Performing Indigeneity in Bolivia: The Struggle Over the TIPNIS

Abstract

Addressing how indigeneity in Bolivia is actualised in social mobilisation as well as by the Morales regime, Fabricant and Postero’s chapter examines the different ways in which indigeneity is performed and represented. Focusing on protests against the construction of a highway through indigenous territories, they consider how performance can play a central role in what they call moral reflection about indigeneity, gender, and the articulation of alternative social worlds. Using the concept of ‘ethical substance’, the authors explore how, through performance, indigeneity serves as a central site of moral reflection and conduct. In so doing, they show how protests and performance also call into question the legitimacy of the Morales government’s claim to stand for all indigenous peoples. The chapter demonstrates how distinct actors can claim access to indigeneity, and that multiple actors perform indigeneity to push through their own ethical and political agendas.

From ‘beasts of burden’ to ‘backbone of society’: The fiscal forging of a new Bolivian middle class

“…Self-identifying as indigenous Aymara, Morales pledged to initiate ‘the process of change’ ( el proceso de cambio ), ending centuries of oppression and racism, securing indigenous autonomies, and protecting the country’s natural resources while exploiting them in an equitable manner to expand national industry and public services. MAS’s stated aim was that it would bring indigenous peoples and their ethics to the centre of the nation (Fabricant and Postero, 2019: 250).…”

Living on a Time Bomb: Local Negotiations of Oil Extraction in a Mexican Community

“…Those studies illustrate the importance of the spatial dimension of resource extraction, while emphasizing space and its limitation as the outcome of social negotiation processes. Suitable examples for that are the territorial struggles of indigenous people, who managed to establish their status as "indigenous" in the national legal framework and thus manifest their rights to certain spaces (e.g., Fabricant and Postero 2019;Nolte and Schilling-Vacafl or 2012;Schilling-Vacafl or and Flemmer 2015).…”

Neo-extractivist controversies in Bolivia: indigenous perspectives on global norms

“…In the resolution (001/2017) of the 12 th Extraordinary Meeting of Indigenous Nations and Peoples of the TIPNIS (25–28 August 2017) that calls on international institutions to act, indigenous TIPNIS communities explicitly evoke the concepts ‘ethnocide’ and ‘biocide’ in the context of the government's approval of the highway project – a last attempt to use international law as an urgent safeguarding mechanism. However, linking indigenous demands with environmental justice concerns, also on the part of environmentalists and NGOs (Fabricant and Postero, forthcoming), comes with the danger of wrongly attributed agency: the Morales government has repeatedly seen NGOs and environmentalist organisations as the main forces behind indigenous mobilisations absolving the latter from genuine decision-making capacities.…”