Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneity, and the State in the Andes

4. The Choreography of Territory, Agency, and Cultural Survival: The Vicuña Hunting Ritual “Chuqila”

Territory, Agency, and Cultural Survival / 81 4 The Choreography of Territory, Agency, and Cultural Survival The Vicuña Hunting Ritual “Chuqila” Marcia Stephenson Recent studies on the nation have called attention to the importance of the performative as a way of understanding how national narratives generate meaning and self-legitimation . Drawing from Judith Butler’s work on the performance of gender norms, Joanne P. Sharp argues that the nation is not founded on a single “originary moment or culturally distinct essence” (1996:98). Instead, the nation is created through the process of reiteration of its symbols and narratives. Through ritualized repetition, narratives of the nation become both normative and “natural.” They can be mobilized to incorporate sameness and exclude otherness by fixing the limits of a particular signifying space and transforming the “difference of space” into the “Sameness of Time,” “Territory into Tradition,” and the “People into One” (Sharp 1996:98; Bhabha 1990:300). Counternarratives performatively intervene in and disrupt this specular relationship between the nation’s self-authorizing narratives and the people who are figured in and of its image when they evoke and interrogate the nation’s totalizing boundaries at the same time as they mobilize alternative histories and agencies (Bhabha 1990:299–300). Homi Bhabha describes the nation-space that results from this process as the “barred Nation,” which he designates as “It/Self,” because it has become alienated from its self-generating representations to become instead a space that is “internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations” (299; emphasis in the original). The performative therefore also introduces the question of embodiment and location, to foreground the ways that narratives mobilize particular representations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, among others. Individual and collective bodies participate in competing and often contentious ways of 82 / Marcia Stephenson nation-making as they negotiate the liminal spaces of cultural and political borderlands. The Andean region is one example of a space where hegemonic and resistant narratives of national identity are mobilized in myriad conflicting ways. Indeed, the essays in this volume point to the variety of engagements that take place as individuals and collectives generate meaning at the limits of dominant narratives of the nation. In the performative context of nation-making in Andean Bolivia, the struggle for alternative narratives of nationhood has fundamentally structured indigenous mobilization. Aymara activist-intellectuals engaged in the decolonial movement for human rights, social justice, and gender equality push hegemonic nationalist discourses to a point of crisis because they link this struggle to the demand for territory and self-determination. They argue that the ethno-political struggle for the right to autonomous material and symbolic spaces of cultural reproduction and representation is a struggle for survival itself. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the native movement for territory and autonomy has exposed the ragged edges of prevailing national narratives, which, in response, have set into motion hegemonic nation-making in its most violent forms. There are perhaps few examples of competing forms of “nation-making ” more stark than the events that took place throughout the Bolivian altiplano, or highland plateau, in the years preceding the Chaco War (1932–1935). During these years, the indian movement to reclaim autonomy and self-determination, known as the movement of the caciques -apoderados, was based on the search to recover land titles indian communities had purchased during Spanish colonial rule. Due to the increasing encroachment on indigenous lands by large landholders or hacendados during the 1910s and 1920s, Aymara leaders used these titles to engage in a legal struggle to protect their communities’ boundaries. The government upheld the claims of the hacendados in most instances and deployed battalions in the indigenous communities to seize agitators and quell the violence. Throughout the altiplano, indian leaders were arrested or killed as a result of the actions they undertook to safeguard their communities. Once the Chaco War started, indians labeled as instigators were forcibly conscripted and sent off to carry out their “patriotic duty” at the front lines, from where few returned (Mamani Condori 1991). For those engaged in the study of nation-making at the margins, there is no mistaking one of the ironies of this undeclared war against Bolivia’s indigenous peoples. The battalions deployed in the countryside for the pur- Territory, Agency, and Cultural Survival / 83 poses of occupying indigenous communities...