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Grupo de Trabalho 7
Gender, Ethnicity and Class in Bolivian Politics: Transformation or Paternalism?

Introduction[2]

 Anthropological theories address ethnicity and gender, together with class, age and sexual orientation, as key elements in the construction and negotiation of identity and power within most societies (Alonso 1995, Di Leonardi 1991). We understand ethnicity and gender as dynamic and interlocking cultural systems that organize and give meaning to countless aspects of our lives, notably the construction of subjective identities, forms of personhood, power and social positioning. Incorporating these analytical categories into political programs is a potentially transformative move because it means taking into account, and possibly changing, phenomena and relationships that cross cut entire societies.

Throughout Latin America, however, public discourse and political programs, liberally influenced by the overarching trope of “development,”[3] have tended to direct our ethnic and gender attention only to marked groups of “marginal” others: Indians and women. This essentialist focus gets translated into a sort of identity politics that allows us to avoid analyzing “privileged” social groups within specific historical processes of domination. Focus on helping the marginalized other conveniently allows us to evade issues of redistribution and to avoid reconstructing the social processes that establish power relations between differentiated individuals and groups.

Recent constitutional and legislative reforms in Bolivia have dared to drastically rethink the workings of a multi-cultural and pluri-ethnic polity, and article 1 of the revised constitution declares that “Bolivia, libre, independiente, soberana, multietnica, y pluricultural, constituida en Republica unitaria, adopta para su gobierno la forma democratica representativa fundada en la union y la solidaridad de todos los bolivianos.”

In the following discussion, we analyze significant conceptual advances in Bolivian politics that recognize gender and ethnicity as generative dimensions of national life, and we also try to understand why so many Bolivian and international institutions continue to direct their practical efforts towards women and Indians. This question leads us to an ethnographic exploration of the identities, ideas, actions and interactions of people who work in institutions striving to shape Bolivia’s development. In this community we find a distancing and antagonism between people working with ethnicity and those working with gender, and try to understand aspects of this ongoing conflict. Although we don’t find definitive answers, we begin to clarify these phenomena in light of the lack of articulation between ethnographic realities, political philosophies and development policies within a political economic environment dominated by neoliberalism.

This lack of articulation is not exclusive to policy makers and practitioners. It has also characterized important currents of Andean ethnography in which rich and sophisticated cultural analyses of isolated subaltern communities are presented against a vaguely evil backdrop of urban elite, national politics and global forces. Like other articles in this issue, our approach challenges traditionally bound objects of study. The research contributing to our paper bridges multiple sites ranging from government ministries to university research projects, international development organizations and, yes, the everyday lives of indigenous women. We report and analyze personal testimonies and visions, “ritual” practices and performances, and underlying norms of action and agency found in each of these arenas in attempts to capture the tense, ongoing struggle over identity that goes on between them and circulates through them. In contrast to more classic concepts of identity as something that is generated by and rooted in specific geographic places and demographic groups, this work explores the

idea that the situated production of identity – of a person, of a group, or even a whole society— does not depend alone, or even always primarily, on the observable, concentrated activities within a particular locale or a diaspora.  The identity of anyone or any group is produced simultaneously in many different locales of activity by many different agents for many different purposes [Marcus 1998:62]. 

Ethnographic moments

In her deeply perceptive ethnography exploring struggles for power and autonomy in production relations in central Bolivian valleys, María Lagos reports, prolonged contact and observation of the daily lives of Tiraqueños forced me to move away from fixed social categorizations and concentrate instead on the ambiguities, confusions, and paradoxes of daily life —on the ways in which they experienced, negotiated, and represented changing social relations [1994:xi].

During the past decade, one of the authors of this paper, Susan Paulson, spent a lot of time wandering through Mizque, Bolivia, trying to understand the dynamics of ethnicity and gender in contexts similar to those explored by Lagos.[4] Her awkward inquiries about identity received answers like, “Cuando una mujer está cultivando papas en su terreno es una campesina, pero cuando se va a Cochabamba para vender las papas, ya es chola.” To demonstrate how this works, let’s glimpse a few moments in the life of a Mizqueña friend named Faustina.

At the crack of dawn Faustina wakes her two daughters and sets them preparing breakfast for the group who will gather to harvest her potato field. She’s expecting her sister María with her two oldest sons, as well as her compadre Tomás with Faustina’s godson, Juan. Together with Faustina's own five children and the gringa anthropologist who offered to help, that makes twelve mouths to feed. Faustina quickly pulls a ratty sweater over her Murphy Crane and Erection Company T-shirt and ties on a dark pollera which reaches almost to her ankles, protecting against the morning chill.

Throughout the long day of cooking, serving, digging, harvesting and sorting potatoes, Faustina lives her femaleness and her Mizqueness in the way that she administers and performs each task in coordination with her relatives and compadres. In the late afternoon, however, her identity shifts as she enters into transport negotiations with a mestizo trucker. Leaving her sister in charge of the final sorting and bagging, Faustina hurries back to her patio where she wets and combs her hair, rebraiding it with shiny hair pieces and brightly colored tassels. She quickly changes into her best market clothes; the transportista is due at 6:00 to load the potatoes, and if he thinks she is some dirty Indian he'll cheat her in the portion of potatoes he takes in exchange for transporting the cargo.

After cutting the deal and getting her potatoes loaded, Faustina says good-bye to her family, assigning chores to each child. She spends the night in the back of the truck, bouncing along on the bags of potatoes together with other Mizqueños who are traveling the long road to Cochabamba. Arriving at the Cancha market before dawn, Faustina arranges her produce in a market stall rented by a cousin who lives in the city. She is careful not to intrude on the space of the neighboring chola vendors, as they resent her presence, calling her a clumsy campesina.

Nevertheless, in her short pink pollera and tight lace blouse glittering with plastic pearls, Faustina competes successfully for the attention of passing customers. She plays up her Mizque identity; Mizque potatoes are known for their quality. She converses merrily with male customers and jokes with them in Spanish; important traits of urban mestizo manliness are established through flirtatious relationships –as well as sexual encounters- with indigenous women. With urban housewives, however, Faustina ingratiates herself by responding to their address of ‘waway’ with humble poses and phrases sprinkled with Quechua. She knows that by emphasizing her Indian ethnicity she can better please clients whose own sense of identity (whiteness, educatedness, cleanliness, female purity) depends on their superiority to her.

In this scenario we observe that all actors acquire, express and manipulate their identities as they interact with each other and move through manifold cultural spaces pervaded by gender and ethnic symbols and powers. Yet it seems that such observations have not informed most policies in Andean countries, in which gender and ethnicity are treated as qualities of human bodies, and moreover, of a specific type of bodies: those of women and of indigenous people.

