Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism

With Dilemmas of Modernity, Mark Goodale intends a critical ethnography of key ideas that have shaped the unfolding history of Bolivia. These cluster roughly under the rubric of modernity, approached by Goodale as a pattern of intentions that informs the Bolivian national project and the sorts of civic subjects that project at once produces and requires. This is a thoughtful ethnography of law that reframes the category in two ways. On the one hand, Goodale presents a robust sense of law as never merely about the practices or written codes explicitly known as "law." Law, in his treatment, is always a cloud of intersecting discourses and practices, operating on multiple levels, and, in a country like Bolivia, inseparable from liberal imaginings of a postcolonial destiny. This is the second framing, as law is functionally approached as a shifting field of discourses and practices that participate in the imagining and realization of a Bolivian modernity. The very category of law here implies a genealogy of a relatively coherent liberal modernity.

Goodale anchors his discussion in the provincial highland town of Sacaca. Here is the capillary endpoint of the classically understood legal system, a space informed by codified norms and values of Bolivian jurisprudence, their vernacular realization by participants at the lower rungs of the system, and the various social mores of day-to-day life for indigenous and mestizo Bolivians of the region. Across this cuts a set of transnational discourses, of which discussions of human rights promoted by development NGOs are of particular interest to Goodale. Goodale offers us law as a lens through which to view this complex cascade of norms and ideals. Within this cascade, different actors participate in a shared or commensurably variant modernity, approached from different points of purchase in Bolivian and transnational society. In this regard, the law provides an encompassing framework for indigenous and nonindigenous, elite and subaltern actors; it also provides threads of continuity across a national history portrayed by some as marked by revolutionary ruptures and encounters between radically disparate sociocultural orders.

These are salutary points for research on Bolivia, and the book is salted with insightful observations that will ring true to many familiar with the region, particularly about the complex social and political spaces of provincial towns and about the points of continuity between the government of Evo Morales and the neoliberal past from which he is said to be making a radical break. Yet Goodale is more adept at saying these things than at showing them. Readers looking for a more empirical or contextualized rendering of law on the ground in Bolivia will find the pickings slim. A handful of vignettes and a few tables detailing kinds of legal cases anchor an ambitiously wide-ranging work. After two chapters devoted to establishing his approach to law, the third chapter turns to sketching the actors and institutions that compose the legal universe of the province of Alonso de Ibañez, where Sacaca is found. Subsequent chapters take up the experiences of indigenous women who might look to the courts for rights and possibilities not always available to them in their daily village life, discourses of human rights as advanced by an NGO-supported legal services center in the region, and ideals of development as represented by the personnel and practices of transnational development NGOs in the area.

This is a promising set of themes, but the analysis is not always adequate to the ambitions of the discussion. Goodale makes note of pinup erotica on the wall of the office of the judge who might be hearing cases brought by indigenous women; the formulaic agenda for an NGO-led human rights workshop: and the television staples of the pensiones at the transnational crossroads of Sacaca's main plaza, including the Simpsons and professional wrestling. These are evocative traces of the fields of tension he wants to examine. However, while we know why Goodale found them striking, we learn little about the perspectives of the wide range of other participants in these encounters with law and liberalism. This is particularly frustrating in the context of the very expansive understanding of the law being advanced here. With law—"[t]he ill-definable sum total of all of this complicated normativity" (p. 76)—potentially about everything, it is sometimes difficult to see the contours of his intended intervention in legal studies or to appreciate what this newly ground lens of the law brings to our understandings of Bolivia.

Though the writing is quite dense in places, the tone of the book is engaging and the issues raised are important and far reaching. Scholars and students familiar with the region or with the various bodies of literature he grapples with will appreciate many points of the discussion. As a gateway to Andean/Bolivian studies, legal studies, or the anthropology of modernity, however, Dilemmas of Modernity, offers little solid to grasp.