Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

ISSN: 1744-2222 (Print) 1744-2230 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlac20

Vivir Bien: a study in alterity

Rosalyn Bold

To cite this article: Rosalyn Bold (2017) Vivir Bien: a study in alterity, Latin American and
Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 12:2, 113-132, DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2017.1325100

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2017.1325100

Published online: 26 Jun 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 27

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rlac20

Download by: [UCL Library Services] Date: 21 August 2017, At: 03:47
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 12, NO. 2, 113–132
https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2017.1325100

Vivir Bien: a study in alterity

Rosalyn Bold
Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, UCL Anthropology, London, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Vivir Bien exemplifies the context of colonial alterity characterizing Alterity; Bolivia;
contemporary Bolivian attempts to create an indigenous state. development; indigeneity;
While emanating from the city, Vivir Bien claims express a rural, tourism; Vivir Bien
indigenous alternative to development. It speaks from the per-
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

spective of an idealized other, an urban fantasy of a timeless rural

peasantry resistant to the temptations of capitalism, the ‘indigen-
ous superhero’ sought out internationally as a remedy to the crisis
of capitalism. In this moment of mimesis, the countryside also
seeks its other in the city, and internal migration is very high, a
dynamic transformation of the countryside which Vivir Bien fails to
address. This article discusses a flagship tourism project created by
one of the original ideologues of Vivir Bien to realize its vision, and
the role of deep-seated hierarchical alterities, as well as the inac-
curacies of its vision of the rural other, in impeding its implemen-
tation and success.

Contemporary Bolivia is characterized by alterity between idealized poles of identity that

are often classified as colonizer/colonized, white/indigenous or capitalist/non-capitalist.
In reality, conflicted actors cross and re-cross the imaginary space between these
categories, constructing ethnicities relationally and circumstantially. In this article, I will
explore how these dynamics shape Vivir Bien, a supposedly indigenous ‘alternative to
development’ that was developed in La Paz in the late 1990s. Urban intellectuals, along
with a myriad host of non-governmental (NGO) and development agencies, look via Vivir
Bien to the indigenous context to provide an alternative to neoliberal capitalism. This
leads of course to substantial reification of the Indian ‘other’, Vivir Bien imposing a set of
conditions of idealized alterity upon communities that seldom conform to the imagin-
aries to which they are subjected. In return, these rural communities engage in a reverse
mimesis of the urban or ‘western’ other, contributing to the inaccuracy of the timeless
vision of the countryside Vivir Bien promulgates. In this article, I will show how these
complex relations of mimesis are exemplified by Vivir Bien, considering the history of the
development of the discourse, and the characteristics it fetishizes in its ‘indigenous’
other. I draw from my experience in the village of Kaata, Apolobamba, where I carried
out 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork from 2010 to 2012, to examine the accuracy of this
projected reality in the contemporary Bolivian countryside. I conclude by looking at the

CONTACT Rosalyn Bold r.a.bold.01@cantab.net Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, UCL
Anthropology, 10 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW, UK
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 114 R. BOLD

unfolding of a tourism project designed by key ideologue Javier Medina, with funding
from the Swiss Cooperation, to realize the ideals of Vivir Bien in Kaata and the neighbor-
ing village of Chari. The tourism project in Chari was being implemented in 2014 when I
returned to the area, and I was thus able to accompany the technicians for some of the
community training. I show how the constant interplay across the mirror line between
colonizer/colonized continues to shape Bolivian realities, from the marketplace to the
national and international policy levels. I explore how the international politics of
indigeneity feed into this creation of an idealized alterity. I suggest that, while aiming
to contradict standard notions of development with an emic alternative, Vivir Bien
reproduces familiar stereotypical assumptions of the powerlessness of the third world
(Arce and Long 2000; Escobar 1995; Hobart 1993; Mohanty 1991).

Vivir Bien: evolution of the concept

Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

Vivir Bien is a supposedly indigenous concept of ‘living well’ that in fact evolved out of
workshops held by a group of intellectuals in La Paz, including Simon Yampara, Javier
Medina, Dominique Temple and Jacqueline Michaux, during the 1990s. The concept was
made public by Medina in a publication by the German Cooperation in Bolivia, GTZ
(Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusmmenarbeit), in 2001. It has since become
phenomenally successful and is widely championed in literature as presenting an alter-
native to development (see Gudynas and Acosta 2011; Gudynas 2011; Radcliffe 2015;
Walsh 2010; Yampara 2001; also contributions to this volume). The concept is now
widely used in development discourse throughout the Americas, directly influencing
Bolivian law and policy. For example, Article Two of the 2009 Plurinational Constitution
of Bolivia recognizes Vivir Bien as ‘one of the structuring principles of the country’,
according to Article Two of the Bolivian Constitution. According to the Bolivian
National Development Plan, of which it is identified as the core goal, Vivir Bien is defined
as ‘access to and enjoyment of material goods and of subjective intellectual and spiritual
fulfillment, in harmony with nature and in community with human beings’ (2006, 10).1
In the rendering of Medina (2011), a well-known Bolivian theorist and proponent of
Vivir Bien, the concept is elaborated as the non-separation of humans from their
surrounding landscapes, and the absence of capitalism. Medina states, ‘in this model
of austerity, equilibrium, and sufficiency of good, nothing is excluded, neither the gods
nor nature’ (2011, 41). In its inclusion of the dimensions of the mythic and sacred, this
statement echoes the ‘landscape’ school of thought developed by Ingold (1993), and
through this Heidegger’s (1971) concept of ‘dwelling’, both of which knowingly for
Medina are widely read. Acknowledgment that the Andean landscape is indeed inhab-
ited by spirits is something ethnography of the region has widely indicated. However, as
I will show here, in the current context animist landscapes are undergoing profound
transformation. Moreover, concepts such as ‘austerity’ and ‘the sufficiency of good’ are
controversial: while classic ethnographic accounts of the 1970s depict rural communities
without access to the luxuries of capitalism, whether this ‘austerity’ is chosen in the
current neoliberal context is highly debatable.
The original aim of the GTZ workshops was to translate the concept of development
into the native languages of Bolivia, including Aymara, Quechua and Guarani. The
treatise of ‘Vivir Bien’ was translated into Aymara as suma qamaña, which was then
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 115

claimed to be an indigenous term. Yet, according to Medina (2011), ‘there is no

adequate translation into Spanish for the suma qamaña’. This is largely because the
act of translation is rather the reverse. Anthropologist Spedding (2010) claims to have
never heard the term suma qamaña used in the Aymara-speaking communities where
she has lived and worked since the 1980s. Analyzing the term etymologically, she
suggests that if it had any meaning whatsoever, it would be something like ‘remaining
in the house rather than working’. A team of researchers working for Diagnosis as part of
the Bolivian Social and Economic Politics Analysis Unit, the UDAPE, studied the state of
Vivir Bien across the country, working with 21 communities across 14 indigenous
language groups. They found that only the leaders of the indigenous communities
they worked with were familiar with the term through the national political discourse
(UDAPE 2011). Defining Vivir Bien in a meaningful way to assess how rural communities
felt about it, the researchers had to return to the definitions in the Constitution or
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

