Indigenous Intellectuals and the
Politics of Decolonial Knowledge: New Anti-Colonial Paradigms in AbyaYala
Waskar Ari (2014). Earth
Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia’s Indigenous Intellectuals.
Durham NC: Duke University Press, 280 pages.
Claudia
Zapata (2014). Intelectuales indígenas en Ecuador, Bolivia y Chile:
Diferencia, colonialismo y anticolonialismo. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala,
445 pages.
Sebastián
López Vergara
University of Washington
Ari’s Earth
Politics and Zapata’s Intelectuales indígenas en Ecuador, Bolivia y
Chile propose critical approaches to the study of intellectuals,
indigeneity, and colonialism as they creatively intersect Indigenous and Latin
American Studies. The figure of the indigenous intellectual serves to
foreground indigenous cultural and political production to rethink colonialism as
a continuing form of power. In fact, by underscoring how indigenous
intellectuals and collectives across different periods and regions in the
Americas have produced a radical anti-colonial tradition of thought through
writing, historiography, culture, and politics, these works present different indigenous
critiques of colonialism as one of the structuring technologies of
dehumanization that subtend the constitution of liberal nation-states by excluding
indigenous societies.
Organized
around seven chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, Chilean historian
Claudia Zapata’s Intelectuales indígenas en Ecuador, Bolivia y Chile offers
a vast critical survey on the social history of Quichua, Aymara, and Mapuche
indigenous intellectuals in relation to hemispheric and global anticolonial
political movements occurring since the 1970s. Zapata explains that while the
figure of the indigenous intellectual has gained more visibility in the last
decades due to the more widespread presence of indigenous students in higher
education institutions, indigenous politicians and activists in the spheres of
political representations, as well as indigenous workers in metropolitan
cities, scholarly studies have not reflected on these social changes. The
historian argues that the omission of these processes and social formations in
the academia are directly related to the essentialist approaches to studying indigenous
societies in the Americas. This is mainly because the ubiquitous rubrics of acculturation
prioritize rurality, orality, and the fulfillment of traditional identities
over their coexistence with indigenous writing, urban diasporas, and
educational and political projects that indigenous societies have proposed in
the past century.[1] Zapata,
thus, advances a definition of indigeneity as a “political” category by means
of which a relationship of power/subordination is articulated. There, culture
–the undeniable diversity of the past and the present, yet with different forms
and contents– is one of the main axes, though not the only one, that has been
ideologically used to create a historical hegemony since the European conquest,
thus creating an inferior and less prestigious social positionality for these
collectives” (p. 22).[2]
In Chapter 2,
Claudia Zapata outlines the figure of the indigenous intellectual in relation
to discussions about knowledge production, postcoloniality, and the uneven
development of educational projects in the Americas. Zapata distinguishes
indigenous intellectuals from traditional or elitist intellectuals in that the
former –as a Mapuche, Aymara, or Quichua intellectual– is a “situated” subject
who “politically and culturally anchors their intellectual practices” in an indigenous
social collectivity, whereas the latter elitist case assumes “a social autonomy”
to produce supposedly “universal knowledge” (pp. 69, 67).[3]
Zapata points
out that the access of indigenous intellectuals to “Western” disciplinary
knowledges is mediated by an apolitical commitment to their indigenous collective.
For this reason, the author notes that the figure of the indigenous intellectual
is not new, since traditional indigenous intellectuals have always existed and
developed knowledges from within, in close relationship with their communities
and members. Indeed, the indigenous subjects studied by the social historian
advance the work of traditional indigenous knowledge by “legitimizing knowledges
orally created and transmitted, through kinship and communities (p. 71).
Moreover, the author states that indigenous intellectuals in the Americas acknowledge
their social positionality as oppressed subjects part of an indigenous society
equally excluded within national states, but whose subaltern identity is a consequence
of historical processes that the indigenous intellectuals attempt to solve by
participating “in a historical project of liberation” with their labor (pp. 72,
77).
The second
part of the book provides a historiographical account of the complex relationships
between the Ecuadorian, Bolivian, and Chilean nation-states, their expansive,
inclusionary, yet contradictory educational systems, and different indigenous
societies. On its third part, the book studies the intellectual practices of
three indigenous groups: (1) the Taller Cultural Causanacunchic (TCC), a
Quichua intellectual group from the Otovalo area of Imbabura, in Ecuador; (2)
the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), a mostly Aymara coalition of
intellectual from La Paz; and (3) the Centro de Documentación Mapuche Liwen (CEDM-Liwen),
a collective of Mapuche social scientists and cultural critics.
