Description
Book SynopsisVeronika Groke interrogates the concept of the comunidad indígena (indigenous community) and the role it plays within contemporary Bolivian discourse by examining its relation to the history and social life of a Guaraní community in Bolivia. While this concept is firmly embedded in contemporary discourse, different people and interest groups have varying understandings of its meaning and purpose. By showing the comunidad (community) to be a multifaceted complex of diverging and sometimes competing ideas, desires, and agendas, Grokes provides new insight into the actions and motivations of the various vested interest groups and highlights the political tensions related to culture, identity, and development.
Trade ReviewThis fine-grained ethnography follows a group of formerly captive Guaraní as they make a new indigenous "community" in the Bolivian Chaco. Groke traces the many constructed meanings of the term ‘community,’ showing how it takes form through a mix of histories, memories, myths, and discourses, as well as the lived experiences of kinship and reciprocal sociality. In a masterful examination of politics at multiple scales, Groke shows how the Guaraní negotiate development agencies’ aims to "develop" them and regional elites’ efforts to coop them, in the process maintaining Guaraní notions of freedom and mobility.
-- Nancy Postero, University of California, San Diego
Table of ContentsPart I: The Comunidad in History — History in the Comunidad
Chapter 1. Cañón de Segura and Its Histories
Chapter 2. ‘Tenemos Nuestra Historia’: A Case of History Objectified
Part II: ‘This Is a Free Community’: Comunarios’ Ideas about ‘Comunidad’
Chapter 3. Tranquility Beats Reciprocity? Of Shifting Meanings and Enduring Significance
Chapter 4. The Emergent Community
Part III: Multiple Perspectives: Negotiating Different Meanings of ‘Comunidad’
Chapter 5. (N)GOs and the Economy of Proyectos
Chapter 6. Beautiful Culture, ‘Shitty Indians’: The Comunidades in Karai and Guaraní Identity Politics
Chapter 7. Changing Alliances: The Elusive Position of Guaraní Comunidades in Local and Regional Politics