National Development Plan, derived from urban intellectuals, and analyze the commu-
nities’ wellbeing according to clearly etic criteria.
Vivir Bien was thus created in La Paz in the image of indigenous peoples. I have
explored elsewhere (Bold 2016) the interconnection of rural and urban contexts in
Bolivia: migration from the countryside has been massive in recent decades, and
urban identities are recalibrating themselves in light of this influx, as contemporary
anthropologists have also analyzed (Lazar 2008; Tassi 2010). Whereas cities were tradi-
tionally the space of the ‘white’ and ‘mestizo’ and are fundamental to the construction
of these identities, the countryside is the space of the ‘Indian’ other. In making Vivir Bien
national policy, the city mimetically fetishes and idealizes its abstract counterpart, the
countryside, looking towards it as an ideal ‘other’. I will refer to this countryside or
campo as an abstract category, in contrast to specific places like Kaata or Chari. This
countryside is the mirror image of the city and is composed both of Bolivian and
international expectations. What is desired of it?
First, it seems this ‘other’ is animist and deeply interrelated with its environment,
much in the sense of the ‘landscape’ elaborated by Ingold (1993). Medina (2011), in a
publication sponsored by Oxfam and produced through the Universidad Mayor de San
Andrés in La Paz, evokes a living landscape of Sumaq Qamaña in which:

The underground, the soil, the water, the air, the mountains are alive and so moreover are
the space-times in which ‘the spiritual beings are latent’; the ecosystems themselves:
altiplano, valles, yungas are living organisms; the cultivated and wild plants, the wild and
domesticated animals are living beings…. The first meaning of Qamaña is ‘way of life where
mutual interconnectivity produces wellbeing’. The effect of this interrelation, in the space of
the ayllu,2 is perceived as happiness and wellbeing. Torrez (2001) indicates the strangeness
of ‘although we be poor’ (in terms of financial income), the Aymara feel good and enjoy a
‘certain happiness’. (46)

Sumaq qamaña is characterized, according to Medina, by intimate relations of reciprocal

exchange between the various human and non-human actors of an animate landscape.
These relations are otherwise referred to as ‘ayni’, which Medina defines as the ‘circula-
tion of energies’.3 The enjoyment of such a state of interconnectivity seems necessarily
confined to the countryside or campo, impossible to attain in the city in the absence of
mountains and rivers. In essentializing indigeneity to the campo, Vivir Bien neglects the
phenomenon of rural–urban migration: it is important to note that of the 62% of the
 116 R. BOLD

Bolivian population who declared themselves to be ‘indigenous’ in the 2002 census, 51%
live in cities. Vivir Bien thus fetishizes and reifies indigenous identities, holding them to a
static past and failing to accommodate their contemporary ways of living. Medina,
taking his arguments from subaltern theory, argues for the fundamental difference
between ‘western’ and ‘Oriental’ civilization, to which the latter pertains indigenous
Bolivia. He aims to reconcile the two, relying on the ‘indigenous’ idea of complementar-
ity. Dualism between two mutually constituting and antagonistic principles is wide-
spread in the Andean countryside (see Gelles 1995), as it is indeed in the ‘West’. Platt
(1978) identified the constant attempt in Andean culture to make equal two comple-
mentary opposites, like man and woman, through yanantin, following the logical thesis,
antithesis and synthesis structure proposed by Levi Strauss. The title of Platt’s article,
‘Symmetry in the Mirror’, is apt, as we are indeed caught in a mirror: Vivir Bien shapes
itself a countryside it knows through well-respected anthropological texts and then
brings this to bear on the ‘West’.
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

Such complementarity, Medina argues, is a defining characteristic of indigenous

Bolivia and indeed all Oriental and Amerindian thought. This, in contrast to western
thought – in a state of complete, neat opposition – is characterized by brittle, warring
opposites. Amerindian or Aymara thought thus represents an ideal ‘other’ to western
thought – informed by capitalism and exploitation – and must be encouraged to grow
so that it can temper its overbearing counterpart (Medina 2011). Indigenous Bolivia is
thus constructed as the ideal ‘other’ to western capitalism, which in a state of pure
alterity can ‘complement’ it.
From this perspective, Vivir Bien is configured as an alternative to neoliberal devel-
opment, serving as the basis of economies characterized by communitarian values
rather than personal interest. In the above-cited 2011 publication on Vivir Bien,
President Evo Morales in his prologue defines it

as a form of life, of relating to nature, of complementarity between peoples it is part of the

philosophy and practice of the Indigenous Peoples. In this way, it does not only lay bare the
structures of the crises (nutrition, climate, economy, energy) which our planet it undergoing,
it proposes a profound criticism of the system, which is devouring human beings and
nature: the world capitalist system.
While indigenous peoples propose ‘vivir bien’ for the world, capitalism is based on ‘living
better’. The differences are clear: living better means living at the expense of the other,
exploiting the other, depredating natural resources, raping the mother earth, privatizing
basic services; by contrast Vivir Bien is living in solidarity, in equality, in harmony, in
complimentarity, in reciprocity. (9)

Indigenous peoples and capitalism are diametrically opposed in this common rendering,
with capitalism defined according to its exploitation of ‘the other’ and of the landscape,
and contrasted to the harmonious egalitarian relations of Vivir Bien. The ‘other’ referred
to is the Indian other, defined here in terms of its exploitation by capitalists. The two
identities mutually constitute one another.
Harris (1995) explores how the Bolivian concept of Indians as antithetical to capi-
talist market relations is a product of their exclusion over the course of the liberal
period from the national economy, as well as of the association of ethnic identities
with class. She suggests that mestizos came to dominate transport and trade with the
introduction of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the government
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 117

and judiciary in rural areas. Taking advantage of commercial opportunities, mestizos

often marketed Indian produce, lent money and obtained Indian land by illicit means.
In some regions, Indians were prohibited from marketing their own produce. And mid-
nineteenth-century attempts to stimulate Indian entrepreneurs by creating markets
within their territories, which had in colonial times been protected, conversely tended
to exclude them, as Indians were a source of free or cheap labor on haciendas owned
by mestizos (1995).
Indeed, Indians’ participation has largely been through unfavorable terms, such that
in the current context those who leave the countryside to become traders are defined as
mestizos, while Indians are defined by a lack of market access and agricultural sub-
sistence. This results in an ideological construction of two polarized ethnic parallel
oppositions – Indian: white = non-market: market. Harris (1995) argues that the associa-
tion of Indian identity with inability or reluctance to participate in markets came about
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

during the nineteenth century and was intrinsic to the mestizo exploitation of Indians.
Then as now, one can become a mestizo through migration and severing ties to the
community, such as by changing an indigenous to a Hispanicized surname, as well as
through dress and diet. It is due to this logic that the Indian ayllu can be perceived as a
space of non-market exchange and reciprocity. Harris suggests that ‘it was precisely
because the relationship between Indians and mestizos was not securely a class one that
ethnic difference became so important a means for mestizos to legitimize their domina-
tion over Indians’, perhaps explaining the ‘paradoxical nature of mestizo identity, which
in some cases seems to reside in nothing more secure than not being Indian’ (1995, 367,
emphasis in original).
De la Cadena (2010) explores how ethnic categories such as mestizo/a, cholo/a and
indio/a in the Andes are relational identities situated along a hierarchically skewed scale,
ranging from Indian to white. In any interaction one can be more Indian or more white: a
market seller, for example, will be derogatively addressed as ‘Indian’ by a customer who
can claim a higher social status, and then turn to the market porter, her inferior, and
abuse him in the same terms (de la Cadena 2010). These identities mutually constitute
one another and shift according to the context and relational position of the interlo-
cutor: a non-Indian ethnic status depends on constructing an identity in relation, or
opposition, to this ‘other’; identities are relative, dynamic and continually recalibrated.
In this classificatory schema, Indian (indio) equates with the lowest on the social scale.
It is synonymous with dirt, poverty and the inability to survive in the city (Weismantel
2001, xxxv), and I have only ever heard it used in Bolivia as an insult. Unsurprisingly, the
people with whom I worked with in Kaata do not willingly self-identify as ‘Indians’. As
one older man explained, the young Kaateños who move to the city become profes-
sionals and look derogatively to their parents as ‘Indian[s], with no money’ (‘indio, con
nada en el bolsillo’).
However, it is also important to note that neither do the people of Kaata consider
themselves indigenous. Canessa’s (2007) experience in Pocobaya near Lake Titicaca was
similar: asking an elderly shaman, monolingual in Aymara, who had lived all his life in
the rural hamlet, if he was indigenous, the man responded with a laugh and said ‘no,
indigenous peoples live in the jungles’. As we have seen above, President Morales and
others refer to highland peasants as indigenous, but this is largely an etic category.
Some highlanders refer to themselves as originarios, originary peoples, a category which
 118 R. BOLD