Among the
many topics and interventions elaborated by Aymara, Quichua, and Mapuche
intellectuals, Zapata underscores in Chapter 7 how colonialism and
anti-colonialism have been reworked as socio-political rubrics to critically examine
subordination and power. Intellectuals such as Sergio Caniuqueo (Mapuche), Luis
Macas (Quichua), and Roberto Choque (Aymara) understand the “colonial situation”
as a collective experience of oppression that calls for a different
periodization. This is because indigenous societies have experienced a
continuous and systemic exclusion not only during Spanish colonialism, but also
by Latin-American nation-states, in a different way. For this reason, the indigenous
intellectuals studied by Zapata understand the differential violence against
indigenous societies of Latin- American liberal and neoliberal nationstates in
terms of a “colonial situation”, which represents political conflicts with indigenous
collectives as an “Indian problem” (p. 306).
Colonialism,
then, is not a periodization. Rather, it works as a structuring feature of
Latin America’s nation-states that forges constitutive asymmetries between a
“national society” –whose status is granted by rights and access– and excluded
indigenous societies. Zapata highlights how, through the assemblage of writing
and political practice, indigenous intellectuals in AbyaYala[4]
build anticolonial projects towards decolonization in direct relation with
indigenous collectives (pp. 349-68). In this radical indigenous tradition,
anti-colonialism becomes the political and intellectual articulator that revises
the past, creates socio-political memory, and raises ethnic (and not only class-)
awareness in order to envision a decolonized world and build “identity, memory,
and dignity”, as Mapuche thinker Pablo Mariman would write (p. 359).
A more
particular political and intellectual formation is addressed by Bolivian historian
Waskar Ari in Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia’s Indigenous
Intellectuals. In six chapters, Ari narrates the history of the rural indigenous
political movement Alcaldes Mayores Particulares (AMP) focusing on four of its
main indigenous intellectuals: Toribio Medina, Gregorio Titiriku, Melitón Gallardo,
and Andrés Jach’aqullu between 1920 and 1960, in addition to a conclusion superficially
addressing Morales’ Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra. Examining the AMP
movement, Ari presents earth politics as the political project that has been
constructed and is constantly rearticulated by indigenous intellectuals in
Bolivia from the aftermaths of the 1874 Agrarian Reform to a few decades following
the National Revolution of 1952.
Drawing from
the apoderados and caciques’ political practices and discourses,
Ari argues that earth politics was a decolonial ideology shaped by the AMP that
opposed liberal and Western conceptions of land and property because it
advanced and proposed earth as “land, territory, nation, faith,
religion, rights, and Indianness” (p. 4). An inextricable practice, understanding,
and relationship to earth, this politics was contemporaneous to indigenismo;
however, in contradistinction to elite appropriations of indigenous cultures
and practices that understood indigenous peoples in opposition to modernity,
earth politics proposed “a unique project of decolonization based on the
reinterpretation and re-elaboration of colonial law” (p. 4).
In Chapter 2,
“Nation Making and the Genealogy of the AMP Indigenous Activists,” Ari
emphasizes the long genealogy of indigenous politics in Bolivia by tracing the
origins of the AMP to the organization of caciques, alcaldes, or mallkus
after the passing of the 1874 Agrarian Reform. In doing this, the author
deepens the historical trajectory of indigenous radical tradition pioneered by
the Taller de Historia Oral Andina with focus on the post- 1952 National
Revolution, as this chapter stresses indigenous alternatives to Bolivian
elite’s projects of liberalization of the country (e.g. Rivera Cusicanqui,
1984). Following the passing of the Agrarian Reform, the notions of private
property and individual rights as structuring technologies of a Bolivian
liberal subject were violently imposed over “all forms of collective Indian
existence, including the Indian ethnic organization of ayllus” (Ari, 2014,
p. 32). An early network of caciques sought to defend communal
indigenous land with colonial property titles as well as to shape Aymara
nationalism. This meant that Aymara rural communities envisioned the creation
of “their own country after the [1888-1889] civil war” as a political solution
to the severance of ethnic communal lands and relationships among Aymara
regions (p. 39). Unfortunately, the project did not prosper, although it did
plant the decolonial seeds for the AMP to carry out re-appropriation of
colonial Leyes de Indios to create the Indian Law.
Chapter 4,
“Against Cholification”, explores the AMP’s decolonial project of an Indian Law.
