Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes (review)

This interesting and unusual book deals with aspects of film and television in La Paz, Bolivia and also the national and international circulation of images. The first substantive chapter is on film distribution, a much neglected but vital part of the industry. About eighty percent of films screened in Bolivia are from the United States and most of the rest from other Latin American countries. The second chapter is a history of film exhibition in La Paz, based on archival research and the author’s own visits to cinemas. This is followed by a useful history of Bolivian cinema, drawing on earlier published accounts such as Gumucio Dagron’s Historia del Cine en Bolivia (1982) and research at the Bolivian cinema archive. The emphasis is on representations of national and indigenous identity.

The core of the book deals with a television program hosted by Carlos Palenque that was especially important in the early 1990s. Palenque was previously a popular singer, then a broadcaster with Radio Metropolitania and eventually became a charismatic television personality and owner of a media network. From this he launched the Condepa (Conscience of the Fatherland) political party and was a credible presidential candidate when he died from a heart attack in 1997. His daily television show, “The Open Tribunal of the People,” invited indigenous and excluded sectors to appear live on television to denounce injustice, family members, or the authorities. People lined up each day and those with the most dramatic stories were selected to speak with Palenque in the television studio. Many of these never had their problems resolved and social workers hired to help them were poorly paid; television is both exploitative and perhaps helpful in at least allowing people to be heard. The book ends with a discussion of contemporary digital media created by indigenous film-makers. Much of this work is produced in collectives and it includes movies as well as documentaries. When shown in the United States there is sometimes a danger of this work being understood in an overly simplified way as calling for the preservation of traditional indigenous culture in modern Bolivia.

The motif of the book is the global circulation of images and it owes much to Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “mediascapes.” Himpele sometimes shares with Appadurai the problem of only a weak sense of the social. At times the author shows a fine sense of the social fabric of La Paz in discussing social relations tied to family, work, and ritual. Yet social class enters mainly as different cinema audiences for first-run films in the city center and for martial arts flicks in run-down neighborhood theaters. The political use of indigenism (an appeal to a traditional and essentialist identity) is well understood and criticized by anthropologists and political activists. But it is not clear what is to be gained by insisting that ethnicity is always performed. Done enough, performance becomes a social fact.

Himpele’s approach to his material is much influenced by postmodern theory and his book shares its over-emphasis on interpretation and performance. The strategy of researching the circulation of images is ingenious but has a tendency to elide social realities. We might be tempted to see Palenque’s “Open Tribunal” as in some way leading to the recent generation of sophisticated indigenous filmmakers. Or as anticipating the public forums that are part of contemporary politics in Bolivia: again indigenous people speaking out. But this is a theoretical short circuit in a much more complex reality that includes decades of community activism in radio, video and film. Radio Metropolitania is very different from a radio station such as Radio San Gabriel that has been working for decades in collaboration with indigenous groups. The indigenous present may have been touched by Palenque’s populist television image, but let us not forget years of political organizing, including the protests for the Five Hundred...