has largely emerged as part of a national discourse of indigeneity and is often articu-
lated in contexts where it is strategically employed as part of a discourse of rights and
territory (Canessa 2007; 2014; Postero 2007a; 2007b; 2013; 2015; Postero and Zamosc
2004). Canessa (2007) explores the enactment of indigenous identities at the Aymara
New Year celebrations on Lake Titicaca; however, as he details, his fieldwork informants
in Pocobaya would not identify themselves in the same category as these celebrants,
and neither would the people I work with in Kaata. Thus, it is important to explore
identity in communities such as Kaata in contrast to this emerging national discourse of
indigeneity that characterizes Vivir Bien.
The emphasis on rural alterity, as a solution to global issues of development, is
connected with the international discourse on indigeneity, which became widespread
through the work of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and United Nations (UN)
in the 1980s and 1990s. As Kuper (2003) indicates in his seminal article, indigenous
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

identities are classified along a radicalized, European axis that sees them in terms of
descent, one that has also, ironically, more recently been employed in Europe to
discourage migration. The UN and ILO, while they emphasize the importance of self-
identification of indigenous peoples, also classify them as colonized. Martínez Cobo,
reporting to the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination of Minorities
(1986, para. 379), defined indigenous people as

those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that
developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the
societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them.

Similar to the Bolivian context, in international development literature indigenous

identity is presented as that of the colonized bound to its ‘other’, the colonizer:
indigeneity is in its origins a discourse of alterity. The World Bank defines indigeneity
in terms of poverty and exclusion, which similarly resonates with the rejection of
capitalism we have seen in Vivir Bien.
An important exception to the rejection of ‘indigenous’ identity in the Bolivian high-
lands is the Indigenous Pachakuti Movement (Movimento Indigena Pachakuti), which has
historically had an influential presence in many Aymara-speaking areas of the region.
The movement was led by Felipe Quispe, a well-known figure in Bolivia known by the
title ‘El Mallku’ (an Aymara term connoting leader). Quispe created the Tupac Katari
Guerrilla Army in 1990 and was later Executive Secretary of the CSUTCB, the rural
workers syndicate, after his release from jail following his leadership over armed mili-
tancy that sought to overthrow the government and restore an Inca state. In 2005, he
ran against Evo Morales for presidency, yet lost, coming fifth with only 2.16% of the vote.
As Canessa (2007) observed, Quispe has taken the indigenist position to the logical
extension predicted by Kuper (2003), demanding that all white people be thrown out of
the country.
Yet this current of racist nationalism in Bolivia also has other European antecedents.
German Nazis seeking asylum in Bolivia influenced ideas of purity of the Aymara race,
some claiming they were the descendants of the lost city of Atlantic and ought not to
mix with whites. It was not uncommon to observe swastikas on the clothes and bodies
of bus passengers crossing the Altiplano on journeys to and from Kaata. One of the first
buildings one sees among the brick-manufacturing warehouses that mark the transition
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 119

from the Altiplano to the edge of the city was a school with swastikas painted on all of
its brick fenceposts, lovingly looping around two names, and sometimes accompanied
by the word ‘Nazis’ for clarity. Similarly, swastikas were graffitied on the walls of the
house of a Kaateño woman who married a Belgian man in La Paz. It is interesting that it
is precisely in the rejection of the European that this fascist tendency adopts what might
be considered the worst aspects of the continent.
In Kaata, as in Pocobaya, identities are constructed in terms of what one does.
Villagers identify primarily with their ayllu, as people of Kaata, and do so as they work
its fields, share with their neighbors and so on. At my first fiesta in Kaata, I was urged to
stay, work a field, marry a random visitor from La Paz and ‘have Callawaya babies’.
Callawaya is a recent ethnic derivation of a term used to describe the medicine men of
the region who famously walked from village to village during the Inca era, curing the
sick. In recent times, it has become an ethnic denomination, though it is used seldom
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

and by few people in the village. The man urging me to this course of action was the
remaining Callawaya medicine man (needless to say, we were all very drunk). ‘You mean
to say’, I replied, ‘that if I had babies here, they’d be you?’ and was assured by all that
this would be the case. As we look at ethnic dynamics within Bolivia, I keep in sight the
construction of alterity in relation to the concept of the ‘West’, which I do not use in the
sense of a geographical location, but as a category of continuing relevance in actors’
constructions of ‘self’ and ‘other’. The ‘West’, as Hall (1992) indicates, is an entity defined
by its alterity to a (post)colonial ‘other’. This alterity feeds into and from the indigenous
context in a hall of mirrors of selfhood/alterity. I shall strategically employ this notion of
a ‘West’, in the sense of a community imagined by those within or beyond it (Anderson
1991), as it is fundamental to the thought of the actors involved.

Reciprocity and animism in the Bolivian countryside

The conception of the Andean countryside as comprising animate landscapes of reci-
procity encapsulated in Vivir Bien might count amongst its influences the classic ethno-
graphies of the 1970s. Bastien’s Mountain of the Condor (1978), based on research
conducted in my own field site of Kaata, is exemplary of this research. The key assertion
of the ethnography is that the Kaateños ‘metaphorically’ considered the mountain they
inhabited to be a living body. This mountain metaphor held together the settlements at
various ecological levels of the mountain, in what Bastien reconstructs via social arche-
ology as an Andean ‘vertical economy’ (Murra 1972), a system of reciprocal exchange
between the various ecosystems of the mountain. The highest ayllu at the head of the
mountain, known as Apacheta, would exchange meat and wool from their herds in
return for the staple crops of potatoes and grains produced by Kaata, at the center and
stomach of the mountain. The lower villages at the ‘legs’ would contribute maize and
coca (Bastien 1978).
By the 1970s this system was breaking down, with the coca traders having moved to
La Paz and making their journeys to collect coca leaf by plane, and selling it in the city
rather than exchanging it on the mountain (Bastien 1978). Apacheta now sell their
camelid products to Peru, at the nearby border markets. The economic landscape has
shifted towards the city, valleys and to a lesser extent the Peruvian border and is
negotiated through monetary transactions rather than exchange. Unlike the higher
 120 R. BOLD

and lower ayllus, however, Kaata cannot sell its crops of staple carbohydrates, which
barely cover the costs of taking them to La Paz for sale, 8 hours away by bus. The lack of
market opportunities for traditional crops has motivated the large-scale migration of
young people to the valleys to grow the cash crop coca, as well as to the cities in search
of employment, something about which villagers complained and charged the govern-
ment to rectify.
According to Mannheim (1991, 90), ayni, the reciprocal exchange of exact measures,
is ‘a comprehensive principle governing social life’ and an assumption about how the
world is organized’ in the Andes. Ayni and the etiquette that accompanies it are what
makes runa (Quechua meaning ‘people’), which is opposed to the uncivilized ‘other’, the
q’ara (Mannheim 1991). Q’ara are typically viewed by Aymara or Quechua people as
whites or mestizos who are typified by their lack of participation in the networks of ayni,
or, as we have seen in Harris’ analysis, by their market activity and exploitation of
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

