This thesis focuses on people with flexible identities and mobile lives, who live precariously between country and city. In order to fully understand the lives of people in 1
'Los pueblos secundarios han quedado debilitados. Con la Reforma muchas de las facilidades y servicios que antes eran monopolio exclusivo de estos pueblos se han expandido a areas rurales circundantes. El caso más importante es el de las escuelas y ferias. Pero anundan los ejemplos en detalles como el poder producir y vender chicha en escala, tener camiones pequeñas tiendas, sanitarios, recibir frecuentamente visitas del cura etc […] Los que salen perdiendo en todo este proceso son los pueblos secundarios que, además de perder el monopolio de servicios que aseguraba su existencia a expensas del campo, no han logrado encontrar ocupaciones sustitutas. Con todo, ahora hay mayor concentración de
this subgroup, a flexible fieldwork between country and city was necessary, and an understanding that identities were forged not just in the community but also in rented and shared houses in the town, on the road and in peri-urban districts around the city. This necessarily involves critical consideration of where the 'field' is and how inhabitation of, or journey through a place can or must be understood. Gupta and Ferguson, in their discussion of the centrality of 'the field' and fieldwork to ethnographic enquiry, comment on how anthropological fieldwork must adapt to a changing and increasingly globalised world in which populations are more mobile than ever before. However, using multi-sited fieldwork still falls short of the task of capturing the ways in which
tapacareño identity (and other identities such as that of the civil servant) is constituted,
which is often on the road and in transit between locations. The constant movement of
tapacareños between different places, and the ways in which former townspeople retain a
sense of themselves as tapacareños despite having lived away from the town for many years, gives rise to a need for a more elastic understanding of 'the local' and, I argue, a de-territorialised understanding of peasantry, at least in the Cochabamba highlands, given that the separation of indigenous tapacareños from their lands when they travel to carry out migrant labour does not denude them of their ethnic and local identity. This call for a new understanding of 'the local' fits into a larger critique of the embeddedness of anthropological work in a particular place, most notably in the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Trouillot claims that the postmodern approach to field and location in the work of Gupta and Ferguson and other products of the 'literary turn' such as Marcus and Fisher (1986) do not adequately address the way in which location and the field of study define each other. 'The problem is not fieldwork per se, but the taking for granted of localities upon which the fetishization of a certain kind of fieldwork was built and the relationship
2003: 125). A holistic picture of the composition of tapacareño society must necessarily include not just the town but also the rural villages which surround it, the municipal government office in the city and a significant part of the population concentrated for half of the year in a periurban neighbourhood, several hours' travel away. The distinctiveness of the ways in which people feel and express their own sense of themselves as
tapacareño is taken here as illustrative of wider dynamics of class, ethnicity and
economic inequality rather than distinction for distinction's sake.
Trouillot's critiques are echoed by Michael Kearney (1996) in his exhaustive deconstruction of the category of 'peasant', whose formation he relates to changing schools of thought in anthropology itself as well as wider political developments such as the waning of the Cold War. Like Trouillot, Kearney sees the construction of peasantry as object of study as tied up with the dichotomisation of human life between an idealised communitarian past and an unstable, individualising modern present – what Trouillot would call the relationship between researchers from the 'North Atlantic countries' and their search for a 'savage slot' in which to place studied ethnic Others (Trouillot 2003: 16). Kearney, too, argues for a deterritorialised understanding of peasantry, influenced by the regular migration and participation in market systems by the peasants he has lived with most in rural Mexico. He emphasises the imposition of discourses of backwardness connected to centre-periphery relations.
Recent ethnographies of particular places in Bolivia stress the twin themes in this thesis of movement and intimacy: Andrew Canessa, who has carried out intermittent fieldwork in the highlands of La Paz for over a decade, writes primarily about the details of everyday life and the insight they provide into discourses of indigeneity and nationalism:
sex, food, domestic violence, schooling, and work. His contemporary Stuart Rockefeller, working in Potosí, carried out fieldwork on the move as well as in the community, looking at movement in agricultural practice and land management but also migration between Quirpini, San Lucas and Buenos Aires. Rockefeller mentions the town of San Lucas in passing, describing a social vista very similar to that of Tapacarí, writing of a dwindling hereditary elite who engaged in paternalistic relations with the peasants around the town:
Although the position of the town elite was steadily weakening, they still occupied the centre of a regional system geared towards reproducing their control. Campesinos, especially those of the valley, had little choice in living their lives but to play to elite strength allowing the elite to enrich themselves while entrenching their position (Rockefeller 2010: 179).
Elements of both Rockefeller and Canessa's methodological and theoretical approaches are seen in the present thesis; like Canessa, I privilege the small stories of everyday life as a way of understanding large questions of ethnicity, political engagement and power. Like Rockefeller I suggest that movement is critical to understanding the processes by which people develop senses of themselves and develop economic strategies for survival, and find de Certeau's idea of 'tactics' for resistance to be useful when thinking about marginalised actors finding creative ways to combat their own oppression.
Together with Rockefeller this thesis provides some background to the fact of large-scale migration from Bolivia, heading overseas. Taking the same starting point of assuming the central importance of movement to Andean cosmologies and memory practices, I also use
the template of the 'vertical archipelago' suggested by Murra (1956) in his account of how Inca and pre-Inca civilisations used distributed and discontiguous settlements to maximally exploit different ecological niches. This model has its roots in deep ethnohistorical accounts but is also adaptable for understanding the effects of a natural-resource-driven economy which goes through cycles of boom and bust and is sensitive to commodity prices, prompting a high degree of mobility in households.