 Visionary reforms

 Recent Bolivian policies express a new vision of political agency and citizenship: a multicultural, pluriethnic and gender sensitive vision that breaks the longstanding integrationist paradigm and promises to respect the dynamics of diverse lifeways and identities. Yet, partly because this culture-sensitive approach is uncomfortably coupled with neoliberal economic programs in a marriage arranged to facilitate ongoing relations of international dependency, its impact is less than transparent.[5] Like other recent attempts at linking social reforms with neoliberal economics, the Bolivian experiment balances dangerously between progressive ideas of autonomy as freedom from cultural and/or economic domination and liberal ideas of autonomy as the right of each individual to compete and consume in the free market.[6]

Widely acclaimed reforms known as Popular Participation (1994) were designed to decentralize certain government decisions and to foster greater involvement of the populace in local political processes.[7] With a mandate to forge more equitable forms of social participation, a Ministry of Human Development was created with a Secretariat of Ethnic, Gender and Generational affairs. This is clearly a progressive improvement over the ‘bureaus of indigenous affairs’ and ‘national services for women’ that still function in many Latin American governments,[8] especially considering the impressive cadre of intellectuals recruited to work in Bolivia’s new Secretariat. Yet, while the subsecretariats bear the names of cultural systems (gender, ethnicity, generation) rather than of physical beings (women, Indians, children and old people), and while many actors involved theoretically define gender and ethnicity as cultural processes that encompass and indeed create all individuals and relations in Bolivia, the bulk of official studies and projects developed and carried out by the subsecretariats of gender and ethnicity have concentrated on women and on marked indigenous groups.[9]

The Subsecretariat of Gender is staffed mainly by women who research women’s issues and plan projects to support, educate and empower women, in addition to coordinating with other agencies in efforts to incorporate women and gender sensitivity into their programs.[10] It collaborated with the Secretariats of Popular Participation and Rural Development in the design and application of participatory surveys designed to elicit women’s ideas and demands as a complement to local planning processes already being promoted by the government.[11] As far as we know, however, the Subsecretariat has not carried out studies or projects concerning men’s gender-specific demands or modes of participation in these planning processes, nor has it developed or distributed materials on other roles, practices and problems of Bolivian men.

For its part, the Subsecretariat of Ethnicity is staffed mainly by social scientists, men and women who study indigenous issues and design policies and projects to support, empower and defend indigenous groups. They also coordinate with other agencies to adapt national political processes to the organizational structures and dynamics of selected ethnic groups. A valuable result of the Subsecretariat’s work has been to generate a better understanding of social organization and territorial management amongst indigenous groups, which has contributed to more adequate political processes in support of communal resource management and customary law.[12]

Although individuals working in the Subsecretariat of Ethnicity have in the past carried out lucid analyses of complex processes of mestization, shifting identities and inter-ethnic relations in contexts including urban centers, the projects they’ve carried out in the Subsecretariat have prioritized groups that are geographically isolated and relatively easy to label as ‘other’: Aymara ayllus of the altiplano, Amazonian tribes in the eastern lowlands, Afro-Bolivians in the Yungas.[13] As far as we know, studies or projects with major Bolivian ethnic groups such as mestizos, urban Indians, cholos, or descendants of European immigrants have not been included in the Subsecretariat’s scope of work. While the advances in territorial autonomy and self-governance of consolidated ethic groups are extremely valuable in both cultural and environmental terms, excessive focus on territorial autonomy avoids the kind of economic and social class autonomy that Lagos (1997) addresses, and echoes anachronistic intellectual positions that no longer fit the highly dynamic ethnic scenario that characterizes Bolivia today.

Ramiro Molina, the first Secretary of Gender, Ethnic and Generational Affairs, reminds us that people working within the limited time frame of a government administration are pressured to make an impact on society within a few short years. Within the Secretariat, these political pressures gave rise to two conflicting responses: 1) a resolution to make measurable short term impacts on concrete social groups in order to gain visible support for the Secretariat, and 2) a determination to transform government structures, laws and procedures in order to make ongoing processes more equitable, even after the staff, and perhaps the whole Secretariat, is dismissed with the change of administrations. Molina explains his effort to intersect the two approaches,

Mi idea fue comenzar a integrar la perspectiva de etnicidad en forma horizontal, entre nosotros -- los funcionarios en los distintos ministerios y secretarias del gobierno. Metemos gente en el Ministerio de Educación, de Participación Popular, Desarrollo Rural, para transversalizar las ideas. Al mismo tiempo, desarrollamos un eje vertical de trabajo con las organizaciones indígenas. ¿Cómo hacemos políticas con y para los grupos diferenciados, si no existen vínculos para que ellos lleguen a nosotros? [Ramiro Molina, La Paz, 17 March 1998].

The Secretariat’s efforts to influence the national political forum by introducing ethnic, gender and generational concerns into debates about governability and sustainability, the new Agrarian Reform, administrative decentralization, and others, are instances of what has come to be called “transversalizing.”

In a 1997 speech, Ivon Farah, Subsecretary of Gender (1995-97), identified transversalización as the agency’s most important approach to gender policy implementation. When asked about the fact that this approach precluded integration with ethnicity, she explained that the two subsecretariats responded to different priorities: family, reproductive health and domestic violence, in the case of gender; and territoriality in the case of ethnicity. This variance of focus is clearly manifest in the concrete actions of each of the subsecretariats, which have, in fact, worked more fruitfully with other agencies than with each other. At certain crucial points the Subsecretariat of Popular Participation even assumed a mediator role in the face of polarized priorities between the two.15 16

While both Subsecretariats have maintained a narrow programmatic focus, they have advanced conceptual efforts to explore relations between gender and ethnicity. The Secretariat of Popular Participation published a document by Javier Medina (1995) that examines gender and ethnicity in relation to concepts of democracy; while Silvia Rivera (1996) edited a thick volume on the intersection of ethnicity and gender in diverse Bolivian contexts. The title of Rivera’s collection, Ser mujer indígena, chola o birlocha en la Bolivia postcolonial de los años 90, manifests the tendency of the Secretariat that commissioned the work to locate the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the bodies of indigenous women. The four texts united in the book, however, question that essentialist focus: Lehm and Paulson provide anthropological analyses of identity construction processes, specifically in relation to knowledge systems; while Rivera positions her ethnography of indigenous women’s economic strategies within a scathing class analysis; and Arnold and Yapita interpret Aymara life cycles in a ritual context that challenges stereotypical social science perspectives, including those expressed in western gender analysis.

Yet people working in both Subsecretariats acknowledge serious challenges in relating these conceptual advances to practice, and in translating specific information about the groups with whom they work into general policies and approaches.[14] We believe that work guided by more integrated and relational approaches to gender and ethnicity would generate results that could be applied more fruitfully to national-level issues as well as class-related challenges. But before advancing this suggestion, we need to better understand where the protagonists are coming from, and what kind of contexts set the scene for their efforts.

Local political cultures and neoliberalism

In Bolivia, the political experiences of diverse actors strongly effect the ways in which they understand and implement ethnicity, gender and class. Until the mid 1980s, the Bolivian political scenario was dominated by capitalist dictatorships and conservative parties supporting oligarchic interests, variously opposed by leftist parties promoting forms of socialist democracy. Beginning in the 1940s, intellectual leaders of leftist movements inspired by nationalist ideologies and competing notions of class (Marx), revolution (Trotsky) and vanguardism (Lenin) established specific power/knowledge relationships with marginalized and exploited groups. Well-educated activists committed to championing the causes of oppressed classes -most notably miners,[15] and later peasants- assumed vanguardism as a mode of representation and decision making.[16] The paternalistic impulses[17] channeled through these movements are still manifest today in efforts to “help,” “serve,” “empower” and, in many cases, “save” marginal and exploited groups, who are increasingly defined in ethnic and gender, rather than class, terms. The shift from social class to personal identity and other changes in these impulses have taken place in the context of shifting relationships between political parties, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the emerging neoliberal state.

Many Bolivians who are currently involved in ethnic and gender politics came of age as militantes de izquierda, young leftist activists, mostly middle class intellectuals and university students, who risked their lives fighting for democracy and political-economic equality during the 1970s and early 80s. Some later formed or joined NGOs, which became a major channel for expressing political ideas and actions: their efforts to provide alternative health, welfare and education services to marginal sectors of the population were often construed in clear opposition to military dictatorships and state capitalism. Leslie Gill writes,

During eighteen years of nearly uninterrupted military rule that preceded Bolivia’s redemocratization, a handful of organizations that would subsequently be called NGOs maintained antagonistic relations with the Bolivian state. They sought the restitution of democracy and, in some cases, the creation of a socialist society by supporting various popular organizations struggling to establish a foothold under the repressive conditions of dictatorship. In the wake of redemocratization, however, their relationship with the state began to change, and their numbers burgeoned” [1997:147].