Indians. Gose (1994) describes villagers exchanging agricultural labor with one another
through ayni and agrees that this is what distinguishes ‘commoners’ from local ‘nota-
bles’, who employ laborers at a daily rate in a system known as the mink’a. It is these
ayni relations of reciprocity that proponents of Vivir Bien imagine an idealized indigen-
ous campo (see Medina 2011, 58, 372, 431).
Today, however, ayni work exchange seldom takes place in Kaata, except among
close relatives. People who have made money through mining will employ others in
the mink’a, as the egalitarian relations of the village become stratified into cash
economies. I was told by Kaateños that whereas in Bastien’s day villagers ‘had
heads’ (were intelligent and hardworking), now they shirk actual labor as far as
possible when performing the mink’a by turning up late and carrying out various
foot-dragging practices.
Indeed, the villagers in Kaata consider themselves and the landscape they inhabit to
be undergoing a moment of ontological transformation, of which Vivir Bien ideologues
seem largely unaware. ‘Climate change’, as it was explained to me, comprises a shift in
the totality of the relations composing the landscape, seen as a weakening among them
(Bold 2016; forthcoming). Ayni connects not only humans but also all the ‘beings’ of an
animate landscape: humans feed the mountain through agricultural labor and ritual, and
the land feeds them crops. Ayni relations still take place between humans and the earth,
but are strained as people cease to work and revere it as before. Fields are becoming
stonier and only render up crops when ‘obliged to’ with lots of fertilizer. The earth is
getting tired: crops are ‘moving’ to higher altitudes, and the sun is getting hotter, as if it
would burn everyone up.
In the context of high migration, seen as a key component of this ‘climate change’,
young people seldom contribute to the earth and mountain through their labor, as they
desire the clothes and foods of the city. The factory-made and imported items are not a
product of the ayni, of the hard work and exchange relations that made up the woven
clothes and foods of the ayllu a few decades before, in Bastien’s time. Factory-made
foods are not considered nutritious, and there is a weakening of human bodies along-
side the earth, crops and animals, that now suffer from more diseases than they used to.
The packaging from consumer goods, which embodies the ‘contamination’ of climate
change, cannot be fed back into household economies like nonindustrial waste pro-
ducts, and there is concern, following government workshops on the theme, that it is
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 121

‘contaminating’ the earth and winds, who respond with bad harvests and weather. This
weakening is taking place across various scales on the mountain.
Moreover, young people who remain in the village engage in mining, without the
sacrifices to the mountain deities once thought to be an essential component of
extracting their minerals. A wave of evangelization has contributed to vilifying these
spirits, and mining is now a relation of one-way gain rather than exchange. A friend who
had opened up a mineral mine on Kaata’s soil had a car accident when driving to the
main town to buy more alcohol during a fiesta, and five young Kaateño men travelling
with him were killed. When this accident was dealt with during the Day of the Dead
festivities, I was told: ‘This is not our culture, that Alejo- he’s an addict’. An addict, it
seemed, was someone who took too much from the social whole for themselves, one
who took selfishly and in excess, and someone, in short, who was not part of the balance
of reciprocity of a landscape characterized by ayni.
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

Mannheim (1991) indicated that mañay ritual offerings to the mountain lords, which
accompany a request for some boon in exchange, or delayed reciprocity, have – or had –
the quality of a ‘total social phenomenon’ in the Andes. Now, young people are seldom
there to contribute to these offerings and prefer playing radios to making the instru-
mental music that traditionally was a major component of such rituals. This is in some
ways still a relational and animate landscape, but one undergoing a profound transfor-
mation. Crops, as animals, are still referred to as sentient and agentive beings. I was told
that ‘we do not say any more’ that the mountain is a living body, yet corporal metaphors
were used regarding it – the melting of the glaciers, for example, was expressed as the
mountain deshinchandose, a term usually used to describe a swollen wound that is
seeping fluid and ‘going down’. In addition, the mummies of the chullpa ancestors,
buried under the square that Bastien (1978) noted as the ‘heart’ of the mountain, who
were said to ‘dominate everything before’, were sold to Cusco archeologists several
years ago, as the power they held apparently had weakened in comparison to that of
money.
The extent of the transformation of the landscape amounts to an ontological
change from a complex of relationships of reciprocity among humans and non-
humans to one human exploitation of ‘de-animated’ non-humans as ‘natural
resources’. As young people move out of the ayni networks that shaped their parents’
identity and social relations to desire the clothes and foods of the city-dwelling,
mestizo ‘other’, their identities become ever further from the ‘indigenous’ ideal
fetishized by the proponents of Vivir Bien (Bold forthcoming). Stuck in a timeless
idealization of ‘indigenous’ communities, Vivir Bien fails to take such contemporary
changes into account.

Migration
As we have seen, Vivir Bien emanates from a city-dwelling world that idealizes the rural
ayllu. As it gazes from the city, however, it also meets a rural vision that idealizes the
urban world and leads young people to migrate. This was often the case in the
communities of highland Apolobamba, similar to many subsistence rural communities,
as those remaining were mature parents and their smaller children, while young people
worked outside the village. Many of them have migrated to urban areas and coca-
 122 R. BOLD

growing regions in the valleys, or nearby mines that are expanding throughout the
Apolobamba region.
When I asked people why they wanted to live and work outside Kaata, they replied
in terms of a desire for commodities, especially clothes. This is not surprising,
considering the wealth of ethnographic examples that illustrate the importance of
dress in the Andes, especially in distinguishing social and racial hierarchies (de la
Cadena 2000; Mendoza 2000; Seligmann 1989; 1993; Weismantel 2001). For the elder
sisters of the family with whom I worked, desirable clothes consisted of the wide
pollera skirts, shawls and hats of the chola, the ‘citified Indian’ (Lazar 2008) who
mediates the rural and urban domains, often marketing the produce of rural kin in
the city. The chola of the market is, compared to her rural cousins, considered
liberated from patriarchal domination; she is an independent woman who makes
money (Weismantel 2001). Seligmann (1989; 1993) indicates that, to a rural commu-
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

nity, chola market women symbolize the power of commodities, the magic of buying
and selling, and transforming rural produce into commodities. The success associated
with the chola makes her less ‘Indian’ and more mestiza (mixed race), with a tradi-
tional claim to social superiority. Being mestizo or Indian is, as de la Cadena (2000)
has suggested among the market women of Cusco, a social condition, connoting
success or failure in the city.
Clothes are crucial in creating these ‘ethnic’ identities. Girls wishing to make some
money and put on the pollera skirt become a new personage, one who may stroll
flirtatiously about the market unaccompanied. In saving money and buying these
clothes, the young women I worked with show the badge of their changing identity
and economic orientation. To some extent actors have the freedom to move through
these domains, (re)constructing their identities to become whiter and less Indian. For
Harvey (2003), the success of this depends on how others assess your claim. Kaateños
seeking the new language of urban identity invoke new flexibilities in socio-racial
constructs, which consumer commodities and new forms of wealth with which to buy
them allow them to articulate.
Thus, while we might celebrate with García Canclini (1995) the hybridity and cultural
mixing this allows, such claims are marked by an underlying tendency that places value
on whiteness and the city. Colloredo-Mansfeld (1999), in his work in Otavalo, Ecuador,
where the burgeoning textiles trade leads to indigenous communities becoming
increasingly wealthy and entrepreneurial, has suggested that commodities can articulate
new indigenous identities:

