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Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 4, Fall 2009, pp. 985-1016

(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/anq.0.0094

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THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF DIALECTICAL

OBSERVATIONS: ESSAYS BY AND IN HONOR
OF DAVID MAYBURY-LEWIS

Manipulating Cartographies:
Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and
Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia
Bret Gustafson
Washington University in St. Louis

Abstract
Latin American indigenous movements increasingly speak of plurinationalism in demands for state transformation. The conceptas yet solidified in
legal or territorial ordersexists in tension with disputed meanings of
autonomy, raising questions about indigenous territorial rights, citizenship, and natural resources. Bolivias new constitution elevates both concepts to official status in the context of struggles over natural gas. Following
David Maybury-Lewiss call for rethinking the state, I consider how Bolivians
are rethinking historicities of space to transform cartographies of a plurinational state. Though raising fears of ethnic partitioning, the Guaran
case suggests that hybrid plural and indigenous territorialities are emergent.
[Bolivia, Guaran, indigenous movements, plurinationalism, autonomy,
natural gas, territoriality]

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 4, pp. 9851016, ISSN 0003-549. 2009 by the Institute for Ethnographic
Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

985

Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

We leave in the past the colonial, republican, and neoliberal State.

We take up the historical challenge of collectively constructing the
Unitary Social State of Plurinational Communitarian Law [.]
free, independent, sovereign, democratic,
intercultural, decentralized, and with autonomies.
Preamble and Article 1, new constitution of Bolivia (2008)
The Constitution [of 1994] decreed that Bolivia
was a multiethnic and pluricultural nation,
which is doubtless true. But then came the question:
If it is multiethnic and pluricultural, why not autonomous?
Regionalist intellectual, M. Kempff (2005)

ince 2000, business leaders of the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz,
applauded by media outlets they control, have been organizing violent
assaults on their fellow citizens. These attacks are carried out in the name of
political autonomy for the eponynomous departmenta region rich in
hydrocarbon, agricultural, and mineral resources that seeks more power
from the central government (Map 1).1 Thanks to Youtube, recent events are
easily accessible.2 Young men beat a peasant leader in the city square. Three
youths chase down, whip, and kick a farmer in a roadside gutter. Gangs
attack students accused of betraying Santa Cruz. Assaults also targeted NGOs,
public officials, and civil society leaders deemed supporters of the central
government.3 Distinct from violence associated with criminality in other
Latin American cities, these are politicallyand often ethnic and racially
charged attacks in support of a regional power structure. With support from
segments of the urban middle class, and enjoying de facto immunity from
state prosecution, regional autonomy advocates sought to use violence to
carve out a de facto sovereignty scaled at the departmental level.
The elite regional autonomy agenda unfolded in response to the rise of
indigenous movements and their alliance with rural and urban workers and
progressive middle classes across the country.4 Following the collapse of the
elite-led party system in 2003, a broad-based movement in support of the
nationalization of gas and the rewriting of the 1994 constitution led to the
2005 presidential election of the Aymara coca-farmer Evo Morales. Moraless
party, the MAS (Movement to Socialism), renegotiated contracts with foreign
oil and gas companies and backed the writing of a new constitution.
986

BRET GUSTAFSON

Approved in October 2008, the document endorses far-ranging rights for

indigenous peoples encapsulated in a plurinational state with
autonomies of different types for indigenous peoples, regions, and municipalities. As in one of Morales campaign posters (Figure 1), plurinationalism
imagines a state that merges constitutive sovereignty rooted in the national
people (pueblo) and indigenous plurality and self-determination (as the

MAP 1: Bolivia and its Departments

987

Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

national tricolor blurs into the checkerboard wiphala of indigenous movements). The wells on the horizon frame this within a strong stance on sovereign control over oil, and especially natural gas, abundant in the country.
Against the elite regional autonomy agenda described above, Morales
invoked a hybrid indigenist, popular, and (pluri)national project.
In this article, I discuss plurinationalism and the contested meanings
of autonomy as conflicting cultural and political paradigms vying for
the reconfiguration of territorialities and sovereignties in
the Andes. Though particular
to regions with strong indigenous movements (especially
Ecuador and Bolivia), the clash
between these paradigms raises questions about space and
power, citizenship and pluralism, and control over natural
resources. The conjuncture
has echoes world-wide, as the
reformulation (or dismantling)
of the nation-state under
neoliberalism, the unresolved
dilemmas of colonialism, and
the explosion of social movements generate unprecedented (re)territorial(izing) conFIGURE 1: The People [as] Constitutive;
campaign poster for Evo Morales (2005).
flicts over de jure and de facto
sovereignty (Hansen and Stepputat 2006). Bolivia is caught between the partial effects of neoliberal
decentralization and the dismantling of corporatism, the resurgence of
nationalist and indigenous movements, and a transnationally dependent
domestic elite seeking to insulate regional governance against democracy.
The Bolivian case in particularwith the first indigenous president in Latin
American historyalso raises questions about indigenous rights, caught
between the erosion of sovereignty inherited from neoliberalism and the
specter of monocultural authoritarianism tied to resurgent nationalism.
In what follows, I describe plurinationalism by tracing grassroots
indigenous practice, a brief geneaology of the idea in the Andes and
988

BRET GUSTAFSON

Bolivia, and the place of indigenous rights in the newly drafted constitution. I make two points. First, I argue that indigenous self-determination
in the paradigm of plurinationalism is being reconceptualized as a
transterritorial articulatory process through which the nation-state itself is
also under transformation. This differs from conventional views of indigenous self-determination as (only) special legal regimes applied to ethnoterritorial enclaves. Second, I suggest that the elite-led departmental or
regional autonomy, which appropriates and transforms debates on collective self-determination rights for marginalized peoples, defines an emergent post-neoliberal strategy to counter indigenous and popular-nationalist projects in Latin America. Autonomy (or autonoma), in this
conservative sense, reflects a global turn toward creation of sub-national
spaces of regional governance that detach production, social exchange,
and citizenship rights (and sovereignty) from the wider national territory
and social body (c.f. Ong 2006, Ferguson 2006). While plurinationalism
represents an attempt to articulate local ideas of peoplehoodwith
regional [and] nationwide ideas about citizenship (Bowen 2000:14),
regional autonomy reflects the paradoxical intensification of localizing
cultural sentiment and citizen rights claims tied to regionally-specific
political-economic, labor, and natural resource formations articulated
with global capitalist circuits. 5 The pursuit of indigenous autonomies is
distinct, offering a competing model of socio-political, legal, and institutional articulations with the national government.
As this issue is dedicated to the work of David Maybury-Lewis, I use his
writings on indigenous rights, ethnic pluralism, and the state to consider
how these issues create dilemmas for indigenous rights advocates and ethnographers grappling with the uncertainties of the (post)neoliberal era.

