundamental
human experiences, such as capitalism and socialism as it actually exists?all perspectives and all
alternatives are open to critical appraisal once more. The position and significance of Latin
America in this debate are fundamental. This is the case not only because Latin America has
been a victim of the most perverse effects of the crisis, but, more significantly, because of the
weight of its historical presence in the construction of the culture of our time?because of the
fecundity it possesses for the reconstitution of that culture. This surely explains the
intensification of the Latin American debate itself, although this may be denied by certain groups
in certain places whose exclusive concern is that of access to one or another rungs of presently
established power. Behind this facade, nevertheless, genuine and critical questions are being
posed whose intellectual or pragmatic exploration surely will affect not only Latin America. One
of these questions?in one sense the most decisive and central one?is the relationship between the
private and the public, because within this relationship virtually every area of contemporary
social existence is implicated. Beyond the circum? stantial disputes on the Peruvian scene, the
debate in question does in fact encompass all the meaning and all the legitimacy of the principal
historical projects now available.

The pressure to "modernize" has been exerted on Latin America during the greater part of this
century, but especially, and in a very distinctive manner, since the end of the Second World War.
In the first place.
  Many Latin Americans participated in the enlightenment age
 The paradox is that Latin America is too poor to modernize, despite having the
intellectual capacity
 It is also that America and Europe deem Latin America as backwards, yet they depend
on them for many things in the past and now

Hybrid Cultures

Garcia Canclini

When it was originally published, Hybrid Cultures was foundational to Latin American cultural
studies. This now-classic work features a new introduction in which Néstor García Canclini calls
for a cultural politics to contain the damaging effects of globalization and responds to relevant
theoretical developments over the past decade. García Canclini questions whether Latin America
can compete in a global marketplace without losing its cultural identity. He moves with ease
from the ideas of Gramsci and Foucault to economic analysis, from appraisals of the exchanges
between Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges to Chicano film and graffiti. Hybrid Cultures at once
clarifies the development of democratic institutions in Latin America and reveals that the most
destructive ideological trends are still going strong.

The Indigenous Movement in Ecuador

Kenneth P. Jameson

The indigenous movement in Ecuador has been among the most successful new social
movements in Latin America since the late 1980s. Its success may be attributed to its formulation
and persistent advocacy of an alternative to the changing manifestations of the capitalist order—
the “plurinational state.” This position has organized and motivated the movement for the past 20
years, in the course of which it has gained access to the center of economic policy for a time and
more recently has operated with greater autonomy. The struggle for plurinationalism remains at
the core of the indigenous movement’s approach to the current progressive government of
President Rafael Correa and provides a distinctly anticapitalist alternative. Though the new
constitution embodies elements of the movement’s program, there remain fundamental areas of
disagreement on the meaning and realization of the plurinational state.

Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America

Anibal Quijano

Whatistermed globalizationisthe culmination of a process that began with the constitution of

America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power. One of the
fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population
around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial
domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific
rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to
be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore,
the model of power that is globally hegemonic todaypresupposes an element of coloniality. In
what follows, myprimaryaim is to open up some of the theoreticallynecessaryquestions about the
implications of colonialityof power regarding the historyof Latin America.

 The "coloniality of power" is an expression coined by Anibal Quijano to name the

structures of power, control, and hegemony that have emerged during the modernist era,
the era of colonialism, which stretches from the conquest of the Americas to the present.

Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges

Walter D. Mignolo

Mignolo describes the role that colonial difference plays in contemporary conceptions of

modernity and the enactment of subaltern knowledges operating on the borders of the current
world system.   Mignolo calls this current world system a modern/colonial world system to
signify the interdependence of modernity and coloniality, which have always been
simultaneously at play.  Coloniality (of power), as Mignolo explains, occurs in and from the
borders and from particular, local histories of modernity/coloniality.  It is created by what he
calls gnosis knowledge, which is “knowledge from a subaltern perspective…conceived from the
exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system”… that strives to a.) “foreground the force
and creativity of knowledges subalternized during a long process of colonization”…and b.)
counter the hegemonic knowledges that govern Western dominant thought and have been
perpetuated through Occidentalism (11-14).   According to Mignolo, border thinking creates
macronnarratives, which attempt to offer a new logic, for he feels that critique of western
knowledge cannot effectively come from Western thinking.  Although he acknowledges the
utility of postmodern theories and deconstrtuuction, he claims these ignore the colonial
difference and constitute nothing more than a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentricism. (37-
39).   Border thinking, on the other hand, which originates from coloniality not from ancient
Greek thought, has epistemic potential to decolonize dominant intellectual thought/knowledge—
logo and Eurocentric knowledges.   Border thinking is a complement to deconstruction and
postmodern theories.

The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference

Walter D. Mignolo

The main thrust of my argument has been to highlight the colonial difference, first as a
consequence of the coloniality of power (in the making of it) and second as an epistemic location
beyond right and left as articulated in the second modernity (i.e., liberal, neoliberal; socialism,
neosocialism). The world became unthinkable beyond European (and, later, North Atlantic)
epistemology. The colonial difference marked the limits of thinking and theorizing, unless
modern epistemology (philosophy, social sciences, natural sciences) was exported/imported to
those places where thinking was impossible (because it was folklore, magic, wisdom, and the
like). I argued that Quijano’s ‘‘coloniality of power’’ and Dussel’s ‘‘transmodernity’’ (and the
critique of Eurocentrism from this perspective) at the same time imprint the possibilities of
thinking from the colonial difference and of opening new perspectives from and to the left.
Quijano and Dussel move beyond the The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial
Difference 91 planetarization of the social sciences (Wallerstein) or the reinscription of a new
abstract universality (Žižek) and contribute to the making of diversality of a universal project. As
such, they join forces with South Asian subaltern studies,88 with ‘‘negative critique’’ as
proposed by African philosophers,89 and with Khatibi’s ‘‘double critique,’’90 that is, of Islamic
and Western fundamentalism at the same time. The tertium datur that Žižek is seeking can be
found not by Khatibi ‘‘in reference to the fundamental European legacy’’ but in an other
thinking, an other logic that cannot avoid the planetarization of European legacy but that cannot
rely only on it.91 An other logic (or border thinking from the perspective of subalternity) goes
with a geopolitics of knowledge that regionalizes the fundamental European legacy, locating
thinking in the colonial difference and creating the conditions for diversality as a universal
project.