Quechua culture does not just sit around a smoking hearth, sometimes it thunders down
the Pan American highway in a Ford truck with the new folklore music blasting out the
windows. (213)

His informants apparently control their new luxuries, synthesizing multiple influences
with regional traditions, rather than mindlessly imitating western style. Identities and
desires, he claims, are fundamentally hybrid in nature; actors are not involved in a
process of ‘losing culture’ to become more western. However, asking a weaver what
he would do if he won the lottery, Colloredo-Mansfeld was told he would live like a
white/mestizo. Despite the weavers’ wealth, and a tendency for cultural hybridity and
mixing, he found that they were hemmed in by a racist culture. western culture also
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 123

brings the notion of hygiene, contesting the clothes and houses of Otavaleños with its
assumption of absolute superiority (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999).
For male migrants and the younger sisters of the family I worked with, who, through
their chola sisters, had access to more prestigious jobs in the city, the latest western
fashions constituted desirable clothes. A younger sister turned up for a fiesta wearing
tight jeans and hoodie reading ‘sexy’. A young male migrant traveled to the city from
Kaata in his drainpipe jeans and winkle pickers, which would not have looked at all out
of place amongst the fashionable undergraduates in my United Kingdom university,
with a pocket full of gold shards he had spent the last month extracting from a one-man
mine shaft in the jungle.
Part of the attraction of these things seems to be their fashionable nature, allowing
young people to become the western ‘other’. Wilk (1990) observes that fashion is
produced by a ‘center’, and the capacity to adopt and keep apace with it articulates a
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

temporal difference between this center and its peripheries. While local elites were
formerly seen as the representatives of this fashion, with the advent of satellite TV,
even those in poorer areas could experience a phenomenon, such as a baseball game, at
the same time as those at the center. This makes the ‘peripheral’ areas contemporaneous
with the center, and with it, the superiority of the mestizo city dweller is undermined; as
those from Kaata reach towards an international ‘western’ level, the center–periphery
model is destabilized in a postmodern landscape.
Indeed, the aspirations of the young people of Kaata are no longer mediated through
a ‘central’ elite urban class, in this age of accelerated distribution of images. The Internet
and videos can provide an ample supply of fashion images that do not have to be
transmitted through the channels of a local center, but are accessible to anyone who has
a mobile phone. Internet and the mobile phones that can channel it accelerate mimesis
and alterity. The place to which Kaateños aspire is ephemeral and elusive; without
having to pass through the intermediate spaces of chola identity, outlined by de la
Cadena’s (2000) scheme of de-whitening, Kaateños can become fashionable city dwell-
ers if they have the cash to buy the costume, and can convince others of their right to
wear it. Thus, desires and centers are de-territorialized (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) from
the spatial and racial hierarchies composing Bolivia, and their sudden accessibility is
attractive to the Kaateños, who look towards the city. The West has been displaced,
constituting a style rather than a location (Yates-Doerr and Mol 2012), and far from
being antithetical to the Kaateños, the western ‘other’ shapes desires and selfhood in
the ayllu.
When I asked Vivir Bien proponent Javier Medina about migration, he irritably
dismissed it – there has always been migration, he argued, and Andean peasants have
always had two or three homes. Careful consideration of migration and its causes would
enable Vivir Bien and current government, which holds Vivir Bien in such high regard, to
better address the needs of its constituents. While it may be true that Andean peasants
have long had more than one residence and undertaken seasonal migrations (see Harris
1995), the sustainability and future of the ayllu community are, Kaateños consider,
currently thrown into jeopardy by the force of the flow of migration and desire for
things from the outside. People worried if there would be anyone left in the village in
another generation’s time. The diminishing population was part of the ‘weakening of
everything’ constituting climate change. Some spoke to me of a cataclysm which might
 124 R. BOLD

take place when the fast-disappearing snows finally vanished from the mountains, which
would erupt and bury everything in lava, a process or reincorporation of humans into
the earth which resembles the pachakuti, the replacement of one cosmos with another
happening at the end of an age of the world (see Bold forthcoming).
In short, reaching towards the western ‘other’, young villagers seek to embody the
characteristics of wealth and exploitation that they associate with its stereotype. In
moving to the city, they are motivated by the desire to become the ‘other’, the counter-
point to the desirous alterity that leads the city to look towards an ‘other’ that lies
beyond capitalism. What the city reaches towards then, that pristine state of alterity, it
cannot grasp, for as Taussig (1993) explains, it is always already engaged in a process of
reverse mimesis whereby it is becoming the self. A constant process of ‘schismogenesis’,
as Bateson (1972) puts it, is what maintains this alterity. For Harris (1995), those who
want to make money are cholos, whereas those who work the land, an increasingly small
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

number these days, are runa.

In his classic essay, Platt (1978, 242) proposed that for the people of Macha ‘the
fundamental structure of the cosmos is dual, and humanity must face both ways at once
in order to benefit from the complementary but antagonistic forces around them’.
Similarly, contemporary Kaata is determined by dual antagonistic and complementary
forces of Indian/non-Indian or rural/urban identity. The complementarity of the two
follows from their mutual implication: in an interaction, one can be either category; the
important point is that there should be one of each. Despite the antagonism between
the two, one completes the other.
To some extent the young people I work with do attempt to ‘look both ways’, rather
than moving to cities in a one-way transformation. My research assistant, for example,
sought to return to the village and live with his parents (Bold 2016). Yet he faced a lack
of opportunities to enter the commercial economy in Kaata. While contributing to his
family’s subsistence economy, he also considered it necessary to have a source of cash
income. Villagers were unable to sell their staple crops of potatoes, grains and beans
produce owing to distance from the city over unpaved roads and low prices. In this
sense, the Vivir Bien project we shall investigate below, in attempting to promote rural
economies through tourism, seemed to me a workable solution.

Case study: tourism in Apolobamba

In an interview in September 2013, Javier Medina outlined to me his plans for a scheme
in Kaata, which would be one of a few laboratories to realize the ideas of Vivir Bien
through the Biocultura program, funded by the Swiss Cooperation and Bolivian state.
Vivir Bien has been criticized for failing to translate its ‘transformative potential’ into
practice (Mansilla 2011; Radcliffe 2015; Ranta 2016). Medina’s idea was to create a
community tourism scheme. A team would improve the footpaths on the route of the
Curva–Pelechuco trek and build hostels for hikers. When I asked Medina how the project
was to differ from normal tourism, he told me that the difference lay in the creation of a
local market for sustainable community agriculture, as well as the dynamically egalitar-
ian ethos of the project, which would create a meeting of two civilizations, with young
people the ‘cultural mediators’ between them. The hostels would use food produced by
the villages, and there would also be workshops for these villages to improve the food
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 125

they eat. Market opportunities are rare in the area, as we have seen. The tourist would
be treated not as a client who must be attended to, but as a guest with whom you
would want to share, creating a form of tourism ‘mas digno para todos’, more dignified
for everyone. Medina sought to encourage young people in the villages to value their
indigenous culture through this meeting of civilizations. Seeing themselves reflected
admiringly in the gaze of the tourists, they would learn to value their own culture and
combine it with elements of western culture. Simultaneously, western tourists would
learn much-needed lessons from the villages, which I assumed to mean lessons about
complementarity, reciprocity and so forth. This assumption that each side needs to be
rebalanced by the other is based in the theory of complementarity expressed above.
After this discussion, I was excited to see what the tourism project might bring into
fruition. Medina identified the ethnic split and idealization of the other that was for me
key to many Andean dynamics, and explained the high rates of migration I had observed
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

