Legal Ethnohistory in Rural Bolivia: Documentary Culture and Social History in the norte de Potosi

Abstract: This article explores the intersection between documentary culture and social history through an analysis of legal archival theory and practice in rural Bolivia. The guiding theoretical premise is that legal archival research in rural Bolivia involves, to different degrees, both methodological and nonmethodological problems. The ethnohistorical researcher should identify, and distinguish between, the two in order to develop and pursue an effective project. Although fraught with uncertainties, ethnohistorical research projects involving rural legal archives can yield insights into local social history in ways not possible through other means.

Legal archives can be especially rich sources of historical data, both legal and nonlegal. ¹ Particularly in rural areas, legal archives are often the only—or at least the most important—repositories of written public records. For the ethnohistorian who is willing to look beyond the superficial legal forms and structures, such materials provide a window into wider social, economic, and historical movements. The nature of legal discourse itself makes this so. Even if a court case is officially concerned with the resolution of a dispute between two neighbors, its resolution demands that the dispute be placed within whatever nonlegal contexts are necessary to achieve a result that is both legally proper and calculated to prevent similar occurrences. Claims for inheritance, for example, are historical by definition: in order to decide who should get what, the court must construct a history of the facts that is necessarily embedded in a wider social history.

But just because legal archives are potentially deep historical veins, this does not mean that they are easy to mine. There are strict methodological problems involved in such research—sorting vast amounts of information, "reading" social history through legal forms, paleography in the case of older materials, and so on—and nonmethodological problems, which are more varied and contextual and involve issues like the politics of gaining access to restricted archives, fending off suspicions by local actors regarding research activities, and making decisions about whether to share a body of information that has been, in many cases, organized for the first time.

In Bolivia these two types of problems tend to relate to each other in a relationship of inverse correlation. In the nation's capital and larger regional population centers, the methodological problems become more pronounced as the nonmethodological problems become less important. This is because legal archives in large urban areas are usually only one type of repository for public documents. There are other archives at universities, museums, and private foundations that provide outlets for the documentation of wider, nonlegal histories; in these cases, legal archives serve more limited functions. Although this is not always true, in many cases, with larger urban archives, it becomes more difficult to use such archives for tracing the contours of general historical trends because the archival material is more specialized and limited in scope, the sheer amount of archival material increases, and the time frame in which archival material is preserved expands. But with larger urban archives, the nonmethodological problems become relatively less acute. Given proper credentials, the researcher can usually gain access without undue difficulty and work without having to face the types of questions one confronts in rural areas. ²

When one moves from the cities to the provincial, sectional, and cantonal centers, the situation becomes reversed. ³ Legal archives are almost always the only repository of public documents, and the documents themselves are almost always the only locally recognized public documents. For these reasons, documents found in these archives will capture wide social histories. But with exceptions, many rural archives ⁴ in Bolivia do not extend in time beyond the mid–nineteenth century ⁵ ; even if late-colonial documents exist, they are usually either not formally archived, or, if they are, they are locked up in church basements, typically off limits to secular eyes. ⁶ Yet even if rural archives are broader in scope...