Bolivia’s return to formal democracy, ensuing political-economic upheaval, and structural economic changes of the mid 1980s initiated a period of uncertainty and redefinition for leftist opposition movements and set the scene for the emergence of multiple and sometimes competing currents amongst and inside NGOs. Governing parties and government agencies gave NGOs a more prominent position and began to exploit their links to the grassroots.[18] NGOs became significant in Paz Estenssoro’s (1985-89) administration when they were called upon to help mitigate the social costs of structural adjustment under the umbrella of the Social Emergency Fund.[19] The fund, which simultaneously promoted acquiescence to the logic of neoliberalism and funded NGOs to palliate its resulting social costs, exemplifies the changing nature of engagement and negotiation between NGOs and the state.[20] Manipulation by political parties threatened the autonomy of NGO programs, causing significant rifts within grass roots movements and leaving a lasting legacy of suspicion at all levels. Silvia Rivera (1992) voiced a growing critique when she observed that NGOs working in northern Potosí had begun to change their orientation from supporting grass roots efforts to implementing development projects on behalf of government and international agencies.[21]

These ongoing social and political struggles, together with emergent indigenous and feminist movements, served to differentiate and oppose those who support ethnic/peasant “others” from those who struggle for the rights of poor and marginalized women, as well as to fuel factions within each current.

As political sympathies and efforts were refocused, female middle class leftists belonging to diverse parties began to define women as the “marginal group” for whose rights they would fight. Three major tendencies were forged: women’s movements (not necessarily feminist) linked to party structures;[22] women’s activists linked to NGOs, who came to be called “institutionalized feminists”; and finally, scattered groups of more radical “autonomous feminists”. Party affiliated women’s movements concentrated mainly on providing services, training and various kinds of material and social support to women in need, while institutional feminists working through NGOs and internationally funded projects began to devise programs and advocate policies concerning family planning, reproductive health, domestic violence, labor rights and opportunities and related issues.[23] Sonia Montaño, who would be named the first Subsecretary of Gender, acknowledged that these two groups engaged in a “necessary courtship” with the state as a strategy to advance their goals (Montaño 1993), while autonomous/anarchist feminists, notably the group called Mujeres Creando, critiqued the middle class bias, financial dependence and lack of ideological autonomy of the first two groups.[24]

By the time institutional feminists were invited to participate in national political processes, notably through the Subsecretariat of Gender, they had begun to use gender terminology and had developed a sophisticated discourse on democratization and modernization. These new “gender experts” had experience negotiating with development agencies and were able to design and implement projects, qualities that differentiated them from the more radical feminist groups as well as from many of those involved in ethnic issues.

Parallel to the rise of women’s groups, men and women from various class backgrounds who had been active in pro-democracy movements and leftist parties focused their efforts on support for ethnic identity and rights for indigenous groups. In their diverse conceptualizations and manifestations, ethnic politics began to inform a wide gamut of political philosophies ranging from Andean fundamentalism to the neo-populism analyzed by Albro in this issue.

Throughout the 50’s and 60’s, rural issues had constituted a problem for orthodox Marxism in Bolivia, where the socio-political agency of the peasantry was understood as contingent upon an alliance with culturally distinct miners, identified as the class that would lead the revolution. Then a set of new actors entered the arena, amongst them a young Aymara who would, in 1993, become Vice President of the nation.

Almost unnoticed amid the social upheaval of the mid-1960s, for the first time a generation of young people from the rural hinterlands of both Peru and Bolivia began to find their way to urban universities in large numbers. In both Andean nations greater access to education, as a result of the general application of social welfare measures (in Bolivia as a result of the 1952 Revolution), enabled highland Andean peasants to search for social mobility and critical answers to their longstanding social marginality [Albro 1998:102].

The presence of these new actors, and subsequent introduction of the category ‘ethnicity’ into the political arena where peasants and workers were trying to consolidate a unified movement, constituted a powerful critique of the dominant discussion of class.[25]

In this context, the Centro de Investigación y Participación Campesina (CIPCA), founded in the late 70s with the support of anthropologist Javier Albó, became one of the first and most enduring NGOs to study and support rural communities in the altiplano, valleys and eastern lowlands. The work of CIPCA and other NGOs paralleled the development of peasant syndicates and the growth of the Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), a major umbrella organization that defends the rights of peasants and other unions, and promotes class-based solidarity amongst its mostly indigenous members.[26] The Katarista movement, in contrast, foregrounded Aymara ethnic identity in a political trajectory that led to the formation of two factions: Movimiento Indio Tupac Katari (MITKA) and Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Katari (MRTKL). Albó (cited in Bigenho 1996) argues that the MRTKL was able to construct both class and ethnic alliances by confronting the problem “with two eyes”: one that focused on an exploited “peasant class” and one that focused on the oppressed “Indian Nations.”

In 1984, the CSUTCB introduced the notion of “multiple nations” in a draft proposal for a new Agrarian Law, and in the following decade, ethnicity increasingly replaced class discourse in discussions about the formation of a multinational state. The forum continues to be crossed, however, by conflicting notions of ethnicity: “pueblos originarios”, a term applied in legislative reforms such as Popular Participation and the new Agrarian Reform (INRA), is linked to fixed notions of ancestral lines and territorial sovereignty; the idea of “naciones” is used mainly by Andean organizations whose concept of cultural and political identity is prefigured by the colonial use of “nación” to classify a certain level of civilization; while “pueblos indígenas” has been adopted by organizations from the eastern lowlands like CIDOB (Confederación Indígena del Oriente Boliviano), CPIB (Central de Pueblos Indígenas) and APG (Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní) in their demands for territorial control, full citizenship and dignity.[27]

Moreover, ethnicity is variously defined as an essence, a process, a power relation, a linguistic practice, and a lifeway. In the introduction to a volume on the creation of Indigenous Territorial Units in Colombia, Dover and Rappaport contemplate issues that arise when ethnicity becomes something that is legislated, noting emerging contrasts between the self-defining discourse of local communities and that of indigenous leaders. “The leaders of the pan-indigenous community display a greater level of ethnic and cultural essentialization, inspired in part by their dialogue with the national government, the dominant society and its institutions” (Dover and Rappaport 1996:8). In a parallel fashion, the newly politicized women’s and feminists organizations (in clear contrast to many grass roots women) have developed what Di Leonardo calls a discourse of feminist essentialism: “The proposition that women are, across time and space, a single oppressed and virtuous class” (1994:26).