from the village. The scheme furthermore aimed to solve the needs of local producers to
find markets. Moreover, the Bolivian Government had recently adopted the rhetoric of
Food Sovereignty, aiming to feed the country from its own agriculture and to create
conditions whereby highland famers were included in national markets. This commit-
ment to highland peasants came after years of their being all but ignored in national
agricultural policy, which supported the creation of what we might term a ‘neoliberal
food regime’, defined as a ‘rule-governed structure of production and consumption of
food on a world scale’ (Friedmann 1993, 30–31). State resources were focused on the
development of an agro-industrial sector in the lowland Santa Cruz region, with transfer
of public resources to create road networks, rice and cotton mills, meat-processing
plants, investment in oil seed, and sugar refineries, as well as textile factories. Under
this ‘food regime’, highland producers, who were largely small-scale farmers, received
little encouragement: national production of quinoa, a highland crop, for example,
dropped in the 1960s and the 1970s, while highland rural families consumed an ever
greater amount of the processed white sugar and white rice, produced by Santa Cruz
food industries, as well as cheap imported wheat flour, often in the form of refined
products such as fideos (noodles). It is exactly these foodstuffs which Kaateños consider
a ‘weakening’ of their community. Thus, a project that provided a market for local
produce and which was furthermore aimed at the valuing of these crops seemed a
worthy initiative.
One of the technicians setting up the project, an anthropologist from a Quechua-
speaking family, was an acquaintance from La Paz, and we communicated over the
Internet from England about the early phases of the tourism scheme. I was thus
consulted, via Facebook chat, on what ‘traditional dishes’ or platos regionales the villages
ought to prepare for the tourists. I replied to the effect that if it was local cuisine being
sought, they ought to ask the women there. In a very noble and ethical tone, the
technician replied, ‘but – really – what should the tourists eat?’ They could not be
expected to eat soup every day, as did the villagers. And the preparation methods
used in the villages were not hygienic. I replied that I thought the locally grown foods
very nourishing, and that I had never been sick from eating in Kaata.
Nonetheless, upon returning to the communities, just as workshops were training
local members to partake in the tourism project, I found women being taught to cook in
a ‘hygienic’ fashion contradicting many existing practices, mainly because tourist food
 126 R. BOLD

would have to be made in a special kitchen outside of the house. As Colloredo-Mansfeld

(1999) indicates, the totalizing nature of the hygiene discourse displaces rural culture. A
woman had been brought in from Cochabamba to teach the ladies how to cook new
meals that would be called their ‘regional dishes’, and an alpaca had been purchased
from the upper villages to feed the technicians.
I was familiar with food as an area of concern, as when I had first gone to Kaata
people were surprised that I could eat the same food as them. This stemmed from the
idea that white people were a different sort of being than runa and, with the emphasis
on personhood being constituted through practice, were understood to be constituted
as such partly by their consumption of different foodstuffs. The imposition of separate
food regimes, especially with the implication that local food was not clean or interesting
enough for tourists, would be bound to deepen existing prejudices and tensions against
white people, who were cast as lordly and deprecating before any of them had even
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

arrived by the well-meaning technicians from La Paz, who themselves were much
impressed by and glorified the idea of tourists. Despite Medina’s educated approach,
not to mention my own attempts at intervention, culture tends to reproduce itself, in
this case meaning that the ends of the project were almost the inverse of its aims,
confirming and deepening stereotypes and antagonism across the ethnic divide. It
seemed the scheme would do little to support local agricultural economies: alpacas
are already sold at a good price into tourism circuits from the upper ayllus.
As mentioned above, my research assistant, Edwin, had, wanted to return to Kaata
and create a small business for himself there. He did not consider living by the reciprocal
subsistence economy of his parents. We thought he might set up a tourism scheme, yet
he decided it was not worthwhile, as any income would have to be shared among the
community at large, creating only a small profit for himself. He wanted an individual
cash income, rather than one that would feed into the community, and when we
consider the goods he wished to buy – clothes, a mobile phone and other commodities
only available from outside the village – this is not surprising. He did not trust the village
authorities to help him, asserting like others that they ‘only wanted money’. The
expectation bound to discourses of Vivir Bien that the ayllu is a site of networks of
reciprocity to which their initiatives can contribute shatters here. If the creation of new
economic opportunities is tacitly aimed at stemming migration, then it might seem
more logical to be framed in terms of individual rather than the communal income that
was the emphasis of the Vivir Bien tourism project.
Furthermore, some of the idealizations of rural communities inherent in Vivir Bien,
such as the expectation that communities will desire communitarian, reciprocal, non-
capitalist economies, oriented towards the production of use-values rather than of cash,
created issues for the implementation of other schemes in Kaata, including an irrigation
canal and chicken battery (Bold 2016). In this sense, more thorough, realistic ethnogra-
phy of these communities can illuminate the shortcomings of city-centered assumptions
that the ayllu is constituted of communal and reciprocal dynamics, as well as the
immunity of indigenous persons to self-interest, corruption and exploitation, seen as
firmly ‘non-Indian’ colonial tendencies that ought to be absent from the countryside.
The technician also asked me what I considered the villagers should teach tourists.
Their own suggestions that recounting how local colonists had been burned out of their
haciendas were regarded as being rather tactless under the circumstances, apparently
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 127

too vehement a form of decolonization for Vivir Bien. I suggested that their agricultural
knowledge, which leads to adaption to climate change, was the most valuable thing to
my mind that they might impart to western travelers. I had hoped to influence the
project towards agri-tourism, with international volunteers learning the sustainable
terracing techniques of the villages and staying in family houses. However, these
suggestions were not heeded, rather regarded with alarm by the technician. The idea
that westerners could work the fields was unthinkable due to the ethnic categorizations
explained above, where they come to embody an idea of whiteness that is based in the
very fact of not carrying out ‘Indian’ work in the fields. This position was taken despite
my assurances that there are an increasing number of sustainable agriculture training
projects in the United Kingdom and my commitment to set up connections helping to
assure a flow of interested persons.
It seems that the idea that the villages wanted another form of cash income was also
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

an assumption. Significantly, they had not been consulted on the tourism project, the
impetus coming from La Paz. The technician told me that in some areas there had been
little uptake on the scheme, where villages were already immersed in profitable cash
economies from coca farming, gold mining and running black market gasoline over the
border to Peru and thus were not particularly interested in this alternative source of
revenue. This completely laid bare the fallacy of expectations of them as harmonious
subsistence farmers immune to the temptations of capitalism. In Kaata, the deputy
mayor, in explaining the government’s proposal to the other authorities, said that on
the one hand it might be beneficial and on the other might ‘ruin the village’. The
integrity of the village is threatened by the presence of white observers like myself: the
authorities had no wish to work to maintain tourists while becoming a fetishized version
of themselves.
Rather than the villagers teaching foreigners about their culture, the dynamics of
knowledge worked in a different direction. When visiting Chari one day, I was taken as a
sample tourist to visit the chullpas, ancestral mummies, above the village by an assort-
ment of teenagers and adolescents who were interested in community tourism, with a
couple of motherly women that accompanied use to keep an eye on things. Though
participating in the scheme obliged them to take tourists to the sacred sites, they
intended to keep any information as to the nature of these places secret. I had found
as an anthropologist that such knowledge was zealously guarded from outsiders who
were widely suspected of ‘stealing the culture’. Foreigners were largely expected to
steal, this being the role of the white capitalist ‘other’; in Kaata everyone was convinced
that the existing tourists who climbed Mount Akhamani were making their way to a
secret gold mine on the summit. The La Paz technicians that led the adventure were
themselves ignorant as to whether chullpas were the circular ruins above the village to
which we went, or, as they inferred from my questions, the people who had lived inside
them.
On our little expedition to the chullperias, one of the maternal ladies carried lunch for
all of us, a total of around 20 people, in a huge cooking pot, tied with a cloth to her
back. When we got back down the mountain, the entire group was submitted to a long
and exceedingly dull lecture on how to pack a rucksack correctly, thought to be an
essential skill for a tourist guide. The young people were essentially being prepared to
carry tourists’ bags about for them, hardly an egalitarian cultural exchange. That a
 128 R. BOLD

