Acting Inca: National Belonging in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia by E. Gabrielle Kuenzli (review)

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the connections between ethnic politics and performance in Bolivia. It draws on archival research and ethnographic methodology, and takes up a history-of-ideas approach, offering a complex and engaging perspective on the issue. Kuenzli uses previously neglected documents of the Peñas trial in the aftermath of the Bolivian 1899 Civil War to demonstrate that collaboration between indigenous communities and national political parties is an essential part of the Aymara past, as are autonomous Indian movements.

She begins by using the testimonies of the Aymaras accused in the Peñas trial to argue that the alliance between Aymara communities and the Liberal Party was not a relationship of convenience to be broken when promises were not met, but an earnest effort to change the political system as a whole, a process that continued even after the war. This argument challenges the Bolivian revisionist historiography that since the 1970s has sought to underscore the autonomy of the Indian resistance to the state.

Kuenzli’s critique points out that revisionist works have relied too heavily on Ramiro Condarco Morales’s thesis regarding the ultimate significance of the trial. The main problem according to Kuenzli is that Morales’s conclusions are based almost uniquely on the prosecution’s affirmations of race war, and that the testimonies of the accused rarely support this.

Kuenzli’s main argument is that political persuasion rather than race-based movements drove the testimonies in the trial. This insight is also applied to an analysis of the intellectual and cultural responses of communities in the aftermath of the war. The political establishment used the trial as a means to minimize the alliance between Liberals and Aymaras, constructing the latter as “savages” in need of tutelage, and ultimately divorcing the Indian uprising from the Civil War. On the side of the defense, Kuenzli finds that the bulk of the testimonies suggest that the rebels were not acting as a vengeful mob, but out of precise political motivations and in support of the Liberal Party. She argues that the violence that ensued after the uprising that supported the Liberal army was not caused by race war or class strife, but was, rather, the exercise of local power struggles.

Her analysis of the discourse of honor in several testimonies sheds light on the trial as a debate over definitions of citizenship and nation. The discourse of honor went beyond the usual categories of family, social status, race and upbringing to claim a space in the national community by offering military and political service to the nation.

Kuenzli’s second chapter, an illuminating exercise in intellectual history, describes the efforts of the Liberal intellectual elite based in La Paz to construct an image of the Aymaras that could circumvent the uncomfortable associations of highland Indians with crime, savagery, and primitiveness. She seeks to explain the paradoxical fact that the La Paz-based elite looked to celebrate the Aymara past and did so in the immediate aftermath of the 1899 Civil War and the trials that found the Aymara guilty of race war and in need of tutelage. Adding to the paradox (and Kuenzli does a great job explaining this complicated dynamic) national intellectuals and local Aymara intelligentsia collaborated in relegating the achievements of the Aymaras to the distant past, while at the same time privileging the Incas as representing the more progressive, and preferred, Indian identity.

The discourse of the intellectuals strove to connect the distant Aymara heritage, visible only in ruins, to the more recent Inca empire. Drawing a contrast to this distant greatness, intellectuals lamented the sorrowful state of contemporary Aymaras. This differential construction of Indian identities in historical time was part of a larger discourse of progress and modernity that conceptualized stages of development in human civilization. This chapter focuses on the work of Emeterio Villamil de...