Indigeneity and Self-Determination

Advocates of indigenous rights have debated the normative and empirical
tension between state and indigenous claims to sovereignty, a global issue
with a rich tradition in Latin America (Urban and Sherzer 1991; Varese
1996; Warren 1998; Sieder 2002; Warren and Jackson 2002; Maybury-Lewis
1984, 1985, 2002; Dean and Levi 2003; Rappaport 2005). Indigenous aspirations to sovereignty (or self-determination or autonomy) confront the
more and less violent opposition of colonial and neocolonial states who
invoke their own sovereignty to justify treating native bodies, territories,
989

Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

and rights as sacrificable for the sake of modernity, development, and

nationhood, often deploying the myth of liberal equality against native
claims (Levi and Dean 2003:16-18; Sawyer 2004). Yet in Latin America,
indigenous struggles have never been framed in the language of secession
from the statenor in fact for sovereignty (soberana)but through
attempts often allied with non-indigenous movements to recover ancestral
territories in some form and achieve a degree of self-determination or
autonomy within the nation-state. Most observers emphasize that indigenous self-determination or autonomy is not inconsistent with the ultimate
sovereigntyof the state (Hannum 1990:474; c.f. Maybury-Lewis 1984,
1997; Warren 1998:6; Nelson 1999:344-345; Nash 2001).6
In September of 2007, the United Nations General Assembly approved
the long-embattled Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that
reaffirmed indigenous rights to autonomya victory for indigenous movements. 7 Article 4 reads Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to
self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means
for financing their autonomous functions. Yet, as with the ILO Convention
169, heretofore the best international instrument for defending indigenous rights, the new Declaration reaffirmed the primacy of states. Article
46 reads nothing in this Declaration may beconstrued as authorizing or
encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in
part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States (United Nations 2007). Much remains open to cultural-political
struggle: the definition of peoples and territories, understandings of sovereignty, self-government, autonomy and self-determination, andcentral
to the discussion herewhether and how these rights require indigenous
accommodations to the state or the restructuring of the symbols, institutions, and territorial foundations of the nation-state itself.
David Maybury-Lewis worked to reach such a point, when indigenous
rights would be inscribed in global covenants and put into effect by
national governments. To this end, he wrote tirelessly on Latin American
indigenous peoples, whether beleaguered minorities, as in Brazil, or marginalized majorities, as in the Andes and Guatemala. Like indigenous
movement leaders, Maybury-Lewis argued that indigenous rights
demands did not undermine the state and if met, might in fact strengthen states. Yet his was not merely a moral stance calling for indigenous
rights, but a call for analysts and activists to rethink the nation-state itself.
990

BRET GUSTAFSON

He extended these arguments to settings of ethnic conflict around the

world, pushing scholars to question Eurocentric assumptions about the
necessary congruity between cultural, territorial, and political orders. At
base, he argued that the form of the state, not ethnocultural difference,
was the problem. The former should be transformed for the sake of the
latter. As he wrote in 1984,
[A] reevaluation of the evidence would show that the aspirations of
ethnic groups were less divisive than had been supposed and such a
reevaluation would necessarily entail a salutary rethinking of our ideas
about the state and an equally beneficial refocusing of theoretical and
political attention on plural, particularly, multi-ethnic, societies. (5)
And,
[There] is no natural law that prevents nationalities, or what we
should nowadays call ethnic groups, from living together in a single
state without seeking to eradicate each others ethnicity. (220)
This reorientation of the framing of the problem toward the state form,
rather than toward ethno-cultural difference, was a decolonizing move.
By questioning the monopoly held on a single cultural identity by the
state, Maybury-Lewis foreshadowed later debates. For instance, critical
multiculturalists similarly argued for the disassociation of the political
community and its common social institutions from identification with
any one cultural tradition[.] In such a polity, legitimacy would derive not
from a shared, consensual culture but from the states ability to promote and coordinat[e] the coexistence of diverse cultural groups
(Turner 1993:425). Plurinationalism in the Andes pursues a similar turn,
disassociating a singular understanding of the nation from the state while
reconstituting sovereignty and legitimacyand a sense of shared unity
through the articulation of pluralities (Prada 2007). Yet unlike neoliberal multiculturalismwhich sought to manage difference and call on the
market to solve redistributive problems while depoliticizing deep historical inequalitiesplurinationalism speaks of robust redistributive social
rights rooted in a strong state alongside equally robust indigenous rights.
The question is whether plurinationalism can reconcile both indigenous
rights and strong state sovereignty, while avoiding new exclusions (and
991

Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

violences) associated with territorializing models of ethnocultural difference and with hypernationalist states.

Indigenous Nationalists and Neoliberal Ethnicists

Two recent historical shifts complicate Maybury-Lewiss formulation of
relations between ethnic groups (specifically, indigenous peoples) and
the state (generally spoken of in its Westphalian form). The first involves
the positionality of indigenous peoples vis--vis the state in Latin America.
Indigenous peoples in the Andes and Amazon are deeply imbricated in
national social and political life, whether in traditional rural regions or in
large cities. They are notless so now, if they ever wereethnic minorities situated outside of society in marginal enclaves. They are citizens
defending both particularity and equality (Varese 1996). While indigenous
territorial demands are still central to rights agendas, indigenous rights
requires thinking beyond territorial containment of indigeneity.
Especially where indigenous populations are large minorities or majorities, to speak of indigenous rights involves transforming the state and
non-indigenous society, not (only) lobbying for territorially-specific legal
regimes. This is not to suggest dissolving indigenous difference into
idioms of class or racial discrimination and civil rights (c.f. Biolsi 2005).
Nor is an abstracted notion of indigenous cosmopolitanism (Goodale
2006) useful for understanding or engaging the social and geopolitical
complexity of these issues. Territoriality and epistemic-historical-linguistic specificityas well as resistance to racialized inequality and claims to
shared modernity and citizenshipare all central to indigenous politics.
Rather, we must direct our attention to the particular ways that indigenous peoples are already engaging and transforming the state, rather
than assume a dichotomous relation between ethnocultural particularity
and an abstract model of the western state.
A second shift relates to the discursive turn in hegemonic intellectual
circles away from nation-building and toward neoliberalism, with the latters embrace of culture as an axis for pursuing governance as the technocratic management of difference rather than government as the sovereign
exercise of rights for (homogeneous) citizens (Nelson 1999). Nowadays,
Hindu nationalists, Guatemalan Kaqchikels, Iraqi Kurds, and Bolivian
Quechuasif evangelized in good governance and excised of contrarian subjectivitiesmight make their peace with market capitalism. This
992