In spite of their differing conceptualizations of ethnic identity and ethnic politics, the above mentioned movements all use relatively traditional indigenous referents and symbols that differentiate them from neo-populist phenomena such as CONDEPA (Consciencia de Patria) and UCS (Unidad Cívica Solidaridad). These groups have developed a thoroughly distinct discourse grounded in the experiences of urban dwellers and migrants of indigenous heritage. This new type of identity politics engages a variety of regional and urban beliefs about “Andeaness” and “popular identity” and exalts cholo/mestizo ideals of a kind of upward mobility that is not synonymous with assimilation.[28] Here identity is clearly defined in material, as well as cultural and ideological, terms, as powerful business connections enter the equation (a TV and radio network in the case of CONDEPA and a very successful beer industry in UCS). Important leftist intellectuals have advanced their ideals and positions using these parties as platforms, and it is notable that women, such as former La Paz mayor Mónica Palenque and presidential candidate Remedios Loza, have enjoyed a much higher profile in neo-populist/cholo politics than in indigenous movements or in traditional right or left wing political parties.[29]

In Bolivia, as well as in other countries that have undergone IMF imposed structural adjustments, multifarious struggles to shape society and to champion ethnic, gender or class causes have been engulfed by a new type of development plan that is implemented with exclusive respect to rational criteria of financial efficiency and economic growth (Ferguson 1992). In 1985, Bolivian President Victor Paz Estenssoro explained that he was putting on hold the programmatic content of the social revolution that he had led in 1952 in order to dispense “necessary bitter medicine” in the form of structural adjustment measures.[30] And, starting in 1993, Sanchez de Lozada managed to wed apparently irreconcilable political philosophies by passing legislation for Popular Participation and Educational Reforms that was financially and legally intertwined with “Capitalization”, a program to privatize state run industries and social programs.

Champions of both gender and ethnic rights have developed ambivalent relationships with neoliberal politics, relationships that are variously interpreted as collaboration or prostitution, becoming more sophisticated or selling out. Part of the seduction of neoliberalism is precisely the promise of a kind of moral equality to be obtained by applying the rules of the free market equally to all peoples. In a country where inequality has been institutionalized throughout a history of legal, economic and political systems explicitly based on class exploitation and ethnic and gender inequality, such a universal principal is tremendously attractive. Since the key agent and unit of analysis in liberal thought is the rational individual, the focus is on turning women and Indians into effective economic actors, rather than on transforming relations and mechanisms that influence identities as well as market disadvantages. In recent years, however, contradictions and tensions are rising with the growing certainty that neoliberal policies are exacerbating the very inequalities that they had promised to overcome (Berry 1997).[31]

Within this neoliberal climate, and in the face of growing material inequality, discussions of gender and ethnicity have conveniently been couched in terms of “identities” and “roles” that, as Kabeer forcefully demonstrates, evade structural analyses of political economic inequality.

The absence of attempts to devise theories of race roles or class roles is precisely due to the fact that the language of roles cannot capture the exercise of power implicit in racial interactions and class relations. Its very absurdity brings home the contrast between the structural and situational perspective used for race and class, on the one hand, and the individualized, essentialist view inherent in the sex roles approach on the other (Ferree and Hess 1987:15)[Kabeer 1994: 38].

Yet, as Lagos’ (1997) case demonstrates, grass roots activists themselves find ways to reject or circumvent this theoretical road block by resolutely manifesting the multiple forces that shape their roles and identities. Lagos describes how cocalera activists symbolically foreground their gender, ethnicity and nationality to strategically deploy those very aspects of identity politics that the state seeks to emphasize, yet also forcefully underscore the structural realities of their class position.

In sum, each actor in the arena approaches gender and ethnicity with a political philosophy and personal history that strongly influence the way in which he or she embraces and implements these ideas. At the same time, each of the convictions at play, variously labeled as femenismo, andinismo, marxismo, katarismo, or neoliberalismo, has its own internal contradictions when it comes to translating philosophical principals into policy implementation and action. Within development politics, inordinate effort has been invested in making actions and techniques more effective and efficient, and woefully little in thinking and talking about the political philosophies and ideological convictions that motivate and justify those actions.

 Gender vs. ethnicity: From theory to practice

 Although gender and ethnicity in the Andes have been closely linked in theory and research (De la Cadena 1997, Paulson 1992, Rivera 1997, Seligman 1993 and 98, Spedding 1997, Weismantel 1988, 1997), their political trajectories have led to polarization and antagonism, of which the case of the Bolivian subsecretariats is an especially public, but certainly not unique manifestation. Later in this issue, Aurolyn Luykx develops a penetrating analysis of the gender equity vs. intercultural debate in public education, showing that beyond practical challenges of program design and classroom practice, this debate goes to the very heart of our most fundamental intellectual and political commitments. How did such powerful tension arise between these apparently kindred issues?

During the 1980s, gender, heretofore an obscure academic theory, was brilliantly reincarnated throughout Latin America as part and parcel of modern development discourse. We now have sophisticated gender methodologies and technologies, indicators that enable us to monitor gender variables in projects and demonstrate how gender can improve efficiency and effectiveness. Many women working in gender have exuberantly embraced the rational discourse of modernity, possibly because they strive desperately to achieve the respect granted to rational modern thinkers, a status formerly denied them on the basis of sex.[32] Fashionable modern discourse on “gender in development” has so overshadowed gender theory’s more scholarly origins that many Andean residents believe that gender sprung, fully clothed, from the forehead of USAID or the Dutch Mission for Technical Assistance. At the same time, the application of gender ideas has frequently taken forms that look less like anthropological analyses of pertinent identities and relations than like feminist clamor for women’s privileges, and as such have created strong negative reactions in many camps. In the past several years, however, graduate programs in Gender Studies have been established in Cochabamba (CESU), Cuzco (CBC), La Paz (CIDES), Lima (PUCP), Quito (FLACSO) and Santiago (U Chile), where students are now developing more integral approaches that balance Andean realities with development concepts, and incorporate work with men, homosexuals, prostitutes and other gender groups together with women’s studies.

Ethnicity, on the other hand, has not been so quick to take up the banner of modern development. In contrast to gender, ethnicity entered the development arena with a long and rich tradition of ethnographic research in both Andean and Amazonian communities, and more recently, in urban contexts. This tradition has fueled ongoing theoretical and conceptual discussions, relatively independent of development politics and projects (although obviously not unaffected by the conceptual foundations of modern western thought). So when people who had dedicated their lives to studying aspects of ethnicity began to work with the Bolivian government and other agencies to support and promote “ethnic” peoples caught in the throes of development, they brought their own methods and motives to the task. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one’s point of view), these well-established approaches, based on qualitative interpretations of complex cultural and historical processes, were not easily synchronized with reigning development paradigms and logical frameworks for project implementation.

Another important factor at play is that, in contrast to the world-wide boom in gender and development during the past decade, an insignificant amount of money and effort have been invested in research, conceptual and methodological development, training or project implementation in the area of ethnicity and development.[33] In fact, when Ramiro Molina took on the task of spearheading the National Secretariat of Gender, Ethnicity and Generations, he found that there was virtually no funding for the latter two themes, whereas the first Subsecretary of Gender, Sonia Montaño, obtained substantial financing for Gender and ended up subsidizing the other subsecretariats.

This situation, together with sundry cultural and personal factors, has given rise to tensions between proponents of gender and proponents of ethnicity, tensions that are pointedly expressed in the work of PRATEC members such as Eduardo Grillo, who writes,

El imperialismo ha optado por el enfoque de género en el desarrollo con el propósito específico de lesionar a la familia y a la mujer en nuestros paises porque ellas son el núcleo fundamental de la regeneración de las culturas originarias del mundo y de su gran diversidad (1994:15).

 So, amongst other things, champions of Andean ethnicity are rejecting gender concepts and methods as an imperialist imposition, and are simultaneously jealous of all the research money and project funds awarded to gender. At the same time, desarrollistas working on promoting democratic citizenship, modeled on the universal modern man (and woman) who so upsets Eduardo Grillo, haven’t advanced much in efforts to work ethnicity into their framework.