rucksack should be assumed to be a superior form of carrying apparatus to the existing

carrying cloths was indicative of the underlying idealization of western technologies,
which was turning the project into the inverse of what it had set out to be and which
characterizes classical developmental initiatives (Arce and Long 2000). While it is easy to
talk about the strength of indigenous culture, overcoming the pervasive underlying
conviction that the western ‘other’ is inherently more valuable or superior is challenging.
Following my experience, I took my concerns to the headquarters of the Biocultura
project in La Paz, outlining the issues to Medina in an email. He was unable to see me
himself, though he instructed those running the project to meet with me, and a meeting
was called, to which no one attended. While we tried to reschedule several times, I was
never able to actually talk to anyone, spending a great deal of time sitting ignored in the
foyer of the organization. I eventually wrote a letter that indicated the scheme was very
unlikely to create cross-cultural, non-hierarchical dialog, tending to confirm stereotypical
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

roles and prejudices. I tried as far as I could to have a positive, productive input into the
elaboration of the tourism scheme, unwilling to be another supercilious academic
writing a damning critique of a development project. However, against my best efforts,
this was, it would appear, to be the limit of my capacities in the situation.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the tourism project, as Vivir Bien itself, was created in the city in the image
of Indian communities. When this image is projected onto the communities themselves,
all kinds of discrepancies emerge that make the scheme unworkable. First, the commu-
nities fail to live up to the anti-market Indian stereotype explained by Harris (1995).
Many of those remaining few who have not migrated to cities and coca fields in search
of economic opportunities are conducting various kinds of black market trade over the
border with Peru, as well as with the burgeoning coca industry, and working in gold
mines. Rather than adhering to an ‘indigenous’ identity, fetishized in the city as embody-
ing a rejection of the market economy, reciprocity, harmony and animism, villagers are
embracing money-making opportunities associated with the mestizo inhabitants of the
cities and towns. What appears to be motivating this is the desire for ‘western’ clothes
and incorporation into an international community. In so doing, their identities, asso-
ciated with rural labor and exchange with an animate landscape, shift to become more
like the exploitative q’aras.
The indigenous identity category on which Vivir Bien is predicated is in itself not
something that the rural communities would recognize. Categories are more fluid,
dynamic and dynamic than this ‘blood-based’ indigeneity would have us believe.
Villagers are not circumscribed to conforming to an exterior imposed category of
‘indiegneity’. While Vivir Bien is to some extent accurate to classic ethnographies of
the 1970s of these areas that depict animist worlds of reciprocity, rural landscapes are
changing at this moment of mimesis, in which the city and campo are gazing desirously
at one another and changing places, seeping into one another through various idealiza-
tions and imitations.
Vivir Bien represents a classically ahistorical approach to communities as timelessly
rooted in a pristine precapitalist reality (Fabian 2002). While seeming to propose a
localized alternative to development along a western modernist axis, being based in
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 129

regional ethnography and anthropological literature, Vivir Bien reproduces underlying

western hegemonies which scholars have identified as characterizing classical develop-
ment, rendering third-world subjects powerless and without agency in programs
imposed from the outside (Arce and Long 2000; Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994; 1999;
2015; Hobart 1993; Mohanty 1991). Championing the indigenous is a change of termi-
nology, yet the underlying colonial aspects of development do not alter. Key to this is
designing the development project from outside rather than consulting the ayllu as to
what shape – if any – exterior aid might take.
I hope that highlighting the desires and experiences of the villages might indicate
how these policies might be better shaped to the reality of rural communities like Kaata.
Separating the world into ideal domains of alterity does not offer any solutions to the
ecological and social dilemmas of capitalism except, as Spedding (2010) indicates, for
everyone to live as subsistence peasants in an animate landscape, and refuses to take
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

into account the contemporary circumstances of the rural base it idealizes.

The idealization of indigeneity in Vivir Bien was paradoxically accompanied by under-
lying de facto normative assumptions of the superiority of western over indigenous
culture. Similarly, the projections of tourists’ needs, desires and tastes are a result of a
reverse alterity in which white outsiders are likewise stereotyped as the ideal other of
Indian virtues. A narrow view of their tastes, interests and needs hampered the project.
As the city and countryside gaze at each other, there is a well-established, underlying
hierarchy that is hard to shift. There was nothing in the tourism scheme to indicate a
reciprocal process of learning; rather, through Vivir Bien schemes, the process of becom-
ing the urban ‘other’ which motivated migration was replicated rather than remedied,
even accelerated, with technicians imposing western cooking and carrying methods on
the villages. Vivir Bien meets an opposite mimesis emanating from the rural communities
that are also in the process of becoming their ‘other’, which renders the city gaze, seated
in a reality of 40 years ago, outdated and inaccurate. Projecting ethnic idealizations
rather than carrying out grounded ethnographic research into with actors’ contempor-
ary realities renders Vivir Bien ineffective in realizing its goals.
In its mimetic projections, Vivir Bien has the strange effect of holding up a mirror to
anthropology and the anthropologist themselves. We notice now the characteristics
ethnographers have selected to observe in the countryside and, in the extent to which
they are posed as the exact compliment of the ethnographers’ own ‘western’ qualities,
are led to reflect on our own research. In attempting to apply these characteristics to the
contemporary countryside, we see the limitations of a static and ahistorical perspective
for which we have as a discipline learned to criticize ourselves (Fabian 2002).
It is interesting to note the conditions that ‘western’ society seeks from its ‘other’, and
how anthropological knowledge plays into these projections. Chibber (2013) criticizes
subaltern scholars’ claims that western categories cannot be applied to postcolonial socie-
ties like India as exaggerating the separations between the ‘East’ and ‘West’, which resem-
bles Medina’s reified assertion of complete alterity between two worlds. Chibber argues that
capitalism is common to both, and capitalism is similarly present in the rural Bolivian
landscapes Medina idealizes – as indeed are ecology and animism in the ‘West’. While we
might conjure worlds otherwise, issues like capitalism or climate change create the oppor-
tunity for their coming together to mutually inform one another across ontological divides.
The villagers I worked with in Kaata, as my friends in the United Kingdom, are grappling
 130 R. BOLD

alike with the temptations and comforts of contemporary industrialized society and strug-
gling to counterbalance these against its ecological and cultural consequences. Reifying the
'other' as having the solution to these problems cannot help. It is to be hoped that
recognising the commonality of our issues is a more stable way of finding solutions.