BRET GUSTAFSON

culturalist turn complemented neoliberalisms decentralizing thrust and

was echoed by a regionalist turn. As geographers have described, regions
and region-specific identities are being reconceived as geographically and
economically relevant units beneath the nation-state where particular
forms of governance (not necessarily democracy), sovereignty (or exceptions to it), and market-oriented development can flourish (c.f. Scott 2001,
Ong 2006). Promoted by regional growth elites or imposed by authoritarian regimes, special development zones or city-regions are treated as
bearers of special rights by virtue of their resources, location, or quests
for competitive advantage, and their proponents seek insulation from
wider democratic and regulatory pressures. A third shift is evident in
scholarship on self-determination. No longer limited to colonized or
minoritized peoples, some entertain sub-state self-determination rights
as applicable to geographically or economically distinct populations (e.g.,
Halperin et al. 1992:47-50). A corollary shift is also apparent in pronouncements on ethnic conflict from Europe to Iraq, now marked by calls
to build walls instead of entertaining pluralist nation-building
(Galbraith 2007). Distinct from earlier modernization paradigms, ethnonationalism, partitioning, and ethnic cleansing are being treated as natural
and inevitableperhaps even desirableas solutions to governance
problems (Muller 2008). These trends together illustrate how the meaning
of states and ethnics is reversed for neoliberalesque intellectuals. Secular
nation-building is being reassigned the slot of anachronistic obstacle,
while ethnoterritorial logics are refigured as templates for market-friendly regionalized governance and modernity.
These two shiftsthe particular case of Latin American indigeneity as
diffusely imbricated in the nation-state and the broader neoliberal rapprochement with territorialized cultural particularismset the stage for
the plurinationalist-autonomist collision in Bolivia. They also emerge
from the historical antecedents of interculturalist policies of the 1990s.
Across Latin America, the decade saw technocratic reformers attempt to
channel indigenous resurgence through official interculturalism (Van
Cott 2000, Hale 2002). In Bolivia, interculturalism offered recognition of
indigenous peoples through land reform, municipal participation, and
bilingual education. Though important, these changes did not significantly rearrange political, institutional, or territorial configurations linked to
the states colonial legacies. By targeting indigenous populations as those
needing to change, official interculturalism left unaddressed, perhaps
993

Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

even intensified, the persistence of racism and coloniality in everyday discourse and state structure (Gustafson 2002, 2009; Postero 2007). Even this
modest opening to indigenous movements sparked conservative reactions, as elites began to reinscribe regional difference as racialized selfunderstanding, with intellectuals (as in the epigraph) imagining that
interculturalism meant that all Bolivians had ethnic particularity and
indigenous-like autonomy rights. 8
Interculturalism also failed from the elite perspective. It did not contain
indigenous movements, which sought to deepen interculturalism through
grassroots practice. Interculturalism did not succeed in localizing cultures to
become self-regulating entities or communities subject to market discipline.
Rather the juridical and representational vacuum created by neoliberalism
generated indigenous and wider public clamor for more robust national sovereignty. The boom in privatization and transnational extractive activities
brought into relief the inability of indigenous peoples to call on the state to
guarantee minimal rights and the incapacity of elites to retain and redistribute surplus. As evidenced in hydrocarbon and resource conflicts, indigenous
peoples and popular movements came to see themselves as the last bastion
of state sovereignty (de la Fuente 2005, c.f. Sawyer 2004).9
This counterintuitive reversalthe westernizing elites embrace of
ethnoterritorial particularity and the indigenous embrace of national sovereigntyraises dilemmas for analysts and advocates of indigenous
rights. In Latin America, anthropologists are placed in the position of
thinking of how indigenous rights might be reconciled with a resurgent
nationalist agenda, processes conventionally seen as incompatible. This
does not preclude a critical view of the essentialist risks in invocations of
indigeneity (Bowen 2000). Nor does it entail an acritical embrace of
nationalism, given risks of authoritarian exclusions embedded therein. It
does require taking up Maybury-Lewis call to rethinkas do Bolivian
indigenous movementsthe nation-state. To this end, rather than assume
that plurinationalism represents a congealed model (of ethnic autonomy
or ethnic federalism), it is helpful to begin by thinking of itand the new
Bolivian constitutionas already ongoing processes with indeterminate
outcomes shaped by unforeseen contingencies and articulations. In the
sections that follow, I consider these rethinkings through three lenses
onto plurinationalism in emergent practice.

994

BRET GUSTAFSON

Plurinationalism at the Grassroots

The case of the Guaran of southeastern Bolivia, the countrys third
largest indigenous nationality, is illustrative. When I began working with
the Guaran in 1992, Guaran leaders were making incipient claims for
rights to land, government services, and education. There was a clear
focus on recovering territory, but I rarely heard talk of sovereignty (soberana) or autonomy (autonoma). This is not to say that ideas of territory,
freedom, and power were not present. They surely were. As their rewritten schoolbooks evidenced, Guaran imagined a vast swath of southeastern Bolivia to be ancestral Guaran territory (which effectively it had once
been). Yet their claims did not challenge national sovereignty as much as
they were deployed against large regional landowners and power structures dominated by karai, or whites. At the national level, the movement
engaged state reforms, collaborated with NGOs, the national peasant
union and other indigenous organizations, and expanded ties to transnational networks supporting indigenous peoples, all while calling on the
state to guarantee emergent rights claims.
During the 1990s, there were concrete advances in collective land
titling following the 1995 Law of Agrarian Reform, which created TCOs
(tierras comunales de orgen, originary communal lands). Though a victory for indigenous movements, the net effect was the creation of archipielagos of land quite unlike the schoolbook vision of pan- Guaran territorial unity (Map 2). The phrase communal lands (rather than territories of
peoples) also reflected the fact that these were grants that did not profer political authority. Nor did they guarantee economic subsistence or
effective territorial control, since many TCOs remained occupied by nonIndian farmers who resisted the law. TCOs were nonetheless crucial. By
the late 1990s, they were the basis for claims against multinational gas
companies, a means of legally questioning fraudulent land claims, and
templates for the creation of resource management plans. Though not
spaces of autonomy, they represented an emergent platform of trans-territorial self-determination.
Yet Guaran life and politics transcended the TCOs. Guaran were moving to work in cities and towns, making inroads into higher education,
and working for urban-based NGOs. Territorial recovery was central, yet
territorial enclosure was politically limiting. As leaders often said in political oratory, Guaran aspired to walk without shame among the karai,
not to be relegated to rural hinterlands. Guaran politics thus unfolded
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Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