One of the many arenas in which these tensions have been played out is a debate surrounding a multi-year research project financed by a Dutch program that supported Bolivian University teaching and research with the objective of better understanding agriculture and irrigation management from a gender perspective. The debate came to a head during a seminar involving two polarized research groups, some of whose members had worked together as leftist activists a decade earlier.[34]

The first group, made up of university professors and thesis students, had been funded to carry out research published in a book, two bachelors theses, and several academic articles (Pozo 1994, Tuijtelaars et al. 1994). Their approach, which we call “classic gender analysis,” was based in predominant concepts and methods of gender and development as promoted by first world authors such as Catherine Overholt et al. (1984), Linda Moffat et al. (1991) and Caroline Moser (1989). The research was especially successful in its unprecedented efforts to apply gender analysis to detailed technical processes in Bolivia, a valuable effort that raised many critical questions. Selected characteristics of this approach are outlined in the left column below.

A second group competing for funds for the next round of research presented a forceful critique of the classic gender analysis from an ethnic Andean perspective. This group argued that in order to understand irrigation and farming systems in Andean communities it is necessary to study qualitative and symbolic aspects of life that are ethnicity-specific and not addressed by the classic gender methods developed in the North. In the right hand column below we outline a few characteristics of what we call their “Andeanist exploration.”[35]

 During the seminar in question, and elsewhere, proponents of these two approaches construe them as methodological opposites and ideological enemies, but from a moderator’s point of view, both help us understand the practices and dynamics in question, and both rectify biases in conventional research concepts and methods. Classic gender analysis responds to the androcentric character of research and practice that has made invisible and marginal that which is specifically feminine, while it continues to be ethnocentric in it’s reliance on “universal” concepts, quantitative categories and western logic. Andeanist exploration responds to the ethnocentric character of research methods that have made invisible and marginal that which is uniquely local or non-western, while it continues to be androcentric in its categorical rejection of historical concerns and initiatives related specifically to gender identities and relations.

Although gender-sensitive and ethnic-sensitive approaches illuminate interrelated facets of Andean life, they are repeatedly polarized in popular and political discourse. Gender theory has been variously associated with modernity: opponents of modern development see gender analysis as an imperialist tool for annihilating unique, complementary and harmonious identities and relationship, while development partisans see gender analysis as a positive tool for democratizing discriminatory local identities and relationships. The latter assumption, shrewdly debunked by J.S. Jaquette, “is that traditional societies are male-dominated and authoritarian, and modern societies are democratic and egalitarian” (1982:269). Ethnicity, in turn, has been affiliated with tradition: something that needs to be overcome through better education and improved standards of life, or something to be glorified, preserved, protected as a unique and untouchable lifeway.

The polarization of gender and ethnicity along the modernity-tradition axis has quashed a tremendous potential to construct a more balanced and comprehensive critique of dominant development processes. Pamela Calla, co-author of this paper, witnessed the limiting effect of this polarization in recent efforts by German Technical Assistance to design an overall strategy to address gender, ethnicity and poverty.[36] This international agency, which funds and implements diverse projects throughout Bolivia, organized two consecutive workshops to develop the bases on which to draft such a strategy. Workshops of this sort serve as complex consultation processes in which agencies draw on the ideas and opinions of people working with “target populations” to inform and evaluate their actions. The ritualized interactions of people working on different “levels” serve to shape and symbolize representation for the professionals involved.  The consequent planning process, dominated by ideas of objectivism and deductive reasoning, assiduously shapes ideas or observations from “below” into manageable “proposals.”

In the first workshop, definitions of gender and ethnicity were provided, and the Subsecretary of Gender gave an introductory speech, but there were no representatives from the Subsecretariat of Ethnicity. Moreover, project representatives had been asked to present the gender approach used in their work, with no mention of ethnicity. The second workshop was designed to develop the theoretical framework, and this time a representative of the Subsecretariat of Ethnicity was invited. Three distinct groups were formed to discuss how to address gender, ethnicity and poverty, respectively and as separate problems. This thematic division effectively curtailed the process of articulation, despite the facilitators’ stated intentions of arriving at some common understanding of gender, ethnicity and economic inequality as interrelated parts of a historical web of power and action.

The final report on these workshops includes a statement that clearly identifies ethnicity with tradition and non-progressiveness as opposed to the modernizing notions of universal citizen rights promoted by a “classical” gender perspective: “También en Bolivia, el término identidad étnica sirve para frenar esfuerzos progresivos, y esto muy especialmente en relación con el tema género.” The express purpose of the event -to explore possibilities for conceptual intersection and practical articulation between gender, ethnicity and poverty- is not breached in the report, which in fact denounces attempts to do so as ideological and subjective.

Many of the practices we have observed define (and ultimately construct) identities on the basis of pre-established categories and/or program policies, rather than seek to understand the myriad ways in which identities are developed, manifest and experienced.[37] Three aspects of political strategy that seem to unwittingly impede a more integral approach to Bolivian identities are: priority-making, additive theories of identity, and transversalization. Both gender and ethnic activists place priority on measurable advancements in their own circumscribed fields of effort, leaving no time for the arduous work of articulating them. The addition model of identity, very common in development discourse, analyzes key identity facets (femaleness, illiteracy, poverty, Indianess, ruralness) as discrete problems, each of which can be addressed in a technically efficient manner with separate sectoral policies. Finally, transversalization is the term given to a forceful strategy in which preconceived gender or ethnic ideas and considerations are inserted into every instance of a given government, organization, or project, resulting in the ahistorical introduction of stylish terminology, rather than in-situ construction of context-appropriate ideas and approaches.

 Us and them

 Why is it so difficult to translate our theoretical understandings of social differentiation and inequity into corresponding actions? One contributing factor is the analytic framework dominant amongst the international organizations that not only influence, but actually finance, the government bureaucracies in question, as well as many research projects and NGOs.[38] These organizations have built their understanding of, and their efforts to shape, Bolivian society within the framework of development discourse (Escobar 1990, 1995), a system of knowledge and practice built on conventional epistemological relations in which the scientist or professional is the agent, and the other is the object of study or action. This relation gives the former disproportionate power based on so-called technical knowledge, contributing to a lopsided distribution of agency in the generation of knowledge and in processes of social change. Escobar affirms that development discourse has fostered a way of conceiving social life as a technical problem, as a matter of rational decision and management to be entrusted to the development professionals (1995:52). We scientists and development professionals are agents, those (ethnic, gender and class) others, implicitly different and inferior, are targets of our technical efforts.

The problem is the use of stereotyped and categorical we/they discourses of contrast, opposition, and hierarchy which pervade discussions of “Western” versus “non-Western” societies. This language of difference portrays other societies as victims (as passive “targets” of programs or “receptors” of technology) rather than as constructors of their own cultural understandings of change and technology [Warren and Bourque 1991:302].

 It is not accidental that in most development efforts, as in most identity politics, target groups coincide with social categories that are marked in terms of class, gender and ethnicity. We don’t design policies and projects for regular people (in Bolivia called “gente decente” wherein decency indicates a privileged normalcy associated with a dominant class position). We design policies and projects to recognize and help poor people, Indians, women, single mothers, homosexuals, illiterates, and the like. What is ironic in the Bolivian case is that these so-called “marginal groups” make up a vast majority of the national population.

In keeping with global discourse, Bolivian newspapers and television announcers diligently repeat key markers of otherness that construe majority groups as inferior marginals. We frequently heard about Victor Hugo Cárdenas, “the Indigenous Vice President,” or “the first Indian Vice President of Bolivia,” while no one said “Goni, the White President.” One of the few women legislators in Bolivia, María Lourdes Zabala, has been represented in the press as “la diputada mujer,” or “la diputada femenista.” Another female parliamentarian, Remedios Loza Alvarado, who wears ethnically marked clothing and was the presidential candidate for Consciencia de Patria (CONDEPA) in 1997, isn’t even given a last name by the media – she has been dubbed, “la Chola Remedios” or “Comadre Remedios.” At the same time, however, no self-respecting journalist would announce that “the European male Blattman” voted thus on given legislation, or refer to Tito Hoz de Vila as “the pro-masculine minister.” These white men simply have names and political titles; their lack of ethnic and gender markers, crossed by a privileged class position, leads us (and them) to believe that they have nothing to do with gender or ethnicity, let alone poverty.

