Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia

Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia PDF Author: Marcia Stephenson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292786980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."

Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia

Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia PDF Author: Marcia Stephenson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292786980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."

A Revolution for Our Rights

A Revolution for Our Rights PDF Author: Laura Gotkowitz
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390124
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A Revolution for Our Rights is a critical reassessment of the causes and significance of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Historians have tended to view the revolution as the result of class-based movements that accompanied the rise of peasant leagues, mineworker unions, and reformist political projects in the 1930s. Laura Gotkowitz argues that the revolution had deeper roots in the indigenous struggles for land and justice that swept through Bolivia during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging conventional wisdom, she demonstrates that rural indigenous activists fundamentally reshaped the military populist projects of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing, she chronicles a hidden rural revolution—before the revolution of 1952—that fused appeals for equality with demands for a radical reconfiguration of political power, landholding, and rights. Gotkowitz combines an emphasis on national political debates and congresses with a sharply focused analysis of Indian communities and large estates in the department of Cochabamba. The fragmented nature of Cochabamba’s Indian communities and the pioneering significance of its peasant unions make it a propitious vantage point for exploring contests over competing visions of the nation, justice, and rights. Scrutinizing state authorities’ efforts to impose the law in what was considered a lawless countryside, Gotkowitz shows how, time and again, indigenous activists shrewdly exploited the ambiguous status of the state’s pro-Indian laws to press their demands for land and justice. Bolivian indigenous and social movements have captured worldwide attention during the past several years. By describing indigenous mobilization in the decades preceding the revolution of 1952, A Revolution for Our Rights illuminates a crucial chapter in the long history behind present-day struggles in Bolivia and contributes to an understanding of indigenous politics in modern Latin America more broadly.

Portraits in the Andes

Portraits in the Andes PDF Author: Jorge Coronado
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Portraits in the Andes examines indigenous and mestizo self-representation through the medium of photography from the early to mid twentieth century. As Jorge Coronado reveals, these images offer a powerful counterpoint to the often-slanted, predominant view of indigenismo produced by the intellectual elite. Photography offered an inexpensive and readily available technology for producing portraits and other images that allowed lower- and middle-class racialized subjects to create their own distinct rhetoric and vision of their culture. The powerful identity-marking vehicle that photography provided to the masses has been overlooked in much of Latin American cultural studies—which have focused primarily on the elite's visual arts. Coronado's study offers close readings of Andean photographic archives from the early- to mid-twentieth century, to show the development of a consumer culture and the agency of marginalized groups in creating a visual document of their personal interpretations of modernity.

Natives Making Nation

Natives Making Nation PDF Author: Andrew Canessa
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816506043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In Bolivia today, the ability to speak an indigenous language is highly valued among educated urbanites as a useful job skill, but a rural person who speaks a native language is branded with lower social status. Likewise, chewing coca in the countryside spells “inferior indian,” but in La Paz jazz bars it’s decidedly cool. In the Andes and elsewhere, the commodification of indianness has impacted urban lifestyles as people co-opt indigenous cultures for qualities that emphasize the uniqueness of their national culture. This volume looks at how metropolitan ideas of nation employed by politicians, the media and education are produced, reproduced, and contested by people of the rural Andes—people who have long been regarded as ethnically and racially distinct from more culturally European urban citizens. Yet these peripheral “natives” are shown to be actively engaged with the idea of the nation in their own communities, forcing us to re-think the ways in which indigeneity is defined by its marginality. The contributors examine the ways in which numerous identities—racial, generational, ethnic, regional, national, gender, and sexual—are both mutually informing and contradictory among subaltern Andean people who are more likely now to claim an allegiance to a nation than ever before. Although indians are less often confronted with crude assimilationist policies, they continue to face racism and discrimination as they struggle to assert an identity that is more than a mere refraction of the dominant culture. Yet despite the language of multiculturalism employed even in constitutional reform, any assertion of indian identity is likely to be resisted. By exploring topics as varied as nation-building in the 1930s or the chuqila dance, these authors expose a paradox in the relation between indians and the nation: that the nation can be claimed as a source of power and distinct identity while simultaneously making some types of national imaginings unattainable. Whether dancing together or simply talking to one another, the people described in these essays are shown creating identity through processes that are inherently social and interactive. To sing, to eat, to weave . . . In the performance of these simple acts, bodies move in particular spaces and contexts and do so within certain understandings of gender, race and nation. Through its presentation of this rich variety of ethnographic and historical contexts, Natives Making Nation provides a finely nuanced view of contemporary Andean life.