MAP 2: Conflicting territorialities: TCOs and State Jurisdictions

in Southeastern Bolivia
996

BRET GUSTAFSON

through other scales of intercultural engagement with the karai society

and system. In education, for instance, the Guaran pursued demands for
bilingual schools in coordination with transnational donors which later
evolved into a pragmatic alliance with the government-backed intercultural education reform. Indigenous education activists engaged institutions and jurisdictions that transcended TCOs within a broader ethnolinguistic territorial frame imagined institutionally, rather than (only)
geospatially, enhancing the Guaran position vis--vis the politically significant formal education apparatus.
Guaran also engaged municipal politics. Municipal government was
offered by the neoliberal state as the venue for exercising indigenous
authority, giving incentives to traditional parties to court indigenous candidates. Formal politics thus remained within a standardized state template (and party power structures). Municipalities were not congruent
with TCOs, nor the linguistic spaces of education activism, nor the geosocial form of indigenous leadership structures. Yet in regions where the
demographics worked out (as in much of the Andes and parts of eastern
Bolivia), indigenous leaders gained posts on municipal councils. Like land
and school reform, decentralization was a double-edged sword. It fragmented indigenous efforts, since energies dedicated to party politics
undermined visions of territorial unity and autonomy. This was the objective of neoliberal interculturalism, to channel indigeneity into managerial sectors of the state, not to grant self-determination. Yet in hindsight the
combination of TCO struggles, education, and municipal decentralization
converged to produce real indigenous wedges into local power, given that
it was here that the roots of coloniality were spatially grounded: in karai
control of land and a monopoly on public office.
As such, the Guaran movementsimilar to other indigenous movements across the countrywas becoming a regional political player. By
1998, as neoliberal interculturalism began its decline, I began to hear in
public Guaran statements a framing that transcended ethnic particularity. When addressing non-Guaran audiences, leaders spoke of representing the interests of all Bolivians or the interests of the entire southeast
Chaco region where poverty was not only an indigenous problem. By the
mid-2000s, the Guaranin alliance with NGO activists and nationalist
intellectualswere taking the lead in regional struggles over gas. Beyond
there were articulations with other indigenous and peasant organizations
congealing in support of the growing MAS party of Evo Morales. These
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Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

repositionings were shaped through inter-ethnic, cross-class, and ruralurban articulations facilitated by NGOs working within the language and
practice of popular nationalism.
This emerging political cartography of indigenous protagonism
unfolded across geographic and institutional spaces and scales. Activist
intellectuals saw these as repositionings of de facto indigenous territorialities from which movements began to establish new regional nodes of
authority and assemble other social and rural organizations in an
associative indigenous network (Garca Linera et al. 2004:356-378,
Gustafson 2004). Indigenous territorialities in practice did not pursue
ethnoterritorial closure through monocultural geographically fixed territorial units. Rather they sought to flexibly rearticulate across space to
counterbalance centers of power like the city of Santa Cruz, contest illegal latifundia or extractive activities, and subvert and invade provincial
power structures. By virtue of their claims on legal rights through the
stateand their resistance to the de facto effects of neoliberal deregulationthey were movements to ground national sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. 10 The net result in Guaran country and elsewhere across the east was an incipient plurinationalism in practice,
through which indigenous peoples turned toward defense of national
sovereignty through horizontal alliances across difference, rather than as
subjects directed in the old leftist idiom of vanguardist struggle. These
processual transformations were mobilized through legal arenas as well
as non-violent tactics like marches, blockades, and hunger strikes. The
effects were seen in the rising elite backlash as struggles reverberated
upward, undermining supralocal power structures that relied on the
reproduction of local hierarchies. 11
This sketch suggests that indigenous self-determination and autonomy
might express itself in ways that build on territorial spaces, yet are not
limited to territorial enclosure. Similarly, most existing cases of indigenous autonomy emerge in multi-ethnic regional formations that combine
territorial spacesin which indigenous peoples maintain a role of leadership and powerand spaces of intercultural political engagement (e.g.
Nash 2001:198-202, Rappaport 2005). As Mexican anthropologist Miguel
Alberto Bartolom argues, no one model guides Latin American indigenous visions, but most contemplate new modes of [inter-ethnic, intercultural] social articulation that are more egalitarian than existing
[ones]. Indigenous autonomy framed thus is not just a question of con998

BRET GUSTAFSON

tainment of indigenous places and bodies, but the decolonizing transformation of the state and non-indigenous society. As Bartolom writes,
echoing Maybury-Lewis: if a multiethnic State really treats itself as a plural society [] it should explore all possible paths in the search for novel
forms of conviviality between culturally distinct groups, rather than, I
might add, simply fencing them off (Bartolom 2005:146).
The concept of intercultural, transterritorial social articulationwithin
and among indigenous peoples and between indigenous and non-indigenous peoplesis central to this vision of indigenous self-determination
and autonomy. This is distinct from liberal notions of individual autonomy
(and the extension of this notion to regional polities as being like indivisible bodies operating like western federalist states). 12 Indigenous
autonomies must be thought of not as seeking the condition of a state
(body) within a state (body), but pursuing transformative, yet eventually
routinized, spaces and processes of social articulation and equality across
multiple territorial scalings. As one Guaran leader told me, autonomy is
about having the possibility of influencing other cultures, who are not
Guaran, it is [as much] about territories of political action as about the
ownership (propiedad) of territoriesautonomy is not simply saying, This
is just for us, and period (see also Camargo Manuel 2005).

Plurinationalism: Emerging Symbols and Inscriptions

This reconfigured view of indigenous autonomy or self-determination provides the basis for the wider project of plurinationalism. Over two decades,
the idea has percolated upward from the grassroots and filtered downward
through transnational movement debate across the Andean region. In the
1980s, Ecuadoran indigenous peoples used the term nationalities to refer
to themselves as distinct peoples within the Ecuadoran state and plurinationalism to describe their agendaa position that created space for articulation with sectors of the Ecuadoran left (Brysk 2000:208). In 1992,
Ecuadors indigenous movements marched from the Amazon to Quito,
demanding a constitutional assembly and the establishment of a plurinational state. These movements were marked by a shift visible in the rapprochement between indigenous peoples and peasant settlers, and
between indigenous federations and other social sectors nationally, former
antagonists pursuing articulations around resistance to neoliberalism
(Sawyer 2004:10, 30-31, 214-223). Plurinationalism did not emerge as a
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Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

frame for imagining indigenous isolationismnor simply claiming dual citizenship in a multinational statebut for positing a new set of relationships between indigenous and other Ecuadoran citizens.
In Bolivia, in 1983 the largely Aymara and Quechua peasant union
CSUTCB reestablished itself as an organization free of government tutelage as the country returned to democracy and invoked plurinationalism
in its Manifesto: We want to be free in a society without exploitation or
oppression organized in a plurinational State that develops our cultures
and our authentic forms of self government (gobierno propio) (Rivera
1984:196). In 1992, the demand returned during the indigenous call for
an Assembly of Nationalities on Columbus Day in La Paz. The effort
floundered, but revealed the emergent popular and (pluri)nationalist flavor that flourished inside movement discourse.
The 1990s saw plurinationalism undergo a hiatus in both countries. In
Bolivia, neoliberal interculturalism redirected indigenous mobilizing as I
described above. In Ecuador, indigenous political missteps and elite resistance weakened the movement. Nonetheless, as neoliberalism wanes and
nationalism waxes, plurinationalism reemerges with more specificity in
proposals for rewriting national constitutions. As voiced by Luis Macas,
past president of Ecuadors CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous
Nationalities of Ecuador):
[T]he thesis of the Plurinational State implies the recognition of the
self-determination of indigenous peoples and nationalities, understood as the right of these nationalities to choose their own political and juridical system as well as their model of economic, social,
scientific, and cultural development, in a territory geographically
defined within the frame of a new Plurinational Nation.
This sounds like ethnic enclaves, yet Macas went on to argue that natural resources be nationalized and administered by the State and no longer
be in the hands of transnational companies that have wounded (vulnerado)
national sovereignty and the dignity of the peoples where those resources
are found (ALAI 2008a, 2008b). A reading of Bolivias new constitution, as
below, yields a similar stance. In both Ecuador and Bolivia, indigenous peoples concede (theoretically legitimate) claims to absolute resource control,
yet seek in return a decolonized, redistributive sovereignty within which
their relative position is one of equality, rather than marginality.
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BRET GUSTAFSON