Media and political discourse frequently situates subaltern others in a “different place” from dominant groups, a place that can then be studied and improved from the outside. In the introduction to the collection Culture, Power, Place, Gupta and Ferguson unmask this deception. “By stressing that place making always involves a construction, rather than merely a discovery, of difference, the authors of the essays here emphasize that identity neither “grows out” of rooted communities nor is a thing that can be possessed or owned by individual or collective social actors.  It is, instead, a mobile, often unstable relation of difference” (1997:13). And it is that relation that we need to recognize and study.

Doing development on others contributes to specific political and structural effects through which target populations, such as women, indigenous people, senior citizens, gays, are made, rather than discovered (Ferguson 1992). In this issue, Tim Wright’s first hand account of efforts to construct a Bolivian gay community on a multifarious sexual terrain deeply engraved by class and ethnic rifts challenges us to reevaluate less polemic, but perhaps not less preposterous, efforts to develop “women’s groups”, “indigenous coalitions” and other expressions of identity.

The practice of defining gender and ethnicity as characteristics of those other people and as problems of those other groups is not just an oversight on the part of journalists and politicians who are reluctant to submit themselves to labeling and adjustment. It has significant ethical and structural implications for all social actors. If we focus on studying and changing the other, we don’t have to question our behaviors and relationships, and we don’t have to transform systems of power that favor us. By focusing on recognizing the other’s unique identity, we avoid redistributing powers and privileges that we monopolize.

 Recognition or Redistribution?

 The separation and objectification of “them” in relation to “us”, together with the contraposition of gender and ethnic politics and the distancing of both of these from class analysis, obscure our understanding of the relationship between recognition and redistribution. Whereas identity politics are often played out on an ideological level, with efforts to “overcome machismo”, or recognize “Indian Nations”, gender theorist Micaela di Leonardo emphasizes the embedded nature of gender as a material and social construction as well as a set of ideologies (1991:30).

More than a century ago, during the boom of industrial capitalism, Karl Marx and other social reformers pointed out that we can give a poor man charity today, but his children and grandchildren will be in the same weakened state tomorrow unless we permanently transform the relations of production: the structures and mechanisms that create and recreate economic inequality. Marx’s idea that the fundamental issue is not a phenomenon (poverty) but a dynamic structural relation (inequality and exploitation) has figured prominently in Bolivian leftist politics for decades. Nevertheless, a series of recent circumstances (the UDP debacle described in the introduction to this issue, the splintering of the Quinto Congreso of the Bolivian Communist Party, the weakened power of workers’ unions in the neoliberal climate) have contributed to the demise of both the idea and the political left. In their place, development politics persistently address “poverty” as if it were an independent entity, a pathogen that can, in itself, “be eradicated.” Hence Bolivia has been the object of a plethora of studies and projects about “gender and poverty” and “ethnicity and poverty” designed to help improve the material conditions of poor women and poor indigenous people, without promoting any kind of meaningful changes in the distribution of power, wealth and opportunity.

It is frustrating to observe so many gender-focused policies and projects in Latin America that apparently ignore Marx’s lesson, or perhaps find it hopelessly outdated.[39] Rather than asking whether the development models that they promote sustain or exacerbate unequal and unjust social and economic relations, these programs limit their concerns to incorporating women into those economic development processes from which they had been excluded (Kabeer 1994:30). The target groups of these programs are women, their sphere of analysis is women’s lives, their indicators of success are changes in women participants. Our concern is that, when these programs are done and gone, the daughters and granddaughters of these “poor ethnic women” will continue to live in societies that are fundamentally unequal and discriminatory, and -worse yet- locked into development paths that lead to even greater social disparity.

We need to ask ourselves, what is at stake in this circumscribed ahistorical position? And what kind of analyses and actions would contribute to the kind of change that would make whole social systems work more equitably? (supposing, of course, that we sincerely strive for more equitable societies as a goal of historical development).

Ethnic and gender considerations have often been construed as opposed to or unrelated to class analysis (Brodkin Sacks 1989), and Bolivian policy processes are no exception. David Harvey (1996) argues, however, that meaningful discussions of politics of identity, multiculturalism and otherness cannot take place in abstraction from actual material circumstances. Nancy Fraser (1995) has also pointed out that struggles for cultural recognition occur in a world of exacerbated material inequality in which cultural injustice and socioeconomic inequity are imbricated so as to reinforce one another. Fraser’s analysis presents us with the possibility of finding points of articulation, support and alliances surrounding dilemmas of recognition and redistribution in Bolivia. These dilemmas include struggles for gender and ethnic recognition in the context of indigenous legal and political demands, women’s autonomy and self-esteem in light of the feminization of poverty, discussions of unique ethnic and feminine knowledge, gendered coca/cocaine economy, and other identity themes that have grabbed the spotlight against a material background of extreme economic and political inequality.

We would like to see ethnic and gender politics give rise to efforts to transform the structures and mechanisms that create and recreate discriminatory material situations and relations, and at the same time promote ideological positions that contest the stereotyped construction of ethnic and gender others as victims, as homogeneous “pueblos originarios”, as classless individuals, losers in the development game, in need of our help.

But we can’t advance this kind of politics by working solely with women and indigenous people. First of all, it means working with and taking into account all members of the society -- even (and especially) the ones that we label as upper-class white men and women. Secondly, it means working with economic policies; with educational systems and methods; with legislation concerning allocation of resources, family law, labor law, agricultural reforms; with the construction and distribution of knowledge; and other spheres of action. Thirdly, it means that we (social scientists, educators, government employees, development agents) are part of society, and part of the ethnic, gender and class problems that we address. We must recognize our own identities and positions, and explore alternative approaches to understanding the relationships of difference which we live, and which we influence through our work and our daily interactions.

Conclusion

The recent constitutional reforms in Bolivia are, on certain levels, motivated by an understanding of the conceptual and structural issues discussed here, and by a genuine desire for some kind of historical transformation. The new constitution clearly recognizes Bolivia as a multi-cultural and pluri-ethnic nation, and statutes such as Popular Participation, Decentralization and Education Reforms are at some level designed to challenge existing structures and relations of power; to reallocate decisions, resources and knowledge; and to create more equitable relationships and processes. It is also clear that people working in the Subsecretariats of Ethnicity and Gender, as well as in myriad other projects and organizations, sincerely want their efforts to contribute to changes in social and political systems.

Nevertheless, the impact of these inspired efforts is constrained by numerous factors, amongst them, significant breaches between theory and practice, and predominant relations of power. Increasing evidence suggests that the political economic processes advanced in Bolivia in the 1990s have actually exacerbated social and economic inequalities. If this is the case, how can our anthropological understanding be put into action to brake this process?

