On June 10, 2008, about 20,000 people gathered together outside the US Embassy
chanting phrases like “Enough with the impunity,” expressing demands that the US government extradite a former Bolivian defense minister who directed military crackdowns in 2003 that killed at least 30 people. That same day, browsing the local Sucre Newspaper Correo, I found an editorial that captured well the sentiments of particular groups of educated middle-class Bolivians who express sympathies with the struggles for popular justice but are suspicious of the modes of political action marked by large-scale mobilizations in public spaces. The editorial suggested that recent violent protests (like that in Sucre on May 24 in which three people were killed and many more wounded) are indicative of “centers of government that claim to defend the principles of life but, at the same time, do not hesitate when the hour comes to sacrifice like lambs the humble campesinos, sending them to wars provoking the principle of finality.”

My research is focused on emergent forms of political subjectivity in contemporary Bolivia, particularly as indicated by the in-many-ways unprecedented mobilizations of marginalized groups in the past four years, mobilizations constituted by both rural and urban groups and organized around indigenous rights claims as well as by cocalero unions. Explanations of such mobilizations in terms of the manipulation and indoctrination of campesinos by the MAS leadership are highly problematic and demand a more nuanced analysis of what – in the graffiti parlance of contemporary Cochabamba – is known as La Revolucion de Hambre (The Hunger Revolution). While the rising costs of staple goods like bread and rice has led to crises and protests around the world this past year, as the poorest country in Latin America and with conflicting views of President Evo Morales’ economic and political agenda for the nation, Bolivia arises as a space of dramatic expectation and critique of political change, its streets filled with organized groups of supporters as well as opponents of MAS, often clashing violently.

The media’s explanation of recent events in terms of eschatological invocations of
indigenous justice as a kind of (false) Messianism point to general social phenomenon that demands careful attention. However, the media’s framing of such events is generally situated within a more general dismissal of the agentive capacities of popular groups, thus resonating with the fears and prejudices of an urban middle-class. For instance, referring to protesters as “humble campesinos” being “sacrificed like lambs” invokes and reproduces a powerful ideology about what sorts of persons are capable or incapable of reasoned political debate. Leaders are assumed to be driven by political strategism, especially the invocation of difference-based identity, and supporters are often framed as too easily accepting or believing what in actuality should be seen as sham or act, what in newspapers is played up as political theatre and in academia is theorized as the instrumental use of ethnicity in indigenous identity politics.

Analyses on the part of media resources and academic texts alike tend to downplay if not overlook entirely the degree to which such (eschatological and other) invocations of the just, of life, and of exemplary modes of subjectivity have antecedents that extend historically beyond Marxian-influenced miners’ movements since the 1950s or the flowering of ‘identity politics’ in the 1980s. While living and studying Quechua in Cochabamba, Bolivia during the summer months of 2008, I became attuned to particular elaborations of subjectivity and ethics of daily sociality that saturate, in different ways, both the Quechua language and the daily practices of Quechua-speaking communities.

For example, in Quechua the word kawsay translates roughly as “to live, lifestyle, to exist, to subsist, life, existence, subsistence.” Most prominently used as a verb form, the question of “what do you do to live” is simultaneously a question of how one lives, in what manner and by what means. Appropriate responses are limited and include the cultivation of crops or the raising of animals, the selling or trading of such goods, the spinning of wool or weaving, of selling goods in an informal market, qhatu, and so on. Kawsay also forms the stem for the verbs kawsarichiy, “to revive, resuscitate” and kawsarimpuy “to revive oneself, return to life” (Morato Pena 1994:183). Secondly, the word qhaway, used in regard to raising animals or children, means “to look, observe, examine, care for, reflect on, diagnose, presage” (199). Care here simultaneously involves visual and conceptual acts of reflection accompanied by practical engagements with other/s. Finally, the word waq means “other, apart, distinct, autonomous” and is the stem for the diminutive waqcha “poor, indigent, orphan” (200). Such concepts suggest specific sensibilities of self and modes of care that do not necessarily follow from the valorization of autonomy built into liberal humanist conceptions of the human. Thus, I am interested in how political debates surrounding the right to life (easily reduced to a doctrine of human rights) also entail considerations about how one should or might live. What does it mean to live with material uncertainty and what are the ethical elaborations and practices by which such a life unfolds and is rendered liveable? Further, how do particular forms of life and ethical practice provide the conditions for the emergence of new modes of sociality and politics?

As Foucault notes, askesis involves particular ways of assimilating truth into the body “to the point of making it part of oneself,” one which supplies ways of dealing with the vicissitudes of life (499). My research is concerned with the ways people live with hunger or material scarcity in the everyday as a form of dwelling in the limits of human subjectivity, both in terms of exceeding acknowledged ways of being human and of malnutrition as a threat to the biological condition of life. Here, debates about life may be understood as shaped by a social and linguistic grammar of kawsay; thus to speak of life is also to speak of manners and modes of existence and exemplary subjectivity.

Joining these initial linguistic reflections with my observations of daily practices like informal food distribution and consumption, it seems that the affective logics animating contemporary politics on the part of Quechua speakers in Bolivia should not too quickly be dismissed as a mere replication of a socialist language of class redistribution or the strategic invocation of ethnicity often known as “identity politics.” Turning to the lives and language of Quechua-speaking communities in the department of Cochabamba and specifically to the informal practices of food distribution, my research will explore the forms of belonging, obligation and exemplary subjectivity (both as emergent as well as shaped by sociocultural traditions) that animate people’s daily struggles to feed themselves and their loved ones in the context of rapidly rising food costs and political instability. Furthermore, my research will consider how such ethical frameworks and elaborations of self intersect with the terms of political debate surrounding neoliberalism and justice in contemporary Bolivia. For many people in Bolivia - including the MAS party - the economic and social influences of neoliberalism are expressed as forms of continued US imperialism. During my stay in Bolivia the region of Chapare (heavily populated by coca-growers) demanded that USAID halt all projects, remove all signs and leave the region, a demand that was highly publicized in the national media. However, talk of nationalization in Bolivia does not speak only to economic restructurings and taxes on national resources, but also to shifts in the way groups articulate their own traditions (as parts of national culture) in regard to the desires and aspirations of “neoliberalism” as both an economic and a social form.

Returning to the chants of 20,00 protesters - “enough with the impunity” - it seems many Bolivians remember the past as a form of memory that transforms the possibilities of the present. Thus, my research considers the entailments of a life in the present that bears the memories of a gruesome colonial past, both as a mark of violent exclusion but also as an enabling form. Bearing the memories of violent clashes between US-funded anti-drug forces and communities, popular groups reformulate US governmental claims of “assistance” and altruism into a language of impunity and violence. For many, such restructurings are not mere intellectual endeavors nor state-based economic reforms. Rather, as one local “militante” articulated it to me, it is about “decolonizing the mind,” a challenge that unfolds in the lived space of the everyday. Thus, for thousands of Bolivians, history is lived both as a burden - social and economic exclusion - but also as a possibility for a remaking of self and nation in the present.

My ongoing work is concerned with the ways that claims to a “right to life” also entail debates about how one should live, that is, about what constitutes a respectable life and an exemplary form of self. It is this intersection of older ethical forms with recent national debates, I suggest, that serves as the condition of possibility for the emergence of new forms of political subjectivity in contemporary Bolivia. By shifting focus to such considerations, my aim is to develop an analytic that grapples with such political forms but does not reduce subjectivity to the instrumental invocation of identity nor take as a priori the desires and sensibilities of the human of liberal rights discourse.