Indigenous movement visions of plurinationalism may also be spreading beyond the Andes. In March of 2007, a continental gathering of
indigenous peoples in Iximch (Tecpn), Guatemala called for the refoundation of the Nation-States and the construction of Plurinational States
and intercultural societies by way of Constitutional Assemblies with direct
representation of indigenous peoples and nationalities (Movimientos.org
2007). 13 In 2008, a new pan-indigenous confederation, the Andean
Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI), convened a meeting of
organizations from Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia and
announced (Enlace Indgena 2008):
[T]he decision of Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala [the Americas] to
reconstruct our Peoples, struggling for inclusion and the construction of Plurinational States and Intercultural Societies, with new
governments that recognize our territories and collective rights and
implement public policies, intercultural and democratic knowledges, and hold for societies the principle of Unity in Diversity
and [seek] the construction of alternative societies based on the proposals of Indigenous Peoples.
The dual invocation of plurinational state and intercultural society
is a crucial signpost of the agenda of social articulation, marking plurinationalism as a dynamic process of transforming relationships, rather than
as a crude territorial or political fixing of ethnic bodies. As a way of
rethinking the state, this presupposes negotiating tensions between a
western-style framework of sovereignty and legitimacy and attempts to
reorder social-territorial inequalities by dismantling racialized spatial and
legal cartographies. Consider for instance, a recent statement by
President Evo Morales in defense of the integrity of the state against the
demands of elite regional autonomists:
I am an enemy of the possibility that four state sectors be drawn and
quartered by way of the constitutional assembly. I am talking about
the armed forces, the national police, education, and health (El
Deber 2007).
Here the indigenous president defends the monopoly over violence
(the army and the police) and the mechanisms of biopower (schooling and
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public health), both at the center of (a very western) vision of the state
and governmentality. Yet the phrase drawn and quartered, (descuartizado) invokes a particular national body, that of the indigenous rebel Tupak
Katari who waged an anticolonial rebellion against the Spaniards during
1780 and 1781. Katari was ultimately captured, drawn and quartered,
pulled apart by draft horses. In the republican narrative of the nation,
this spectacular execution stands as a reminder to unruly Indians who
challenge coloniality, since traditional nationalism excluded Indians as
Indians from full citizenship, treating them as subjects needing control
and racial improvement (Sanjins 2004). Moraless usage of drawn and
quartered subverts this metaphor of racialized bodies and bio-evolutionary temporality, reframing the nation as an insurrectionary anti-colonial
historical subject and nation-building as a geographically rooted unfinished insurrectionary history. To be sure, Tupak Katari was Aymaraand
maleleaving ample room for new racisms and exclusions. Yet Katari and
other martyrs of indigenous and popular struggle are rarely invoked as
singular bodies, but are listed in enunciations of pantheons of martyrs
representative of collective subjects and territorialized histories, along
with heroes like Bartolina Sisa (Kataris wife), the Guaran leader
Apiaguaiki Tpa, Amazonian leaders, contemporary rebels like Zrate
Willka, mestizos, and even Che Guevara. 14 Descuartizamiento also
appears in nationalist discourse to describe external threats to Bolivian
resources and territory, linking colonialism to imperialism (Orgaz
2005:19, 107). In this emergent narrative, a space of potentiality rather
than ideological closure, the apical progress of the pluri-nation is not
reached through racial improvement and mestizaje nor by inverting race
and power relations in a new ethnonationalism, but through the articulation of multiple histories and geographies of decolonizing struggle.
Another set of plurinational rethinkings recasts the powerful
metaphorical and practical relationship between maps, mapping, and
nation-building. Raul Prada (2007), a non-indigenous philosopher and
MAS constitutional assembly delegate, writes of plurinationalism as an
emergent process to articulate and change heterogeneous territorial and
sociological formations into a new national landscape. In his language of
analysis, as a language of political practice, mapping is a way of thinking
about (reordering) power. Inspired by Gramscian, Foucaultian and
Deleuzian terminologies, Prada views the game of hegemony not simply in the old revolutionary term of capturing the centralized state, but
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through reordering power from the ground-up. This requires understanding the current historical moment as an illusorily static instantaneous
temporary map, a manipulable cartography of forces. Yet cartography is
not a literal reference to map-making (which is in fact sometimes part of
pro-indigenous activism). Rather cartographic practices are imagined as
political and intellectual practices that should work at mapping institutions in [a] state of deterioriation; changing institutional maps and
[seeking] a new territorial ordering; transforming the economic map of
the country; reordering the entirety of the geography of properties, latifundias, communities, and cooperatives; and pursuing communitarian
interweaving [with] an expansive map of social networks (Prada 2007). In
short, the plurinational project requires not fixing indigeneity within
existing geopolitical lines, but decolonizing territory as a prerequisite for
constituting plurinationalism from the ground up.
As with the rethinking of bodies in allegorical and historical, rather
than biological and evolutionary terms, this unsettling of the national
space subverts existing sub-national jurisdictions (i.e. departments,
provinces, etc.) enshrined in political imaginaries through the multi-colored logo map (Anderson 1983:172-174). Traditional nationalist cartographies and contemporary (ostensibly liberal) regional elites seek to
defend and naturalize these divisions (i.e. those of Map 1) by linking them
to the corporal integrity of regional criollo bodies and families and a
regionalist paradigm of race. These elite positions argue that the plurinational project seeks to dismember territories (distinct from drawing and
quartering); exhibits a kind of mental dysfunctionality; or would be
akin to children (rural provinces or indigenous regions) questioning the
authority of fathers (the departmental centers). 15
Although plurinationalism facilitates alliances between indigenous and
progressive sectors of society, in neither Bolivia nor Ecuador is plurinationalism wholeheartedly embraced by the nationalist left. In Ecuador,
indigenous organizations still mobilize despite the election of a putatively pro-indigenous president in 2007. Ecuadors new constitution leaves
much to be desired in the way of indigenous rights. In Bolivia, though
often ascribed to Evo Morales, plurinationalism emerged out of the
indigenous organizations and came to the agenda of the MAS party only
very recently (Pacto de Unidad 2006, Mayorga 2007). Indigenous peoples,
including the Guaran, mobilized to defend the insertion of indigenous
autonomies into the new constitution against opposition from within
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Morales party. In addition to racist and conservative reactions, old-guard

left-leaning nationalists and intellectuals oppose plurinationalism, seeing
it, like elite regionalism, as a balkanizing threat to national sovereignty
and territorial integrity. With the final approval of the legal figure of both
plurinationalism and autonomies in the 2008 conclusion, these debates
now center around how these terms will come to ground in the territorial and administrative transformation of the state.