On one hand, we encourage a more dynamic, context-sensitive approach to ethnicity and gender, inspired by the creative management of identities and relations observed in so many ethnographic studies. On the other hand we fear, with Mark Rogers, that “In demonstrating the constructedness, fluidity, and context-dependence of cultural identities, such analyses seem to loosen culture from its social, spatial, and historical moorings and evoke a world of flux and play, in which ideas and practices circulate freely” (1999:11). The challenge is to frame our analyses in terms of multiply constituted subjects without losing sight of the unequal material and power relations within which their identities evolve. With Rogers, we ask, “how do we carry out analyses that are simultaneously sensitive to the subtleties of cultural processes and to the political realities faced by the groups we work with?” (1999:11)

We have considered the dynamic and fluid nature of gender and ethnicity as observed in everyday ethnographic contexts, the personal and institutional antagonisms that prohibit the construction of an integrated approach to gender and ethnicity, the prevalence of lopsided agent-object relationships that underlie international development politics and NGO programs, legacies of leftist parties’ vanguard traditions, disparities between political philosophies and practical strategies, pressures arising from neoliberal state transformation, and not-so-accidental confusion between goals of recognition and redistribution. All of these factors have something to do with the ways in which gender, ethnicity and class are played out in Bolivian politics, but no one of them, nor the sum of them, holds the answer. We believe that this lies in a greater understanding of the dynamic relationships between these factors.

Starting from reflections on three types of phenomena: ethnographic observations, political philosophies, and development practices, we were hoping to neatly braid these pieces together, like our Mizqueña friend Faustina braids her freshly combed hair, but it didn’t work out that way. These dimensions of life continue to be differentiated in our thoughts and actions, domains separated by lack of understanding and sometimes antagonism, as well as by potentially fertile tensions. We believe that the lack of communion between these elements is an obstacle not only to our understanding, but also to the design and implementation of truly transformative ethnic and gender politics in Bolivia and elsewhere.

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[1] Escuela Andina de Posgrado, Centro Bartolomé de las Casas, Cuzco Perú, Centro de Estudos Superiores Universitarias UMSS, Cochabamba, Bolívia.

[2] An earlier version of this paper was presented by Susan Paulson at LASA 1997, where it benefited from the lively discussion of numerous participants. Later versions of the paper were enriched by comments from Rob Albro, María Lagos, Aurolyn Luykx, Silvia Starkoff, Wendy Weiss, and several anonymous reviewers to whom we are indebted.

[3] In Bolivia, virtually all economic, cultural and environmental policies and programs are construed as “development” efforts. In recent administrations, government ministries and secretariats have included Economic Development, Sustainable Development, Rural Development, Human Development, and for many years the most powerful regional government agencies were called “Regional Development Corporations” (CORDECH, CORDEPAZ, CORDECO, etc.).

[4] Susan Paulson did 20 months of field research in Mizque, Bolivia between 1988 and 1997. Her initial research was funded by Fulbright Hayes Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

[5] Irma Arriagada’s recent article on social policy in Latin America demonstrates that key contradictions in Bolivia’s policies are widespread throughout the region. “Los resultados de las políticas sociales universales desarrolladas en América Latina antes de la crisis de los 80 cuestionan la existencia efectiva del Estado de bienestar. La segmentación de clases, etnias, géneros y grupos impidieron el éxito de aquéllas” (1996:57). Arriagada also demands improved coherence between social and economic policy as an important goal, one which many think recent Bolivian reforms fail to achieve. “Los Estados de la región enfrentan ciertos dilemas dado la aceleración de los cambios, planteando como desafío el diseÒo de políticas públicas que integren lo social con lo económico, flexibles y adaptables a las nuevas dinámicas” (1996:57).

[6] Lagos (1994) assesses struggles for household autonomy and freedom from exploitation in Bolivia, Dover and Rappaport (1996) analyze territorial autonomy in Colombia, and Stephen and Collier (1997:9) deal with contested notions of autonomy in Chiapas.

[7] The Law of Popular Participation (Ley de Participación Popular, No. 1551, April 20, 1994) was developed by the National Secretariat of Popular Participation, and complemented by additional measures put into effect in January 1996 under the Administrative Decentralization Law (Ley de Decentralización Administrativa).

[8] For example, in Chile: SERNAM, Servicio Nacional de la Mujer; in Perú: Ministerio de la Mujer y el Desarrollo Humano; in Ecuador: DINAMU, Dirección Nacional de la Mujer, and in Argentina, Consejo Nacional de la Mujer

[9] In a publicity pamphlet about its programs, the Subsecretariat of Gender lists among its specific objectives the facilitation of women’s access to development services and programs in the areas of health, education, work and rural development (SAG 1995:3). A later document points out that because discrimination against women is multicausal, the SAG has designed actions to fight against it in four important spaces of development: political, economic, social and cultural, concentrating their actions in the areas of women’s rights, health, education, work and productivity, women’s citizenship, communication and culture, as well as the daily violence against women (SAG, 1997:5-6).

[10] The way in which structural discussions of gender equity are facilely reduced to a series of woman-centered actions is demonstrated in the document titled, Introducción de la perspectiva de género en el desarrollo rural, produced by the Subsecretary of Gender together with the National Secretary or Rural Development (SAG 1995). The introduction opens with a structural vision: “Se intenta hacer un balance analitico del trabajo realizada de forma conjunta entre la Secretaría Nacional de Desarrollo Rural y la Subsecretaría de Asuntos de Género durante el segundo semestre de 1994. Se ha realizado esta labor a partir de la Reforma del Poder Ejecutivo y las nuevas leyes que se están implementando, particularmente la Ley de Participación Popular. De esta manera se ha buscado una conexión estructural de las políticas públicas de género con las políticas para el área rural, apuntando a obtener resultados concretos y no aislados” (original emphasis). Nevertheless, a few lines later, the basic criteria for action are defined in explicitly womanist terms, “En primera instancia se define que las mujeres deben ser actoras y gestoras del desarrollo y que las políticas públicas buscan una compatibilización entre las necesidades básicas de las mujeres con sus demandas históricas de autonomía,” followed by five proposed policies for action, all directed exclusively towards women’s issues: respecting women’s autonomy, strenghtening women’s self-esteem, respecting women’s decisions about sexuality and fertility, etc. (1995:1-2).

[11] The Unidad Departamental de Asuntos de Género of Cochabamba carried out Diagnósticos Complementarios de Género in seven communities in the province of Tiraque in 1995-96, and published the results in various reports and popular education pamphlets. While the purported objective of the studies was to provide equal opportunity for men and women through the knowledge of the situations of both, the actual emphasis of the studies was exclusively on describing “...the organization and participation of women...and gathering more information from the women’s point of view” (UDAG-Cochabamba, 1996:1).

[12] One of the main objectives of the Bolivian government’s ethnic politics is the consolidation and recognition of indigenous socio-cultural entities as units for territorial planning and administration. The Popular Participation Law theoretically recognized indigenous groups as legal organizational and territorial units; four indigenous municipalities were established in 1995, and the Subsecretariat of Ethnicity developed numerous projects to support the establishment of more indigenous districts.

[13] In a document related to the Programa Indígena para Tierras Altas, Carmen Medeiros of the Subsecretariat of Ethnicity writes about the difficulty of addressing indigenous/ethnic issues in Andean regions where socio-cultural units are not as clearly identifiable as in the lowlands (Medeiros 1995). Quechuas and Aymaras constitute 60% of the Bolivian population, and live in rural as well as urban areas, often without clear boundaries or corporate group identity.

15 Interview with Luis Ramirez, Subsecretariat of Popular Participation, Cochabamba, 1998.

16 Popular Participation engaged in inter-institutional collaboration with the Subsecretariat of Ethnicity in the elaboration of maps dealing with different notions of territoriality. Ricardo Calla et al (1995) have redrawn a map of Potosí taking into account Ayllu territoriality. It is being used as an official map by the Subsecretariats of Ethnicity and Popular Participation. The Subsecretariat of Gender to create training manuals to monitor and control local political processes were produced collaboratively (Secretaría de Participación Popular 1996:93).

