Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia

Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia
Author: Marcia Stephenson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2010-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292786980

In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."

After Servitude

After Servitude
Author: Dr. Mareike Winchell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2022-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520386450

How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude explores how agrarian engineers, Indigenous farmers, Mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from Mestizo elites and, when that fails, through acts of labor militancy. Against institutional faith in property ownership as a means to detach land from people and present from past, the kin of former masters and servants alike have insisted that ethical debts from earlier racial violence stretch across epochs and formal land sales. What emerges is a vision of justice grounded in popular demands that wealth remain beholden to the region’s agrarian past. By tracing Ayopayans’ active efforts to contend with servitude’s long shadow, Mareike Winchell illuminates the challenges that property confronts as both an extractive paradigm and a means of historical redress.

Intimate Indigeneities

Intimate Indigeneities
Author: Andrew Canessa
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2012-11-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822352672

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

A Revolution for Our Rights

A Revolution for Our Rights
Author: Laura Gotkowitz
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2008-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822390124

A Revolution for Our Rights is a critical reassessment of the causes and significance of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Historians have tended to view the revolution as the result of class-based movements that accompanied the rise of peasant leagues, mineworker unions, and reformist political projects in the 1930s. Laura Gotkowitz argues that the revolution had deeper roots in the indigenous struggles for land and justice that swept through Bolivia during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging conventional wisdom, she demonstrates that rural indigenous activists fundamentally reshaped the military populist projects of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing, she chronicles a hidden rural revolution—before the revolution of 1952—that fused appeals for equality with demands for a radical reconfiguration of political power, landholding, and rights. Gotkowitz combines an emphasis on national political debates and congresses with a sharply focused analysis of Indian communities and large estates in the department of Cochabamba. The fragmented nature of Cochabamba’s Indian communities and the pioneering significance of its peasant unions make it a propitious vantage point for exploring contests over competing visions of the nation, justice, and rights. Scrutinizing state authorities’ efforts to impose the law in what was considered a lawless countryside, Gotkowitz shows how, time and again, indigenous activists shrewdly exploited the ambiguous status of the state’s pro-Indian laws to press their demands for land and justice. Bolivian indigenous and social movements have captured worldwide attention during the past several years. By describing indigenous mobilization in the decades preceding the revolution of 1952, A Revolution for Our Rights illuminates a crucial chapter in the long history behind present-day struggles in Bolivia and contributes to an understanding of indigenous politics in modern Latin America more broadly.

Peruvian Street Lives

Peruvian Street Lives
Author: Linda J. Seligmann
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2022-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252054229

For more than twenty years, Linda J. Seligmann walked the streets of Peru in city and countryside alike, talking to the women who work in the informal and open-air markets in Cuzco's Andean highlands. Her combination of ethnographic analysis, insightful and human vignettes, and superb photographs offers a humane yet incisive portrait of the women's lives against the backdrop of globalization and other powerful forces. In Peruvian Street Lives, Seligmann argues that the sometimes invisible and informal economic, social, and political networks market women establish may appear disorderly and chaotic, but in fact often keep dysfunctional economies and corrupt bureaucracies from utterly destroying the ability of citizens to survive from day to day. Seligmann asks why the constructive efforts of market women to make a living provoke such negative social perceptions from some members of Peruvian society, who see them as symbols and actual catalysts of social disorder. At the same time, Seligmann shows how market women eke out a living, combat discrimination, and transgress racial and gender ideologies within the rich and expressive cultural traditions they have developed.

Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia

Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia
Author: Kyunghee Pyun
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2018-10-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319971999

This edited volume on radical dress reforms in East Asia takes a fresh look at the symbols and languages of modernity in dress and body. Dress reform movements around the turn of the twentieth century in the region have received little critical attention as a multicultural discourse of labor, body, gender identity, colonialism, and government authority. With contributions by leading experts of costume/textile history of China, Korea, and Japan, this book presents up-to-date scholarship using diverse methodologies in costume history, history of consumption, and international trade. Thematically organized into sections exploring the garments and uniforms, accessories, fabrics, and fashion styles of Asia, this edited volume offers case studies for students and scholars in an ever-expanding field of material culture including, but not limited to, economic history, visual culture, art history, history of journalism, and popular culture. Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia stimulates further research on the impact of modernity and imperialism in neglected areas such as military uniform, school uniform, women’s accessories, hairstyles, and textile trade.

The Woman in the Violence

The Woman in the Violence
Author: M. Cristina Alcalde
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010-12-10
Genre: FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
ISBN: 0826517315

Combating abuse and violence in a South American capital

The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader

The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader
Author: Ileana Rodríguez
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2001-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822327127

DIVArgues for the saliency of the category of the subaltern over that of class./div

Unequal Cures

Unequal Cures
Author: Ann Zulawski
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2007-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822390027

Unequal Cures illuminates the connections between public health and political change in Bolivia from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the country was a political oligarchy, until the eve of the 1952 national revolution that ushered in universal suffrage, agrarian reform, and the nationalization of Bolivia’s tin mines. Ann Zulawski examines both how the period’s major ideological and social transformations changed medical thinking and how ideas of public health figured in debates about what kind of country Bolivia should become. Zulawski argues that the emerging populist politics of the 1930s and 1940s helped consolidate Bolivia’s medical profession and that improved public health was essential to the creation of a modern state. Yet she finds that at mid-century, women, indigenous Bolivians, and the poor were still considered inferior and consequently received often inadequate medical treatment and lower levels of medical care. Drawing on hospital and cemetery records, censuses, diagnoses, newspaper accounts, and interviews, Zulawski describes the major medical problems that Bolivia faced during the first half of the twentieth century, their social and economic causes, and efforts at their amelioration. Her analysis encompasses the Rockefeller Foundation’s campaign against yellow fever, the almost total collapse of Bolivia’s health care system during the disastrous Chaco War with Paraguay (1932–35), an assessment of women’s health in light of their socioeconomic realities, and a look at Manicomio Pacheco, the national mental hospital.