Plurinationalism in the New Constitution

Beyond grassroots struggle, and narrative reconfigurations, the new draft
constitution of the country seeks to formalize plurinationalism as an
emergent possibility by laying the legal groundwork for the emergent
process to continue. Reflecting the class-inflected vision of the left and
the tensions that still mark the MAS-indigenous alliance, the document
merges indigenous and rural peasantries, defining indigenous originary
peasant people[s] and nation[s] as
all of the human collectivities that share cultural identity, language, historical tradition, institutions, territoriality and cosmovision, whose existence is anterior to the Spanish colonial invasion
(Repblica de Bolivia 2008:9, my translation).
To these indigenous and peasant peoples the constitution ascribes
rights that echo the 2007 United Nations Declaration. Specifically, indigenous autonomy is guaranteed through the creation of Indigenous
Originary Peasant Autonomies and Autonomous Indigenous Territories
(Article 289). These autonomies may be formed from existing TCOs
(described above), from municipalities where indigenous peoples are a
majority, or from agglutinations of ethnically diverse territories and
municipalities. These may unite with other territoriesincluding nonindigenous or intercultural urban municipalitiesto form intercultural
regional autonomies as well. This presumes a multiplicity of avenues to
autonomy and multiple types of relations between territory and ethnic
identity which will precede through local negotiations and decision-making, rather than top-down ascription. There is an ongoing debate about
whether and how the administrative attributesas well as potential legislative or juridical functionswill differ between indigenous, municipal,
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regional, and departmental autonomous spaces, all currently part of

public discourse which will lead to the formation of a law on autonomies
(Alb and Romero 2009). In all cases, the rights of indigenous peoples fall
short of absolute self-determination. Though indigenous peoples are given
control over renewable resources (timber, water, etc.), non-renewable
resources remain under control of the state. Bolivias natural gas boom
may overwhelmin the nationalist and productivist orientation toward
resource userights gains acquired through years of struggle. Other rights,
such as bilingual and intercultural education and legal autonomy are guaranteed, though much remains to be sorted out in law. Afro-Bolivians, generally forgotten in discussions of interculturalism, are granted the same
rights as the indigenous originary peasant peoples and nations (Article 32).
Clearly the constitution is a constitutive opening that contributes to a
longer historical process, not a definitive and completed moment.
At the national level, the constitution speaks of the need for a plurinational consciousness (conciencia plurinacional), plurinational identities (identidades plurinacionales), and a plurinational Government
(Gobierno plurinacional), referring to the national state apparatus. New
legal entities, including the Plurinational Legislative Assembly and the
Plurinational Constitutional Court might allow for direct representation
for each of the 36 distinct indigenous nationalities of the country.
Conservative elites howled when the official name of the country was
changed to the Plurinational State of Bolivia. As such, regional intercultural and indigenous configurations of territoriality intersect ongoing
rethinkings of the state at the national level. This included a much debated opening to direct representation for some indigenous peoples in the
lowlandsthose who are absolute minorities in electoral distribution
but not for all indigenous peoples, an early demand of the movements.
Much remains to be worked out in practice and risks of sliding into ethnoterritorial logics exacerbated by hydrocarbon rent-seeking are high.
The constitution is challenged by opposition groups. Critics dismiss
plurinationalism as inviable, calling it a balkanizing process to create 36
ethnic territories (c.f. Mayorga 2007). These are reasonable concerns. If
large cities and provincial rural towns fall within indigenous territories
there is the specter of mestizo and criollo expulsion. Nonetheless, the
bogeyman of 36 Nations does not accurately capture the proposal of
plurinationalism. The Aymara for instance, are divided by territorial
and social distinctions between ayllus, unions, and ethnonationalist styles
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of organization, not to mention their vast urban expression. Large cities

like El Alto (mainly Aymara) may in fact seek to declare themselves an
autonomous indigenous municipality, while multiple Aymara territorialities across the Altiplano may take different routes to autonomy, in
effect yielding a variety of spatial orders even within one ethnolinguistic
group rather than the homogeneization of singular identities and territories. While the idea of a Guaran nation motivates current discourse,
there similarly exist multiple debates over how specific Guaran subregions might engage the new constitutions possibilities. Elite regional
autonomists and others who fear indigenous resurgence are thinking in
traditional western terms of ethnonationalism and partition, thus fearing
what they have long enjoyed, the equation of political legitimacy with a
particular racialized identity. Against the moderate processes envisioned
by the new constitution and a long history of indigenous articulations
with the state and non-indigenous peoples, this seems an exaggerated
reactiona kind of colonial mirroring under the accusation of reverse
racism or reverse colonialism. These preemptive strikes (Hale 2006:118)
against decolonizing plurinationalism seek to stifle creative political
thought and defend colonial relations of power.

(Post)Neoliberal Autonomy: the Counterpoint

This preemptive strike takes practical form in business leaders attempts
to create de facto departmental autonomies around urban centers and
existing departmental jurisdictions, mobilizing racialized fears of rural
uprising and threats on urban jobs to blockade indigenous-inspired plurinationalist agendas (Gustafson 2006). This usage of autonomy emerges out
of the states corporatist past in combination with traces of neoliberal
anti-statism. Historically the term autonomy was used to describe institutions, like public universities, which resisted political oversight despite
their dependence on government funds. Municipalities also deployed the
label. Autonomy as such was about prebendal freedom in the context of
state-dependent corporatism as local elites competed for access to public
money while excluding or co-opting the poor through parties and civic
committees. During the 1990s, sectors of liberal NGOs, transnational companies, and development agencies injected other usages of autonomy
into public discourse, with meanings derived from its liberal philosophical origins as a concept of individual self-regulation. This usage filtered
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through texts in civic education, entrepreneurialism, and of late, USAID

