Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprisings and State Power in Bolivia by Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (review)

How and why did Evo Morales and his party MAS come to power? What happened after the well-known Water and Gas War? Why did Felipe Quispe, the Kataristas and Indianists (radical ethnicists that dominated a part of the political discourse since the 1970s) virtually disappear with the surge of Morales?

Rhythms of the Pachakuti, an English translation of the seminal book by longtime political activist and academic in both Mexico and Bolivia, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (first published in Spanish in 2008), is now available and responds to those questions. It provides a detailed and insightful analysis of the social unrests in Bolivia between the years 2000 and 2005.

Departing from a relational and practice-centered definition of social emancipation (embedded in an almost Marx-less Critical Marxism), Gutiérrez Aguilar analyzes the multifaceted fights in Bolivia at that time as part of a profoundly changing society, referred to by her as Pachakuti.¹ Rejecting the classical conception of the political as totalizing (xxix), she opens up the theoretical scope to find emancipatory struggles in what is sometimes considered as pre-political or even traditional groups, communities and actors that form identity in the conflict they fight. The book is mainly concerned with three groups: rural workers, coca growers, and rural and urban indigenous peoples. Their politics is opposed to and goes beyond state and capitalism—at least in the moment Gutiérrez Aguilar writes about.

Gutiérrez Aguilar leaves current social movement theories aside in order to focus on the actors and their actions. The opposition of the “practical scope of the struggle” (xxiv)—the parts that can be observed from the outside (and typical object of investigation for social movement researchers—and the much less accessible “interior horizon” (xxiv), constituted of tacit knowledge and covered strategies of the movements, can be helpful to open up social movement theory toward the actors. A major advantage of this approach is the possibility to comprehend social movement organizations as actors and, at the same time, as coalitions of actors. This is also key for understanding acts of ethnic revitalization (6) as political choices rather than as some kind of prevailing primordialism (in the sense that ethnic identity is stronger than other identities), or as a radical strategic essentialism that uses ethnicity for non-ethnic aims (in the sense of social actors that claim to be indigenous in order to build up spaces of autonomy). Instead, ancient practices are updated and integrated under new circumstances, including non-indigenous discourses and concepts, but not invented (at least, not completely). Another strength of this relational focus on actors is that it allows us to trace the extensive networks of contacts, institutions, free spaces, infrastructure, etc. (what could be called resources), provided by different members of the alliance. Momentary or permanent cooperation between social movement organizations have been much studied by social movement theory. A dialogue with, for instance, the distinction between cooperation, coalition and merger—as outlined in the classical work by Mayer Zald and Roberta Ash (1966, 335)—would perhaps have helped in understanding the underlying dynamics and ultimate outcomes. This dialogue with Zald and Ash’s work would have been useful for her discussion of “the question of permanence over time” (14). It would have helped if she had engaged with Zald and Ash’s concept of a “becalmed movement” (Zald & Ash, 1966, 334), a movement that has already realized its goals and tries to maintain its structures. Likewise, there are explanations to be found in those theories (as in: Zald & Ash, 1966, 334) to the question Gutiérrez poses: why does mobilization weaken after success? (121)

Gutiérrez Aguilar provides an in depth analysis of both social structures of the indigenous communities and of state structures (for instance, 34-36), but she highlights fundamental...