Intimate Indigeneities

Analyzing the nuances of identity formation in rural Andean culture, Andrew Canessa draws on two decades of ethnographic research in a remote indigenous community in Bolivia's highlands.

An Open Secret traces the history of women's experiences with unwanted pregnancy and abortion in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia between the early 1950s and 2010. It finds that women's personal reproductive experiences contributed to shaping policies and services in reproductive health care.

Today a majority of Indigenous peoples live in urban areas: they are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most individuals in the twenty-first century. Despite this basic fact, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples concentrate solely on rural Indigenous populations. Aiming to highlight these often-overlooked communities, this is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. The contributing essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, architecture, land economy, and area studies, and are written by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. The analysis looks at Indigenous people across the world and draws on examples not usually considered within the study of indigeneity, such as Fiji, Japan, and Russia. Indigeneity is often seen as being “authentic” when it is practiced in remote rural areas, but these essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too. The book challenges many of the imaginaries and tropes of what constitutes “the Indigenous” and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality. As such, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the real lives of Indigenous people today. Contributors Aiko Ikemura Amaral Chris Andersen Giuliana Borea Dana Brablec Andrew Canessa Sandra del Valle Casals Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov Daniela Peluso Andrey Petrov Marya Rozanova-Smith Kate Stevens Kanako Uzawa

Beyond Indigeneity offers new analysis of indigenous identity and social mobility that changes the discourse in Latin American social anthropology. Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón explores the positioning of coca growers in Bolivia and their reluctance to embrace the politics of indigeneity.

Indigeneity in Latin American Cinema explores how contemporary films (2000-2020) participate in the evolution and circulation of images and sounds that in many ways define how indigenous communities are imagined, at a local, regional and global scale. The volume reviews the diversity of portrayals from a chronological, geopolitical, linguistic, epistemic-ontological, transnational and intersectional, paradigm-changing and self-representational perspective, allocating one chapter to each theme. The corpus of this study consists of 68 fictional features directed by non-indigenous filmmakers, 31 cinematic works produced by indigenous directors/communities, and 22 Cine Regional (Regional Cinema) films. The book also draws upon a significant number of engravings, drawings, paintings, photographs and films, produced between 1493 and 2000, as primary sources for the historical review of the visual representations of indigeneity. Through content and close (textual) analysis, interviews with audiences, surveys and social media posts analysis, the author looks at the contexts in which Latin American films circulate in international festivals and the paradigm shifts introduced by self-representational cinema and Roma (Mexico, 2018). Conclusively, the author provides the foundations of histrionic indigeneity, a theory that explains how overtly histrionic proclivities play a significant role in depictions of an imagined indigenous Other in recent films.

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.

In Bolivia's plurinational conjuncture, novel political articulations, legal reform, and processes of collective identification converge in unprecedented efforts to 're-found' the country and transform its society. This ethnography explores the experiences of Afrodescendants in plurinational Bolivia and offers a fresh perspective on the social and political transformations shaping the country as a whole. Moritz Heck analyzes Afrobolivian social and cultural practices at the intersections of local communities, politics, and the law, shedding light on novel articulations of Afrobolivianity and evolving processes of collective identification. This study also contributes to broader anthropological debates on blackness and indigeneity in Latin America by pointing out their conceptual entanglements and continuous interactions in political and social practice.

Academic and research fields are moved by fads, waves, revolutionaries, paradigm shifts, and turns. They all imply a certain degree of change that alters the conditions of a stable system, producing an imbalance that needs to be addressed by the field itself. New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power offers researchers and students from different theoretical fields an essential, turn-organized overview of the radical transformation of epistemological and methodological assumptions in Latin American Studies from the end of the 1980s to the present. Sixteen chapters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include: Why are turns so crucial? How did they alter the shape or direction of the field? What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute? What were or are their limitations? What did they displace or prevent us from considering? Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, decolonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/hegemony, deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance, and cultural studies.