and oil-company sponsored workshops on authority, individual responsibility, and regional freedom (Gustafson 2009).
These corporatist and neoliberal geneaologies are distinct from the
idea of autonomy as collective, territorialized self-determination associated with indigenous peoples. By 1999, when indigenous and popular
movements began to coalesce in opposition to neoliberalism, elites of
the city of Santa Cruz had refigured the term autonomy to speak of
regional particularities and sovereign-like power for the department of
Santa Cruz. The regionalist sentiment was not new, yet the framing in
terms of ethnoterritorial particularity as radically federalist sovereignty
was. Given the effects of privatization and the regional boom in transnationalized agro-industrial and hydrocarbon economies, regionalists
demanded freedom from the state rather than prebendal benefits from
it. Autonomy talk exploded in print and TV media. We owe Bolivia
Nothing! read one bumper sticker. The idea mobilized anxieties of
urban middle classes against the putative threat of indigenism and
socialism represented by the MAS government. Along with violence
against those who questioned autonomy, elites staged political rituals
that appropriated symbols of sovereignty, indigenous slogans like land
and freedom, and tactics of the Bolivian left. 16 By 2006, the discourse of
departmental autonomy was sufficiently normalized that it gained a
place on a national referendum. In eastern provinces and urban centers,
the YES vote for autonomy took as much as 70%. The NO vote, seen as
support for the indigenist and nationalist agenda of the MAS won a
majority nationally. In late 2007, when the plurinational constitution
was drafted, autonomists in Santa Cruz, though backed by no law, circulated their own autonomy statute (Asamblea Provisional 2007). In a relatively short span of time, the word autonomy (autonoma) had become a
non-indigenous claim for regionalized sovereignty.
The curious merger of autonomy in corporatist, neoliberal, and racist
idioms is visible elsewhere. In Bolivia, autonomy claims have united
urbanites in the cities of Tarija to the south and Trinidad, Cobija, and
Riberalta in the north. Autonomy has also appeared in other countries
where indigenous movements, natural resource politics, and strong nationalism challenge neoliberal agendas: in Ecuador, the city of Guayaquil voices autonomy against the new constitution; in Venezuela, autonomy rhetoric marks anti-Chvez student mobilizations and regionalist discourse in
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oil-rich Zulia state; in Loreto, Peru, autonomy has been spoken of in a context where Amazonian indigenous peoples recently suffered the violence
of the state in their struggle against regional elites and oil companies; in
Guatemala, autonomy also circulates amidst other discourses of elite control. This transnational autonomy discourse is energized by real and virtual networks linking nodes of European, Latin American, and North
American liberal and libertarian think tanks. 17
In Bolivia, this new autonomy seeks to fracture indigenous-popularnational unity by driving a wedge between indigenous peoples and
between the popular urban-rural articulation that sustains nationalist
agendas. Against national indigenous unity, departmental autonomists
suggest that their indigenous peoples (our ethnicities) are in a relation of harmonic mestizaje with the dominant Cruceo criollo ethnicity,
a move that has support of some indigenous leadership (Lowrey 2006).
This creates convenient enemies within the region: the Andean migrant or
disloyal local indigenes who support the plurinationalist agenda.
Deploying an idiom of ethnic cleansing unprecedented in Bolivia, rightwing autonomists speak of Quechua and Aymara migrants in eastern
Bolivia as ethnic cysts and hostile ethnics (Muoz Garca 2002). It has
been a short step to suggest that in eastern Bolivia the countrys president
is illegitimate (by virtue of Evo Morales Andean identity), and regional
leaders have boisterously threatened to deny the president pisada (the
right to step onto regional territory). The privileging of the city as the
center of citizenshipand the rescaling of colonial idioms of rurality and
indigeneity as subject spaces and bodiesweakens urban-rural alliances.
The threat of undesirable bodies, the delegitimization of national sovereignty based on ethnic origins, and an apical model of city-centric citizenship that replicates colonial spatiality, all fuel calls for civil disobedience
and the ethnicized violence I described abovetactical procedures in
pursuit of a de facto sovereignty (Hansen and Stepputat 2006).
References to indigenous rights in the (extralegal) departmental autonomy statute of the right are illustrative. The first article on indigenous
rights reads:
Article 161. Recognition
In agreement with the ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on
Indigenous Peoples, the cruceo people [of Santa Cruz] recognizes
with pride its majoritarian mestizo racial condition and to that meas1008

BRET GUSTAFSON

ure, its obligation to conserve and promote the integral and

autonomous development of the five indigenous peoples dwelling in
the department: Chiquitano, Guaran, Guarayo, Ayoreo and Mojeo, in
conformity with that established in this Statute (Asamblea Provisional
2007, my translation).
Though citing the recently approved UN Declaration on Indigenous
Rights, the autonomists affirm the majoritarian mestizo racial condition of the region and deny indigenous peoples any autonomy by conserving and developing them within departmental authority. By reinserting race and mestizo into the language of departmental law,
autonomy merges regionalist and colonial racial paradigms. Autonomy as
such excludes other Bolivian indigenous peoples who may dwell in Santa
Cruz, primarily the Aymara and Quechua (as well as those like the
Guarani, who cross departmental lines) and recreates an older model of
the nation-state at the city-region scale.

Conclusions: Skulduggery, Pluralism, and Gas

The current moment pits plurinationalism and indigenous autonomies, a
project in support of robust indigenous self-determination rights, citizenship, and national sovereignty against departmental autonomya
regionalist, city-centric effort to defend existing jurisdictional orders
around racialized claims of region-specific citizenship rights. What is crucial about the plurinational agendaand considering the risks of essentialized notions of ethno-cultural differenceis the way in which indigenous territorialities are imagined not as closed enclaves, but as
articulatory spaces that cross multiple scales. Against the specter of 36
Nations, plurinationalism in fact imagines a multi-scalar mosaic
(Sawyer 2004) of pluralities in which indigenous rights (to language,
knowledge, history, land, resources, and equality) unfold between multiple institutions and scales of the state, rather than only within certain territorial and legal regimes. To be sure, plurinationalism requires changes
in the subjectivities of other Bolivians as well, through the recrafted discourse of intercultural society. Despite the risks of exclusion inherent in
claims based on indigeneity as prior occupation, by any reasonable
accountwhether in the name of equality, vulnerability, or the argument
of prior self-governanceplurinationalisms flexible deployment of
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indigenous self-determination as bottom-up inter-ethnic, inter-territorial

articulation appears to rest firmly within a broadly accepted normative
agenda on human and indigenous rights.
On the other hand, if anthropologists are called upon to assess selfdetermination claims, another analytical descriptor often used by David
Maybury-Lewis might be applicable to the project of right-wing departmental autonomy: skulduggery. I often jotted down the word in the
margins of now weathered and yellowed notes I took during Davids lectures years ago. He used the word frequently when talking about tactics
for dispossessing native and poor peoples of their lands, from the grileiros
who fabricated land titles in Brazil to the neoliberal reformers of Mexico
who dissolved indigenous ejidos. David Maybury-Lewis might have agreed
that the departmental autonomy projectin its separatist and radically
federalist expressionsis skulduggery. Despite its resonance with middleand lower-middle class urbanites who face economic insecurity in a commodity-dependent export economy, the elite-conceived departmental
autonomy project is at base an anti-democratic defense of race and class
privilege. It involves no prior history of self-governance, deploys a spurious claim to ethnic minority status, and relies on illegal claims and tacticsfrom illegal land seizures (largely from native and peasant communities) during the dictatorships of the 1970s to ethnic and political
violence today. Departmental autonomy at best proposes a market-friendly space for securing resource and rent extraction; at worse it pursues a
violent rationality of racist ethnic cleansing. Autonomy seeks to harden
boundaries through its enclosure of the region and concepts of citizenship within a territorial enclave. It is like a gated community, not a model
for democratic society. In short, skulduggery.
For indigenous peoplesmarginalized both by neoliberalisms vision of
multiculturalism and nationalisms traditional appeal to authoritarian
homogeneitythe current conjuncture is complex. At the moment, most
indigenous leadership nuclei critically support the popular-national project
of the MAS. A small minority are making agreements with departmental
elites or maintaining a radical stance of self-determination. Behind these
debates lie Bolivias natural resources and the risks of a crude battle familiar in other hydrocarbon rich-settings; one that pits a centralized state
against territorially-based challenges. As in Nigeria, where the oil boom led
to an ethnicization of politics and the multiplication of regional
provincesdesigned neither for freedom nor equality but to defuse chal1010

