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130 / Andrew Canessa 6 The Indian Within, the Indian Without Citizenship, Race, and Sex in a Bolivian Hamlet Andrew Canessa On a recent trip to the village of Pocobaya1 in the highlands of Bolivia I found myself sitting in a friend’s kitchen whilst she prepared one of my favorite dishes. As she busied herself preparing the guinea pig and I peeled vegetables, we chatted about my goddaughter, Alicia, who had just left her husband because of his violence . We commiserated with Alicia and then I asked, “Do you fight?”2 She nodded matter of factly and explained yes they did; her husband even beat her up once with the metal tube she uses to blow on the fire, she said with a laugh. We talked on and I asked her what kinds of things her husband said when they “fought.” She said he often shouted in Spanish and said “carajo” (damn!) as well as phrases such as “india sucia” (dirty indian woman) and “maldita india” (accursed indian woman). I was not surprised, as I had heard people recount similar things before, and Bonifacia simply shrugged when I asked her why her husband spoke to her in this way. Pocobaya is an indian village several hours’ walk from the nearest road. Everyone in the village speaks Aymara; all the women dress in the mode that currently typifies indian dress in Bolivia, and all the residents would certainly be considered indian, indigenous, Aymaras, campesinos, or whatever term outsiders use to characterize the ethnically distinct peasant communities of the highlands. So why then would a man from this community bark insults in Spanish to his wife and call her an “indian”? The Community and the Nation Pocobaya, at an altitude of 3,000 meters above sea level, is a hamlet of approximately two hundred persons (INE 1992) in the province of Larecaja (La Paz). No road leads to Pocobaya, but it is a few hours’ walk from the provincial capital of Sorata (pop. 2,000), which is the most important Citizenship, Race, and Sex / 131 market town in the region. Sorata is on the road that connects the Bolivian highlands to the tropical lowlands. Thus, even though Pocobaya is at some distance from the metropolitan centers, it is not difficult to travel to the mines and cities of Bolivia; indeed, many Pocobayeños travel with some frequency to the gold mines. Pocobaya furthermore has a school that teaches children up to the sixth grade (until recently only to third) and many adults listen to Aymara language radio. Thus Pocobayeños, even those who rarely leave the community, are quite aware of life beyond their small village. Nevertheless, the experience of Pocobayeños of the life beyond the village is by no means homogeneous: some spend a good deal of their time away from home and consequently have views on the world beyond that differ from those who remain. The people of Pocobaya may all be indians as far as Bolivian society is concerned, but within the community some symbolize indianness more than others: namely the monolingual women who rarely move beyond the ambit of the Aymara-speaking world. Many of the men, in contrast, speak Spanish, do seasonal work in mines and large agricultural concerns, and have done military service, which gives them a familiarity with the country most women do not possess. Men are generally the only ones able to obtain cash, which is virtually unobtainable in Pocobaya.3 Due to increasing population in recent decades, the fertility of the land has decreased as a result of shorter fallow periods and erosion. This leaves little surplus for the market; and when Pocobayeños do take their produce to market, rates of exchange are generally quite disadvantageous. As a result, and as is the case in many indian communities in Bolivia (Rivera Cusicanqui 1996:75), men are obliged to leave the community to acquire the resources to satisfy the demands of the community . That is, Pocobaya, as is the case with most similar communities, is dependent on the society and economy beyond it. In terms of the household economy, men and women agree, when asked, that they have complementary roles, and many household tasks require the labor of men and women to be performed properly (Canessa 1997). For example, plowing requires a man to lead the team and a woman to drop the seeds. These tasks are deemed “male” and “female,” respectively. The positive value of complementarity is clearly...

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