Aconcagua

Aconcagua PDF Author: Joy Logan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816502315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Aconcagua is the highest mountain in the Americas and the tallest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas. Located in the Andes Mountains of Argentina, near the city of Mendoza, Aconcagua has been luring European mountain climbers since 1883, when a German ge-ologist nearly reached the mountain’s summit. (A Swiss climber finally made the ascent in 1897.) In this fascinating book, Joy Logan explores the many impacts of mountaineering’s “discovery” of Aconcagua including its effect on how local indigenous history is understood. The consequences still resonate today, as the region has become a magnet for “adventure travelers,” with about 7,000 climbers and trekkers from all over the world visiting each year. Having done fieldwork on Aconcagua for six years, Logan offers keen insights into how the invention of mountaineering in the nineteenth century—and adventure tourism a century later—have both shaped and been shaped by local and global cultural narratives. She examines the roles and functions of mountain guides, especially in regard to notions of gender and nation; re-reads the mountaineering stories forged by explorers, scientists, tourism officials, and the gear industry; and considers the distinctions between foreign and Argentine climbers (some of whom are celebrities in their own right). In Logan’s revealing analysis, Aconcagua is emblematic of the tensions produced by modernity, nation-building, tourism development, and re-ethnification. The evolution of mountain climbing on Aconcagua registers seismic shifts in attitudes toward adventure, the national, and the global. With an eye for detail and a flair for description, Logan invites her readers onto the mountain and into the lives it supports.

Owners of the Sidewalk

Owners of the Sidewalk PDF Author: Daniel M. Goldstein
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374714
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's poor—a practice common to neoliberal modern cities—makes the poor exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about what ethical scholarship entails.

Between the Andes and the Amazon

Between the Andes and the Amazon PDF Author: Anna Babel
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816537267
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Examining how people understand themselves and others in the linguistic crossroads of South America--Provided by publisher.

La Paz's Colonial Specters

La Paz's Colonial Specters PDF Author: Luis Sierra
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350099171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This original study examines a vital but neglected aspect of the 1952 National Revolution in Bolivia; the activism of urban inhabitants. Many of these activists were Aymara-speaking people of indigenous origin who transformed the urban environment, politics and place of “indígenas” and “neighbors” within the city of La Paz. Luis Sierra traces how these urban residents faced racial discrimination and marginalization despite their political support for the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR). La Paz's Colonial Specters reassesses the contingent, relational nature of Bolivia's racial categories and the artificial division between urban and rural activists. Building on rich established historiography on the indigenous people of Bolivia, Luis Sierra breaks new ground in showing the role of the neighborhoods in the process of urbanization, and builds upon analysis of the ways in which race, gender and class discourse shaped migrants interactions with other urban residents. Questioning how and why this multiclass and multi-ethnic group continued to be labelled by elites and the state as “un-modern” indigena, the author uses La Paz to demonstrate the ways in which race, class, and gender intertwine in urbanization and in conceptions of the city and nation. Of interest to scholars, researchers and advanced students of Latin American history, urban history, the history of activism and the history of ethnic conflict, this unique study covers the previously neglected first half of the 20th century to shed light on the urban development of La Paz and its racial and political divides.

Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges

Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges PDF Author: Stephan F. Miescher
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111905219X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges presents a collection of original readings that address gendered dimensions of empire from a wide range of geographical and temporal settings. Draws on original research on gender and empire in relation to labour, commodities, fashion, politics, mobility, and visuality Includes coverage of gender issues from countries in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia between the eighteenth to twentieth centuries Highlights a range of transnational and transregional connections across the globe Features innovative gender analyses of the circulation of people, ideas, and cultural practices

Mothers Making Latin America

Mothers Making Latin America PDF Author: Erin E. O'Connor
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118341120
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Mothers Making Latin America utilizes a combination of gender scholarship and source material to dispel the belief that women were separated from—or unimportant to—central developments in Latin American history since independence. Presents nuanced issues in gender historiography for Latin America in a readable narrative for undergraduate students Offers brief, primary-source document excerpts at the end of each chapter that instructors can use to stimulate class discussion Adheres to a focus on motherhood, which allows for a coherent narrative that touches upon important themes without falling into a “list of facts” textbook style