A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia by Mark Goodale (review)

In A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia, Mark Goodale skillfully tracks the political history of President Evo Morales’s legal and political reform project in Bolivia from 2006 to 2015. The book draws from interviews and conversations with Bolivian intellectuals, political leaders, jurists, and indigenous activists, as well as detailed readings of federal legislation and constitutional texts. Goodale argues that the juridification of Bolivian politics during this period became a “mechanism for much more limited, exclusionary, and ambiguous shifts” (241). Through new kinds of legislation, Morales’ government was able to “harness the power of the rule of law” as a principal mechanism for actualizing its revolutionary visions (25). However, this project was complicated by the fact that its central pillar, a proto-nationalist re-fashioning of indigeneity, was not itself the basis of an existing indigenous movement at that time. Rather, this notion of indigeneity was generated as a “socio-juridical concept” that also circulated among social movement actors, and often in ways that departed from Morales party agendas (238). Goodale’s book complicates romantic accounts of Morales to reveal how his agenda was “embedded in an emerging hybrid ideology” based on reworking an older Orientalist imaginary of the Andean into an emergent ideal of lo indígena (7).

The book consists of a Preface, Introduction, Conclusion and six substantive chapters. The Preface begins with Che Guevara’s hands or, rather, their absence. Their severing was crucial to the body’s identification by retired Bolivian military officers in the mid-1990s. Guevara’s bodily remains were displayed to visitors by the Castro government in Havana. Goodale takes this as a point of insight into the “prismatic quality” marking quotidian experiences of revolution and their various afterlives (x). Similarly, he approaches the MAS political era of 2006 to 2015 in terms of “shifting fragments that came together [...] at particular moments in time” (x). In the Introduction, Goodale extends this discussion to outline a “politics of allochrony—the reification of past, present, and future into categories that did certain kinds of public work.” Not all epochs were weighted evenly in this configuration. In particular, Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party government drew from notions of “cosmic time,” or Pachakuti. Following Indianista writer Fausto Reinaga, Pachakuti was understood by some MAS officials as a subterranean force that returns to break down racialized hierarchies and liberate Bolivia’s marginalized indigenous majority (5). Here and in the Conclusion the book offers a refreshing discussion of how ethnographic armatures of authority and certainty broke down (15, 243). Most notably the book recounts interlocutors’ challenges to Goodale and their rejection of the need for white, non-Bolivian scholars to ventriloquize indigenous voices.

The book then turns to a detailed institutional history of legal shifts under Morales that will interest scholars of Bolivian politics and Latin American social movements. Additionallly, Goodale offers fascinating meta-commentaries on this reform project itself. He does so through the eyes of people charged with carrying it out as well as by those, like older Leftist Trotskyites, who felt alienated by the government’s increasing alignment with extractivism and its seeming abandonment of class politics (29). Chapter 1 looks at the ways that this juridification occurred through the re-making, rather than displacement, of earlier bureaucratic channels in order to “forge a dominant cadre of public and social actors” in the absence of a well-defined ruling class. Chapter 2 examines “revolution by constitution,” the translation of a revolutionary program into law, and maps the tensions that emerged out of this codification effort. Chapter 3 traces the resistance that faced the MAS project, particularly in the wake of a conflict over a highway to be built through protected indigenous regions in Bolivia’s lowlands. Chapter 4 considers the internal conflicts facing Bolivia’s process of change, which Goodale argues emerged out of a “patchwork state ideology” that provided a...