Notes
1. All Spanish quotes are translated by the author, unless otherwise noted.
2. A Quechua/Aymara word meaning a community and the territory that sustains it.
3. See, for example, Medina’s contribution to the blog site La Reciprocidad, ‘Suma Qamaña, Vivir
Bien y de Vita Beata. Una cartografía boliviana’, 20 January 2011, available at http://larecipro
cidad.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/suma-qamana-vivir-bien-y-de-vita-beata.html.
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

References
Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso.
Arce, A., and N. Long, eds. 2000. Anthropology, Development, and Modernities: Exploring Discourses,
Counter-Tendencies, and Violence. London: Routledge.
Bastien, J. 1978. Mountain of the Condor: Metaphor and Ritual in an Andean Ayllu. St. Paul: West
Publishing.
Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing.
Bold, R. 2016. “Landscapes of Alterity: Climate Change in Kaata.” PhD diss., University of
Manchester.
Bold, R. forthcoming. “Climate Change: Generating Cross Cultural Equivocation.” In Climate
Change: The End of the World? edited by R. Bold. London: Palgrave- Macmillan.
Bolivian National Development Plan. 2006. Ministerio de Planificación del Desarrollo, Plan Nacional
de Desarrollo Bolivia Digna, Soberana, Productiva y Democrática para Vivir Bien 2009–2014. http://
www.planificacion.gob.bo/sites/folders/documentos/plan.pdf
Canessa, A. 2007. “Who Is Indigenous? Self-Identification, Indigeneity, and Claims to Justice in
Contemporary Bolivia.” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic
Development 36 (3): 195–237.
Canessa, A. 2014. “Conflict, Claim and Contradiction in the New ‘Indigenous’ State of Bolivia.”
Critique of Anthropology 34 (2): 153–173. doi:10.1177/0308275X13519275.
Chibber, V. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. New York: Verso.
Colloredo-Mansfeld, R. 1999. The Native Leisure Class: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the
Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
de la Cadena, M. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-
1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
de la Cadena, M. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond
Politics.” Current Anthropology 25 (2): 334–370.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fabian, J. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. 2nd ed. New York:
Colombia University Press.
Ferguson, J. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power
in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, J. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian
Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 131

Ferguson, J. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Friedmann, H. 1993. “The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis.” New Left Review 197: 29–57.
García Canclini, N. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Gelles, P. 1995. “Equilibrium and Extraction: Dual Organization in the Andes.” American Ethnologist
22 (4): 710–742. doi:10.1525/ae.1995.22.4.02a00040.
Gose, P. 1994. Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gudynas, E. 2011. “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow.” Development 54 (4): 441–447. doi:10.1057/
dev.2011.86.
Gudynas, E., and A. Acosta. 2011. “El Buen Vivir o la dissolucion de la idea del progreso.” In La
Medición del Progreso y del Bienestar. Propuestas desde America Latina, edited by M. Rojas,
103–111. D.F., México: Foro Consultativo Cientifico y Tecnologico, AC.
Hall, S. 1992. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Formations of Modernity, edited by
S. Hall and B. Gieben, 275–332. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harris, O. 1995. “The Sources and Meanings of Money: Beyond the Market Paradigm in an Ayllu of
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

Northern Potosí.” In Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes at the Crossroads of History
and Anthropology, edited by B. Larson and O. Harris, 297–328. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Harvey, P. M. 2003. “Elites on the Margins: Mestizo Traders in the Southern Peruvian Andes.” In Elite
Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by C. Shore, 74–90. London: Routledge.
Heidegger, M. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
Hobart, M., ed. 1993. An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance. London:
Routledge.
Ingold, T. 1993. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25 (2): 152–174.
doi:10.1080/00438243.1993.9980235.
Kuper, A. 2003. “The Return of the Native.” Current Anthropology 44 (3): 389–402. doi:10.1086/
368120.
Lazar, S. 2008. El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Mannheim, B. 1991. The Language of the Inca since the European Invasion. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Mansilla, H. C. F. 2011. “Ideologías oficiales sobre el medio ambiente en Bolivia y sus aspectos
problemáticos.” Ecuador Debate 84: 89–105.
Martínez Cobo, J. 1986. “The Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous
Populations, Vol. 1-5.” United Nations Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7. New York: United
Nations.
Medina, J. 2011. “Acerca Del Sumaq Qamana.” In Vivir Bien: ¿Paradigma No Capitalista? edited by I.
Farah and L. Vasapollo, 39–64. La Paz: CIDES- UMSA/Plural.
Mendoza, Z. 2000. Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mohanty, C. T. 1991. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Third
World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres,
51–80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Morales, E. 2011. “Prólogo.” In Vivir Bien: ¿Paradigma No Capitalista?, edited by I. Farah and L.
Vasapollo, 7–10. La Paz: CIDES-UMSA/Plural.
Murra, J. 1972. El “control vertical” en un maximo de pisos ecologicos en la economia de las
sociedades Andinas. Huánuco Peru: Universidad Nacional Hermilio Valdizan.
Platt, T. 1978. “Symétries en miroir: Le concept de yanantin chez les Macha de Bolivia.” Annales
Économies, Sociétés, Civiisations 33 (5–6): 1081–1107.
Postero, N. 2007a. Now We are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Post-Multicultural Bolivia. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Postero, N. 2007b. “Andean Utopias in Evo Morales’s Bolivia.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic
Studies 2 (1): 1–28. doi:10.1080/17442220601167269.
 132 R. BOLD

Postero, N. 2013. “Introduction: Negotiating Indigeneity.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic
Studies 8 (2): 107–121. doi:10.1080/17442222.2013.810013.
Postero, N. 2015. “Even in Plurinational Bolivia: Indigeneity, Development, and Racism since
Morales.” In Geographies of Power, Re-Cognizing the Present Moment of Danger, edited by H.
Merrill and L. Hoffman, 230–254. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Postero, N., and L. Zamosc, eds. 2004. The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America. Brighton,
UK: Sussex Academic Press.
Radcliffe, S. 2015. “Development Alternatives.” Development and Change 46 (4): 855–874.
doi:10.1111/dech.2015.46.issue-4.
Ranta, E. M. 2016. “Toward a Decolonial Alternative to Development? The Emergence and
Shortcomings of Vivir Bien as State Policy in Bolivia in the Era of Globalization.” Globalizations
13 (4): 425–439. doi:10.1080/14747731.2016.1141596.
Seligmann, L. 1989. “To Be in Between: The Cholas as Market Women.” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 31 (4): 694–721. doi:10.1017/S0010417500016169.
Seligmann, L. 1993. “Between Worlds of Exchange: Ethnicity among Peruvian Market Women.”
Cultural Anthropology 8 (2): 187–213. doi:10.1525/can.1993.8.2.02a00040.
Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 03:47 21 August 2017

Spedding, A. 2010. “Suma qamaña. Qué quiere decir vivir bien?” Fe Y Pueblo 17: 1–20.
Tassi, N. 2010. Cuando el baile mueve montañas: religión y economía cholo-mestizas en La Paz,
Bolivia. La Paz: Fundación Praia.
Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.
Torrez, M. 2001. “Estructura y proceso de desarrollo del Qamaña.” Pacha 6: 45–67.
UDAPE (Unidad de Análisis de Políticas Sociales y Económicas). 2011. Informe de Resultados:
Concepciones Sobre el Vivir Bien en Pueblos Indigena Originario Campesinos de Bolivia. La Paz:
UDAPE.
Walsh, C. 2010. “Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional Arrangements and (De)Colonial
Entanglements.” Development 53 (1): 15–21. doi:10.1057/dev.2009.93.
Weismantel, M. 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (Women in Culture
and Society). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wilk, R. 1990. “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Difference.” In Worlds
Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, edited by D. Miller, 111–133. London: Routledge.
Yampara, S. 2001. “Viaje del Jaqi a la Qamaña: el hombre en el Vivir Bien.” In Suma Qamaña: la
Comprensión Indígena de la Vida Buena, edited by J. Medina, 72–82. La Paz: PADEP/GTZ.
Yates-Doerr, E., and A. Mol. 2012. “Cuts of Meat: Disentangling Western Natures-Cultures.”
Cambridge Anthropology 30 (2): 48–64.