[14] Marcela Revollo, coordinator of gender affairs at the National Secretary of Popular Participation, points out in a final report evaluating their experience with gender that while SAG’s work had positive results at the municipal and communal level, their strategies for transversalizing and institutionalizing gender were too vague to be useful in policy making (1997:12).

[15] For a complex analysis of the process of national class consciousness formation and the central role of miners conceptualized as proletariat, see Zabaleta Mercado (1988, 1990). Sergio Almaraz (1976) provides an apposite analysis of party constitution, class formation and nationalism.

[16] See Calla (1996) for an examination of the secularization and gendering effects of pastoral power as a power/knowledge technique used by the Sandinistas as a vanguard party in government. For a wider analysis of Christianity, Marxism and party building in Nicaragua, see Lancaster (1998) and on the religious basis of party building in Perú see Vega-Centeno (1991).

[17] A term coined by Steve Stern (1995).

[18] According to Kruse (1994), the World Bank grasped NGOs’ utility: relative efficiency, proximity and “knowledge of target populations.” It also understood their political tendencies, and began to classify NGOs as either ‘reliable’ or ‘suspect.’

[19] Kruse explains that the Social Emergency Fund (FSE) was created to absorb the economic “shocks” of the Nueva Política Económica, and sought to stabilize the adjustment program through the creation of massive short-term employment (1994:137). Relationships with the FSE did not compromise NGOs in partisan political terms but it did in other ways, causing tensions which often undermined their relations with the communities and social movements with which they were working.

[20] Gill writes, “Development NGOs in Bolivia are not strongly opposing the neoliberal policies of successive governments. In some cases, this is because a new group of NGOs--particularly those associated with the U.S. Agency for International Development--actively support these policies; in other cases, it is because NGOs are not developing alternatives to neoliberalism” (1997:164).

[21] A similarly skeptical analysis of organizational attempts to represent marginal sectors is developed by Edelman (1991) in the Costa Rican context. Petras (1990) also comments on the shifting bases of the political economy of intellectual production, manifest in an explosion of NGOs and think-tanks throughout Latin America.

[22] Amongst the first party-related NGOs that focused on women conceptualized as victims of class and gender subordination were INEDER (Instituto de Educación para el Desarrollo Rural) and the Oficina Jurídica de la Mujer, linked to the Communist Party, and IFFI (Instituto Femenino de Formación Integral) linked to the Revolutionary Leftist Movement party (Zabala 1995).

[23] Critiques of institutionalization were articulated by people working within NGOs themselves and by marginal groups such as Soberanía y Paz in Cochabamba, who were accused of being spontaneous, anarchic and “anti-democratic.” Ana Botello, a member of Soberania y Paz, described the use of theater to critique institutional co-optation of feminist groups. In a skit prepared for the second Encuentro Feminista in Santa Cruz (1991), NGOs were portrayed as part of capitalism’s diabolical attempt to destroy a long history of local women’s power and knowledge.

[24] In the third Encuentro Feminista (1992) which took place in La Paz, women working through NGOs and with the state were called “las pagadas” (mercenaries), and were vividly critiqued in a poster depicting women spouting political parties of all sorts. The term “gender technocrats” came to refer to so-called institutionalized feminists who became part of the 1993-97 MNR government (Galindo 1997).

[25] Throughout the first half of the 1980’s, Xavier Albó, Victor Hugo Cárdenas, Silvia Rivera, Ricardo Calla and others developed interesting critiques and political proposals dealing with the intersection of class and ethnicity in state formation.

[26] The consolidation of CSUTCB involved a definitive break of the military-peasant pact established by Dictator Rene Barrientos in the mid 60’s.

[27] Territory and Dignity became the central demand of the Eastern lowland people in their 1990 march toward the capital city of La Paz where they were received by government officials and popular organizations of Qhechua and Aymara people.

[28] Linda Seligman’s (1993, 1997, forthcoming) work on market women explores the paradox of upward mobility, while Rob Albro’s article in this issue, and Albro 1997, offer vivid detail on chola/mestizo politics.

[29] In this issue, Albro argues that despite Remedios Loza’s high profile political career, we should not hastily assume that political fortunes of popular women have improved significantly. Rather, the “chola” has become indispensable as political symbolic capital for men, who are looking for avenues of legitimation in an increasingly populist climate. As thus, the chola literally embodies the regional intransigence of “tradition” itself in her unmistakable “social skin” (Turner 1980).

[30] Structural transformations implemented by the MNR have been interpreted as a sort of desrevolución through which Victor Paz Estenssoro and Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada have been able to reverse the ideological cycle of “revolutionary nationalism” and begin another ideological cycle dominated by neoliberalism and capitalist economic development (Yaksic and Tapia 1997).

[31] Structural adjustment implementation has been officially justified as an inevitable, efficient and technical solutions to these debacles. Veltmeyer, Petras and Vieux (1996), however, affirm that far from being the only possible savior of human kind, neoliberal reforms are part of an ingeniously disguised project designed to serve the interests of a particular class --and not a marginal one.

[32] Naila Kabeer writes, “It is the claim of liberal theory that all men are equal because they possess this essentially human ability to reason.  Liberal feminists extended this claim for equality to women on the grounds that they, too, are rational beings, but have been denied the opportunity to exercise fully their rationality because of constricting socialization processes” (1994:27).

[33] Most organizations we know who work with “ethno-development” have defined themselves and their work in opposition to and in critique of dominant development models and agencies. In Cochabamba, CENDA (Centro de Comunicación y Desarrollo Andino) has been one of the few NGOs exploring the notion of ethnodevelopment. In Chuquisaca, ASUR (Asociación de Antropólogos del Sur), works with Jalk’a and Tarabuco communities to research and support weaving traditions and promote projects that involve local weavers in the planning, production and commercialization of these weavings.

[34] Co-author Susan Paulson served as moderator and discussant in this seminar, and has written extensively about the gender vs. Andinista debate  (Paulson 1996a, 1996c and 1998).

[35] Members of this group have recently formed the Centro de Aprendizaje Intercultural working in activities such as translating Wolfgang Sachs’ (1997) The Development Dictionary, a Guide to Knowledge as Power.

[36] The introduction of poverty as a category to be discussed in relation to gender or ethnicity exemplifies the way target populations and “their problems” are constructed. Rahnema (1997) points out that the global discourse on poverty includes different perceptions of the problem but focuses overwhelmingly on economic growth and prosperity as a solution. This means, according to Rahnema, that the consolidation and strengthening of government structures and economic institutions at national and international levels is considered the only way to eradicate poverty.

[37] Carmen Medeiros (1995) quotes a participant in a workshop organized by the Subsecretary of Ethnicity in Challapata: “Until now they have called us peasants and there were policies directed to peasants, now they speak of our ethnicity, I would like to know what kinds of things will change with the use of that little word.” Medeiros affirms that this question reveals participants’ perception of ethnicity as a political process through which the state constructs the identities of its subjects.

[38] These agencies include the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Autoridad Canadiense para el Desarrollo Internacional (ACDI), Autoridad Sueca para el Desarrollo Internacional (ASDI), Embajada Real de los Paises Bajos, Organizaciˆn Holandesa para la Cooperación Internacional al Desarrollo (NOBIV), Cooperación Técnica Alemana (GTZ), Cooperación Técnica Suiza (COTESU), Cooperación Danesa (DANIDA) and others.

[39] This observation is based on experiences of both authors, who have evaluated, critiqued and provided conceptual support to gender and development projects in numerous Latin American countries.