Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes

Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes: Ritual Practice and Activism explores how Evo Morales’s victory in the 2005 Bolivian presidential elections led to indigeneity as the core of decolonization politics. Anders Burman analyzes how indigenous Aymara ritual specialists are essential in representing this indigeneity in official state ceremony and in legitimizing the president’s role as “the indigenous president.” This book goes behind the scenes of state-sponsored multiculturalist ritual practices and explores the political, spiritual and existential dimensions underpinning them.

Candidly and with respect to those that may think that ‘tradition’ is timeless, this book experiences Aymara politics as re-membering. I think of this word as a conceptual practice, proposed by young Aymara intellectuals-politicians as a de-colonial practice of the self with which to bring to awareness that which denies their possibilities of exceeding the practices imposed by modernity, while at the same time using that which modernity offers to, precisely, emerge against the denial. The book is an ethnographically brilliant and carefully composed work in which Burman does not study the yatiris; he learns with them other ways of knowing and he thereby transforms ‘participant observation’ into experience and proposes a novel notion of methods; not a practice of collecting data, but a practice of knowing through fieldwork., The outstanding and fascinating contribution of Indigeneity and Decolonization is that it shows the deep interpenetration between the political and spiritual worlds of Aymara healers. Based on their ritual practices involving the body, mind, and nature, it offers us an important new way to think about decolonization as a process of healing the afflictions of history and the sickness of society. As the product of Burman's intimate engagement in the daily lives of the maestros, it is itself an example of the decolonization of ethnography., Indigeneity and Decolonization provides a detailed, rigorous, and committed insight into the fascinating creation and recreation of Aymara ways of being and feeling. It’s an indispensable guide to understand how, in the twenty-first century, traditions are maintained while novelties are added to Aymara knowledges and feelings, including humans as well as nature., After more than a decade in Bolivia where indigeneity and decolonization have been key tropes in political discourse, Anders Burman offers a magnificent example of, not only a decolonizing anthropology, but an anthropology of decolonization. For his Aymara activist interlocutors, colonialism is an illness much like any other and in his fine-grained and sensitive analysis Burman explores the ways in which power, ritual and being are intimately linked. Burman achieves the enviable goal of offering a genuinely fresh look at the politics of indigeneity in the Andes while providing a valuable contribution to debates about the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology.

Anders Burman is associate professor at the Human Ecology Division at Lund University.