Ari considers this law as a decolonial strategy for autonomy created by Aymara collectivities,
as it was “a discourse that addressed dimensions of racialization by responding
to the dehumanization of indigenous peoples” as well as it advanced “a more
holistic sense of sumaqamaña (living well)” through “colonial law in
order to explicitly reject the republican law” (p. 97). In fact, re-elaboration
of colonial Leyes de Indios by AMP apoderados, such as Toribio Miranda,
Gregorio Titiriku, and Andrés Jach’aqullu, advanced an autonomous indigenous
politics against the Bolivian nation-state due to the colonial legal recognition
of Aymara territories before the Bolivian republic. For example, as part of the
Indian law, Miranda encouraged indigenous peons not to pay their rents and
tributes to the haciendas, but instead perform indigenous religious
practices and offer payments to Pachamama (Mother Earth) because “pachacuti
[the time of great change] was coming” for the Indians (p. 74). AMP’s Indian
law understood that Aymaras, Quechua, and Urus, as well as peones hacendados,
were the puchus (vestiges) of the first Bolivia. This meant they had to practice
Aymara religion and pay tributes to Pachamama and Achachillas in
order to re-establish reciprocal relations with the earth, and to reject
stipulations of liberal property, rights, and law as well as white and cholo
dress codes and religion.
In this
juncture, the boycott to the hacienda system and the refusal to comply
with liberal Bolivian juridical stipulations were part of AMP’s decolonial
earth politics that organically combined religion, oral traditions, cultural
practices, and a radical interpretation of colonial legal texts in order to
re-imagine ethnic diversity for the creation of an autonomous Indian Republic,
as Ari explains.
The books
reviewed offer insights to think the important tradition of indigenous decolonial
political thought and praxis in the Americas. These traditions have not only
contested the rigidity of distinctions between written and oral, urban and
rural, modern and non-modern categories, but also have thoroughly criticized
the liberal and neoliberal nation-state and their economic developmentalism as structured
by a colonial power that further dispossesses indigenous peoples. At times when
we see the limits of the “Pink Tide” progressive political project – especially
in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian cases– in their continuous deployment of
militarized violence against indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, who oppose
and challenge the extractivist matrix of the national economy, the long history
of indigenous political movements and intellectuals across AbyaYala leads
the way towards proposing genuine grassroot projects to confront segregation
and build liberation for the future. Students of Latin-American, Indigenous,
Cultural, Decolonial, and Postcolonial Studies will find innovative approaches
to political history and social movements.
Bibliography
Comunidad de
Historia Mapuche (2012). TaIñ Fijke Xipa Rakizuameluwun: Historia,
Colonialismo, y Resistencia desde el país Mapuche. Temuco: Ediciones Comunidad
de Historia Mapuche, 366 pages.
_____(2015). Awükan
Ka Kuxankan Zugu Wajmapu Mew: Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu. Temuco: Ediciones
Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 331 pages.
Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui (1984). Oprimidos pero no vencidos, luchas del campesinado Aymara
y Quechwa de Bolivia, 1900-1980. La Paz: HISBOL-CSUTCB.
[1] See, for instance, the two volumes of essays Comunidad de Historia Mapuche—TaIñ Fijke Xipa Rakizuameluwun: Historia, Colonialismo, y Resistencia desde el país Mapuche (2012) and Awükan Ka Kuxankan Zugu Wajmapu Mew: Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu (2015)—for a collective of intellectuals that brilliantly theorizes and examines Mapuche politics and knowledges, in addition to addressing Chilean and Argentine colonialities across periods and spheres.
[2] “Lo indígena como una categoría política en torno a la cual se articula una relación de poder/subordinación, donde el factor cultural (la diversidad innegable en el ayer y en el ahora, aunque con distintas formas y contenidos) es uno de los elementos, fundamental por cierto pero no el único, que ha sido utilizado ideológicamente en la construcción de una hegemonía a partir de la conquista europea (…) [que] creó el lugar de inferioridad y escaso prestigio en que se ha situado a estos colectivos.”
[3] “Vale decir, que los intelectuales indígenas son aquí intelectuales situado como lo indica la necesidad de agregar la palabra ‘indígena,’ que actúa como anclaje político-cultural.” “Los intelectuales que los asume como un grupo social autónomo… que produce un conocimiento igualmente elitista y universal.”
[4] AbyaYala is the native term proposed by Aymara leader Taki Mamani in 1980s to refer to the Americas. It means “Land in its full maturity” in Kuna language.