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lenges to the centralized regimeboth autonomy and plurinationalism

could decay into a crude spatialization of politics, which sidelines a decolonizing and deracializing agenda (Watts 2004). Booms like natural gas can
sustain a nationalist redistributive project (as in Norway) but may also lay
foundations for the fragmentation of a country (as in the Sudan). Rather
than the formation of a new consciousness of plurinational citizenship, the
proliferation of autonomiesindigenous, municipal, regional, and departmentalcould become a template for the respatialization of prebendalism,
what Watts referred to as the unimagining of the nation (2004:214).
Nonetheless, plurinationalism is spreading in the region. Without acritically embracing all indigenous or nationalist claims, plurinationalism posits a
process that seeks to construct pluralism through spaces of mediation, articulation, and exchange. Instead of preemptively dismissing the possibility of
creative political change, if scholars, like Bolivian movement leaders, are
able to critically engage emergent plurinationalism, there may be a means
of transforming the nation-state and achieving real democratic pluralism.
And, as Maybury-Lewis might have quipped with another of his favorites,
thats better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

POSTSCRIPT
As this article went to press, another round of right-wing violence led to assaults by
paramilitary gangs on the Guaran in the south in April, 2008 and the killing of more
than a dozen peasant and indigenous farmers in the northern Amazonian Pando on
September 11, 2008. These killings sparked national and international outrage against
the right-wing autonomist opposition, forcing them to give their tacit support to call a
referendum on the new plurinational constitution, held in January of 2009. The constitution was approved, and as above, tactically re-appropriates autonomy discourse
into its legal framework, weakening elite usages of the term. Bolivia now faces legal
and political struggles described above, while confronting resource extraction, stubborn inequalities, and a still powerful neoliberal agenda.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article is based on fieldwork in southeastern Bolivia in 2005-2006 and 2008-2009
carried out with support from Washington University in St. Louis. It has had incarnations
in conferences at Duke University, Syracuse University, Northwestern University,
Washington University, and the 2007 American Anthropological Association meetings.
For feedback and facilitation of exchanges, I thank Robert Albro, Jason Cross, Arturo
Escobar, Niki Fabricant, Mara Elena Garca, Shane Greene, Joshua Kirshner, Mabel
Moraa, Andrew Orta, Tom Perrault, Joanne Rappaport, and Thea Riofrancos. A special
thanks to Bjrn Sletto and Daniel Goldstein for insightful commentary, Efran Tinta of
Fundacin Tierra for TCO shape files, and Fernando Garcs for comments on the Pact of

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Unity. I borrow manipulating cartographies from Prada (2007). I appreciate the comments of the editor and reviewers of AQ, and thank Jay Levi for spearheading this effort.
Finally, I thank both David and Pia Maybury-Lewis for their inspiration and affection.

ENDNOTES
1

Bolivia is divided into nine departments, each subdivided into provinces and municipalities.

See among others, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug_AlDscgQE.

Gustafson (2006, in press) document these events.

By indigenous I refer to those who identify with one of Bolivias 36 Amerindian ethnolinguistic identities, 57% of the population according to the 1992 census. The largest are
the Quechua (2.3 million), Aymara (1.2 million), and Guaran (70,000) (Gustafson 2009).

As Comaroff and Comaroff write (2001:13), autonomy in this sense suggests on the one
hand a [d]econtextualization, the distantiation from place and its sociomoral pressures [which] is an autonomic impulse of capitalism at the millennium, and on the
other, given the dependence of capital on natural resource extraction and city-centered security and processing apparatuses, a hyper-contextualizing cultural project
that mobilizes parochial sentiments and middle-class anxieties and vulnerabilities in
defense of regional space (ibid:12).

Autonomy may range from absolute territorial sovereignty to federalism or selective

devolution of administrative or legislative powers (cultural, language, and religious
policies, natural resources, schools, policing, courts, local government, social and civil
services, etc.) (Hannum 1990).

The United States, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia voted against it. In November
of 2007, the Bolivian congress endorsed the declaration as law.

In everyday Bolivian discourse, razas (races) are spoken of in ethnic and regional
terms. A colonial paradigm of race (arranging bodies on an evolutionary scale from
whites to Indians and Blacks) is crosscut by regional paradigms of race, in which different criollo-mestizo (non-indigenous) and indigenous subjects are deemed to also possess distinct biosocial characteristics (beauty, laziness, stinginess, etc.) defined less by
skin color than by naturalized (in relation to the land) and regionalized histories of
colonialism. During corporatist rule, regional identities were mobilized in prebendal
battles for patronage, such that state jobs were reserved for those in their place of origin (invoking regional specificity), while generally excluding indigeneities (invoking
colonial racism). Indigenous resurgence is dismantling the colonial racial paradigm,
while an elite defensive tactic involves retrenchment of regionalist categories of race
and mestizaje, effectively rescaling coloniality to departmental levels. On Santa Cruz
particular imaginings of race, see Lowrey (2006) and Gustafson (2006).

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission also observed this neoliberal vacuum
of judicial recourse for native peoples (OAS 2007:255-256).

10
I thank Alfredo Rada, Marcelo Arandia, and Fernando Garcs for contributions to this
understanding.
11
This modified Foucaultian rethinking of power that worked through a ground-up dismantling of colonialism is explicit in plurinationalist intellectual tracts (see Prada
2007).
12
Smith-Morris (2006) offers a critique of the deployment of autonomy as individual
choice vs. autonomy as indigenous self-determination in a Native (North) American

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context. See also Sawyer (2004), who describes the tension between liberal claims to
legal equality and plurinationalist visions in Ecuador.
14

Manifestos from continental meetings in Teotihuacn, Mexico (2000) and Quito (2004)
did not invoke plurinationalism other than in reference to Ecuador.
14

The convocation for the 2005 national decolonization of education congress showed a
map of Bolivia as a mosaic of indigenous and non-indigenous faces framed by drawings of
insurrectionary heroes with the iconic profile of Che Guevara at the center.

15

See, e.g., El Pas (Tarija), February 2 and April 3, 2006.

16

There is another autonomy trajectory with a Marxian, rather than a Liberal genealogy
(c.f. Lotringer and Marazzi 2007 [1980]). Some rightist autonomists describe themselves
as having leftist genealogies (S. Antelo, personal communication). Yet beyond the invocation of civil disobedience and appropriation of popular movement tactics, there is little
in the way of left in Bolivias urban-centered departmental autonomy project.
17
Including the Liberal Network for Latin America (RELIAL) and European and American
think-tanks such as Cato, the Heritage Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Stiftung,
Manhattan Institute, and the Atlas Foundation.

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